Internationally recognized sales trainer Shane Gibson believes Artificial Intelligence (AI) will not bring about the cataclysmic end to sales or sales people. Gibson, who has spent 24 years in the sales training space, believes the AI narrative should be flipped.
“AI and the future of sales can be flipped around to say the future of sales involving AI,” he said.
Gibson will be keynoting on this topic at the upcoming ChannelNEXT East Conference in Esteral, Que. Gibson will also be talking about social selling and delving into the skills that can’t be replaced by AI such as networking, report building, social intelligence, and negotiating.
“Sometimes you need to break the rules to make a sale happen and AI can’t do that. Or helping to motivate someone on your team. This is right brain selling skills that can’t be replaced by robots,” he added.
Only two days remain until the opening of the ChannelNEXT East Conference. ChannelNEXT is embarking on a whole new conference format built on gaining intelligence to help partners future-proof their business and establish sustainable recurring revenue.
Gibson, who placed No. 5 on the Forbes list of the Top 30 Social Sales People in the World, told EChannelNews that he is more of a sales futurist and can help channel partners improve the sales process and their competencies. He believes that technology can assist or disrupt the way people sell today. He is going to bring a global perspective to the conference along with strategies from other industries such as insurance or with fleet sales. “It will be like the outside looking in,” he said.
Gibson has a popular blog site called Closing Bigger and it’s based on a book he wrote a decade ago.
The book shows how sales people could close million dollar deals and what they were doing differently than the average sales person. Those sales skills will be needed, he said, to not be replaced by AI. “It’s about buy-in instead of buying and it takes a different set of skills to do that,” Gibson said.
The channel today is still fighting with the same issues as before. Gibson cited a CEB Insight report that found the average corporate sale is more complex. A year-and-half ago a sales person had to involve five people and now it needs six. “It’s becoming more and more like governments. The decision-making process is impacting more people and how you navigate this – even for a mid-size company – is hard and most people and programs are not equipped for this,” he said.
Other keynote speakers at the two-day ChannelNEXT East event are leadership coach Ian Kaiser, Julian Lee on Channel Development, Randal Wark on developing profit-making business practices, and Saher Ghattas and Marie Wiese on digital marketing.
For those who want to explore how they can get a free ticket to attend, you need to get in contact with the ChannelNEXT event staff at www.channelnext.ca.
For more on the upcoming ChannelNEXT East Conference watch this video: http://new.e-channelnews.com/julian-lee-presenting-channelnext-2-0/ or download the information kit: http://technoplanet.com/kits/Channelnext2018EastProspectus.pdf.
