EXPRESS: High Tech, Not Low Touch: Empowering the B2B Sales Force through Online Channel Integration

As many B2B companies are transforming their sales processes by adding online channels to the sales force, it is critical to better understand how salespeople respond, adapt, and manage relationships after customers adopt them. Leveraging data from a large B2B firm, we investigate how customers’ integration of an online channel affects salesperson-customer relationships. We find that customer online channel integration leads to a 7% increase in quarterly customer gross margins, with 28% of a customer's sales volume shifting online, but only a 9% reduction in face-to-face sales transactions relative to that of before the online channel integration. Salespeople continue to hold a substantial number of face-to-face meetings to handle transactions and engage in other activities with customers that integrate the online channel than expected, given the proportion of sales volume that those customers shift online. Relatedly, customer integration of the online channel enhances the quality of salesperson-customer interaction within those relationships, reducing products sold at a loss and increasing the breadth of product categories sold. We also identify important contingency factors regarding online channel integration, including that its effectiveness when use is highly synchronized with face-to-face sales transaction meetings can further drive customer gross margins by about 16%.