ANALYZING THE LINK BETWEEN SALES TECHNOLOGY USE AND SALES PERFORMANCE

Firms invest billions of dollars in sales technologies in the form of order tracking and CRM systems, sales automation tools, or smartphones and tablets to enable their sales workforce to access, analyze, and communicate information about products, sales calls or orders, sales, accounts or competitors more easily, and to improve sales effectiveness and efficiency and thus, to generate a superior customer experience. However, the results regarding the link between technology use and overall salesperson performance is mixed. Thus, there is a need for a better understanding of how technology impacts performance of the salespeople. This study tries to demonstrate this link with data from direct selling organizations. Results indicate that salespeople mainly use sales technologies to analyze data and that sales technology use influences internal administrative performance, sales performance, and customer relationship building performance; i.e. all aspects of salesperson performance. Customer orientation, training and perceived ease-of-use of the sales technology enhance this relationship. On the other hand, expertise of the salesperson was found to display no influence