Trend analysis is an important tool for environmental scanning. A trend can indicate a long-term and stable direction of a change. An important insight about trends is that they apply external pressure on organizations. Only a few large companies have the ability to resist or define trends.
The big power shift
It’s all about the customer
Polarization of sales logics – The emergence of complex and transactional sales.
The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do. You can’t be all things to all people. Professor Michael Porter, Harvard Business School
Not so long ago, before the Internet became a force of nature in the beginning of the 21st century, sales and marketing departments dictated the flow of information. Sales people had, thereby, a raison d’être as providers of information.
Selling was therefore relatively standardized and based on customers’ lack of choices. We can see this type of dependency historically as a traditional sales logic. Along with the rise of the Internet, this sales logic became more diffuse.
Forrester has demonstrated in one of its studies that 74 percent of B2B buyers perform half of their research on their own on the Internet before they contact a sales rep or make a purchasing decision. 90 percent of all purchases begin with an Internet search.
If customer purchases are routine, the sales rep’s role becomes less and less important and the customer can just as well perform the purchase on her own. This is a transactional sales logic, where the sales rep is partially or entirely replaced by digital marketing and sales via e-commerce platforms.
However, if the customers’ needs are complex, different or of a tailored character, the customer’s need of qualified advice increases.
The sales rep becomes thereby, by definition, more of a consultant, advisor and business developer, tasked with differentiating its services by adapting and creating unique values for clients with those types of needs. This type of emerging logic is defined as a complex sales logic.
Polarization between transactional and complex sales logics has important implications for how todays and tomorrow’s sales organizations should be organized.
For transactional sales it is all about utilizing every technological option available to make it as easy and time-saving as possible for the customer to buy.
Complex sales logic means that, for some transactions, clients require in-depth advice and support for complex problem solving, where tailored solutions are sought after to meet a business’ own unique needs.
Interdependency – Increased complexity in the purchasing process
Individual buyers are not usually involved in B2B purchases. They are made by teams. Therefore, individual personalities are not as important. It is the team as a whole that must be assessed. Lori Wizdo, Vice President, Forrester
According to CEB/ Gartner, in the past two years the number of people that are involved in the purchase of B2B – solutions has increased from an average of 5.4 to 6.8, while at the same time these stakeholders represent more roles, functions and geographies.
When customers become increasingly careful to choose suppliers that can improve their businesses, one must recognize that one no longer sells products that have an inherent value. Value is created first when the product is used and integrated with other parts of a chain of activities.
Customer orientation – Increased focus on customer values beyond the product
There is nothing more disruptive than the customer. Tiffani Bova, Growth & Innovation Evangelist, Salesforce
With intensified competition, products – and services – are no longer in focus, even though product development, production and distribution are important parts of running a business. In recent decades, customer orientation has emerged as a strong trend, not only in sales and marketing but as an approach that creates a foundation for companies’ reason for existing.
If sales training focused previously on identifying problems, confirming problems and then communicating value, the focus today is more aptly on anticipating the customer’s problem and creating value through interaction with the customer.
Professor Neil Rackham. The experience of value to the customer is created when the sales representative follows the following principles:
- Help the customer move in her strategic direction
- Help the customer to foresee future problems, not just see current ones
- Create tailored solutions for the customer’s unique problem
- Ensure that the customer’s voice is heard in her own organization
- Propose new creative ideas about trends and perspective about the customer’s market
The best sales people provide a different perspective of the world, they understand the customer’s business, love to debate and participate in constructive and developing conversations, and challenge the customer to move forward.
Personalization – Increased need for customization
Personalization is the automatic tailoring of sites and messages to the individuals viewing them so that we can feel that somewhere there’s a piece of software that loves us for who we are. David Weinberger, writer and expert in Internet marketing
Digitalization has made this trend possible, but it is above all customers that drive the trend.
Personalization can create huge opportunities for companies. With the help of available data we can study people’s behavior instead of their opinions. The trend towards increased personalization is not just an issue for B2C companies.
Personalization is taking off with a vengeance in the B2B world. As professional B2B buyers we want the same assistance.
But can an algorithm really perform a sensible personality test based on digital footprints? Yes, if we are to believe researchers from Stanford and Cambridge. Algorithms perform better personality tests than we humans do.
Hyper competition – Increasingly difficult to create sustainable success
We no longer live in a time of perpetual competitive advantages. We live in a time that requires cunning, agility and courage. Richard D’Aveni, Bakala Professor of Strateg , Tuck School of Business
Few industries are safe. A study of nearly 7,000 companies showed that hyper competition is not only hitting technology companies: it is a general trend that is affecting all industries.
Today, rapid technological development in combination with increased globalization result in products and services constantly getting cheaper and better.
One cannot rely on different types of barriers to entry. Globalization has made markets more open and trade barriers have gradually been removed, despite the increasing protectionist tendencies of recent years.
The thresholds for starting a company have also become lower. The financial requirements are often limited and cheap labor is available in the global labor market.
Competition can also come from unexpected places, when established actors seek new opportunities and markets.
Drift also occurs in the value chains of many industries with the consequence that middlemen are hard pressed.
New business models
Business in digitalization’s footsteps
Innovation acceleration – A flood of new solutions
The world is changing very fast. Big will not beat small anymore. It will be the fast beating the slow. Rupert Murdoch, Media mogul
Larger investments do not necessarily result in more innovation. But there are other indicators that point toward an innovation acceleration. The number of patents has increased dramatically since the end of the 1970s.
These developments have led to a flood of new products and services that companies want us customers to embrace.
Innovations, just like news, are launched and snapped up at an increasingly fast pace, which also creates a feeling that things are happening faster.
Innovation is not only about developing products and services either. It is just as much about investing in smarter production, logistics, sales and marketing.
