What Artificial Intelligence Means to the Present and Future of Sales
Dr. Vivienne Ming, Theoretical Neuroscientist, Entrepreneur, and Author
Artificial intelligence might sound scary to quite a few salespeople. But what if you could eliminate the need for every single salesperson to do basic risk assessments? What if you took away their spreadsheets and left those assessments to AI? It means you could run them quickly, virtually for free, and in an automated way across your company. That shouldn’t sound half bad.
AI does mean the nature of work must change — and it’s actually for the better. But it will require a new strategic view for salespeople. Here are just a few areas where AI is transforming both the present and the future of sales.
Rethink the AI dynamic.
There’s actually a race to the bottom if an organization thinks, “Wow, I don’t have to have people like that on staff at all. AI can cover this work at a fraction of the cost and we realize a huge chunk of value.” Really, a company should turn this thinking on its head and ask, “How do we use AI to put value back into our employees? How do we turn the people who were doing a lot of this rote work before into creative components of my company?”
The future of global competition is about creativity and talent. Everyone will have access to amazing AI. This is an opportunity not to replace your current, incredible salespeople; it’s an opportunity to make them better.
Become acquainted with data.
By virtue of my personal professional career, I’m an advocate for being multidisciplinary. Clearly we need people working in theoretical realms and advancing not just AI, but databases and data structures.
In that sense, I see the future of sales roles as “data salespeople,” too. It’s not because they themselves are designing these systems, but they need to understand what these algorithms are doing — at least in broad strokes. Salespeople need to be sophisticated about what data can do and what it can’t do. This will require a fairly different background than how many people are trained today, but it’s something that companies could take ownership of.
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