Selling in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Davos 2016 from VUCA into the 4th IR.

Following on from the introduction of steam power the (first industrial revolution), came the electricity revolution then the electronics  revolution, we are now entering the fourth industrial revolution (4th  IR).

Five years from now the World Economic Forum ( Davos 2016) predicts, over one-third of skills (35%) that are considered important in today’s workforce will have changed.

The new Selling Paradigm

Selling skills sets will need to adapt similarly or selling in its conventional model will die -we have been warned  ( not for the first time). 

This book was on the shelves
in W H Smith within the week
of David Bowie's death
'Speed is the new currency of business'
 as Marc Benloff –CEO of Salesforce said
 at Davos this week

Like the late David Bowie we need to reinvent ourselves periodically.

The nature of the change will depend very much on the industry . Global media and entertainment, for example, has already seen a great deal of change in the past five years.

The WEF report stresses the financial services and investment sector, however, has yet to be radically transformed. Those working in sales and manufacturing will need new skills, such as technological literacy.

Some advances are ahead of others. Mobile Internet and cloud technology just think of systems like Salesforce.com are already impacting the way many in sales work. Artificial intelligence, 3D printing and advanced materials are still in their early stages of use, but the pace of change will be fast.

'Change won’t wait for us': 

Business leaders, sales trainers and governments all need to be proactive in up-skilling and retraining  salespeople so each can benefit from the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

The WEF 'Report on Jobs' states Creativity will become one of the top three skills workers will need.

 With the superfluity of new products, new technologies and new ways of working, it suggests that salespeople are going to have to become more creative in order to benefit from these changes. Sales managers will need to recruit train and re-train their teams accordingly.

Robots may help us get to where we want to be faster, but they can’t be as creative as salespeople quite yet but Cobots ( Collaborative Robots) will become a more powerful threat / opportunity to salespeople.

How does your current skills set match up to what the WEF predicts ?

Source : Future of Jobs report World Economic Forum

Does your refreshment training include all of these ?

Whereas negotiation and flexibility are high on the list of skills for 2015, in 2020 they will begin to drop from the top 10 as machines, using masses of data, begin to make our decisions for both buyer and seller.

"Mastering the Fourth Industrial Revolution" is the theme of this year's World Economic Forum's Annual Meeting in Davos 2016 . 

I am not sure we can master it, but we can use our current skills in risk managing the era of cyber-physical systems from what we have learnt in selling in a current environment  which is volatile uncertain complex and uncertain  ( VUCA) times that we now operate in.

This revolution has been designated as one of "cyber-physical systems," or, generally speaking, Cobots, driver less cars, the Internet of Things,etc..

The WEF  have already predicted that 7 million jobs could go in five years.

A new report from UBS predicts the 4IR will have less of an impact on developed economies, such as Switzerland, Singapore and the UK

Possible consequence to Emerging markets will be felt more so – notably in parts of Latin America and India – will suffer when artificial intelligence and robots become widely used, reducing the competitive advantage of their cheap labour.

For nations, the largest gains from the fourth industrial revolution are likely to be captured by those with the most flexible economies, adding a further incentive for governments to trim red tape and barriers to business.

4IR Automation will continue to put downward pressure on the wages of the low skilled salespeople in commodity markets and is starting to impinge on the employment prospects of middle-skilled salespeople. 

By contrast, the potential returns to highly skilled and more adaptable salespeople are increasing.

I am re-reading 'Selling is Dead'
by Milller & Sinkovitz.
Still pertinent ten years on
yet we will still see 'new' paradigms for selling
 especially in this new era of fourth industrial revolution

From Robots to Cobots

 Cobots  (Collaborative Robots) are robots intended to physically interact with humans in a shared workspace which are able to perform more intricate tasks. This is in contrast with other robots, designed to operate autonomously or with limited guidance.

The greatest disruption from 4th IR, however, could be experienced by those in Selling who have so far felt immune to robotic competition, namely those in middle-skill professions. The UBS bank report points to clerical work, such as customer service, being replaced by artificial intelligence. For example :- Insurance claims could also be settled without human intervention.

