Correspondence: Leyland Pitt, Faculty of Business Administration, Simon Fraser University, 500 Granville Street, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada V6C 1W6

¹(MS, Lic.) is a PhD student in the Division of Industrial Marketing and eCommerce at Lulea University of Technology, Lulea, Sweden. His research and teaching interests are in the areas of personal selling and sales management. His published work has appeared in Total Quality Management & Business Excellence, as well as the Proceedings of the Academy of Marketing Science where it has won best paper on track awards.

²(PhD, MBA, MCom) is a professor of Marketing in the Segal Graduate School of Business at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada, and is also a Senior Research Fellow of the Leeds University Business School in the United Kingdom. His work has appeared in publications such as the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Information Systems Research, Sloan Management Review and MIS Quarterly, in which he also served as Associate Editor.

³(MA, BBA) is a PhD candidate in marketing at the Segal Graduate School of Business, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada, where he is researching various aspects of advertising. His work has been accepted for publication in journals such as California Management Review, Industrial Marketing Management, Journal of Business Research, International Marketing Review and the Journal of the Operational Research Society.

⁴(PhD) is a senior lecturer in Marketing Strategy in the Department of Marketing, Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia. He has taught at the universities of Cape Town and Aston, and also at Henley Management College. His work has appeared in such journals as the Journal of Business Ethics, European Journal of Marketing and the Journal of Marketing Management.

Received 29 January 2009; Revised 29 January 2009.

Abstract

The existence, benefit and management of customer–salesperson relationships in the marketing of financial services are topics of increasing interest. Much of the sales and marketing literature implies that because of time spent together, salespeople and some of their customers develop close relationships that are akin to friendships. Evidence from social psychology confirms that strong relationships are founded in deep knowledge of others gained over long periods after sharing personal information. This paper reports on the results of a study of salespeople's assessments of their personal acquaintance with customers and friends in a financial services setting. The results indicate that salespeople do not classify customers as friends on all the dimensions of personal acquaintance. Furthermore, the nature of personal acquaintance differs between 'good' customers (those salespeople enjoy serving), and 'bad' (those they do not), with the exception of the personal acquaintance dimensions of interaction frequency and personal disclosure. We discuss the implications for practice and make recommendations for future research.