#AI Will Reinvent Sales... and Sales Professionals

For those of us old enough to remember when Hertz introduced their "skip the rental counter and go straight to your car" innovation, let me ask you a question… did you ever miss spending 20 minutes interacting personally with a counter agent?

I didn't.

It was no fun to wait in line, or to watch him type endlessly into his keyboard. I gained no pleasure from answering the same questions in Boston that I answered yesterday in Toronto. No matter how kind, courteous, or professional a Hertz agent might have been, I gladly walked away from ever having to deal with one again.

Sales professionals, beware, because you may be a Hertz agent in disguise.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is growing increasingly capable of handling many sales transactions. In reality, most transactions don't even require AI, but my point is that technology is advancing quickly and a growing numbers of transactions will require no human involvement.

If you don't believe me, Forrester says that "85% of tasks performed by sales professionals are ‘automatable’".

AI is destined to be the perfect tool to fuel organizations' sales efforts and power sales teams with genuinely intelligent tools to more effectively organize their work and sell more. It will not displace the sales person, but instead amplify and accelerate the sales person's ability to understand and employ data -- not just to improve productivity and boost performance, but to improve the customer experience.

So my view of the sales landscape looks like this:

From a buyer's perspective, she wants one of two things.

If at all possible, she wants to go right to her car… or to click one button. These are low friction transactions that the buyer wants to perform as quickly and easily as possible. Translation: she doesn't need a sales professional's help.

By the way, if you are skeptical of this, GE is already selling motors on eBay.

But there are still many circumstances when a knowledgeable, capable, and perceptive sales professional adds value. You wouldn't sell your $100 million company by pressing a button. Neither would you hire a consulting firm in this manner when the assignment was to make the right investments to support your digital transformation. For the foreseeable future, there will remain a need for human beings to guide high value interactions.

“Houston, we have a problem.”

You better sit down. Most sales professionals do not operate in the opportunity-rich space at the top of my drawing. Instead, they dwell in No Man's Land, which is what I call that middle wasteland filled with high friction, low value transactions.

Let me ask you this... are you living the life of a Hertz counter agent of old?

Does "doing your job" mean that you play cat and mouse with potential buyers? Do they try to avoid you for as long as possible? This is a tip off that you're not providing much value, and yet you're making it hard for buyers to, well, buy from you.

A few stats from Salesforce's "State of the Connected Customer" report to consider:

• Seventy-nine percent of business buyers say it's absolutely critical or very important to have a sales rep that serves as a trusted advisor. Click to tweet
• By 2020, 75% of business buyers expect companies to anticipate their needs and make relevant suggestions. Click to tweet

I can tell you with absolute certainty that countless tech companies and startups will relentlessly target and ultimately erase the middle wasteland space; in fact, Salesforce is making big bets on AI with its machine learning-enabled technology "Einstein" that will allow salespeople to work smarter and faster and know the best move to make next. Ten years from now, my diagram will look very different… the bottom section will be twice as large and No Man's Land will be tiny.

Why? Because this is what buyers - the folks with the money - want. They don't want to be stuck in the middle, wasting their time, while you fiddle with your keyboard. To avoid becoming obsolete, you have one choice: head north.

Jill Rowley wants to connect every person (and device) she encounters. You can engage with her on LinkedIn and Twitter if you need help digitally transforming your sales organization.