XANT Chief Strategy Officer Dave Boyce shares with us the benefits of collective intelligence and how it fuels the next generation sales platform. Read on to find out more.

RELATED: How Artificial Intelligence Helps Sales Reps Close More Deals

In this article:

1. Redefining Enterprise Information Architecture
2. The Sales Technology of the Last Generation
3. Sales Reps Spend Time on Low-Quality Prospects
4. The Need for a Next Gen Sales Technology
5. Collective Intelligence Technologies
6. Benefits of Collective Intelligence
   1. It Recommends a List of Prospects Based on Your Target Person
   2. It Gives You Information on Prospects’ Phone Numbers
   3. It Helps You Optimize the Emails You Send to Prospects
7. How Collective Intelligence Works
8. The Value of Collective Intelligence for Sales Teams

How Collective Intelligence Can Change the World of Inside Sales

Collective Intelligence Definition: This refers to the shared intelligence that comes from the collaboration of individuals. It can also consistently predict a group’s performance in the future.

Redefining Enterprise Information Architecture

Boyce started off the discussion with a little thought experiment.

• If you had the opportunity to redefine enterprise information architecture, how would you do it?
• If you can rebuild the way we manage our data in enterprises, how would you do it?

Boyce argued that we would rebuild it the way we built the Internet. This way, the more people that use it, the more valuable it becomes for each user.

This is the characteristic we see in sites like Netflix and Amazon. They match watching and purchasing patterns to make relevant recommendations to each user.

The more people that use Netflix and Amazon, the more useful they become to each user.

Enterprise architecture wasn’t built that way. It was actually lifted from client-server data structures.

It has clearly-defined firewalls and silos that keep the data within four walls, never to mingle.

The Sales Technology of the Last Generation

Since we have the next generation sales technology, what’s considered as the “last generation” sales technology?

Boyce made a bold statement on this: The last generation sales technology is CRM, and CRM is dead.

He clarified that this doesn’t mean CRM is going away. Rather, it’s considered “dead” because it no longer adds incremental value to sales teams.

It has already reached its peak in terms of adding value and has now relegated as a database and record system. There is no opportunity for it to stretch beyond where it is right now.

Now, let’s look at the era we’re currently living in. We’re in the most impressively-sustained period of economic growth in the United States and most of the world.

This should be great for our sales teams, right? Yet in reality, it hasn’t been that way.

We’re now down to 53% of sales reps achieving quota on average in the U.S. A lot of that is because 92% of companies are raising their targets every year for their sales teams.

These companies also add new members to their team, thinking that by adding new people, they’ll be able to hit their target. They also give their sales reps pieces of technology similar to CRM so they can do more.

Yet, they’re just not working. All these changes don’t help salespeople sell more.

Sales Reps Spend Time on Low-Quality Prospects

Spending time productively to hit the quota

One of the problems is how sales reps spend their time. Yes, they may be working, but they’re also spending time on the wrong things.

Boyce cited a conceptual graph that tracked the effort sales reps put in on different types of prospects. It shocked him to discover how evenly-distributed sales reps’ efforts are across all qualities of prospects.

Why would anyone spend time and effort on low-quality prospects, you ask? It’s because they’re the ones who return calls, schedule demos, attend meetings, and take slots on our calendars.

Those make sales reps feel good and busy, but they don’t necessarily mean closed deals.

If companies had the ability to determine which prospects and activities are high-quality, they would aim their time and effort toward those.

If companies give their sales teams tools that allow them to do more, they can also reach out to the low-quality prospects. Of course, this is after they exhaust all opportunities they have with high-quality prospects.

To achieve that, companies need information about the future. The problem is, this information isn’t present in CRM.

The Need for a Next Gen Sales Technology

CRM has information about history. What sales teams need is information about the future, and this is what sales reps crave for every day.

They spend 18% of their time in CRM to record details about deals they’ve already closed and activities they’ve already performed. All that effort so that sales managers can feel better about knowing what they are doing.

In contrast, they spend 65% of their time in tools where they’re looking forward to tomorrow’s deals. Those are tools like Inbox, LinkedIn, and sales productivity applications like XANT.

They want to know where buyers are and how they can find and engage them. This is the kind of job that you’ll entrust not to CRM, but to artificial intelligence.

AI runs on data, but not all data is equal. Sales reps want data about the buyers.

Remember that tomorrow’s buyers look different than yesterday’s. In fact, today’s B2B customers act like consumers.

All the data from the past you loaded into your CRM aren’t relevant if you’re trying to figure out present and future buying behavior.

Collective Intelligence Technologies

Where can companies get the information about the future that they need? Not out of CRM, but rather out of something we call “collective intelligence.”

An easy way to understand this is to compare it with Waze, the navigation app. Every single user of this app agrees to stream data off of their device while they’re using it.

Google then analyzes the data and uses it to help the rest of its users navigate in the most efficient way. In short, every Waze user contributes data for the benefit of the whole community.

There’s nothing artificial about this. It’s real intelligence from users who are accessing the app real-time.

That is collective intelligence — real-time feedback from the collective that helps other users.

Benefits of Collective Intelligence

Enhancing sales with collective intelligence technology

Instead of using CRM, imagine your sales reps are logging into a next-best prospect, next-best action-scripted interface. This system tells them the next best course of action for a prospect who’s enrolled in an IT executive play.

Not only is the system telling them what to do and who to call, but it also suggests a script for a prospect call. What are the other benefits you can get out of this next generation sales technology?

RELATED: 7 Data-Backed Sales Best Practices [INFOGRAPHIC]

1. It Recommends a List of Prospects Based on Your Target Person

Imagine yourself in your sales reps’ shoes, using this next gen sales technology powered by collective intelligence.

Before you call your prospect, the system gives a list of recommended prospects whom other sales reps before you also reached out to. Other reps who got engagement from the prospect you’re reaching out to also got engagement from these recommended prospects.

That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re your buying committee, but it’s a good place to start.

If these are people worth considering, you can enroll them in their specific place. This will save you time doing LinkedIn research, title-matching, and trying to guess your prospect’s buying committee.

