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Managing business relationships during a pandemic: Conducting a relationship audit and developing a path forward
During stable times, firms will generally aim to create reliable B2B relationships that provide increased efficiency and profitability. However, tumultuous times, such as the time during a major pandemic, cause many significant disruptions in both internal and external environmental domains. Thus, w...
Autores principales: | , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Elsevier Inc.
2020
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7261259/ http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.indmarman.2020.05.025 |
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author | Obal, Michael Gao, Tao (Tony) |
author_facet | Obal, Michael Gao, Tao (Tony) |
author_sort | Obal, Michael |
collection | PubMed |
description | During stable times, firms will generally aim to create reliable B2B relationships that provide increased efficiency and profitability. However, tumultuous times, such as the time during a major pandemic, cause many significant disruptions in both internal and external environmental domains. Thus, we argue that it is critical during this time to reevaluate the company's business relationships as a whole. While long-term partnerships are great for handling incremental changes during stable times, disruptive environmental changes may require managers to consider disruptive changes to their businesses. A pandemic may also present opportunities for establishing new relationships as there may be other partners/suppliers who are better equipped to help the company address urgent short-term needs and to capitalize on significant long-term opportunities. In this paper, we design a new relationship audit template to help B2B firms weather the immediate crisis at hand and position themselves more strategically for the future. We explore this idea in relation to the coronavirus outbreak, introduce the idea of a B2B crisis relationship audit, and offer potential steps forward for firms. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-7261259 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2020 |
publisher | Elsevier Inc. |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-72612592020-06-01 Managing business relationships during a pandemic: Conducting a relationship audit and developing a path forward Obal, Michael Gao, Tao (Tony) Industrial Marketing Management Article During stable times, firms will generally aim to create reliable B2B relationships that provide increased efficiency and profitability. However, tumultuous times, such as the time during a major pandemic, cause many significant disruptions in both internal and external environmental domains. Thus, we argue that it is critical during this time to reevaluate the company's business relationships as a whole. While long-term partnerships are great for handling incremental changes during stable times, disruptive environmental changes may require managers to consider disruptive changes to their businesses. A pandemic may also present opportunities for establishing new relationships as there may be other partners/suppliers who are better equipped to help the company address urgent short-term needs and to capitalize on significant long-term opportunities. In this paper, we design a new relationship audit template to help B2B firms weather the immediate crisis at hand and position themselves more strategically for the future. We explore this idea in relation to the coronavirus outbreak, introduce the idea of a B2B crisis relationship audit, and offer potential steps forward for firms. Elsevier Inc. 2020-07 2020-05-31 /pmc/articles/PMC7261259/ http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.indmarman.2020.05.025 Text en © 2020 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Since January 2020 Elsevier has created a COVID-19 resource centre with free information in English and Mandarin on the novel coronavirus COVID-19. The COVID-19 resource centre is hosted on Elsevier Connect, the company's public news and information website. Elsevier hereby grants permission to make all its COVID-19-related research that is available on the COVID-19 resource centre - including this research content - immediately available in PubMed Central and other publicly funded repositories, such as the WHO COVID database with rights for unrestricted research re-use and analyses in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for free by Elsevier for as long as the COVID-19 resource centre remains active. |
spellingShingle | Article Obal, Michael Gao, Tao (Tony) Managing business relationships during a pandemic: Conducting a relationship audit and developing a path forward |
title | Managing business relationships during a pandemic: Conducting a relationship audit and developing a path forward |
title_full | Managing business relationships during a pandemic: Conducting a relationship audit and developing a path forward |
title_fullStr | Managing business relationships during a pandemic: Conducting a relationship audit and developing a path forward |
title_full_unstemmed | Managing business relationships during a pandemic: Conducting a relationship audit and developing a path forward |
title_short | Managing business relationships during a pandemic: Conducting a relationship audit and developing a path forward |
title_sort | managing business relationships during a pandemic: conducting a relationship audit and developing a path forward |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7261259/ http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.indmarman.2020.05.025 |
work_keys_str_mv | AT obalmichael managingbusinessrelationshipsduringapandemicconductingarelationshipauditanddevelopingapathforward AT gaotaotony managingbusinessrelationshipsduringapandemicconductingarelationshipauditanddevelopingapathforward |