“Change won’t wait for us” the  UBS report warns.

Reminding me of something James Goldsmith once said 

‘ If you can see the bandwagon – you’re too late!”

So as sales leaders,  sales trainers and  relevant government departments -we all need to be proactive in up-skilling and retraining salespeople so they can benefit from the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Related Posts

Selling and the Internet of things

Scientific Attributes can help selling Davos 2015

Little Bogden is not at Davos this year but if he were

Why do Salespeople overstate, inflate, embroider embellish, blown up their claims and are expected to be larger than life ? Ethics and morals in Selling.

Today in the UK we have our General Election where we vote for our local member of Parliament.

We have to exercise some discernment on all the claims and counter claims that the parties have communicated on the doorsteps, the  Press ,TV and Radio and social media.

We love to have a good old moan at and criticise our political representatives . The opinion polls say the result is too close to call and that another coalition is on the horizon. 

There have been some exaggerations stated from pressurised politicians during the electioneering period but before we finger point the political candidates perhaps we should look at ourselves today as well.

Interval Curtain at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden's
 production of Donnizette's L’elisir d’amore 
The Elixir of Life where  the travelling medicine salesman is one,
Dr Dulcamara played by the  Bryn Terfel

Are we prone to exaggeration?

 Have you ever exaggerated a product’s strengths? 

Have you ever underplayed a product’s weakness?

Is everything in your CV or LinkedIn profile  totally true?

 Was that trip adviser critique you wrote in anger just a little overstated? 

 Was the track record of the new product you are selling a little embroidered? 

Was your sales forecast just a bit overstated or understated? 

Were the reasons you gave for losing the sales just a little more blown up ( cheaper competition, delivery etc) than was really justified ?

Of course  we salespeople are not alone in all this.

The distinguished former civil servant  Lord Thomas Armstrong was ‘economic with the truth’ in the 1987 Spycatcher trial. Politicians are economic with the ‘realité ‘ as Alan Clark one said. I dear say some premier football managers did seen the foul committed by one of their players but when after the match asked deny seeing the incident and dear I say,

buyers can be liars as a negotiation ploy.

It is perhaps useful for us to consider why this may be.

Earlier this year ,the American  journalist/ anchor   Brian Williams was suspended for six months without pay from the Nightly News for "misrepresent[ing] events which occurred while he was covering the Iraq War in 2003.

I came across an article in Portico magazine by journalist Jack Shafer on the Brian Williams story. It stopped me in my tracks and I would like to share it with you

“Williams’ insistence on playing for laughs—and his talent at garnering them—points to the compulsive desire to please often seen in the behaviours of salesmen, teachers, confidence men and political candidates.

 As long as the comedian has the crowd chuckling, he can sell them something, teach them something, pick their pocket or otherwise bamboozle them.

 The comic arts should not be banned from journalism—God forbid that should happen!

 But journalists who work overtime on entertaining you or making you laugh deserve your suspicion. In journalism, the story is supposed to be king. That doesn’t mean the cleverness or emotive writing has no place, only that the narrow bandwidth comedy offers can carry only so much journalistic information”

In sales I also think we should be wary where our cleverness and emotive descriptions which can take us beyond our bandwidth of trust with clients. Wise buyers know that we are prone to such exaggerations.

In this era of the industrial Internet of things IIoT, more is recorded of our claims as salespeople in social media, videoed presentations, recorded conference calls, emails and their attachments etc.

We  in the future IIoT era,may well  be exposed to the equivalent video clips of Mr Williams’ reports from 2005 that have now gone viral.

 Of course like journalism, selling should not be just be all ‘worthy’ vegetables. Buyers want meat in our presentations to them also.

However if our entertaining embellishment values outbalance our trust values  with clients business suffers.

Of course customers have their part to play in  making “reasonable demands”

An analogy  in this current UK election ( and many past elections).

Claims and counter claims of the main political parties in solving the country’s deficit through Harnack ( austerity) or  their opposite post- Keynsian economic principles cannot be reasonably be achieved in a short electoral period of five years.