2. It Gives You Information on Prospects’ Phone Numbers

Let’s say you’re now going to call your prospect. You want to make sure you’ll be able to get in touch with them.

Right next to their phone number are three bars that give useful information. For example, someone within the collective called this particular 10-digit sequence six days ago and received an answer.

That means someone ahead of you, who is on the same path you want to be on, got engagement from this phone number. It’s a good number, so you can go ahead and place that call.

3. It Helps You Optimize the Emails You Send to Prospects

After you call your prospect, in this IT executive play, the system says email is next. What if you don’t like the one-bar signal the system projected for the email address you’ll contact?

One option is to run different permutations of the email address. Then, see if any of those have ever gotten an engagement within your network.

Let’s say you get a hit. You can now check the engagement rate with that email address.

If it’s better, you can send your email to that address instead.

Another advantage of collective intelligence systems is that you can ask your network when the best time to send an email to the prospect is. The collective can vote on it, and you can use that data for decision making.

How Collective Intelligence Works

Collective intelligence improving sales

Using collective intelligence requires a lot of data. It requires data about successes and failures.

To gain collective intelligence, you need to log all the relevant data that will be useful to users. This includes things like each call placed, each action taken on an email, and what the title of the target person and their geography are.

You log all this data, whether it lead to a sale or not. A hundred billion of those with associated outcomes — that’s critical mass.

In the last generation sales technology, we relied on sales reps to enter information about their activities. Yet a sales rep wouldn’t enter all the information about their activities, like an unanswered phone call.

When all those relevant data points come together, you’ll know what works and what doesn’t, then you can make recommendations.

That’s what we call collective intelligence.

When you have all this information, you have critical mass. Then your collective intelligence AI can start adding value the same way Waze does.

Collective intelligence requires critical mass. The more people use the system, the more value they can get out of it.

The Value of Collective Intelligence for Sales Teams

Sales companies spend billions of dollars to get access to collective intelligence data. They want to optimize their sales teams.

They’re equipping them to do more of the right things so they can hit their quotas.

These sales teams are also making money. They’ve figured out a way to leverage the power of the collective, and it makes them more powerful.

Collective intelligence is real intelligence. It comes from people who are ahead of you on the path, and they’re leading you on the way you want to go.

Now, inside sales provides a systematized collective intelligence which you can let your sales reps use. This will make them smarter and faster at what they do so they can hit their quota.

Don’t let CRM box you in — leverage the power of collective intelligence and the next generation sales technology. When you understand the benefits of collective intelligence, you can take advantage of it.

Providing the data that your sales reps need will help them become more efficient and productive. In turn, you’ll be able to achieve the end goal — hitting your sales quota.

What are the advantages and limitations of the sales technology you’re currently using? We’d love to hear from you in the comments section below.

Up Next:

• 9 Best Sales Software Systems for Your Business
• How Artificial Intelligence Is Changing B2B Social Selling
• Inside vs Outside Sales: What’s the Difference Between the Two

RELATED: 15 Sales Management Software And CRMs Used By Sales Teams

In this article:

1. Current Landscape of CRM Software Market
2. Different Benefits of Using a CRM Software
   1. More Streamlined Data Management
   2. Faster Inter-Company Collaboration
   3. Enhanced Customer Interactions
   4. Increased Sales
   5. Lower Overhead Costs
   6. Remote and Flexible Software Access
   7. More Organized Social Media Marketing

Different Perks of Using a CRM Software

What is CRM Software? A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software allows businesses of all sizes to engage with customers more efficiently and effectively. Through automation and streamlining, CRM helps businesses achieve a better customer experience. And at the same time, the business can also gain better data and analytics.

Current Landscape of CRM Software Market

CRM software used to be available only for large enterprise companies. Nowadays, there’s CRM software that caters to small businesses as well.

Some vendors may offer free CRM software package for a limited time. This may depend on their free trial terms and agreement.

CRM software brings all client information into one live interface. With it, you can track your clients’ call logs, sales history, requests, and appointments.

Some of the best CRM software may also give real-time notifications about clients’ significant activities. Examples include the number of times they access your website or click links from your emails.

Different Benefits of Using a CRM Software

1. More Streamlined Data Management

One large benefit of CRM is helping users have an organized data management and storage system.

Through this, different departments can easily access the data that they need. It can assure you and your team that no customer data is misplaced or misclassified.

CRM software also lets you set data parameters. This means that only authorized employees or departments can access sensitive customer information.

Aside from streamlining data, it also helps you safeguard your CRM data ecosystem from hackers.

Data Privacy Definition: A company or an individual’s ability to distinguish which personal information in a computer system can be shared with external or third parties.

2. Faster Inter-Company Collaboration

Since CRM software lets you streamline databases, it enables faster inter- and intra-department collaboration.

Everyone can also access on-location and real-time data, which allows for easier sharing of insights and faster decision-making. There can be a faster turn-around time for sales-related reports.

For example, decision-makers can take a quick browse through the CRM and already be well informed. This can help them come strategize and decide faster when needed, such as when reacting to volatile market trends.

3. Enhanced Customer Interactions

Another practical benefit of using CRM software is achieving more leads and unparalleled customer retention.

CRM can help you answer customers’ problems or queries faster by providing users with a 360-degree view of all pertinent customer information.

Suppose a customer calls to report a deficient product.

Your customer service team can flag the product’s serial number in the system. Then, your logistics team can analyze the product’s manufacturing batch. Necessary replacements can be made faster.

From there, your finance team can forecast the replacement costs to your monthly bottom line.

Your customer service team can use CRM to analyze recurring problems. This lets them reduce the turn-around time of customer engagements.

At the same time, your marketing team may also use such information to parse data and forecast market trends.

The software enables departments to anticipate customer needs better. Employees can thoroughly analyze customer demographics and segmentation.

RELATED: Stop Pitching: Start Solving Problems For Your Customers

4. Increased Sales

Another major benefit of having CRM software is achieving more robust sales growth.

