Artificially Intelligent Selling

Sales, the final frontier...

Social, Mobile, Cloud and Big Data have dominated the ‘trend’ conversations in 2014, and all four will continue to gain momentum as change agents in B2B and B2C business. But in 2015 they will be accompanied by three complementary technologies – the dawn of AI (Artificial Intelligence; yes the scary self-learning type), micro predictive analytics (BI leveraging big data) and the maturing of mobility proximity (beacons and geo-fencing). All seven of these elements together coupled with the dawning explosion of sensors everywhere, will represent unprecedented technological synergies and the use-cases are limitless in transformative customer experience. It’s already happening and Amazon is an example.

But almost all the hype around these advancements has missed an important consideration… technology is ushering in an era of distraction and artificial connection. The appearance of connection is not the same as real connection. An ‘always on’ and ‘always connected’ world means no-one is really concentrating and ADD is a constant barrier to meaningful conversation and genuine engagement. There are 1,000 channels but there’s nothing on. The noise is deafening but no-one can hear. The sheer volume of content, channels and workload is killing quality. In short – people are skimming, misinterpreting, clicking away and tuning-out. Miscommunication and misunderstanding is everywhere.

But technology is evolving at a faster rate than any of the creators could imagine. Where could all this take B2B and B2C selling? Could AI and the enabling data sources mean that technology could create relevance in every dimension, even assessing our ‘mood’. When process automation crosses over into automated engagement, then sales people are facing an apocalyptic threat. By 2020, could the majority of salespeople be replaced by AI? If the value of a sales person is defined by providing information and enabling someone to transact; then the answer, sadly, is definitely ‘yes’.

How can sales people avoid digitally driven extinction? The answer is value – the creation of value for customers and employer through traditional concepts executed innovatively with technology. We live in a human world and emotional connections are what influence us, motivate us, and inspire us. Everything old (value selling, solution selling, insight selling, trusted advisor, etc.) will be new again because it is how to best differentiate in a human world. But only for those who can adopt blended engagement models where differentiation is created through the combination of online and physical presence with digital and human interaction. This is future for the most successful sales people… the ones who will prosper beyond 2020.

I predict a great future for you in sales but only if you learn to create innovative mash-ups of proven selling principles combined with new world digital engagement to meet and serve your markets and customers where they are and how they prefer to interact. Sales must move higher up the value chain to conduct the digital symphony. In many ways, this will bring you closer to the customer than ever: if they let you in. You must be the signal in the noise to break through so I will write more on how to do this strategically in upcoming posts, to in essence, future-proof you.

If you valued this article, please hit the ‘like' and ‘share’ buttons below. This article was originally published in LinkedIn here where you can comment. Also follow the award winning LinkedIn blog here or visit Tony’s leadership blog at his keynote speaker website: www.TonyHughes.com.au.

Main Image Photo by Flickr: OiMax

A.I. Salesbots Driving Sales Extinction?

This post is a reprint of an article I recently wrote for Sales Mastery Magazine and thanks Mary Poul for allowing me to reproduce here!

Advances in social media platforms and the ubiquity of mobile devices are creating disembodied engagement like never before. You only have to observe the digitally distracted herds of people wandering down the street like Brown's cows, gazing into their devices, meandering across the paths of others, clicking away in their narcissistic pursuits to see that society has changed.

Harold Diculous, Adjunct Professor of Social Anthropology and Special Assistant to Australia’s Science Minister, recently quoted a USL report highlighting that the brainwaves of pedestrians engaging in social media platforms on their smartphones are remarkably similar to sleep-walkers with both being open to suggestive behavioral stimulation. “PDSP [Physically Disengaged by Social Platform] consumers are highly susceptible to sales messages delivered in social”, said professor Diculous, “and that’s what’s driving the acceleration of advertising in Facebook and now linkedIn... which is very concerning.” Messages from social platforms bypass all filters nature has designed into human reasoning functions, implanting directly to the belief system.

