Open Access

Günther Schuh, Wolfgang Boos, Lennard Holst, Benedikt Moser

• Industrial companies are moving to a solution driven business by offering smart product service systems (Smart PSS). In addition to an existing portfolio of physical goods and technical services, companies develop new digital services and combine all three offerings to an integrated digital solution business. While the development of new digital services does not pose any major challenges for companies, the successful sale of Smart PSS does. Due to changing customer requirements and value propositions of a solution, the sale of Smart PSS requires new design principles for the sales organization compared to the simple sale of physical goods or technical services. While there are already many publications on the topic of industrial sales in research, the description of Smart PSS in particular represents a new field of research. The combination of both topics is therefore not only interesting from a theoretical point of view, but also has a particularly high practical relevance and impact for industrial companies. This paper therefore describes on the one hand, which characteristics can be used to derive customer requirements for Smart PSS and on the other hand, which effects these requirements have on the sales organization of the industrial company. The design principles give recommendations for the organizational structure, the resources, the information systems and the culture of the company depending on the targeted customer type. In order to identify and describe both the customer requirements and the design principles, two morphological boxes were developed based on a literature research and semi-structured interviews with industrial companies. The paper gives an outlook on the different characteristics of the design recommendations and describes first best practices for the successful transformation of the sales organization.