Through automation, you can monitor your sales pipeline more comprehensively.

You can easily pinpoint which deals to prioritize. You can also track which customers are profitable and which ones are not.

Also, this software can also help you track client interaction. All information can be captured, whether by phone, email, or through customer helpdesk.

This can help your business employ a more comprehensive target marketing plan. At the same time, you can take advantage of big data analyses and an automated sales dashboard, too.

As a result, you can better identify client prospects for upselling or cross-selling. This can minimize sales cycles while boosting sales success rates.

For example, by using CRM, your Sales department can give a quick scan of your current sales figures and be able to assess the most performing sales clusters.

They can forward this information to the Supply Chain and the Logistics departments. This client information can help the departments organize more effective marketing trials.

CRM software helps you monitor both performing and needy sales clusters. As a result, you can gain better insights on how to spread your resources among teams.

5. Lower Overhead Costs

Profitability can also be achieved by decreasing overhead costs. Through automation, the time spent on manual procedures can be allocated to other important tasks.

With user-friendly CRM tools, you can also reduce training costs.

CRM helps you equip employees with easy-to-understand standard operating procedures (SOP). This can also help your business avoid doubling of tasks.

CRM also gives you an easier time aligning accounting, sales, and inventory monitoring tasks.

All forms, templates, and procedure lists can be universally available in your system, for everyone’s easy access.

Also, all avenues of customer engagements, such as emails and phone calls can be tracked better. A CRM system helps your customer service team forward clients’ concerns to the right department immediately.

This, in turn, lets you see which teams or employees are performance hotspots. This lets you recognize performers for incentives faster, too.

6. Remote and Flexible Software Access

One important functionality of CRM software is its ability to be remotely accessed.

Using the software, you can access customer information, sales history, and delivery schedules anytime and anywhere.

The software also lets you access real-time inventory counts and clients’ credit limits using your authorized devices. This helps you process approvals within minutes instead of days.

These features would be very helpful, especially in field sales.

During a client meeting, you can log field inputs in the CRM software. While you are pitching, your back office can already start processing the inputs and produce a quote.

Then, you can easily show the quote as your meeting ends. This can save you time from scheduling another meeting just to show a customized quote.

7. More Organized Social Media Marketing

CRM software also gives a panoramic view of all social media platforms.

Since social media is a crucial part of modern-day marketing, CRM can help you monitor your business’ online engagements.

You can have consolidated monitoring of all your online platforms to track which network is the most effective in generating traffic. This can help you assess online trends to know the most effective time to roll out new marketing campaigns and promotions.

Moreover, CRM software also helps monitor if you’re successfully reaching your ideal online customer profiles. This can aid you in developing new products for your target market.

Indeed, CRM software can open more doors of opportunities for your company.

Through automation and streamlining of inter-departmental processes, you can boost your employees’ productivity while achieving your target sales growth.

The best CRM software for your business should be able to help you increase sales and productivity, have better coordination among employees, and achieve a healthier sales pipeline.

Up Next:

• TechTarget: How a Millennial Workforce Benefits Sales Teams, CRM
• Is CRM Dead? How Sales Reps Can Get The Most Out of CRM
• Top 25 Sales Leaders Award Winners

Learn the different software you can use to optimize your sales management functions from Kyle Lacy, Lessonly’s Vice President of Marketing, in this episode of Sales Secret.

In this article:

1. About My Guest — Who Is Kyle Lacy?
2. Sales Management Software for Optimizing Stack
3. Sales Management Software for Direct Mail
4. Sales Management Software for Sales Cadence
5. Sales Management Software for Project Management
6. Sales Management Software for Email Marketing
7. Sales Management Software for Sales Playbooks
8. Important Tips on Getting A Software Vendor

Top Sales Management Software You Should Invest On

What Is Sales Management? This process involves sales force development, sales operations coordination, and the implementation of sales techniques. With proper sales management, the business could hit and surpass their sales targets.

About My Guest—Who Is Kyle Lacy?

Kyle Lacy is the Vice President of Marketing for Lessonly, an online training software. Their services include sales enablement, onboarding, and training customer service and sales teams.

The training they offer spans across software retail, e-commerce, and telecom.

Lessonly is Indianapolis-based, with a team of more than 100 employees. Kyle’s role consists of almost all top-of-funnel dimensions.

He also manages his own team of Sales Development Reps (SDRs) and Managers.

Before joining Lessonly, Kyle worked with Salesforce and ExactTarget, then spent a couple of years at OpenView in Boston.

Kyle’s hometown is Indianapolis, which is why he and his wife took the opportunity to move back by working in OpenView’s portfolio company, Lessonly.

During our discussion with Lacy, he shared with us the different sales management software he and his sales team use to improve their processes. These help them optimize their sales process and activities so they can be more efficient.

Sales Management Software for Optimizing Stack

Using sales management software

When it comes to optimizing their stack, Lessonly uses three different pieces of software to yield accurate information.

Initially, Kyle and his team thought about how they can source qualified accounts for their team of sales reps who need them. Before, their sales reps sourced these on their own for Account Executives.

They realized that the best thing they can do for their SDRs was to give them qualified accounts by sourcing these based off of market signals.

Those market signals could be fundraising or at inside sales, among others. This then became the foundation of their pursuit to optimize their stack.

Eventually, Lessonly got DataFox to provide this information for them. Now they’re tracking 80 different market signals within the platform.

Here’s how it works.

• DataFox comes up with accounts that they may find interesting.
• In turn, Lacy and his team have their sales representatives work on those accounts.

Lacy admitted that, on the marketing side, they are still working on how to qualify with intent. They recognized that they must first establish the account level and then work up from it.

Another software they use for optimizing stack is Sales Navigator, but it wasn’t enough to find the right contacts. This is why they supplemented it with ZoomInfo.

Lacy emphasized that the accounts are the foundation. You can only optimize your stack if you’re able to work up from an established foundation.

In reality, though, the leads are the problem for a lot of people. They may get lots of accounts, but they don’t know where to start.

