Pipeline Power Hour: Sales, Fall '23
Buckle up for five masterclasses on sales strategies your team needs to be successful in this challenging market.
Welcome everyone to Pipeline Power Hour for Sales Leaders.
My name is Kieran Snaf,
I'm the VP of RevOps here at Qualified.
We hear so much about AI changing the game for sales teams,
but we don't often hear the nitty-gritty details on how teams are finding value
in AI,
and what's actually impacting their pipeline and deal cycles.
We have five great sales leaders here to give us a peek into what's really
working for them,
and what's just hype when it comes to AI.
Let's start with a foundational element of any good sales team.
Sales Enablement.
We're taking a look into how AlphaSense uses AI-powered tools to scale
their sales enablement and coaching strategies with their senior associate of
sales enablement,
Los Attica Berry.
Okay, so welcome everyone to the Pipeline Summit AI for Enablement Strategies
for Coaching at Scale.
By brief introduction, my name is Los Attica Berry.
I'm originally from St. George, Utah, and currently based out of New York City.
I'm over on the sales enablement team at AlphaSense,
and I primarily focus to support our sales and marketing teams,
specifically through onboarding, ramping, continual sales training, one-on-one
coaching,
and any type of continual support.
So I'll speak more into AlphaSense later, but to provide a high level,
we are an AI market intelligence research platform,
purpose-filled for financial and corporate professionals,
and we combine all of our premium and proprietary content, such as
worker research, company filings, trade journals, news, expert calls.
And what we do is we layer on a thematic search,
which allows our clients to search thematically through our across-the-business
content,
which detects various financial language,
and allowing our clients to be able to provide more insights and coverage
to make better investment decisions.
So again, I'll speak more on AlphaSense and our AI tech stack,
specifically on how we enable generative AI in our enablements.
When we think of AI, the narrative and common misconceptions
has changed a lot throughout the years, and now companies and teams are
thinking about
how we're going to use AI, how do we allow computers to work with said person
to make us
smarter? And so when it comes to sales enablement, we're always thinking
about ways to improve how we run our onboarding programs, ramping reps,
one-on-one coaching, continual sales training, building best practices,
and of course, driving pipeline.
And so sales enablement will continue to evolve when it comes to building sales
programs.
And so what does that change look like?
What are our essentials to better equip and coach our sales teams?
And then where can we see that growth for enablement teams in 2024?
So within three buckets of where I see the most changes in enablement this year
my initial challenge is always thinking about my training programs,
how do I create an effective training that impacts and improves how our reps
sell?
So done thing is perfect.
And without in mind, what is the goal for each training?
So by leveraging AI, we now have more insights more than ever before within
sales performance.
Documentation is a huge thing and I no longer need to join every live cold call
demo and instead of
get a glance of a rep and prospect interaction, I can build more content, sales
resources,
one-pagers, repositories for our sales team to then leverage in our
conversations.
And then especially when it comes to strategizing how to better understand our
key accounts,
verticals, personas, and then receive sales data on processes and patterns.
Within sales coaching, grading and phone video calls has changed a lot
throughout the year.
So summarizations of phone video conversations where I can now identify key
trends within specific
cold calls and demos where it picks up language recognition and buyer sentiment
So I can then go and ask questions and insights through generative AI, allowing
me to provide
real-time feedback and effective turnover one-on-one coaching.
When it comes to our goal to create a standardized sales process within AI,
I can then ensure time-sensitive actions are being met by each rep, like
response times,
touches per lead, effective outreach, and quick messaging from Gen AI tools.
I can now build a Holocene repository for onboarding reps and ramp faster and
build
a strong best-up behaviors that are backed up by data.
And then I can monitor conversation trends to then build future trainings and
drive urgency
within specific language. I've seen a 25% reduction in time spent onboarding
with new hires to get
them moved quickly to ramp because I can now identify top-performent behaviors,
highlight areas
improvement, provide actual feedback, and then use that data for new hires.
Although these are our current essentials and we are just tapping into
potential AI through
enablement, we are continually looking at AI tools to leverage in our day-to-
day,
like GONG, chat GBT, document tools, qualified alpha-sense, and then have all
enabled our
training to better provide support and insights in our enablement.
So a common pain point for enablements that we cannot be on every single live
cold call or demo.
And so we want to document how every call went based off of the reps notes
and be able to create some real insights. So we are looking for insights on
what was
talked about, how are reps handled each topic and what were the agreed next
steps.
With GONG, we can leverage through their generative AI to provide major
spotlight insights of what
was discussed in the call. I can then ask a question to have them generate a
summarize and
provide the specific topic that I wanted to pull from the reps call.
So then this allows me to better provide feedback and pinpoint the area of
interest.
And those topics can be filtered and transcribed for me so that I don't have to
listen to the full
call and leverage spotlight areas for in real-time coaching.
