The human side of digital transformation in sales: review & future paths

Abstract

The digital transformation of organizations is a pervasive force which fundamentally changes companies and, in fact, society as a whole. For many companies, the sales force is at the center of this transformation seeing the essential role of salespeople at the customer-company interface and the exceptional quantifiability of salespeople’s work outputs and inputs. New, cutting-edge sales technologies such as predictive sales analytics, virtual or augmented reality, or AI bots hold the promise of significant productivity gains, yet, simultaneously may entail insidious side effects for sales employees and companies. While past research made significant progress in understanding the benefits of these new technologies, the intricate ‘human side’ of the digital transformation remains relatively ‘uncharted territory’. With this special issue, we aim to contribute to a better understanding of the human side in digital transformation of sales—to augment academic knowledge, provide immediate guidance to practitioners, and improve academic sales education. This editorial reviews the works in the special issue, the state of digital sales transformation in practice, and on this basis derives ideas for future research.