How the digital sales professional will change marketing’s customer intelligence

Leading-edge personalisation companies like Amazon and Netflix pioneered the use of collaborative filtering to convert customer similarities into powerful predictors of interests. Many organisations followed suit, and big data arose in part with this objective in mind. Yet sales organisations have lagged in this area, with limited experimentation with statistically-based optimisation solutions. More importantly, sales and marketing organisations have largely failed to unify their customer data to make this possible. However, change is in the making. As sales organisations adopt intelligent mobile solutions in their engagements with customers, the opportunity to track receptiveness at a granular level is bringing a volume of preference data to the enterprise, similar to how marketing data exploded with the advent of the internet. This paper addresses how intelligent mobile applications have created the digital sales professional, and how this is changing companies’ abilities to share customer data throughout their organisations. This is enabling an optimal and consistent approach by sales and marketing organisations, and a much improved experience for the customer.