CONTRIBUTION OF SOCIAL MEDIA AND CULTURAL INTELLIGENCE ON INDIAN-THAI B2B

Journal article

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Publication Details

Author list: Arti Pandey;Aksarapak Lucktong

Publication year: 2020

Volume number: 13

Issue number: 1

Start page: 90

End page: 111

Number of pages: 22

ISSN: 1906-3296

URL: http://www.assumptionjournal.au.edu/index.php/AU-GSB/article/view/4823

Abstract

Business to Business or B2B relationships lead to a large volume of long-term business, in particular international trade. Effective salespersons who are able to deal with foreign clients are essential in this globally digital world. Social media has been used as a communication tool for cross-cultural selling; however, personal selling attributes of salespeople should be considered as well. Therefore, our study aims to examine the benefit of social media in facilitating cross-cultural sales performance and to investigate the mediating effect of cultural intelligence (CQ) and two selling behaviors on increasing sales success. The survey study collected data from a total of 234 Thai salespersons dealing with Indian businessmen. Findings show that Thai salespeople using social media intensively in their B2B tasks tend to present higher levels of cross-cultural sales performance. The mediating effects analysis shows that CQ, adaptive selling behavior and customer-oriented selling behavior fully mediated the positive relationship between social media use for Indian-Thai B2B selling and cross-cultural sales performance. It is recommended herein that, apart from social media usage training programs, international businesses should organize CQ, adaptive selling technique and customer-oriented selling technique programs for their salespeople in order to increase the chance of their success in cross-cultural selling tasks.

Keywords

Social media, Cultural intelligence, Cross-cultural selling, Business to business