Digitalization of the sales process : Leveraging digital sales and marketing tools to increase time effectiveness of multinational SMEs

Abstract: Internationalizing small and medium sized enterprises are limited in resources in comparison to larger enterprises. Through digitalization, smaller sales organizations have been presented with tools to enable the sales representatives to use time more effectively and focus on reaching organizational goals. This study aims to determine how digital sales and marketing tools should be implemented into the traditional sales process to increase time effectivity of sales representatives. Based on previous literature on related topics, sales representatives of Scanmast were interviewed and insights specific to the implementation of digital sales and marketing tools into complex B2B sales processes was gathered. The analysis of the responses in congestion with previous research demonstrated that certain ways of leveraging digital sales and marketing tools increase the time effectivity of sales representatives. These results were found to be especially present in regard to the parts of the sales process where customer interaction is considered to be low.