The E – commerce boom – Trade is moving to the net
E – commerce isn’t the cherry on the cake, it’s the new cake. Jean-Paul Ago, CEO, Lóreal
Retail E-commerce revenue in Sweden is approximately 6.7 billion US dollars today (of a total revenue of 76.7 billion) and grew by 20 percent on average annually between 2004 and 2017. This development can be compared to total retail, which grew by an average of four percent during the same period.
Internet B2B trade resulted in three times the revenue of private e-commerce globally in 2017: 6.8 compared to 2 trillion dollars.
The most prominent types of e-commerce goods today are petroleum products and medication, and these are expected to continue to dominate in the near future.
The development is also accelerating due to the two largest e-commerce giants – America’s Amazon and China’s Alibaba – aggressively expanding their businesses.
In the beginning their platform was for B2B but now it includes both B2C and C2C. Their platforms are so extensive that they can be considered digital ecosystems that function almost seamlessly between e-commerce, mobile payments, logistics, search engines and social media.
While Alibaba is a pure platform player and does not keep an inventory, Amazon makes its top-modern logistics chain accessible to smaller companies.
The platform revolution – Digital matchmaking
Platforms beat products All the time. Marchhall Van Alstyne, Professor at Boston University specialized in the digital economy
This is an example of how the business model can look for a platform company. Such companies build their business models on technological platforms that create value by connecting supply and demand. Sellers and buyers. Workers and employers. Investors and entrepreneurs. Developers and innovation projects. To enable these exchanges, the platforms offer large, scalable networks where users can integrate and exchange with each other.
Business models based on platforms can be categorized into transaction platforms, innovation platforms and integration platforms.
- Transaction platforms that create value by enabling transactions between individuals and companies.
- Innovation platforms create value by enabling independent innovators to contact each other.
- Integration platforms build on both transaction and innovation platforms.
The strength of the platform idea lies in handling gigantic networks of people and companies.
The platform-based business model unarguably raises questions for most companies and businesses. Should you invest in building your own platform or collaborate with one of the big platform companies? Many companies will undoubtedly need to choose between one of those alternatives in the near future.
The sharing economy – Sharing is the new owning
The things you own end up owning you. Rachel Botsman, lecturer and author of “What’s mine is yours”
In Sweden, 15 percent of the population has used some form of sharing platform, while other countries are significantly ahead, such as France with 36 percent.
Under-utilized resources can even be an opportunity to generate new revenues.
Why is the sharing economy emerging now? From a historical perspective, the phenomenon isn’t new. But along with the growth of cities, trust between people declined. What we are now seeing is a return to the original model of shared ownership.
Where long-standing relationships were once required to build trust, we can now evaluate people far outside of our social circles via previous ratings. Trust is becoming a new form of currency.
Some cities, such as Amsterdam, have implemented systematic efforts to promote a sharing economy.
The gig economy – Freelance labor
There is no longer shame in having a temporary job. These days all jobs seem to be more or less temporary. And you can find smart people anywhere, anytime and in many ways. Olga Mizrahi, lecturer and author of “The Gig is Up”
Every limited task to be solved is considered a “gig.”
The gig economy means that temporary assignments are preferred to traditional forms of employment.
The gig economy phenomenon is taking hold rapidly. For example, 28 percent of Swedish laborers work entirely or partly as consultants, freelancers and temporary employees – a figure that appears to be increasing.
Why is the gig economy growing so strongly?
The Nature of the Firm, written in 1937 by the British economist Ronald Coase, provides one answer. In the book, Coase describes the fundamental logic of the firm. He asserts that companies per se are necessary because the transaction costs that would otherwise be incurred for finding the right competence for every individual task on an open market would be too high.
Lack of flexibility must be weighed against low internal transaction costs.
Ronald Coase was right, at least in 1937. Today it is not as self-evident. The reason is that transaction costs have dropped drastically with digitalization.
Will sales and marketing be considered a task that can increasingly be outsourced to external talent?
The business of the future will increasingly involve coordinating global networks of innovators, designers, product and service developers, manufacturers, logistics companies – and sales representatives.
Meaningful entrepreneurship
Values as a competitive advantage
The battle for the brains – Lack of qualified labor
A great workplace is not espresso or lush benefits or sushi lunches, grand parties or nice offices. Patty McCord, Chief Talent Officer, Netflix
The consulting company McKinsey & Co coined the phrase “The war for talent” back in 1997.
The war for talent is now a fact.
According to the Manpower Talent Shortage Survey, 45 percent of the world’s companies have difficulty finding the right personnel – an increase from 30 percent in a period ten years.
It is primarily two functions in companies that have the most difficult finding personnel: IT and sales.
Suddenly the sales profession is competing with other qualified jobs in advisory and consultancy services.
At the same time, sales organizations are faced with weaker demand for sales positions, particularly for younger workers. Sales representative is not amongst the ten most popular careers amongst 18- to 25-year-olds, and ranks lower than both administrative jobs such as the criticized teaching profession.
Sales competence is often perceived as an inborn talent – “the ability to sell is something you’re born with.”
Millennials – A new generation takes over
This generation is on fire and ready to go. Are you ready to change the world? Farshad Asl, lecturer and writer
According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, millennials – the generation born in the beginning of the 1980s and up until the year 2000 – will comprise 75 percent of the American labor force in 2025.
Millennials – also referred to as Generation Y – is the first online generation. No other generation has grown up with the Internet, computers and cell phones.
They are an ambitious group but have a weak work ethic.
For those who want to recruit sales reps from this generation it is important to take several factors into account to be attractive. Besides the fact that millennials want greater influence on their work, to develop personally, and continuous and fast feedback, their philanthropical ambitions also single them out.
