Phase I: Instrument Your Sellers

Phase I is about getting better data, and we do this by instrumenting the team. Instead of having the team use their desk phones, we have them use a connected system to make phone calls. Instead of letting emails go back and forth under the cover of night, we track them. With phone calls and emails automatically logged -- even the calls and emails that go unanswered -- the data becomes pristine and useful to AI. 

Phase II: Optimize Your Buyers

With clean data, CRM now becomes useful to our AI efforts. AI wants basically four categories of data:

Descriptive data--who are the prospects, and what characteristics do they have?
Activity data--what actions have been taken? (calls, emails)
Contextual data--what are the prevailing conditions at any given time (weather, economics etc.)
Results data--what have been the outcomes of our activities?
Phase III: Optimize Your Sellers

For the sales leader who wants to build a team that can reliably hit quarterly targets, it’s important to understand who they have in which seats. AI can instantly evaluate the historical performance of thousands of reps, identifying the behaviors and attributes that separate one group of performers from the next. Phase III relies on data from Phases I and II, but it flips the unit of analysis from the buyer to the sales rep.

Phase IV: Custom AI

With good data on buyers, good data on sellers, and good data on how opportunities make their way through the sales cycle, the remaining opportunities to leverage AI for revenue lift fall into the catch-all category of “what else?” These answers can be broken up into two categories:

More data / data sources
Different questions

1. Engaging customers the way they want to be engaged
Our research showed that some 76 percent of B2B buyers found it helpful to speak to a salesperson when researching a new product or service. That figure fell to 52 percent for repeat purchases of products with new or different specifications, and only 15 percent indicated a desire to speak with a salesperson when repurchasing exactly the same product or service.

Engaging customers in the future will require a multichannel sales strategy powered by smart digital investments, which caters to the different needs of first-time and repeat customers. When targeting first-time customers who are looking for direct interaction with sales teams, the fastest-growing companies are using digital tools to help their sales teams address customer needs at each stage of their purchase journey. 

2. Using advanced analytics and machine learning to make better decisions faster
In the next five years, we believe that the fastest-growing companies will be using advanced analytics and machine learning to address fundamental strategic issues, such as what sales opportunities to pursue, what resources to allocate to which accounts, and what behaviors to prioritize to drive sales productivity. Already the days when lead generation relied entirely on local field knowledge are fading fast. Market leaders of the future are using advanced analytics to build a granular account, product, and geographic profile of each of their customers. These profiles are then augmented with relevant external data such as news reports, public financial information, and social media to generate a truly 360-degree view of each customer.

3. Continually investing in finding and developing world-class talent
Buyers are becoming increasingly sophisticated and technically savvy, which has led to the rise of a new breed of sales leaders who bring a strategic mind-set and rock-solid technical skills. These leaders are “growing up” across multiple roles in their organization and come with a truly cross-functional and cross-geographic skill set. They view themselves as coaches whose primary job is to turn rookies into rainmakers.

"Sales enablement is both a business discipline and a collection of technology. It encompasses the process, content, training and tools to help salespeople (and others involved in the buying journey) be more efficient and effective.  Capabilities include sales content management, coaching, training, onboarding, and account management.

But in the past year, Gartner has been tracking the development of sales enablement platforms. Some of the sales enablement vendors have converted their applications into API-based open platforms, offering their own library of open APIs. With native APIs, sales enablement vendors can:

• Provide native connectors to other API-enabled sales enablement applications
• Create user-interface mashups with other sales and marketing solutions that are based on open APIs.
• Offer basic tools for building custom user interfaces or data capture forms
• Deliver granular functions for capturing and measuring how business contacts engage with the content sent to them by sales representatives."

Highspot, a sales enablement solution provider, announced the closing of a $15 million series B financing round led by Shasta Ventures, with additional participation from Salesforce Ventures and existing investor Madrona Venture Group. The funding is intended to help Highspot expand its capabilities and better position sales reps to have more effective customer conversations.

Seattle-based Highspot is designed to help reps enhance their sales content and training investments to improve sales effectiveness. The company leverages artificial intelligence to provide contextual recommendations to identify the right content for customers. Over the past 12 months, Highspot has expanded its customer base by 300%.