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The purpose of this paper is to understand the main drivers of change in the relational approaches adopted in business-to-business (B2B) companies as an effect of the digital transformation processes boosted by COVID-19 pandemic.

The methodology includes a qualitative study based on an abductive approach. Twenty-eight semistructured interviews and two focus groups have been carried out with sales and marketing professionals from different industries.

The research defines a conceptual framework that describes what the main changes of B2B relational approach are in a context affected by the pandemic, as well as its effects. The framework is constituted by three dimensions, namely, efficiency of the interaction, coordination and digital trust, and seven subdimensions.

This research also contributes to managerial practice, defining some directions to be fulfilled in a business context affected by the COVID-19 emergency to improve efficiency, coordination and trust.

Academic literature has greatly analyzed the transformation of the B2B scenario; less studies have explored how the relational approach is changing due to the digital acceleration caused by COVID-19 pandemic.

With the popularity of social media and, recently, live streaming, internet celebrity endorsements have become a prevalent approach to content marketing for e-commerce sellers. Despite the widespread use of social media and online communities, empirical studies investigating the economic value of user-generated content (UGC) and marketer-generated content (MGC) still lag behind. The purpose of this paper is to contribute both theoretically and practically to capture both first-order effects and second-order effects of internet celebrity endorsements on marketing outcomes in an e-commerce context.

This study conducts a cross-sectional regression to evaluate the economic value of internet celebrity endorsement, and a panel vector autoregressive model is adopted to examine the relationship between celebrities’ and consumers’ content marketing behaviors and e-commerce sales performance. The authors also adopt look-ahead propensity-score matching technique to correct for selection bias.

The empirical results show that the content generation efforts of marketers and the interaction behaviors between marketers and consumers will significantly influence the e-commerce sales, which refers to the first-order effects of internet celebrity endorsement. Moreover, interactions within the fan community exert second-order effects of content marketing on sales performance.

This paper provides new insights for e-commerce retailers to evaluate the economic values of internet celebrity endorsement, a new content marketing practice in e-commerce platform.

Digital ecosystemic business environments challenge dyadic approaches to value creation and particularly to business-to-business (B2B) sales. This paper aims to offer a novel conceptualization of the connection between value creation and B2B sales, which indicates practical implications and builds an agenda for future research.

This conceptual paper integrates theoretical insights on service-dominant logic, service ecosystems, interactional value co-creation and B2B sales. This paper uses anecdotal evidence from the field of B2B sales to illustrate theoretical concepts developed in the paper.

The paper develops the concept of value idea emergence (VIE), the process through which B2B entities become aware of a pursuable benefit. The paper further proposes that value (co-)creation in ecosystems happens through VIE’s intertwinement with the process of value proposition creation, a process, which includes all activities needed to bring a value proposition to a customer. The paper then discusses the role of B2B in these processes and proposes an agenda for future research.

The novel conceptualizations of value (co-)creation can help B2B sales managers to understand the ecosystemic nature of the interactions that affect sales and value creation in the current business environment.

The paper contributes to the literature on B2B sales and value creation by proposing a novel concept of VIE, introducing a conceptual model of interactive value (co-)creation in ecosystems and reformulating the role of B2B sales in value creation. These theory-developing insights can be used to guide both academic and managerial attention to interactions happening in the ecosystem outside of the buyer-seller dyad.

Currently, online chat is in common use in e-commerce. By adding social interaction to the online context, companies hope to increase customers’ purchasing intentions. However, previous studies have not investigated how social presence is embedded in online business-to-business (B2B) chat conversations between buyers and sellers. Moreover, the functions of online chat in B2B sales have not been investigated.

The data was collected at a case company over the course of four years, from which the authors analyzed 157 online chat conversations between buyers (n = 157) and sellers (n = 9) with a theory-driven thematic analysis. In addition, data from the company’s customer relationship management system was collected to specify buyer types.

The results reveal that social presence was embedded in online B2B chat via buyers’ interactive, affective and relationship maintenance responses. Social presence differed depending on the type of buyer, with only existing customers having relationship maintenance responses. E-commerce B2B chat functions can be described as multiple and changing depending on the buyer–seller relationship stage.

Having data only from one case company limits the results to one type of industry.

The results can be used in sales training and when developing online chat services.

Results bring scientific utility to B2B sales and marketing research, as the authors build a bridge between social presence, the existing theoretical model on B2B buyer–seller relationship development and online chat as a communication medium. Other researchers may use this understanding when exploring B2B buyer–seller interaction in different digitalized communication media.

The concept of emotional labor refers to the management of emotions in interaction with customers. This study aims to suggest an integrative definition of emotional labor. It develops a conceptual framework that helps organize and synthesize key insights from the literature, in an interactional and multi-level perspective.

This integrated framework consists in a mapping of key research themes resulting from a systematic literature review, which includes research in sales and marketing. As critical affective processes in sales have not been studied sufficiently, both in business-to-business and business-to-customer selling, this review also incorporates works in other research fields.

Sales representatives’ emotional labor must be considered as a bi-directional interaction with the customer in a multi-level perspective. Moreover, emotional labor has rather negative consequences for the salesperson (e.g. burnout and job stress), but may have positive sales and customer outcomes. Findings suggest that the expression of genuine emotions should be used during sales interactions. In addition, organizations should prevent customers’ negative behaviors (e.g. mistreatment).

Emotional labor key practical implications with regard to several management functions such as the recruitment, performance management and training (Ashkanasy and Daus, 2002) of the sales representatives.