The talent hunt and the great generational shift are running amuck, and competitiveness can quickly be decimated for those who are not fast.
The Search for Purpose – Business with heart and soul
Being the richest man in the cemetary doesn’t matter to me. Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful, that’s what matters to me. Steve Jobs, founder of Apple
The search for purpose has begun. More and more of us choose employers, suppliers, products and services that stand for something. Companies have to find a “why” that engages and attracts both customers and employees.
Being meaningful is spurred on by new values. A desire to contribute to something bigger. And if one can serve a higher purpose and make more money at the same time, we all win.
In their book Fast/Forward – Make your Company Fit for the Future the writers Jonas Ridderstråle and Julyan Birkinshaw say that one must first decide which stakeholder one wants to serve and how one can address their values – beyond money.
The writers describe instead five stakeholders that one can focus on when attempting to create a more meaningful business: employees, customers, suppliers, the local community or the planet.
Karma capitalism – The responsible company
The business of business is improving the state of the world. Mark Benioff, CEO and founder of Salesforce
In the new karma capitalism, it is not only about making money but also about taking responsibility for the environment and the climate.
Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has become increasingly important in many companies. The CSR concept means that aspects of social, environmental and societal responsibility are woven into business strategies and operations.
In the future, companies will both need to make money and make a difference.
Happynomics – Happiness as a business strategy
Have fun, do good and the money will come. Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin Group
In the late 1700s the British philosopher Jeremy Bentham declared that the only thing that means anything in the end is increasing happiness in the world.
Bentham’s ideas, however, did not lead to a revolution; in the 1800s and 1900s governments, companies and researchers focused instead on welfare and economic goals.
In the past decades, however, the pendulum seems to have swung and Bentham’s ideas have experienced a renaissance.
The American career site CareerBliss has been publishing an index for the past several years that lists and ranks the companies with the most satisfied employees.
At the top of the list are companies like Nike, Adobe, Starbucks, Apple, Pfizer, American Express and Microsoft, but also a number of smaller less-known companies. Number one on the list is the real estate agent Keller Williams.
Gamification – Business becomes a game, games become business
Games reward us in a way that reality doesn’t. Jane McGonigal, Lecturer and best-selling author in game design
That is what gamification is about. To simply make work tasks more fun. By borrowing ideas from the playfulness of computer games and design and transferring them to other areas that are not game applications, we can increase an individual’s motivation and enthusiasm.
Gallup’s measurements show for example that only 8 percent of all employees in the UK are engaged in their work, and an entire 73 percent are detached.
We need games and play to learn how to handle danger, improvise, be creative and thereby develop and create more effective brains. They are central, therefore, to human development.
The ideas behind gamification are about achieving short- and long-term goals through immediate feedback, visualization of targets and the progress of individuals or teams toward achieving the goal, and creating a sense of context.
This is also one explanation for why the large suppliers of CRM systems, such as SalesForce and Microsoft, currently offer gamification built in to their solutions.
The hunt for trust
Trust as currency
The knowledge explosion – From deficit to surplus
There were 5 Exabytes of information created between the dawn of civilization through 2003, but that much information is now created every 2 days. Eric Schmidt, former CEO, Google
Throughout history, knowledge has been a scarce commodity.
The volume of knowledge that a normal person in the slow agricultural communities of the 1800s received during an entire lifetime was equivalent to what we find in the Sunday edition of our daily newspaper.
We are currently witnessing an unprecedented knowledge explosion, that the American writer and systems theorist Richard Buckminster Fuller showed in his analyses. In 1982 he introduced a statistical model called Buckminster Fuller’s Knowledge Doubling Curve. Using the model, he demonstrated that the quantity of knowledge in the world is doubling faster and faster. For example, historically it took 1,800 years – between 100 B.C. and 1700 A.D. – to double the quantity of knowledge. Then it only took 200 years, until the beginning of the 1900s, before the quantity of knowledge doubled again. Between 1900 and 1950 the quantity doubled again, followed by a new doubling between 1950 and 1960. Following Fuller’s death, IBM complemented this development curve with a prediction that in the year 2020 we will double the amount of knowledge around us every 12 hours.
Calculations indicate that digital technology has developed seven million times faster than the human brain’s management of information.
The average increase in IQ has been about three to seven IQ points per decade, but has recently begun to flatten out in the West.
This is the paradox of knowledge: with access to information we should in theory understand the world better, but the result is the exact opposite.
In behavioral economics this is usually called “Status Quo,” which is a form of bias where we elect to keep what we already have by doing nothing, a behavior that gets stronger when information becomes too complex or there are too many alternatives.
Total transparency – The emergence of the modern pillory
It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. Warren Buffett, investor and multimillionaire
We can now talk about total transparency, where all of a company’s faults and misdoings are continuously exposed for public view on the Internet.
The ability to scrutinize companies and organizations on the net has literally exploded.
Companies are forced to accept that in the era of total transparency they must provide excellent products and outstanding service.
In all forms of sales contexts, the seller has traditionally had the information advantage. The situation is almost the reverse of the past – the information advantage is more and more often in the customer’s favor.
Another consequence is that companies are in the process of losing control of their brands.
Obviously, it is becoming important that employees, as representatives of an organization, from beginning to end do their best to provide good service, and even exceed customers’ expectations.
One approach to addressing this development is to meet transparency with more transparency.
The American Internet company Buffer works actively with “radical transparency” as they call it. They publicize their business plans, product ideas, and pricing motivations.
Truth inflation – Who should you trust?
There are no truths without the small truths. The big ones have – just like the dinosaurs – died out. Luke Rhinehart, writer
Historically, the truth was something absolute and not to be questioned.
