Objective: The aim of this study is to determine the impact of attitudes toward the usefulness of social media and learning goal orientation on competitive intelligence, adaptive selling behavior, and sales performance, considering the mediating role of social media usage.
Method: This is an applied study utilizing a descriptive-survey method. The statistical population consists of all salespeople, sales specialists, and sales managers employed by manufacturing companies active in the industrial marketing (B2B) sector within the Sari Industrial Estate. A non-probability convenience sampling method was employed, resulting in a sample of 260 individuals. Data collection was conducted using the standard questionnaire developed by Itani et al. (2017). Following expert validation, the Composite Reliability (CR) for each construct was reported to be above 0.7, indicating satisfactory internal consistency for the measurement model. Data analysis was performed using Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) with SmartPLS3 software.
Results: The findings showed that attitude toward the usefulness of social media and learning goal orientation, with the mediating role of social media use, collectively have an impact on the competitive intelligence set, adaptive selling behavior, and sales performance. The results obtained from the conceptual model of the study showed that the indirect effect of attitude toward the usefulness of social media and learning goal orientation on the competitive intelligence set, adaptive selling behavior, and sales performance, with the mediating role of social media use, is 0.11. Furthermore, the effect of learning goal orientation and attitude toward the usefulness of social media was estimated at 0.85; the effect of attitude toward the usefulness of social media on social media use at 0.28; the effect of learning goal orientation on social media use at 0.64; the effect of social media use on the competitive intelligence set at 0.74; the effect of social media use on adaptive selling behavior at -0.37; the effect of the competitive intelligence set on adaptive selling behavior at 0.71; and the effect of adaptive selling behavior on sales performance at 0.83.
Conclusions: The present study provides empirical evidence to strengthen the role of social media as an influential factor on two key sales behaviors: competitive intelligence gathering and adaptive selling.