Social Interaction

1. Introduction

In business-to-business (B2B) sales encounters, the participants engage in institutional interaction in and through which they establish their roles as salesperson and client and aim to achieve specific transactions related to selling (see Mondada et al., 2023; Humă & Stokoe, 2023). These transactions may consist of various activities, including invitations, proposals, persuasion, and small talk, which are often closely intertwined with each other and with broader institutional aims (e.g., De Stefani, 2018; Humă et al., 2020; Kaski et al., 2018a). Sales situations are complex in the sense that, although their ultimate goal is to make a sale, the sales process is rarely completed in a single meeting. Rather, each meeting has smaller objectives aimed at making the service relevant to the prospect (see Heinonen et al., 2021) and thus converting the prospect into a client over a longer period of time (e.g., Humă & Stokoe, 2020; 2023; Niemi et al., 2021).

In the 21st century - and especially since the COVID-19 pandemic - B2B sales encounters have increasingly shifted from face-to-face locations to online environments, which in turn adds new elements to these interactional situations and require participants to share their attention in new ways (see Heinonen et al., 2021). In particular, shared screens in video-mediated environments require participants to navigate between interacting with their remote co-participants and their own screen activities (see Balaman & Pekarek Doehler, 2022; Heinonen et al., 2021), potentially transforming sales meetings into arenas of multiactivity (on multiactivity, see Haddington et al., 2014; Mondada, 2014).

This paper focuses on such multiactivity in video-mediated sales interaction by examining the use of PowerPoint presentations during the video-mediated sales meetings in which lawyers from a legal service company present their services to prospective corporate clients for the first time via a shared screen. Research on multiactivity has been conducted in different kinds of institutional contexts, showing how the participants rely on different embodied and multimodal resources to simultaneously coordinate activities such as providing professional services and chatting with the client (De Stefani & Horlacher, 2018), making phone calls during the meeting (Ticca, 2014), or doing surgery and demonstrating it to the audience (Mondada, 2014). However, little is known about situations in which the orientation needs to be shared between technology and the co-participants. In a face-to-face context, Ruusuvuori (2001) has shown how the doctor's activity of disengaging from interaction with the patient and engaging in reading or writing the medical records on the computer is treated as problematic because the patient cannot know whether the doctor is listening or not. Similarly, in video-mediated interaction, Balaman and Pekarek Doehler (2022) have shown that coordinating actions between what is happening on one's on-screen and engaging in a discussion with a remote co-participant during a collaborative task in such a "complex digital-social ecology" can be difficult. By focusing on a video-mediated sales presentation, the current research investigates how the simultaneous orientation to technological presentation and service discussion with the prospect can be coordinated and how the technological affordances of a video-conferencing tool, MS Teams, and PowerPoint are used to achieve multiactivity.

In what follows, we first provide a background by drawing on conversation analytic oriented research on the use of digital objects in sales interaction and in video-mediated interaction. Then the data and methods of the study are introduced. In the analysis sections, we provide illustrative examples of engagement in multiactivity in our data, showing how participants coordinate their orientations to both the on-screen presentation and the remote prospect. The findings show how technological affordances, namely participant icons in Teams and mouse cursor movements and slide changes in PowerPoint, are used to accomplish interactional practices that allow social and technological actions to be progressed simultaneously. Finally, we discuss the findings in relation to previous studies.

2. Digital Objects in Video-Mediated Sales Interaction

Previous research on sales interaction, mostly focused on face-to-face shop encounters, has shown the importance of embodiment and the materiality of the encounters: products are not only verbally referred to but also pointed at and manipulated by the sellers and the customers (see Brown, 2004; Llewellyn & Burrow, 2008; Mondada et al., 2023). Also, in B2B sales meetings, material resources such as documents and presentations can be used to accomplish and support multiple institutional practices (Geiger & Kelly, 2014). In this paper, it is the PowerPoint presentation in particular that is used to support the meeting agenda, which is more or less followed during the meeting (see also Arvedsen and Hassert, 2020). Previous studies focusing on PowerPoint presentations as social conducts in professional settings have shown how the slides become part of the verbal and bodily presentation of it and how they are intertwined in the broader institutional task, activity, or social roles (e.g., Nissi & Lehtinen, 2016; Rendle-Short, 2006; Knoblauch, 2008). The studies have focused on face-to-face situations, in which multimodal activities of pointing and body formations become salient parts of the presentation.

Importantly, when moving from face-to-face contexts to video-mediated environments, participants do not have access to all the resources, e.g., material artifacts, from their co-participants' local environment, thus establishing "fractured ecologies" (Luff et al., 2003). In other words, video connection only provides mutual visual access between participants, but not a shared environment or common frames of reference for forming situated and shared understanding of the ongoing activity (Luff et al. 2003). In addition, the appearance of embodied resources, such as gaze direction and gestures, is limited or transformed when they are viewed on a computer display (Heath & Luff, 1992), which may lead to practical problems in coordinating social activities (see Balaman & Pekarek Doehler, 2022). However, rather than taking the technological tool as a context that shapes the interaction on its own, in conversation analytic approach technologies are seen through their affordances: at the same time, they enable specific activities and constrain others (Hutchby, 2001; Arminen et al., 2016).

