AI For Sales "Best-Of" Reel
Many companies are in the process of or have already adopted the use of AI for sales, and they're coming out to talk about it. AI has many uses in the sales field, and it really all depends on what you need. Chad Burmeister teases some of his upcoming interviews with various sales leaders talking about how they're using AI for sales. There's a lot to come, so don't miss any of it!
Listen to the podcast here:
AI For Sales "Best-Of" Reel
The AI For Sales (And Marketing) Teaser Episode Will Get Your Heart Pumping With Up-To-Date Information About How Companies Are Deploying AI For Sales In The Rapidly Changing World We Live In Today!
What it comes down to is do I want to spend, $4,000, $6,000, $7,000 a month on a couple of BDRs or I can deploy your solution. What if your solution didn't work for me? It's easy for me to call you up and say, “Chad, we're not going to do this again.” If I have 1 or 2 BDRs that I’ve got to fire, that becomes heart wrenching. That's also costly. There's also litigation. It's easier to make a mistake with AI than it is easier to make a mistake with a human.
AI for sales is a hot topic in this day and age. How would you define it? Whether it's you personally or market source, how do you think of this thing called AI for sales?
I agree it's been talked about, maybe over-hyped and even over promised, but it's here now and we're seeing it. The way I and my peers here at MarketSource define it is when we look at productivity for our reps, we look at the red time and green time. Red time is non-sales activities. Administrative activities that you have to do by updating your CRM and doing research on your accounts, those are not sales activities. Sales activities are conversations. That's green time. Whenever we're researching technology and making our reps most productive, especially when it comes to AI, we want AI to reduce the red time away from the reps so that they can spend more green time.[bctt tweet="AI can reduce the amount of time sales reps spend on non-sales activities." via="no"]Studies say that sales reps are spending 35%, 36% of their time in actual sales activities. I think that's true. We believe AI can increase those sales activities. A good friend of both yours and mine, Joel Aban, he describes it where AI is used for all the hard skills that reps are doing such as sending emails, LinkedIn connections, updating CRM or doing research. What you want your reps using are their soft skills, human skills, active listening skills, communication skills, relationship-building skills, the human-to-human interaction. AI should remove the hard skills from the reps' job so that they can use more of their soft skills. I like how Joel describes it as well. Those are the two ways I describe AI.
How do you define AI for sales coaching? What do you think of them when we talk about it?
What I think about sales coaching specifically is that AI can extend our ability to observe. One of the hardest parts about developing the talent of your people as a sales leader is knowing how they're doing the work when you're not there. Having the ability and a little bit of insight into how they're having common conversations, early discovery and need development conversations, or conversations with customers about why we're competitively different. If I don't hear or see that live, it's difficult for me to give feedback to a salesperson that's going to help him or her get any better.
AI For Sales: One of the hardest parts about developing the talent of your people as a sales leader is knowing how they're doing the work when you're not there.
AI for sales has taken on a meaning of its own depending on what company you're with. How would you define it at a high level? You talked conversation intelligence and you talked a little bit about your view. What do you think of when you think of those three words?
I think of aiding the sales process or activities within the sales process like how can you do things better? How can you do things faster? How can you do things cheaper? How can you add a multiplier effect? Just in the two examples I gave, I'm making more calls than ever before using AI and we're using technology to help improve the quality of the calls at the same time. Talk about a multiplier effect. The quality and the quantity are both going up at the same time. Pipelines are exploding and I've got more proposals out than I've had in a year.
Using AI can have a multiplier effect on your pipeline, and get it exploding.
Because everybody was mentioning different things, as a B2B marketer, I segment them and give each one of them a persona. What I have realized is there are multiple people that are incredibly pessimistic. When I mentioned AI, they immediately went to the dark side. “Are you talking about the Terminator or the AI is eventually going to take over all jobs and that kind of stuff?” I call them Eeyore. There are people that are incredibly optimistic and they’re talking about R2-D2. They’re talking about data from Star Trek and I was like, “This is great. They are my Tigger.”
When you had the picture of the human shaking the hand of the bot, you said, “Who's wearing the pants in the relationship with the AI?” The AI can start to tell me when do I wake up in the morning and when do I brush my teeth. What I didn't hear you mention that I saw and that I keep getting notice on is I'm a skier. There's an AI that will go in the bottom of your boot and it will tell you even while you're skiing, “You need to edge more. You need to lean backward.” AI is telling you, but I'm ready to relinquish that level of control too. If I can ski better, I'll spend the $250.
AI For Sales: The essence of artificial intelligence in the current world is all about embedding learning algorithms into devices to make your life better and more productive.
That's one thing about artificial intelligence. In a way, it's not necessarily a physical robot. It's a software or machine learning algorithm that’s embedded in the software. Think about everything that you do can have some sort of software embedded to it. To make that device, we make that tool a little bit more intelligent. That is the essence of artificial intelligence in the current world. It's software or machine learning algorithms that built into devices and help you make your life better and more productive.
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