Technology use in B2B sales: examining the extant literature and identifying future research opportunities using morphological analysis

Abstract

Understanding the impact of technology use on the business-to-business (B2B) sales profession has been one of the priorities for scholars for over 20 years. While the extant sales literature has focused mainly on stand-alone technologies like customer relationship management and social media, few studies have taken a holistic approach to understand how technology has transformed the sales function and the corresponding impact this change has had on the salesperson and sales organizational level. Employing morphological analysis (MA), we conduct an extensive review of the last two decades of B2B sales research to highlight emergent research topics on how technology use is continuing to influence B2B selling and identify research gaps that still need to be addressed by sales scholars. We characterize the literature on technology use in B2B sales in terms of 6 ‘dimensions’ and 22 ‘variants’ and represent it as an MA framework. Using this framework, we identify 49 research gaps that can inform future research on technology use in B2B sales. These gaps were prioritized using inputs from academics and practitioners and 10 gaps rated high by both groups were identified. We conclude with theoretical and practical implications of our research.

Keywords:

• B2B salespeople
• technology use
• customer relationship management
• social media
• sales enablement
• morphological analysis
• systematic review

Declaration of interest

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 A keywords-based search using the following search string was employed: “selling” OR “b2b selling” OR “digital selling” OR “social selling” AND “business-to-business” OR “b-2-b*” OR “customer relationship management” AND “technology” OR “digital transformation” OR “augmented reality” OR “virtual reality” OR “Artificial intelligence” OR “big data” AND “job satisfaction” OR “organizational commitment” OR “motivation” OR “happiness” OR “productivity” OR “performance” OR “sales performance” OR “burnout” OR “stress” OR “anxiety” OR “turnover”.