Despite their prevalence in today's sales work (Heinonen et al., 2021), to our knowledge no studies have so far focused on video-mediated sales encounters as interactional achievements. The closest to video-mediation, and therefore to the current study, are studies in which the salesperson and the customer participate in a meeting via telephone and a shared screen (Kaski et al., 2018b; Heinonen et al., 2021). These studies have addressed the ways the used technologies are intertwined with the sales interaction. Kaski et al. (2018b) have shown how in addition to more traditional relationship building strategies, such as demonstrating customer-oriented attitude by encouraging the customer to discuss during the meeting, technology-mediated B2B sales meetings require new techniques, such as demonstrating the services on a shared screen. Similarly, Heinonen et al. (2021) showed in their study how a shared screen in sales meetings can be used as an interactional resource to achieve joint attention. They showed that it is not only a resource for the salesperson, but that the customer can also use it to direct the salesperson's focus or even control the agenda of the meeting. However, in both studies, these collaborative practices are only related to the stages where the PowerPoint presentation has already been completed. In fact, both Kaski et al. (2018b) and Heinonen et al. (2021) argue that during the slideshow, the shared screen was only the salesperson's resource, while the customer remained in a rather passive audience position. Although neither study focused in detail on the interaction during the PowerPoint presentation, the findings regarding a shared screen as an interactional resource are also relevant to our study.

There has been considerable research on other types of video-mediated institutional settings, where digital objects are used to draw joint attention between remote participants. In pedagogical contexts, Melander Bowden and Svahn (2020) have studied a tutor-student encounter, which is communicated through video and digital platform that is used as a shared workspace. They show how the participants manage to work together to establish shared points of reference in an asymmetric environment, where only one participant has access to an important resource, i.e., to the math book. They show that only after establishing a shared point of reference, can the participants start collaboratively to solve the problem. Collaborative and task-oriented interaction has also been of interest in other studies. Oittinen (2023) focuses on multiparty learning activities, where verbal, embodied and technological resources are used to highlight some content on the screen. She shows how highlighting is used not only to draw joint attention, but also to initiate negotiations about the written item. Similarly, in other kinds of institutional contexts, Olbertz-Siitonen and Piirainen-Marsh (2021) and Arvedsen and Hassert (2020) show how a mouse cursor is used by the person managing the screen both to establish a joint attention between participants and, as part of first actions, to pursue next actions by co-participants and to direct the conversation. Balaman and Pekarek Doehler (2022), for their part, focus on a collaborative task that requires participants to do searches on their own screen, which is not accessible to remote participants, while at the same time interacting with them. They show how this kind of "complex digital-social ecology" sets a practical problem of coordination, but also how participants display their concentration on their own screen activity over their co-participant, e.g., through verbal alerts ('let me') and non-vocalizations, thus ensuring the progression of the task.

The aforementioned studies provide insights into the digital objects and the ways in which they can be brought into the joint focus of remote participants, as well as the ways in which they can contribute to the progress of specific activities. Our study adds to this by highlighting the ways in which the digital objects and affordances of the technology (PowerPoint slides, a mouse cursor, a participant icon) feature in multiactivity during video-mediated sales meetings. We ask the following research question: How do presenting lawyers in sales meetings use the technological affordances of MS Teams and PowerPoint to navigate multiple orientations between the on-screen presentation and the prospect?

3. Data and Methods

The participants in this study are Finnish lawyers and potential customer representatives of a legal service company, pseudonymized as "LPY". The data consists of screen-recorded sales meetings in which lawyers from LPY introduce their services to prospective clients. The lawyers were invited to participate in the research during and after an information session about the study, that was held for all interested employees. The prospects' willingness to participate was inquired when they were booking an appointment for an online introductory meeting with a lawyer. All participants signed an informed consent form to be screen-recorded for research purposes. In total, eight prospects and 10 lawyers participated in the study. Information about the participants and the research data is summarized in Table 1.

Table 1. Research participants and data.

The dataset including eight meetings (30-80 minutes) held via Microsoft Teams was collected in 2021. Seven of the meetings involved a prospect and two lawyers, and one of the meetings was a one-on-one meeting between a lawyer and a prospect. Some lawyers participated in more than one recorded meeting. The purpose of the meetings was to understand the prospects' legal needs and to help them understand how the firm's services could meet those needs. The meetings had a recurring structure: after entering Teams, the meetings began with an introduction of both parties and the prospect's company. This phase was followed by a presentation of the legal services, using the PowerPoint document shared on a lawyer's screen. The lawyers could manage the presentation in different ways: either one of them was responsible for both the technical manipulation of the slides and the speech, or they could share the roles so that one lawyer acted as a presenter and another as a technical controller of the slideshow. At the end of the presentation, the screen sharing was usually stopped, and the participants moved on to discussing the next steps in the possible collaboration. In this study, we focus on the presentation phase of the meeting.

Microsoft Teams is one of the leading applications for video-mediated meetings in organizations. MS Teams allows the participants to turn their video and audio on or off at any time during a meeting. In the default view, all participant icons (i.e., video images) appear in the middle of the Teams application (see Image 1). When a participant has their video turned off, their icon turns black with only a circle in the middle with their initials. When the participant speaks (or sometimes even breathes loudly) with the video off but the microphone open, the edges of the circle turn blue to indicate that the participant's microphone detects audio. Participants can also share their screen with others. The shared screen opens in the middle, while the participant icons are reduced in size and moved either to the side or bottom of the application (see Image 2).

