Sales Mastery conducted its second annual AI-for-Sales survey, gathering 500 responses between 2/03/20 and 3/27/20. On the first day we received survey responses, there were only 11 cases (0 deaths) of COVID-19 in New York city which was the early epicenter. These numbers jumped to 52,300 (728 deaths) by the time our survey closed. This was 1 week after California became the first state to mandate COVID-19 stay-at-home orders. To say the least, a great deal has happened since early February and, in many ways, B2B sales have changed dramatically.
Perhaps one of the biggest changes is that digital transformation initiatives that were planned out over 2-3 years were compressed into just a few weeks. Nearly all calls have become virtual, versus in-person, both accelerating the adoption of technologies (e.g., Zoom, Google Meet) and opening new possibilities such as call coaching (e.g., Salesforce Voice, Chorus.ai).
This acceleration is especially important and relevant to point out, since our original survey population was divided into 3 segments: 1) firms already implementing AI-for-Sales; 2) those planning to do so in the coming 12 months; and 3) those that had evaluated AI-for-Sales and decided against implementing anything at the time of their response.
The efficiency assessment ratings for sales managers (chart at right) are in line with those of sellers, while the effectiveness ratings came in higher at 70.4%. One contributing factor to this is that AI is giving managers key metrics on how their sales teams are selling and the rate at which deals are moving (or not moving) through the sales funnel.
Looking to the near future, the numbers tell two stories (see chart below). First, a strong majority, 81.2%, see AI-for-Sales as a key addition to CRM, or something even more significant. Second, our past studies have often seen impact numbers drop from the first year of a study to the second as the excitement and promise of new innovations get replaced by reality. So far, this is not the case with AI-for-Sales as key addition/game changer ratings compare favorably at 93.5% this year, compared to the 80.5% figure from the 2019 survey.
Be Late to AI-for-Sales at Your Own Peril
AI Requires Good Data
AI is Part of a Solution Framework
Optimize Your Processes First
Think Long-term, But Act Short-term
Invest in Training to Help Sellers Fully Leverage AI
AI-for-Sales is Top-down, not Bottom-up
This is not a traditional sales effectiveness initiative that a CSO/CRO can assign to an individual and say, “Make it happen.” Instead, this needs to have ongoing sponsorship at the senior sales management level, if not at the executive leadership level. The announcement that AI-for-Sales is going to be a reality needs to come to the organization from the top and be reinforced regularly so the organization understands that this will be the new reality for your business.
And as noted above, these are not traditional times. The Army used to say there were 2 kinds of bayonet fighters: The Quick & the Dead. The same may be said a year from now, that there were 2 kinds of AI-for-Sales adopters.
Jim Dickie is a Research Fellow for Sales Mastery; an independent research firm that focuses on profiling case study examples of how firms in the B2B marketplace are leveraging sales process, CRM, AI and knowledge to optimize revenue performance. Jim has over 30 years of sales and marketing management experience. Jim began his career with IBM and Sterling Software and then went on to launch two successful software companies. Jim then went on to co-found CSO Insights, which was acquired by Miller Heiman Group (now a part of Korn Ferry). Jim is also a contributing editor for CRM Magazine, CustomerThink, Top Sales World, and a contributing author for the Harvard Business Review. He has served as an advisor to Baylor Center for Professional Selling, William Patterson University’s Russ Berry Institute for Professional Selling, and is a lecturer at the University of Colorado’s Leeds School of Business. Over the past twenty years, Jim’s teams have surveyed over a thousand sales transformation initiatives. Their research has become the benchmark for understanding how the role of sales is evolving, the challenges that are impacting sales performance, and most importantly what companies are doing to address those issues.