Research on emotional labor in a sales ecosystem is scarce. It has largely covered service industry employees in contact with customers, but has not paid enough attention to sales representatives (Mikeska et al., 2015). The proposed integrated framework concerning emotional labor focuses on the bi-directional interaction between the sales representatives and their customers.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between a company's customer‐related performance and its learning and growth capabilities.

Four banks in Taiwan – Citibank, Chinatrust, Taipei Fubon Bank and Taiwan HSBC – have recently applied the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) perspective to their customer service. This research was designed to use the data of these sample banks and analyze it to build the theoretical relationship.

The results reveal that a company's customer‐related performance is positively associated with the interactions of its Human Resource Service Capability (HRSC), Information Technology Service Capability (ITSC) and Marketing Service Capability (MKSC).

This paper contributes to the literature by providing empirical evidence that when an organization establishes and raises levels of company learning and growth capabilities by using HR‐service capability, IT‐service capability, and MK‐service capability, conjoint effects of these result in a favorable interaction relationship and thus can help achieve a higher level of customer‐related performance.

The purpose of this paper is to categorize customer‐to‐customer (C2C) interaction as a sub‐component of relational capital and conceptualize C2C interaction adding value to business‐to‐customer (B2C) relational capital.

This work empirically tests the concept of C2C interaction and its added value to a firm's B2C relationship within the movie industry. Both business data and consumer interaction from blockbuster movies are collected to test their impact on movie sales.

The results support the hypotheses that C2C interaction (user messages on Yahoo movie message board) adds more explanation to movie sales than B2C interaction (advertising budget) alone, and that there is an inverse relationship between the impact of a firm's B2C interaction and C2C interaction on a firm's sales performance, with the former diminishing over time and the latter increasing over time.

For intellectual capital (IC) researchers, the main implication from the results of this paper is that the value of C2C is “in addition” to the existing customer relations already managed by the firm. The results of this paper confirm C2C relational capital within the movie context. Future research should use more textual‐based data to evaluate the positive and negative consumer interactions and their impact on IC value.

The findings of this paper stress the importance of practitioners, including the voice of customers in their financial reporting. Managers can now extract and incorporate the content of C2C interaction to a firm's day‐to‐day decision‐making process.

The originality of this paper resides in extending relational capital conceptual framework by dividing relational capital into B2C and C2C subcomponents, hypothesizing the added value of C2C interaction to B2C relational capital and the inverse relationship between B2C and C2C relational capital over time, and empirically providing a reference sample for practitioners for future IC reporting.

Despite the acknowledged importance of an understanding of the determinants of and processes affecting the salesperson‐customer interaction, this issue still remains an enigma. Posits that, of the two main philosophical stances available in the study of human behaviour (i.e. mediationism and behaviourism), the prevailing approaches adopted in the study of the salesperson‐customer interaction are mediationistic in nature and are, for the most part, uncritically accepted. States that in order to improve current understanding of the salesperson‐customer interaction, alternative sources for explaining this dyad should be introduced into the field of study. Argues that the competing philosophical stance offered by radical behaviourism may be suitable for this purpose, providing an examination of how this approach can be utilized to explain buying behaviour within the sales interaction context.

Sales organizations embrace technological innovation. However, salespeople’s willingness to use new technology influences a firm’s return on investment, representing a significant concern for the organization. These concerns highlight tensions regarding the tradeoffs associated with technology implementations. The purpose of this study is to offer insights that help reduce the complexities of sales technology (ST) by exploring the changing dynamics of contemporary business relationships.

This paper synthesizes the ST literature using the service ecosystem perspective to propose the sales techno-ecosystem (STE) framework, providing new insights into organizational decision-making related to the ongoing digital transformation of sales tasks.

This synthesis of the ST literature with the service ecosystem seeks to clarify the impact of technology within the evolving nature of buyer–seller relationships by providing four unique perspectives.

Perspective 1 reviews the sales-service ecosystem framework and develops the theoretical underpinnings and relevant terminologies. Perspective 2 summarizes critical aspects of the ST literature and provides foundations for future research in the STE. Perspective 3 offers a more granular view, explicating roles and contexts prevalent in buyer–seller–technology interactions. Perspective 4 provides a set of tenets and advances research questions related to each tenet.

The culmination of these four perspectives is the introduction of five key tenants designed to help guide strategy and research.

The paper advances Hartmann et al. (2018) service ecosystem paradigm by explicating critical aspects of its ST domain to generate insights for theory and practice.

This paper aims to study how price and sales level information influence consumer product perceptions and choices in online settings. It, in particular, tests whether displaying sales level information increases consumer price sensitivity, which is a potential strategic risk to retailers.

Study 1 uses eBay data to investigate whether the interaction effects between price and sales level can be observed in an existing market. Study 2 involves online experiments across three product categories. Participants choose from product pairs that are shown with either the same or different prices and with no, the same or different sales levels.

Study 1 shows strong effects of a product’s displayed sales and price level on its daily sales but finds no interaction effect. Study 2 shows strong effects of price and sales levels on product choice but similarly finds no evidence that sales level information influences consumer price sensitivity, although it reveals an effect on quality perceptions. The results show how perceptions of quality, sacrifice and popularity mediate the effects of price and sales level information on product choice.

Study 1 has limited control over prices and sales levels. Study 2 involves only hypothetical choices.

These findings indicate that businesses can use sales level information to manage consumer product quality perceptions and choices without having to be concerned that this will make consumers more price-sensitive.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first to investigate how sales level information affects consumer responses to price differences in online contexts.