Image 1 (left). Default view of participant icons with videos on in MS Teams. Image 2 (right). The view of the participants during a screen share in MS Teams. L1 and L2's videos are on, and P's video is off. The images illustrate what is seen on the researcher's screen during screen recording. It might not fully correspond to how the participants' screens are configured.

In order to get to the heart of the multiactivity in the data, we have focused on such episodes where the prospect takes or is invited to take a turn while the lawyer is running the PowerPoint presentation. In addition, we have focused on episodes where the same lawyer (L1) is responsible for both operating the PowerPoint on their screen and leading the presentation. These fragments are fruitful for our analysis, because during such moments L1 often has to divide their attention between the discussion with the prospect and the on-screen activities. All the lawyer participants were familiar with having online meetings with customers. One researcher was present as a non-active participant during the online meeting to record it. The recordings were made using a screen capture software from the researcher's computer. We are aware that collecting the data in this way gives us only one kind of access to the interaction, and that, for example, the transmission delay between the participants may differ between the locations (see Due & Licoppe, 2021).

A total of 43 episodes (see Table 1) were analyzed by relying on multimodal conversation analysis (Mondada, 2016), which is based on the conversation analytic (CA) principle of looking at naturally occurring interaction as a sequentially unfolding social activity. The key benefit of the method is that it reveals the participants' own understanding of what is happening in a particular interactional situation (Sacks, Schegloff & Jefferson, 1974), and thus enables us to analyze how the participants themselves orient to multiactivity and display their understanding of normative expectations about interaction in these sales meetings (see Haddington et al., 2014). By taking into account the multimodal nature of interaction, we look at the video-mediated sales encounters as verbally, bodily, and technologically produced (see Mondada, 2016). In terms of video-mediation, it is important to look at how the participants themselves orient to technology as relevant and consequential for the sales interaction (Arminen et al., 2016; Hutchby, 2001). In practice, this means focusing on the technological affordances of PowerPoint and Teams, which may be oriented to and used by the participants in varying ways. In the transcriptions, we use Jefferson's (2004) conventions for transcribing audible interaction and Mondada's (2022) conventions for multimodality (see Appendix 1).

4. Analysis

The analysis is divided into three parts. Section 4.1 focuses on the display of multiple orientations in the preparation of the PowerPoint presentation and shows how the lawyers, in particular the one responsible for operating with the presentation (Lawyer 1), move to the screen sharing of the presentation in MS Teams while at the same time discussing with the other participants. The next two sections focus on Lawyer 1's multiple orientations during the PowerPoint presentation. Section 4.2 illustrates how Lawyer 1 uses the participant icon in MS Teams to orient to the prospect's changing participation status while simultaneously engaging in the presentation. In section 4.3, we show how the activities of progressing with the presentation and progressing with the discussion with the prospect can be pursued in parallel using slide changes and a mouse cursor, and how these affordances are used to (dis)engage with the prospect's actions while operating with the technology.

4.1 Multiple orientations while preparing for the presentation: Displaying the need for double orientation

We begin by illustrating the preparation phase for the PowerPoint presentation and show how screen sharing at this stage requires the orientation to be divided into multiple activities. Extracts 1-2 illustrate how the lawyers manage the transition from the introduction of the participants to the PowerPoint presentation, which is shared on Lawyer 1's computer using the screen sharing feature in MS Teams. As has been shown by Balaman and Pekarek Doehler (2022), the mutual discussion is usually suspended to perform a technical task on one's screen, which is also the case in Extract 1.

Before Extract 1 begins, the participants have introduced themselves to each other and the prospect has provided information about their firm and legal needs. The extract begins when Lawyer 1 initiates the transition to sharing the presentation from her computer.

Extract 1. Meeting 2, 9:47-10:15

In line 01, Lawyer 1 begins to open the presentation, while verbally making a suggestion about it. The problem with opening the presentation from her computer is first signaled in line 07, where she repeats the word 'your'. This is followed by a short gap, after which L1 first produces a non-lexical vocalization mhm (line 09) to react to on-screen events presumably on another display she is gazing at (Fig. 1A), and then a more explicit display of a suspension pieni hetki 'just a moment', by which she accounts for the upcoming silence (Balaman & Pekarek Doehler, 2022). Through these devices, and by clearly orienting to something on her own screen by gazing at another screen, the lawyer in charge of presenting shows that the activity of moving to the presentation is temporarily postponed due to the problem.

Interestingly, the verbal alert of putting the ongoing action on hold leads to Lawyer 2 filling the gap. After a pause of 5.0-seconds, L2 also orients to the trouble by taking the floor and asking the prospect about the location of their office (l. 11). She thus uses the gap caused by the technical issue to initiate small talk with the prospect.¹ A somewhat similar way of using the problems to build relationships is also addressed by Oittinen (2018). In her article on hybrid business meetings, she showed how people in the same physical space can build alliances during technical problems. In our case, the lawyer, who is not in charge of solving the technical problem, takes the lead in progressing another, temporary activity. In this respect, the extract shows how the lawyers can share the activities during the opening phase of a presentation, so that one lawyer focuses on operating the technology and the other on acknowledging the prospect.