When it comes to building programs and revamping our framework and language,
leveraging AI can help with gathering insights on suggestions, methodologies,
framework and coaching skills and language. For example, training and building,
I was curious
on what CHAT-GBT would pull for cold call methodology versus structure and see
the benefits
and differences and approaches and how to better build rapport effectively,
engage and
understanding different aspects. Very similar to how I can see strategies and
free work on how to better improve my sales training and ensuring that each
session,
there's a goal and it's truly impactful for our sales team. On a sales reps
perspective,
they can leverage the tool with suggestions and better understanding their
prospects.
For example, what is the day in the life for a hedge fund manager? This is
something that all
of our reps have to be trained on, is value and why should they care? What is
their day in the life?
So we are also looking at auto-pouncing to help drive engagement numbers, limit
the amount of
touches and sales cycle and not go straight to demo book with AES. So with the
growth of AI tools,
documentation is more available than ever. So enablement teams and marketing
segment are now
creating more internal and external content. Our sales team can leverage these
one-peters,
battle cards for their messaging, knowledge and training that are all being
generated by AI.
So all marketing collateral, sales battle cards can be found and shared
internally or externally.
For example, all updated resources and battle cards can be searched across
through our generative
AI by question and insight. So if I wanted to look up information for my own
knowledge as a rep
or share one-peters to potential prospects, I can search through questions and
insights.
For example, how to competitive intelligence teams use Alsescents. I can share
this with my
prospects. I can also use this for my own knowledge and training and then be
able to
leverage sharing and tracking type links and touches for engagement.
Our inbound team manages the many channels of incoming leads. So when it comes
to boosting
productivity and leveraging AI for messaging and enabling personalization, we
utilize qualified
AI when responding in real time to potential prospects like face-to-face
experience. And
then within their AI, we can pull information quicker so we can respond using
the same language
across the whole org on Alsescents questions. We have to match a very similar
type of language
across the org when it comes to financial language, corporate markets. And so I
can,
for this example, I can leverage their AI by pulling suggested public
information on broker
partners and include tone and sentiment and elaboration in addition with rep
personalization
to their messaging. And this is allowing them to receive that real-time
response from direct sales
reps. And then we can do this in the questions when it comes to our content
sets and where that
would take us to create any type of draft on our own, all that time that would
take. We can now
leverage that into our specific messaging. So we are always treating our sales
reps on the value
and building rapport with our prospects. Our generative AI is a purpose-built
and fine-tuned
through our vertical LLM. In addition to our already set-in-place AI tech stack
, like our Slurm
Search. And so specifically with our generative AI, our clients can go in and
find company
recognition, sentiment, topic extraction, smart synonyms, and smart summaries.
And then this is
enabling our clients to deliver, insert, and accurate and secure summarizations
of both premium,
external, and proprietary internal content. So when it comes to our sales teams
and how we train
them, we're basing off of value-selling. So we're understanding specific person
as day to day
and better understanding what does that look like for them when it comes to
utilizing
alpha sense and conducting their research. By using alpha sense JNI, the sales
rep can leverage
sentiment topics, market trends, summaries at scale, and their cold calls and
demos through
their specific vertical focus or to better leverage value and use case and
their messaging,
cold calling, or demos. Some predictions that I see for AI powered enablement,
I truly see
chatbox training being more part of onboarding. A common onboarding cadence
right now is cold
calling email, LinkedIn outreach, best practices. And so by prospect behavior,
a lot of that I can
see will change when it comes to the sales cycle. Buyer behavior will evolve
and rely more on
getting straight to a demo. So this will reduce that sales cycle with a benefit
of immediate
support and sales contact. And then personalization tools and content, we will
generate more personalized
content from prospect behavior tracking, which will increase the demand of
collateral tracking
and suggestions through automation. And then within our sales rep productivity,
I think
a lot of productivity tools, I know that's something that we're currently
looking into.
Obviously, we shown a few that we're currently using, but there's always a lot
of growth as a
lot of companies are looking into generative AI call transcripts, polling
specific topics,
trends are happening in calls, lead prioritization, and deal conversions are
going to be the biggest
ones that I think will be focusing on for next year. And then within grading
and learning management,
I'm constantly grading, I'm constantly working with new hires and in ramp. Our
ramp period is
a longer period of time, which makes sense for our sales cycle. But with that,
we want to look
at how we can be more effective and efficient with our new hires. So having a
faster ramp period for
new sales reps, increase of data on performance and be able to push on increase
on any rep productivity,
that's always something that's going to be important for us. And then I can see
in the future. And so
when it comes to AI, we're truly excited to see the potential. We're really
only tapping into
limited or what we've seen so far. So when it comes to 2024, I think this is
probably the most
exciting part of being able to make my job be more effective, see how many
teams are going to be
strategizing ways to leverage AI when it comes to running sales team and
driving pipeline. So
really looking forward to AI in 2024. Thanks so much, Losetica. All of the work
that goes into
enabling your sales team is meaningless if you can't rise above the noise and
get in front of your
buyers. AI generated outreach has its place, but when done poorly, it creates a
lot of noise in
your prospects inboxes. But AI isn't just limited to email writing. Next, we'll
hear from Katie Penner,
head of sender relations at Sendoso about how they're using AI to power their
direct mail platform
and get your company in front of buyers in creative ways that make a big
statement. Take it away, Katie.