 We as voters ( the consumers in this case) perhaps need to have  reasonable rather than overstated demands on politicians .

Come what may, salespeople up and down the country will play their part in the success of the country  following this election,whether acknowledged by politicians , electorate or not.

But maybe we should keep the embellishments under control a bit more.

Good Selling

The soft-sell of merino wool Pop In to Pop Up Knyttan style

Great designs by Knyttan

As we approach the razzmatazz of  London Fashion Week in February 2015 what will this season's big new thing be? 

Should you be visiting the show tent set in the court of Somerset Square ,you might like  afterwards  to pop-in to a pop-up shop in the newly refurbished new wing of the square. Knyttan.

Back in the day long before the industrial revolution , before  Richard Arkwright’s spinning jenny indeed  even before medieval golden days of England’s wool trade, the Flanders cloth trade and the dyers of Lincoln Green and Lincoln  Red, making wool garments were a local cottage industry. 

In a sense the Industrial Internet of things has brought us full circle back to the 'one stop shop'.

 Knyttan was the old English word for knitting. There was a time when each and every garment was different.

Now in the era of the Industrial Internet of things there is a sector of the fashion industry that has re-invented the one stop shop.

Display of Knyttan knitwear

Knyttan  knitwear give a voice to their customer in what they make. They engage their customer through a personalised contribution to the design pattern of your jumpers, scarves, neck ties, and socks. In effect an ‘infinite collection.

The selling role is one of listening to the customer and guiding them through the design process if they need it.

 The seller must be diplomatic, consultative and a professional conversationalist.

Knyttan make everything to order on the premises . Their customer can either pick from designs by famous artists or create their own using Knyttan’s revolutionary design system.

The customer’s choice is then made for them on their own industrial machines.

Knyttan's Simple
3 step process to a bespoke garment

       

1.Swatches and tablet where customers can
create their own design patterns

2. Computerised Stoll Knitting machine
 see video clips below

3. Louise from Marseilles with her own design scarf

Knyttan Unique design scarves

   

Small , Medium and Large

Knyttan Neck ties

Three sizes available small , medium and large

Three short video clips of the knitting machine at work "printing" out a customer's design of scarf

Related Links

Knyttan website


Selling Wool and Magna Carta 1215

Cutting your coat to your cloth - genuine bespoke offerings

Tell Sid #SID2015 ‘Let’s create a better internet together’.

Ultimately a better internet is up to us.

Safer Internet day offers the opportunity to highlight positive uses of technology and to explore the role we all play in helping to create a better and safer on line community. It calls upon law enforcement, companies, policy makers, and the wider on-line community, to join together in helping to create a better internet.

ComRes data*

45% of adults who use social networking and messaging apps said they occasionally see people on their social networks and messaging apps posting unkind, negative or upsetting content.

72% of adults reported sharing gossip and rumours  using social networking and messaging apps

 59% of adults have experienced people posting things that attack a certain group (e.g. racist, sexist or homophobic comments)

    

There is useful advice and good practise. It's not just for children but for ALL of us. There is a quiz on the site covering:-

• ·         Sharing photos and videos on line
• ·         Reporting on social networking sites
• ·         On line communication
• ·         Evaluating Information on line
• ·         Accepting friends on line
• ·         Sharing personal information with others
• ·         Embarrassing images on line
• ·         Downloading music on line
• ·         Meeting up with on line strangers

Which of the following have you ever done online?  

BBC Smart Campaign research secondary school children

Looked at or read things that you think your parents/carers wouldn’t like you to see - 47%

Signed up to services or websites that aren’t meant for people of your age - 29%

Been unkind to others - 15%

Sent pictures or videos to people of yourself that your parents/carers wouldn’t want you to share - 14%

Sent pictures or videos to people of others that your parents/carers wouldn’t want you to share - 14%

Shared videos of yourself doing risky or unsuitable activities (like challenges or dares) - 13%

Net: Any of these - 57%  

 Source: BBC commissioned research Be Smart  Campaign bbc.co.uk/aboutthebbc/insidethebbc/whatwedo/learning/audienceresea 

Related Link

Selling privacy, social media and cyber bullying

*Source: ComRes interviewed 1,445 GB adults on line 14^th-15^th November Data were weighted to be representative of all GB adults 18+  http://comres.co.uk/   

For more information

www.saferinternet.org.uk. 

