Virtual Reality Workspace, Really?

Kelly (Kelly, 2016; TNW, 2018) tends to be a bit extravagant for me in his belief in what the future has in store for us related to technology. It feels a bit syfi-ish for me. It fills like the world described in Ready Player One (2011). When I picture this world, I think many people would be willing to participate in it. Then I think about my parents. Yes, the folks who, when helping them with anything related to tech, we have to try 20 different passwords before we can get anything to work. They are never going to want to live in this world! I do not just think that is a generation thing. I think it will take much longer than Kelly anticipates before we can have the world he describes.

However, there are some trends I am noticing in the sales industry that will need to be addressed more rapidly. In addition, I am seeing technology moving in that direction. In this post, I will uncover four trends I am noticing in the industry and reveal where I believe they are going.

Tech Enabled (AI)

AI does exist in the sales industry already, but it has mostly been available only to big organizations. This is changing rapidly. CRM’s are getting more and more sophisticated, and tools are becoming more connected. Data is being shared more easily between tech-enabled sales tools giving salespeople more relevant information quicker.

I mentioned that we have made a change to use HubSpot. In the middle of the change, I had disconnected my calendar and then forgot to reconnect it again. A few hours later, I got a notification from HubSpot that John Doe (obviously John is a fake name, but HubSpot did give me the real name) had gone to my scheduling page to book an appointment, but my calendar was no longer connected. HubSpot had tracked John with a cookie, then when he landed on the booking page, and the form was no longer available even though John did not fill out the form, HubSpot knew what his intent was and informed me of the issue. I quickly reconnected my calendar and emailed John directly, saying the booking link was working again and that he could use it or let me know when a good time was. In 30 seconds, John had booked with me.

These situations are only going to get better.

Personalization

Personalization in both the marketing and sales world is becoming more and more critical (HubSpot, 2021). There is a whole industry that is being created called Sales Enablement (Mobile Sales Enablement, 2021). Sales Enablement tools allow sales reps to maximize communication to suspects (people who sales reps believe would be a good customer) yet add personalization. This happens in a few ways. First, through custom fields that can be set in a CRM and added to an email. Second, allowing sales reps to personalize a templated email before it goes out to the suspect. Third, segmenting a contact based on interactions and then putting them into an automated sequence that matches the interests they have demonstrated. Of course, there are other ways; those are just a few. These allow contacts to get information that is most relevant to them in a timely matter.

Remote Work

Sales moving from belly to belly to an inside sales floor has been a significant movement over the past decade (Martin, 2013). The next evolution, started pre-COVID but exponentially speed up during COVID, has been to remote sales teams (Krogue, K2017). This expands the locations where organizations can find talent. The concern will be the social aspect that comes from being in the same location. Kelly’s (2016) vision is a virtual working space supported by virtual reality or augmented reality. He suggests that you walk into the workspace virtually, sit down in your virtual workspace, and login to your virtual computer. I don’t see this being the case. If we were doing that, people would be creating a virtual workspace designed to be on the beach. Yet, if it is remote work, they could be on the beach. However, if remote work continues, I believe it will be because this problem will be solved somehow. Kelly suggests that a coworker, client, or prospect could potentially join you on your living room couch for a meeting (TNW, 2018). This is very interesting to me, and while I do not think this is the next step in the remote workspace, I feel it is a good goal in mind when finding the right solution.

Organizations like Zoom, Google, and Facebook are working on these kinds of things, yet reports show that it is far (Khalili, 2021; Melnick, 2020) from the image that Kelly sees of inviting someone to sit on your couch (TNW, 2018). So, for the remote work trend to continue, there needs to be another massive step.

Big Data

Big data is again one of those areas that, until recently, only large organizations have had access to (Polakoff, 2020); however, this is changing. Organizations like Facebook, Zoom Info, Growbots, and Leadinfo pull data from all over, aggregating it together to provide excellent relevant data. The ability for this to happen is based on user behavior, cookies, and previously lenient data regulations. Recently data regulations in the EU have caused global organizations to increase their transparency with data under the GDPR (Koch, n.d.). It also appears that governments care what you do with that data; the example of Cambridge Analytica and Facebook is an excellent example (Amer et. at, 2019). In addition, cookies may be put back on the shelf (Johnson, 2021); yet rest assured that organizations are not going to sit back and let this data be taken from them.

In summary, salespeople are going to have the most relevant information in front of them. It will no longer be held as a secret for large organizations.

References

Amer, K. (Producer/Director), Noujaim, J. (Producer/Director), Kos, P. (Producer), Dreyfous, G. (Producer), & Korin, G. (Producer). (2019). The Great Hack [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.netflix.com/title/80117542

Cline, E. (2011). Ready Player One. Ballantine Books

HubSpot (2021, August 21). Personalize your content. HubSpot. https://knowledge.hubspot.com/website-pages/personalize-your-content

Johnson, T. (2021, June 24). Death of cookie delayed until 2023, Google says [next steps for advertisers]. Tinuiti. https://tinuiti.com/blog/data-privacy/what-is-a-cookie-and-why-are-third-party-cookies-going-away/

Kelly, K. (2016). The inevitable: Understanding the 12 technological forces that will shape our future. Penguin Books.

Khalili, J. (2021, July 15). Google brings Meet video calls to its augmented reality glasses. TechRadar. https://www.techradar.com/news/google-brings-meet-video-calls-to-its-augmented-reality-glasses

Krogue, K. (2017, Oct 3). Sales trend research: Inside sales vs. outside sales. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenkrogue/2017/10/03/2017-sales-trend-research-inside-sales-vs-outside-sales/

Martin, S. W. (2013, November 4). The trend that is changing sales. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2013/11/the-trend-that-is-changing-sales

Melnick, K. (2020, March 30). How to attend Zoom, Skype, Hangouts Meetings in VR with SPACES. VR Scout. https://vrscout.com/news/spaces-app-vr-zoom-skype-hangouts/

Polakoff, S. (2020, May 20). Why small business can no longer ignore Big Data. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2020/05/20/why-small-business-can-no-longer-ignore-big-data/?sh=7467cd737639

Koch, R. (n.d.). Cookies, the GDPR, and the ePrivacy Directive. Proton Technologies. https://gdpr.eu/cookies/

TNW. (2018, June 1). Kevin Kelly (Wired) on the emerging V-Cloud | TNW Conference 2018. [Video file]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/8DprsisgvDw

Mobile Sales Enablement (2021, September 1). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_sales_enablement

Zoom. (2017, November 20). Zoom + Meta: The future of AR learning. Zoom Video Communication. https://blog.zoom.us/zoom-meta-future-of-ar-learning/