Sales is an ever-changing process whose trends and changes need to be kept up with by those seeking to control the market. Since sales is constantly changing, I wanted to share with you a few things to look out for in 2018 regarding sales.
Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been introduced as some of the most transformative technology the world has seen. Recent articles ask you to imagine, as a salesperson, waking up in the morning and knowing immediately which leads you have are most likely to close that day. In addition, AI will offer guidance on which actions to take next that will result in the best scenarios.
Artificial Intelligence allows for salespeople to focus more on strategizing and actually selling by automating some of the grunt work such as logging customer emails and phone calls, creating invoices, and more.
After reading about this topic a bit, it seems that AI will be integrated into the sales world fairly quickly and vastly, changing the way sales and salespeople work.
Increased Importance of Customer Experience, Personalization & Innovation
It is important to focus on time, budget, and other resources on fostering customer relationships, support, and retention. As we have learned a lot in sales, the customer experience is growing in importance. So with trends in sales, it is important to establish an engagement framework where experiences can be hyper-personalized for each client.
Structuring Sales with Millennials in Mind
A Google study showed that over half of B2B buyers are now millennials. Since this change, businesses are realizing “the way things have always been done” may not be the best way to do things now. The best way found to build a successful culture that embraces the millennial generation is to start by opening your mind to new ideas, more collaborative approaches, inventive tools, etc.
Keep in mind though, once you feel that you have this all figured out, you’ll need to make sure you’re paying attention to the next generation coming into the sales place!
Sale is ever-changing and ever-growing, so be sure to keep up with its trends!
BoweryJE22
Change is happening so so quickly these days and I’m glad you decided to write about it. One thing that is hard to replicate is that human-like interaction which you addressed in your post. I think that if we apply what we have learned in class to the sales force we can continue to be relevant.