Freedom to Sell and Magna Carta 1215

People in line on 3rd April 2016 to view the copy
of Magna Carta belonging to Salisbury Cathedral

You have got to hand it to the merchants of the past on whose broad shoulders we stand. ( forgive the mixed metaphors ;) )

As we salespeople going about our daily business, visiting our clients by air, sea and land it is easy to take for granted the freedoms and the rights to move around the country and the world that the medieval merchants gained for us. 

We might occasionally be made aware of this when we are asked by Passport Control whether our visit to their country is for “business or pleasure?”.

 Yet in the past our selling forefathers, the merchants , had to endure many difficulties and restrictions.

As we celebrate the 800^th anniversary of Magna Carta and its place in the development of individual freedom and liberty under the law, it is interesting to see how some early foundations for our selling and trading developed. We can gain such an insight through reading some of the clauses in the great charter of 1215.

“Omnes mercatores habeant salvum et securum exire ab* Anglia et venire in Angliam *, mirori et ire per Anglia tam per terram quam, ad emendum et vendendum, sine omnibus malis toltis.”

The 1297 version kept at the Guildhall Library London

Clause 41. "All merchants are to be safe and secure departing from England and entering into England and staying and going through England both by land and by water to buy and sell without any evil exactions."

Clauses 12 and 13  cover protection from arbitrary  taxation and confirming London and its merchants its liberties.

Clause 20 on amercements( fines / penalties)

... that amercements imposed on free men and merchants should fit the crime. They should not be so large as to effect a free man’s ‘contenementum’ which means livelihood and a merchant’s merchandise which came to the same thing.

London

Amongst the 25 Barons who were signatories to the security clause includes the unnamed Mayor of London.

By 1150 London was referred in some records as the “Queen of the whole kingdom”. London’s population by 1215 was around 40,000 by far the country’s largest town. Its  nearest rivals  were Bristol, Winchester, Norwich and York.

London’s geographical position on the east of the country placed it near to the merchants of the continent.  Goods could be sailed up the Thames and merchants could unload their wares well inland rather than in some inland port. 

London was effectively the only large town in England. There were networks of craftsmen, tradesmen and shopkeepers supported a thriving urban culture, and the River Thames was busy with merchant traffic. Apparently vessels could reach up to  * Lechlade Gloucestershire.

 The city jealously guarded the extent of its self-governance and its financial freedoms. ( not much change then today !)

By the second half of the 12^th century the country’s exchequer moved from Winchester to Westminster.

 London is the only city mentioned by name in Magna Carta but the charter does refer to “ ..all other cities and boroughs and vills and ports” confirming them “ liberties and free customs”.

Wealth of the towns came from both trade and manufacture. In Clause 35 we learn of the standardising of measures of wine, ale, corn and cloth. Much of trade was internal but corn was imported in times of dearth.

Ale was even more local needed to be consumed soon after it was brewed.

Wool

English Wool has a long pedigree

Wool was exported to Flanders to be made into cloth.

Documents from the 13^th century refer dyed cloths , russet and halbergers e.g. the **scarlets of Lincoln, halbergers of Stamford and russets of Colchester. 

 From 1275 we see in documents that duty is raised on exported sacks of wool to Flanders and the foundation of English customs.  Cloth from Flanders to England did not balance the value of the wool it imported so it paid for much of the wool in cash ( silver coins) This had profound effects on England’s money supply.

Clause 33 sought to remove fish weirs (a physical obstacle to trade) from the river Thames, Medway and elsewhere throughout England unless at the seashore.

Clause 35 sought to establish uniform measures of drink (wine and ale), corn and cloth throughout the country (where corn measures  were adopted  to the measure of London)

Clause 41 allowed ,except in time of war, merchants except in time of war, all merchants safety and travel without suffering any unjust exactions.

