Social Media Affordances to Engage Clients During the Sales Process: Sequential versus Multiplex Media Use

ABSTRACT

Social media have changed the way salespeople communicate with and build relationships with clients. This study explores how social media are integrated into the communication strategies of sellers in a business-to-business e-commerce context using an affordances approach to analysis. Seller strategies used to build and develop relationships with clients were analyzed based on data collected from a large multinational corporation. Data were collected through a series of interviews and ethnographic observations and were analyzed as part of a multimethod case study. The findings show that employees strategically select media to build stronger client relationships. Contrasting prior work on the topic, we find that sellers are more likely to use media sequentially than simultaneously, and sellers often leverage social media because of the searchability and immediacy of the platform compared with other tools. The concluding section outlines practical implications for managers and illustrates how the process of social media use in sales aligns with key stages of the sales process.

KEY WORDS AND PHRASES:

• Business-to-business e-commerce
• media affordances
• online sales
• social media

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Matthew S. Weber

MATTHEW S. WEBER ([email protected]; corresponding author) is an associate professor and the Cowles Endowed Fellow of Media Management in the Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota. He is a computational social scientist and an expert on organizational change in news media. Dr. Weber has conducted a number of large-scale longitudinal studies examining change strategies employed by organizations and examined how organizations evolve through changes in technology as well as changes in hiring patterns. His recent work focuses on media organizations and changes in patterns of news dissemination. He is also leading an initiative to provide researchers with improved access to social media datasets, including the development of new tools for research.

Müge Haseki

MÜGE HASEKI ([email protected]) is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Center for Technology, Innovation and Competition at Carey Law School, University of Pennsylvania. She is working on the multiyear 1 World Connected project that focuses on the evaluation and assessment of Internet-based initiatives that aim to connect the unconnected communities around the world. These include demand-side interventions that aim to facilitate ICT adoption and use such as digital literacy, health, financial inclusion, and supply side interventions that aim to extend the coverage of the internet. Her research focuses on the socio-technical practices of disadvantaged and underserved communities, with a particular attention to ICT access and use.