Digital Maturity and Organizational Resilience during Crisis : An Exploratory Single Case Study within B2B Sales Interactions during COVID-19

Sammanfattning: Over the past decade, digitalization has played an increasingly important and prominent role in the competitiveness of businesses. The pace of digitalization is not slowing down and has only intensified rapidly over recent years. Because of this, businesses that invest a significant amount of resources toward digitalization could increase and strengthen their competitive advantage and develop their digital maturity, which can be described as the technological functions and visions available for a firm. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the pace of digitalization was intensified further, and many businesses were forced to adapt their business activities through digital channels to stay operational. Furthermore, a specific field affected by the governmental restrictions was B2B sales interactions, which has caused several problems for firms that do not have sufficient technological functions to adapt to digital channels, the digital capabilities can be described as sufficient. To counteract the pandemic effects, organizational resilience is an aspect that is activated to aid companies in parrying the effects of the sudden shock, in this case, caused by COVID-19 and can be described as the resources made available by management to respond and adapt to unexpected events. Hence, the purpose of this study is to investigate how sales interactions were impacted, by investigating the level of digital maturity and organizational resilience of one specific company, during the COVID19 pandemic. This was conducted through an exploratory single case study of a global biomaterials company where digital maturity was measured through a survey followed by an in-depth interview to assess the company’s organizational resilience.The findings suggest a clear link between the digital maturity level of a firm and how well it can be utilized in organizational resilience efforts when re-shaping the business landscape. Furthermore, the study highlights that digitalization is becoming a prominent factor in the way businesses and sales are conducted and even more in the times of crisis, thus, highlighting the importance of digital maturity. Based on the insights gained from the in-depth interview, a conceptual framework called digital activation of resilience within sales interactions was constructed. This framework highlights what was discovered in this single case to be the main influences on sales interactions and how digital maturity aids the activation of resilience.