Navigating Between On-Screen Activities and Discussion : Multiactivity in Video-Mediated B2B Sales Interactions

Abstract

This study examines multiactivity in video-mediated business-to-business sales encounters. By drawing on multimodal conversation analysis, the paper examines how representatives of a legal service company navigate between talk-in-interaction with prospective clients and operating with a presentation on a shared screen where the sold service is demonstrated. The findings show how the technological affordances of MS Teams and PowerPoint are used to coordinate the presentation-orientation and prospect-orientation in a complex digital-social environment in order to display engagement in multiple technological and social actions simultaneously. The paper contributes, firstly, to the field of B2B sales interaction by showing how technology transforms the meetings into arenas of multiactivity, where the presenter has to navigate between their on-screen actions and their remote co-participants. Secondly, the paper contributes to the field of video-mediated interaction by illustrating how technological affordances are used to maintain both the progressivity and interactivity of the video-mediated meeting.