Salesperson communication effectiveness in a digital sales interaction

By Neeraj Bharadwaj, Garrett M. Shipley. Industrial Marketing Management, 2020

87 citations recorded by the source corpus.

B2B buyers are exhibiting an increased preference to transact digitally with vendors. A topic which has yet to receive sufficient academic attention in this modern selling environment is salesperson communication effectiveness. Accordingly, this article: 1) defines digital sales interactions (DSIs) as technology-enabled, face-to-face buyer-seller exchanges; 2) proposes a typology of DSIs to set the stage to examine salesperson communication effectiveness; 3) introduces a framework that reifies the sender's auditory and visual cues that can influence receivers' thoughts (i.e., cognition, affect, intention) and activity (i.e., purchase behavior, advocacy); 4) suggests theoretical lenses that can illuminate various aspects of the salesperson's communication barrage; 5) advances how machine learning can be applied to understand what constitutes effective communication in a digital interaction by asking: to what extent does what a salesperson says (auditory cues) and how s/he says it (visual cues) impact her/his effectiveness in a DSI?; and 6) concludes by noting promising future research directions for B2B marketing researchers.

Subfields: Marketing, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/80f72abc063aed3c263b7a164628eca0d5479659