Selling Power Blog

Five Components of an Effective Predictive Revenue Strategy

Today's blog post is by Taj Mian, Managing Director, Canada, Board International.

 

Revenue growth is a key metric for all sales teams. In order to achieve consistent growth, sales leaders must create a revenue strategy that allows them to create and execute on reliable, accurate forecasts. Historically, most organizations relied on their managers’ experience and intelligence to manually create revenue forecasts. However, experience among managers can vary greatly from person to person, creating inconsistent forecast accuracy. Further, without data and analytics, it’s hard to identify where an organization is having revenue challenges, such as a need for more coaching, low pipeline, or low close rates. Each of these requires a different approach and focus. 

Enter predictive revenue. Predictive revenue planning is a data-driven approach, which leverages historical sales data and forecasts revenue based on advanced statistical methods. Statistical forecasting has been around for a long time, dating back to General Motors in the 1930s. But today, powerful computing capabilities that can instantly calculate complex forecasts models based on massive amounts of detailed data are both ubiquitous and cost effective. A predictive revenue strategy can help sales organizations accelerate their revenue by incorporating more transparency and predictability into the forecasting process.

In this post, we’ll explore five key components of an effective predictive revenue strategy.

Clean, quality data

Predictive models rely on historical data to highlight deal archetypes and add intelligence to forecasts, so it is paramount to ensure that data is clean, unified, and harmonized. Bad data is a challenge for most companies. Products, customers, and channels are often defined multiple times across systems, with different IDs, making it nearly impossible to have a single source of truth on the organization. Simply put, bad data will result in bad forecasts. And without historical data, predictive models aren’t possible. 

Accurate forecasting model

Most forecasting software will offer a choice of predefined statistical models, but it’s still important for sales leaders to have solid foundational knowledge of statistics and forecasting methods. Without this, it will be difficult to effectively interpret, question, and act on the forecasts. Knowing how the model works—and that it’s statistically accurate—is critical to differentiating the forecast from pure magic. 

Test-and-learn approach

Implementing a predictive revenue strategy doesn’t mean that traditional revenue forecasts are obsolete. In fact, collecting both traditional and predictive forecasts over time will uncover accuracy trends that give management confidence in their predictive revenue models. Another component that organizations must consider is that creating a predictive revenue strategy is not a one-time event. There must be leadership willingness to frequently test, evaluate, and adjust the models to best fit the organization and its specific business needs. 

Talented salespeople

At the end of the day, statistics aren’t perfect, and they require talented human counterparts to reach their full potential. An effective predictive revenue strategy is enabled by high-performing salespeople and leaders, who know when unique situations require the model to be tweaked, or when to make customer-specific exceptions to the rule. 

A comprehensive platform

Implementing a successful predictive revenue strategy often means adopting a platform that brings all of the necessary data into one place. Sales leaders should look for platforms that are user-friendly and easy to understand, which increases the likelihood that salespeople will enjoy using. Built-in analytics can provide visibility into planning, budgeting, forecasting, and scenario planning with simple and actionable dashboards and workflows.

Overall, adopting a predictive revenue strategy is a significant undertaking that requires a long-term commitment from leadership. In order to be successful, organizations need to have the right data, models, expertise, people, and platform. With these components and a growth mindset, sales teams can consistently and reliably accelerate revenues.

To learn how Ricoh Group transformed sales performance across millions of sales activities with Board, download our case study.

Three Ways AI Guidance Can Help You Sell Better in a Black Swan Environment

Today’s post is by Amit Pande, CMO and head of Strategy at Aviso AI. Connect with him on LinkedIn.

 

The year 2020 has already been a year of tumultuous twists and turns unlike anything we’ve seen in recent decades. It has brought concepts like “Black Swans” – unpredictable or unforeseen events, typically with extreme consequences – into the mainstream. Experts even say what we’ve just seen in the first half of 2020 may be the new norm for the decade: unpredictability. 

