Abstract

The digital transformation of organizations is a pervasive force which fundamentally changes companies and, in fact, society as a whole. For many companies, the sales force is at the center of this transformation seeing the essential role of salespeople at the customer-company interface and the exceptional quantifiability of salespeople’s work outputs and inputs. New, cutting-edge sales technologies such as predictive sales analytics, virtual or augmented reality, or AI bots hold the promise of significant productivity gains, yet, simultaneously may entail insidious side effects for sales employees and companies. While past research made significant progress in understanding the benefits of these new technologies, the intricate ‘human side’ of the digital transformation remains relatively ‘uncharted territory’. With this special issue, we aim to contribute to a better understanding of the human side in digital transformation of sales—to augment academic knowledge, provide immediate guidance to practitioners, and improve academic sales education. This editorial reviews the works in the special issue, the state of digital sales transformation in practice, and on this basis derives ideas for future research.

摘要

组织的数字化转型是一股无处不在的力量，它从根本上改变了公司，实际上也改变了整个社会。对于许多公司来说，销售人员处于这种转变的中心，因为销售人员在客户与公司的界面中扮演着重要角色，并且销售人员的工作输出和输入具有非凡的可量化性。预测性销售分析、虚拟或增强现实或 AI 机器人等新的尖端销售技术有望显着提高生产力，但同时可能会给销售员工和公司带来潜在的副作用。虽然过去的研究在理解这些新技术的好处方面取得了重大进展，但数字化转型复杂的“人性方面”仍然相对“未知领域”。有了这个特刊，我们的目标是帮助更好地理解销售数字化转型中人性化的一面——增加学术知识，为从业者提供即时指导，并改善学术销售教育。这篇社论回顾了特刊中的作品，数字销售转型在实践中的状态，并在此基础上得出了未来研究的思路。