Collective Sensemaking When Purchasing Complex B2B Services: How Buying Centers Construct and Align Interpretations of Vendor Service Offering

Buying centers evaluate complex B2B service offerings not by aggregating independent assessments but through collective interpretive processes that buying center theory has documented structurally without explaining. This study introduces collective service offering sensemaking as a theoretical lens that explains how buying centers construct, contest, and align interpretations of a vendor’s service offering. Drawing on a multi-phase qualitative multiple-case study of six organizations (24 interviews, 3 focus groups, 5 procurement-meeting observations; 2022–2024), we show that service evaluations originate in identity-rooted interpretive frames that differ across technical, financial, procurement, and operational roles. Through interpretive bridging, narrative negotiation, controlled dissent, and evaluative rituals, buying centers transform fragmented meaning structures into interpretive sufficiency, a threshold that enables collective action despite persistent misalignment. The central contribution is interpretive sufficiency: buying centers act on negotiated adequacy rather than consensus, convergence, or shared understanding, through three forms of service value alignment. Three supporting elements explain how the threshold is reached: identity-rooted frames generate the divergence, four interactional mechanisms convert it into workable evaluations, and contextual anchors condition which interpretations gain authority. These elements are not unique to services; what changes under service conditions is their function, salience, and intensity once value-in-use cannot be verified before adoption.