The Role of Technology and New Equipment in the Sales Performance of SMEs: An Empirical Research in Emerging Country

Abstract

Technology has recently become a competitive advantage to firms in severe competition in creating new products, higher working environment quality, and more outstanding customer response capabilities. Thus, this study avails the phenomenon to consider whether technology can foster sales performance. To deeply analyze the relationship, we perform (i) an analysis of the technological adoption and sales performance during the period and (ii) an in-depth exploration of whether new equipment can fortify the sales performance when along with technology. The study is conducted as a contributor to the Technology-Organization-Environment framework for all these purposes. The research is based on the aggregation of 3494 samples collected from the Vietnamese Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) survey, implemented biennially between 2011 and 2015. So far, the results indicate that technology does wonders in the efficient sales performance of SMEs in general. In detail, the effectiveness of technology is accentuated in larger firm sizes, while small and medium enterprises can only be assured of taking the opportunity to apply new technology since it does not harm sales effectiveness. However, it seems to have no effects when it comes to new equipment, even when the firm can benefit from applying new technology in all firm sizes. In this study, technology is a phenomenon in fostering most enterprises’ operations without doubts; hence, the practitioners and researchers only need to take more insight research based on their firm and market characteristics to apply the proposed results fully. We also bring out even more in-depth to see how the new equipment and new technology affect the sales performance along different regression models, which aims to heighten the accuracy of the results in different aspects. Nevertheless, the study’s limitations remain the data time-scope problem, which is not up-to-date, as well as the economic scale on which the study takes place.