Salespeople
are always the early adopters. Here's where they (and you) are heading.
For the past two decades, salespeople have been
the early adopters of technology that's later permeated the rest of the
business world. Salespeople, for example, were the first to embrace smartphones
and CRM was the first viable "cloud-based" application.
Therefore, if you want to know how the general
business public will be using computers in the future, you'd best understand
the trends that are already taking place within forward-looking sales teams.
To this end, I've been working with sales
research pioneer Howard
Stevens
on a book about the future of selling. We have just completed the chapter on
sales technology which (along with other chapters) is available for free on the
Chally website (HERE).
1.
Cold calling will become impossible.
Today, all companies use some form of voice
mail, which provides an automatic and relentless gatekeeper. While sales
technology firms have come up with technologies (like autodialers) to overcome
these barriers, many decision-makers (especially young ones) no longer use
voice mail and only take calls from recognized numbers.
At the same time, there's been an increase in
government regulation of cold calling. Member states of the European Union, for
instance, are now required to have laws that prohibit general cold calling.
While cold calling remains legal in the United States, the FTC's "Do Not
Call List" has greatly curbed unsolicited telemarketing.
The combination of these two factors is already
making cold calling less effective at lead generation. Because of this, we see
salespeople already migrating to other lead generation methods, such as
developing customer relationships using a combination social media and other
"known-person to known-person" communication.
2.
Tablets will replace laptops (and maybe desktops).
While it is currently too soon to tell for
certain, we remain deeply skeptical of the ability of Microsoft's Surface
tablet to establish itself as a third alternative in the tablet market. While
there's no question that Windows machines will remain a fixture in the business
world for many years to come, we feel the days of the dominance of the desktop
and laptop inside sales teams is drawing to a close.
3.
Sales management will become more data-driven.
Sales management has always been data-driven;
few corporate metrics are more visible than sales figures! However, because
sales revenue measures after-the-fact result, sales executives don't know
whether their strategies are actually responsible for revenue increases.
As a result, most sales managers rely primarily
on intuition and tradition when making important decisions. For example,
companies spend billions of dollars every year on sales training that attempt
to "clone" the winning behaviors of top salespeople, even though
there's no data to show that such training improves overall sales performance.
Increased data gathering through CRM and survey
vehicles is now making it possible to gather and analyze demographic and
performance data about sales personnel. This scientific process often reveal
that the "intuitive" truths about sales management are dead wrong.
Top salespeople, for example, always build their
success on pre-existing natural talent that tends to be unusual in the general
population. A data-driven approach to sales management thus allows companies to
re-target sales training to making average performers slightly better rather
than wasting time trying to turn them into stars.
4.
CRM will become invisible.
Historically, CRM implementations have had a
failure rate as high as 70%, according to some studies. Experts believe that
such failures have been largely due to a mismatch between the needs of sales
management (i.e. control over the sales process) and the needs of the salespeople
(i.e. control over their customer relationships.)
However, CRM systems are gradually becoming
"smarter" in the way that they use existing information, greatly
reduce the amount of clerical work required of the sales team. Tablets and
smartphones will make CRM both less burdensome and more customizable and
therefore more attractive to sales teams.
We believe that we're on the brink of a sales
technology environment where the accumulation of customer data becomes
automatic and CRM thus becomes an more or less invisible part of the overall
computing environment, in the same way that Ethernet and email are now simply
assumed to be part of the general business tool kit.
5.
Interactive video will become ubiquitous.
Video conferencing has been around for over two
decades, but has not yet played much of a role in sales environments. However,
we believe that this will change over the next decade, and that video
interaction will permeate the sales environment, primarily due to the increase
use of smartphones and tablets in sales environments.
Fueled by online applications like Skype, the
video conferencing marketing has been growing rapidly and the integration of
video conferencing into iPhones, iPad and other table devices has turned
videoconferencing from a specialized application to a preferred way for people
(especially young people) to communicate.
We predict increased
usage of video conferencing for holding online events, creating collaborative
sales proposals, sales training, product demonstrations and ongoing customer
service. Overall, we believe that interactive video is likely to largely
replace in-person meetings for all but the biggest ticket sales items.