While governments are considering how to legislate against the unintended consequences of social engagement platforms, tech-savvy entrepreneurs are harnessing the hypnotic power of social for commercial advantage to rid their companies of unnecessary sales overhead. the rise of ‘Dark Social’ combined with the rapid evolution of Artificial Intelligence (AI) may be signaling the decline of the sales profession. Dark Social is the unintended consequence of interconnected social platform metadata and APIs.

In a world where most products, services and solutions are increasingly seen as commodities, differentiation has been desperately pursued by business through the ability of sales people to create relationships of trust. But even trust has become a commodity with the recent advances in Siri, Cortana and Google Now which leverage back- end AI algorithms fed by social proximity beacons, wearable devices, the Internet of things, metadata harvesting and predictive big data analytics.

According to Professor Diculous, “By linking all social platforms together through APIs and metadata tags, dark social can power AI cyber- selling.” When asked what it will mean for the selling profession, Diculous responded, “All the elements are now in place and I predict 65% of inside sales roles with be replaced by AI Cyber Sellers (AICS) by 2018. Many sales people will have to turn to burger-flipping to make a living.”

Field sellers are next in the line-of-fire. Just last month a humanoid robot named Ham drew breathtaking reactions at the Asia World Expo in Hong Kong with its lively eyebrows, wrinkled cheeks, and eyes that could follow a person around the room. Amazingly, Ham speaks in tweets that create a hypnotic trance with anyone within a three-meter radius. the robot can be programmed to leverage Dark Social influence to program listeners to buy.

Ham is designed to be an exceptional closer in sales applications and according to a discredited unnamed source, “More than half of the Fortune 500 are set to place orders this year, meaning Hanson Robotics could outsell the iWatch.”

The second generation robot will become a complete AI salesbot, traveling to customers using a Google Car to deliver Challenger insights. the bot will effectively build rapport during presentations where the audience is handicapped by PDSP (Physically Disengaged by Social Platforms), which is spreading at epidemic proportions. Customers are wide open to the salesbot’s dulcet tones that auto-suggest volume purchase orders and high Net Promoter Scores.

The article above is satire and here is the original article on the Sales Mastery website. The thing you may not know is that Ham is real! Have a look at him interacting with visitors at the Hong Kong show in early 2015.

I encourage you to subscribe to Sales Mastery Magazine and if you valued this article, please hit the ‘like' button and also share via your Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and Facebook social media platforms. I encourage you to join the conversation or ask questions so feel free to add a comment on this post. Pleasefollow my LinkedIn post page for all my articles.

Bonus content! Here is one in a series of interviews that I conducted with Professor Diculous. To see more, search his name in YouTube or click here.

If you valued this article, please hit the ‘like' and ‘share’ buttons below. This article was originally published in LinkedIn here where you can comment. Also follow the award winning LinkedIn blog here or visit Tony’s leadership blog at his keynote speaker website: www.TonyHughes.com.au.

Main image photo by Flickr: 'Aye, Ham!': Presentan un insólito humanoide que sabe dialogar

Will Artificial Intelligence Protect Sales Jobs?

I've written about how Artificial Intelligence (AI) is going to create a sales career apocalypse but not everyone agrees with me. I took the time to meet with Matt Michalewicz who is a global leader in applying AI to create opportunities and drive the productivity of sales people. His perspectives are thought provoking and profound.

Although Artificial Intelligence (AI) and automation is going to displace many people in current jobs, including white collar professions,  AI can also make certain jobs more productive. Matt believes that AI can actually make some jobs so much more productive that they will be protected from becoming extinct. I asked Matt to elaborate in the context of business-to-business (B2B) sales roles and here is his response (in italics).

The 'salesperson' job category is predicted to suffer significant job losses in the decade ahead but these predictions are based on a number of factors:

• The growing sophistication of AI technology
• The continuing move by consumers to online, self-service consumption models
• The deteriorating return on investment metrics of many sales jobs (especially “in field” jobs)

Just look at what happened to the salespeople that sold vacuum cleaners, insurance, and encyclopedias on a door-to-door basis. Their demise stemmed from too much cost (salary, travel expenses, commissions, etc.), and not enough yield (too few sales to justify the cost). The same also happened to B2B sales people selling fax machines, radio paging and other technologies that became common-place.