In our post-modern time, the concept of truth has continued to diverge in even more directions, we choose to call this truth inflation. Given all of the experts that exist in different fields, one would expect that we would have better facts today. The problem is simply which of these experts one should trust.
As much as 59 percent of all links that are shared on Twitter haven’t even been read by the reader who shared them.
Our ability to determine what is real and what isn’t is continuously challenged.
Studies show that youth evaluate information on the Internet more critically than older people, which to a large extent believe that most of the information on the Internet is reliable.
Young people most likely have more experience than older people.
On the whole, we are approaching a situation where over time we are losing more and more of our trust.
This trust gap between sellers and buyers is becoming increasingly difficult to bridge; it is not something that can be solved with a few discount coupons. The new paths for creating truth haven’t yet been entirely drawn. It is about shared passions rather than pitching.
The Power of Authenticity – The fall of advertising
Get to know your customers. Humanize them. Humanize yourself. It’s worth it. Kristin Smaby, support manager Owl Insights
Trying to deceive cynical and well-read customers with seductive advertisements is becoming increasingly difficult.
Instead, we see a stream where false is in increasing degrees being forced to make way for real and where affect must give way to authenticity.
The concept of authenticity has many dimensions, such as simplicity, ease, and honesty.
Something else that is authentic is people. People aren’t perfect, which sets them apart from emotionless computers and machines.
From a marketing perspective, this means that sales reps must not only be correct and well – informed. They must also be passionate and live their brand. They must show that they themselves believe in what they are offering, 100 percent.
False authenticity is regarded as even worse than honest artificiality.
Thought leaders – The return of the oracle
Thought leadership is when a leader’s thoughts are being used by leaders to lead other. Onyi Anyado, prize-winning speaker, entrepreneur and writer
The term thought leader has its roots far back in history. But it was first in 1994 that the American economist Joel Kurtzman made it a concept in the business world. He defines a thought leader as an individual or a company that builds its competitiveness and profits on being a known authority within a specific area.
An influencer can be a thought leader but usually isn’t. A thought leader, on the other hand, is always an influencer.
Gartner even claims that thought leadership is one of the most powerful trends in sales and marketing, and is currently the highest priority for most B2B companies.
The entrepreneur Brian Clark, who started the blog Copyblogger in 2006, is someone who has succeeded at this. In 2017 Copyblogger was the most influential blog about content marketing, with more than 200,000 unique followers.
Consulting and analysis companies often try to achieve this position by publishing advice, research, statistics, tend analyses and new management models in their own publications, such as McKinsey Quarterly, A.T. Kearney Executive Agenda and Deloitte Review.
One important conclusion in this context is that all companies don’t strive to become thought leaders. But for an increasing number of companies this strategy is becoming more important in a growing knowledge-based society, where doing so helps and strengthens the marketing process.
Digital lighthouses – Navigating the sea of information
It’s not information overload. It’s filter failure. Clay Shirky, New York University
More information does not necessarily mean being better informed.
A digital lighthouse can be described as an actor that helps the customer to sort through the overflow of information, news, and offers that they face constantly.
Homo Effectivus
Time is money
Servicification – A weightless economy
When modern economies grow, production and consumption shift toward economic value that exists in bits and bytes, and away from atoms and molecules. Danny Quah, Li Ka Shing Professor in Economics, National University of Singapore
The Mayority of Swedes today work in the service sector, which generates two thirds of the country’s GDP.
Eight out of nine start-up companies are service companies. As a result of this structural shift, Sweden’s economy is becoming “weightless.” One third of Sweden’s exports don’t weigh anything – because they are comprised of services.
It has become increasingly popular to package offers for services and provide different types of subscriptions and service contracts. This servicification means that instead of making unpredictable one-time purchases, customers make longer commitments.
On the whole, we are standing at the edge of a future where goods are replaced by services and where it will become increasingly difficult to clearly define an industry.
Increased perception of lack of time – Time as a currency
Time is more value than money. You can get more money, but you cannot get more time. Jim Rohn, writer and lecturer
“People don’t have time to perform their tasks at work,” says Anders Ivarsson – Westerberg who is performing research on administrative tasks.
Gradually, inefficiencies are being eliminated, while employees are expected to take on larger and larger workloads in the form of increased volume and speed or increase demand for cognitive and physical effort.
An increased perception of lack of time at work not only causes consequences for the work-environment, it also creates external consequences, primarily for customer relations.
Even if it sometimes is a challenge to capture a customer’s attention, paradoxically they require total attention when they initiate contact independently.
Quick responses are the highest priority when customers have questions and concerns, and the level of service comes in third place.
The paradox of free choice – Increasingly difficult to make decisions
To be content with little is hard: to be content with much, impossible. Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, writer
An infinite number of choices leads to a new dilemma: the problem of choosing.
In addition to time being a limiting factor, our brains have difficulty managing too many alternatives. “Miller’s law” says that humans’ working memory is extremely limited when making choices. This insight was presented in the book The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two, written by psychologist George Miller in 1956. His research showed that a person has the capacity to rationally compare about seven alternatives.
To facilitate decision making, people create labels that categorize information, with the hope of being able to predict results.
Another consequence of the free-choice paradox is that decision makers tend to delay making decisions.
Another negative consequence is the risk of “post-purchase anxiety” – anxiety over perhaps having chosen the wrong alternative. Research shows that such feelings occur in more than 40 percent of implemented B2B purchases.
Virtual relationships – Digitalization of social codes
If social activities move into virtual worlds, economic activity will surely follow. Edward “Ted” Castranova, Professor, Indiana University
We see a shift toward more virtual relationships.
Many young people have difficulty interpreting social codes, and some don’t have the same habits and social skills for managing physical meetings with people they don’t know.
The problem is that young candidates searching for jobs have difficulty interpreting facial expressions and managing social interaction.