Hello, my name is Katie Penner. And today we're going to talk about the gift of
AI and using AI
to blow your buyers away. Now, I am the head of sender relations at Sendoso,
where we make it
possible for you to send virtually anything to anyone anywhere. Now, with that
being said,
let's go ahead and dive in. So I first want to share my opinions about the
future of AI and how
it will affect sales organizations. Now, I'm sure we've all heard the narrative
that AI is going
to replace all salespeople. However, human to human connection is actually more
important than ever.
So AI should be leveraged by revenue teams to make their efforts more efficient
, but not to
replace them. That being said, humans that leverage AI will probably end up
outperforming those that
don't people in AI bring different strengths to the table. AI tools are
incredibly fast and
accurate, but they aren't empathetic, sensitive, intuitive. And that human to
human personalization
is actually key to standing out today. A study by Gartner reported on the
percentage of customers
that expect companies to be well informed about their personalized information
during an interaction.
That number is 71% for B2C and 86% for B2B. Customers don't just want personal
ization,
they're demanding it. And technology plays a significant role in modern sales,
but it should
never overshadow that human element. So using tools like Sixth Sense Intent
Data,
Qualified Chatbot, and AI with tools like BARD to streamline processes, gather
insights,
and personalize communication is necessary. However, always remember to infuse
that personal
touch in your interactions, to balance that efficiency with authentic human
connections,
to create a seamless and memorable experience for your prospects, clients, and
customers.
In today's world where AI is taking a front seat and buyers are experiencing
buyer fatigue,
physical touchpoints with Sindoso can help you foster these relationships
faster.
Now that being said, how are we leveraging AI to create these more delightful
experiences for
our customers? In the future, AI is going to be leveraged to provide a more
intuitive user
experience for our customers, guiding them through the process of selecting,
customizing,
and even sending gifts on behalf of the sender. Our engineering team is
utilizing an OP stack.
So an AI plus a vector database. For those of you unfamiliar with an OP stack,
OpenAI has this huge information database as it's essentially trained with the
entire internet.
Therefore, when you ask a question, it sometimes has a tendency to hallucinate.
An adding a vector database with a tool like Pinecone gives AI a memory layer
to avoid hallucinations.
In preparation for this presentation, I had the honor of chatting with one of
our brilliant
engineers, Cheema. He began to show me this chat bot that he and his team are
developing.
And he also showed me a chat bot that another company in the gifting space has.
We gave that chat bot a simple prompt. What should I send to someone in college
And the chat bot narrowed down to categories that it believed to be relevant,
such as education
and technology. Of course, any narrowing down of options is helpful. However,
as we scrolled
through the options, we saw things like educational toys made for children, not
college students.
The gifting assistant bot that our teammates in DOSO is building is much more
intuitive in
comparison. You can give it a prompt like, what's a good gift for my calorie
conscious friend who
loves cheesecake. And the bot will suggest a cheesecake sampler so that they
can indulge
in a portion controlled manner. But that's not all. You can also give this bot
the prompt,
send name at company.com, a gift meant for someone who's calorie conscious and
loves cheesecake.
Then this gifting assistant bot will find that cheesecake sampler gift,
compose a note card for you, and complete the send. It will complete the entire
send process
for you after being given a simple prompt. This kind of thing is going to be
absolutely game
changing for our prospects and our customers. A smart AI tool that they can
trust to not only
select a highly curated gift, but to also complete the entire send process. I
mean, it's pretty
pretty incredible. So by communicating with our engineering department more
regularly,
our revenue org is becoming more empowered to speak to the product roadmap and
to what customers
can expect in the future. This has enabled our revenue team to close more deals
with more confidence
than ever before. In the future, we can also utilize AI to optimize operations
in our SFC,
our warehouse. Things like inventory management, shipping logistics, and other
operational
aspects to ensure timely deliveries and to minimize cost for our customers. We
currently
utilize AI for order waving, so attaching inventory to orders based on shipping
timelines
for rate shopping, finding the Sindoso optimized fulfillment options that
ensure the lowest cost
for our clients, and performing quality audits. But in the future, we can see
Sindoso utilizing
AI to help route orders to the most optimal fulfillment center based on
capacity, time,
labor cost, inventory availability, outbound connections, using AI to track
inventory and
consumption levels, generate recommendations on send trigger dates while fact
oring in shipping
methods and costs predicted by AI, and finally, utilizing AI to analyze
transactions to prevent
fraud. As Sindoso looks to expand, AI will become this integral part of our
fulfillment
optimization on behalf of our clients, and ensuring that our revenue org has a
deep understanding
of what our engineering team is developing with AI is critical to communicating
these things effectively.
