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Assistant Professor Chris Nelson recently co-authored an article in the European Journal of Marketing that proposes a new framework for studying how innovative technology tools can help facilitate or enable the sales process.
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Chris Nelson, assistant professor of marketing, joined colleagues from other top marketing programs across the country to create a new framework for studying the ways sales teams strategically implement technology and how technology impacts dynamic business relationships.
Nielsen is one of seven scholars who co-authored “Technology Integration in the Sales Service Ecosystem: Emerging Sales Technology Ecosystems.” The article is published in the latest issue of the European Journal of Marketing, which is rated as one of the highest rated journals on the ABDC journal quality list.
The scholars’ framework identifies five principles to guide future research and applications:
- Use technology wisely: Companies should aim to use technology strategically to improve connections with customers and outperform competitors.
- Different social levels matter: Technology can impact sales at different organizational levels, from individual salespeople to entire industries. Companies should strive to understand these impacts.
- Balance technology and people (i.e. augmentation versus automated decision-making): When using technology in sales, it’s best to find the right mix of technology and people to get the best results.
- More than just money: Rather than focusing solely on short-term monetary gains, companies should also measure how technology impacts long-term relationships with customers.
- Mixed research methods: To understand how technology is changing sales, companies should consider different research methods, such as surveys, experiments, and interviews.
The paper notes that more than half of sales professionals believe technology can enhance buyer relationships, although one-third of technology experts also believe that introducing new technology can extend project timelines by months.
That doesn’t even take into account salespeople who are hesitant to adopt innovations that might benefit the company’s bottom line. Nielsen and his colleagues focus in part on “helping solve the complexities of sales technology implementation.”
“While there are many tools that sales teams can use to improve productivity, there is a real threat of failure when implementing new technology,” Nelson said. “Sales leadership should carefully consider how technology tool strategies will enhance relationship-building behaviors with buyers.”
Nelson joined Elon University in 2020, and his research interests are relationship sales and sales technology. He teaches courses on topics such as professional sales, sales management, customer relationship management and marketing research.
Nielsen’s research has been published in a variety of high-quality journals, including a separate article on relationship marketing accepted for publication in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Industrial Marketing Management.
Nelson plans to use his latest research when teaching customer relationship management. “Students will gain information about common sales technique stacks they may encounter in the sales force, and then they will analyze how that technique can improve or hurt relationships with account teams,” he said.
In addition to Nielsen, academics who co-authored this article in the European Journal of Marketing include:
- Carlos Bauer, Assistant Professor, University of Alabama
- John Galvan, Assistant Professor, Missouri State University
- Tyler Hancock, Assistant Professor, University of Toledo
- Gary Hunter, associate professor at the University of Mississippi
- Jen Riley, Senior Lecturer, Vanderbilt University
- Emily Tanner, Assistant Professor, West Virginia University
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