The drivers towards interactive digital sales processes in business-to-business markets

In the past years, digitalization and information technology have changed our buying behavior in numerous ways. As consumers, we increasingly go online to search for more information, evaluate products, and make purchasing decisions. Nonetheless, the online purchasing has mainly focused primarily on non-complex business-to-consumer (B2C) goods. When products become more complex, customers are left struggling with company web pages that only list their product information online and with online stores that are not helpful when buying multidimensional products. Therefore, companies have started using interactive digital selling processes and sales configurators as tools to address these challenges. The goal of this paper is to identify the drivers behind this emerging organizational movement toward deeper digitalization in business-to-business (B2B) selling processes. The paper analyses 32 in-depth interviews conducted in 14 different companies. The results show that, in addition to technological and economical enablers, the organizational benefits are a major driver in this movement. Major selling company benefits include operations that are more efficient and increased market knowledge. Distributors are believed to have an improved selling process and more easily managed profitability. Finally, customer benefits are found to include improved need fulfillment and optimized configuration processes.