Fully leveraging AI in B2B sales: Exploring sales managers’ capabilities and organizational knowledge processes
Citation. Hautamäki, P., & Heikinheimo, M. (2025). Fully leveraging AI in B2B sales: Exploring sales managers’ capabilities and organizational knowledge processes. Journal of Business Research, 194, 115396. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2025.115396
Summary. Hautamäki and Heikinheimo use a grounded theory design based on interviews with 32 top-level managers in B2B sales organizations to explain how sales managers support AI exploitation. Their framework links three managerial capabilities—data-based human capital, social capital for knowledge-sharing culture, and a transformative AI-positive mindset—to AI-related knowledge processes at individual, team, and organizational levels. The source is useful for treating AI adoption as a multilevel managerial and knowledge-process problem rather than a salesperson-level tool-use problem.
Key claims
- Sales managers’ data-based human capital fosters individual-level knowledge creation by helping teams understand the context of AI use, identify cause-and-effect relationships in internal and external data, and identify or remedy competence deficiencies in AI use.
- Sales managers’ social capital fosters team-level knowledge sharing and transfer by encouraging sales teams to share AI use cases, use data as a common language, treat AI as an analytical collaborator, and build ties across sales, IT, data, HR, finance, and other functions.
- A transformative AI-positive mindset supports organizational-level knowledge reconfiguration by making small AI-enabled improvements visible, tolerating incomplete data and volatile tool environments, encouraging experimentation, and continuously revisiting the roles of humans and AI in sales.
- The framework positions AI exploitation as a multilevel process: individual knowledge creation, team knowledge sharing and transfer, and organizational knowledge-asset reconfiguration depend on different managerial capabilities and together may support greater sales efficiency and growth.
- The study argues that AI accessibility alone does not create B2B sales value; sales managers need contextual understanding, data literacy, cross-functional relationship-building, and change-oriented behavior to turn AI tools into usable knowledge processes.
Evidence & limitations
- Evidence comes from a constructivist grounded theory study using in-depth interviews with 32 top-level managers of B2B sales organizations, with coding in ATLAS.ti, researcher/data triangulation, participant clarification, steering-group peer debriefing, and practitioner/scholarly resonance checks.
- The sample covered several B2B industries, but 63% of interviewees represented IT, software development, and management consulting services, so transfer to less digital or less knowledge-intensive sales contexts remains untested.
- The study relies on sales managers’ supervisors rather than sales managers or salespeople themselves; the framework is strongest as theory-building evidence about perceived managerial capabilities and weaker as direct evidence of enacted behavior or performance effects.
- The framework has not yet been quantitatively tested, and the source does not establish whether the named managerial capabilities cause better AI exploitation or sales performance.