Raj Venkatesan and V. Kumar have won the inaugural ISBM-David T. Wilson-Sheth Foundation Award for Long Term Impact in B2B Marketing for their 2004 Journal of Marketing paper, “A Customer Lifetime Value Framework for Customer Selection and Resource Allocation Strategy,” Journal of Marketing paper. The biennial award is made to a paper published in a refereed journal that has made a significant long run impact on the theory and practice of B2B Marketing.

The award is supported by the Sheth Foundation and named in honor of the late Penn State Professor David T. Wilson, a leading B2B scholar and founding Managing Director of the ISBM (Institute for the Study of Business Markets).

“The winning paper, in the true spirit of Dave Wilson and the ISBM, addresses a B2B problem—the optimal allocation of customer relationship resources across time and channels—that has both academic and practical importance,” noted Prof. Gary Lilien, Penn State, ISBM Research Director and Prize Committee Chair. (Other Committee Members were Prof, Hari Sridhar, Penn State and ISBM Associate Research Director and Prof. Tomas Hult, Michigan State and President, Sheth Foundation.). “The paper showed that Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) performed significantly better than other common resource allocation metrics, leading to a projected incremental profit of nearly $20 million in a test at IBM with a sample of only 216 customers, projecting to over $1billion for the entire IBM customer base,” continued Lilien.

Venkatesan and Kumar will share a cash award of $2000 along with a plaque of recognition and will be honored at a special session of the ISBM Academic Conference at Emory University 3-4 August 2016.