Now, predictive analytics will also be huge for us. Sindoso will be able to
feed historical data
to AI so that AI can make recommendations to our customers based on what other
companies
similar to them are sending. What sends are the most successful for what stage
of the sales cycle
they're in and more. We will also be able to provide personalized trend data
for individual users
that will add a more detailed layer of tracking and understanding success of
various direct mail
campaigns. Our first AI release was Punpal. Now, Punpal provides AI generated
messages
that correlate with the gift being sent, and it's also just a lot of fun. Our
customers are
seeing that the time spent on ideating messages for note cards that go along
with e-gifts and
physical gifts is being cut down tremendously when they utilize this tool, and
this is just the beginning.
Now, I hope that this presentation was interesting and that at the very least,
it sparks some ideas
for how you can leverage AI at your organization, but if you walk away with
nothing else from this
presentation, I'd like you to walk away with this. The time to take a deep dive
into AI is now.
Educate yourself, ask your engineering team questions about how AI is currently
being
leveraged at your company, continue to learn by attending events like this, and
like I mentioned
earlier, people who leverage AI will begin to outperform those that don't. So
make sure that
you begin leveraging AI and exploring AI tools and offerings to ensure that you
and or your team
become more efficient so that you can focus more on things like building
relationships with your
prospects and customers. Thanks, Katie. AI is powering all of these crucial
channels that support sellers
and getting the most out of their outreach and meetings. But how much of these
AI tools are
actually helping sales teams hit their quota and what's more hyped than help?
Our very own Ryan
Teasle, enterprise sales and partnerships here at Qualified is ready to
highlight where AI really
shines for sellers and where it still needs a lot of human interaction to make
the most of the
technology. Let's hear it, Ryan. Hey, everyone. My name is Brian Teasle. I work
on the sales team
here at Qualified. We're going to talk about how most successful go-to-market
teams are balancing
meeting AI in the middle while still standing out as humans in their processes.
So the kick things off.
I took this quote from one of my favorite podcasters, the name is Lex Friedman.
I have
he's an AI researcher with millions of subscribers and followers, but more
importantly, he's an
optimistic and romantic human being. He believes that we will eventually become
more AI than men
when we integrate with AI, but even integration with AI is ultimately becoming
better human being
in our day-to-day lives. So we can focus on the core interactions and
everything that means the most
to us. I believe that the most successful salespeople right now are already
taking this approach,
meeting AI in the middle for suggestions, sometimes taking them into account,
and then
sometimes saying like, eh, thanks, but I think I got this one. So as we move
forward to this
presentation, I hope this prompts you to think about what AI can help you to do
to streamline
your processes and then what you can double down your human efforts on in your
everyday
single processes. So looking into quick data of AI in 2023 and business
business sales,
that may present a BDB sales theme for already being AI. So we're all using it.
71% of sales
leaders say that AI is going to make their teams more productive, but 61% of
employees are
skeptical about how useful AI actually is in their work long term. So we're all
using it.
We all say it's going to make us more productive. Why are we all still
skeptical? AI has rounded
us for years already, even if we haven't truly acknowledged that it is, the on
social media,
our algorithms, the music we listen to on Spotify, the movies we watch on
Netflix are served up to us
by AI, the meetings we book in sales, the Zoom call if we record and listen
back to the data we
use to build account lists and target prospects that accounts. This list goes
on and on. We're
already surrounded by it. We're all selling it. So why would we still be
skeptical? I'm going to
pull from my personal experience using AI every single day and just give my
take on whether something
is helpful or maybe it's a little too hyped up right now. And so there are many
different areas
about how go to barcode teams specifically use AI and drive productivity. But I
'm going to focus
on a couple here that are likely top of mind for all reps and me especially.
Generative is the first
researching accounts, generating emails to send insight looking for insights on
public information,
10k interviews, podcasts, whatever might be out there for your accounts. It's
going to help
and stay relevant. Then I'm also going to dig into sales coaching tools and how
AI is helping you
take a look at your calls, give you some coaching, give you some feedback and
how you can improve
on your identity processes and become the best rep that you can be. Then we'll
start
with generative AI. And two of the main ways I'm using generative right now are
to research
accounts and find information and also for writing. So we'll start with
research. Being relevant
is the key to any outbound approach. What used to take hours and hours to find
any kind of
kind of key insights on your accounts and prospects and now really take just
seconds.
Whether you're about to start a prospecting account, hop on a first call or
deepen a cycle and trying
to validate your solution with above the line leaders. There's a number of
tools to help you
find what you need, build relevancy and trust with whoever you're selling to. I
prompted to dig
into 10k's, summarize earning calls, look into podcasts, pull snippets from job
posting with
one of my favorites and look into the company ebooks that you can dig into. Hey
, maybe their
ebook is going to give me some insight as to how this company is writing their
business. Anything
that's going to help you shape your approaches or rep is certainly an help you
win. And as you
familiarize yourself with your buyer persona as in constant trends in the
market, this quick research
is also going to be useful when trying to be creative and experiment with new
value props.
