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The larger the company’s development is, the more difficult it is to innovate and act rapidly in terms of growth. However, this rule does not apply to the team of Marc Benioff and Salesforce.com. They are still ranked as the top 3 in Forbes’ list of the world’s most innovative companies, with a 24.88% of sales growth in 12 months(2017). For these few years, it has secured its position.

In terms of scale, it is almost impossible to imagine that Salesforce.com was a company that had only been listed for 14 years. The number of their employees increased from 500 to 29,000. There is no doubt that they have a different point of view when building their business model and methods when they contact new prospects.

The most important thing to a successful sales process: innovative prospecting without cold calling.

Some tips for email marketing:

1. Check your email response rates
2. Do not except an instant response, it generally takes 2-4 weeks to develop new leads
3. Make sure the timing to contact/ talk is correct
4. Find out what kind of emails are responded and why
5. If people are not interested, find out the reason
6. Do not give up easily, unless you were refused by the decision maker
7. Always follow up a next step

Cold calling 2.0 :Nowadays people are more resistance to the kind of traditional cold prospecting, therefore, the Cold calling 2.0 framework was introduced in the book of Aaron Ross, “Predictable Revenue”. How this new framework differs from the traditional prospecting is, instead of cold calls, doing researches before contacting people,making referral calls will gain you more leads. Besides, sending short and sweet emails instead of long letters and emails will give the potential customers a better impression.

In addition, having more salesperson in the team will not definitely help growing the revenue. In fact, the training program a company provided to the sales reps is relatively more important. When the sales are highly committed to the values and culture of the company, they could present the products in a more natural way during the business selling processes.

Salesforce.com’s business development strategy

Some tips for the sales managers:

1. Treat your team members like your customers
2. Train the sales reps and give them time and opportunities to practice their presentation skills
3. The quality is more important than the quantity
4. Learn to listen and give the right support to your team members

One of the key to the success of Salesforce.com is the ability to win customers from large organizations. To win over customers, companies must provide strong incentives and a reliable image.

In the beginning of the business, Benioff insisted on setting up a foundation for charity activities. He setted up  a 1:1:1 principle, that is donating 1 percent of the company’s shares, one percent of the annual profits and one percent of the employees’ time to do charitable activities to give back to society. With these activities, it gained good reputation for his company and also earned more support.

Benioff created his own strategic management method, with “V-2-Mom”, this tool created by Benioff, can show the road map of each of the Salesforce products.This is a combination of operational concepts and products. For Benioff, “trust” from the customers is more than anything, even though you have a nice product, without the trust, customers do not stay long, the key to gain trust, is to first have employees who trusts themselves and the organization commitment that they are being an important part of the firm.

References

1. ‘5 deceptively simple steps to success’ 2017, Executive Leadership, 32, 10, pp. 1-2, Business Source Complete, EBSCOhost, viewed 4 June 2018.
2. Karmali, N, Helft, M, Kauflin, J, Vinton, K, Herper, M, & Bosilkovski, I 2017, ‘THE WORLD’S MOST INNOVATIVE COMPANIES’, Forbes, 200, 2, pp. 72-90, Business Source Complete, EBSCOhost, viewed 4 June 2018.
3. Forbes.com. (2018). [online] Available at: https://www.forbes.com/innovative-companies/list/#tab:rank [Accessed 4 Jun. 2018].
4. Lashinsky, A 2017, ‘BENIOFF IN BLOOM. (cover story)’, Fortune, 176, 6, pp. 64-72, Business Source Complete, EBSCOhost, viewed 4 June 2018.
5. Ross, A. and Tyler, M. (2012). Predictable revenue. West Hollywood, CA: Aaron Ross.
6. Anon, (2018). [ebook] Available at: http://topopps.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Predictable-Revenue-Guide-To-Tripling-Your-Sales-Parts-1-4.pdf  [Accessed 6 Jun. 2018].

Chatting robots, a computer program designed to simulate conversation with human users, especially over the internet. In fact, what they can do, by all means, is not just chatting with the user. Chatbots can develop tools with different functions according to the builder’s different purposes. This also shows that in addition to chat, chatbots also have greater potential waiting to be developed.

Grand View Research. n.d. Size of the chatbot market worldwide, in 2016 and 2025 (in million U.S. dollars). Statista.

For example, for companies, chatbot is a gracious and intelligent brand spokesperson who can introduce visitors to the company’s top technology, data mining and supporting the human resource. From the merchants’ aspect, chatbot is a caring and efficient shopkeeper, it can recommend the most suitable journey and investment project for visitors. Chatbots which can directly and intuitively start interaction without additional installation, can of course be an assistant who integrates physical location information, providing exhibition guides, on-site promotions.

Chatbots & Artificial Intelligence

In short, because of the popularity of chatbot technology, for the first time, people can easily apply “artificial intelligence” to the community and business. Therefore, the marketing staff of the operating community can obtain technical support, technical person can also get a community of practical skills.

For the chatbot to have enough wisdom to talk with the customers, there must still be technical support such as machine learning and deep learning. However, the recent attention of these two technologies and the many open source communities that have emerged in succession have made machine learning possible. The development of such fields as deep learning has made great progress in recent years.