Here’s the truth: Surviving novel problems requires novel solutions. From a revenue perspective, old approaches, technologies, and biases won’t just hurt us – they have the potential to sink entire companies. If we learn the right business lessons from COVID-19, we can be better prepared for future uncertainty. 

Using novel technologies such as AI will be absolutely key to remaining afloat through troubled waters. Here are three ways we believe AI can enable your selling success even through all-virtual WFH collaboration, deviant markets, and a general mood of chaos. 

1. Stay close to the ground with AI understanding of markets and buyer behavior.

Companies can benefit from applying the power of AI both to who they sell to and how they sell. Leaving this sensemaking task to human brains is fraught with specific risks – humans don’t look far back enough, broadly enough, or objectively enough. 

A starting point with AI can be looking at similar challenges experienced in the past, and how revenue forecasts dropped in those situations – for example, previous recessions. At Aviso our AI Research team has found that the extent of the impact your industry faces depends on a variety of factors: financial resilience, sales cycles, geographical exposure, churn versus new customer acquisition rates, account sizes. All these considerations should be modeled into your business to forecast future quarters. 

On the buyer engagement side, AI can also help you develop more empathy for the impact on prospects so you can adapt the way you sell. For example, applying AI to actual email and calendar engagement – and even chat conversations – will give your sales teams a better understanding of prospects’ pain points and how to create a virtuous cycle with them.  

2. Collaborate as one virtual team with revenue-focused AI “war rooms.” 

Working from home is the new normal. From team SKOs, on-site demos, and field sales, revenue teams are rapidly digitizing all their operations. How do you keep up velocity virtually? In times of rapid change, just “watercooler” collaboration (e.g., Slack or Zoom) is not enough. During remote work, teams suffer from deeper cognitive biases. Good news looks better than it should, and bad news often doesn’t enter the discussion. These biases can compound and spread across CRM, forecast calls, and deal reviews, and inhibit timely actions. 

We recommend using digital “revenue war rooms” where sales leaders and teams can plan and execute during these uncertain times. Ideally, these rooms combine the best of Zoom, Slack, and CRM-like tools while keeping end-to-end encryption and also augmenting sales collaboration with AI insights, live chat, video, file sharing, and “to-dos” prioritization. 

Such rooms serve as a virtual collaboration space to move deals – drawing in other go- to-market members such as customer success, marketing, or legal, for help when needed.

3. Vigilantly apply AI to predict forecasts and recalibrate pipeline numbers.

A key challenge faced by companies in crises is that CRM data loses its trustworthiness. This is due to many deals drying up as poor economic conditions lower buyer intent. CRM becomes a lagging indicator of business. More so, if you are using a spreadsheet, it is nearly impossible to forecast during COVID-19 due to the large amount of rapidly shifting variables constantly influencing potential revenue outcomes. 

Re-assessing both forecasting strategy and pipeline quality is critical to revenue success. Using a machine learning approach to forecasting sales – preferably with a tool that applies advanced data science to learn your organization’s selling patterns – will help your team get smarter over time. AI pipeline analytics can help with objective, unbiased inspection. 

Comparing start-of-the-quarter pipeline and new pipeline added to ending pipeline predictions can reveal when and where you need to strengthen revenue strategy. Playing the long-term optimization game is key to sustained revenue; see if you’re on track to creating sufficient pipeline one, two, and three quarters out. To round the process out, find out if your pipeline is the optimal mix of opportunities that will gear your team for success.

Confidently close your next quarter with an AI Guidance Compass 

Aviso is here to help companies recover from the impact of COVID-19. Get Aviso AI complimentary for 90 days to understand your business better, collaborate more effectively across your revenue team, drive more revenue, and reduce the burden of CRM. 

Why You Need a Human Connection to Make Sales Soar

Today's post is by George Brontén, a lifelong technology entrepreneur, and founder and CEO of Membrain.com, a sales enablement CRM. His new book is Stop Killing Deals: How to Avoid Deadly Assumptions and Achieve Sales Excellence. 

 

Would it surprise you if I said sales technology does not hold all (or even most) of the answers to common sales challenges?   

