Dynamically Adapting Sales Influence Tactics in E-Commerce

Abstract

Salesmen have a set of sales influence tactics (SITs) at their disposal when approaching customers in a face-to-face setting. This paper argues that in order to transform e-commerce into e-selling, SITs need be able to be adapted to individual customers rather than the average customer. Next, via a field experiment, we show that the revenue of an e-commerce platform can be increased by dynamically adapting SITs to individual customer responses. We explain how sales professionals can modify their e-commerce platforms to implement the same personalization they use in face-to-face selling.