For Lessonly, DataFox is the tool that helps them know which leads they should go after, then they use Sales Navigator and ZoomInfo to make sure that their SDRs have the right contact information on those leads.

Sales Management Software for Direct Mail

One of the core components of Lessonly’s sales strategy is direct mail. This is the best-performing medium for them, as Kyle revealed.

Together, DataFox and ZoomInfo provide the data that allows them to get accurate addresses of their leads. They did all this in-house, but now they also brought in Sendoso to take care of their direct mail enablement.

We asked Kyle for tips when it comes to utilizing direct mail, and he shared interesting insights.

He said the most important thing is to involve your reps in the process, especially if you’re doing it for a sales audience. Whether it’s handwriting cards or using Sendoso, getting them involved in the process is important.

Kyle admitted that you cannot always rely on direct mail for direct sources, but it will drive sales pipeline faster.

Based on Lessonly’s experience, the best-performing direct mail is not about their product — it’s about their brand. One way Lessonly promotes their brand is through their “Golden Llama award,” as a Llama is their mascot.

Every quarter, they give this to an employee who exhibits their values. This is what they highlight in their direct mail to prospects, because it shows their values, not a feature set.

For Kyle, sending creative coffee cards is also a great way to reach out. They allow Lessonly to stand out from the other direct mail that prospects receive.

Sales Management Software for Sales Cadence

For Lessonly, using direct mail as their medium meant adding contacts on top of the funnel. Each SDR’s task is to do 25 a day.

To track this properly, they need salesforce dashboards, which is why they now use SalesLoft for cadences.

Applying this process is important, and so they needed to make sure that the sales team is doing it. Through cadences, they can also ensure that their team is able to keep up on the activity level they expect them to.

When asked what kind of advantage cadences give their sales team, Kyle said it’s the process that they provided. Their sales team can follow the process so they can get in front of prospects.

The secondary advantage is the standardization around messaging.

Kyle shared that, before, their SDRs freely did what they wanted, so their cadences differed from each other. The problem with this is that they can’t yield a data set they can use for decision-making.

Everybody did something different, and each one used a different messaging. This process may work, but you will get to the point where you cannot create a database from the information you have.

Not setting a standard for your sales team will only let you keep track of scores. You’re not trying to create better actions in the future, which is the number one thing in cadence tracking.

Through tools like SalesLoft and XANT, they can set the process their SDRs can work with.

RELATED: The 5 Step Process to Building a Sales Cadence That Works

Sales Management Software for Project Management

Kyle introduced us to two software for project management —Trello and monday.com.

Their team uses Trello to keep track of their spreads, tasks, and blockers — basically everything they do as a team. When projects started to become more robust for their team of 11, they discovered that Gantt charts weren’t working on Trello.

As a result, their team wasn’t able to manage their to-do’s and tasks very well.

That’s when monday.com came in. Kyle’s team started to use it to keep track of their bigger projects, such as their enterprise campaign and direct mail campaign.

They integrated these two tools for their day-to-day tasks and big project pieces. Now they have two software they can rely on for project management.

Sales Management Software for Email Marketing

Email marketing with sales management software

Another software Lacy shared with us is Sigstr. This is an Indianapolis-based company offering email marketing services.

One of their offers is email signature marketing. They can set up your email signature to redirect recipients to a landing page, which is typically your company website.

This way, people can learn more about you and your business just from the email you send them.

Sigstr also has a Relationship Intelligence functionality, which uses your email inbox to find connections among contacts.

For instance, if someone within your company has already interacted with a specific lead, Sigstr can tell you who it is. This can save anybody in the organization from spending time and energy establishing a relationship from scratch.

The Relationship Intelligence feature is especially useful for large organizations. Sigstr believes that the email inbox is the most important relationship we have with our network, as we spend a lot of our time here.

This is why they provide ways for companies to maximize the use of their email inbox.

Sales Management Software for Sales Playbooks

To keep track of client information, Lessonly uses Dooly. It mainly assists their Account Executives and SDRs in note-taking.

With the help of this software, they can keep track of what is happening in every sales meeting. As Lacy put it, Dooly makes it easier for them to input data in their CRM.

Important Tips on Getting A Software Vendor

When it comes to the evaluation of sales management software, there are three things you need to remember:

1. The software should be able to fill a hole in your sales process.
2. You should let the vendor know that you expect a 1-to-1, if not 3-to-1, return on your spend for their platform.
3. Make a decision based on the return of investment.

Follow these basic guidelines so you can pick the right sales management software that will yield the best results.

If you want to get in touch with Kyle Lacy, you can send him a message on LinkedIn. You can also check out Lessonly’s website for more info.

The main purpose of sales management software is to make the sales process more efficient by automation. Keep in mind that you need to carefully consider its purpose and the return it will yield.

In this way, you can choose a platform that will not only optimize your processes, but will also give you successful sales.

Which one of these sales management software can you use for your own sales team? Let us know in the comments section below.

Up Next: 10 Sales Management Software And CRMs Used By Sales Teams

I know what you’re thinking – that’s the most derivative statement a sales professional can make. But it doesn’t make the assertion less true.

Over the years, I’ve learned that it doesn’t matter how much I plan and organize my day. If I don’t know how to manage my time, there’s little that I can get done at the end of the day.

From experience, and from watching others, I have learned that it doesn’t take much to become successful at selling. You only need to know how to use every minute of your day to the fullest.

My Hacks For Time Management in Sales

While I still consider myself on the learning curve, here are some key takeaways that I’ve managed to score over the last decade in sales:

Never Multitask

If there’s anything I’ve learned over the last ten years, is to stop multitasking in sales. Some studies show multitasking is a myth. But regarding sales, engaging in different tasks require different mental muscles. For example: giving a demo requires a completely different mindset and focus as compared to prospecting. Instead of trying to give it a go at different things at the same time, try to group similar activities.

It can help you save time and become productive at accomplishing tasks and ticking off items on your to-do list.

