Seth Marrs, the Forrester analyst who follows sales technology, painted an exhilarating picture of the future of SalesTech, saying it will combine with MarTech into an entirely new way of going to market — along with a new organizational function called Revenue Teams. Primarily focused on the B2B ecosystem, but with consumer applications — especially for call centers — this developing technology is enabling an end-to-end customer experience driven by conversational intelligence, NLP (natural language processing), AI, and real-time data capture and analysis. In fact, Seth believes the future will be about opportunities and not leads, and this tech gives us a brand new container for our engagement experience, resulting in more powerful roles for marketing, higher revenues, and customer satisfaction overall. Sounds great. Give a listen!
Cyndi Greenglass: What is sales tech?
Seth Marrs: Sales tech is everywhere now, and I think that's largely due to the deficiencies that have come up in CRM and companies coming up with unique ways to add value to a seller. Sales tech is really about helping the seller improve efficiency, helping the seller with insights that are valuable and helping them close deals and prospects. If you think about a seller’s job, the things that add value or add insights have traditionally been very hard to understand because the value of a seller is in their interaction between the buyer and them. That's traditionally been off limits for the most part. Those conversations happen, and it was whatever the seller said happened is what happened. But with tools like Gong and Chorus and some of these other conversation intelligence tools, and with the pandemic and everyone working from home, that sped up a new form of technology and sales tech, which is capturing those interactions and using natural language processing to understand what those interactions mean. And then taking that and translating that back to the seller and actually giving them insights that maybe they didn't know.
