Embrace Advantages in Artificial Intelligence

JIM PRESTON urges sales professionals to embrace advances in artificial intelligence

We ’ ve all heard stories about how robots and computers could replace millions of jobs and how artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly changing our working world. There ’s been a lot of scaremongering about how AI is a threat to humanity – and yet more stories about how algorithms are getting recording contracts, robot dogs are jumping over fences and so on. Regardless of the industry, machine learning and AI are everywhere.

And it’s not simply hype. Consider this – when you’ve been shopping, have you had more interactions with real people, compared with your experiences 10 years ago? I suspect not. A considerable proportion of our shopping is done online, with our only human interaction being with the courier who delivers our package –although in future, even these roles may vanish as drones drop off our Amazon purchases. In supermarkets, we may use self-checkout without interacting with another human being.

That said, B2B purchases are often more complex than B2C purchases, making smart salespeople more important. Indeed, sales enablement platforms have been helping salespeople stay on top of the data deluge – but with smarter buyers and ever-smarter AI coming into play, where can machines help us, and where can they hinder us, in changing times? HUMAN WORKERS: AN ENDANGERED SPECIES? Consider this question – when was the last time you got advice from a colleague in a shop or online? Probably not too long ago: not all of our purchases are simple, self-service arrangements. This is especially the case with more expensive or technically demanding purchases, like a car, a new laptop or a B2B purchase for your organisation, like a CRM suite or other sales and marketing software.

As we know, a lot of B2B purchases involve multiple people – 6.8 on average, according to CEB1 – and 81% of these buyers will buy based

on experience rather than price or even product, according to SiriusDecisions. 2 While in some situations, humans are losing ground to AI, in others they are making gains, especially in B2B. The big caveat is that buyers must feel understood and sales reps must add value, rather than just churning out content and sales patter. AUGMENTED HUMANITY Despite the rise of machine learning and –eventually – AI, machines are not good at handling the complex and ambiguous world of human interaction. Unfortunately, humans often aren ’t good at this either. With customers’ expectations increasing, it’ s something businesses can ’t afford sales employees to fall down on. We know from our own experiences that customers begin to tune out if they are presented with too much content and information – and that’s true in our own lives as sales professionals too.

For example, a sales rep must often remember details about products, services, the customer’s products and services, details about the other stakeholders involved in the organisation, and the context of the overall buying process within the company – and that’s before you start recalling the nice-to-have details like the customer’s birthday, hobbies and so on. As salespeople, we haven ’t always been good at listening, although this is improving across the industry – but actually remembering all of the information we hear is yet another challenge.

The asymmetrical nature of the buying process has made this an even tougher process –customers have more content and are better equipped than ever before. Most of them will be at least 60% of the way through the buying process before ever contacting a salesperson for help, so they’ve done their research, whittled down a long list of vendors to a shortlist, and are approaching you from a privileged position of power and authority. It’s no longer enough for salespeople to be smart and charming – they need to offer buyers something they don’t already have, while also playing catch-up, fast.

This challenge has a very real impact on sales performance – I read recently that 57% of sales staff expect to miss their targets in 2019, which is very alarming. Not only is it uncommon for sales staff to admit this, but it’s not just a small number of underperforming staff – it’ s a serious industry-wide issue. SMART CONTENT It is possible for salespeople to stand out using content, but only if it’s done in a smart fashion. A dusty catalogue from yesteryear or a PowerPoint presentation for another sector is simply not going to cut it. This is where

JIM PRESTON is director of sales for Showpad, the sales enablement platform, where he is responsible for leading the mid-market sales team and growing the business across the UK, Ireland and Nordics. He has over 15 years’ experience of business development with leading global SaaS companies, including Salesforce, Pitney Bowes and Neopost. Visit Showpad.com

1 The new sales imperative. Harvard Business Review, March-April 2017. bit.ly/2lLoKiA 2 SiriusDecisions buyer insight reports, based on 2017 B2B buyer study. bit.ly/2VlKy3v “augmented humanity” comes into play – AI can augment rather than replace salespeople in the customer journey. Systems can analyse available data, such as which content was most used by a customer in a similar sector, in an organisation of a similar size, giving the sales executive some meaningful insights.

Today, various technologies do already capture data from these engagement tools, but it is collected in a decentralised and unstructured way. By introducing data science and AI to sales conversations this can be automated, which already drastically reduces the time a seller needs to spend on administration and increases their productive selling time.

AI can summarise meeting notes and send those back to the seller, manager and CRM system. Furthermore, with the help of natural language processing (NLP) all of the collected data can be structured in key concepts (such as pricing negotiation and competitive fear uncertainty and doubt) and fed back to the seller in the form of recommendations on what the best next steps should be, based on historical success – driving sales efficiency.

After all, if there is one certainty in life, it is that we are notoriously bad at taking notes or collecting any other relevant data coming out of each conversation. A large proportion of what is said in customer conversations gets lost – and that is a huge and very literal cost for companies. Consequently, reducing the mental pressure on sales staff through smart technology helps them to focus on what is truly important, such as the evolution from being a “consultative ” or “challenger” salesperson. UNDERSTAND TECHNOLOGY AS A BUSINESS ENABLER It’s unlikely that we ’ll ever completely trust AI assistants or systems to give us enough information and advice for a complex B2B purchase, because the old adage holds true that people like buying from people – and they need to feel trust in an expert’s advice before making a significant, complicated purchase.

As a result, salespeople must lose the fear of digitisation and whether they’ll be replaced by robots. Instead, they should see technology not as an adversary but a business enabler. In a similar fashion to the industrial revolution, although there continues to be disruption as machines replace some roles, the majority of jobs turn into “human plus machine” roles. This “augmented humanity” has the potential to make the sales professional an efficient and trustworthy consultant, able to cope with the vast amount of data at their fingertips – and triumph in sales situations faster and more competently.