I have observed several trends in sales and I believe that are all important – just in the nature that sales drives business.
The most significant is technology. Technology is supporting and driving sales and those people/companies that do not embrace it may fall behind competitively.
With this, the most important technologies include CRM packages to track relationships and sales (ACT, SalesForce.com, NOW Contact, etc.), PDA technology to monitor and improve communications (mobile phones, email, IM, SMS, etc.) and internet research tools to research companies and discover new buyers (Hoovers, Lexus-Nexis, Google/Yahoo finance, etc.).
Another key trend is how sales professionals need to do more than just “find, introduce and close a sale.” They need to know the industry, understand the potential clients’ business and even be strategic with their customers. They must be mediators and handle more of the account management after a sale. And they must further own-up to mistakes perceived in their product or service.
I’ve linked a few related articles here. Ad Age, Chally, Hoovers, Fast Company and others have all documented trends like this in the past year.
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