The Adoption of Information Technology in the Sales Force

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to explain why salespeople adopt information technology. The results from a cross-sectional study of 229 salespeople indicate that putting sales technology to use strongly depends on salespeople’s perceptions about the technology enhancing their performance, their personal innovativeness and organizational efforts in terms of user training. Throughout the adoption process companies also need to target sales line managers – next to end users – because salespeople clearly comply with the expectations of their supervisors. Finally, the threat from competing sales professionals or peers who use similar sales technology seems to be of secondary importance for individual sales technology adoption.

Keywords: Technology adoption, Sales management, Innovativeness

JEL Classification: M30, O30