Your Sales Productivity Tools and Automation are Killing You! Read Below for Some Better Ideas!

The amount of sales productivity tools we have invested in over the past twenty years is Epic! Yet, we find cost of sale going up and productivity in general going down or staying the same! Why is this? The main reason is that we are applying them in a digital world using the processes from the world before digital.

We have invested in CRM, Cadence Tools, Sales Training, Sales Methodologies, Intent Tools, Video Conferencing, to name a few. When any company applies technology to any process, they generally experience significant increases in productivity and significant decrease in expense. When you look at the investment B2B companies have made you would think costs would be at least half what they were not more, and that revenue per head would be significantly higher. However, it is not! When you adjust for inflation in the prices charged for products revenue per head in way down!

The really scary thing is that we are about to mainstream AI. AI used correctly can really help. But, almost all the AI being developed right now is going to drop productivity even more and increase expense even more. The reasons are twofold. First, garbage in and garbage out! The data in many cases that the AI will use is not good. Secondly, much of the AI is going to help salespeople do more nonproductive things even faster!

In this article I am going to cover three technologies everyone has but mis-uses. These three technologies are CRM, Cadence Tools, and Video Conferencing. When you understand the issues with these technologies and how to use them right you will know how to apply the correct processes and the best AI to improve revenue performance and reduce Expense.

CRM

The first thing to realize about CRM is that like every other application you have it is a system of record. However, it is the exact opposite when it comes to the sales part of a CRM application. Your HR application, ERP application, financial application, and even your CRM application outside of the sales module are systems of record. Systems of record contain facts.

The sales part of your CRM is mostly opinion. Your pipeline value is an opinion, how qualified an account is an opinion, the importance of the people in an org. are an opinion, the revenue estimates are an opinion as are the forecast, the next best step, and where a deal is in the sales cycle. Hopefully those opinions are fairly accurate but most times at least some of the things are not the way things are. When you start treating these opinions as facts and building process, account plans, account strategies and spending sales dollars based on these opinions you can get off track very quickly.

The very first adjustment you must make is to treat the sales portion of the CRM as a sales engagement application and not as a system of record. When you do this you stop managing to the information as though it were fact. You allow your sales teams to adjust, strategy, process, forecast, and activities as things in their accounts change. You are able to better react to what needs to be done from a process and activity standpoint instead of being wed to processes and activities that do not work. Most importantly you stop measuring the activity stand alone because the activities are going to change as the situations in the deals change in order to move them in a positive direction toward close.

You start to measure what you should measure which are results. These metrics are things like revenue, days in stage, deal size, forecast accuracy, Revenue per head. revenue per sales resource. These metrics when you have the CRM set up correctly as a sales engagement application tell you things like: What is our forecasting competency, how well do we sell value, where do my salespeople need help with skills, what systemic things do we need to improve, How many people do we need to support our sales efforts, how good is our coverage model. These are the things you need to know to figure out how to improve productivity.

Measuring activity that you have no solid proof develops pipeline or moves deals toward close is pure folly! You are measuring an opinion which has no basis in fact. How is this helpful! The answer is that it is not only not helpful it is destructive. Any activity that is not proven to develop pipeline or move a deal toward close in the over whelming aggregate likely does not. This means the overwhelming majority of activity is not productive. Hence you need more people and more time to close the same amount or less business. This is the very definition of non productivity and that is exactly what is happening in the B2B world of the complex sale.

Treat your CRM system like a sales engagement system and not a system of record! Get rid of the dumb activity bases sales process and stages in your CRM. Change the stages to the more generic emotions that a prospect and org. go through to buy anything and everything they buy. These are attention, interest, desire, conviction and close. Then take the activities you have as a process and align those with the emotional stages. This assures your salespeople are executing activities that align with were the buyer is. Then align the resources you need to those activities. This gives you a framework for ensuring your sales people are executing activities aligned with where the buyer is with the correct resources. The result will be sales teams that do more activity that develops pipeline and moves deals using the right resource much more often. The result will be more revenue at a lower cost of sale.

These stage are easy to identify and align. An example would be a latent prospect is not aware of you or not interested in what you have. You are executing campaign to raise awareness using marketing and your SDR's. Your prospect has shown interest, you are doing discovery and then perhaps a presentation and demo perhaps with an SE. Your prospect wants to buy but needs to be convinced. You are doing POC's ROI's proposals etc using the correct resources and so on.

Ideally a sales engagement application should be divorced form the CRM and the CRM should be updated by the sales engagement system. This day is coming! SFDC will be disrupted completely in the next two years. I am aware of and you will see at least one sales engagement system that does exactly what i describe powered by AI.

However, in the mean time if you would like to set your CRM up in the way I have described please reach out! You are far better off with the right process partially automated then you are with the wrong process totally automated.

Cadence Tools

The way these tools are implemented they go a really long way towards hurting productivity. But, they are good tools if you use them right.

There are three things we need to remember when you do reach out. These things are: Prospects do not want to speak to you unless they are already interested, you are a stranger to them, and you are selling in the digital age.

Hammering a base with your product pitch and web site content with email is not effective because only at best five percent of the market is already interested and as such the rest of the market does not want to engage you.

Emailing a prospect that does not want to talk to you and to whom you are a stranger is not at all effective. The first question you must ask yourself is "how do I get a stranger who does not want to talk to me to engage" The thing you must do is get them curious enough. You do not accomplish this with email because it is too direct. They know if they respond that they must engage you. But if you use things that do not force them to engage immediately you will have better luck. You can use Blogs, videos, e books, white papers, and third parties that they already have a relationship with. Your website should absolutely contain links to all of these things. You can also drive them to these mediums through social media networks. But stop emailing them! Email will typically only receive a response if the prospect is interested, it does not go to their spa folder, and they want to speak to you.

