12/22/2023

When Analytics Should Drive Sales Decisions — and When They Shouldn’t

Organizations are using AI to offer recommendations for a wide range of things

An AI-based system suggests to a salesperson at a technology company that a medium-sized company might be interested in purchasing cloud services. A sales manager at a financial services firm gets a LinkedIn-generated list of potential hires to fill a vacancy. A sales leader at a pharmaceutical company gets a recommendation from an internal project team to reduce its sales force size by several hundred salespeople.

As data-driven insights and recommendations such as these become ubiquitous in sales, so does the question, "How much should we rely on the data-driven insights?"

There are many complications. Data accuracy and completeness can be high or low. Models that turn data into insights can vary in quality. Errors in some decisions can have mild consequences. Other decisions affect many people and have long-term impact.

Please select this link to read the complete article from Harvard Business Review.