This may seem counterintuitive – salespeople use a lot of very helpful technology tools, especially now that 90 percent of sales teams are closing deals remotely. 

But, despite an explosion of technology and tools in the past 10 years, the sales profession has not seen a lot of progress in sales effectiveness in that same time frame. In fact, I founded Membrain.com in 2012 because I saw that current technologies were, in many cases, making problems worse rather than solving them. 

That’s because most sales technologies are built on the same three bad assumptions that cause the problems they’re trying to solve.

Three Assumptions about Sales Technology That Kill Deals 

Take, for instance, the CRM. Most CRMs are simply databases with tools wrapped around them. When the CRM was invented, it was intended as a replacement for the Rolodex. As such, it was effective in making it easier for salespeople to keep track of information.

But it didn’t make salespeople better salespeople, because it still operated on the three bad assumptions that kill deals: 

1. Salespeople are born, not made.
2. Salespeople are naturally self-disciplined.
3. Sellers and buyers are driven largely by logic.      

All these assumptions reflect a misunderstanding of human nature, and all three lead to poor sales results.

In my new book, I explore each of these assumptions and show where they are hidden inside most sales organizations. I also reveal how sales leaders can: 

• Defeat the deal-killing monsters lurking in your buyer’s subconscious
• Heal your organization and help your team win with sales enablement
• Align your strategy, process, and methodology to achieve scalable, world-class sales performance
• Build your sales coaching around your sales process to generate exponential results within complex B2B sales environments
• Understand the essential humanity of your sales workforce, thereby enabling you to recruit better, train, and support the people on your team in order to win more deals
• Turn your sales technology into your servant, not your master

Embrace the Humanity of Selling to Improve Sales Performance 

I lay out a framework for achieving world-class sales performance based on this better, correct understanding of the sales team. The framework starts with a human-centered strategy, and drills down through all the layers of the organization to align every aspect of it with a proper understanding of the humanity of both buyers and sellers.

The book is a fast read and supplemented with extensive additional material, including white papers, tools, and calculators, available for download via an online resource center. My hope is that the book will provide a new way to structure complex B2B sales organizations to yield substantial performance gains while honoring the basic humanity that connects us all. 

In a world saturated by more and more technology and inundated by artificial intelligence, I believe returning to our humanity is the only real way forward.

Contact George at george@membrain.com and purchase his new book, Stop Killing Deals: How to Avoid Deadly Assumptions and Achieve Sales Excellence.

How to Increase Sellers' Productivity with AI

Today’s post is by Sergey Medved, head of product at ClearSlide.

 

 

A good mix of creativity, personality, and persistence is the hallmark of a successful seller. When the mixture can be seasoned with a healthy pinch of technology, sellers can find more time in their days and close more deals. That’s a boon for most sellers because, right now, they’re only able to use 34 percent of their time for actual selling. The rest of the time, they are consumed with other work – from manual data input to administrative tasks.

This time crunch combines with salespeople’s busy schedules to make hitting their numbers a challenge. One of the ways artificial intelligence (AI) solutions are reshaping the sales industry is with tools that can boost sellers’ productivity and give them more time with prospects.

Productivity Drain

The majority of sellers’ time is spent in sales technology that doesn’t always directly support their sales efforts. Sometimes, reps spend hours just tracking down the right content to send prospects. Then they have to figure out what content is current, approved, and appropriate for a prospect’s specific stage in the sales funnel. That’s a lot to ask of people who already struggle to find time in the day to accomplish all their tasks.

Rather than asking sellers to sort through and familiarize themselves with a massive library of content, use AI-enabled tech in the following three ways to boost your sales team’s productivity and give them more time to focus on selling.

1. Automate low-value tasks.

Start with the low-hanging fruit: Automate easy, low-stakes tasks. For example, leverage automated email campaigns to help your sales reps check in with and send relevant content to prospects. That will save sellers from having to draft a long personal email each time they contact a prospect.

