The future of AI in the world of Sales Management

• In the last decade, selling has gone digital, marketing has gone digital but sales management is still being run in the old school way.
• Sales managers and reps are spending most of their time in a spreadsheet and never-ending forecast and deal review meetings.
• COVID pushed this boundary even further as the customer time reduced because of no travel and so reps have become more like project managers.
• While CRM (SFDC) is a good starting point for going digital, it’s a very basic step and the world needs more sophisticated and intelligent digital systems to transform its sales management.
• We (the world) know the advantages of going digital, it ranges from reducing the cost to improving efficiency to improving results and so this is not new.
• What’s new is access to data. For the longest time, this data has been unavailable. In the past, it was because the sales discussions were happening in elevators, in board rooms, in the golf course, and in bars and restaurants and this was a big barrier to data. This is now changed, most of the data is available in digital format.
• However adoption of digital sales management will not be frictionless, there will be people concerned about job security, oversight, big brother, compliance, etc. This is also not new. When Uber came, initially people were concerned about sharing your location with a taxi driver but then technology solved these problems.

What’s Possible with the Tech (AI) Today?

FORECASTING

• Learn from the past — when making forecasting decisions, utilize the learnings of the past to make an accurate prediction of the future.

PIPELINE MANAGEMENT

• Go beyond %age conversion rates — use the deal by deal risks indicator to understand. AI empowers the leaders to do a qualitative pipeline analysis which is so much better than just an X-Factor-based or “quantitative” analysis.

OPPORTUNITY MANAGEMENT

• Go beyond sales stages to understand the opportunity health — there is so much data to make an accurate judgment call on an opportunity. AI can comb through all of that data and look for risk patterns based on your business and your cohorts.

REP/TEAM MANAGEMENT

• Go beyond how much have you closed for me this quarter — there are a number of leading indicators to understand how a rep is doing. Empower your managers with those leading indicators so they can truly understand and coach the team to better and more predictable revenue outcomes.

The Future of AI (next 2 years)

FORECASTING

• Beyond the quarterly numbers: AI will be able to predict not just what numbers you will close but also forecast the learnings that you can apply to improve your numbers for the next quarter.

PIPELINE MANAGEMENT

• Look beyond the size of the pipe — AI will empower leaders to look at the various qualitative aspects of the pipeline. Eg — engagement, lead source ranking, the value-add of the DemandGen team. Score your nurturing tracks etc.

OPPORTUNITY MANAGEMENT

• Inspection and review in real-time — inspection without consequences or cost, significantly improve win rate.
• Reserve rating — rather than reps and managers rating the opportunity, the opportunity will rate the reps and managers and create a forecast based on their individual ability.