“Siri Can Now Increase Your Win Rates” by Cindy Gordon was originally published in Sales Mastery Magazine.
The not-far-off future of selling is a bit like the movie “Her”. In the movie a man falls in love with his virtual assistant, modeled after Apple’s Siri. We forget about the computer that’s driving and relate to her as another uber-intelligent person who can answer anything.
In this world buzz words like Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, Cognitive Computing, Deep Learning, Sentiment Mining, Text Mining, Machine Learning, Predictive Analytics, and Prescriptive Analytics are buried under a simple interface that we can actually converse with. What if sales professionals had their own version of “Her”?
The Backdrop – Meet Dinesh
Dinesh is the VP of Sales & Business Development at a company called Macadamian Technologies, and they build innovative world-class products using web-based experiences. Dinesh has a sales force of less than ten sales account executives. Forecasting accuracy has been an ongoing challenge due to rapid growth dynamics. They spent a lot on marketing programs, Google Ad Words, Marketing Campaigns, Customer Loyalty and Referral programs, Newsletters, etc. tracking the value and return on investment of these activities often is fuzzy on outcomes.
Dinesh is a win-win Sales leader who wants his whole sales team to win more and avoid wasting time chasing any, as he calls them, DUDs. Selling, in his view, is all about focus, rapidly qualifying the right opportunities to pursue, and knowing when you need to let go. However, he also knows that sales reps have a very hard time with letting go of their sales opportunities as they form relationships. Furthermore, he knows that in over 15 years of doing business, Macadamian Technologies has sold many projects with a wide range of pricing and discounts. Dinesh wonders what the precise pricing mix is to win more.