10 SALES ENABLEMENT TRENDS TO LOOK OUT FOR IN 2019

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As we lay our eyes on 2019, it is time we take a stock of how the year

went by, what are next ‘big-ticket’ disruptions we can be expecting and

how further do we envisage the digital transformation fabric

encompassing our lives.

During this time, surfing through reports, expert columns, predictions

from industry gurus and much more, often take up a significant chunk

of time which no decision-maker or serious industry professional

agrees to trade off with any other activity. And it’s rightfully correct as

well. Having a view – how much so ever precise or assumption-based it

may be, always adds up to the preparedness level.

Also, one biggest factor to be kept in mind while reading and assessing

these trends is that change is the only constant you’ll ever find – be it in

your life or in your business strategy. Hence, being open and aware of

the vast realm of possibilities in this technology-driven yet so-human

world of sales, is the key to spear ahead from the rest.

NEW YEAR – NEW POSSIBILITIES

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In the last few years, we have seen a momentum which has changed

the face of sales – quite much in its entirety, leaving just the basics

behind. The evolution has been positive, and the new-found sales-tech

domain has indeed altered the dynamics of this erstwhile traditional

territory.

The dawn of customer-focused selling, data-driven strategies, socially-

backed decisions, tech-brought intelligence etc. have resulted in the

birth of a new type of selling. This revamp called for renewed sales

enablement measures also and thus, here we are – staring at the

looming 2019 and getting ready to plunge into another year with better

customer relationships, increased revenues, expanded territories,

upskilled sales force and much more.

Remember, evolution is a continuous process and thence, the scope of

emerging market inclinations or industry leanings is vast, however, it is

better to keep a lookout for some of the expected trends and brush up

the readiness before we knock into 2019.

GETTING READY

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Technology is constantly evolving, and its pace of transformation will be proportional to

the impact which we will see in the sales domain that is now starting to depend heavily

on tech – be it the leverage of analytics, AI, machine learning etc. to zero-down on the

right and the most relevant data.

Automation is another segment which will see a boom not just from the field force

perspective but from the point of view of complete management hierarchy. The key

would lie in the word ‘specialization’. Moving away from generic applications, sales tech

and especially automation will be more about creating expert tech services. Thus,

lessening the pressure on sales reps for closing deals and helping with quicker closures

and newer in-roads.

Sales Tech and Automation to Get A Massive Boost

Trend Alert 1

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While this duo is already disrupting the status quo when it comes to lead generation. This

is going to get revolutionised further with the time taken to acquire the ‘next new

customer’ being further lessened by using extraction business rules and database

management. Intelligent bots culling out contactable database with multiple validations

and checkpoints is not a far-flung fantasy but a soon to be trending affair in the world of

sales.

With bots such as contact finder bot, email finder bot or other specialised ones which can

be employed to map out the verticals and sub-verticals to an organisation based on the

names and locations etc., database management will become increasingly accurate and

apt. Such effective lead generation through intelligent automated web scraping and its

cleansing will soon become a sought-after science.

Intelligent DB Management and Machine Learning Will Be the Magical Combo

Trend Alert 2

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Staying ahead of the curve is becoming a necessity for salespeople and the growing

intelligence in the traditional CRM space is helping them to do just that. Significant

overhauls can be expected in the direction of simplification and innovation in the CRM

domain which is projected to be worth $81.9 billion by 2025. 1

With intelligence, integration and automation becoming a norm, standardised procedure of

lead qualification as per BANT criteria will see major improvisations. Voice recognition

integration will also become a seamless element and will assist in the process based upon

the tonality, content and sentiment of the conversation. Such precise sieving will ensure

better opportunity management and lesser time wastage at both seller and prospect’s

end. Real-time identification of deviations in the conversation or process will also allow for

quicker quality analysis and training needs fulfilment.

Intelligent CRM to Become A Norm

Trend Alert 3

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While the industry is still somewhat divided on accepting the advent of technology,

especially AI, automation, machine learning, RPA etc. as an industry boon or doom for

workforce, the foresighted ones do understand that apt leverage of these technologies is

actually a saviour for the workforce. Industry-wide surveys validate this point as 76% of

teams 2 already using AI have increased their staff levels over the past three years. It is all

about amalgamating the tech intelligence with human touch and creating an unmatchable

value-add. Increased AI integration in sales processes will make salespeople get a better

hold of their sales quotas with useful insights all throughout the sales course and become

more productive.