Do What You Hate First

As a sales rep, everyone hates performing a particular task – be it prospecting, making a cold call, logging information to Salesforce, etc. I often leave things that I hate doing to the last, and it always meddles with my concentration because I know I have to get it done before the end of the day. I used to over-invest my time performing other tasks and found that I was mismanaging my time a lot. Now, I just tackle activities that I don’t enjoy doing first. I assign myself a two-hour block to complete that task at the starting of the day so that I can focus on doing the things I’m best at for the rest of the day.

Go to DND (Do-Not-Disturb) Mode:

Distractions are a huge part of my job. That doesn’t help when I need to get important and complex tasks. As a sales rep (either at team or managerial level) it’s integral to physically shut yourself away and concentrate on getting things done on your to-do list. Turn off your phone, notifying your team that you’ll be unavailable for the next thirty minutes, set yourself away on your company’s internal channel and focus on the task at hand without being interrupted.

Biggest Time Wasters in Sales, And How To Avoid Them

Sale reps are always in a time-crunch. But you’ll be surprised to find out that they spend an unnecessarily large portion of their day on dispensable tasks. To become more productive at time-management, make sure to:

1) Setting unrealistic goals: Don’t fill up your entire day, back-to-back with ten different things to do. Chances are, you’ll crash and burn. Your mind can’t jump so quickly from one activity to another (bringing back to point 1: don’t multitask), and you want to set realistic expectations of what you can achieve in one day. Divide your day into blocks of two to three hours (at most), and assign activities to each of those blocks.

2) Prospects flaking: There’s a high chance that one or two prospects might cancel a call the last minute. Write them an email and summarize what you hoped to achieve in that call. If you’d rather wait to get them on the phone, make use of your free time and pivot into other productive activities.

3) Poor throughput: When I first started in sales, I quickly realized the importance of getting ALL decision makers on the first sales call. I’ve had to give the same demo to one lead multiple times because all of the decision-makers were not there for the first call. Now, I simply ask my prospect who is involved in the decision-making process and schedule a demo with all of them.

Tools For Improved Productivity

In sales, it’s important to eliminate and automate monotonous and administrative tasks. With a great tool stack, you can do that and so much more.

At ContactMonkey, we use a suite of tools that help the sales department remain productive and successful.

Following are some tools that my team uses to help manage time more effectively:

1) Salesforce

2) Drift

3) Join.Me

4) ContactMonkey

5) Buffer

6) Asana

7) Trello

8) Slack

9) DocuSign

Being a sales professional is difficult. It entails odd working hours, high-pressure work environment, tight deadlines, and so much more. When there’s a lot to get done, and very little time, these productivity hacks can help you get the most out of your day, and exceed monthly quotas.

Free whitepaper download – 15 time wasters of inside sales and lead generation.

This is where sales enablement can add value. As a sales enablement specialist, my role is to improve sales reps’ performance, and I do this by leveraging training, content, technology and deal support to help them beat their quota.

As I’m sure you can imagine, I’m asked a lot of questions by sales reps. But not all questions are created equal – nor do they need to be answered by a human. To free up my time and provide immediate answers to sales rep queries, I created a ChatBot.

But before we get into that, let me explain what I do.

What Is Sales Enablement?

The role exists to positively influence the performance of a company’s sales organization by helping reps close more deals, more quickly.

Today, more and more companies are wising up to how sales enablement can dramatically increase sales productivity and the function is no longer regarded as an optional extra, but an important investment in sales rep success.

Sales enablement is here to stay, and there’s lots of research which points to a promising future:

• 2% of companies now have a dedicated sales enablement function (up from 32.7%), while 8.5% of companies have plans to create one in the coming year (CSO Insights).
• Sales enablement technology is currently a $780M market, and it is expected to be worth $5B by 2021 (Aragon Research).
• Companies with a sales enablement team are 52% more likely to have a sales process that’s tightly aligned with the buyer’s journey (Highspot).

Sales Enablement Tools

In the early days of sales enablement, when practitioners like myself would be “building the plane while flying it”, we would often stitch together a stack of disparate tools to get the job done. While this worked up to point, it was suboptimal.

However, times are changing and today, armed with the right CRM software and sales tools, we can make a big impact on sales reps’ productivity, proficiency and performance, boosting overall revenue.

One of my favorite productivity tools right now is the ChatBot I built for HubSpot’s sales team.

Why I Created the ChatBot

Each week, I can spend a large portion of my time answering sales reps’ questions. As I mentioned earlier, not all questions are created equal, and for the most part they can be split into one of two categories:

1. Consultant questions – low volume, high value queries that require a bespoke response. For example, when a sales rep wants advice, guidance or coaching. This is a great use of a sales enablement specialist’s time.
2. Agent questions – high volume, low value queries that require a templated response. For example, sourcing case studies, sharing competitive intelligence, sales decks or links to various resources.

Thanks to bots technology, the way to avoid spending too much time answering agent-type questions was clear. To lighten the load, we created a ChatBot as part of our internal Slack channel to help answer the most common agent-style questions from our sales reps.

Here’s How It Works

The bot was built to answer questions frequently asked by sales reps. It works by quickly pointing sales reps to the right answer and relevant information wherever they are in the sales process.

For example, here are just a few of the things that any sales rep can ask our ChatBot:

• Who are <competitor name>?
• How did we beat <competitor name>?
• Market research / statistics
• <Product> case studies
• ROI of HubSpot
• GDPR information
• Sales aids / sales decks / playbooks
• Brand guidelines / standardized spelling

Our Sales ChatBot Is Here To Stay

It’s only been 3 months since the launch of our sales Slack ChatBot, but it has already increased productivity.

For the sales team, the ChatBot provides the perfect channel, cadence and format for many of the standard, agent questions sales reps might ask:

1. It Streamlines Sales Processes: ChatBot messages are short and easy to read, making information easy to assimilate. They empower sales reps by providing succinct answers in seconds.
2. It’s scalable: An internal ChatBot channel solution is viable for sales organizations of any size. We update it with new information each week.
3. It’s available 24/7” The ChatBot is there to use at any hour, in any time zone, across any device and whether or not your reps are in the office, on the go or working from home.