Of course, there’s still a time and place for personal communication – especially as prospects make it further down the funnel. But, at the top “awareness and education” stage, a prospect is just as happy to get a free white paper via an e-blast. Automated email technology is also helpful for one-off sends like birthday emails and check-ins. Sales reps can still personalize their message (or have it automatically personalized for them via language processing software). But, with the email timing and content already automated, your sales team will get back hours of time – time they can use to actually meet with prospects.

2. Use AI to tailor content.

While AI starts with automation, it doesn’t stop there. It’s constantly learning from the data it analyzes. That’s how Google – which you probably use every day – knows you, knows your preferences, and ranks Websites based on how well those Websites have helped others accomplish their goals. Sellers can leverage a similar approach to further personalize their interactions with prospects.

Sellers spend too much time searching for content and often end up with outdated decks. To get back some of that time and ensure content accuracy, AI can recommend the most appropriate content for a sales rep to use based on what’s known about the opportunity. For example, a sales enablement platform can help you find relevant content or even recommend specific content based on what has worked for a similar buyer, industry, or stage before.

3. Leverage power calendaring.

Even if admin tasks do take up an inordinate amount of sellers’ time, AI can help by turning time management into time intelligence. For example, platforms such as Woven – an AI-powered calendar app created by the former CIO of Facebook – scan users’ emails for signs of meeting requests. It then generates suggested meeting times and sends options to the attendees to book. On a more basic level, options like Calendly give your sales team the ability to ask prospects to book a time that works for them, via a simple link. That means no more weeks of back-and-forth emails requesting bulleted lists of days, times, and narrow windows of availability.

By using AI, sellers can get out of their email and calendars and into more – and more effective – meetings. 

Want to learn about how AI is shaping the future of the sales industry? Download the ClearSlide white paper, “AI-Powered Selling.” 

How Companies Can Leverage AI to Benefit Sales

Today’s post is by Matt Langie, CMO at XANT.

 

 

We have all seen enough Hollywood movies to know the stereotypes of sales. The sunburned door-to-door suspect. The slicked-back smooth talker at the car lot. The buttoned-up professional in the boardroom. Among the more recent additions is the caffeine-driven tech bro working the phones and email.

Good Sales Leads Always Drive Revenue

But the one thing these caricatures tend to get right is the driving need for good leads. Good leads have always been the backbone of any sales organization to build pipeline and drive revenue.

With each new technological revolution, the way sales teams found, sorted, and pursued leads improved. The humble act of knocking on doors drastically decreased as more households adopted the telephone. Cold calling began to disappear as computers helped teams find better targets and communication preferences shifted from phone to email.

However, even as more sales representatives adopt digital communication, they struggle to get the right data to do their jobs. This is where artificial intelligence (AI) can take sales to the next level. AI is not just a reworking of tried-and-true technology; it is a genuine game changer. Companies that utilize AI to drive sales leads are finding that it does more than just level the playing field – it raises the entire field. These companies are becoming more efficient and reaching more of the right prospects, at the right times, in the right ways. 

Find Sales Leads More Efficiently with AI

There are three primary ways companies can reap the benefits of AI for sales:

1. Implementing data algorithms that comprise the right statistical and machine learning code that helps an AI learn data patterns.
   
   The right data algorithms can fuel automation capabilities to improve the sales process. Those same algorithms can also enable automation to improve a sales rep’s visibility and productivity. Utilizing these algorithms correctly breaks down which sales activities will have the greatest impact, at the right time of day. 
   
   
2. Gathering enough data volume and depth of information so AI algorithms can sort, compile, and understand these inputs.
   
   CRM and sales activity data can be merged, anonymized, encrypted, and enriched. Once complete, that processed data can be used to train AI models that deliver predictive insights to sales organizations. This will help sales reps target the right customers – improving the quality and effectiveness of any given engagement. 
   
   
3. Ensuring proper data quality – including variability, freshness, and uniqueness – so AI can provide the best outputs.
   
   By enriching and extending customer data, an AI system can best identify not only whom to target, but, more importantly, how they behave and how to best engage them. 
   
