The increasing application of digital technologies is transforming sales considerably. However, it is unclear how sales can adapt properly – particularly from the B2B sales skills side. Despite the urgency of this matter, in-depth research on B2B sales skills in the digital era remains sparse. In this structured abstract, a new conceptual model for a more modern B2B skill set is thus developed in a cross-country study. As a preliminary result, most of the traditional sales skills are still required in future, but need to be complemented by intercultural as well as digital sales skills.

Open Innovation means a situation where a company does not just rely on their own internal knowledge and resources for innovation but also uses multiple external sources to drive innovation. This approach may also influence various aspects of customers' brand perception. To investigate this issue, an experimental study based on two different Facebook posts by the well-known consumer brand "Frosch" was conducted (n = 2,426). The results show that open innovation creates an additional communicative value, by affecting consumers' price acceptance level, the brand personality, and the perceived quality. The effect depends on the extend of knowledge about the nature of open innovation.

Bei der Öffnung unternehmerischer Innovationsprozesse (Open Innovation) kommt die Frage auf, ob und inwiefern dadurch die Markenwahrnehmung der Konsumenten beeinflusst werden kann. In einer experimentellen empirischen Studie (n = 2.426) werden Facebook-Nutzern unterschiedliche Posts der Konsumgütermarke „Frosch" gezeigt und Aspekte der Markenwahrnehmung erhoben. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass Open Innovation einen kommunikativen Wert generieren kann, der aus Kundenperspektive insbesondere die Preisbereitschaft, die Markenpersönlichkeit sowie die wahrgenommene Qualität beeinflusst. Die Wirkung ist umso stärker, je größer das Wissen der Konsumenten über Open Innovation ist. Für die Praxis bedeutet dies, dass Open Innovation Teil einer langfristigen Kommunikationsstrategie sein kann, um die Marke zu stärken.

The majority of business-to-business companies are working on their digital transformation in sales. Despite enormous transformation efforts, the expected productivity gains are often missing in most companies. Based on empirical research, this paper aims to develop a new market- oriented transformation model. Management implications as well as future research directions are derived for a more focused digital transformation process in sales. Design/methodology/approach – Within the exploratory research study, 90 key informants were interviewed to provide better insights in the context of digital transformation in sales. The accuracy of the research results was safeguarded by triangulation. Findings – As this research paper will show, the reasons for the missing productivity gains caused by a limited knowledge about the main success factors of digital transformation as well as a lack of understanding of digital transformation as an evolving process. Originality/value – Based on the empirical research, a new market-oriented transformation model is developed and management implications as well as future research directions are derived for a more focused digital transformation process in sales.

Companies are either proactively driving the digital transformation or are forced to digitalize by markets and eco-systems. In order to identify the status about the digital transformation of sales in practice and to get deeper knowledge about treated areas in sales and challenges on the path of digitalization, in-depth interviews of sales executives and managers of more than 50 internationally operating companies in three countries Germany, Finland and Austria were conducted in this research. The results show that one major goal for companies is to accelerate digitizing processes as digitalization helps to work more efficiently. Access to systems is necessary, hence investments in digitalization are seen as sustainable and absolutely essential. Digital tools lead to adaptions in the sales process as with support sales processes and sales management. Accelerated also by the COVID-19 crisis, face-to-face customer visits have been reduced even more and online meetings have increased as the speed of response has become more and more important. Finally, the necessary skill set of a sales force has to be adapted, which has to be further researched in the future, having support of higher education institutions being the order of the day. Companies have realized that a good sales pitch does not necessarily need to be in person, due to the new virtual technology.

KI und maschinelles Lernen sind in aller Munde, gerade im Marketing – aber gilt das auch für den B2B-Bereich? Welche konkreten Einsatzmöglichkeiten gibt es?

The aim of this work is to analyze the reports on cluster headache attacks collected online in the citizen science project CLUE with respect to the effectiveness of drugs taken during the attacks. The collection of data within the framework of citizen science projects opens up the possibility of investigating the effectiveness of acute medication on the basis of a large number of individual attacks instead of a simple survey of patients.

Photocatalytic disintegration is a novel approach to eliminate pollution. The method utilizes the semiconductor titanium dioxide to degrade organic molecules in the presence of ultraviolet (UV) light. In this study, it is shown how the capabilities of several types of catalyst designs degrade the non-polar substance diesel fuel and the polar substance methylene blue. The floating design of foam glass coated with titanium dioxide could reduce the concentration of diesel fuel by 329 mg/L in 16 h; the submerged designs for coated glass fiber and coated steel grit could reduce methylene blue concentration by 96.6% after 4 h and 99.1% after 6 h, respectively. It could be shown that photocatalysis is a promising cost- and energy-efficient method for managing air and water pollution. It can be established as a low-technology method without requiring the use of a conventional source of energy, given an adequate amount of sun hours, or as an additional cleaning stage in water treatment plants using UV-LEDs.