If you work in B2B sales and have been living anywhere except under a rock, you're probably sick of hearing about AI and sales. In particular, you've probably heard more than enough about the initial, breakthrough sales use cases using generative AI:
- Content creation for sales, which enables scalable personalized outreach for sales reps
- Q&A and chatbots, where customers can get quick answers to common questions
Those use cases are pretty incredible, and can lead to significant productivity gains for sales teams. But we're not here to talk about those. We're here to talk about the next phase of AI in sales.
The next phase of AI in sales
These newer large language models give us the ability to not just generate content, but to understand content in a way that is really unique, and then turn that into things we can utilize in a lot of different ways. A few examples include:
- Sales roleplay and coaching, so reps can get in practice reps to improve their pitch
- Data analysis and retrieval to help prioritize accounts based on market research
- More efficient sales engagement with personalization at scale
AI is impacting a lot of other sales use cases than the generative AI ones above. The power of this next generation of AI is going to change the ways sales reps work, managers work, and sales leader work. Right now we live in this world where sales teams are not perfectly efficient or perfectly optimized, but AI can dramatically help with that.
Further, the companies that succeed in 2023 are going to figure out how to transform their teams with the help of AI.
What will be the truly transformational use cases? There's a lot of power wrapped up in some pretty simple ways of accessing the technology. Teams are going to be experimenting a lot, and we're gonna see really interesting things happen as a result.
We recently discussed these topics and more in a webinar with Quantified. We'll link to a video when it's available so you can watch it on demand. For now, here are some takeaways from that webinar.
Opportunity in sales is not as evenly distributed as the capability.
If you think about a sales team in terms of a bell curve - a probability distribution of reps - then teams get most of their performance from a small number of reps that are off to the right on the bell curve. But that model opens teams up to a lot of risk. What if one of those reps leaves? What if they have some deals that go the wrong way?
Sales teams have been playing hero ball, when they should have been playing moneyball. Let's figure out how to shift that entire bell curve to the right and make the bulk of your team more successful.
By combining new capabilities from large language models with being able to summarize and research data with more traditional machine learning models that help you cluster and prioritize things into a process, we’re in a place where we can make all of your reps much more efficient.
AI allows us to turn territory planning from a static, annual process into a dynamic process running continuously.
Imagine a world where every rep has a high-quality book of business that represents the best accounts you company should be working on. At any given point in time, they're prospecting into the best possible accounts. So there are no more bad territories, each rep has the best opportunity to succeed, and you as a company have the best opportunity to cover the accounts that you want.
And the secret to doing that is to move the prioritization of what accounts to work forward. Don't just outsource it to the reps and say “Okay sales reps, you've got to figure this out, along with all the other things that you need to be doing.” AI can inform continuous, intelligent distribution of accounts you know are good, with high fit and timing, incorporating a feedback loop that allow reps to return accounts they can’t make progress with.
And that's what we're doing at Gradient Works, because we think this is what the future looks like. The future doesn't look like spreadsheets and traditional static territories, where you're using basic firmographics and zip codes to carve things up based on some rough estimate of potential value over the course of the next year. It looks like something that's much more dynamic happening continuously, and using AI to make those types of decisions so that every rep has an opportunity to succeed. That's dynamic books.
More soon on AI and sales as we continue to learn more and develop innovative ways to improve sales productivity.
