Bringing It All Together: Driving Through Growth With AI

What if you could revolutionize your sales process and boost your team's productivity without adding a single new hire? Join us as we uncover the transformative power of AI in sales with insights drawn from a compelling Salesforce study and engaging conversations with three seasoned sales leaders. Discover how AI is reshaping sales workflows, enabling teams to reclaim valuable time for direct customer interactions and driving substantial growth and value creation. We emphasize the critical role of structured initiatives in harnessing these capacity gains and how well-trained sellers can outperform their peers, ultimately generating significant revenue.

In another exciting segment, we explore how Chief Revenue Officers can leverage AI and coaching to maximize sales effectiveness. By reallocating time saved through AI into deeper, high-quality engagements, sales teams can seize opportunities even in limited-deal scenarios. Learn about the use of conversation intelligence as an early warning system to prevent lost deals, and get a sneak peek into the future of sales with a discussion on the shift from traditional SaaS contract pricing to usage-based models. Tune in for valuable insights from our guests and get ready to explore the evolving landscape of sales with industry innovators.

(00:05) Using AI to Drive Sales Efficiency

(07:33) Leveraging AI for Sales Improvement

(00:05) Using AI to Drive Sales Efficiency

This chapter explores how AI can drive value and efficiency within sales organizations, emphasizing that the future of sales is about collaboration between humans and technology. By reimagining workflows, sales teams can use AI to reduce non-selling time and increase direct customer interaction, ultimately boosting productivity. We examine a Salesforce study suggesting that by enhancing efficiency in five key areas, sales teams can reclaim 5% of their time for direct selling, potentially generating significant revenue without additional hires. The discussion highlights the importance of structured initiatives to maximize capacity gains and improve key performance indicators. Additionally, we touch on the impact of effective training, noting that well-trained sellers can significantly outperform their peers. Overall, the focus is on leveraging AI for both efficiency and effectiveness, aiming for substantial growth and value creation in sales organizations.

(07:33) Leveraging AI for Sales Improvement

This chapter focuses on the innovative ways CROs can harness AI and coaching to enhance sales effectiveness. I discuss how reallocating time saved through AI into deeper, higher-quality engagements can maximize opportunities in limited-deal scenarios. Additionally, I highlight the importance of using conversation intelligence to set up tripwires, allowing sales teams to detect and address issues in individual engagements early, thus preventing lost deals. Looking ahead, I introduce the upcoming topic for November, which examines the transition from traditional SaaS contract pricing to usage-based models. This shift involves moving revenue generation from upfront contracts to ongoing usage, posing new challenges and opportunities for sales organizations. I look forward to exploring this with revenue innovators across various industries.

Download the report mentioned in this podcast:

https://enterprise.sandler.com/whitepaper-why-cros-who-adapt-with-ai-will-lead-the-next-era-of-growth?utm_content=350656110&utm_medium=social&utm_source=linkedin&hss_channel=lcp-14155

