Keeping up with the latest advancements in the field of sales technology is quite acceptable. On the contrary, if you want to thrive in the current sales environment, you must keep up with the latest developments.
Having said that, we are positively deluged with headlines about the newest products that promise to “forever change the world of sales” every time the calendar turns to a new year. Big data analytics and social selling are two of the more modern examples.
And yet, the great majority of sales are still conducted person to person, just as they have been for millennia.
What are the newest technology trends that sales managers should definitely completely disregard?
Chatbots
Since chatbots have been around for a while, it has been increasingly obvious that they are present on almost all websites. For many businesses, including Facebook, the appeal of having an AI sales assistant was too great to pass up.
However, Facebook made the decision to discontinue its chatbot strategy earlier this year after it had a 70% failure rate. Yes, you read correctly: there is a 70% failure rate. They found that the capabilities had been much overstated, and they now intend to start over with more specifically targeted chatbots that won’t let the people down as badly.
It’s unlikely that your business will be able to afford a more successful solution when you consider that Facebook, with their virtually infinite resources and skill, yet only achieves a 30% success rate with its chatbots.
The primary cause of Facebook’s (and other chatbots’) inability to live up to expectations is that their natural language processing powers are still quite restricted.
In order to enable computers to understand the natural language that people use, an area known as natural language processing (NLP) combines computer science, computational linguistics, and artificial intelligence.
There’s more to be done, as computational linguist Jason Baldridge states in an interview about the state of natural language processing.
Large-scale data
A few years ago, big data was predicted to be the next big thing. While some sales managers may believe that the year big data will finally bring about the revolutionary changes to the sales industry that it deserves to have by now, this is just not going to happen anytime soon.
One of the world’s foremost experts in machine learning, artificial intelligence, and statistics, Michael I. Jordan, offered perhaps the most compelling reason in an interview with IEEE Spectrum as to why big data is still in its infancy and not producing the kind of outcomes that the business community had hoped for. He states, among other reasons, that it will likely take decades to develop a true engineering strategy for big data, at which point it will be difficult to guarantee that you are providing accurate answers and accurately measuring the chance of errors.
He’s not saying big data isn’t promising and can’t be used in productive ways even in the present; it’s simply that it will take some time and a more “engineering” approach before the costs can be justified by the high success rate.
Contracting Out the Whole Procedure
Since businesses have been outsourcing sales for a while, it is nothing new. This trend was included in the paper because new automation software solutions are bringing down costs and increasing the appeal of comprehensive sales outsourcing.
Salesforce also notes in a recent blog post that these new solutions enable these outside partners to manage the full process, from demand creation to acquisition and fulfillment.
It may take some time for all of the issues to surface from outsourcing the entire process, but in the long run, you will undoubtedly suffer from it. One reason is that you are handing over control of your company’s destiny to someone who might not care as much as you do about it succeeding or failing. Furthermore, by not marketing yourself, you are losing out on the wealth of information and insights that are available.
This is not to argue that it makes no sense to outsource some or all of your operations, including hiring outside IT firms or third-party logistics partners, or even just some portions of your sales process.
Simply said, outsourcing must be done with caution and only after thoroughly considering your options.
Put aside the things that modern technology makes possible.
Does it make financial sense for your business and sales?
Final Word
The goal of this post is not to convert readers into Luddites who will see all sales technology negatively. Its sole objective is to demonstrate that caution is warranted and that there are instances when IT trends are more talk than walk.
