Unpacking social selling in financial services: the interplay of organizational support, social media self-efficacy and sales technology orientation

Purpose: This research aims to unveil the mechanisms underlying successful social selling strategies. Specifically, we focus on the processes through which organizational content and social media sales tools support affect sales performance via salespeople’s social media self-efficacy and social media use. Additionally, we explore how these organizational supports interact with salespeople’s sales technology orientation to enhance salespeople’s social media self-efficacy, a critical factor in boosting social media use in selling. Design/methodology/approach: Data were collected from 277 salespeople in a South Korean insurance company, yielding a 78.9% response rate. Structural equation modeling with Mplus 8.10 was used to test the hypothesized relationships, including mediation, moderation and moderated mediation effects. Bootstrapping with 5,000 samples was applied to estimate standard errors, and interaction terms were computed using Mplus’s latent variable interaction approach. Findings: Our findings indicate that while social media content and tools support enhanced social media self-efficacy, the moderating role of sales technology orientation can be counterproductive, reducing the positive effect of social media tools support on social media self-efficacy. These insights provide a nuanced understanding of optimizing organizational support for social selling strategies. Originality/value: This research provides a nuanced understanding of how organizational support can be effectively leveraged to enhance social selling outcomes, with particular attention to the complex interaction between organizational initiatives and individual salesperson characteristics.