Clause 42 gave freedom of travel to everyone in and out of the kingdom again in time of war.

2015 

In our business era of the Industrial Internet of Things, selling is increasingly integrated with the internet, the word 'merchant' is used less nowadays. 

Yet it intrigues me today when we insert our credit or debit card into those bank card readers,  that after we have keyed in our PIN  it displays the instruction  “hand back” the machine “to  merchant”.

 It is worth noting what we professional salespeople owe a debt to those 25 barons at Runnymede and to merchants for the spread of Selling.

However you wish to celebrate the 800^th anniversary of Magna Carta , I wish you Good Selling.

For further reading 

Source :  Magna Carta Penguin Classics 2013 ISBN 978-0-241-95337-2. New commentary by David Carpenter.

* perhaps of interest to readers from USA ,Lechlade was the birthplace of one Thomas Prence (1599-1673), emigrated to America in 1621 and was a co-founder of Eastham, Massachusetts, a political leader in both the Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay Colonies, and governor of Plymouth, Massachusetts (1634, 1638, and 1657–1673).

**Lincoln Scarlet (known then as Lincoln graine/greyne)  was expensive compared to Lincoln Green.  In order to create the deep scarlet hew, a dye from Turkey called ‘Kermes’ (from which the English word ‘crimson’ developed) was imported. This dye was made from the crushing of a particular insect, giving a more richer colour than could be created with the dyes native to Britain.

Related Links

Cutting your coat to your cloth - bespoke selling

Lincoln Green and Scarlet Cloths

Selling & the Industrial Internet of Things #IIoT in the OUTCOME Economy

Back in the day there was a heated debate  in certain selling circles about the difference between "retail/consumer" selling and  "industrial / service" selling.

By the end of the century this ‘difference’ was relabelled  into B2C and B2B.

But the evolution of business and selling’s role continues to change and adapt. In some senses Industrial and service selling has always followed certain aspects from the retail or consumer world. For example industrial selling adopted product branding some while after retail.

Industrial Internet of Things

The Industrial Internet of Things IIoT,  will contribute increasingly  to the benefits of improved efficiency of operations, lowering of costs, the generation of revenues and creating competitive differentiation that will play an increasing part of the twenty first century’s salesperson’s offer.



Where are you on your IIoT journey?

Professional Salespeople will become increasingly a part of a blended workforce working in ever closer collaboration with intelligent machines. 

Sales force control  and recording systems whether on  the cloud like salesforce.com or conventional computer systems, already have begun to show this integration  but it will increase in other parts of sales work from initial enquiries to order, from concept to completion.

More of the procedural  activity, particularly in commodity markets, will take over or be  delegated to digital labour such  as smart sensors, machines (e.g. robots) or intelligent systems that can do parts of the jobs that only humans used to do.

This is already apparent in hybrid industries  where the intersection between physical industries and digital technologies has already started to happen. (e.g. precision agriculture, digital manufacturing, medical robotics, smart transportation).

Sales has already understood the concept of added value through personalised  benefits but this will further evolve into quantifiable outcomes  for an outcome economy:

The Outcome Economy

This is the marketplace where businesses compete on their ability to deliver quantifiable results that matter to clients rather than just  the transactional selling products or services, e.g. energy saved, crop yield or machine uptime.

Delivering customer outcomes requires sellers to take on greater risks.  Managing such risks requires automated quantification capabilities made possible by the Industrial Internet.

There will be a further development of platforms (“technology” or “software” ), which is the digital layer that allows business partners to connect and interact from any applications or devices.

Through this technology platform, professional salespeople will play a part in the value network becoming part of what some are calling a digital ecosystem.

 Example industry platforms already present include  MyJohnDeere, Qualcomm Life’s 2net and GE’s Predix.



Photo of a table from Accenture on the Davos site

At the same time, Accenture’s  research participants  also point out a number of challenges that could potentially slow down the pace and increase the risks of adoption, which include  

• security interoperability, 
• data policies,
• education and talent gaps.

