Digital Selling: Organizational and Managerial Influences for Frontline Readiness and Effectiveness

Link: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11747-021-00836-5

Over the last few years, especially since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, several companies have invested in digital technologies to equip their salespeople for digital selling capabilities. However, a majority of these digital selling initiatives haven’t paid off – resulting in a $900B in wasted technology investment – largely because top-level executives are eager to invest in digital assets without discerning their salespeople’s preparedness for digital selling. Even the best prescriptive guidance sometimes fail to shift sales organizations towards digital selling since many salespeople perceive issues with their own teams, managers, or other functions.

To address this challenge, a paper published in December 2021 focuses on digital selling readiness – or the belief in the need and ability to leverage digital assets for valuable customer exchanges – to explain salespeople’s felt preparedness towards digital selling activities. For Chief Sales Officers, digital selling readiness offers an assessment tool to ensure alignment between investments in digital assets and a digital-ready sales force.

Drawing on change readiness theory, the authors distinguish two key components (i.e., organizational and managerial) that drive salesperson readiness: a) digital selling psychological climate—extent to which digital selling is expected, supported, and valued by the organization, and b) positive outcome framing– supervisor’s efforts to emphasize the benefits of digital selling. By distinguishing these two pathways, the authors emphasize the distinct roles of executives and front-line leaders to support and enable digital selling readiness.

Data for the study were obtained from a random sample of 1,852 Indian firms drawn from the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy database. Surveys were administered in collaboration with local researchers, who in turn reached out to randomly selected managers at each sample firm through formal and informal communication channels. The theoretical framework and empirical analysis of surveys suggest the following:

1. Sales and marketing rewards and rivalry act as critical boundary conditions for digital selling climate
2. Front-line managers weaken their positive influence on salesperson readiness if they leverage sanctions to motivate digital selling
3. Digital selling readiness drives digital selling effectiveness, a key performance indicator for evaluating a digital-ready sales force

The results of the study offer two broad lessons for Chief Sales Officers:

• Leaders should not assume that digital selling readiness should be measured only at the sales organization level. Rather, they should consider a global evaluation of the sales force as well as a more granular view to identify variance in readiness across teams, roles, or other groups.
• Sales must coordinate with marketing to enable digital selling readiness. To achieve better alignment, functional leaders should formalize a meeting cadence to share each function’s targets and mutually define rewards that incentivize coordination.

The study also offers guidance for managers at a granular level. This includes identifying salespeople who can comprise an early experience team (i.e., pilot group) before a largescale rollout; opting for a rotational implementation of policies that include frontline sellers and executives; prioritizing coordination norms between sales and marketing units to reduce rivalry; and practical guidance for managers to encourage salesperson receptivity to digital selling.