Designing a Digital Meeting Place for B2B Sales Interactions

Sammanfattning: Business to business (B2B) sales constitutes a big part of today's sold goods and services. These sales processes are getting more complex and involve more people than before. B2B sales are also more and more taking place online. Throughout this thesis the author has researched the nature of a typical B2B sales process in an attempt to find sales activities that could be gathered in a common space online and thereby simplify the complex sales processes. The goal of this space was to serve as a digital meeting place for all things related to a specific deal. Based on the research, a prototype of the digital meeting place was created. The prototype was developed during two iterations. Each of the iterations was followed by a usability test to evaluate the prototype. The final prototype was implemented as a web application with the JavaScript framework Vue.js and tested by five sales persons with a background in B2B sales. This prototype received high system usability scale (SUS) scores from all but one of the test participants, indicating that they were overall satisfied with the application. Further, all of the test participants successfully completed all of the test tasks used to evaluate the HiFi prototype. Most importantly, they were all convinced that the application would simplify their sales processes. The sales persons that tested the HiFi prototype also requested additional features. This included, among other things, integration to services like Google Calendar, a more advanced document viewer and a way to keep private notes in this digital meeting place. These features would require further investigation and were not covered in the thesis. With this in mind, it could still be concluded that it is possible to simplify the B2B sales process by gathering sales activities in a common space.