Understanding and Defining the Corporate Influencer in Business-to-Business Sales – First Insights from an Interview Study

While the importance of social media and influencer marketing for business-to-consumer markets is already widely recognized, such approaches have long been uncharted territory in business-to-business contexts. Nevertheless, a growing number of business-to-business salespersons adopt social media for their sales activities and begin to enact a role that we conceptualize as the corporate influencer. In order to empirically explore this emerging role, we conducted an interview study with ten experts who themselves serve as corporate influencers. Based on our qualitative data analysis, this study gives a description of their tasks and objectives as well as their characteristics, skills, and requirements. We also suggest a preliminary definition of the corporate influencer which has been lacking so far in academic literature. Finally, we outline how we plan to procede with this study and which implications for future research our first insights already yield