Business-To-Business E-negotiations and Influence Tactics

Link: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0022242919899381

Business e-communications accounted for more than 125 billion daily messages, or 86 million messages per second, as per an industry report in 2018. Surveys have shown that 77% of customers prefer e-communications over other formats, and data indicate returns of $40.56 for every dollar companies invest in e-communications.

E-communications may lack the contextual cues, interactivity, and flexibility of face-to-face communication but it offers multiple benefits for sales teams. These include ease of access to e-mail, instant feedback from the customer, higher transparency at each stage of the communication, the option to send video content and attachments as well as to-the-point messages that strip away undue emotion.

E-negotiations serve as a permanent record of the selling process as it unfolds, without needing interventions as with surveys and video and audio recordings.

Research into the effectiveness of B2B e-negotiations is limited, in part because of the challenges of analyzing unstructured data. Recent studies that utilize process data from digital technologies have provided fresh insights.

A working paper examines salespeople’s dynamic influence tactics as textual cues for winning sales contracts during the e-negotiation phase of the B2B selling process when e-mail is the dominant mode of communication.

The study helps Chief Sales Officers answer two key questions:

1. How do salespeople use e-mails to influence buyers?
2. How do buyers process salespeople’s e-mail communications?

The researchers focused on a heavy equipment custom manufacturing firm that serves the Utility, Oil, and Gas industries. They collected e-mail data pertaining to 47 contracts over a span of 2.5 years, and the communications provided real-life accounts of buyer-seller negotiations. In addition, they conducted in-depth interviews, surveys on demographics, and a sales manager survey that provided performance and profitability data.

The first part of the analysis consisted of identifying four specific influence tactics that B2B salespeople use during negotiation: promise and assertiveness – which use a common cognitive mechanism of compliance; and recommendation and information sharing – which use a common cognitive mechanism of internalization. The next step was to identify three specific elements of customer attention: instrumental cues, valence cues, and time cues.

The researchers found that when promise and assertiveness are used together as influence tactics–or when recommendation and information sharing are used together–it elevates customer attention. However, the use of influence tactics in any other combination leads to mixed signals and thereby a decrease in customer attention.

The results offered three recommendations for Chief Sales Officers:

1. Incorporate guidelines in sales training on how to evaluate and build customer attention during e-negotiations,
2. Use complementary influence tactics that prompt either internalization (internal analyzing) or compliance (risk shifting), but not both,
3. Follow suggested roadmap to develop a valid dictionary of textual cues for influence tactics.