摘要:Few attempts have been made to empirically get an understanding of "what should be going on” at each stage of a relationship between two partners of any dyad. This research investigates the evolution of a relationship in a B2B context using the Nominal Group Technique approach to collect the data and puts the emphasis on the actions to be taken. The data coming from account managers in commercial banking are applied to Macneil’s contractual norms to portray this evolution. Results emphasize the importance of role integrity through most of the stages in this evolution. Furthermore,a relationship is seen as a combination of transactional,relational as well as business related factors,which is rarely taken into account in the literature. Thus,relying only on the relational dimension to understand a marketing relationship has to be challenged.