The 2023 Gartner Hype Cycle for Revenue and Sales Technology Shows that New Technology Investments Put Customer Experience Back at Center of Buying Journey
The Gartner 2023 Hype Cycle for Revenue and Sales Technology identifies generative AI, digital twin of a customer (DToC), process mining, self-integrating applications and augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) for sales as transformational innovations.
The Gartner Hype Cycle provides a view of how a technology or application will evolve over time, providing a source of insight to manage its deployment within the context of a specific business goal. The Gartner Hype Cycle allows clients to get educated about the promise of an emerging technology within the context of their industry and individual appetite for risk.
“These technologies remove friction in business processes, propel growth and help leaders mitigate external influences that create unforeseen uncertainty,” said Melissa Hilbert, Senior Director Analyst in the Gartner Sales Practice. “We expect each to have high or transformational impact within the decade.”
Generative AI for Sales
Generative AI, at the Peak of Inflated Expectations (see Figure 1), has profound business impacts on content discovery, creation, authenticity and regulations, as well as customer and employee experiences. For sales, it can produce content in the form of emails, customer facing content, meeting summaries, training content and role plays.
Because of these use cases, Gartner predicts that B2B sales organizations using generative-AI-embedded sales technologies will reduce the amount of time spent on prospecting and customer-meeting prep by over 50% by 2026.
Figure 1: Gartner Hype Cycle for Revenue and Sales Technology, 2023
Source: Gartner (July 2023)
The DToC is appearing on the Gartner Hype Cycle as an Innovation Trigger on the Gartner Hype Cycle, the phase where a breakthrough, public demonstration, product launch or other event generates significant media and industry interest.
DToC is a dynamic virtual mirror representation of a customer that can be used to simulate and to emulate and anticipate behavior. They increase efficiency and provide a personalized, empathetic service to customers, many of whose buying habits have changed during periods of disruption and change.
Gartner predicts that 20% of B2B sales organizations will employ digital twins of customers to improve revenue outcomes and improve customer experience by 2027.
Process Mining
Process mining is farther along at the Innovation Trigger phase. Process mining is designed to discover, monitor and improve real processes (i.e., not assumed processes) by extracting knowledge from event logs readily available in today’s information systems.
It provides visibility, analysis and understanding about business operations by providing near-real-time information to all end users about how they are currently performing, whether their processes are compliant, and what could be improved.
“In showing which process improvements are necessary to meet and exceed customer expectations, process mining helps organizations in addressing how they can actively impact CX and customer retention through internal operational improvements,” said Hilbert.
Self-Integrating Applications
Self-integrating applications will use a combination of automated service discovery, metadata extraction and mapping, automated process definition, and automated dependency mapping to enable applications and services to integrate themselves into an existing application portfolio with minimal human interaction.
Requiring only minimal human intervention, self-integrating applications remove the need to manually integrate new apps into sales tech stacks by enabling applications to integrate themselves into an existing application portfolio via tools such as machine learning.
AR and VR for Sales
AR adds value to the selling environment by providing real-time information in the form of text, graphics, audio and other virtual enhancements integrated with real-world objects. VR provides a computer-generated 3D environment that surrounds the user and responds to a buyer’s actions in a natural way. Both can offset and complement the on-site selling and physical product demonstrations that sellers perform.
“Early adopters of AR and VR will complement on-site selling and physical product demonstrations currently performed,” said Hilbert. “Take digital sales rooms as one example: By 2025, Gartner predicts that 50% of all enterprise B2B sales technology implementations will include digital sales rooms, so it is imperative for sales leaders to prepare now.”
