There are also a lot of investments being made in sales technologies. While one-on-one, human interactions still play a very important role in developing strong relationships with buyers, research from LinkedIn shows that 73% of sales professionals are using technology to close more deals. Furthermore, 97% said that sales technology is either important or very important to closing deals. Another emerging category in the salestech landscape is sales intelligence. These tools are designed to collect, integrate, analyze and present information to help salespeople find, monitor and understand insights and data on prospects and existing clients.

For the buyer of sales technology, you can sometimes be overwhelmed by the term, Artificial Intelligence. Like any buzzword, it's attached to all the latest platforms and products trying to entice buyers, into purchasing a new Sales Technology. The reality, however, is that there is just as much hype as there is confusion around exactly what Artificial Intelligence is. For those who purchased a few solutions, I'm sure you have largely ignored any sales person who touts an A.I. option, possibly placing it in a category where all the other buzzwords go. But it seems this time, maybe this isn't a buzzword, and maybe we should be paying attention.

There are also a lot of investments being made in sales technologies. While one-on-one, human interactions still play a very important role in developing strong relationships with buyers, research from LinkedIn shows that 73% of sales professionals are using technology to close more deals. Furthermore, 97% said that sales technology is either important or very important to closing deals. Another emerging category in the salestech landscape is sales intelligence. These tools are designed to collect, integrate, analyze and present information to help salespeople find, monitor and understand insights and data on prospects and existing clients.

This infamous phrase was popularized in the 1992 film Glengarry Glen Ross, and has become a mantra among fervent salespeople. While sealing the deal is always the ultimate goal, salespeople actually spend the majority of their time on other tasks like generating and nurturing prospects, following up with customers, and finding new sales opportunities. For this reason, nearly three-quarters of sales professionals rely on technology to do those less glamorous tasks faster and more efficiently. Today's graphic from Raconteur shows the value of technology in today's sales world and how artificial intelligence (AI) technology ultimately helps sales reps win more business. Globally, 40% of salespeople use or are implementing AI technology into their workflows to automate or streamline sales.

No one with any experience in enterprise IT would suggest that technology itself can boost the bottom line. Emerging AI sales technology, however, can provide a shortcut to success by delivering more leads and making more reliable predictions than sales reps can on their own. Today's sales teams rely on numerous tools to fill out the entire sales value chain, with large organizations reporting the use of 60 or more sales technologies, said Tad Travis, Gartner research director, in an October 2018 panel webinar in which analysts discussed emerging trends in sales technology. Sales force automation (SFA) handles the basics of sales execution programs, like managing accounts, deals, forecasts, sales activity recording and lead management. Then, there are components that integrate with those, such as configure, price, quote tools, master data management, marketing automation and partner relationship management tools.