   This enables every sales representative to effectively execute a “cadence” when they reach out via email, phone, social media, etc., to initiate a conversation with a potential prospect. The art of a cadence is determined based on myriad factors, fueled primarily by the quality of data regarding the company and contact being pursued.

These three levers help sales teams produce exceptional data intelligence and, in turn, more sales. The intelligence behind these levers is also not new – essentially, sales leads have been driven by patterns, raw data, and quality for many years. But AI helps leverage much larger datasets than ever before, find the best variables and fit, and then predict business outcomes with high accuracy.

Imagine a world with no more cold calling and fewer leads that turn out to be duds? Imagine a world where you’re not wasting time and resources selling to the wrong individual at a company? Using AI to improve leads and manage the sales team will make everyone from the EVP of sales to the junior associates happy, which will turn around the stereotypes and present a kinder, gentler form of salesperson. Where will scriptwriters turn in the future for examples of burned-out, frustrated professionals? Maybe the marketing team.

The Value of Digital Sales Transformation Right Now

Today’s guest post is by Mike Orr, co-founder and CEO of Grapevine6. Connect with Mike on LinkedIn.

 

As sales and marketing teams adapt to the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, we’re all adjusting to new modes of operation as we try to stay productive, connected, and successful. 

One lesson the global quarantine has taught us: the value of digital sales transformation. Specifically, it’s urgent for sellers to change our communication habits and embrace the digital world to stay connected and carry on. 

At Grapevine6, we began helping customers prepare for a shift to digital sales transformation a few years ago. Here are two key reasons. 

#1: Conventional content marketing approaches aren’t cutting it anymore. For one thing, customers have stopped trusting what brands say about themselves; they trust what other people say about the brands through peer advocacy and peer reviews. Second, too much content has created noise and made it difficult for brands to stay relevant. 

#2: Social has emerged as a source of trusted information. Many forward-looking companies like Guardian Life Insurance Company, SAP, and others recognized the shift to social as a source of trusted information in the buyer’s journey. 

Harvard Business Review reported 82 percent of the seller’s social content had a significant impact on their client’s buying decision. They turned to digital programs to address the issue of brand authenticity and to help their business leaders and customer-facing employees create engaging and valuable conversations with their future clients. These social selling initiatives enabled salespeople to build out authentic and professional (yet personal) brands online, create authentic connections with their networks, and provide engaging, valuable content to their buyers. 

The True Value of Digital Sales Transformation

The sheer volume of available content creates two primary challenges:

1. How do we enable our salespeople to efficiently find the right content at the right time to advance sales conversations in digital? 
2. How do many companies – especially the ones that represent highly-regulated industries such as financial services – ensure the content and conversations don’t create more problems than they solve by introducing reputational or regulatory risk?

The answer to both questions – managing relevance and risk at scale – is artificial intelligence (AI), specifically AI-powered technology. These tools collect large amounts of content, analyze it for compliance, and personalize it for each user’s profile based on their personal preferences. 

Those profiles can be further personalized by monitoring the engagement with content over time. This approach, powered by mature AI, takes the pain and risk out of content curation and compliance, freeing up the valuable resources for more strategic and creative tasks by sales and marketing.

Now’s the Time to Embrace Digital Selling

Digital transformation of sales was always a good idea, but it was never an urgent one. In March 2020, however, it became a pressing issue – moving digital selling from “nice to have” to vital.  

As we adapt, survive, and learn, we are accelerating this change. Most companies have to embrace digital selling in the short term or risk a collapse in commerce. Ignoring social and digital selling also creates the long-term risk of falling hopelessly behind competitors. Combine that urgency with the understanding that most behaviors are very difficult to change and change back. It’s apparent that investing in digital selling as an organizational capability and mandate is critical now and will be in the foreseeable future.

How AI Automation Will Change the State of Sales

Today’s post is by Jessica Munday, a content marketing specialist at Automation Hero, an intelligent process automation (IPA) company combining RPA and AI for next-level businesses.

