Keep Your Sales Team Ahead of the Curve

Welcome to part three of the "Sales Success Through Business Acumen" series. If you missed part two—Empower Your Sales Team with Storytelling Skills—find it here.

If you've been reading our series, you probably get the hint by now that we need salespeople who can speak the business language of their customers. They need to be able to tell stories about what's happening in their customers' industries and how organisations are dealing with the risks and opportunities they face.

While this is great in theory, the question I'm regularly confronted with is, "Where do we find these industry insights?" Unfortunately, the conversation often descends into a discussion of who owns finding the insights: Marketing, Sales Enablement, or the individual salesperson. Then, the discussion inevitably turns to where the insights should be housed: a separate portal, embedded in the CRM, etc.

Here's how I try to steer the discussion and where I think we need to focus our insights, all from a buyer's perspective.

What makes an insight useful?

• It must be relevant to the recipient
• It must be up-to-date
• There must be a quantifiable impact associated with the insight
• It should be apparent which part of the buying process it supports (a reason to change, solution criteria, or who to pick as the supplier)

What insights should we ideally have to be credible?

Market Insights – What's happening in the customer's market. You could base this on PESTLE, but it can be broken down into:

• Regulations & legislation that will impact the customer
• External market forces, such as growth forecasts, market trends, and environmental trends that impact both the customer and the customer's customers
• Technology drivers that impact both the customer and the customer's customers
• What the major players in that market are doing

Regional Variations – How the above market insights vary by region

Company-specific Insights

• Strategic drivers
• Operational imperatives
• Individual stakeholder issues

So how do we find these insights? 

Use AI (e.g. CoPilot) to:

• Identify market insights (e.g., "What regulations will impact e-commerce companies in Mexico and Brazil in the next 18 months?")
• Identify technology trends (e.g., "What technology will have the most significant impact on last-mile delivery for logistics companies in the USA?")
• Identify what major players are doing (e.g., "Who are the major players in last-mile delivery in the USA, and how are they innovating and differentiating themselves?")
• Identify company strategic drivers (e.g., "What are BT Group's strategic drivers for 2025?")

Please remember that all AI is doing is "searching" publicly accessible large language models (LLMs) for this information, so it should always be validated.

• There is still immense value in human-driven research, either by investing in bespoke research or subscribing to analyst reports.
• Build a network and ask them, then share the results with your peers.
• Ask your champion within the customer's organisation.

How do we access these insights? 

Based on the above, you could say, "Give every salesperson some training on generative AI and let them do it for themselves." However, experience shows that high performers are probably already doing this, while others will find excuses not to have the time for preparation. So again, look at your technology stack and see how you could embed AI into it to do the heavy lifting. This will have some added benefits:

• If you embed this in your CRM, it should already know the customer's industry/market, the geographies they want to operate in, where they are in the buying process, and details on the stakeholders.
• It can inform your in-house LLM so you automatically share manually gathered insights.
• By having everything accessible within your CRM, you're not forcing salespeople to jump between systems; it's all in one place.

How do we ensure Insights are used effectively? 

Just because you've given the salesperson access to relevant insights doesn't mean they will derive value from them. The value is only derived if they effectively use the insights during customer conversations.

• Train your salespeople in the effective use of insights throughout the customer's buying process.
• Observe calls and coach on the use of insights.

Next Steps

To reuse a well-known phrase, "Don't boil the ocean." Before you worry about embedding the technology in your CRM, start by showing the value of insights.

• Identify a pilot audience.
• Get them to use AI to build their own insights and turn them into stories.
• Monitor the impact.
• Use this as the case study to convince everyone to change.

Hi, I'm Mark, CEO of Strategy to Revenue.

I lead a team of content designers, technologists and training leaders building a range of training solutions for individuals, and SMBs and Enterprises that want to get the most from their sales teams.

I'm known for having an opinion about most things in sales—sometimes controversial ones. Ultimately, I like starting conversations and hopefully sharing something of value. Please share your views with me either with a comment or by dropping me a message. 😎