Artificial Intelligence for Asset Management and Investment

Chapter 13Sales Science

IF MARKETING IS ABOUT MAXIMIZING DEMAND, sales transforms the demand signals into revenue streams. It includes processes such as prospecting, presenting, identifying objections and roadblocks, forecasting, negotiating, and closing. Intelligent automation of the sales process builds on marketing automation.

WHAT IS SALES SCIENCE?

Sales science is the scientific management of sales. As the world shifts to modern technologies, an equal and parallel sensemaking (Weick, 1995; Reynolds, 2015) is needed on the sales/marketing sides. It is the process by which people give meaning to their collective experiences. It has been defined as “the ongoing retrospective development of plausible images that rationalize what people are doing” (Weick et al., 2005). It is a space where plausible stories are shaped and shared, and a collective and coherent meaning develops. In underdeveloped sales approaches, the narratives are usually absent or misaligned between firms and their clients.

New challenges demand the introduction of new technologies. Sensemaking is not about buying some planning software or implementing CRM—it is mostly about extracting and shaping the shared narratives. In sales, it is about creating metacognitive structures about the offerings and aligning them with the perceived benefits of the clients such that a shared meaning develops. The meaning developed must be contextually connected with the needs and wants of the client.

Since sensemaking emerges ...