CONTEXT SETTING FOR WEBINAR JULY 26th – 1-2 PM EST
REGISTER HERE
July 26th, 1:00 to 2:00 PM EST.
Registration URL: https://bit.ly/2Kzsil1
Webinar ID: 342-552-075
Declining Human Productivity in The Age of Distraction
Did you know that our human attention levels cognitively has declined by over 50% since the advent of mobile. We now live in the Age of Distraction, where humans are increasingly unproductive, and addicted to mobile phones, texting and spending more time on being connected 7×24. The impact is catastrophic to business productivity, but also raising concerns on the addictiveness of smart technology to the human race.
We have already seen how the smart phone has shaped the minds of young people, who barely remember what it was like before addictive activities – from video games to social media – were constantly at their fingertips. According to one recent study, recreational computer activities partly explain a decline in labor supply among men ages 21 to 30. But this is not the only impacts we are seeing. In business, B2B Sales professional productivity is plummeting to the point that soon the robots may be the only way to counter their declining productivity rates. We are not quite at this tipping point – but to achieve AI super cluster status, all sales leaders must start to experiment with AI to learn how these new tools can give them a unique competitive edge.
Impact on B2B Sales Professionals
What drives economic growth? There are many factors. One major factor that keeps me up at night, is the declining productivity of B2B Sales Professionals globally. According to Accenture, Chief Sales Officers (CSO’s) have spent billions on CRM tools to improve sales performance, however more than 60% of these CRM programs have major adoption and data issues. In addition, sales productivity has declined to less than 35% of time focused on what counts – real customer interactions. The decline is worrisome. The Age of Distraction, where there is too much information, too many choices, competing sales imperatives, and too many tools, processes and policies are taking their productivity toll on sales professionals.
So how do you cut through the noise? Is there an alternative pathway? The answer is Yes – and it will come from Artificial Intelligence and (AI) Guided Selling Methods. Do Read on!
The Rise of AI Guided Selling
Accenture is a market leader in advancing the strategic importance of AI Guided Selling methods which take advantage of diverse AI methods to solve different sales use cases to increase sales productivity. One of the major gaps in CRM continues to be the adoption rates of CRM tools in using them correctly to fill in the right data at the right time to ensure sales forecasts are accurate, actioning leads that are the most valuable to invest precious time in, or knowing what product mix or pricing strategy can be optimized to increase your odds of winning.
Today, if your company does not have AI in place for your sales team, they are likely very inefficient in spending time chasing the wrong opportunities that won’t yield them the best results. With declining rates of sales professionals, plus the fact that 30-60% of sales professionals don’t make their sales plans, despite all the investments that marketing is making in sending leads their way, what else can be done?
Applied AI in Sales – Real World Results
At SalesChoice, we have worked with Accenture, leading brands like Rogers, and experienced sales leaders like, Tom Kane, former VP Global Sales OpenText, and currently VP Global Sales Virtek Vision International, to build an AI INSIGHT ENGINE that can predict sales future outcomes at over 95% accuracy and deliver guided selling coaching to sales professionals to increase their odds to getting to win faster.
What is unique about our methods/approaches is that we have been evolving the engine and our AI ALGOs for over 5 years, because we have recognized that this is not a simple problem to crack. Many companies have specialized in lead scoring but this contributes only 5% of the value to a sales journey. Taking into account all the possibilities is what is critical – the more breadcrumbs collected, the more powerful and accurate AI model can be created that is 100% customized to your unique business.
We have learned that one method of AI on a subset of Sales Truths is not good enough, as the power is in customized data sets vs. subsets, as every company seems to keep customizing their deployments of CRM, especially in Salesforce, which only exacerbates the productivity challenges versus using industry proven templates.
We are now at the point that we can accurately predict sales forecasts more accurately than humans can by seeing at least 100 plus moves in advance, due to advanced AI methods, and thousands of simulations. We also take into account a sales rep and team’s prior performance mathematically on their outlook accuracy and also their past sales performance to automatically take note if there are risks in human decisions that are not positive. Every time new insights are received into the CRM, the AI Model predictions are automatically adjusted and new coaching moments, prescriptive insights, are communicated to sales professionals in their mobile devices or CRM.
Positive reinforcement is key to keeping focused as sales professionals are always hungry for more gratification. It’s hard selling without warm referrals or best pathways optimized. Conversion rates for cold calls are typically about 2%, compared to 20% for solid leads and 50% for referrals. SalesChoice automatically takes into account best pathways from lead channels, whether connected to Pardot, ActOn, Eloqua, or Marketo. It also knows that a lead channel is not always a good prioritization parameter as a new account that has no history in a industry that you have never won in, is also a low-odds bet.
