The Future of Marketing and Sales Automation

The history and development of marketing and sales automation has been shaped by the reciprocation of technological advancement, organizational adoption, and contextual application. It was modern computing and the adoption of Internet services by consumers, that enabled Marketing and Sales Automation as known today. However, hurdles of organizational technology adoption have created imbalances between an organization’s state of technology adoption versus its environment. These imbalances extended through the involvement of the human factor in marketing and sales automation relevant decision-making processes. Utilizing the Human Activity Assistive Technology Model allows to acknowledge these imbalances through contextual dependencies. Balancing novel technologies alongside an autonomous decision-making versus a technology interaction sphere, permits to rank technologies by their potential efficiency and effectiveness impact on marketing and sales automation. While it is impossible to discuss every technology’s impact on marketing and sales automation, smart glasses provide the next efficiency frontier by enabling real-time contextual analytics, as well as CRM-based predictive or even prescriptive outputs. Algorithmic Commerce on the other hand completely substitutes the human factor by combing autonomous decision-making processes with autonomous technology interaction models. The autonomous organization is the result of the next evolution of marketing and sales automation through value chain integration. Despite the fictional and slightly dystopian nature of these predictions, companies like SHEIN have already made these developments a de-facto reality. Organizations are thus advised to evaluate their state of marketing and sales automation to identify contextual shortfalls and how the next wave of technological innovations can strengthen their marketing and sales automation landscape.