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

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.