For a sales enablement specialist, this means a reduction in low value questions, freeing up my time to focus on more strategic work. It also means we’re providing sales enablement in a more scalable way and have analytics into the types of questions sales reps have, which informs our approach.

In the past three months since I launched the ChatBot, here’s what I noticed:

1. I saved time: Approximately 20 hours per month. That’s because the ChatBot helped me by answering over 500 questions per month.
2. I moved the needle on bigger deals: All that time saved meant that I can focus on the more valuable consultant-style questions that require a bespoke response.

This Is Just The Beginning

To conclude, sourcing (or building) your own sales business ChatBot should be a key sales automation goal in 2018 – whether or not your organization has a dedicated sales enablement function. If you have a smaller sales team, sales managers and their reps could just as easily benefit from this on-demand technology.

If you’d like to learn more about my sales enablement work at HubSpot, you can follow me on Twitter or subscribe to my blog. Happy to connect with you and answer any question you might have on the topic.

B2B Sales Problems That Artificial Intelligence Can Solve

If we think about B2B sales, it’s a very complex environment. The competition is fierce, technology is more rapid, and profit margins have shrunk. There’s three main problems that are keeping sales leaders awake at night, and this is just the short list:

1. Sales leaders don’t know when they are leaving money on the table. They need to hit quota, and they don’t know when they have passed up a really good opportunity.
2. They also don’t know if they are chasing the right accounts and opportunities. What if they deploy all their resources and their lieutenants on the wrong accounts? What would have happened if they put the resources elsewhere?
3. Finally, how do they make frontline sales representatives more productive? Our research shows that sales reps spend less than 40% of their time actually selling. This is why finding tools, technologies, and changing processes to make the reps more productive will immediately translate to more revenue.

B2B sales organizations has no choice but to leverage AI as a way to optimize resources and initiatives.

Research shows us that only 60 percent of sales reps are reaching quota, so at this point they have nothing to lose.

What’s Holding Us Back From Implementing AI In B2B Sales?

We mentioned how AI is being used on a large scale in B2C businesses – while B2B is lagging behind in this perspective. Studies have found that only 36 percent of consumers have actually experienced AI in the workplace.

The truth is that B2B sales, especially with enterprise organizations, have traditionally lacked the systems and infrastructure to be confident enough that their data is complete and clean enough to take advantage of AI.

Moreover, B2B sales has always been about building and maintaining customer relationships face to face – and AI has been secondary to that. Business development reps (BDRs) cold call, set in person appointments for an account executive, and relationships are established or further developed.  Mature industries such as chemicals, construction, and manufacturing in particular continue to hold onto the old-school way “sales is done”.

Things are slowly starting to change.

Sales leaders are becoming aware that Artificial Intelligence can help them build more business. It can tap into their data and find hidden gems that will unlock new potential for revenue.

A Simple 3-Step Process to Deploy AI In Your Business

However, sales organizations need to have the personnel structure, the data, the technology, and the initiative to fully gain the benefits of AI. They can’t just flip the switch and hope to see revenue lift. There’s a lot that goes into ensuring that AI’s potential is maximized , but I’ve simplified this into a three-step process for the sake of brevity.

• First, it’s important to make sure everyone in your organization is committed to supporting the AI system. Sometimes sales leaders might own their numbers, but they do not own the technology behind optimizing their system – and that can be a show-stopper. IT leaders need to realize AI’s potential in the B2B space.
• Step two is to make sure that sales reps are actually doing AI-recommended actions. Without understanding why it’s important to use a certain system, sales reps might just ignore it and do sales the way they have always done – with a pen and paper, or even with their old-school sales dialer.
• Step three is to make sure the system and the AI-driven scores are being monitored to ensure success. Sales leaders need to tap into AI data and make adjustments so that targets don’t slip.

How Artificial Intelligence Can Help Realize Human Potential

I’m aware that Artificial Intelligence has had a bit of a bad reputation. It’s been portrayed as an existential threat to human kind. Research shows the major concerns about AI are about job security.

I believe AI is going to create more jobs in a knowledge economy versus reduce them. It’s going to make the sales process more efficient.

At the same time, we will need more people to analyze and interpret the results and make smart decisions from the snippets of wisdom that it throws at us.

In the knowledge economy, sales people who cannot embrace AI insights to more effectively close business will consistently underperform versus their peers.

State of Artificial Intelligence research

Artificial Intelligence Deployment Gone Wrong

AI can’t be just a buzzword. It’s a bad idea to deploy a technology just because it has a ‘cool’ factor to it. “Oh, everybody’s doing AI, we need to do this too.” That’s the quickest way to a disaster.

If we don’t have a well thought-out business case and scenario to optimize and improve sales results, Artificial Intelligence deployment can fail.

There are cases where sales organizations fear AI implementation, thinking that their data is too dirty to use.

My advice is this: don’t be afraid to the advantage of AI – even if your data is not pristine. There’s this idea that you always have to keep data clean, and a lot of people are obsessed with it. But the truth is, even if your data is only 50-70 percent clean – the results of AI predictive sales scores are directionally accurate and provide value to your business.

It still provides insights that make a difference towards your bottom line.

The third type of situation where AI implementation can go wrong is – not being sure what’s important to business growth and revenue. So many sales organizations deploy incentive plans around metrics that are not important and don’t actually increase revenue.

Sales leaders need to make sure that your decisions are based on data and always challenge the outputs from an AI model and work with the implementers – most often data scientists – to refine the inputs and make sure the model is as unbiased and affected as possible.

You Think AI Is Coming 100 Years From Now? How About In Two Weeks?

I mentioned that AI is here already influencing our lives, and it’s here to stay. It’s not something that will happen in some distant future. B2B leaders can experience Artificial Intelligence in their business with a two-week process that starts with deploying the XANT NeuralScan. It’s is the easiest way to measure the potential impact of Artificial Intelligence in B2B sales for your organization.

