“Technology is taking on an even more central role in the sales process, and chief sales officers (CSOs) need to get ahead of a series of innovations that will significantly disrupt sales strategy, engagement, pricing and enablement,” said Noah Elkin, VP Team Manager in the Gartner Sales practice. He identified seven key disruptions that executives need to prepare for in the next five years.
- Machine Customers – Non- human economic actors that obtain goods or services in exchange for Sales leaders should begin developing sales forces that can effectively navigate the challenges of human, machine and hybrid selling environments.
- Generative AI – By 2025, 30% of outbound messages from large organiza- tions will be synthetically generated.“Generative AI means sales teams will never have to beg for content again,” said Elkin.
- Digital Twin of the Customer – A dynamic virtual representation of a It ingests data from personas and runs tests for sales messaging, sales processes and marketing campaigns to predict what does and doesn’t work for that customer.
- AV-VR – By 2025, 80% of B2B sales interactions between suppliers and buyers will occur in digital channels. Sales organizations need to actively look for new ways to engage with customers.
- Digital Humans – Digital humans are interactive, AI-driven representations that exhibit some of the characteristics, personality, knowledge and mindset of a By 2026, half of B2B buyers will interact with a digital human in a buying cycle.
- Emotion AI – Emotion AI technology can help by disrupting sellers’ empathic ability and alter buyer engagement. It’s a system that analyzes, processes, and responds to user emotion. By 2024, AI identification of emotions will influence roughly half of the online ads buyers see. It will be able to read faces and emails, and determine which ads are going to work on a given buyer.
- Multimodality – Multimodality means that there will be multiple modes for sellers to log activities, helping sales leaders to address data challenges. By 2025, 70% of all B2B seller-buyer interactions will be recorded to extract competitive, deal and market insights using AI, machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP).
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