The impact of salespeople’s social media adoption on customer acquisition performance – a contextual perspective

Abstract Even as salespeople increasingly adopt social media, sales research and practice struggle to understand how their application can help salespeople acquire customers. This article therefore explores empirically under which conditions social media adoption enhances or impedes the customer acquisition performance of salespeople. According to motivation literature, the outcomes of salespeople’s social media adoption should depend fundamentally on the interplay of the level and direction of social media adoption. Based on a multi-level data set containing objective performance data and surveys of salespeople, the results of this study reveal that salespeople’s social media adoption increases customer acquisition performance if salespeople communicate in a customized way (indicated by customer orientation). Strikingly, the study also unveils that this effect is negative if salespeople communicate in a standardized way (indicated by, for example, performance orientation). These findings in turn offer several managerial and theoretical implications. Supplemental data for this article is available online at https://doi.org/10.1080/08853134.2022.2033624 .