The NeuralScan is basically three-step process that shows you real AI results in less than two weeks:

1. During a NeuralScan, XANT’s machine learning engine Neuralytics directly connects to a business CRM. We collect relevant data about sales activity, about buyers, sellers, the sales process and its results – what is success and what is failure.
2. We then train a machine learning model specifically to your data and present a read out document to show you the potential impact the model deployment could have on your sales process.
3. The resulting charts show the associated revenue impact, if you were to use AI in your business.

Running your CRM data through a NeuralScan leads to actionable insights such as:

• Identifying the accounts or leads most likely to purchase from you
• Focus on the X% (AI recommended set) of the accounts or leads for improved success
• What are the most important attributes that determine the top X%.

These are just examples, the core of the process is that it allows you to see projections of revenue lift after using AI. We do this by using just a subset of data with your sales metrics.

The Impact of AI on Business Growth

It basically gets AI into your hands to see what it can do for your business.

A NeuralScan enriches your CRM data with over 15 years of cross-company data that we’ve collected with crowdsourcing. You can filter the information to look at business unit data or region, and look at just a segment of your business.

It’s a good way to alleviate concerns about how ready is an organization to embrace an AI solution. In just two weeks, you can get a true representation of what AI can do for your business.

AI not something out of Sci-FI – it’s is already here, and it’s producing results by increasing sales revenue up to 30 percent for businesses. Email us at neuralscan@www.xant.ai to find out how, or visit bit.ly/neuralscan.

Recently I’ve had the honor of being invited to the Andy Paul “Accelerate” podcast, where I was asked how technology can help salespeople get their sales cadence just right.

What’s The Best Sales Cadence?

Sales cadence is the sequence of activities that sales reps do to contact and try to qualify a lead. Now, some companies might get 35,000 inbound leads a month, and certainly they can’t contact them all. Other companies might receive only 20 leads per month, and just give them a lot of attention. So, what to do to make sure you have the best sales cadence for your industry and for your product?

You must always figure out what your priority accounts are, your target audience, and focus on those.

It’s for each company to figure out where they are, and what to do.

Powered by Artificial Intelligence, smart lead response management systems such as Playbooks can help you work out which are the leads most likely to close.

However, there’s a debate here on what technology can do and how much it can help.

I feel like sometimes, a lot of leaders will rely on technology and innovation as a crutch for ailing processes.

“The system will just save me – I’ll just give this to my reps and it will fix everything.”

I think this is a dangerous mindset – we can’t rely on technology alone, without attempting to fix broken processes. It will mean wasted money, and it doesn’t lead to real sales transformation that will grow revenue.

Sales Technology Can’t Help Without Sales Transformation

I often use the following analogy: if I give a weight scale to someone – yeah, it will help them lose weight. That’s what it will do. However, the scale doesn’t help anybody lose weight. It plays a role in it, but really the program around the weight scale, the whole exercise regime, in conjunction with a tool to measure progress, that’s where the power comes in.

I think a lot of times we give a tool and we say, “Oh my goodness, now our cadence is going to be fantastic,” as an example.

But a sales rep can still do whatever they want.

They may not know why they need to change the process – call more times on the same person, or email at the right time. As a result, they simply will do what they have always done. They may still just say, “You know what? I’ve tried to get this guy two or three times, it’s not working.” Then they exit him out of the cadence.

Unless you align all people, systems, and processes to reach a true digital transformation, there is no way you will be successful.

The reps need to know the ‘why’ of what they’re doing, otherwise they will just ignore the technology they have available.

Sales Coaching Is The Answer

Unless you’ve got more coaching to get an optimal sales process, these systems are not saviors. It just doesn’t work like that. Sales representatives – especially millennials – won’t adopt a technology if they don’t understand how it helps them and why they should use it. What’s in it for me – this has to be very clear to them.

XANT conducted research that shows how 8,000 companies structure their sales cadence and how they respond to leads. It showed a huge difference in how sales reps perceive their activity – versus what they are actually doing every day in the field.

It also showed that about 40 percent of leads simply aren’t contacted at all. So, what are sales reps doing with their time?

I suggest you download the Response Audit study, it’s an eye-opening piece.

CRM has been around since the 1980’s, when it was pivotal to automating much of the contact list management for sales reps. This single piece of software has accomplished so much since then. It has managed organize sales efforts for millions of companies, and CRM adoption has been staggering.

According to Gartner, CRM software was an industry estimated at $31 billion, and for 2017 it was estimated to reach $40 billion, with two-digit growth year-on-year.

Everybody is using – or aspires to be big enough – to use a CRM, and it’s an incredibly powerful system.

However, its strength is proving to be its downfall. With the CRM, the sales process is organized according to a linear construct, with opportunities following a single-threaded, phase-based path toward the close, showed Ken Krogue, in a recent Forbes article.

In a traditional sales model, a user makes a call, asks about features and price, and closes or not, based on circumstance.

The Internet and the Rise of Inside Sales

Today, customers are following a non-linear path to the purchase. Thanks to the Internet, they are more empowered than ever to find the best solution for their needs without any assistance from a vendor.

They educate themselves about products, they know what type of product they need and they follow other customer’s recommendations in terms of features and cost-efficiency. They download ebooks, data sheets, read product specifications and read reviews. In Marketing, we know this well: B2B customers consume around five pieces of content before making a purchase decision.

Here’s some stats to show exactly what we mean:

• 70 percent of the buyer’s journey is completed before they even get in touch with a sales rep
• Over half of B2B customers now rely on content to make their buying decisions
• 88 percent of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations

This is the driver behind the rise of sales organizations and the inside sales role recently. Stats show that there has been an increase of 89% of inside sales roles in organizations in the last four years (State of Sales 2017 research).

Inside sales reps are the first point of contact with users who are interested in a company’s products and services, and they have had prior contact or knowledge about the company. 

The classic sales funnel has been disrupted, and the CRM no longer equipped to service modern sales reps needs.

CRM, Rated the Lowest in Terms of Useful Sales Technologies

XANT Labs recent study polled 721 salespeople to determine how reps divide their time between sales tasks and sales systems. The analysis showed there are 13 tasks sales reps to in a typical week.