It is no wild guess that an increasing share of sales will occur without human contact, without physical meetings.
Unlike other customers that just go into a website and look, for B2B companies the share of concluded transactions increases three times for those who also choose to chat with a customer service rep.
Facebook is becoming increasingly popular as a channel for customer contacts, as is their variation Spaces, where one can implement virtual meetings with VR glasses.
Self-service – When the customer does the work
It ought to be common sense that service is important to sales. But it’s not. Stanley Marcus, former chair of the department store chain Neiman Marcus
Without realizing, as customers, we have gradually assumed increasingly large workloads. The fact is that we are more and more frequently – entirely unpaid – carrying out tasks that used to be someone else’s job.
Through apps, websites and smart speakers one can, without being disturbed, evaluate and personalize products and services based on one’s own needs.
Along with our relationships becoming more virtual, many prefer to shop without talking to a person.
This is the ultimate form of self service is short-circuited purchasing chains where the manual steps have completely disappeared.
When machines order products, clearly suppliers must realize that they have entered the IT industry. They must learn how ordering systems work, how to make themselves known, and how to become part of this new ecosystem.
Social media takes over
New arenas for business relationships
Social selling – Building relationships via social media
The modern customer is digitally driven, socially connected and mobile empowered. Sales reps need to adapt or be replaced. Jill Rowley, Chief Growth Officer at Marketo
Social selling is a relatively new term that has emerged in recent years along with the development of social media.
Today, 2.5 of the world’s 7.6 million people use social media, which is equivalent to about a third of the world’s population.
When social relationships increasingly move to the net, sales reps have to follow. Social selling has become increasingly popular in a number of industries, but it is used the most within B2B sales or more considered customer purchases (such as financial advisory services and car purchases) where human interaction is important.
The road to success in social selling requires involving, engaging and nurturing a relationship with the customer instead of chasing them. The traditional way, where we push a message, is dying out and being replaced by inspiring and educating our target group.
According to a study by Forrester, nearly 50 percent of companies have developed a program and strategy for social selling and 28 percent are in the process of doing so.
On average it takes about 18 telephone calls to arrange a customer meeting and only one percent of customers call back when a sales rep leaves a message.
According to LinkedIn, those sales reps that actively use social media perform 78 percent better in their sales work than those who don’t.
The trend toward increased use of social media for driving sales will likely continue to grow in the coming years.
Influencer marketing – Modern rulers
I think that influencer marketing is going to have an incredible global era for the next decade, and we’re just at the beginning of it. Gary Vaynerchuk, American entrepreneur and writer
This trend, where individuals obtain ever more influence over us as customers, customers or citizens, is growing increasingly stronger, and companies are not slow to jump on the bandwagon.
In many cases one can even use someone from one’s own personnel and their influence in social media. This is something that IBM did successfully when for a period of time they let 1,000 of their most knowledgeable employees share six posts per day on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.
For a sales or marketing manager, influencer marketing can be a useful marketing channel for reaching out to a target group.
The challenge is to find influencers that really are interested in your product or service, that understand your target group, and that use the right channels.
Tribalization – Tribes on the net
A tribe is a group of people connected to one another, connected to a leader, and connected to an idea. Seth Godin, American entrepreneur and writer
As the American sociologist Robert Putnam has pointed out in his studies, tribes are no longer tied to geography, family, friends or neighbors. The way that we establish tribes has moved out onto the Internet and to social media, where anyone can create a movement and ride on the tribalization trend. In a digital tribe, like-minded people are brought together and create an affiliation that strengthens their identity and wellbeing.
Several studies have shown that the younger generation is extremely individualistic, where focus has moved from the group to the individual and collective values have been replaced by individual ones. But one must remember that individuality to a large degree is about external attributes. Sticking out is a way of belonging together. The young become, in this way, just as much “we” focused. They want to belong to a flock, even if the flocks today are new.
The tribes can be comprised of people who know each other, but often it is just a common interest that connects group members.
The Canadian futurist Marchhall McLuhan’s expression, “the global village” is a fact today – digitalization makes the world shrink back to small villages again.
In the new form of marketing and sales, it will not be about printing a message for different individuals or target groups, but about inspiring a given tribe.
For a modern sales organization this means that we must understand which tribes we want to influence, who their leaders are, and which ideas and knowledge we want to promote.
Tubification – Video aligns with new media habits
Within five years, Facebook will be mostly video. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder
Our appetite for moving pictures seems to be impossible to satiate – we swallow everything from music videos and reality television to funny cat videos and news from war zones. The new English term for 2015 was “binge watching,” which means watching all the episodes of a TV series in a row.
Text is a much more difficult, and above all slower, way to transmit complicated messages. It has been estimated that the human brain can process pictures 60,000 times faster than text.
IBM has been particularly successful with video marketing. They analyzed what IT managers searched for on Google and created a list containing those exact formulations. Based on this knowledge they created a number of short explanatory videos for each of the topics. In this way they ensured their direct relevancy and could demonstrate for potential customers that they understood their problems and had solutions for them.
Something else that is growing is live streaming, with services like Facebook Live, YouTube Live and Periscope.
The pod explosion – Anyone can be a radio host
For corporate marketers, pod-casting is low-hanging fruit. Paul Gillin, author of “The New Influencers”
People driving cars, cycling or walking usually need to keep their attention on their environment – not on a screen. As a result, we have seen the podcast phenomenon grow strongly over the past ten years.
The emergence of podcasts probably has two central driving forces: in part continuously-increasing demands at the workplace to be well informed and up to date, and in part an increased perception of a lack of time.
We don’t want to adjust our routines to broadcast schedules set by someone else.
Another strong contributing factor is that podcasts are very cheap to produce. Normally you don’t need more than an interesting script or exciting guests, a computer, a recording program and a microphone to produce a podcast.