If a company wants to set higher thresholds or importance on new business vs current business, these prioritization adjustments can easily be made in customizing the AI model(s).
What the big breakthrough for us in the last 18 months has been is pushing deeper into the AI insights in real time, and providing sales professionals with deep insights on their win patterns. We worked closely with the former Chairman and CEO of Xerox Canada, Dr. Kevin Francis, a global expert in Sales Process and a global sales trainer for brands like Accenture, HP, etc. Kevin’s vision has been to help design our software to make it so intuitive that it simply gives sales people comfort to listen and take notice that we are helping them to win their sales plans and quotas. It’s all about everyone winning.
OTTAWA COMPANY VERSATURE LEADING IN AI GUIDED SELLING INNOVATION
Versature is one of the first Ottawa companies to test the waters with SalesChoice and have become avid supporters. They have improved their data completeness levels in Salesforce to over 98% accuracy on the most significant AI parameters being filled out accurately, increasing their adoption rates, and hence AI smarts for a major competitive advantage. SalesChoice is the only company that provides AI Guided Selling on data completeness visualizations in real time, as without quality data AI is more limited, but even with only 60% of data quality and completeness AI can figure out the best pathways, to predict outcomes reliably. The vision for data accuracy was inspired by Joe Deklic, when he was in his former role as VP EBU Sales Operations (former Cisco CFO and current head of Checkpoint’s Strategic Accounts), where he asked SalesChoice and Accenture to focus on data completeness visualizations to help managers be more informed on what was happening in their workflows. Hence, we built out this new layer of intelligence correlating to AI patterns.
The success was further germinated by Versature’s vision, “As our team grew, sales managers were concerned they were not seeing enough on deal status. We didn’t want to pull reps out of the field. It was time to find a solution to unify our sales and marketing teams to scale our entire organization. SalesChoice helped us improve our sales productivity and also enable 7×24 AI coaching insights, says Anastasia Valentine, Head of Sales and Marketing, Versature.
Conclusion
According to the World Economic Forum, declining productivity rates of all professionals in the Age of Distraction is an economic imperative to improve upon. It won’t come from banning access to smart phones, or texting at work. The only way to increase B2B Sales Productivity is to instead leverage these through alternative methods to increase productivity from augmented intelligence sources that are more accurate and more reliable using AI guided selling tools. We trust our Netflix to recommend the best movies to us, and this is from AI methods. We trust Uber to take us to the fastest route, using AI methods. We now trust traffic signals to give us the fastest routes, using AI methods. Increasing medical doctors are relying on AI for advanced diagnostics to reduce health risks.
Hence learning to trust AI methods in guided selling – it’s the right time, and I am here to advise you that this really works — the challenge is, as Deloitte has highlighted in their Canadian research, that Canadian leaders lack courage to innovate.
We have spent too much time with Business Intelligence approaches looking in the rear view mirror. Now the time has come to look ahead and take advantage of Advanced AI Methods to transform sales as we know it.
As a Board Director of CATA, Canada’s largest Technology Association, and a Co-Founder of the AI Directory, www.aidirectory.ai which has been designed to help all Canadian companies find and source AI companies to solve different use cases (and has also now expanded to include USA and Chinese companies), we want to help global leaders see what’s possible with proven AI in Guided Selling approaches.
For Canada to achieve its AI SuperCluster status, and handle all the economic set backs from new trade agreements, manage in the big Data Tsunami and productivity declines, not only of humans, but of B2B sales professionals, where 30% of the sales workforces also suffer from attention deficit disorder, we believe at CATA that we have only one pathway forward to augment human intelligence and solve the productivity crisis with B2B Sales Professionals.
Hence, we are inviting you to join us in an EXCLUSIVE CATA WEBINAR: ACHIEVING AI SUPERCLUSTER VIA AI GUIDED SELLING – on July 26th, 1:00 to 2:00 PM EST.
Registration URL: https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/8249560268742312451
Webinar ID: 342-552-075
Agenda
1.) The Global Impact in an Attention Distracted World: The New Normal
2.) The Cognitive Decline of B2B Sales Professionals Driving AI Guided Selling Enablement
3.) Defining AI Guided Selling: Predictive and Prescriptive Analytics
4.) SalesChoice – Software Demonstration and Case Studies
5.) Questions and Answers
We hope you will join us and advance to learn about the importance of AI in your role as a CEO, or Sales Professional. Even CFO’s have a responsibility to learn about AI – after all – what is the price of a miss in a sales forecast?