You must get them curious enough to first engage without a response directly to you. Remember, unless they are keenly interested, they do not want to talk to you, you are a stranger. But if they are curious, they might watch a video, download a white paper or e-book, or visit your website. These are all forms of engagement that indicate a prospect is curious but not ready to reach out to you.

The final point is that you are trying to sell in the digital age. You cannot influence an audience on a single channel. The ability to impact someone’s opinion via a single channel is very limited an ineffective. People are influenced and learn from repetition. Think back to the way you learned in school. Perhaps you had a teacher, a parent and a relative or friend tell you something 5 times each for a total of 15 times. But if that is not enough for you consider this. When we had Three major channels on television and a few newspapers people all had similar opinions that varied only slightly by today’s standards. Again, perhaps you got told something 5 times and you go tit from 3 or 4 sources. When cable came along and the number of channels exploded people's opinions started to vary more because they started to hear more of different things from more different sources more often. This may have meant you were told or exposed to something 5 times form say 6 or 7 sources. Roll the clock forward to the last ten years where social media exploded and streaming became more mainstream. This may mean that you may be exposed to something 5 times from 10 or 15 different sources! Today we have a good number of people that believe the moon landing never happened, the covid vaccine has something in it so that you can be tracked, the world is flat, and Apollo seventeen was not the last Apollo mission as there was an Apollo eighteen that was never reported because the astronauts were killed by aliens! Again, these theories have been put forth across many media channels many times. They become a part of people’s opinions because of how many times they heard it. People are influenced and learn by repetition. Your single channel email will just be swallowed up and lost in the pure volume or competing messages and the myriad of other channels by which they are delivered.

In order to be effective in the digital age you must have a website, be on social media, blog, have video, have e-books and white papers. You must use all of these in your marketing and reach out attempts. The role of cadence tools is to manage these campaigns and track the prospects across all of the channels of engagement to see if they are curious and to expose them to more and more different media channels to get them to react. Cadence tools that track primarily email campaigns are almost as useless as the email campaigns themselves.

By the way if you are interested in a platform that creates world class digital content rapidly that you can modify rapidly reach out and I will plug you in. This AI technology cannot only create the content but host webpages, blogs, video, e books, white papers and other custom built campaigns that are targeted at specific buyers. This is an example of AI that can really help you!

Video Conferencing

Again, this is fantastic technology that is massively mis-used by the very under skilled!

Video is used from the initial meetings you will have all the way through close. Yet, few are trained in how to effectively communicate over that medium and even fewer know the right way to use it! Do you really think that you communicate over video the same way you do in person to a live prospect. You do not. You should know this is true but if you want proof reach please reach out. I will plug you into a great trainer who was an actress. She started her career acting in front of live audiences. However, not to long after she had to act for the camera for TV production. These days she trains salespeople how to be effective in front of the camera. She will tell you why they are very different and what you need to do differently in front of the camera.

When you have been properly trained, learn to use video the right way. The first rule is do not record anything unless you simply want the video to be used for informational purposes. There is no one that is going to give you the information you need about politics, influencers, internal process, and anything they might deem sensitive on a recorded line! I do not care how much your manager wants you to record so they can critique you and coach you. Tell them to do that with the informational presentations you do!

When you have a presentation that is to decision makers and key influencers try and do that in person. I know with remote work that is harder these days. But you are way better off in a room you can read then you are on video for those presentations. But if you must be on video have another person on the call who is there to add value but who also has the main assignment of reading the room and the reactions the best they can. This person should also take notes. When you engage a room on video correctly you really can't also read the room and take notes. Oh and please do not tell me that this is the reason you record it! Yes you may be able to go back and review it later but your are reviewing pablum! They are not going to tell very much that really matters. They are also not going to tell you anything they are not telling your competitors.

The AI revolution is here, and it will gain more momentum this year and next. But most of the AI I have seen just helps you get even more unproductive faster! Ai that does things that you cannot effectively do now and allows you to implement process and automation that improves productivity is the ticket. A good rule of thumb is "does the AI automate something I am doing now it’s likely not going to help." "Does the AI do it for my salesperson or does the AI do it with my salesperson?" Ai that does it with your salesperson and makes them think more and do it better is good. AI that does something they do not like to do for them is generally bad. AI that does something with your salesperson that they cannot do now, that is more effective and makes them think more is the best AI!

The good news is that AI platforms and training I am referencing in this article are fractions of fractions of what you have already invested in the tools you have.

In the end bad AI will create the same outcomes as all the technology that had been applied to b2b selling. Good AI that helps improve and automate process will bring high productivity gains. AI that helps you execute the wrong process faster will make it worse.

There is one distinction to look for though. AI that does what you cannot do now is AI that has the most potential. The two AI technologies I outlined above are examples. You must be multi-channel today. Btu your corporate IT, and you marketing org. are set up for the masses. Your marketing org. is not set up to produce targeted campaigns for small numbers of targeted prospects. Your IT is not set up to host web pages, blogs, videos and custom-built content. Your IT would take months to get it up and running, your marketing would take weeks to build it and more weeks to change it. Hence an AI product that can take inputs, read the internet and then rapidly produce and host multi-channel content is a game changer!

The same is true of a sales engagement application that uses AI to intake massive amounts of external data and internal data. A sales engagement system that tracks activity based on where the client is in the cycle and them uses AI to recommend next best activities in another game changer. SFDC was developed over 20 years ago. The user interface for sales look pretty much like a set of data entry screens. They may call that module a sales engagement module but if it walks like a system of record and it quacks like a system of record it is a system of record. AI based sales engagement will forever disrupt SFDC and CRM in general.

Again, if you would like to hear more about these please reach out.