Sales roles in B2B selling are at risk, especially with commoditized products such as liquor, food, carpet, electronics, paint, hardware, among many others (where the average sale size is low, but the costs of keeping reps on the road is high). Unless these companies can increase the yield and sales effectiveness of the in-field reps, they will suffer a similar fate as those that sold vacuum cleaners, insurance, and encyclopaedias. In other words, these sales job types need to become more productive to stay viable from a business (cost/benefit) perspective

But then Matt took the conversation in a surprisingly positive direction.

"Imagine if you had a digital assistant who did your research and created the insights you can take to customers to create value."

All B2B sales people need to lead with insight as their key point of differentiation. I've been following IBM's Watson closely but Matt has founded his own company,  Complexica, focused on the application of Artificial Intelligence to help organizations capture both profit and productivity gains. The application of his technology can change the game for those in B2B selling, especially where there are huge amount of data that can be analyzed. Matt and his team of AI “lifers” have worked in the area of Artificial Intelligence for more than 20 years, written dozens of books on the topic, and Complexica is their 3rd AI company (with their previous being acquired by Schneider Electric in 2012).

Complexica’s core product – an AI-based software robot called “Larry, the Digital Analyst” – has been specifically designed to make sales people more productive. How? By using advanced AI to automatically capture and analyze countless data sets (both internal and external), to determine:

• The most promising customers and prospective customers to visit (where the wallet share potential is the greatest)
• Value-adding insights that can be shared with the specific customer or prospective customer (such as “businesses just like yours are doing/buying/selling xyz at the moment” or “this is what’s selling well in your area” and so on)
• The exact offer to be made to each customer or prospective customer (based on analysis of similar customers and transactions)
• The exact price (again, based on analysis of similar customers and transactions)

Where IBM's Watson is currently focused on medical diagnosis (after winning Jeopardy against the best people on the planet), Complexica began life with a different approach.

Matt explains that Complexica's Larryhas been designed from the very beginning to enhance the value that sales people provide their customers while dramatically improving their efficiency. “We observed that huge productivity gains could be achieved if we could just tell sales reps where the most promising opportunities are, arm them with research and value-adding insights for each visit, and suggest the best combination of products, services, and price for each sales conversation. If we provided this information automatically and simultaneously to hundreds of in-field reps and telesales operators, they would immediately become more productivity and their yield would increase, because they would be targeting better opportunities, with the right products at the right price. From that initial observation, the idea of building an AI-based software robot was born, so we could automate all the complex data analysis to provide right the insight, to the right person, at the right time, without any of the complexity for the end user. That was the moment Larry, the Digital Analyst was conceived.”

Matt Michalewicz is a global leader in AI and the video interview with Sky News makes for fascinating viewing (Click this or the image below to view)

While technology and automation can destroy jobs it can also enhance sales careers and the value being provided to customers. Those sellers who embrace technology to create the necessary value to fund them in their roles will be the ones who prosper.

Matt Michalewicz is co-founder and Managing Director of Complexica.  

If you valued this article, please hit the ‘like' and ‘share’ buttons below. This article was originally published in LinkedIn here where you can comment. Also follow the award winning LinkedIn blog here or visit Tony’s leadership blog at his keynote speaker website: www.TonyHughes.com.au.

Main Image Photo by Flickr: Sean Davis

The Buy-bot Disruption of Professional Selling

I was a keynote speaker along with Andrew Vorster at a conference last month and he delivered a provocative presentation titled: The Rise of the Robots. I believe that automation is taking sales jobs away and I had a coffee with him to ask if sales people are all destined to become extinct sometime soon. Here is his response.

"I get a range of reactions but most importantly I aim to get people to think about their preconceptions so they can decide on the future they are going to create. Hollywood has done a great job over the years entrenching the idea of the inevitability of a future robot apocalypse."

