E-commerce

Leadership for the next phase of digital sales

For many companies, e-commerce is no longer a separate channel alongside the rest, but the place where the commercial strategy changes first. D2C transformations, new revenue models, and an ever-growing share of automated customer contact call for a different kind of commercial leader than the traditional sales organization is used to.

How much this demands is evident from a large meta-analysis in the Journal of Marketing (Gelbrich, Roschk, Miederer & Kerath, 2025) based on 943 effect measurements from 327 studies into chatbots, algorithms, and robots in customer contact. Customers are initially skeptical of an automated salesperson, but ultimately buy from one just as easily as from a human — provided the performance is good. More importantly: each type of automation (chatbot, algorithm, robot) has its own set of conditions for performing as well as a human, and those conditions are not interchangeable. For e-commerce leaders, this means that "automating" is not a one-time choice, but must be reconsidered for every customer contact moment.

The same applies to the role of people themselves in digital sales. Research into extended reality in sales (Mettler, Lanzrath & Homburg, 2026) shows that AR/VR strengthens buyers' imagination and thereby improves loyalty and upselling, even in remote sales settings — exactly the kind of tool with which e-commerce can compensate for the lack of physical contact.

SalesQuarters sees this shift reflected in clients such as Ford, where we found the Head of eCommerce & Marketing for the D2C sales transformation. We help companies find the right commercial leader for this next phase of digital sales — someone who understands customer psychology just as well as technology.