Value Loss of Activities Propelled by Digital Transformation: Theoretical Evaluation and Empirical Modelling to Identify Efficiency Potentials to Maximize Value in the Field of Marketing & Sales.

Abstract

Digital transformation of firms and the adoption of digital technologies is progressing inexorably. Decision-makers are preoccupied with the endeavor to identify the potentials of existing as well as newly emerging technologies and underutilize the entailed profits. This research study proposes a newly developed conceptualization and model to compute efficiency potentials in the field of marketing and sales, a business function with an intense consumer focus. While this conjoint business unit mainly fosters and propels the performance measure of effectiveness, the full exploitation of internal workforce efficiency stays neglected and barely treated by practice and science. By employing expert interviews with managers in this field, a tailored efficiency determination model is created with in total eight efficiency potentials allocated to three digital technology effects, acceleration, automation, and outsourcing. The efficiency coefficient of time weights the human labor input while the additive connection with digital technologies as input factor engenders either a complementary, substitutional, or no effect. With a sequential mixed-methods research approach, a further quantitative study with 251 employees in the field of marketing and sales uses the qualitative model to determine the efficiency potential based on individual task assessments, including the identification of task values. While distinguishing between office and customer interaction-related work, the study finds that 45 percent of the working time underlies an efficiency potential by utilizing the ONET database, which contains 214 individual tasks in the career cluster marketing and professional sales.