[Online] GGS Teaching Assistantship Programme: Digital transformation of sales: Outcomes, Determinants, and its Unfolding over Time

This workshop is part of the GGS Teaching Assistantship Programme 2021.

Content

Sales organizations represent the cornerstone of every firm in generating sales, prospecting, building and maintaining long-term profitable relationships with customers, and thus are of utmost importance for securing the survival of the firms. Behavioral, technological, and managerial developments have changed the sales environment and called for transformational reforms in the sales discipline. Sales management is expected to face revolutionary progress due to the heavy reliance on technology especially after the COVID-19 crisis. Some researchers even fear that sales management faces the risk of extinction if no revitalizing changes are made to cope up with the rapidly changing environment. Unfortunately, marketing scholars are becoming less interested in sales research and much of sales knowledge adopts outdated models. This represents an opportunity for sales researchers to broaden the vision, revise the current sales knowledge, and even create new sales knowledge. In this lecture, steps, outcomes, determinants, and strategies for digital transformation of sales will be discussed to rejuvenate the sales discipline. It is argued that social media has transformed the sales discipline the most, therefore, social selling which is still in its infancy will be among the highlights of the lecture. Additionally, strategies for rebuilding the theoretical foundations and models of the discipline will be discussed.

Key words:  Evolution of marketing, sales, social selling, digitalization

Further information is available in the syllabus.