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Sales Profession and Professionals in the Age of Digitization and
Artificial Technologies: Concepts, Priorities, and Questions
Jagdip Singh
1a
, Karen Flaherty
2a
and Ravipreet S. Sohi
3a
Dawn Deeter-Schmelz
4b
, Johannes Habel
5b
, Kenneth Le Meunier-FitzHugh
6b
,
Avinash Malshe
7b
, Ryan Mullins
8b
, Vincent Onyemah
9b
1
AT&T Professor of Marketing, Case Western Reserve University
2
Professor of Marketing, Oklahoma State University
3
Professor and Robert D. Hays Distinguished Chair of Sales Excellence, University of Nebraska-
Lincoln
4
Professor & J.J. Vanier Distinguished Chair of Relational Selling and Marketing, Kansas State
University
5
Associate Professor of Marketing, ESMT Berlin
6
Senior Lecturer in Marketing, University of East Anglia
7
Professor of Marketing, University of St. Thomas, MN
8
Associate Professor of Marketing, Clemson University
9
Associate Professor of Marketing, Babson College
a
Team Lead. Coordinated the efforts of their team members to workshop ideas and develop
initial drafts. Subsequently, teams leads worked together to develop a coherent and integrated
article for submission. Team leads contributed equally to the development of the final
submission.
b
Individual team member. Team members contributed equally and are listed alphabetically by
last name.
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Sales Profession and Professionals in the Age of Digitization and
Artificial Technologies: Concepts, Priorities, and Questions
Abstract
Recognizing the rapid advances in sales digitization and artificial intelligence technologies, we
develop the concepts, priorities, and questions to help guide future research and practice in the
field of personal selling and sales management. Our analyses reveals that the influence of sales
digitalization technologies, which includes digitization and artificial intelligence, is likely to be
more significant and more far-reaching than previous sales technologies. To organize our
analysis of this influence, we discuss the opportunities and threats that the sales digitalization
technologies pose for (a) sales profession in terms of its contribution for creating value for
customers, organizations, and society and (b) sales professionals, both in terms of employees-in-
organizations and individuals-as-self, seeking growth, fulfillment, and status in the functions
they serve and roles they live. We summarize our discussion by detailing specific research
priorities and questions that warrant further study and development by researchers and
practitioners alike.
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Sales Profession and Professionals in the Age of Digitization and
Artificial Technologies: Concepts, Priorities, and Questions
Rapid advances in digital technologies, popularly referred to as the fourth industrial
revolution (Syam and Sharma 2018), are disrupting well-established sales practices and
upturning well-known sales theories, just as they are opening new and exciting opportunities for
innovation and creativity in sales practice and research (Grove et al. 2018; Baumgartner, Hatami,
and Valdiviesco 2016). Practitioners and scholars differ in their prognosis. For some, “selling in
the future decades will be disruptive and discontinuous… such that salespeople will have to
coexist with AI and other technologies” (Syam and Sharma 2018, pp. 135-136). For others, the
technological advances portend a future that is a “better time [than any so far] to be in sales…
[despite] the considerable shrinkage in overall number of sales jobs” because these advances will
augment the sales profession with “…ethical standards, formal processes, rigorous metrics,
continuous learning and a huge body of research behind it” (Trailer 2017, pp. 2-4). Differing
predictions for the future of sales as a profession, and for individuals who will populate this
profession, are commonplace (Cron 2017; Orlob 2017; Marshall et al. 2012). Yet, there is a lack
of clarity regarding how digital technologies will shape opportunities and threats for the (a) sales
profession in terms of its contribution for creating value for customers, organizations, and
society and (b) sales professionals, both as employees-in-organizations and individuals-as-self,
seeking growth, fulfillment, and status in the functions they serve and roles they live.
This preceding gap motivates this paper to develop priorities and directions for future
research that provides robust and meaningful insights to guide sales research and practice. Three
aspects of our contribution are noteworthy: (a) unconventional approach, (b) multi-faceted
consideration, and (c) comprehensive development. We outline each in turn.
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First, our approach is based on team-based workshopping and a collaborative process that
emerged from the “Setting the Research Agenda in Sales” session at the 2018 AMA New
Horizons Faculty Consortium in Selling and Sales Management. Led by Karen Flaherty, Jagdip
Singh, and Ravi Sohi, consortium faculty worked in teams to workshop three broad themes, each
illustrated by discussion questions and suggestions (see below). Teams were encouraged to use
the discussion questions and suggestions as starting ideas:
Theme 1: Sales as a Profession and Value Creation
Consider the broader contribution of sales profession/function to value creation for customers,
organizations and society in the age of exploding information (abundance but noisy), intelligence
(powered by AI) and technologies (complexity and dynamic).
Theme 2: Sales as Professionals and the Organization
Consider the organizational challenges of structuring and managing the sales force in an era of
intelligence and technology, with empowered and informed customers.
Theme 3: Sales as a Professional and the Individual
Consider the individual challenges of filling sales roles/functions in the age of information and
intelligence-rich environments, empowered and informed customers, and intelligence and
technology-embedded products/services.
This paper summarizes the resulting deliberations from the subsequent development of
the ideas emerging out of the Horizons workshop. Teams deliberated over a multi-month period
to advance workshop ideas, connect them to the existing literature, and distill promising research
priorities and questions. After that, the team leaders coordinated their team’s contributions to
develop a coherent and integrated contribution. This paper is the result of these efforts.
Second, throughout the workshop, teams’ deliberations adopted a multi-faceted
perspective to examine the forces wrought by digital technologies, particularly AI technologies,
on both the sales profession, in the spirit of the “macro” approach espoused by past researchers
(Cron 2017), and the sales professional, in the spirit of the individual approach common in past
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research (Verbeke, Deitz and Verwaal 2011). Salespeople fill professional roles within
organizations, and it is the latter that often define sales role requirements and responsibilities.
Themes of organizational control of sales professional role, common in the studies of sales
control, may appear to unify sales profession and sales professional; sales profession is an
aggregated representation of what professionals who fill sales roles designed and managed by
organizations do (Singh and Jayanti 2013). However, as Cron (2017) alludes, new technologies
are affording possibilities of untethering the sales professional from the dominant hold of
organizational control as salespeople explore new roles such as “free agent” intermediaries who
source products/services to provide customer solutions, and “expert” brokers who possess unique
knowledge and skills to orchestrate inter-organizational assets and resources to create value. Our
position is not that going forward sales professionals will be located for the most part outside
organizations; instead, an increasing plurality of professional roles will shape the sales
profession, and this plurality will motivate a professionalization of the sales field, as anticipated
by Trailer’s (2017) observations noted above.
Third, the purpose of this paper is to chart future research directions and priorities that are
motivated by the threats and opportunities from digitization and AI technologies. Interest in
examining the role of sales technologies has been a robust pursuit in the literature. Past research
has examined the influence of a varied set of technologies including sales CRM (Hunter and
Perreault 2007), social media (Marshall et al. 2012), automation (Homburg, Wieseke, and
Kuehnl 2010), and other information technologies (Ahearne, Hughes, and Schilliwaert 2007).
Our paper advances this stream of work by examining technologies that go beyond the goal of
automating procedural activities or supporting the relational efforts of a sales role. Specifically,
these technologies enable the use of digital assets to drive new business models, and address