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:05

Hello everyone and welcome back to the Innovative Revenue Leader podcast. This past month, we've brought together three sales leaders to talk about how they're using AI to drive value within your sales organizations. This was backed by a report that we did just around how you can get more efficiency from your sales team and then also find a way to get more value through training and enablement to drive more efficiency as well. So in this episode, we're going to talk a little bit more in depth about some of the insights around this concept from the report and then bring in some of the key insights that came out of the last three weeks in talking to our to our guests. And then at the end, I'll announce what the topic is that we're going to talk about for the month of November. So to start things off, I'll start with a quote that Mary had that I thought was really great at the beginning. She said, the future of sales isn't about replacing humans with AI, it's about reimagining how we work together. And that technology is evolving faster than we can consume it. So we've got to continue to reimagine how this stuff works. And I think that's really important because if you're not doing that, one, if you're not looking at your world differently with these new tools that just are fundamentally different, that makes it challenging for you to understand how they work and understand how to adopt them. And then when it's moving faster, if you don't take the time to really think about what that looks like, it kind of consumes you. So you you end up paralyzed not understanding what you can do. So you either do nothing or you do things that are too far afield. And we see both. Like you see both when you look at different businesses. So when you think about the discussions, they were grounded in the concept that CROs can use AI to grow their business and build more capacity with their sales team. So to be specific, the concept that was used was you could take five percent out. So there's a Salesforce study that talked about non-selling time used to prepare for selling. And one of the key concepts with that is you can't just take time away from a seller or tell a seller they they shouldn't do these things because those things are valuable. So the only reason, the only way to actually get capacity is to continue doing those things but do them more efficiently or more efficiently. And I think that gets lost in a lot of cases. But fundamentally, looking at those five concepts, and you can you can get the report to talk through what that looks like. And for those of you on YouTube, you'll be able to see this in the background with it with a figure. But the to get that five percent out, you have to you go through each one of those five components and just take one percent. So that's the challenge that I have to anybody that's listening. Look for each of the concepts. So if I'm trying to do to be more efficient with admin, more efficient with quote creation, all of that stuff, there is one percent efficiency that you could pull from each one. So the idea with that is I get one percent from each, I redirect that into direct selling with your with your customers. So say three percent more prospecting, more time on the phone with customers, more time uh in person with them. So you increase your selling time from what was in the study 29 to 34. So 17 plus percent more time actually selling. And the idea there is if you do that, you can create five percent more in growth just from that transition of effort, because now you would hire a salesperson. If I can give you five percent more time for each of your salespeople, they they should actually be able to give you more sales because you have no rank period, you have experienced people, and that's the concept there. And in talking with the the with with the team, the the three people we have on, the sales leaders we had on, all three of the guests felt like this was a very conservative estimate of what is possible. Like this is this is something that's very tangible, something that you could really do. Key thing is to do it. I think sometimes the when you look at something that's small, you don't think it's big enough. But think about the power of adding sixty thousand dollars in additional revenue per seller driven straight by efficiency and without hiring a person. Multiply that by your sales team, the number grows really quickly. So it's worth the effort. One thing that Phil talked about was like the headcount math of that. So going back to, I mean, most people would look at it and say, I need more headcount to be able to do it. Challenge that I'd have for you is to look for the capacity to get more out of each salesperson rather than the math of I need two more people to hit my number. Then another key insight that Phil had that was a little bit different than the way I was thinking about it, because I look at it from uh once you get capacity, you need to consume it. Like you can't just let a salesperson do their own thing. You need to have an initiative or something to be able to grow. And I still think that's it, that's an important thing to do. But another thing he said was really around how do I get the KPIs understood in a way that when I implement these changes, I should see those go up. Like I should see the number of activities go up. I should see certain things happen. So when you implement an initiative, look at it from uh either I'm gonna put it, or when you implement a change that's gonna provide efficiency, you should either have an initiative, have an initiative that you can consume that, or you should have metrics that you're looking at. And that was a key insight that I really thought was was valuable from Bill. To say, I'm gonna see my activities go up, I'm gonna see different things go up, so you can see the impact happening in your group. As a leader, it's not just gonna magically happen when you give capacity. So we talked a little bit about the the efficiency piece. There's also an equal benefit for the effectiveness side. Like if you get a seller that is trained and doing a good job and doing the things you want. Like there was a study done, admittedly, a a while ago, but there isn't much around this around how ROI could work. And what they what they found was there's very few people that got the most value out of their training. But when they did, they had 10% higher performance than those that didn't get value from the training. Now, the technology that's out there, and there's a lot more that's gonna be coming around this, is gonna make it much, much easier for you to ensure that the training that you're provided is actually being implemented and done. So that's gonna pull you into a place where you can actually you can get lift from being able to do that that training to be able to get the most out of it. And if you can improve your tent your win rate by 10%, which is what that study said for those who've got training that was valuable to them, it's an additional hundred K that you can pull into your business. And that is a significantly valuable piece. There was another part that Phil talked about that I think is really important is all that training piece and getting people up to speed, it like using role play, using using other different tools, your ramp time for new sellers should be significantly higher than it was before. Like if you're not looking at that and saying I need my ramp time to be half as much as it was before and putting initiatives in place to do that, I think it's it you're not going fast enough. Like there is a real opportunity, and anybody who's running a sales organization knows that one of the biggest inefficiencies in a business and one of the biggest costs, like or revenue, cost and revenue problems is how do I get that seller ramped quick enough to be able to contribute? Another thing that came out around the effectiveness side that I thought was really good for Mike is he started to he talked through around stacking AI and coaching. So instead of he thought about some of the time that he would get back, instead of diverting it into efficiency, he would have them reinvest it into more depth and higher quality engagements. So I thought that was a very good way to look at it, or in a different way of looking at it. Like you do one or the other depending on on what works best for you, but that sounds like a really that that that makes sense to me in how you're trying to improve the results in these, especially in deals where there's very limited opportunities and you really need to make the most of them. And another thing that he talked about that I thought was important was he looks for tripwires in these individual engagements to see at the individual interaction level whether a seller is performing or not performing, so he can go and engage well before the deal is lost. That has never been easier. When you talk about conversation intelligence and building triggers to be able to identify moments and call, that's all at hand and ready and can be done today. So it's something that everybody really should set up. Take the time to build the triggers, take the time to understand what that looks like and to build that out so you can start identifying problems that are happening in a deal well in advance. You don't want to find out about that when you lose the deal, or right at the point where you're at the moment where you have to save it. All right. So those are some of the key things that that I just wanted to wrap on in these four weeks where we talked about kind of how CROs could get value from AI. Hope this topic was useful for you. If you want to access the report, we will put a link in the podcast notes for that. Our next topic going into November is another one that I think is very valuable for CROs and sales organizations, and that's this transition that's happening between contract typical status pricing, where you sign a contract up front, and the game is really about how to get the contract and term to usage-based, where it's more about how do I get you signed up and on the tool and then increase sales based on having you use the product, which is tricky because it takes the revenue component from an upfront to an over time. So we'll spend November unpicking that with revenue innovators that are doing that across all sorts of different industries. Look forward to talking to you about it in November.