Tasks such as lead qualification and prospecting, automation of iterative tasks etc. would

see an upswing with AI and we may also witness deal closures being managed solely by AI

engines. Research suggests that by 2020, majority of commercial interactions will involve a

virtual agent 3. Sales leaders expect their adoption of AI to grow by 155% by 2020 4, further

validating the expected exponential growth of AI in sales. Being the next frontier in digital

intelligence, AI will witness augmented adoption within sales teams as it will also facilitate

strengthened trust between sellers and buyers owing the transparent logic-based

decisions and actions. Ultimate word – AI will lead to an increase in resourceful and above-

average sales headcount instead of lessening the number.

AI Will Automate, Not Replace

Trend Alert 4

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While sales had branched beyond content much earlier but that doesn’t undermine the

critical position it still holds. It’s further true in the case of B2B since research suggests that

60% buyers are preferring not to interact with a sales rep as the primary source of

information; 68% are preferring to research on their own, online; and 62% say they can now

develop selection criteria or finalize a vendor list — based solely on the available digital

content. 5 Another study shows that 9 out of 10 B2B buyers 6 claim that online content has a

moderate to major effect on their purchasing decisions and similar will be the situation for

B2C as well.

In such a scenario, sellers will be seen vying with one another for becoming a relevant part

of the trending conversations ahead of time and create personalised experiences for their

buyers. Keeping a safe distance from that ‘pitch -y’ feel to the content, which may seem

like a hard-sell, consultative and precise content will see growth. With a clear focus on

content strategy and how the same is put in front of customers, B2B sales players will lead

the way to an efficient and optimized digital sales motion.

Content Will Continue to Be the King

Trend Alert 5

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As per Forrester, the total global public cloud market will be approx. $178B in 2018, up

from $146B in 2017, and will continue to grow at a 22% compound annual growth rate

(CAGR). 7 Another research report states that global cloud services market is expected to

reach $555B by 2020. 8

Extrapolating from the current revenue and adoption growth, it is quite an optimistic

picture that is in front of salespeople. The adoption will grow by manifolds – at a pace

which will surpass its own record. On the home front too, cloud leverage and adoption will

further make sales output faster by providing actionable information at the right time to the

sales person. This will lessen the reaction time by making the information access faster.

The value of time being equated to that of data in the realm of sales, this is going to be

huge disruptor.

Cloud Adoption to Surpass All Prediction

Trend Alert 6

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Revenues for big data and business analytics solutions are forecasted to reach $260 billion

in 2022. 9 The gigantic figure itself indicates the trajectory that we are on and how things

will shape up in the coming year as well. With predictive and prescriptive analytics being

further strengthened by developmental strides in cognitive analytics, leveraging

semantics, artificial intelligence, deep learning and machine learning, the road ahead is

bright in terms of precise insight extraction from data.

As per reports, by 2020, 25% of organizations using a sales performance management

(SPM) solution will also leverage advanced analytics for optimizing their sales

compensation plans. 10

Domain and language agnostic analytics will pave the way for insights-as-a-service model

to become more widely adopted. End-to-end cloud analytics will also see a momentum

with another expected breakthrough being the expansion of input nodes for analytics

engine going beyond five human senses. With narrative representation getting refined

further, 2019 will also see a lot more emphasis on building visually appealing information

centers on sales-tech platforms to enable better customer conversion.

Analytics Will Be the Biggest Sales Catalyst

Trend Alert 7

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Global image recognition market is expected to reach $43.57 billion by 2022 and $77.69

billion by 2025 while speech and voice recognition market is expected to reach $18.30

billion by 2023, at a CAGR of 19.8% between 2017 and 2023. 11,12 & 13

Digital transformation and AI proliferation will leverage the progress made in speech

recognition to improve the deployment of sales tools by replacing input mechanism

through speech. Speech to text progression in vernacular or local languages is being

practiced by many but is still lacking the expected adoption pace and trailing behind

English speech conversion. This scene is set for transformation in the coming year. Image

recognition will also get augmented inclusion in the realm of advanced analytics, for

example – it will be extensively leveraged in the space of merchandising analytics for

compliance management, making the process more transparent and real-time.

With the focus on analytics and market insights, the need to capture more last mile data is

going up by the day, and speech to text/ image recognition evolution will become the

primary drivers of such data capture. The same will be leveraged by the sales industry and

thus, reduce the ongoing struggle between deployment and effective usage.

