The doctoral dissertation in the Service Management will be examined at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Business Studies at Kuopio Campus.
Business-to-business (B2B) relationship selling is now at a crossroads, as sales move towards digital platforms. The fast advancement of new technologies, expansion of e-commerce, and customers’ growing expectations hinder opportunities for long-term customer relationship building. Furthermore, the recent global COVID-19 pandemic has rapidly forced companies and organizations to change their working habits and move their businesses and customer interactions online. Sales interactions, and the customer relationship development process tend to occur increasingly online. Therefore, it is important to investigate what sales communication competence salespeople need to communicate in a competent manner with their customers in modern B2B relationship selling environment.
This dissertation focuses on sales communication competence in modern B2B relationship selling contexts. Relationship selling is a process that focuses on securing, building, and maintaining long-term profitable customer relationships. Furthermore, the modern B2B relationship selling environment is characterized by rapid technological progress and digitalization, global competition, active customer roles, the need to build and maintain long-term customer relationships, the need to build solutions and bring value to the customer and the need to communicate with customers via multiple communication channels. All these changes in the B2B relationship environment demand a new understanding of sales communication competence of salespeople.
The dissertation consists of three articles. The first article investigates how sales communication competence can be defined in international B2B relationship selling contexts. The qualitative data includes expert interviews (N = 39). The transcribed interviews were analysed using abductive logic applying a theory-driven theme analysis.
The second article focuses on digital sales communication and investigates social presence in B2B chat conversations between salespeople and customers. Online chat conversations (N = 157) were analysed with a theory-driven theme analysis.
The third article focuses on long-term customer relationships and investigates the long-term development of B2B customer relationships at the interpersonal level from the perspective of social penetration theory focusing on the salesperson’s self-disclosure and relational cost and reward evaluation. The data consists of expert interviews (N = 47) with sales professionals. The transcribed interviews were analysed using a theme analysis.
The findings of the first article conceptualize a new theoretical construct, namely sales communication competence, which consists of four dimensions. The dimensions are (1) the behavioural communication dimension, (2) cognitive communication dimension (3), affective communication dimension, and (4) sales acumen. The findings provide an in-depth understanding of the content of the behavioural, affective and cognitive communication dimension as well as sales acumen.
The findings of the second article provide an understanding of interpersonal sales communication and social presence in a digital sales communication context. The findings indicate that social presence varies depending on the stage of the customer relationship. In the data, customers also had different purposes for online chat depending on the stage of their customer relationship.
Findings of the third article reveal that B2B sales communication occurs via multiple communication channels (e.g., social media, email, phone, in-person face-to-face meetings, video calls, videoconferences). The findings indicate that long-term B2B customer relationships evolve at the interpersonal level through a process of continuous relational cost and reward evaluation and self-disclosure. As a result, three relationship phases were found: becoming business partners, collaborative partners, and collaborative and personal partners. The reward evaluations progress from being business-related to including ever more relational benefits. Disclosure progresses from general business disclosure and general self-disclosure; to strategic business disclosure and personal life self-disclosure; to synergistic business disclosure and private self-disclosure. Mutual understanding and reciprocal self-disclosure were needed between partners to deepen the relationship.
The most important theoretical contribution of this dissertation is a new theoretical construct, sales communication competence in modern B2B relationship selling contexts, which is produced as a result of all three articles. The managerial implications are connected to sales training and education, digital sales communication, and sales management.
The doctoral defence of Jonna Koponen, PhD, entitled Sales communication competence in modern B2B relationship selling, will be examined at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Business Studies on 3 December 2021 at noon in Kuopio Campus, Medistudia MS300. The Opponent will be Professor Pauliina Ulkuniemi, University of Oulu, and the Custos will be Professor Anu Puusa, University of Eastern Finland. Language of the public defence is Finnish. Public examination will be streamed live.
For further information, please contact:
Jonna Koponen, Academy Research Fellow, Business School, University of Eastern Finland, jonnapauliina.koponen@uef.fi, tel. +35850 343 7446