AI and sales

12th December 2019 |   Journal Of Sales Transformation

As tech companies move to digitize the front office, digital start-ups have been flooded with cash in recent years, as they search for a way to use historical data such as emails and customer call logs to help average salespeople emulate the best. The following passages (in double quotes) taken from a recent story in Fortune magazine ask whether AI is ready to replace humans in the sales arena…

“Sales observers say it’s possible the software programs could bring incremental benefits that will nevertheless prove valuable to companies, but they’ll be unlikely to replicate the finer art of closing transactions.

“‘The human element is not going away,’ says Frank Cespedes, a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School and author of Aligning Strategy and Sales and Re-Thinking Sales: What’s Changing, What’s Not, and Why Knowing the Difference Matters. ‘The opportunity is to make salespeople even better and more productive at what they do.’