Purpose -This paper aims to understand how organizational and interpersonal relationships influence selling centers, and how to form an effective selling center to establish cooperation among the functional departments to satisfy customer needs. Design/methodology/approach -The selling center and social capital literatures are reviewed. A social network perspective is employed to explore the internal and external relationships of corporate selling centers. Findings -Building upon social capital literature and team literature, the authors propose that selling center performance is influenced by its internal and external social capital. Social capital influences selling center performance through facilitating knowledge transfer and absorption within and across the selling center. Practical implications -The findings help sales managers diagnose the problems of the social networks among their selling center members, to improve their selling center performance in the future. Originality/value -The paper investigates the relationships among social capital, knowledge transfer and absorption and team performance in the selling center context. By considering both intra-firm relationships and inter-firm relationships, this study provides a relatively complete picture of selling center performance and adds knowledge to the field.

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Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to develop an in-depth understanding of the issues that organizations consider and experience when making the decision to adopt B2B technologies. Design/methodology/approach -The paper uses a qualitative approach to collect and analyze data. In-depth interviews were conducted to help generate new themes, and ideas about B2B technology adoption. After the data were collected, the authors used an elaborate multi-stage process to code, analyze, and interpret the data generated from the interviews. Findings -The main theme that emerged out of this study is that an organization's response to requests from its trading partner to adopt B2B technologies is highly influenced by its marketing channel orientation. The study identifies three types of marketing channel orientations that can influence a firm's technology adoption decision and demonstrates how each of these orientations influence a firm's responses and attitudes towards B2B technology adoption. Originality/value -The study is important to practitioners since it helps them recognize the value of understanding their trading partner's channel strategies and orientations as they develop strategies to get their suppliers to adopt B2B technologies. It also contributes to the academic literature by demonstrating the value of a firm's channel strategy orientation, a very important concept that has been ignored in the channels and B2B technology adoption literature.

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