Do we have to fear to lose our sales jobs due to AI?
Currently, it’s all about AI wherever you set your foot. Right from children being taught in schools on AI to start-ups innovating AI products, it has found its way. One set of people believe AI will transform the world in an unimaginable way where another set of people fear about the very transformation. But we know for sure that AI has made our life a lot more straightforward. It has immersed itself in all the disciplines that you can think of. Be it healthcare, education, banking, agriculture, marketing and whatnot. You name it we have it.
But, will AI replace all the jobs in the future? Especially sales jobs? Before diving into how it will transform the sales world, let’s take a step back and see how AI has impacted other fields and whether it has wiped out the jobs or made it more manageable.
How has AI influenced other fields?
- AI in education, we have seen robots teaching in classrooms. But have they replaced teachers everywhere? Definitely no. Sure, humanoid robots have garnered a positive response, but they are only making teachers’ life more comfortable. It’s a challenging task for teachers to focus on teaching as well as on students, but with robots, the teachers can give individual attention to students more.
- Coming to banking and finance, a lot of banking processes used to take hours and days to complete, but with AI, it’s lighting fast. You no longer have to wait long hours in a queue. Several fraudulent activities used to take place which was left undetected in the finance sector, but now it is easy to protect delicate data and also detect any activities. With decision-making techniques and data analytics, the finance sector has transformed for better. Just when we thought people lost their jobs, fresh jobs were created, which required people to know how to analyze the data using the most advanced tech.
- Healthcare has experienced the benefits of AI too. It has helped doctors and nurses immensely by detecting major diseases and predicting the patient’s health before any significant illness. Analyzing massive amounts of patients record is no easy task, but with artificial intelligence, it cannot get simpler.
- Marketing strategies have radically changed. With Google Analytics, customer behaviour can be analyzed to ensure better marketing strategies, which otherwise would have been a difficult task. One can gain customers to buy their products by carefully studying the behaviour and coming up with creative ideas to scale up the business. In no way has it made people lose jobs, the one with the right analyzing skills has the upper hand here. Numerous people with upgraded skills have been continuously a part to ensure better productivity.
- The same applies to the agriculture sector as well. Instead of the traditional methods which took enormous amounts of time, now can be done effortlessly using the latest tech. If in any of these cases, you think AI has made people lose jobs, you cannot be more wrong. It has made our life a lot easier than before and for those who are thinking there will be a massive blow due to AI in every sector, maybe sit back and relax as it’s no way near to what you might think. It has a lot of potentials to increase the production of any business.
Impact of AI on Sales People
We hope you got an idea of how AI is impacting our lives. At this point, nothing more can be said, but we know for sure there are ways where we can upskill ourselves and be a part of this changing world.
Coming to how AI will impact the sales jobs, what is the main ingredient in sales? Let’s rule out, making leads and reaching the targets. An essential element is to build harmony with the customer and trust. Even after hours of convincing them to buy your product, if you haven’t built a sense of trust with them, they sure will put it down. Let’s gain a more in-depth insight into it here.
A sales job is not as simple as people see it. If you were in the shoes of a salesperson for one day in your life, you would understand how busy and how challenging it is. You can see them setting up meetings and schedules, picking up innumerable calls and talking to clients for hours who only leave in the end without buying their product. To reach their monthly targets, they need to be always busy even on weekends. You can see how hard is it to get their time.
- One best thing that AI could do is to assist them with some of the monotonous tasks so that they can concentrate on better parts of the business. AI can help them in deciding when to further their deal.
- We have experienced this ourselves, say you go to a supermarket and buy their products, they ask for your phone number or mail id if it’s your first time in their store. Soon after that, you keep receiving messages about their latest offers and products. The same applies to sales too. It’s a tedious task to keep following up with numerous clients. Now, that’s when AI comes into the picture. Your job is made easier, and you get to keep in touch with your clients and up your business. It’s a win-win situation for both. If you think, salespeople will lose their jobs; we don’t see how.
- Another best thing about AI is that now a lot of organizations are using the Customer Relationship Management software to predicts their customer’s behaviour and ensure it is rightly targeted for better deals. Large amounts of data will be analyzed and predicted so that you will have a better idea when you approach a client.
- For a greater part, as mentioned earlier, sales are all about building trust with the clients. We have used chatbots for queries lately, but when we don’t get the right answers, we immediately call the customer service for better information about the product. What is that chatbots are lacking? They are designed perfectly well to resolve the human needs, but at some point, the connection we have with people will not be there. So, keeping this exact thing in mind, you can’t imagine a robot to sit in front of the client and close deals. Some level of emotional connection and trust should be built to turn them into potential buyers.
Will AI replace salespeople?
Coming back to the central question as to will AI replace salespeople. Well, if we look at it on a deeper note, AI will not replace salespeople anytime soon. There are numerous things to be kept in mind, though. You will be able to spend more time with your family, as AI will ease your daily tasks to a great extent. However, you need to learn the latest technology to keep up with the pace of changing scenarios.
Youngsters are highly motivated and eager to learn the latest tech, and they do grasp the idea and skills in no time. So, to keep up with their skills and to save your job, you need to keep updating yourself with the tech advancements. Plenty of online courses are available, and as always, the Internet is an ocean of information anything under the sun, so if you’re curious enough to upskill and learn new things, then sure shot you will find a way to stay in your job no matter what.
Embracing adversities and moving past it is what helps us achieve bigger in life. AI will do certain monotonous tasks, but that will only give you more time in improving the sales by focusing solely on building better relationships and designing new services.
To Summarize
Every business runs with a single motif that is customer satisfaction. With AI, not only your customers are satisfied, but you will also be satisfied with your job. By analyzing your customer’s behaviour, you can come up with innovative strategies to increase the number of customers and turn them into potential buyers. On the one hand, even though your job is made easier, if you’re a go-getter, you would love the new challenges that come along with it.
Any job cannot be called a job if it is monotonous. Innovation is inevitable, but for sure, it will open doors to new opportunities where all you have to do is to upskill yourself and make it a part of your life. It will be all the more exciting and interesting to head to your workplace when you anticipate new things every day.
In a nutshell, you can start by understanding the basics of what you do in technical terms so that when it happens or if at all you see AI taking over your jobs, you will be well-prepared and ready to tackle the adversities. It’s not an easy task to interpret large amounts of client data and come up with new innovative techniques, but you will love the learning process and love to apply practically in your work. Come what may, it’s all in your hands whether to stay the same or learn new things with changing times.