From a sales perspective, podcasts create two possibilities. The first possibility is to see podcasting as an advertising medium where one can, through others’ podcasts, have opportunities to reach niched target groups with specific interests.
A podcast can be a tool for establishing a position as a “thought leader” within a given field. One becomes a knowledge center that provides the latest expert insights.
Social listening – Analyses of dialogues in social media
Social media is not a media – The key is to listen, engage and build relationships. David Alston, marketing entrepreneur
The term social listening hints at the fact that one tries, in a structured way, to analyze what is being written about a certain company on social media.
There is an abundance of tools for working with social listening, such as Talkwalker, Sentione, Falcon, and dozens more.
A central part of social listening is so-called sentiment analysis. It involves using smart algorithms to try to discover if a general tone is positive or negative.
Social listening is not something that can be quickly applied in the event of a crisis , but rather something that is intended to be used continuously over a long period of time.
Smart machines
Human-like interfaces
Algorithmization – The emergence of the instruction society
Every creature is a living instruction that runs the algorithm of nature. Joey Lawsin, researcher, writer and heuristic philosopher
An algorithm is a methodical set of steps that can be used for performing calculations, solving problems, and making decisions. Algorithms are used all the time in mathematics and data processing.
Algorithms are a prerequisite to automation.
Algorithms are practically everywhere, especially for online services and not least in purchasing and sales processes.
The big advantage of algorithms is that they do the work much faster than humans.
an analysis of the customer’s needs that leads to a recommendation or a product suggestion often follows a number of methodical steps and is built, thereby, on an algorithm. An algorithm can also be used to calculate the probability of a customer making a purchase from us, based on the data that the algorithm collects.
Artificial intelligence – The future is here
AI is the most dramatic thing that has happened in computer science in 40 years. Stefan Carlsson, Professor in computer science, KTH Royal Institute of Technology
Unlike earlier systems that were rule and statistics based, modern AI solutions build upon machine learning. This concept means that computers can learn and, after the fact, improve their abilities. It is about letting computers train, so that they get better and better.
Phrasee is an AI solution that composes powerful headings for email campaigns. This can sound trivial, but if one can get a couple more percentages of recipients to open an email this can mean big money.
Another ingenious solution comes from Cogito, which can analyze a sales conversation in real time and provide feedback to the sales rep.
One can even use AI to manage leads and sort through incoming email. The telephone operator CenturyLink in the USA, which has both small and large companies as customers, recently invested in such a system. They call their virtual sales assistant Angie.
Angie identifies the leads that have the greatest potential and can also determine which sales rep is best equipped to contact the customer. In their first pilot test, Angie was able to interpret 99 percent of the incoming emails.
With the introduction of new technology, business logic and relationships between actors often change.
Barney Pell, who is an American AI researcher and entrepreneur, has observed the dynamics that occur when an actor begins to utilize AI, which he summarizes as “Pell’s law of AI lock-in.”
Just about every industry will experiment with new AI-based products and services. Those that become commercial successes will be highly motivated to invest more in AI development. This, in turn, means that more AI-based products and services will be on the market, which forces competitors to act. This creates a lock-in effect, where no actor in the long run will be able to resist.
Big data – The new gold
Without ‘big data’ you are blind and deaf in the middle of a freeway. Geoffrey Moore, management consultant and writer
The more data that becomes available, the more intricate patterns, connections and trends can be revealed, something that is extra interesting when it comes to people’s and companies’ purchasing preferences. It is about understanding the customer, through the data that they have previously generated.
Brian Krzanich, the CEO for the processor manufacturer Intel, answers this question well. “Those who have the best data can develop the best AI tools, smart algorithms and data analysis.”
By collecting unique data, one hopes to later be able to utilize this new knowledge – or sell it. Selling data has become a large market per se. An example is the company Q Data, which as created a marketplace for data buyers and sellers.
Another example is Oracle, which offers its customers five billion customer profiles and a billion company identities. Iota and Fetch are other market platforms for purchasing data that are in the process of emerging.
Automatization – When machines do the work
Sometimes our lives seem better suited to robots, for machines that can be programmed. We work. We clean. We pick up the kids. Danica Kragic Jensfelt, Professor in computer science, KTH Royal Institute of Technology
Between 2006 and 2011, about 10 % of Swedish jobs disappeared because of automatization.
Many bankers, engineers, stockbrokers, economists, teachers, real-estate agents, pedagogues, lawyers and judges, for example, have long been protected from automatization, but can eventually rapidly reduce in numbers.
That more and more sales reps will be replaced by machines is something that is already happening. As early as 2013, two researchers from Oxford University predicted that many simpler sales professions would be automated in the future.
According to the authors, the following sales professions are at greatest risk of eventually becoming automated (with the probability of automatization percentage in parentheses):
- Telephone sales reps (99 percent)
- Event sales (94 percent)
- Sales reps in shops (92 percent)
- Insurance agents (92 percent)
- Real – estate agents (86 percent)
- Sales reps in wholesale and manufacturing (85 percent)
- Advertising sales (54 percent)
- Sellers of technical products (25 percent)
Chat bots and voice assistants – The machines are talking to us
Fifty percent of all searches made on cell phones will be voice-based within three years. Dr Peter Cahill, founder and CEO, Voysis
It seems like the experience that is offered online doesn’t live up to customers’ expectations anymore. What we need is another more human-like interface, that can understand what we want. This is where chat bots and voice assistants make their entrance.
Something that may have even more potential than chat bots is voice assistants. These already exist in many smartphones, with names like Siri (Apple), Cortana (Microsoft) and Bixby (Samsung).
