Sales professionals know that a fundamental part of the job is to face the new challenges that the market presents with the best preparation. Their ability to find growth opportunities and analyze sales trends before competitors will make a difference. The key to achieving this is to develop a sales strategy that responds to the new challenges you will have to face in the short and medium-term. Jose Duarte, a successful entrepreneur from Costa Rica, explains some of the sales trends coming in 2022 and how they will influence the new sales opportunities that the market will offer.
Going one step ahead is not just a phrase made, and in Sales getting a competitive advantage is essential for the growth of the business. Market-leading companies are allocating an increasing percentage of their budget to preparing commercial strategies for lines of activity that today are just ideas, but they intuit that they will have growth in the coming years.
The best salespeople are never satisfied with the growth potential of the business because they know that if they carry out a thorough analysis, even in mature markets, segmenting the target and disaggregating the data, they can develop ad hoc strategies that allow strengthening the business figures. Asserts Duarte, “With new technologies, we have more and more ability to segment our target audience, which allows us to customize the offers and offer the customer what they need.”
The advanced analytics offered by Big Data allows translating into commercial tools the enormous amount of data that large corporations have today. For example, predictive analytics of customer complaints can establish correlations by offering a more efficient response and improving customer satisfaction. Thus, the trends of Big Data for the coming years go through effective treatment of data to optimize decisions and undertake more effective actions, allowing companies to differentiate themselves in a relevant way from the competition.
Social media is a valuable source of information for companies and professionals who want to gain a significant competitive advantage. Millions of people sharing in real-time their experiences, opinions, tastes and trends on different platforms offer the possibility of adapting the offer to the end customer as never before has even been imagined. Therefore, social networks allow us to better understand who makes purchasing decisions, who is the one who manages the budget, what opinion they have about our organization and what influences are relevant.
The Sales and Marketing departments have to collaborate closely, but those who work in these areas know that this is not always the case. According to research conducted by McKinsey, Sales departments dominate the B2B sectors, while Marketing predominates in B2C.), where strategies to reach the final consumer prevail.
The use of artificial intelligence and the automation of sales tasks is an increasingly close reality. “Technological advances and language processing will offer a qualitative leap in the application of artificial intelligence in sales,” asserts Duarte. A clear example is seen in the generation of leads with the information obtained through CRM. However, currently, 75% of companies do not track their customers which means wasting the resources and efforts of companies.
augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) will have an impact of up to $1.5 trillion on the global economy by 2030, as collected in PwC’s “Seeing is Believing” study. The application of these technologies, also facilitated by the advance of 5G, opens up infinite possibilities to connect with the consumer and interact with him, improving the customer experience. Imagine, for example, virtual fitting rooms, seeing how your bedroom looks with other furniture, or driving a new car model without leaving the point of sale.
Another trend in sales that is reaching more and more relevance is personalized advertising. An application of this trend are chatbots that, thanks to artificial intelligence, allow the user to maintain a colloquial conversation with a computer program in apps such as Messenger, Slack or Telegram. Chatbots have the great advantage that they learn from our tastes and offer us services and products in a precise way, avoiding what does not interest us.
The market will demand a professional with the ability to adapt to an environment in continuous change and trained in the latest sales trends and new technologies.