دانلود رایگان مقاله استفاده از رسانه های اجتماعی در فروش B2b و تاثیر آن در جمع آوری هوش رقابتی و فروش سازگار

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the use of social media by business-to-business (B2B) salespeople to assist in their job functions. The authors propose that a salesperson's attitude toward social media usefulness, as well as a salesperson's learning orientation, will influence how much a salesperson uses social media to assist in day-to-day job tasks. Additionally, the impact that the use of social media has on collecting knowledge about competitors, adapting to customers, and sales performance is considered. Accordingly, a broad literature review is provided to introduce extant theory contributing to the proposed model. The practical uses of social media by salespeople will be described, and then the theoretical foundation is built, encompassing social media use, goal orientations, and adaptive selling theory. Results of an empirical model are provided, followed by a discussion of theoretical and managerial implications.

1. Introduction

In the world of business-to-business (B2B) sales, “social selling” is a relatively new idea but an ever-growing opportunity. Social selling is referred to by Agnihotri, Kothandaraman, Kashyap, and Singh (2012) as a professional selling practice that is “predicated on the strength of social media allies within a social enterprise” (p. 341) and by Trainor (2012) as a capability “to use knowledge about customers and the network of customer relationships to effectively navigate the firm's sales cycle” (p. 324). Social media is associated with different technologies able to provide users with services such as networking, online search, and analytics (O'Reilly & Battelle, 2009). In this paper, we identify the role of social media in B2B sales and examine its impact in the selling process. For marketers, social media is a promising marketing tool that may complement customer relationship management (CRM) processes and can be used to target specific segments of customers (Heller Baird & Parasnis, 2011). In fact, a 2015 trade study by PeopleLinx found that 73% of the 277 respondents, all of whom were B2B sales and account management professionals, considered social selling to be “valuable.” Increasingly, managers are adding social media as a new element to the traditional promotion mix tools (Mangold & Faulds, 2009). Social media can be technically defined as “a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of User Generated Content” (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010, p. 61). Social media includes social and professional networking sites, social blogs, micro-blogging, podcasts and wikis (e.g., LinkedIn, Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, and Flickr) (Avlonitis & Panagopoulos, 2010). From a marketing and sales research perspective, social media is defined as “the technological component of the communication, transaction and relationship building functions of a business which leverages the network of customers and prospects to promote value co-creation” (Andzulis, Panagopoulos, & Rapp, 2012, p. 308).