Customer Relationships and Digital Technologies: What Place and Role for Sales Representatives?

Augmented Customer Strategy, CRM in the Digital Age (2019)
Auteurs : E. Julienne, M. Damperat et R. Franck


This chapter offers a prospective vision on two digital technologies (social media and artificial intelligence), which should in the future continue to transform customer relationships and offer new opportunities to sales representatives. It focuses on social media, which is making its way into the daily lives of sales people, particularly in B2B through social selling. Social selling is essential in sales practices, because it is necessary for salespeople to meet prospects and customers wherever they are, hence why buyers like social media. The chapter also focuses on emerging technologies and attempts to imagine the possible impacts on the commercial function and customer relationship. It aims to imagine the impacts on sales and customer relationships through three prospective scenarios, oriented toward the technologies of the future and which may exist simultaneously in the medium to long term: the augmented seller, the sale without a seller and humanoid robots.