As a result, artificial intelligence has long been a distant dream. Now when you want to build a chatbot, you no longer have to grope, construct, or train an artificial intelligence engine from scratch. You can establish the goal of a chat robot and devote its energy to a deeper level.

Some of the best intelligent Chatbots online you may like to chat with :

1. Rose: Rose is one of the chatbots that is highly humanized.  http://ec2-54-215-197-164.us-west-1.compute.amazonaws.com/speech.php
2. Mitsuku: One of the best chatbots, the winner of the Loebner Prize https://www.pandorabots.com/mitsuku/
3. Poncho: A messenger designed bot, it is very friendly and helpful for daily life, it can even send alerts about the condition of the weather. https://poncho.is
4. Andy: Andy chatbot was customized for learning English, except the chatting function, it also gives out grammar lessons and vocabulary every day.  https://andychatbot.com/

Examples of companies that have adapted chatbots

JPMorgan Chase: Their bot, COIN, is able to analyse the legal contracts more efficiently than human lawyers, this bot has helped them saved more than 360,000 hours of manpower! As for the future, they are aiming to use the bots to establish some new sources of revenue.

Asos: By using the messenger chatbot, Asos has increased their annual orders by 300%, at the same time they managed to reach 35% more potential customers.

KLM: By implementing the messenger chatbot, KLM has increased 40% of their interactions with customers, 15% of the customers download their boarding pass on the chatbot. The chatbot integration did not only increased their revenue, but also increased the brand loyalty.  

How will chatbots be impacting the human workforce?

While chatbots becomes more and more useful, companies started to implement this tool into different departments with different usages. At the same time, it impacts the workforce in different levels.

1. Customer services:In terms of customer services, Drift’s chatbot report has stated that, most of the customers now prefer to communicate with a chatbot in several circumstances. When they wanted to get a quick response, when they are searching an answer for a simple question or the ability to get a 24-hour service.However, shown in the survey, in some of the situations, people still prefer to communicate with a human. For instance, while dealing with complex problems, the customers would rather talk to an expert such as an engineer. Besides, people feel more ease while communicating with people in the phone, email or live chat.Indeed, it is efficient to use chatbots as a supplement to the human workforce, however, it doesn’t mean to replace all of them. As while chatbots cannot replace emails and phone, businesses will still need human when it comes to answering the technical and complex questions.
2. Human Resource department:For the HR department, nowadays, chatbots are already performing some basic HR roles. The most common feature will be the FAQs, when employees are asking questions such as “How many holidays do I have left?” or “When is the next pay day?”.Except of the chat function, chatbots can also be used in assisting the recruiting process, on boarding and training, schedule meetings and company policies questions.The change doesn’t mean that the jobs that are related to HR is under a threat, however, it means that humans have to change their roles in some ways and work on more important strategic tasks.

Chatbots: The future of training?

While chatbots are normally being seen as a standardized service with regular conversations. In fact, chatbots are now developing into a wider scope of application:

1. New employee on boarding and training
2. New manager training
3. Diversity and inclusion training

It has been proved that, nowadays, people expect the online service to be instant, their questions and their requests can ideally be handled immediately. That’s why chatbots now have an important role. Not only providing the instant reply, a 24-hour service and also giving the answers to simple questions consumers might have. Indeed, technology improves the speed, automation and efficiency in the workforce. Which means that people have to re-position their roles given the more time and chance to focus on the more value-based tasks.

References

1. Bassett, G 2018, ‘THE RISE OF CHATBOTS’, Journal Of The Australian & New Zealand Institute Of Insurance & Finance, 41, 1, pp. 38-40, Business Source Complete, EBSCOhost, viewed 8 June 2018.
2. Preimesberger, C 2018, ‘State of Chatbots in 2018: Rapidly Moving into the Mainstream’, Eweek, p. 1, Business Source Complete, EBSCOhost, viewed 8 June 2018.
3. CARNETT, L 2018, ‘Are Chatbots Here to Stay?’, Response, 26, 4, p. 48, Business Source Complete, EBSCOhost, viewed 8 June 2018.
4. GYTON, G, & JEFFSRY, R 2017, ‘These are the experts deciding the future of HR… …shouldn’t you know who they are? (cover story)’, People Management, pp. 24-31, Business Source Complete, EBSCOhost, viewed 11 June 2018.
5. State of Chatbots Report 2018, (2018). [ebook] Available at: https://blog.drift.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/2018-state-of-chatbots-report.pdf  [Accessed 11 Jun. 2018].
6. ”Chatbots’ can help provide instant online answers & free up time for HR’ 2018, HR Specialist, 16, 3, p. 2, Business Source Complete, EBSCOhost, viewed 11 June 2018.
7. Grand View Research. n.d. Size of the chatbot market worldwide, in 2016 and 2025 (in million U.S. dollars). Statista. Accessed June 13, 2018. Available from https://www-statista-com.proxy.grenoble-em.com/statistics/656596/worldwide-chatbot-market/  .