Digital commerce affects almost everyone’s lives. It is hard to remember a time when one could not sign on to a website like Amazon, order a product, pay for it and have it delivered to your front door within days, not weeks. Although catalogues have been around for a century or so, the digital-commerce revolution has changed the way we think about shopping for many of our everyday and special occasion products. Extend this to digital services, such as streaming videos or online games, and there is barely a sector that has not been touched by digital commerce. And, for organizations, it is an essential component of their revenue-management efforts that enables the digital transformation and monetization of goods and services.
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Topics:
Sales,
Customer Experience,
Analytics,
Business Intelligence,
Product Information Management,
Price and Revenue Management,
Digital Commerce,
AI & Machine Learning
Although historically there has been a hard divide between what are colloquially called “Inside and Field Sales,” changes over the last 10 years have narrowed the distinction. The pandemic has only accelerated the path to unifying sales activities commonly performed to engage buyers and customers. Characterized by a very disciplined and controlled endeavor, inside sales teams have been heavier users of technology. This has enabled more productive engagement including emails and calls, as well as provided techniques such as gamification to set competitive internal dynamics that help motivate sales professionals.
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Topics:
Sales,
embedded analytics,
Analytics,
Business Intelligence,
Collaboration,
Internet of Things,
Sales Performance Management (SPM),
natural language processing,
AI and Machine Learning,
intelligent sales,
sales enablement
Subscription-based business models have seen exponential growth over the last decade. The growth of this recurring revenue business model, where a subscriber commits to repeatedly pay for a good or device for a fixed or indefinite timeline, has been caused by the shift from the one-time selling of physical products to selling digital services on a subscription basis. The first phase of this transformation was led by “digitally native” organizations, typically B2C, that have only ever offered services via subscription. Although a large market in its own right, it is still dwarfed by businesses selling physical products. But this market is also changing, as more and more traditional organizations transition some or all of their revenue to the subscription economy. Ventana Research asserts that through 2023, fewer than half of organizations will have the correct technology in place to support such a transition. This Analyst Perspective looks at some of the key implications of this transition and what it means for technology choices as companies move toward a subscription management approach to overseeing the subscribers and usage of their products and services.
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Topics:
Sales,
Customer Experience,
Office of Finance,
Voice of the Customer,
embedded analytics,
Analytics,
Business Intelligence,
Collaboration,
Internet of Things,
Contact Center,
Product Information Management,
Price and Revenue Management,
Digital Commerce,
Enterprise Resource Planning,
ERP and Continuous Accounting,
natural language processing,
robotic finance,
AI and Machine Learning,
revenue and lease accounting,
Subscription Management,
agent management,
intelligent sales,
sales enablement
I’m very excited to announce to my network as well as the ever-expanding Ventana Research community that I’m now directing Ventana Research’s Office of Sales practice. The focus is to guide and educate sales and business professionals on the selling applications and technology including digital commerce, price and revenue management, product information management, sales enablement, sales performance management and subscription management. While these are the main topics of our Office of Sales practice, my decades of experience in analytics, artificial intelligence (AI) and planning are part of what I bring to the firm to help advance the science of selling.
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Topics:
Sales,
embedded analytics,
Analytics,
Business Intelligence,
Collaboration,
Data,
Product Information Management,
Sales Performance Management (SPM),
Digital Technology,
Work and Resource Management,
Digital Commerce,
Conversational Computing,
AI and Machine Learning,
collaborative computing,
mobile computing,
intelligent sales,
sales enablement
