Sales

Sales is the easiest, most difficult role in any business. And the dividing line between the two is sales discipline. It is the most critical function a business has. Without sales, there is no business. Everything else, the product, the people, the premises is funded by it. And yet the secret to it is almost boringly simple: a successful sales function is nothing more than disciplined, consistent execution of the right activities. Do the right things, day after day, and sales follow. Not because it's magic- because it's mechanics.

There has been a lot of hype about artificial intelligence (AI) in recent years, and a lot of scaremongering too. We’ve been told these technologies could solve almost any problem, from creating revolutionary healthcare treatments to reversing climate change. We have also been warned that it could put millions of people out of work, enable devastating cyberattacks on businesses and national infrastructure, and perhaps destroy our civilisation altogether. In truth, none of those things seem likely to happen anytime soon. But AI is already driving the most powerful productivity-enhancing tools we have ever seen; and those tools are available, in some form, for businesses of all sizes at relatively low cost. These are perfect tools for a growing business: offering powerful and sophisticated capabilities to complement other outsourced, cloud-based IT and business services – and they are continuing to evolve at breakneck speed.

Three decades ago, American author and astronomer Clifford Stoll famously called breathless forecasts of a world-changing internet “baloney”. In a 1995 Newsweek article, laden with sarcasm, he argued buyers wanted the “human touch” and wrote: “We'll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obsolete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire internet handles in a month?” It’s fair to say that things have changed. The following are some of the key trends in online sales in 2026: Almost all Irish internet users shop online. In Ireland, 96% of internet users made a purchase online in 2024, the highest percentage of any EU country, according to Eurostats; at least 80% of the Irish population between the ages of 16 and 74 had ordered goods or services online in the three months before the survey. And figures from the Office of National Statistics for the UK show that the percentage of retail sales that were made online has grown from 2.8% in 2006 to 27.3% in 2026.