| Budget cuts along with the preponderance and rate of progress of social media tools are revolutionizing businesses and the way their employees interact with customers. Today's salesforce are being forced to utilize the social media tools to establish and maintain virtual relationships with their customers without truly understanding how to effectively use the tools to gain the virtual trust of their customers. Currently, researchers argue that salespeople are currently piecemeal social media usage. As a result, they are not as effective in building online trust with their customers. This presentation elaborates upon some of the ways salespeople can gain their client's virtual trust. The presentation will cover the existing literature on how businesses and salespeople build trust online. Specifically, the literature framework builds upon some of the most cited buyer-seller relationship research that proposed a framework for how buyer-seller relationships developed. Our goal is to use existing relationship frameworks and draw on the literature in information technology (IT), sales, communications, sociology and psychology to suggest how salespeople can use technology to establish virtual or nearly virtual relationships with customers. We will also expand upon popular research analogy between buyer-seller relationships and interpersonal relationships between men and women, specifically leading to marriage providing the relationship framework. Finally, we will present a framework for an online salesforce to build online trust via some of the same tools that build trust in online dating. . |
Updated 03/19/2014