Will you seize the IIoT day ? ( Carpe diem IIot)

To seize the opportunities, overcome key challenges and accelerate the Industrial Internet development, business, technology and government stakeholders will need to take immediate actions.

The Industrial Internet of Things will fundamentally rearrange entire supply chains from production all the way through to consumption.

 As such the role of open standards that help establish new partner ( selling-buying)  ecosystems will be critical for adoption of new technologies across different verticals. Not doubt there will IOS type standards on the horizon with accompanying auditing ( and concommitant revenues for the Standards Industry !)

IIoT will create opportunities for  sales professionals  who are equipped to cross sell  operations effectively across different silos in their clients' operations .

IIoT Challenges for Sales leadership

Sales Leadership seeking to adopt IIoT will first reorient their overall sales  strategy to take full advantage of the latest developments in the Industrial Internet.

They also  a need to identify their new ecosystem partners, and determine whether they should join a partner’s platforms or develop their own.

Those sales leaders  that  are new to the Industrial Internet would be wise to identify one or two relevant pathfinder applications that can be piloted within say a six month project period to create necessary momentum and learning.

Some critical factors in IIoT projects

All stakeholders will  need to work together in three important areas. Industries, governments and academia need to collaborate on long-term R andD to solve fundamental technology challenges:-

·         security,

·         interoperability

·         and management of systemic risks.

ROMI of IIoT ( Return on marekting investment)

They need to conduct joint lighthouse ( path seeking) projects to demonstrate the real benefits and raise the profile of the Industrial Internet in the market. They will also need to implement new training programmes, and provide policy incentives to employers and workers to encourage re-skilling for high-demand job categories

Photo of stats from the Accenture report on the Davos site.

In WEF workshops on IIOT  held in July 2014 included their conclusions areas of interest to the sales role.

• Over the long-term, new business models around products-as-a-service, pay-per-use models and monetization of data will emerge.

• Industry verticals will blur through shared relationships with customers, partners and data.

• The required education level will rise and necessary skill sets will shift. Demand for higher- skilled and higher-wage resources will increase.  

The Industrial Internet is still at an early stage, similar to where the Internet was in the late 1990s. the Accenture survey results underscore this point: the vast majority

88% of respondents say that they still do not fully understand its underlying business models and long-term implications to their industries

72% of respondents believe that the development of the Industrial Internet will be disruptive to their businesses and industries,

79% of respondents think those disruptions will occur within the next five years. These disruptions will manifest themselves in Phases 3 and 4 in the form of the outcome economy and an integrated human-machine workforce. 

Salespeople  will need to perform more specialized tasks earlier in their professions, which will require them to regularly update skills through informal or independent learning, such as participating in massive open online courses (MOOCs).

 Instead of one-off degrees and technical courses, educational institutions will need to develop platforms for continuous learning, collaborating with students, businesses and governments to produce contents relevant to valued skills.

Such training will also reduce the length of on boarding time for new employees.

 Accenture research reveals that 79% of organizations already use just-in-time and social learning to build skills quickly.

 For example, one can reasonably imagine a newly hired retail sales associate could be given a wearable intelligent assistant on the first day of the job. When a customer asks a question about a product, the tool would use automated speech recognition to detect verbal cues, and deliver relevant product information. This just-in-time delivery of information could enable the associate to learn as he is helping the customer.

Help those  adopters in Selling address market opportunities and risks.

 The Industrial Internet market is still in a formative stage.

So, many potential adopters  in Selling will need to develop a clearer picture of the landscape before they drive along it !

 It will be  important to share with them best practices, winning use cases and operational models with customers to get them started in their Industrial Internet journey. Salespeople will need  to employ a collaborative / partnership selling style. Both parties will need to assess 

1. What benefits have been demonstrated so far?
2.  What are critical barriers (e.g., IT/OT integration, security) that need to be overcome early in the process?
3. What are lessons learned from past implementations?

Supplier salespeople will need to think, too, about the most effective ways to share early adopter experiences, such as by leveraging industry consortium like the Conferences at Learning Technologies, IIC or events like the IoT World Economic Forum.

Related links

The Industrial Internet of Things - Accenture Report Link