 

Sales productivity is the number one challenge for 65 percent of B2B organizations. It’s an industry-wide problem that heavily impacts revenue margins and a company’s bottom line.

The biggest inhibitors to productivity are the inefficiencies within the sales process. According to Salesforce, the average sales rep spends 64 percent of his or her time on non-selling tasks – 25 percent of which are administrative tasks.

The burden on sales managers grows as executive leaders push for higher revenue gains. The solution managers have discovered? Implementing sales AI to automate inefficient processes that prevent sales reps from selling. These technologies make it so the data entry and busy work are still done, but salespeople have more time to sell and drive profits for the company.

Rapid Growth in Sales Tools

The current sales tech landscape has more than 700 tools – up from around 300 in 2015. Growth in the sales technology space will continue to accelerate over the coming years, resulting in a flooded market with thousands of productivity tools.

While many of these tools promise to increase productivity, the number of vendors and products out there add even more noise and confusion for sales managers. In this hyper-growth market, managers can find it difficult to select the right tools for their business needs. They waste time comparing and evaluating vendors to find “the needle in the haystack.”

Many of these basic productivity tools add even more steps to the already-inefficient sales process, further preventing sales teams from selling.

What Makes Sales AI Better

Sales AI tools differ from traditional sales technology because they’re built with intelligence to improve the sales process and enable salespeople to be as productive and sales focused as possible. Sales AI optimizes the sales process through automation and augmentation.

Automation is when an intelligent machine performs low-level, repetitive tasks automatically with little assistance from the sales rep – and, as previously stated, sales reps spend a majority of their time on administrative tasks. Sales automation cuts down that time by performing tasks like CRM data entry, researching contact information, scheduling meetings, and drafting emails.

Augmentation is designed to elevate human intelligence to help people work smarter. Augmenting the sales team’s intelligence leads to sales reps making smarter decisions. Tasks that can be augmented include “next-step” engagement recommendations, prospecting, and cross-sell and up-sell suggestions. Gartner predicts that, by 2020, 30 percent of all B2B companies will add intelligence augmentation to augment at least one of their primary sales processes.

Sales AI Adoption

A Forrester survey shows that 46 percent of companies are looking to implement AI systems specifically for their sales and marketing teams. Salesforce says it’s the top growth area for sales teams, with adoption expected to grow 139 percent over the next three years.

Early adopters are already seeing results. Eighty-three percent of the most aggressive adopters of AI and cognitive technologies say their companies have already achieved either moderate (53 percent) or substantial (30 percent) benefits. Research shows that high-performing sales teams are 3.4 times more likely than underperforming teams to already be using AI.

Critical Skills and Habits You Need to Succeed in the AI Era

Today’s post is by Ilan Kasan, co-founder and CEO of Exceed.ai, the leader in AI and automation for sales and marketing. Ilan is a thought leader and blogger and a strong proponent that the best sales teams will join forces with AI to exceed their goals.

 

To succeed in the 1950s, salespeople needed a handful of critical skills: connecting with potential customers, listening to their needs, and forming a strong relationship based on trust.

Then came the 1980s and 1990s, and things changed.

Suddenly, salespeople needed to learn how to crunch numbers and work with CRM systems. Administrative skills became a core part of their job. They became documenters and technologists in addition to relationship builders.

Now, we’re entering the AI era, and everyone is quaking in their boots that their job might be overtaken by an AI entity.

We’re not nervous, because we view this new era differently.

We welcome it. We even celebrate it.

By partnering with AI-powered tools, today’s salespeople can delegate their administrative work and focus more on what they have always liked doing and have been valued for: building relationships.

Building relationships, listening actively, and making people comfortable are best accomplished by humans, not technology. Here are the three critical skills salespeople can use to succeed in our new AI era.

Skill #1: Fearlessness

The only way to succeed in the AI era is to embrace it without fear.

