Will Barron is the founder of Salesman.Red and host of the Salesman Podcast, where he entertains hundreds of thousands of salespeople every month. We love his podcast because of his no-nonsense approach. He always pulls great information out of his guests that is of great value.
On episode #188, Will interviews our CEO Jon Ferrara who shares his predictions on how he thinks sales is going to change in the years to come. They also discuss the roles that automation and AI (Artificial Intelligence) play now, and what roles they will continue to play in the future sales industry.
Jon shares with Will that he thinks that sales is going to go full circle – back to what it was when we first started, when sales was about providing great service.
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[Tweet “Service is the new sales. Sales has always been about serving others to help them grow. ~ @Jon_Ferrara of @Nimble”]
“Customers these days don’t want to talk to sales people or look at marketing materials. They have already done 60% of their research by the time they reach out to a company. Sales teams should be focused on customer success and compensated based on customer satisfaction. We need to move away from “bag em and tag em” salespeople who have made SALES a four letter word.”, says Jon.
What is the role of automation and AI in current and future sales process?
According to Jon, we are already experiencing the role of automation and AI when communicating with sophisticated businesses like banks or airline companies. These companies are using conversational bots that will walk us through the funnel process in order to get us to the right person at the right time. He adds that he is personally not the biggest fan of these bots, as he finds himself “hitting zero” way too many times, and believes that “the more digital we get, the more human we need to be. We all value human interactions and conversations”.
Is there always going to be place for human beings in the customer life cycle?
“There’s absolutely going to be a place for humans in the customer life cycle, but we need more intelligence and workflow automation in order to scale the interactions with our customers”. “The basic sales and marketing technology stack that you need today consists of Marketing Automation system, CRM, Sales Intelligence, Sales Enablement, Email Tracking. All this is costs companies from $300 to $500 per rep per month. The problem is not just the price but also that these apps don’t talk to each other”, continues Jon.
He then adds that “the price is not the only problem, these apps are also too complex and most importantly, don’t communicate with each other. I truly believe that humans dig humans and my guess is that we will be seeing more nimble platforms that help individuals and businesses intelligently engage at scale and will ultimately connect people with an actual person at the organization.”
There’s so much more that Will and Jon discussed during their interview. Why don’t you check it out? 😉
Subscribe to Will’s podcast here.
Connect with Jon on Twitter.
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