Generative AI Can Drive Huge Sales Force Productivity Gains

Consultative selling, where salespeople engage in an iterative process to uncover customer needs, can create customer satisfaction, high margin solutions that competitors can't replicate, and substantial revenue growth. While consultative selling sounds attractive, it's much tougher to implement across an entire sales organization. We believe Generative AI can play a huge role in enabling broad performance and productivity enhancements for frontline salespeople and sales managers alike.

The critical steps in consultative selling are discovery (learning about your customer and the challenges they face), asking questions, actively listening to responses, and sharing information that can help customers make solid decisions based on needs met. Generative AI can contribute at every step:

1. Discovery: Gen AI's ability to consume great amounts of data, including natural language, synthesize its meaning, and summarize content in digestible formats can elevate research for even the most brilliant salespeople, and perform excellent research for many others who race through this step. Further, AI can be trained to identify opportunities that emerge from such deep research, and to create open-ended questions that begin the consultative selling process.
2. Asking questions and active listening: The heart of consultative selling is asking open-ended questions, confirming and clarifying customer responses (active listening), and then suggesting potential actions to help clients take advantage or avoid key issues based on the dialogue. Expert practitioners are much better at thinking on their feet than most of us are; AI can simulate such conversations over many iterations so that every salesperson can feel comfortable engaging in these conversations instead of delivering a scripted "talk track".
3. Sharing information: Most organizations have vast amounts of historical data, most of which exists in silos or is otherwise inaccessible to salespeople. How helpful would it be to share "we've worked with dozens of clients who have faced similar situations; here's what we did for them and here were the results"? As web meetings and CRM systems create digital histories of sellers' actions, AI can access and synthesize your organization's experience and success to underscore your credibility as a solution provider.

Sales management can benefit from generative AI which can help them coach and mentor their teams to become experts. AI can mine CRM data to construct the most productive path based on time-to-revenue creation, then help managers diagnose individuals' performance compared to the ideal in order to create individual performance enhancement plans.

We think generative AI will enhance sales organization productivity (time-to-revenue creation) in at least 4 ways:

1. Speed to top-quality discovery will enable top performers to spend more quality time with prospects, and average performers to engage in thorough discovery as they have never done before;
2. Asking questions and active listening will uncover more and larger opportunities than more transactional approaches do, meaning that each sales opportunity will be larger and more profitable;
3. Sharing broad organizational experience, expertise and results builds credibility, accelerating each sales progression and raising closed/won rates; and
4. Better coaching and mentoring can build overall sales teams' proficiency with consultative selling, meaning that there can be many more, more-productive sellers at the same headcount. Plus, successful sellers have far less incentive to look elsewhere, reducing recruiting expense.

We look forward to your thoughts and reactions.