According to research by InsideSales, over 20 percent of sales teams that don’t use AI tools say it’s because they don’t trust AI, and 5 percent are scared it will take their jobs. That means over a quarter of sales teams avoid AI out of fear. But, when you have the right solution, you’ll find it’s not as intimidating as you thought.

Exceed.ai’s virtual assistant enables sales teams to make the best use of their time by taking over repetitive administrative tasks, freeing sales reps to focus on the things only humans can do. Exceed.ai assistants can:

• schedule calls and book meetings,
• make initial contact with cold leads,
• qualify them,
• identify the best time to reconnect with potential customers, and
• unfailingly follow up on new leads through natural, two-way conversations over email and chat.

Sales teams that use Exceed.ai experience up to an 80 percent increase in new sales opportunities and a 67 percent drop in the cost of qualifying leads.

When you let go of your fear and really partner with your AI sales assistant, working alongside it effectively, you can prioritize your time more efficiently and convert more leads into sales opportunities.

Skill #2: Relationship building

The biggest benefit of sales in the AI era is that salespeople are now free to dedicate the bulk of their time doing the things AI can’t do, like banter, joke, find common ground, and build genuine relationships with potential customers.

Human nuance, demonstrating emotion, and connecting with people are what salespeople were born to do. But, in the past two decades – when nearly half of their time was required for emailing; communicating back and forth to establish, confirm, and reschedule meetings; following up; and documenting every interaction – their true sales skills set, including fostering relationships and closing deals, became stymied.

AI has created the opportunity for salespeople to excel at exactly what they were hired to do. AI tools can free salespeople to cultivate the skills buyers value. Research by Salesforce reveals that 75 percent of buyers expect companies to understand their needs, and 79 percent want to interact with a salesperson they trust. Today’s buyers want to trust their vendors and suppliers, and that can be done only if salespeople listen carefully to what buyers need and want.  

Skill #3: Cross-collaboration

Entering the AI era doesn’t mean salespeople will suddenly become “lone wolves,” sitting together with their AI assistant, set apart from the rest of the marketing and sales teams. On the contrary, skills as a team player will be more important than ever, and more productive.

AI will make sales teams smaller – placing each representative in a holistic unit that unites sales, marketing, and customer service. Salespeople will have to grasp the big picture, considering all the interactions among the three departments. Only salespeople who recognize and prioritize cross-collaboration will succeed.

Salespeople also have to embrace greater transparency within the team and let go of their pride in doing everything themselves. It’s going to require a completely new perspective, where every sale is truly a joint effort. They’ll need to be willing to share information, leads, and insights openly and freely, learn how to intelligently delegate to their AI partner, and become willing to hand over leads for someone else to complete the sale.

Use AI So You Can Sell More

With the advent of AI, salespeople can fully embrace interpersonal skills, relationship building, fearlessness, and other uniquely human skills, and leave the administrative work to technology.

Salespeople must abandon their fear of AI and learn how to delegate to it, then polish their relationship building skills. Visit Exceed.ai to learn how.

How to Use AI to Find Sales Talent and Motivate Teams

Today’s post is by Fabio Ronga, CEO of beqom. He drives the company strategy and makes sure everyone understands it and is equipped to contribute to it.

 

Next-generational tools are making it easier for businesses to hire and retain salespeople and motivate sales teams. Here are some ways sales managers can leverage the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to create, keep, and incentivize teams to close the sale.

#1: Earn their trust.

To recruit and retain top talent, you need to make sure employees know they’re fairly compensated for their work. Sales managers can leverage AI-driven data to benchmark compensation, identify flight-risk employees, and personalize bonuses and rewards based on an individual’s key motivators – whether cash bonuses or additional vacation time – without having to rely on “gut instinct.”

For example, sales managers 10 years ago might have responded to an employee’s resignation notice with a counter-offer. Today, by using AI and predictive analytics, employers can identify “flight risks” – before they become unhappy employees – based on a variety of factors (a dip in performance, low engagement, frequent tardiness or absenteeism) and take actionable steps to modify those behaviors with incentives such as a bonus, work-from-home benefits, or more vacation time.

