Contact current or potential customers to promote products or services
Part of the output can be produced by software today.
The research, the list building and the first draft of the pitch are already automated across most sales teams. Closing is not. Buyers still want a person to be answerable, and volume without judgment mostly produces noise.
| How automatable | Partly automatable |
|---|---|
| Kind of work | Selling and influencing |
| Jobs that do it | 10 occupations |
| Tool categories that apply | Vertical agents, Builders |
| O*NET activity | Selling or Influencing Others (4.A.4.a.6) |
What this looks like on the job
Not our paraphrase. These are real task statements recorded against this activity, spread across the 10 occupations that perform it.
- Visit retailers and sales representatives to promote products and gather information.
- Locate and contact potential clients to offer advertising services.
- Contact prospective customers to present information and explain available services.
- Contact prospective or existing customers to discuss how services can meet their needs.
- Visit establishments to evaluate needs or to promote product or service sales.
- Contact regular and prospective customers to demonstrate products, explain product features, and solicit orders.
- Contact previous clients for prospecting of referral business.
- Visit prospective buyers at commercial, industrial, or other establishments to show samples or catalogs, and to inform them about product pricing, availability, and advantages.
- Contact businesses or private individuals by telephone to solicit sales for goods or services, or to request donations for charitable causes.
- Arrange buying parties and solicit sponsorship of such parties to sell merchandise.
- Contact new or existing customers to discuss how specific products or services can meet their needs.
- Contact property owners and advertise services to solicit property sales listings.
- Arrange for demonstrations or trial installations of equipment.
- Telephone or write letters to respond to correspondence from customers or to follow up initial sales contacts.
What we would actually use
One recommendation rather than a shortlist, because a shortlist is just your problem handed back. This is what we would buy for selling and influencing, and what it costs.
The research and the first draft of the pitch are the automatable part, and a $20 assistant does both. Clay is worth its $149 a month only once the list is bigger than you could research by hand.
Chosen for the cheapest thing that does the job, not the best funded. Nothing on this site is sponsored, and the full landscape is there when you want to disagree with us.
The rest of the category
Context, not alternatives to weigh up. We name the layer rather than promise a named product does your specific task.
Matched from the kind of work, not from vendor marketing. Check any of them can reach the system your records actually live in — that connection, not the model, is where these projects stall.
How people actually do it
Step-by-step workflows that name this activity, with the prompts to paste and what to keep for yourself.
Who does this work
10 occupations in the O*NET database perform this activity. Each one has a full breakdown of its other tasks.
- Advertising Sales Agents
- Door-to-Door Sales Workers, News and Street Vendors, and Related Workers
- First-Line Supervisors of Non-Retail Sales Workers
- Real Estate Sales Agents
- Sales Engineers
- Sales Representatives of Services, Except Advertising, Insurance, Financial Services, and Travel
- Sales Representatives, Wholesale and Manufacturing, Except Technical and Scientific Products
- Sales Representatives, Wholesale and Manufacturing, Technical and Scientific Products
- Securities, Commodities, and Financial Services Sales Agents
- Telemarketers
Work that goes with it
O*NET groups these under “Promote products, services, or programs”. In practice they tend to be done by the same person, in the same sitting.
Method. The activity, its taxonomy placement and the occupations that perform it come straight from the public-domain O*NET 30.3 database. The automatability band is ours: we map each of O*NET’s 41 generalized work activities to how much of its output current software can produce, assuming a person still reviews and owns the result. It is a coarse three-way judgment on purpose. A precise-looking percentage here would be invented.