AI Will Not Improve Sales
Based on the 2018 State of Sales report by Salesforce, sales reps spend only 34% of their time selling directly to customers.
The 2018 study that Salesforce released shows that the activities of sales reps has shifted from directly selling to customers to preparation for sales meetings, crafting personalized documents, prioritizing leads and opportunities, prospecting and more admin works. The main reason for this shift is that buyers are no longer need basic and foundation information from sales reps. Buyers now know what exactly they need and how to use it to their benefit and what outcome they can expect from this solution, specially in B2B sales process. The information that now buyers have access to, will help them to be educated enough so they can have a strong viewpoint when facing sales reps.
What this means for a sales rep is that they are no longer expected to deliver that basic information about their products and services. They are expected to deliver a great experience to their leads. Sales reps are expected to be educated enough so they can answer specific questions about their offerings in a way that both educate and in some cases challenge the status quo. Customers want to be educated through the buying process and get the unique view points of the sales reps that they are interacting with.
On the other hand, sales reps are sill expected to hold the relationship with their customers and making sure that they have a smooth transition from old way of doing things to the new solution. Many organizations are investing on customer success process and engaging sales reps in the initiative to make sure customers can maximize their benefit from the adopted solution.
This means the skills and tools that sales reps need to be able to success in the market place are fundamentally different from the past. Data is playing a key role here and if organizations cannot harness the power of data during sales process, they will fall behind the competition. In another report, Salesforce stated that by using data to identify the individuals or accounts with the greatest propensity to buy, reps can focus on building the value-adding relationships with the right prospects and spend less time on admin work.
Skills of future
The fact that now customers are more educated than ever is undeniable. A regular sales reps with basic information about the solutions and products cannot add much value to the sales process and customer experience. To be able to deliver a unique experience to your buyers, sales reps should be able to know the solution in and out. They are ideally educated and coming from technical background and hungry to make an impact. Technical sales rep (especially in technology space) can add tremendous value to the conversation by becoming trusted advisor for buyers and promote the brand awareness in a non pushy way. Technical sales rep knows how to build a personal brand and how to generate both demand and solution so that buyers start to chase them rather than other day around.
Technical sales rep creates content based on SEO techniques so they can educate the market around their solution and publicly speaking about the stories that they have. Technical sales rep can think strategically out of the box or even remove the box from the sales process and radically simplify things for buyers.
AI Transformation of Sales
We are at early stage of evolving artificial intelligence into sales process. However, there are already some tools in the market that can help optimize the sales process and even bringing new insight for sales reps. Guidance on which leads to prioritize, how leads are interacting with the content and how they behave online and automation of data entry are some of the use cases that AI can improve dramatically.
The biggest road block in adopting AI in sales process, is the myth of AI replacing sales team so that the sales reps will lose their jobs. Even if the leadership team move towards having AI-driven sales tools, sales reps can still act in traditional way by not using the technology effectively to their own benefit. We are still far away from having an AI robot to sell things to humans, specially in B2B world. However, the culture of using AI technology will help sales reps achieve more by focusing on building meaningful relationships with their customers rather than doing admin work which has no revenue value.
AI can help uploading documentations and email correspondence to CRM of choice instead of uploading all these important stuff manually, tracking social media and web to find opportunities and leads that are discussing the problem that your solution solves and seeking help, improving sales forecast and finally looking at old opportunities and making new deals is just the beginning of AI transformation in sales.
AI will become the centre of transformation in the next five years and will change the world as we know it. It is just the matter of embracing the shift and making sure we can use it to our benefit as a human being.
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Houman Asefi is a husband, father, investor, strategist, speaker, influencer, blogger, problem solver, life long learner and technologist with the growth mindset who has learned throughout his journey the value of honesty and working hard. He has worked with enterprise organizations and handful of startups to scale the business via modern digital strategies and technology. He believes IT-Business alignment is legacy. He has delivered embedded digital experience to achieve tangible business outcomes and achieve goals within the business beyond expectations by building agile and flexible self service digital business.