However, the activities of operating with the technology and orienting to the prospect in the screen-sharing phase are usually not divided between the lawyers, but one of the lawyers (L1) is engaged in both activities simultaneously. Extract 2 is a case in point. Before the extract, the participants have again introduced themselves to each other and the prospect has told about their firm and legal needs. The extract begins when Lawyer 1 starts to project her orientation to the transition to screen sharing by using technology to do so, while at the same time explaining to the other participants what she is doing - that is, what is happening on the shared screen and the possible problems related to screen sharing.

Extract 2. Meeting 4, 18:22-19:28

Lawyer 1's engagement in multiactivity and the possible problems caused by screen sharing is evident throughout the extract. From line 01, L1 begins to initiate a transition to the PowerPoint presentation by simultaneously opening the presentation from her computer and verbalizing these emerging digital on-screen actions (see Gardner & Levy, 2010). With the meta-talk in lines 01-02, she simultaneously orients to the upcoming presentation and acknowledges the importance of continuing the discussion regardless of the presentation. L1 continues by opening the presentation, while at the same time verbally anticipating a potential hindrance to engaging in these two activities simultaneously, namely, the lack of visual access between the participants that may occur when she begins her screen sharing (l. 03-06). When the screen sharing begins, a solution to the anticipated problem is however immediately found and oriented to: L1 shares her second display (l. 07-08).

The presentation is shared in an editing mode (i.e., it includes the slide in the middle and the slide preview on the left), with the participants' videos remaining visible below the presentation (figures 2A, 2B).² Now L1 asks if the participants 'can see my' which is understood by L2 and P as a confirmation seeking for seeing the presentation (l. 09-11). L1 reformulates the question with an emphasis 'but can you see me' (l. 13), which is confirmed by L2. L1 reciprocates that she can see her co-participants (l. 15), which shows that she treats the "talking heads norm" (Licoppe & Morel, 2012), i.e., seeing each other's faces during the video-mediated encounter, as essential for progressing the presentation on the screen and discussion with the co-participants simultaneously.

Next, in lines 17-18, L1 addresses another potential problem by accounting for the participants seeing only her side profile due to her second display. Here, she reveals two presumptions being compromised: the expectation that a presenter looks at her audience during a presentation (see Rendle-Short, 2006, p. 41-47), and the expectations that co-participants look at each other during a conversation (Licoppe & Morel, 2012). In a way, she orients to a slight deviation from the talking heads norm as she makes it explicit that the co-participants won't be gazing directly at each other. She also uses multimodal resources to deal with this problem by first pointing to her second display and then showing it to the camera (figures 2C, 2D). L1 then concludes that from now on she will have two orientations: the participants and the presentation (l. 20-22). To multimodally illustrate her two orientations, she shifts her gaze from her co-participants to the presentation on her second display and uses the mouse cursor as a virtual pointer to circle around the slide preview when referring to it (see Knoblauch, 2008; Olbertz-Siitonen & Piirainen-Marsh, 2021) (figures 2E-2F).

Finally, before moving on to the presentation, L1 ensures that her presentation will also be displayed as intended (l. 23). After receiving confirmation from L2, L1 accounts her choice of sharing the presentation in an editing mode (l. 25-26). In doing so, L1 explains the technological feature - the presentation mode in PowerPoint - to be the potential obstacle to mutual visibility, and by not using it, she shows how the potential problem has now been avoided. Finally, L1 acknowledges that the prospect may also have to engage in two simultaneous activities: listening and taking notes. As a solution, she offers to send the materials to the prospect afterwards (l. 27-29). Here, she also specifies the prospect's role as an active and knowledgeable participant capable of criticizing, rather than only listening as a passive audience.

The extracts in this section showed a practical problem in sharing orientation between discussing with other participants and starting to share a presentation from one's computer. Instead of suspending the discussion altogether while L1 carried out her own screen-based activity (cf. Balaman & Pekarek Doehler, 2022), the gap caused by the problem in sharing the presentation could be filled in different ways. As there were two lawyers in the meeting, small talk could be initiated by Lawyer 2 to fill the gap (in Extract 1) or Lawyer 1 could show double orientation (cf. Deppermann et al., 2010) between two activities visible by verbalizing it to the co-participants as she began to share the PowerPoint presentation (in Extract 2). In the latter case, L1 oriented to "seeing" as a foundation for being able to progress the activities simultaneously: the participants seeing each other as well as the presentation. The technological setup was addressed as an essential factor in this work of seeing: while L1 initially anticipated that it would be problematic to divide her orientation (since screen sharing may result in the invisibility of participant icons), she solved the problem through her technical configuration, which included having two adjacent displays for different orientations as well as sharing the presentation in an editing mode. L1 also shows interactional competence and consideration towards her co-participants when guiding them through the transition to the next phase of the meeting, by ensuring that the foundations for progressing both activities simultaneously, i.e., seeing both each other and the presentation, work as they should for all of them.

