Did you ask yourself why “sales” had become a noble topic during the last decade? My explanation is that the growing importance of e-commerce has created a new strong competition for the classical physical channels from the 20th century. Finally synergies were found thanks to the omni-channel approach. The main consequence of this little revolution is that Marketing and Sales teams cannot work in silos any more, they must collaborate in order to produce some customized personas for their targeted customer segments.

But the next revolution will be the emergence of a new type of sales channels operated by botnet (robot/network), your personal botnet will kill the personalized advertising produced for you today by the online giants. This is why some of them like Amazon or Google are fighting to be first on this Market in order to keep their supremacy on your purchasing mood. It is probably a lost battle, if we consider that “botnet” will multiply and appear everywhere in your smartphone or in your future autonomous car for example.

If I refer to an « old-school » sales world, botnet could be considered as new a “indirect” channel, but these new channels will not be controlled at first by your company but by the algorithms of their programs. 

I predict that some innovative companies will be developing their owned proprietary botnet as soon as possible in order to protect the direct relationship with their customers. Some start-ups will at the same time start a race to produce the best botnet dedicated to specific Market segments.

In fact this new sales revolution will carry another one: the way we are conceiving our product &services roadmap.

These new portfolios of products &services should become « botnet » compatible and correspond to real customer needs and wishes…once again brands will have to boost their emotional presence in order to increase their share of customer mind.

At the same time, companies will have to progress also regarding their customer segmentation and improve the correlation between the key purchasing criterias and the proposed offer.

This is a prospective analysis, but it is the right opportunity to highlight once again the importance of mastering always your channel/sales strategy in today’s world. I am working for more than 20 years of these revenue engineering levers and believe me this is more fascinating than ever….