And this is where writing comes into play. Generative and writing emails has
come a super long way.
Nine to 12 months ago, I wouldn't have trusted any AI tool to write an entire
email for me
that converts into pipeline or an opportunity. That still hasn't changed for me
to a certain
degree, but there's still have been some major improvements in this field. If I
'm stuck,
it gives me a really great starting point to help me shape my message and get
the creative
agents flowing. I'll get into this a couple slides from now, but I'd much
prefer starting and writing
my own email and using AI to coach me on my grammar, cutting fluff, rewording
anything that
sounds off rather than the reverse. So if you do have writer block or need a
good reference point,
you can always just generate a few email examples, picking two of the few
sentences that look great
and go from there. The medicinal use cases, leveraging JAREDA.I can be sending
out a post
call recap email. It's really great for just remembering what prospects ask for
on calls.
But again, I'm typically going in and editing most of what that follow up email
is going to look
like. Like in come off as Ryan and not just an AI sending an email. For me, I'd
put generative
about 60% height and 40% helpful review right now. I'm almost to the point
where it's 50-50.
It can be helpful in the right context and situation, but it still takes a lot
of human effort to get
this right. And so a few generative tools I love to use on a daily basis are
some of the big names
that everybody's probably heard of, chat, hibt, google bar, or perplexity. And
I'll usually prompt
all three of these to see what insights each of them will gather. For this
example, if I was
prospecting or have a first call with my VP of wrap ups here at Qualified, this
is the prompt I'd
start with. Can you pull some insights from Qualified's website? Tell me what
their goals might be.
You can go as far down the rabbit holes you'd like, but I always like to dig
until it breaks
because you never know what valuable information it's going to give you. I go
in, I ask him how
it's going to be relevant to Karen's role. I try and find any hobbies or
interests that
Karen actually likes to do outside of work to try and personalize a little bit.
And then I can
give it a prompt that relates what Karen's into, his golf game, improving it to
how Qualified
can help him improve his website conversion, and so on and so forth.
Moving into more some of the coaching side of things, I think this is where AI
shined the most.
For me, just as a rep in my day to day life, I use tools like Lavender and Gong
every single day
to iterate and make myself a better seller. These tools provide scalable team
insights so that
leadership doesn't miss any bad habits that need to be stopped right in their
tracks. And the data
is backed by actions and actual reality, things that reps are doing every
single day. The reps who
are open to this coaching, no matter the situation, start to pile up wins, and
the reps who stay stuck
in their ways will start to fall short. I do find that sometimes AI can miss
some of the contacts.
For example, a prospect mentions a competitor on a call once. They aren't using
them, but the AI
now alerts my team and my manager that this is a competitive deal when we just
talked about a
competitor once. Humans are still needed to implement action on this coaching,
and I'm currently
all the way in on how AI can constantly make me better as a seller every single
day.
Couple examples here. We'll talk about writing coaches. I use Lavender and Gram
marly on pretty
much every single email that I sent. There's a couple examples here, but there
's hundreds of
different ways to write an email from what I've seen, both in getting prospect
ing emails sent to
meet personally and using AI myself. There's generally three schools of thought
. There's the
automation school letting AI do most of the work. It looks fine. You copy and
paste it and send it
off. But in a world where your prospects inbox has hundreds of prospecting
emails in it every
single morning, a year for now when the percentage of people using AI grows
from 70 to 80 to 90 percent.
How many more emails do you think your prospects are in the beginning? You have
to stand out.
Automating completely everything will get you a couple places, and that's a
spam folder or
a trash folder. The second way is automation with a little bit of flair. You
did your personalization
in your research. You give the specifics of the prospect and the personal
ization that you found
through the AI and ask it to relate to your value crop. You edit the email, you
send it off.
This method has gotten me some meetings every now and again. If you're smart
about how you scale
this, but I'm skeptical about how this method scales over time. The third way,
and I've already
alluded to this early on in presentation, is handwriting your email, full email
and copy,
looking at it and letting the AI coach you and edit it for you. It'll prompt
you for suggestions.
It'll give you some edits that you can make to edit it down. You can see I went
from a 77 on this
first email here to a 90 within 14 minutes. It's a long time, but I usually don
't spend that much
time on an email and send it off. This is my number one method, and we'll lead
us into our next session,
where AI can help you help coach you and make your own work just a little bit
better.
Recording calls has been ubiquitous for years now, but it's only become more
powerful and useful.
It was like gone, chorus, sales, love, outreach, record your conversations, and
they provide you
with actual items to send post call, e-topics, and keywords and problem
statements that were
discussed and showing the call, that you can discuss with your manager, and
then also will give your
leadership in your manager an idea of what deals could be at risk or more
accurate forecasting based
upon how the conversation is going and how the deal stages are moving along.
Reps are held accountable
at all times during cycles, whether we may like it or not, and having a coach
who's only there to
make you better is going to significantly improve your weaknesses and only make
your strength better.
