Implementing e-commerce channels in business-to-business selling
研究B2B销售人员实施电子商务渠道后，客户覆盖增加但咨询质量下降，且这种权衡受销售人员资历和客户获取导向影响，电子商务收入激励可缓解负面影响。
• Implementing e-commerce channels creates a trade-off for B2B salespeople. • E-commerce channels increase customer coverage but reduce consultation quality. • This trade-off is weaker for more tenured salespeople. • This trade-off is stronger for acquisition-oriented salespeople. • E-commerce revenue incentives help mitigate the trade-off. E-commerce channels are becoming increasingly popular in business-to-business (B2B) markets and promise efficiency gains to salespeople and companies. However, enabling customers to serve themselves through e-commerce channels disrupts selling practices, requiring salespeople to adapt while exposing them to multiple risks. Strikingly, prior literature is silent on the consequences of e-commerce channel additions for salespeople. Drawing on goal systems theory, the authors propose opposing effects of the e-commerce implementation on salespeople’s customer coverage and consultation quality. The authors conduct a multimethod approach combining a natural experiment in which an industrial distributor implemented an e-commerce channel (n = 20,280 observations from 845 salespeople) with two online experiments (n = 551 salespeople). Collectively, results show that the e-commerce implementation increases salespeople’s customer coverage but lowers their consultation quality. The beneficial and harmful effects are strongly contingent on salespeople’s past customer acquisition and tenure. Incentivizing salespeople on e-commerce revenue increases the effect on customer coverage and mitigates the harmful effect on consultation quality, while sales manager multichannel promotion emerged as ineffective in these respects. Thus, this study offers managers actionable recommendations on how to improve multichannel selling in B2B contexts.