"Arnie’s terminator might be a good guy in the movies but each time the franchise is rebooted, Skynet has managed to foil the pesky humans and there is some other dastardly plan to rid the earth of people and by the end...  well, you know it’s not the end and the next sequel will reveal just how futile resistance is."

But is it inevitable?

"We humans essentially all yearn for an easy life and in today’s world, robots are increasingly taking over mundane and routine tasks. The most common form of these are software robots – which most people might not even consider robots at all. As we embrace the opportunities of the Internet of Everything, we allow the software robots to remove friction from simple everyday activities. Examples in my own life are my connected thermostat that adjusts the temperature of my house depending on our habits and will turn on the heating while I commute home based on my location, or my bedroom blinds that open and close based on sunrise and sunset, or my home lighting that reacts to the music I’m playing based on my mood or my front door that unlocks as I approach the house (my next project). These small insignificant but frequent interactions begin to build a complex digital profile of me – a virtual representation of me that makes my life easier."

How far away are digital assistants that will disrupt sellers?

"When Apple introduced Siri, it seemed like a bit of a novelty but we have since seen Google, Cortana and many other “digital assistants” follow suit, all based around fairly simple search and response style constructs. A Kiwi company called MyWave have a digital assistant called Frank which expands on the concept and Frank can potentially start carrying out more complex tasks on your behalf.

Wow, could this automated buying have a disempowering impact on Business-to-business sellers as it matures?

"It's here for B2C today and B2B levels of sophistication are coming. Their demo shows how Frank can help you find a new pair of jeans, based on your brand, style and color preferences; and I have no doubt that in the future this could include an indication of who in your social network has already bought the jeans and maybe Frank could even make alternative suggestions based on what events you are attending from access to your calendar. To some people this might sound a little creepy but I think that over time the cool factor will kick in and the use of digital personal assistants will become more and more commonplace. As adoption increases, so will our expectations of the technology and we will begin to accept that in order for these assistants to become infinitely more useful, they have to become even more like us – they are going to have to “think” like us"

"Moving away from the idea of personal digital assistants, if software hardware it controls “thinks like us” then there is of course much more it can do to help us and it could potentially replace us in many walks of life. For a sobering view of what the future of work might look like, take a look at this article that highlights why men are more vulnerable than women to robot replacement."

"And here comes the warning of the “singularity” – that point in time predicted by the greatest minds on the planet when Artificial Intelligence becomes self aware – or when the distinction between humans and machines is blurred. Indeed, Ray Kurzweil (the founder of MIT’s Media Lab) predicts that by 2030 humans will be directly connected to the cloud – something that just a few short years ago would have sounded insane, but now sounds like something that for many is infinitely desirable."

"Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and Bill Gates are among the high profile names that are warning of the possible dire consequences of future AI and they have signed an open letter published by the Future of Life Institute calling for careful consideration of the focus and control required in developing this technology."

So, the future sounds like it could be bleak but you and I are optimists. What does the future really hold?

"I’m going to answer your question with the closing statement that I used in my session –  the future is not something that happens to us, it is something that we create. If we are all wiped out by killer robots, it will be our own fault – what kind of a future are you building?"

Thanks Andrew Vorster and connect with him here in LinkedIn.

If you valued this article, please hit the ‘like' and ‘share’ buttons below. This article was originally published in LinkedIn here where you can comment. Also follow the award winning LinkedIn blog here or visit Tony’s leadership blog at his keynote speaker website:www.TonyHughes.com.au.

Main image photo from Flickr.

Humans Need Not Apply For These Roles

The bots are coming, make no mistake, and they're not just taking blue collar or low skill roles. Manufacturing bots have been here for decades and now writer-bots are disrupting journalism, driver-bots are taking over warehouses, and software-bots are driving web traffic and eCommerce. If you think that Uber is disrupting the taxi industry... wait until Google Self-driving Car. Ashley Madison was using software sex-bots to dupe male members... cheating the cheaters; how ironic. Buy-bots and Sales-bots are here now; you just need to open your eyes. Not convinced... watch this compelling short video and then we'll discuss how you can bot-proof your own career. Seriously, watch the video now.