4.2 Multiple orientations during the presentation: affordances for noticing a change in the prospect's participation status

In this section, we move on to analyze multiple orientations in the presentation phase of the meeting. We focus on the affordance of the participant icon in MS Teams and the ways it is used to orient to the other participants during the PowerPoint presentation. Extracts 3 and 4 illustrate how the different configurations of the participant icon can provide cues to L1 about the prospect's changing participation status during the presentation; either from an active co-participant to the audience (Extract 3) or from the audience to an active co-participant (Extract 4).

Extract 3 is a continuation of Extract 1. The analysis here begins from line 12, where the prospect responds to Lawyer 2's small talk initiation about the location of their office.

Extract 3. Meeting 2, 10:15-12:13

As L2 and the prospect continue discussing the location of the office (l. 13-15), the presentation appears on the screen (l. 13, figure 3A). After answering the question, the prospect orients to a "display rule" (Rendle-Short, 2006), i.e. the norm of matching the current talk with the content displayed on the screen, by producing a noticing 'now came hey the presentation' (l. 16). During the prospect's noticing, L2 turns off her microphone (l. 17), thus treating the noticing as an attempt to shift from chatting to the presentation. However, instead of immediately shifting to the presentation, L1, who has opened the presentation on her computer, treats the noticing as a confirmation of the presentation's visibility with 'alright now you can see it?' (l. 17-18), after which she joins the small talk by continuing the discussion about the office location. The prospect begins to answer L1's question with a detailed description of the buildings and companies located near their office (l. 22-26), but then cuts off the continuation (l. 26) with 'so well (.) yes' indicating a closure of his response. The hesitative closure seems to indicate orientation for closing this small talk, but also that the motivation for the lawyer's question was unclear to the prospect. The latter is seen also in a way in which L1, after a 1.0 sec pause, acknowledges the prospect's description with the revelation of her motivation for asking about the exact location of the office: telling that her current customer is in the same building (l. 29-33). Bonding with the prospect with such small talk can be seen as an aim for establishing a common ground with them (cf. Kaski et al., 2018a).

It is only at this point that L1 begins to shift to the content of the presentation with several transition markers (l. 35). In lines 37-38, L1 concludes the transition with mutta näin 'but yeah', stops on the slide with the meeting agenda and lists through the main topics in the upcoming presentation (l. 39-41). After the prospect's acknowledgement, L1 seems to continue the presentation by orienting to a new topic with a slide change and hesitation markers ja tota ja ja 'and well and and and' (l. 43). At this point, the prospect turns off his camera (l. 43, figure 3B), thus using it as a resource to withdraw from an active participant role and to position himself as an audience to the presentation. In contrast to Extract 2, where the participants oriented to the norm of seeing each other during the presentation, here the prospect deviates from this expectation by turning off the camera but still showing his engagement to the meeting by leaving his microphone open. As a result, L1 immediately halts her ongoing action of continuing the presentation and orients to the change in the technical environment by reminding the prospect (and L2) to remain active by asking questions at any time during the presentation (l. 43-46). Thus, the prospect's video changing to a participant icon served as an affordance for noticing the co-participant's behavior while already having an orientation to the presentation.

In the next extract, we illustrate how the participant icon affords Lawyer 1 to shift her focus from the PowerPoint presentation to the prospect again, this time by acknowledging the prospect's attempts to activate during the presentation by taking the floor. Extract 4 takes place approximately 6 minutes after the end of Extract 3. It begins with Lawyer 1 presenting the company's service model. She has a slide open showing the areas of practice in which they can provide legal assistance. The prospect is still participating with the camera turned off but with the microphone open.

Extract 4. Meeting 2, 18:24-19:28

The lawyer presents the expertise of the company's lawyers by showing a slide with the areas of practice and by verbally presenting the lawyers' experience (l. 01-05). In line 04, the progression of the presentation is suspended for 2.2 seconds. This is noteworthy because the lawyer's utterance on LPY:stä sitä sitten 'who have had in LPY then' (l. 03) is syntactically incomplete. The incomplete utterance is followed by a pause, after which L1 continues by completing the utterance (l. 05). Already this short suspension reveals L1's orientation to something outside the PowerPoint presentation (see Balaman & Pekarek Doehler, 2022). A clearer indication of a shift away from the presentation can be seen during the pause (l. 04), during which L1 nods slightly towards the screen. The gesture does not seem to contribute to the completion of an ongoing utterance but is rather a distinct action orienting to interaction with the prospect. In fact, by pausing and nodding, L1 orients to the participant icon of the prospect that has flashed only a moment earlier (l. 03, figure 4A). By stopping the slideshow, L1 seems to expect the prospect to take the floor. As this does not happen, L1 continues and changes a slide (l. 05).

