Enhancing B2B sales through digital transformation: Insights into effective sales enablement

Business-to-business (B2B) firms increasingly face the challenge of enabling their sales force to interact with informed customers during the sales process. Consequently, B2B firms have been investing in sales enablement initiatives to help their salespeople have value-adding dialogue with their customers. Due to the evolving influence of digital technologies on buyer behaviors, B2B sales organizations are responding by deploying digital technologies as part of their sales enablement initiatives. Yet, practitioners and sales research lack insights on how digital technologies actually enable the sales force to deal with the challenges of the sales process. Basing ourselves on a qualitative field-study involving interviews with 26 B2B sales executives, we studied how sales organizations deployed digital technologies to help their salespeople along the sales process. Our empirical findings offer two contributions to extant sales enablement literature. First, our study gives structured and nuanced insights on how digital technologies are deployed as part of sales enablement initiatives along the entire sales process by a) facilitating customer facing sales interactions, b) facilitating internal work efficiencies, and c) salesperson capability enhancement. Second the findings from our study helped us propose a digital sales enablement framework that showcases the impact of digital sales enablement on performance outcomes. Our framework also identified two sets of contextual factors that could affect the digital sales enablement-performance outcomes relationship.