Assuming you’ve been reading our blogs, you know I whole-heartedly believe and execute towards helping the modern, digital sales organization. Why – because our team at Sales for Life share one simple thesis:
“Great sales organizations are investors. And the best investment with the most accretive gains you can make, are with increasing the yield/throughput of each seller”.
In the last 7 years, I’ve had an innate ability to see trends and opportunities in the sales world, and what I see, is that the modern, digital seller using social media to:
– Research
– Communicate
– Build Relationships
Wait! That’s only one vantage point you have of the customer. It’s an excellent, game changing vantage-point that a vast majority of sales organizations are yet to master, but it’s only one vantage point.
The reality is, we’re approaching the “age of enlightenment” and a renaissance era coming. That renaissance is the augmentation of AI (Artificial Intelligence) and ML (Machine Learning). While it’s hard for most sales organizations to see the opportunities now, but mark my words AI/ML as a 2nd vantage-point will be game changing.
My favorite future value-drivers:
Propensity to buy (completely changing your account selection and sales cycle velocity, and dramatically increasing the probability of won rates)
How do I know AI/ML + Digital Selling is the future? I’ve seeing the earliest renaissance of this combination first hand!
Story: a Fortune 50 customer of ours had a lead challenge. Each SDR was receiving a waterfall of leads, and engaged each prospective in order of lead flow, with the same engagement cadence/sequence. That process yielded an average lead-to-SQL ratio of 12%. Once this customer’s sales tools extracted customer data points such as “content consumption” from marketing automation, and digital relationship data (two data points fed into AI), they did the following:
a. Reduce each sellers lead flow by 80%
b. Focused each seller to “double-down” and using social/digital to build much stronger relationships.
Results – they DOUBLED conversion. DOUBLED! From 12% conversion to 24% conversion.
Why? Because the AI + Digital data showed that only specific leads had a “high propensity to buy”. It’s the like the invention of the printing press 500 years ago (the scale of literature).
While this is only one use case, I recommend you read Victor Antonio’s book – Sales Ex Machina for other ideas on AI/ML.
Next step – realize that data will completely alter your sales outcomes. Currently, digital information is one variable your sales organization MUST be leveraging to highly influence your sales objectives. Digital selling is your FY 2019 horsepower boost.
