Linkedin: Artificial intelligence will change the game in Latin America

This article was written and published in Spanish and has been translated into English via Google Translate. Click here to read the original article.

By 2020, the professional social network estimates that 85% of B2B transactions will be carried out without human intervention and that, in addition, 22% of the positions in the sales area will disappear.

Sales are transforming, and the trend reveals that the best companies have undertaken a broader transition to obtain positive results. As is often the case with drastic transformations, the change agent is a new generation of people, a new approach and a new technology. In that sense, LinkedIn identified the 3 trends that will help increase sales performance:

• Convergence of sales and marketing
• B2B sales automation
• Customization to scale

Conventional sales tactics are no longer as effective. Buyers are accustomed to services such as those in the streaming industry, for example, providing highly personalized experiences, which has generated an increase in expectations related to the experience that companies provide to their customers, including in the B2B field.

According to exclusive data from LinkedIn that demonstrate how the sales profession is growing and evolving, the following can be concluded:

Jobs in this area are stagnant. This is observed in comparison with the marketing positions, which have a year-on-year increase of 4%.

The demand for sales skills on the platform is not disappearing, but simply changing: more strategic than transactional skills are sought. The demand for professionals with complex sales skills has quadrupled in relation to the demand for average sales representatives.

Sales need to keep evolving. Just as the skills of the marketing professionals have been developed accompanying the evolution of the technological groups of the profession, the sales sector needs to develop its skills to keep pace with its products and processes.

So what is really happening? Why do companies accelerate the hiring of sales representatives and why is the profile of the most wanted representative changing? Because sales are transforming. And LinkedIn has identified the three underlying trends that drive business transformation:

Convergence of sales and marketing: Recently these two activities have begun to converge. A key indicator is the emergence of a new position on LinkedIn, the Director of General Revenue (CRO), which usually has responsibility for both sales and marketing. A future is seen with the teams aligned thanks to the shared vision of the same data, customers and activities.

Automation to help with B2B sales: Automation frees the sales representative time because it deals with repetitive tasks of lesser value. You can give the sales representative free time to devote to what he stands out for.

Customization at scale: By providing highly customized experiences at scale, consumer technology companies have forever changed the way B2B companies interact with their customers. In fact, 77% of buyers want representatives to incorporate personalized information and data into their interactions. Some ways to provide this type of experience can be: discover points of agreement with a potential client, use content to personalize messages and identify contacts in common.

LinkedIn's advice is to hire for the future, and not for the present. Strategic skills such as selling solutions, complex sales and relationship management are more requested than ever.

According to Gustavo Pagotto, Regional Sales Manager for Latin America, "In 2021, 46% of professionals are already going to be millennials and, in some years, these people will occupy important hierarchical positions in companies. That is why, which, with a view to the future, it is recommended to adopt innovative processes, expand the reach of new technologies and perform interdisciplinary work, as well as have the ability to aggregate and learn from the technological disruptions they say are present."

This article was written and published in Spanish and has been translated into English via Google Translate. Click here to read the original article.

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