Project Details
Projekt
F - The Impact of the Digital Sales Work Environment on Value-Creating Sales
Applicant
Professorin Dr. Nancy Viola Wünderlich
Subject Area
Accounting and Finance
Term
from 2018 to 2023
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 407488096
The digital transformation affects all facets of a firm’s business model and posits new challenges to create and communicate a firm’s value proposition. At the same time, the transition to a value-creating paradigm shifts salespeople’s activities towards more inter- and intra-organisational interactions, data integration and analytics. Both trends are mutually beneficial as technologies such as cloud-based access, smart products and artificial intelligence enhance the infrastructure available to salespeople and enable collaboration between departments, sellers and buyers across and within each level of the value chain. This allows for firms to gain new and profound insights into their customers’ business models and fosters analytical sales activities, that are of key importance to create value for their customers.Although these new technologies are available in more and more industries, firms struggle to fully implement them in B2B sales due to a lack of strategy, skills and insufficient investments. Thus, it is paramount to develop an overarching digital sales strategy that incorporates the salespeople and sales-related activities, technologies, skills, and resources. In this context, we investigate the digital transformation in sales and the evolution of the digital sales work environment (DSWE). Based on knowledge from research on the digitisation of organisations and sales technology adoption we propose a conceptual framework that explicates theoretically derived quality characteristics of the DSWE and its impact on organisational and individual outcomes. This project aims to examine: 1) the quality of the DSWE along characteristics and activity domains, 2) the effect of the quality of the DSWE on value-creating selling behaviour and performance-related, relationship-related and salesperson-related outcomes, and 3) how context factors such as individual and organisational characteristics affect the impact of abovementioned effects.In this project we aim to address these questions by conducting three empirical studies. First, we will conduct an extensive qualitative interview study with (IT)managers and salespeople of firms that are in the transition from a product-centred to a value-centred business model. Second, we will employ an empirical scale development process to establish a measurement scale for DSWE quality. Third, we will mix different data sources in a multi-level design. We will employ multilevel-SEM on data from three quantitative surveys targeted towards IT-managers, salespeople and customers. Our results will offer first empirical insights into which quality characteristics of the DSWE have an impact on the performance of an organisation. We will quantify the effects of the DSWE quality, identify accelerating and weakening context factors and derive strategies on how to configure a DSWE that propels a value-creating sales approach.
DFG Programme
Research Grants
