The 2020 Salesforce to be at the helm of democratising digital transformation.
Salesforce automation is having a global impact on local economies – bringing growth, innovation, jobs and in-demand tech skills. Quite ironically, automation is bringing personalization due to clear segmentation basis contextual parameters of the [salesforce] economy – bringing sales/ market insights that are real-time and data driven. The 2020 Salesforce economy looks ready when it comes to adopting digital leadership and digital capabilities via making digital investments in the realm of embedded technologies, mobile computing, big data, social media, etc.
According to the IDC Salesforce 2017 report, the industries that will gain the most from the automation are retail, financial services, and manufacturing, among others. Let’s examine how the Salesforce automation and monitoring momentum will revolutionize the 2020 Salesforce economy with the following foreseeable trends.
First off, we will witness new sales technologies that will power organizations with real time data analytics that will help in quicker decisions and redefine the business environment. With the rising adoption of sales technologies and increased mobility usage, the FMCG distribution system has become more transparent, structured and easily compliable. That said, the number of mobile internet users in India is estimated to reached around 420mn by June 2017 from 389mn in December 2016, growth in rural market being much higher than urban market.
Categorically put, field force automation is seen as beneficial to businesses in regard of customer relations, maintaining skills among the field workforce, and limiting the size of this workforce. Given that the Indian FMCG market is expected to grow at a CAGR of nearly 21% between 2016 – 2020, in order to meet consumer demand, work out the delivery schedules; reduce inventory and monitor the field Salesforce, the need for sales technologies such as field force automation will become a pre-requisite. Subsequently, E-com companies are also strengthening their FMCG business by positioning their platform as front line offering to drive daily product sales.
Rise in rural consumption is all set to drive the FMCG market. It is estimated to grow at a CAGR of 14.6% during the period 2016-2025. A major reason behind the spurt is explained by an increased disposable income that has grown at a CAGR of 4.1%. This trend underpins the need of real-time consumer/ customer information that will help the economy to mine the data through sales technologies basis not just demographics and psychographics, but also tracking the real-time behavior of the customer journey – right from awareness to consideration to purchase to ultimately build brand advocacy. Through automation, targeting consumers will become simple, at each consumer touchpoint.
In addition, through cloud adoption, we will see improvement in customer experience, employee engagement, and operation as a business; platforms like salesforce automation will see prominence when streamlining business functions to operate without silos and with increased collaboration. There will be an increase in IT innovation, which in turn supports business innovation that will lead to accelerated development schedules, faster project completion, shorter time to market for new products, and lower operational costs.
Recent reports indicate that retail market in India is expected to grow to $1.3 trillion by 2020 with an improved GDP at 8%, making it the world’s fastest growing market. This will warrant SFA partners to double up as knowledge partners engaging in discussions with retail clients that defines the landscape and scope of sales force automation in the country and its impact on the economy.
Owing to higher adoption of sales technologies, the sales forces will evolve and increasingly become more productive, proactive and organized. Moreover, customer conversations will be more personalized owing to increase in data support and streamlined customer segmentation basis market research.
In the long-term, the Salesforce economy will observe an integration of data science and big data capabilities, which would result in automated customer service tasks and would let marketers leverage data for predictive and targeted marketing. If this is done, it will be a step in the right direction, considering a report from MIT which stated that 71% of businesses invest in business intelligence and big data, of which 20% have said to made substantial investments.
And lastly, progressing towards 2020, the Indian economy will need a new set of digitally empowered workforce in ground as well that has the ‘new know-how’ of the digital age and can cope up with new [sales] technologies and applications. Overall, the emerging 2020 salesforce [Indian] economy looks optimal, and will give the best results across all levers – financial, social, political and personnel.
By: Paramdeep Singh, CEO of Field Assist
