This article comes from an interview with and original research led by James W. Phillips, Business Intelligence Analyst for my company, InsideSales.com, about a research study entitled “2014 Sales Acceleration Technology Market Size.”
The research will be formally released next week at The American Association of Inside Sales Professionals Leadership Summit in Chicago.
Sales Acceleration is defined in detail in a prior Forbes article entitled “What Is Sales Acceleration? Start By Picking Up Your Phone.” It outlines categories that include new and emerging software applications and services that fall under this new market category.
The 15 cloud-based categories listed are as they appear in the study:
- Contract Technology
- Data Visualization
- Business Intelligence
- Gamification
- Presentation Technology, including Slide and Screen Share
- Predictive Analytic Tools and Technology
- Sales Intelligence Tools
- Email (designed specifically for the sales function)
- Fax
- Sales Communication tools
- Chat
- Texting
- Video technology
- Voice technology
- Social selling technology
In summary, sales acceleration means to increase the velocity of the sales process.
James gives some background, “Over the last 10 years, the sales industry has witnessed a disruption. Due to the innovation of Internet cloud-based business transactions and an upsurge in sales technology development, the sales profession is in a state of rapid modernization.”
He continues, “The ‘Sales Acceleration Technology’ industry is the business space between CRM and marketing automation which facilitates, and thereby accelerates, all processes pertinent to the sales pipeline.”
The study addresses the following questions:
- How much spending is currently going towards sales acceleration technology in North America?
- How much spending occurs per sales rep?
- How big is this new market?
- In what categories is the spending occurring?
- What should we expect in the future about the growth of sales acceleration technology?
James collected information from 439 companies for this study, which was segmented by type of sales function (retail, inside sales, outside sales) as well as size of company and industry.
U.S. Census data presents a total of 13.98 million sales reps in North America. Analyses through this research shows there are 8.357 million in sales people employee retail sales, and 5.622 million inside or outside sales professional sales reps.
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