Using AI-driven compensation technology can mitigate the risk of employee turnover, which costs businesses as much as 33 percent of a worker’s annual salary to replace them.

#2: Eliminate unconscious bias.  

Sales managers can take the guesswork out of rewards, bonuses, and compensation by leveraging AI to create fair and accurate compensation strategies based on education, experience, certifications, and more (but not age or gender).

This is not only key to retaining top talent, but significant when you consider how biases have defined and perpetuated career-debilitating constructs like the gender pay gap. The fact is, employee performance is inextricably linked to a company’s commitment to diversity, inclusion, and transparency – with reports showing that the combination of employee engagement and gender diversity resulted in 46 to 58 percent higher financial performance for business units above the median on both engagement and gender diversity.

Finally, when it comes to employee satisfaction and retention, younger generations expect their employers to take a firm stance on issues like diversity and pay equity: Among workers ages 18 to 35, 75 percent expect employers to take a stand on equal rights, climate change, immigration, and constitutional rights.  

#3: Boost engagement.

This final step – motivation and engagement through incentivization – is pivotal to accurately reward the sales talent that managers have worked so hard to win. Business leaders and sales managers alike can improve the employee compensation experience – and, ultimately, boost engagement – by applying AI-driven tools like self-service payroll chatbots and natural language processing.

These tools are helpful in various scenarios – from empowering employees to gain a full understanding of how their sales performance impacts their salary, to enabling employees to receive compensation-related answers in real time, to improving HR responsiveness and reducing support costs. For sales teams specifically, this technology can also lead to optimized territory and quota allocations to maximize sales performance.

Providing employees with the tools and transparency to understand how their work is being compensated will not only motivate them to boost performance, but will also help solidify their loyalty to your company.

Improved sales performance is the result of a happier, more motivated, and aligned sales force. These core tenets – trust and transparency, investing in the issues that matter to employees, and fair rewards for hard-earned work – are key to keeping your salespeople motivated and dedicated employees for the long haul.

This Is What Happens When You Don't Capture Sales Call Data

Today’s post is by Eric Esfahanian, chief revenue officer of Gryphon Networks.

 

 

Nowadays, a lack of meaningful visibility into reps’ daily phone calls is a plague affecting sales managers leading teams of all sizes.

According to research conducted by The Brevet Group, only 33 percent of organizations say their sales goals were met in the past two years. However, the research also found that the majority of relevant sales interactions still happen over the phone.

With that in mind, it’s clear the telephone is the richest source of intelligence into the behaviors of your reps and customers. And, if you can’t capture, measure, or manage data related to daily sales calls, you’re potentially missing major insights that could be leveraged to earn you thousands or even millions more in revenue.

This visibility gap between a rep’s call activities and revenue is due to a lack of ability to capture sales call data and rapidly interpret it in a targeted, contextual way. HubSpot reports 40 percent of sales teams are still using manual spreadsheets to track sales-activity data, and almost 30 percent of salespeople report spending more than an hour each day on data entry.

No wonder sales managers still tend to rely on old-fashioned gut instincts, hunches, and historic trends to inform their decision making.

Here’s the thing: Technology can now automate sales activity data into easy-to-understand, actionable insights. So why aren’t more managers using such solutions to guide and drive standards to improve performance?

Companies tend to forget that the sales call data produced by reps is company property. You’re either using it or wasting it. As Forbes has reported, 62 percent of CRM is estimated to become cloud-based by 2018. This means now is the perfect time for sales leaders to look to the cloud for device-agnostic telephony that simplifies, standardizes, and automates your capture of phone-based activity from your sales force – whether captive or independent.

Overlooking sales call data is like a farmer playing Fortnite for 11 months out of the year instead of nurturing and cultivating their crops to maximize output come harvest time in October. As crazy as that may sound, managers do it every day when they rely on pipeline management instead of measuring and optimizing daily sales call data.

Remember: If you can’t accurately measure your sales activity, you can’t interpret or improve it. And that’s kind of the purpose of a manager, after all.