Reps who take this feedback and stride will have a serious leg up, and the rest
who ignore this
will start to fall right away. To finish up, a few thoughts and predictions for
2024 and how
sales teams will adapt to this new world we're selling in. The first is that
teams will adopt
this idea of AI in automation, and that it's going to become more relevant, and
teams are going to
learn their lesson that this is not going to work for them. Sales reps, AI is
not going to do your
job for you, but it will help you do your job extremely efficiently. If you're
using it for
nominal tasks already, you're ahead of the game. Reps will look at their
weaknesses and use AI to
improve them and double down on their strengths and they'll have the upper hand
on reps you don't.
I say we're at the peak of AI that's in the industry right now. I think there's
going to be some AI
coming up here in 2024. Tools that don't meet buyer's expectations are going to
fall by the
wayside, and tools that exceed expectations will only get better as time goes
on. And after the
facts, I think it will be in a much better position to become market leaders.
Last but certainly not
least, people buy from people. Humans trust other humans that they connect with
, and AI is going to
help reps and managers move deals along, but deals will get done at the human
level.
I'll leave you with that. I hope this session was helpful, and that's all crush
our numbers and
the year. Thanks everyone. Thanks for that deep dive, Ryan. I'm curious what
Chatch EPT told you
about my golf game. One of the ways we know AI is helping both marketing and
sales leaders is
taking over some of the more mundane tasks to free us up to get more creative,
but VDAR is taking
that to a whole new level by using AI to help sellers make more creative,
engaging content for
their buyers. Ali Forbes, Sales Manager at Vidyard, is here to show us how to
think outside the box
with the help of AI. Hello, everybody. My name is Ali Forbes. I'm a Sales
Manager at Vidyard.
I've been selling Vidyard since June 2020. It feels like forever ago and just
like
yesterday as well. I've been worked way way up as a top performer and I've been
a Sales Manager
here since March 2022. I'm almost two years as a manager. I finally know what I
'm doing as a
manager. I'm really excited to chat with you all today about leveraging the
power of AI to cut
through inbox noise. We're going to chat a little bit about video, AI, and the
humanization piece
as well, really just marrying the two in order to be successful and building
pipeline, whether that's
marketing sourced or sales sourced at the end of the day, as long as the
pipeline's there, who
really cares where it comes from here. So I'll jump to the next slide here and
sit.
There we go. You'll notice here from the title, it's as virtual as the normal
for sellers and buyers.
I've presented on similar topics in the past and virtual previously was the new
normal, but at this
point, it's here to stay, whether you're selling virtually from home or
virtually on your laptop
in an office. 76% of sales managers believe remote sales is the most effective,
but most
importantly, our buyers, 80% of buyers say they prefer remote sales interaction
. So we really do
need to meet our buyers where they're at. Obviously, we have our sales
processes and
things that we know that work. But buyers at the end of the day are the ones
that keep us going.
So we really need to, again, meet them where they're at and sell to them how
they prefer to buy here.
So there's a number of aspects that go into by behavior in terms of building
pipeline, obviously,
and closing revenue. So just studying the stage here before we get into the fun
stuff with AI
and humanization. But typically, the top three that I've noticed that my team
is known as as
a sales org. The industry is buyers prefer like self education. So whether that
's
easily digesting content on a website or, you know, their own third party
research, things that
they can do on their own in their own time. I think a lot of folks are
experiencing this,
like buyers prospects don't want to talk to sales unless it's absolutely
necessary.
You know, and they're in the stage where they're in that action or desire phase
where they
they finally do want to purchase. And then, of course, asynchronous decision
making. And if anyone
is wondering if I spelled behavior wrong or right, I was second guessing myself
, but I'm Canadian.
So in my mind, I have spelled it right. I did do a quick Google search prior to
this.
So I'm just going to jump to the next slide here. So just something that we've
noticed from like an
IC, like a rep perspective in terms of a problem that they're looking to solve
is that 40% of sales
reps according to Forester are looking for new ways of selling in this remote
environment,
especially now the market has never been tougher to sell. It's not only harder
to catch our ICP's
attention, but rather like earn their time, like given the budgets and how long
it takes to make
decision make decision. So our prospects need to know that you're going to show
them value,
whether or not they buy from you or not, that at least is half an hour or 45
minutes spent with you
has been valuable to them in their mind here. So what are we doing at Vidyard
to help mitigate
this? And how can we find the balance between AI and humanization or personal
ization, ideally
humanization? A lot of folks are looking for a silver bullet to solve all their
problems.
