We’re pleased to have Shruti Kapoor on the podcast this week to lift the lid on the state of automation in sales right now. This was an interesting discussion, where Shruti explains how prospecting teams in future will be using just-in-time learning technology to help them do the right thing more often on sales calls. Added to that, Shruti has an interesting view on where we are right now with regards to how advanced the technology we can use as prospecting teams is, on the scale from 0 to seamless integration…

In This Podcast You’ll Learn:

• Just In Time Learning Saving Deals
• Making Tactical Improvements
• Advancing Technology To Make Us Smarter

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Just In Time Learning Saving Deals

John Barrows: Where do you think we are today? And where do you think we’re going to be over the next two to three years?

Shruti Kapoor: I think it’s still kind of hard for people to imagine technology taking over sales. Right? And I don’t think it’s going to replace sales people. And so what is the happy intermediary state? I think that what’s going to happen is, a new balance.

So one is how people adopted the just-in-time concept into manufacturing or how people adopted automation into aviation. So if you look at how manufacturing thought about just in time, it was two things. And one of that is how do you identify what is the bottleneck? Then you try to improve that because that’s where you’re going to kind of see the maximum gain.

And the other part of it was to think of how do you reduce inventory? Now if you were to apply the same things to sales, what you’re saying is how do I quickly identify what is, what is it that’s causing my sales rep to lose that deal?

The second thing that you want to identify do is to make sure that that inventory of information are things that they need to remember is small. So do you have an example of training? You wanted to condense it so that it’s no longer a month long program, which people forget about, what can you give them as a nugget that they will remember?

And if you keep moving that forward, what you would want to be able to do is, Hey, of course I don’t want to hire a goldfish for a salesforce who doesn’t remember anything, but I definitely don’t want my prospecting teams to be going through those 25 Excel sheets. So it’s not about saying that sales reps and prospecting teams don’t need to remember anything and they can be stupid, but it’s about saying how do I enable them so that they can still deliver the best value to the customer. I think in terms of the trend where it’s going to go is therefore to make sure that inflammation can find the rep rather than the rep finding the information.

Making Tactical Improvements

Shruti Kapoor: Let me ask you fun thing. How long do you think was your last monologue was?

John Barrows: During this call? Uh, Oh s**t. Probably less than a minute.

Shruti Kapoor: Right. But there’s no way for you to know that during the call. And if I ask what do you think has been the talk to listen ratio in this call? You can’t answer that question either. People have been pounding on saying what the ideal talk to listen ratio is. When I go into a call, there is no way I’m going to be thinking about that.

I’m not acting on that. So irrespective of whatever people say, I’m still going to go ahead and fall into my comfortable pattern. So what I want to do is distinguish between things which are content and things which are behavior. Part of it is you can do a bunch of very simple behavior interventions that can still be very fruitful and only need me to quickly look at something and say, Oh yeah, I can do that now. If I’m suddenly sounding too monotonous, if it tells me, I can quickly change that and I don’t have to get distracted or you know, some variety of those types of things.

Advancing Technology To Make Us Smarter

John Barrows: So if having no technology is a 0 and how Iron Man has his AI guy Jarvis who does everything is a 10, where do you think we are now in sales with our use of tech like this?

Shruti Kapoor: I would say we are on a seven.

John Barrows: Yeah. You think we’re that far?

Shruti Kapoor: Yeah. If you think about something as simple as the internet, which seems obvious today. It took a really long time to get adopted, right? But if you think about the smartphone and if you think about the touchscreen being an important part of it, right? That was around for a long time before the smartphones came around.

For some of those things to evolve, the use cases needed to evolve as well, right? If I didn’t have a real use case, the technology didn’t move as fast. But what we’ve seen in the white space, and especially for voice in customer interactions, right? Is that the use case has always been pretty strong.

The technology has in some ways be lagging. I would say that the 10 is not really having the right arm or like Jarvis from Iron Man. All right, 10 is not not having a man inside. And so what needs to now happen is over a period of time, as the technology gets adopted more and more, it’s going to improve more and more because it’s going to get trained with the context of the people. I think that’s probably why we are at a seven and not at a 10. I definitely think that we are more than halfway there.

That’s a wrap. Join us next time

If you made it this far, you’re the best. Thanks for reading and listening to this podcast. We hope you gained a ton from it and will listen in next week too. Don’t forget to check out our recent podcast episode highlights too. You can reach Shruti by email at shruti@trywingman.com or visit Wingman’s website here.

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