There will always be a role for human-to-human (H2H) selling but if all you do is provide a form of connection or information dissemination... then you're doomed just like the dinosaurs. The machine age is upon us and singularity (the moment individual computers match the level of human intelligence and become capable of recursive self-improvement) is projected to will occur in approximately 2030 (2050 at the latest).

An article published here by BBC News summarizes research carried out by Oxford University and Deloitte that reveals 35% of jobs are at risk of being computerized in the next 20 years (thanks Jonathan Farrington sending this to me). It is worth reading and ranks jobs in order of which are most likely to be lost to machines.

Natural language has been one of the biggest challenges for computers due to nuance, ambiguity, humor and syntax. English language is one of the most difficult but look at the progress Siri, Google Now and Cortana have made in dealing with these challenges plus the problem of accent. When a computer first beat the world's best chess player we thought that was no big deal because chess is game of pure logic and what-if scenarios. But A.I is a whole new game... Watson reads online encyclopedias and trolls the internet to create its own databases. It doesn't forget and has photographic memory. It can also understand weak links and attribute meaning to obscure questions. ... it can understand the spoken word and then respond at lightening speed to mop the floor with the very best Jeopardy players in the world. It's a stunning achievement. This video clip is short but the full documentary is worth watching.

So, how important is it to fire-proof your sales career?  According to Andy Hoar at Forrester Research, there is only one segment of professional selling that will continue to grow. In his April 2015 report, Death of a (B2B) Salesman, he details the results of surveying 236 buyers. Andy says “B2B buyer behavior has changed significantly in the past few years” and he believes that more than 1 million sales reps in the United States will lose their jobs by 2020. That equates to more than 22% of sales roles that will be gone and he claims that 93% of buyers prefer buying online when they’ve already decided what to buy.

Here is the brutal reality for those in sales concerning job prospects:

   - Order Takers: 33% Job losses by 2020

   - Explainers: 25% Job losses by 2020

   - Navigators: 15% Job losses by 2020

   - Consultants: 10% Job gain for those who can adapt

I've mapped Andy's [Forrester Research] terminology into my own quadrants that I've used for years (from my first book in 2010) and here's the stark picture.

Forrester says that only 25% of B2B businesses actively sell online today yet the cost of sale reduces from $24.50 to $1.50. Any business selling a commodity must explore ways to reduce cost of sale and those who operate on the left side are in trouble. Those in the bottom right need to elevate because relationships alone are not enough... insight and value is the new black.

So how can sales people avoid digitally driven extinction? The answer is value – the creation of value for customers and employer through traditional concepts leveraged through technology.

We live in a human world and emotional connections are what influence us, motivate us, and inspire us. Everything old (value selling, solution selling, insight selling, trusted advisor, etc.) will be new again because it's how to best differentiate in a human world. Challenger Selling has a real role but only for those who can adopt blended engagement models where differentiation is created through the combination of digital and human interaction.

"I predict a great future for those in sales but only if they can create relationships of trust with the most senior people and then provide value through insight and innovation"

Learn to also innovate in the way you sell through mash-ups of proven selling principles combined with new world digital engagement to meet and serve your markets and customers, where they are and how they prefer to interact. Sales must move higher up the value chain to conduct the digital symphony. In many ways, this will bring you closer to the customer than ever – if they let you in. You must be the signal amidst the noise to break through and this is why leading with insight and having business acumen is so important.

Finally, watch this short video that captures the thoughts of Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking... the bots here are real (no CGI) and online salesbots are more advanced than those seeking to navigate the physical world to go to war.  Look at marketing software such as Hubspot for lead scoring and nurturing to see how automation and disruption is real for professional selling. Wake up if you don't want to be replaced; define the value you bring your employer and customers.

If you valued this article, please hit the ‘like' and ‘share’ buttons below. This article was originally published in LinkedIn here where you can comment. Also follow the award winning LinkedIn blog here or visit Tony’s leadership blog at his keynote speaker website:www.TonyHughes.com.au.

Main image photo from Flickr.