Even when prospects come to Vidyard, they're like, well, how can we make this
more efficient and
not actually record videos for every single prospect? And like, I think it's
really important to define
what does efficient mean for you. I think if you didn't have to record a video,
if you wanted to
make things human and personalization, you'd be selling Vidyard for a million
dollars. And
that's not the case. But you can absolutely marry the two here. So just taking
a step back
in terms of what how like what Vidyard actually does for those who don't know,
we're a full suite,
go to market tool for driving leads, pipeline, revenue, of course, like on the
marketing side,
overall sales efforts and host sale as well. As we can see here, there's a
number of pros
in terms of leveraging AI and the humanization piece and like with your sales
process. So we
won't get into absolutely everything here today. But really what I've done, I
've selected like the
top four that we focus on at Vidyard for ourselves and then potentially
customers as well. And
hopefully you do see some sort of value in this to help build your own pipeline
. So first of all,
leveraging like hosting video as well in combination with your CRM, whatever
that may be like a sales
force or hub spot, marketing automated platform like Mark Keto and using AI to
identify leads
and qualify leads. So just using the database that you have the AI,
technicality part is above my pay grade, but it's something that we're doing
here. Not only to
again, just identify leads, but create at minimum 30 to 50% more qualified
leads for our teams. So
we're spending time and personalizing our outreach to the right folks and we're
spending our time
efficiently here. So that's one aspect that we're doing here. Secondly, when it
comes to research
and generating sales pipeline, like just what my team is doing, what we
recently been doing is
using chat TPT as soon as we sign on a customer. I just use Shopify as an
example. We'll pop in.
Hey, let's say we sign on Shopify. I don't know if we have to, but like give me
the top five
Shopify competitors. And then from there, we'll tailorize our outreach. We
already have like a
cadence setup for competitive prospecting. I have an example here that you can
see where you'll just
like pop in the competitive organization and Dolly prop and so forth there. So
really just using
AI just to help you do overall research. I've been doing it as well. This is
not meant to be like
a video art pitch. We have a two platform called prospector where you can
basically set up your
territory and then AI grab all the accounts, all the prospects that you'd want
to be reaching out to.
You can create a quick general video that's included in this email outreach and
then like the AI will
also spit out the messaging. So it's very general, but the results you get from
that, our team will
personally do their outreach to the folks who are the most engaged as well. And
then lastly,
video messaging, right? Video is new to a lot of folks. We use chat GBT to help
create video scripts,
just making these video a lot easier and decrease that learning curve like cold
calling,
write an email poppy. That's all new for a salesperson. So at the end of the
day, this is just a new
tool to your tool belt, but use a technology for you to be more human and
ultimately see
more success there. So rounding out here, these are the four things that we
focus on right now with
AI and humanization, lead identification, research, prospecting, and then
overall video messaging. So
thank you very much for listening to my chat regarding AI and humanization to
help drive pipeline.
Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn and happy to answer any questions.
Thank you so much,
the qualified team for having me. That was great, Ali. We've talked about
enablement. We've talked
about how to engage your buyers in new ways. And now we're bringing it all home
and learning how
to use AI to better build and scale your win loss program with Ryan Sorley VP
of win loss at Clue.
Hey, everybody. My name's Ryan Sorley and I'm the vice president of win loss
over at Clue. I'm
super excited to be here with you today to talk about something that's really
near and dear to my
heart, the use of generative AI technology to launch your win loss program.
Just to set the stage,
when I think about win loss and when we think about win loss at Clue, we really
think about it
in the form of building blocks. We'd like have to identify the program type
that we're launching.
Is it focused on channel partners or direct sales motions? We have to narrow
down the objectives.
We have to think about is this a effort to collect data on competitors or maybe
it's a
effort to understand how people perceive our product. And then we have to get
into the segmentation
of opportunities. So when we're collecting data, we want to end up with enough
of a sample size of
anything to be able to start to do trend analysis. So that might be looking at
our enterprise business
versus our SMB business, maybe looking at our European market versus our North
American market.
We want to isolate those. So we do go through a segmentation process to
typically help
get things going. And that's what we would recommend to you. Then we want to
start to
figure out, well, what questions are we going to ask in these win loss
interviews? And those
should definitely align back to those objectives that you created with your
team as you were
launching the program. Then you get into the outreach, which is often a
problematic area for
a lot of people getting folks to actually respond yes to an interview. Then we
actually hold the
interviews and think through like, what is the strategy that we're going to
take when we're
speaking to somebody to get them to really open up to us? And how are we going
to summarize
our conversations? And then finally, how are we going to identify themes that
are emerging from
across all of these interviews? So traditional win loss looks like this. But
when we're thinking
about AI for the purpose of this conversation, because I only have 10 minutes,
I'm going to focus
on these last three areas, which is the generating the outreach plan holding
interviews and thematic
analysis. So let's start with the first area. And let's talk about the
challenge. So more times
than not, I hear from salespeople, product marketers, leaders that they have a
really difficult time
getting people to respond to requests for interviews. People are too busy. They
've moved on if it's a
loss. And that is an area that I want to focus on here, because I think there
is a way that we
can leverage AI technology, generative, generative AI technology to help here.