Speech & Image Recognition WillRevamp Reporting

Trend Alert 8

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How much so ever loyal the customer base be, single channel outreach will fade away into

oblivion sooner than later. Numbers also signal affirmation to this with 84% of C-Level

executives using social media to make purchasing choices. 14 The buzz in sales can be

understood from the global trend wave which predicts that by 2019, there will be around

2.77 billion social media users around the globe, up from 2.46 billion in 2017. 15

The thumb rule stays as is - being present where your prospect is expected to find you and

in the increasingly social world – those platforms are numerous. The trend will be to put

together riveting content and outreach strategy when it comes to omni-channel presence

and especially social selling. The paradigm of selling has got its axis shifted and the brands

have realised it in a major way. Therefore, 2019 will see organisations spending a lot more

in the social selling space, going far and beyond the regular social media marketing and

advertising. Seamlessly integrated multi-channel platforms will become a norm as a

disintegrated and hushed-up job in that segment will brush you sideways that very

moment, in the race to gaining customers.

Omni-Channel Sales Strategy and Social Selling to Become Mainstream

Trend Alert 9

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Research suggests, in case of a non-aligned environment between sales and marketing

teams, there's a 4% decrease in company revenue, however, if the teams work in

collaboration then many companies experience a 20% increase in their sales. 16 Misaligned

metrics, unrelated technologies, separate knowledge bases, and fragmented goals have

spelled doom for both marketing and sales as well as for the organizations they serve,

since long enough. The need which has been identified since quite some time now is to

integrate, consolidate and collaborate. We will witness the complete actualisation of this

realisation in the coming year.

2019 will see sales and marketing more intertwined than ever before, not just because of

shared revenue goals, but because the new-age customers demand it. Since buyers today

expect a fluid experience, any interruption or inconsistency in the process encompassing

marketing to sales journey, will have a negative impact on the buyer’s trust and

confidence. As it is, the increased and may be even, mandated integration of both teams

into one common entity – will allow for better content leverage, clearer view of customer’s

needs and a seamless and shorter sales funnel.

Sales & Marketing to Emerge as anIntegrated Superpower

Trend Alert 10

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There is always an element of supposition attached to predicting the trends, however, a quick glance through the past and an analysis of the present situation gives quite a

near-about idea of what the future holds. With technology making major strides inside the world of sales, elements which were perceived as hoop-la earlier, are causing

significant transformations today. Hence, no possibility can be ruled out.

In the time when humans have even cracked the code of verifying a quantum computer, we can only see some variations in the speed at which these trends will overtake the

present-day sales enablement space – without entertaining any doubt that whether these are hype or mere distant probabilities.

While it’s important to strengthen the current anchors, it always pays to be prepared for the expected wave!

THE GEAR-UP MODE

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Sources:• https://www.grandviewresearch.com/press-release/global-customer-relationship-management-crm-market

• https://www.salesforce.com/form/conf/2016-state-of-sales.jsp

• https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/gartner-predicts-2017-marketers-expect-the-unexpected/

• https://c1.sfdcstatic.com/content/dam/web/en_us/www/documents/reports/sales/state-of-sales-3rd-ed.pdf

• https://go.forrester.com/blogs/the-ways-and-means-of-b2b-buyer-journey-maps-were-going-deep-at-forresters-b2b-forum/

• https://www.cmocouncil.org/thought-leadership/reports/btob-content-impacts-customer-thinking--buying-decisions

• https://www.forbes.com/sites/louiscolumbus/2017/11/07/forresters-10-cloud-computing-predictions-for-2018/#f3997854ae18

• https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/press-release/global-cloud-services-market-is-expected-to-reach-555-billion-globally-by-2020.html

• https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS44215218

• https://www.gartner.com/ngw/globalassets/en/information-technology/documents/insights/100-data-and-analytics-predictions.pdf

• https://www.reuters.com/brandfeatures/venture-capital/article?id=5680

• https://www.grandviewresearch.com/press-release/global-image-recognition-market

• https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/PressReleases/speech-voice-recognition.asp

• https://www.superoffice.com/blog/social-selling-statistics/

• https://www.statista.com/statistics/278414/number-of-worldwide-social-network-users/

• https://www.impactbnd.com/blog/integrated-sales-and-marketing-5-reasons-why-integration-is-valuable

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