Sales profession and professionals in the age of digitization and artificial intelligence technologies: concepts, priorities, and questions

By Jagdip Singh, Karen Flaherty, R. Sohi, Dawn Deeter-Schmelz, Johannes Habel, Kenneth Le Meunier-Fitzhugh, A. Malshe, Ryan Mullins, V. Onyemah. Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management, 2019

296 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Recognizing the rapid advances in sales digitization and artificial intelligence technologies, we develop concepts, priorities, and questions to help guide future research and practice in the field of personal selling and sales management. Our analysis reveals that the influence of sales digitalization technologies, which include digitization and artificial intelligence, is likely to be more significant and more far reaching than previous sales technologies. To organize our analysis of this influence, we discuss the opportunities and threats that sales digitalization technologies pose for (a) the sales profession in terms of its contribution to creating value for customers, organizations, and society and (b) sales professionals, in terms of both employees in organizations and individuals as self, seeking growth, fulfillment, and status in the functions they serve and roles they live. We summarize our discussion by detailing specific research priorities and questions that warrant further study and development by researchers and practitioners alike.

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2ce0df22eb4854e6f4210165b1ebc076d058430f

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Citations in the corpus

Salesperson communication effectiveness in a digital sales interaction (2020, unknown): “…and/or conduct sales interactions more efficiently (Sheth & Sharma, 2008; Thaichon, Surachartkumtonkun, Quach, Weaven, & Palmatier, 2018), some open questions remain before those business gains are to be realized (see, e.g., Singh et al., 2019; Organizational Frontline Research (OFR), 2019).”
How artificial intelligence will change the future of marketing (2019, background): “…and hence more related to perhaps the Data Robot cell, but more so to the Robot Expert cell Sales and AI As we discussed with regard to Conversica, AI may alter all stages of the sales process, from prospecting to pre-approach to presentation to follow-up (Singh et al. 2019; Syam and Sharma 2018).”