So at a basic level,
what organizations should be thinking about when looking to schedule interviews
is asking earlier
in the process for that interview. So if you're a seller, and you're maybe at
the demo phase,
maybe you're at the price or negotiation phase, that's the time when you should
ask if that particular
buyer champion would be open to speaking to you again, or speaking to somebody
within your
organization after they've made their final selection simply because you're
eager to understand
what their experience was like and learn from it. By asking when you're still
engaged,
your chances of getting that person to respond favorably are significantly
higher. So that's
the first step. I know it's not gen AI related, but I'll get there. The next
area is to schedule
those interviews once that you'll close this in your CRM. So you're automating
that request
earlier on. Now you're automating the request to follow up on that person with
that person who
agreed to the interview. And then you can get that interview schedule. However,
if you are unable
to do these things, there is a new technology area that we're really doing a
lot of experimenting with,
which is actually using voice bots. And before you kind of roll your eyes or
laugh, there are
technologies out there that are quite advanced. They can actually use your own
voice. And you can
build a generative AI workflow in the discussion field within these platforms
to be able to
have a really natural conversation with folks. So think about using AI
technology and generative
AI technology for phone calls, actually reaching out to people following up on
those emails that
you sent and trying to schedule them. These tools are super advanced. And if
you spent a little time
looking at some of them, I think you'd be quite surprised at how advanced they
are. And they can
actually, a single bot can make up to 3000 calls a day. So super good use of
the hub of their time
to do that work for you. Now let's move on to the next challenge, which is
really focused on
summarizing those interviews. See, if I had a great conversation with somebody,
maybe you've
taken some notes, maybe it's chicken scratch, maybe you have a stronger process
for doing it.
But I think that it's been a challenge historically for people to take those
conversations and turn
them into some sort of a deliverable for the rest of their team. So what we're
going to do here is
we're going to touch on a tool that we use every day, which is called Rev. It's
a transcription tool.
And there's plenty of transcription tools out there, different levels of
quality, of course.
But that first step is having some sort of automated transcription of your
conversation. And that may
require you getting consent from the person you're interviewing, especially if
they're in the European
Union and GDPR compliance is an issue for you. But we recommend asking for
their permission
to record the conversations and 9.9 times that of 10, they'll agree to it. So
this is basic,
right? A summarization or sorry, transcription has been around for years. But
what's new is this
whole idea of summarizing the conversations. And a lot of these tools today,
based on chat,
GPT coming into popularity late last year in November or so about a year ago,
we can actually
summarize those conversations into something meaningful. It might be a 15 page
transcript,
but you can narrow that down into a paragraph of three or four sentences that
do a pretty good
job of describing what happened in that interview. And that might be good for
some, especially if
you're conducting win loss interviews at scale. However, a lot of folks need to
go deeper. So
what they are looking for is the ability to ask questions about that particular
interview.
And those questions might be related to, you know, how was the sales experience
or what were the
business drivers that led you to look at our solution as compared to others and
what solutions
did you look at? Which of our competitors did you evaluate and what did you
think of them?
And there's a lot of wonky technology out there today that will do this. And
then there's some
really good technology. And going back to Rev, I'm not paid to promote Rev, we
just have been
using them for years. But they have also come out with a really interesting on
capability where
you can just ask those questions. And those questions, if they're consistent
from one
interview to the next can start to build a really interesting database of
insight about
key learning objective areas. Like, why were they looking? What were key
selection criteria?
What resources did they leverage? What competitors did they look at? How did
they feel about your
price, your sales experience? So there's a whole list of common areas that you
can use with the
capability like this to kind of start to string data together. So now you have
this view into
what happened in a deal and you're starting to farm data from an individual
interview. But the
next challenge is how do you look across interviews and start to summarize this
data in a way that's
meaningful that identifies trends, which is the next challenge here. Now what?
What do I do?
So the way that we think about that is using generative AI technology to dip
into all of
this unstructured data using prompts to be able to tell a really cohesive and
comprehensive story.
One of the things that we've rolled out recently at Clue is focused on looking
at GT reviews,
trust radius, Gargner, Pure Connect, resources like that, where there's actual
real buyer and
customer feedback, pulling all of that data together through generative AI
technology and machine
learning to spit out what are those core strengths and weaknesses? What are the
key areas that people
talked about most that they really liked about each solution in dislike? So
when you're looking at
this type of data from a win loss perspective, competitive intelligence
perspective, leveraging
various tools to get to this point are going to be super critical in the future
and more and more
companies are coming out with these types of capabilities. So in the 10 minutes
, I have 32 seconds left,
I just wanted to wrap up that these are three immediate areas that you can
focus on to really
get your win loss program rolling. There's a lot of other areas that still
require some manual
intervention, but our vision is over the next few years to have all of this
stuff be fully
automated borderless, which would be in any language and always on collecting
data at scale as you go.
So I hope you found this information to be valuable. If you have any questions
and would like to go
deeper in any of these areas, feel free to shoot me a note. I'd be happy to
chat.
Thanks, Ryan. That does it for our sales pipeline power hour here at Pipeline
Summit AI.
Thank you so much to all of our speakers. It's great hearing how other teams
are leveraging AI
within their sales strategies. And we definitely learned a few things to take
into 2024 with us.
We'll see you next time.
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