Surprisingly though, they spend very little time actually selling – and they are incredibly frustrated with the CRM, which they rate as the least useful system.

The eye-opening take-away of the study was: sales reps don’t spend a lot of time actually selling:

• 35.2% of a sales’ reps time is spent on revenue generating activities
• 64% is spent on non-revenue generating activities

Administrative tasks such as dealing with internal policies and approvals (14.8%) and customer meetings (14%) take up the most time for sales reps. Admin tasks are also the ones they find least effective for the job.

In fact, sales reps rate spending time on social media 7% more effective than admin tasks or meetings.

What CRM Is Still Lacking – A Way to Be More Than a Spreadsheet

Sales reps spend only 18.0% of their time in CRM, shows the study. The majority of sales reps’ time is spent in sales technology (61.7%) with email for sales related purposes taking the most time (33.2%), and tools to gather sales intelligence taking the least. (0.4%).

Because of the inefficiency of CRM, sales reps report that 9.7% of their time (over half the amount of time spent in CRM) is spent in spreadsheets trying to more effectively manage CRM related tasks.

What the data is showing is that CRM works well as a recordkeeping system. But without knowing the answer to important questions, salespeople cannot succeed:

• Which are the most important leads that I need to focus on?
• How do customers prefer to be contacted, and when?
• When are they most likely to answer the phone, and what should my pitch be?

Prospecting technologies that provide sales cadence capabilities are one of the most effective technologies (80.0% effective) but they are also one of the most underutilized (only used 1.9% of time).

I work in a company that has a professional sales organization. And although I’m not in sales, I’ve heard salespeople say they have a love-hate relationship with their CRM.

It’s not that it’s useless for their profession, but that they feel is so much more functionality that they need in order to be efficient and productive.

“My favorite sales tool is definitely Salesforce. I use it the most, because it offers total transparency into the pipeline. You’re able to keep track of all your leads. That being said, I don’t know how much I would say that if I didn’t have a sales cadence tool. Playbooks gives me so much more information inside of Salesforce that I wouldn’t have if I just utilized Salesforce,” told us one enthused sales development manager, Jon Dyer.

How Artificial Intelligence Has the Power to Change CRM

I think by now, we have the answer to the question that’s been on everyone’s mind for the last five years or so – is CRM dead?

Not at all.

Sales reps still use their CRM – and they want to do more of it. They want it to be smarter, faster, intuitive, and to offer information beyond just a name and a phone number.

Sales reps need their CRM to help them close bigger and better deals.

Sales acceleration technologies with incorporated Artificial Intelligence have the power to change the way sales reps work and close deals. More importantly, they can save sales reps from spreadsheet hell and bring back the productivity to working within the CRM.

Built on top of CRM’s, smart sales systems can offer insights that go beyond the data that exists in your database and make a difference to sales productivity and revenue growth. They can enhance the functionality of CRM by offering:

• Customer behavior predictions
• Accurate revenue forecasting
• Funnel analysis and deal predictions.

Artificial Intelligence has the power to change the future of sales, and it’s here. We should embrace it.

The latest research from XANT Labs, “Time Management for Sales,” shows exactly how sales reps use their CRM.

You can download the study here or get this bite-sized infographic if you’re short on time.

Download the infographic here.

I spent my formative years at Oracle in the 1990s when the business was growing fast in Europe. In the early 2000s, I left Oracle with a group of colleagues to establish Salesforce in Europe. At first it was just the three of us in an office, with three laptops and that was it. During my ten years there however, we grew the company from nothing to a $300m run rate.

I now find myself in the start-up environment once again with XANT. I joined as the first person in Europe and we’ve so far grown to a headcount of around forty. We’ve got a data center and telephony center in Ireland and are due to open a data center in Germany, whilst our first full year in operation saw us grow by just under three hundred percent.

The Current State of the European Market: GDRP and Tech

The main issue that entrepreneurs are dealing with today in Europe is the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). I fear GDPR may go too far and could act to ultimately slow expansion and negatively affect European economies. Ironically, I think GDPR is a case of closing the barn door after the horse has bolted.

As individuals, most of us already fully consent to give away our data, we do it with everyday things like Google, Facebook or Netflix.

One positive effect I’m hoping GDPR will have however, is to homogenize the diverse legislations of Europe that hinder many early stage companies when it comes to effectively doing business across borders. If it doesn’t achieve that then I think it has failed.

Despite GDPR, I believe there’s a new wave of technology entrepreneurship in Europe. This is partly evidenced by the rise of European VCs but more importantly, the extent to which US VCs now invest right across the continent. Whereas, they used to land in Britain or Ireland and then sweep East, they now see greater opportunity all over Europe.

This, I believe is due to the growing liberalization in European countries who have become more open to Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) – money coming in from the US and the ways in which that money can stimulate the economy.

The Challenges Posed by the European Market

As I mentioned, the European market isn’t all the same. However, it’s important not to over fixate on cultural variations. If you land in the UK and are successful, don’t assume that means you’ve cracked Europe, because some things such as language and legislation are not homogenous.

To overcome these sorts of challenges, CEOs must use their network, talk to people they know, who have done it and know what it’s like.

One thing I’ve seen go catastrophically wrong is when a business tries to land all across Europe. Don’t think you’re covered because you have a salesperson in every country. That will almost certainly fail because you won’t be able to build any cohesion and some individuals will almost certainly become detached from the organization, its culture and processes.

My view is you should find a single location to start from and then test continually into different markets.

The Talent Market in Europe

The European talent market is certainly becoming more competitive. It’s getting tougher and tougher to find good people.

I’m not seeing an explosion of growth in the number of people coming into the sales profession. The barrier to entry at the lower levels is almost nonexistent, but it’s much harder to find the best people at the top of the profession and it’s very expensive.

I encourage you to read the full interview for GSInsights.

It includes views and advice from reputed general managers such as Matt Piercey from Zscaler and Ian Tickle from Domo.