Business-to-Business E-Negotiations and Influence Tactics

Abstract

E-negotiations, or sales negotiations over email, are increasingly common in business-to-business (B2B) sales, but little is known about selling effectiveness in this medium. This research investigates salespeople’s use of influence tactics as textual cues to manage buyers’ attention during B2B e-negotiations to win sales contract award. Drawing on studies of attention as a selection heuristic, the authors advance the literature on mechanisms of sales influence by theorizing buyer attention as a key mediating variable between the use of influence tactics and contract award. They use a unique, longitudinal panel spanning more than two years of email communications between buyers and salespeople during B2B sales negotiations to develop a validated corpus of textual cues that are diagnostic of salespeople’s influence tactics in e-negotiations. These e-communications data are augmented by salesperson in-depth interviews and survey, archival performance data, and a controlled experimental study with professional salespeople. The obtained results indicate that the concurrent use of compliance or internalization-based tactics as textual cues bolsters buyers’ attention and is associated with greater likelihood of contract award. In contrast, concurrent use of compliance and internalization-based tactics is prone to degrade buyer attention and likely to put the salesperson at a disadvantage in closing the contract award.