The Changing World Of Sales Skills: From Live to a Mix of Live and Virtual Selling

This study navigates the literature review to extract today's virtual selling skills and evaluates these skills from a multi-national company's sales personnel perspective. The extracted skills were employed by using a survey approach to assess their importance. A group comparison analysis between the main communication channel being face-to-face (live) against a combination of face-to-face and virtual was explored. Altogether, the skills ranked important with a score mean of 4.27. Significant group differences were observed across three conceptual, interpersonal and technical skills clusters and their related skills. The differences were significant, considering the use of Eta squared values to measure the effect size. Owning the right skills by sales personnel will enhance virtual selling and customer relationship. Future sales research could investigate how these several skills will be transferred from traditional sales face-to-face selling to a virtual one.