In line 12, the prospect's participant icon flashes again, this time with an audible inhalation. L1 continues with her presentation, changing a slide twice (l. 14-15)³, but then again reacts to the prospect's activity as an attempt to take the floor. Figures 4B and 4C show how she displays her attention to the prospect by shifting from a presenting posture to prospect-oriented posture by leaning forward closer to the screen (see Oittinen, 2023), while also now verbally addressing the prospect (l. 16-17). With a go-ahead sano [...] vaan 'just [...] tell', she gives P a permission to speak, thus implicitly orienting to P's flashing icon as the prospect's uncertainty about whether or not to take a turn (see Sorjonen, 2017). At the same time, she shows what kind of turn she is expecting at this point, that is, asking a question related to the presentation. By verbally addressing the prospect, L1 displays that she has noticed the P's "attempts" and more explicitly encourages him to participate in the discussion (see Kaski et al., 2018b). In other words, since the prospect has not used the empty slots L1 has opened for him, L1 needs to verbally guide him towards this activity. At the same time, by formulating the prospect's possible turn as a question, she can maintain the focus on the presentation.

The prioritization of the discussion with the prospect can also be clearly seen in line 18: with 'so this doesn't turn into a monologue' L1 shows that the aim of the meeting is not only to go through the slides, but also - and more importantly - to have a conversation about the services and to hear the prospect's perspective (see Niemi et al., 2021). However, as can be seen in lines 19-20, the prospect strongly rejects the offered turn with repeated 'no', followed by an account tää on hyvä 'this is fine'. An even clearer preference for continuing the presentation can be seen in line 23, in which the prospect explicitly proposes mennään eteenpäin vaan 'let's just move on'. The prospect formulates the turn as responsive by using [IMP + vaan] format, through which he gives L1 a go-ahead to continue the presentation, thus implying that the presentation has been suspended and it is (also) the lawyers' wish to continue it (see Sorjonen, 2017). L1 continues with a restatement of the topic 'so: LPY's services', which was suspended in line 16.

By orienting to the technological affordances of MS Teams' video and participant icons, L1 can register the subtle cues in the prospect's behavior and use them to orient to the prospect and engage them in discussion during the presentation. In sum, the excerpts in this section showed L1's orientation to multiactivity in terms of engaging in presenting while simultaneously monitoring (Nevile, 2004). The possibility to monitor the part of the screen below or next to the PowerPoint presentation - and thus the prospect's actions - enabled the lawyer to coordinate the activities even without seeing the prospect's face. Moreover, by quickly shifting from a presentation-orientation to a prospect-orientation, the lawyers can show that the turn-taking machinery is not restricted to responsive turns only, but that the prospect is also given space to participate in the conversation (cf. Humă et al., 2020: 364). Compared to the studies by Heinonen et al. (2021) and Kaski et al. (2018b), in which participants shared a screen but could not see each other, the extracts in this section showed how L1 was able to notice P's changing level of participation (although also false alarms in terms of it) by having a visual technological affordance for monitoring co-participants. In this respect, the participant icon provided subtle cues that the lawyers could rely on to support interactivity without having to explicitly invite the prospect into a dialogue.

4.3 Multiple orientations during the presentation: affordances for (dis)engaging in prospect's actions while operating with technology

In this section, we explore how Lawyer 1 uses the affordances of PowerPoint to simultaneously display orientation to the on-screen activities and to the prospect's initiative actions. The extracts in this section show how moving forward and backward through the slideset and moving the mouse cursor can be used as resources for both disengaging from (Extract 5) and engaging in (Extract 6) the prospect's actions. The extracts illustrate how the progress of the presentation and the discussion with the prospect can be organized in parallel order, i.e., smoothly together (Mondada, 2014).

In Extract 5 we see how the lawyer treats the prospect's question and its sequential and temporal placement as relevant to be responded to. This leads to a split in orientation between responding to the prospect and progressing with the presentation, and the extract shows how the presenting lawyer uses the affordances of a cursor, slide changes and shared screen to carry out these two activities simultaneously. The extract begins at the point where the lawyer is about to change the slide, but the prospect interrupts the action by asking a question.

Extract 5. Meeting 1, 43:04-44:20

At the beginning of the extract, L1 is preparing to change the slide, which is indicated by the falling intonation (l. 02) and the cursor moving to the preview and scrolling it down to find the next slide (see Olbertz-Siitonen & Piirainen-Marsh, 2021). This indicator of completion creates a transition relevance place, which is used by the prospect to ask a follow-up question (l. 04). Overlapping with L1's restart, P initiates a turn that is explicitly formulated as a question about something that has already been talked about ('question of that'). L1 treats this as such, which can be seen in line 04 in her quick shift to the previous slide, even before P has come to a recognizable turn completion. By moving to the previous slide, she can answer the prospect's question by relying on the visual material: in line 08, she moves the cursor on the slide to a point relevant to the current topic. In this way, the cursor serves as a virtual pointer, which is used to make an item on the screen salient and thus to establish co-orientation between the participants (Knoblauch, 2008; Olbertz-Siitonen & Piirainen-Marsh, 2021). After explaining how to choose the hours for the legal service, L1 concludes with 'so we can discuss these further then' (l. 14) which indicates resuming in the presentation and orienting toward the future actions, anticipating the continuation of the collaboration (see Humă & Stokoe, 2020). Thus, the lawyer uses the question at this point as an opportunity to promote a sales relationship with the prospect.