Amazon already has plans for the business segment with “Alexa for Business.” With this solution one can create unique comments with pre-defined functions such as appointment making, reporting problems, help for new employees or ordering office materials. As a sales rep one can quickly check inventory levels and sales statistics.
B2B sales require social competence, intuition and improvisation – things that machines are notoriously bad at.
Facial recognition – The technology reads the customer’s feelings
Soon, books will read you while you are reading them. They will know what makes you laugh, what makes you sad, and what makes you angry. Yuval Noah Harari, historian and writer
It is probable that our faces will be used to a greater degree for logging in and for adapting different services coupled to our personal profiles.
Singularity – Superhuman intelligence
The emergence of AI means that we need to get better at the humane: empathy, intuition and social competence. Anna Felländer, digitisation economist
To get an understanding of the development, which may lead us forward to a time where computers have superhuman intelligence, we can divide it into three different phases.
- In the first phase we carry the technology with us everywhere and we live with it.
- In the second phase we begin to integrate biology and technology, for example with the help of neurological implants. Eventually we will not only replace and repair organs. We will even be able to strengthen human cognitive ability and create hybrids that are part human and part artificial thinking people.
- In the third and final phase we completely replace man’s biological organs to create an entirely new non-organic being.
Technifying sales
Increased supply of digital sales tools
Martech – Marketing and sales become software
Software is eating the world. Marc Andreesen, Internet pioneer
Software is eating up and will soon take over every traditional form of business. Marketing and sales are no exception. Here, the selection of digital tools, often called martech have exploded.
The selection of software intended for use in marketing and sales increased from a few 100 to nearly 7,000 applications between 2010 and 2018: an increase of over 3,000 percent.
Several factors are driving the development of marketing and sales applications.
When customer dialogues and customer relations move from lunches and meetings to digital channels, software becomes a prerequisite for being able to interact with customers at all.
It has also become easier for new companies to develop software tools without enormous investments in either technological infrastructure or recruiting and training a large personnel force.
An additional driving factor is that it has become much easier for those who work with marketing and sales to adopt and begin to use software.
The applications don’t have to be comprehensive anymore either. They can manage various delineated steps and challenges in the revenue – generation process.
It is important to realize that software is not just exciting news, but will soon be an ordinary part of marketing and sales work.
Marketing and sales managers are becoming to much larger degrees IT buyers and strategist.
Omni channel – Seamless customer experiences
Customers don’t live a single channel life, or even a dual channel life. In both B2B and B2C worlds, customers today live multi-channel lives. Liz Miller, Vice President, CMO Council
The number of communications channels has literally exploded in recent decades.
It is becoming increasingly difficult for people who work with sales and marketing to capture and retain customers’ attention.
Maintaining coherency in the purchasing experience has become one of the stumbling blocks for today’s technology-smart buyers.
Therefore, for suppliers it has become important to – to the greatest extent possible – streamline and integrate the purchasing experience in the channels where the customer is. Integration between channels is becoming increasingly important.
Marketing automation – Get the customer to come to you
Marketing automation gave marketers a way to measure their performance. Now I can go to sales reps and say – we have created X dollars in revenue. That is really powerful, and has earned us a place at the sales table. Amanda Hall Bates, Demand Generation Manager at LinkedIn
New fashionable terms are constantly popping up in sales and marketing. One of the terms that has gotten the most attention in recent years is marketing automation. Just as the term sounds it involves automating parts of the marketing process.
The opportunity to offer more relevant and personal communication, instead of mass-marketing with unclear addresses, is a strong motivation for this.
Marketing automation is something that, when managed properly, should benefit both sales reps and customers.
The more information that is stored about a contact, the more complete a customer profile can be built, and the more tailored the communication can be made.
With marketing automation, managing leads can be adapted and categorized by relevance. The chain of events is tailored to the specific profile, which makes marketing customer-oriented. All visitor activity is registered and can even be rated. This phenomenon is called lead scoring. By working with lead scoring one can get a sense of where each lead is in the purchasing journey: which are still just orienting themselves and which are ready to be contacted.
Marketing automation strategies and lead scoring are based on having a relevant website with attractive content.
Account-based marketing – Technology-based work with key customers
Fokus is key. Do a few things well and forget the rest. Tim Cook, CEO, Apple
Do your largest customers represent a predominant share of your revenues? Do you know which of your most prioritized potential customers has the large business potential? And are your business transactions characterized by high complexity, long sales cycles and many people influencing decisions? Then account-based marketing (ABM) – one of the hottest trends in digital marketing in recent years – may be a solution.
ABM can be seen as a rebirth of key account marketing.
There are many suppliers that offer software solutions that support ABM, such as Vendemore and Jabmo.
How does this work in practice?
An ABM program begins with creating a list of a small number of key customers with large potential.
The next step is to understand which channels are most appropriate for influencing the customer.
Programmatic advertising – The highest bidder gets visibility
It’s gone from ‘Mad Men’ to math men. Ken Auletta, writer and columnist, The New Yorker
Programmatic advertising is a concept that has become increasing popular in recent years. It is a rapidly-growing phenomenon in marketing and generates 12 billion US dollars in revenues on the European market.
The word programmatic refers to purchasing and sales of advertising being programmed and automated. In practice this can work as follows. When someone visits a website, a question is sent from the site to an advertising exchange. The advertising exchange works like an agent between advertising publishers and buyers. The advertising exchange publishes a notice that there is an advertising display opportunity for sale. A number of advertising buyers evaluate, based on a given set of criteria, how much they think that the particular advertising display opportunity is worth, and respond with a bid on the advertising exchange. The advertiser that makes the highest bid wins the auction and the opportunity to display their ad for the website visitor. The entire process is automated and takes fractions of a second.
The hope is that, through programmatic advertising, the ads will become more relevant and likely to hit their target.
