How Cognitive Computing Can Fuel Sales and CX

While the majority of sales and marketing executives believe that cognitive computing will emerge as a disruptive sales and marketing force in their industries, relatively few are working with a cognitive computing strategy today, according to a recent survey from the IBM Institute for Business Value (IBV). The resulting report, "From Data Deluge to Intelligent Insights: Adopting Cognitive Computing to Unlock Value for Marketing and Sales," compares companies that are considered "outperformers" on this technology innovation to the rest of the pack. Outperformers are organizations that have fully bought into the idea that cognitive computing focused on sales and marketing will play an important role in their future, and they are prepared to adopt these technologies now. In addition, they are more likely to invest in cloud-based storage to support these efforts, while collecting and analyzing market and social media data. Through these and other initiatives, these businesses have positioned themselves to gain a substantial competitive edge by maximizing the effectiveness of their sales and marketing data analysis. "Many marketing and sales professionals find themselves drowning in data that fails to deliver the value or the insights they need to serve their customers well," according to the report. "A wide variety of data analytics methods and tools exist today to help, but few offer as much promise as cognitive technologies. Cognitive systems understand unstructured information the same way humans do. They ingest vast amounts of data far faster than traditional platforms, and can reason, grasp underlying concepts and form hypotheses." More than 900 chief marketing officers and sales executives took part in the research, which was conducted by Oxford Economics.