The end of the extract reveals how the cursor movement is not only used to highlight things on the screen, but also to direct the attention of other participants between activities (see Knoblauch, 2008). That is, the lawyer can manage the two relevant activities simultaneously by making a gradual shift (see Ticca, 2014) from responding to the prospect back to the presentation. The first indicator of preparation for the next action can be seen in line 20 (figures 5A-5B), where L1 moves the cursor from the slide to the preview. By doing this in the middle of her turn, L1 holds the floor by continuing to answer the prospect's question. Secondly, this can be seen in line 22 (figure 5C), where L1 changes the slide forward at the point where her contribution is not complete: the repeated word vai 'or' shows that the other option is still to come. In this sense, the lawyer displays a double orientation to the ongoing interaction by drawing on multimodal resources: while she is still verbally in conversation with the prospect, she is already disengaging from the prospect's question and moving towards continuing the presentation with the help of the mouse cursor and by moving forward in the slideset. Thus, although she pauses for 1.2 seconds before verbally moving on to the next slide, thus producing a pre-closing and giving the prospect an opportunity to take a turn (see Schegloff & Sacks, 1973), she has already reached the correct slide and thus the point at which it is expected to continue the presentation.

The extract showed how the presenting lawyer can manage multiple activities and progress them in parallel by drawing on the cursor to visibly prepare the next on-screen actions (see Olbertz-Siitonen & Piirainen-Marsh, 2021). This is possible in situations where the lawyer does not rely solely on a single mode but can rely on the multimodality of the situation and on different verbal, bodily and technical resources (see Ticca, 2014). Such gradual shifts, accomplished with the help of technical affordances, make it possible to avoid the sense of "rushing" while at the same time effectively facilitating the transition between phases of interaction. In this sense, the lawyers can intertwine the discussion with the prospect and the presentation together, and thus control the progression of the meeting.

Finally, Extract 6 illustrates how the affordance of moving backwards in the slideset allows the display of a double orientation towards demonstrating something from the slides and engaging in the prospect's initiative action. In the extract, the lawyer orients to the need for the previous slides to demonstrate the service. The search for the right slide by moving back in the slideset seems to open a slot for the prospect to initiate a parallel activity, i.e., to criticize the service, which leads to the need for a double orientation between searching from the computer and responding to the prospect's criticism. The extract begins at the point where the lawyers have just introduced the pricing of their legal service, and where the prospect then takes a turn by asking to return to the previous slide.

Extract 6. Meeting 4, 51:22-52:06

In lines 01-02, Lawyer 1 finishes her turn by promising that the prospect will be informed about special projects that are more expensive than the usual work. The prospect replies with a minimal response, after which he produces a request mennääs nyt takasin to make a return in the presentation. By using the imperative form 'let's go back' with the enclitic particle -s mennääs, he displays the joint orientation to the shared screen and uses it to direct the lawyer to take a step backwards in the presentation as a joint action of the participants (see Heinonen et al. 2021). As seen in lines 03-04, the prospect's desire to move backwards is due to a lack of understanding of the pricing principles. In line 06, the prospect reformulates his confusion into a question about the pricing, which projects an answer as a relevant next action. However, instead of answering to the prospect, L1 starts scrolling up and down on the slide preview (lines 3-10), also verbalizing the suspension in providing an answer with 'wait (.) where is that ((contract price))'⁴ (line 08) (see Balaman & Pekarek Doehler, 2022), which opens up a space for the prospect to initiate another activity, i.e. criticizing the service (lines 03-04, 11-12, 15-16). Thus, the decision to use a previous slide to support answering the question leads to multiple orientations, with L1 having to split her orientation between finding the slide from the computer and responding to the criticism.

It can be seen how the lawyers' main orientation is first to answer the question, and how the specific slide is treated as essential for supporting the answer. This can be seen in L1's action: she starts to scroll up the slideset even before the prospect has asked the actual question (l. 04). In line 09, L2 also orients to the need for the slide before answering the question with a stretched conjunction eli: 'so:', which is synchronized with the L1's searching activity (see Gardner & Levy, 2010). However, during the search, the lawyers slightly change their orientation towards the management of the criticism, which can also be done with the help of the slide. Both lawyers react to the criticism but in different ways: L2 reacts with laughter particles, which possibly show the delicacy of the situation (Haakana, 2001), and L1 with an agreement ei se ookaan 'it surely is not' (l. 14) and further with mä tiedän 'I know' (l. 17). It should be noted, that at this point L1 has stopped scrolling, and also verbalized the completion of her search (l. 10), which can imply that the slide on the screen should demonstrate the pricing and thus stop the criticism.

However, even though the prospect can see the pricing, he does not treat it as making the pricing more understandable but continues the criticism - this time comparing it to their current model. This leads L1 to move the cursor to the next slide in the preview (l. 21) and to change the slide again (l. 22) to the example rates. The change in orientation from using the specific slide only to answer the question to becoming a part of the response to the criticism can be seen in L1's question starting with 'well is it difficult if' (l. 24). With this formulation, she seems to anticipate that the prices on the slide are easy to understand, which projects P's next action as displaying understanding of the price, and ends the criticism. Indeed, the prospect now displays understanding with a positive assessment 'alright that is now clear' (l. 28-29). The search for the right slide is thus intertwined here in responding to the two actions initiated by the prospect: to demonstrate the pricing and to respond to the criticism.