One driver behind this development is that large publishers want to maximize revenues from online advertising.
Advertisers will increasingly manage programmatic purchases on their own, without involving an agent.
Digital newcomers
Technology of the future
The Internet of things – Even the smallest gadget will be connected
If you think that the internet has changed your life, think again. The ’Internet of things’ is about to change it all over again! Brendan O’Brien, founder of the software company Aria
The Internet was first envisioned as a way to connect computers. After a while, people realized that it was also an ideal network for connecting people.
What we are now seeing is a development where not only computers and people will be online, but even a range of other objects. The English phrase, the internet of things, i sometimes abbreviated IoT, describes just this.
One of the drivers behind this development is the decreasing cost of hardware, which makes it economically viable to connect just about everything to the Internet.
Even Internet connections are becoming both cheaper and faster over time.
Some predict a future where every physical product is connected and where sensors everywhere make it possible for us to fully understand and read our environment.
With sensors that monitor use, inventory status and wear, one can create proactive sales mechanisms that inform customers of their needs before they realize them themselves.
With IoT, customer care and increased sales go hand in hand.
The next step in the development will probably be to stop involving the customer at all. Instead, automated orders based on different events will ensure timely delivery before inventories get low.
A more autonomous ordering process also creates lock-in effects that make it difficult for competitors to take over – assuming that the process works flawlessly and the price is acceptable.
Quantum computers – Ever more powerful machines
I believe that there is a global market for maybe five computers. Thomas J. Watson, CEO for IBM (1943)
One of the driving forces behind many of today’s – and above all tomorrow’s – technological solutions for sales and marketing is the continuously decreasing cost of computing power that we have seen for several decades.
We are seeing exciting research that can nevertheless make it possible to achieve more processing power in the future. One of the more promising areas is quantum computers.
Instead of storing information like normal computers do, in zeros and ones, quantum computers use something called a qubit. What is remarkable about a qubit is that it can be a zero or a one – but also a zero and a one at the same time.
The big advantage of quantum computers is that they can carry out multiple computations in parallel, instead of like traditional processors calculating one thing at a time.
Because despite faster computers, calculation time is still an obstacle. An example of such an area is speech synthesis: the ability to create artificial speech that sounds human. Today’s solutions for this are phenomenal and can, with different voices and dialects, read texts aloud in such a convincing way that it is no longer possible to differentiate them from a real person. The problem is that they take about 90 minutes to produce one minute of speech. Achieving high-quality synthesized speech in real time is not yet possible.
With quantum computers one will, for example, be able to simulate chemical experiments, optimize investment portfolios, map genetic illnesses and develop new medicines. As well as optimizing marketing campaigns and improving logistical flows.
We often tend to overestimate technology from a short-term perspective, but we also underestimate it for the long term.
Virtual reality – Welcome to the computer’s artificial world
This is not just a game accessory – this technology will change to a great extent the foundation of how we see computers. Liv Erickson, VR evangelist at Microsoft
With VR glasses, a potential customer can study a product in detail and just about put the product to use, thereby understanding why just that product is the best choice. With interactive elements a customer can squeeze, feel, test and evaluate. It is like a combination of trade fairs, customer visits and webinars in one.
The big advantage of VR is that it can create a realistic feeling and experience of complex products.
A company that sells complicated services that may be difficult to demonstrate and explain can also benefit from using VR.
3D printers – Three-dimensional challenges in the value chain
Forget shopping. Soon you’ll download your new clothes. Danit Peleg, fashion designer
The global market for 3D printers generated 12.6 billion US dollars in revenues in 2018.
The environment question is another aspect that shouldn’t be underestimated.
Studies show that 3D printers require roughly half as much energy as producing objects in a factory, if one takes into account the total environmental impact from manufacturing, maintaining an inventory and transportation.
Three-dimensional printouts can potentially become a threat to producers, wholesalers and transporters alike.
If 3D printouts become increasingly common, the physical products per se will tend to become less valuable, while the files that describe them will be where value is created in the future.
Blockchain
Distributed digital trust Blockchains. Blockchains are by nature decentralized. They are self-organizing networks that lack hierarchical systems and can thereby become a counterforce to traditional national states. Robin Teigland, Professor, Chalmers Institute of Technology
Blockchains can be understood on two different levels; one related to possible applications and one related to the actual technology.
Managing trust is a large part of the benefit of blockchain technology.
Imagine that you want to guarantee the authenticity of a digital document. It could be an agreement, a payment, a patent or why not a photograph. You want to ensure that no one in any way can change the contents of the document after the fact.
The first step to achieving this is to digitally verify the document through an algorithm that becomes a form of unique watermark that certifies its authenticity. Everyone who has access to the original document can perform the same procedure and arrive at – assuming the document is intact – the exact same watermark.
These verifications or watermarks are linked to each other. In practice this usually occurs by grouping together a large number of verifications into what is called blocks. These data blocks then form a chain, where every block is linked to the previous ones, which is why they are called blockchains.
A basic assumption is that all parties who are involved in a business relationship use the same blockchain.
What differentiates blockchains from other forms of identification and transactions is that they don’t require an external guarantor.
From a security perspective there is also no central place to attack. The information is divided up and is always updated – what once lands in a blockchain is there forever.
Blockchains will probably become increasingly relevant in sales. Negotiating and trust are central factors of many types of B2B sales, and if there is a technical platform that simplifies and secures transactions it will probably be used.
Things like signing and approving contracts, agreements, deliverables and invoices will become increasingly comprised of solutions based on blockchain technology.
As a sales rep it is important to have enough knowledge to meet customers’ expectations about discussion and implementation. If blockchains become the new operating system for the marketplaces of the future, this can revolutionize the premises of sales.