In sum, this section showed how the forward and backward movement in the slide set as well as the cursor movement can be used to either engage in or disengage from the prospect's line of action. The analysis revealed that the lawyers orient to the slideset as a joint point of attention, and thus use it as a means to redirect the focus from the discussion back to the presentation (Extract 5) or to intertwine multiple activities together (Extract 6). Compared to face-to-face situations, where the participants often have to do extra work to display the shifts in their orientation (see Ruusuvuori, 2001), in a video-mediated environment both the joint point of attention and the co-participants are visible on the shared screen, which makes it easier to notice the subtle movement of the cursor and thus, for example, to consider it as a way to move on.

5. Discussion and Conclusions

The aim of the present study was to examine the engagement in multiple activities during video-mediated sales meetings and the lawyers' use of technological affordances of MS Teams and PowerPoint to navigate multiple orientations between the presentation on the screen and the prospect. The first analysis section revealed how the transition to screen sharing opened up a gap, which led to a split in orientation between the activities on one's computer and interaction with the prospect (see also Balaman & Pekarek Doehler, 2022). The section showed how the lawyers could help each other to fill the gap by sharing their roles, so that one lawyer oriented to operating with the technology and the other to chatting with the prospect (Extract 1). Alternatively, the lawyers could manage their competing orientations between the technology and their co-participants by verbalizing the technological orientation to the other participants (see Extract 2). Second, the analysis showed how the technological affordances, namely the participant icon in Teams, could be used as a means to monitor the behavior of the prospect and thus as a device of noticing their changing status in terms of participation during a PowerPoint presentation (Extracts 3-4). Finally, the analysis revealed how the use of slide changes forward and backward and cursor movements could be used as subtle indicators of (dis)engaging in discussion with the prospect. The shifts between activities were made by using double orientation (Deppermann et al., 2010), which enabled the lawyer to verbally complete the answer to the prospect but also to progress the presentation at the same time (Extract 5) and intertwine the activities of searching for a slide and answering to the prospect's actions (Extract 6).

The study contributes to our understanding in two different research areas: First, the results contribute to the literature on sales interaction by demonstrating how technology transforms sales meetings into arenas of multiactivity, requiring the salesperson to divide their orientation between the prospect and their on-screen activities. The analysis sheds light on the importance of the PowerPoint slideset not only in demonstrating the service and highlighting relevant parts of it (cf. Heinonen et al., 2021), but also in managing the meeting agenda. At the same time, however, the participant icon in MS Teams could be used to coordinate the shifts in orientation according to the prospect and thus show a more customer-centric approach (see Ruusuvuori, 2001). In this sense, the results partially challenge the notion made in the previous studies (Heinonen et al., 2021; Kaski et al., 2018b), which have argued that the customer easily remains in a passive role during PowerPoint presentations.

Second, the findings contribute to the literature on video-mediated interaction. In particular, the findings add to the current knowledge on the interactional use of both video conferencing tools and PowerPoint presentation by showing how the participant icon, cursor movements, and slide changes enable smooth progression of multiple activities in parallel. Previous studies have shown how engagement in on-screen activities opens up a gap that has to be filled somehow to display that the other activity is put on hold (see Balaman & Pekarek Doehler, 2022). Our findings show how instead of putting the discussion on hold during the on-screen activity either 1) the other lawyer fills the gap by initiating small talk as a parallel activity, or 2) the lawyer responsible for both operating with the technology and leading the presentation explains the opening phase while doing it technologically. Despite these possibilities to split the orientation, our study partly confirms the results of previous studies, as our analysis showed that the simultaneous progression of two activities was also treated as partly problematic by the participants. As seen in Extract 2, the technology, and in particular the combination of PowerPoint presentation and Teams, caused a problem in "seeing" the other participants. At the same time, however, our analysis reveals how the technology was used to solve the problems by adding an extra screen for "presentation mode", which enabled the other screen to be used as a screen for interacting with the co-participants. In that sense, it could be seen how the participants adapted the technology to their virtual sales environment and used these existing resources in creative ways.

In addition, the findings show the importance of careful monitoring and the role of both MS Teams and PowerPoint slideset in that activity. First, our analysis showed how, by acknowledging the delicate technological cues, it is possible to notice the level of participation of the co-participants. In that sense, careful monitoring from the lawyer's side is needed. Second, the analysis showed how manipulating the technology can be used to display multiple orientations simultaneously. For example, searching for the right slide does not have to be a separate activity but it can be intertwined with responding to the prospect's question or moving forward technologically while still verbally answering to the prospect.

A limitation of this study is that by recording the meeting only from the researcher's computer, we only had access to the researcher's view of the situation. By recording the same meeting from all the participant's computers, it would have been possible to see the differences in the participants' views and thus to focus on the multiactivity of all the participants from their own perspectives. This would be a fruitful area for further work. In spite of its limitations, we were able to meet our research objectives and reveal something about the rapidly expanding and ever-changing nature of the video-mediated sales interaction.

The authors report there are no competing interests to declare.

Appendix. Transcription conventions

Audible interaction is based on Jefferson (2004).

Multimodal interaction (based on Mondada, 2022):

^{1 The continuation of this small talk is analyzed in Extract 3↩}

^{3 There seems to be a delay in L1's technological connection.↩}

^{4 ((contract price)) refers to a pricing for customers who belong to a specific business network.↩}