The good news from a new survey of more than 5,000 B2B sales professionals by Salesforce is that sales are up. Nearly four in five teams report increases in both revenue and customer acquisition over the past 12 months. Moreover, 82% of sales professionals feel confident about their company’s 12-month growth strategy, according to the report.
The less positive news in that same report is that 67% of sales reps don’t expect to meet their quota this year, and a whopping 84% missed it last year.
With access to an unparalleled amount of sales enablement technology, AI-driven sales coaching tools, highly sophisticated CRM systems and copious amounts of customer and prospect data, how can more than 8 in 10 professional salespeople fall short of their quotas?
Some would argue it’s due in large part because of the enormous amount of technology that has been incorporated into what once was an extremely person-to-person process.
A Teammate, Not a Tool
Gartner reported last year that a survey on seller productivity revealed that 49% of sellers are overwhelmed by the number of technologies needed to do their job. Revenue goals are at risk, as these sellers are 43% less likely to achieve quota than non- overwhelmed sellers, according to Gartner.
“To succeed, CSOs need to evolve the way sales technology supports sellers by elevating technology to become a teammate, rather than just being deployed as another tool,” the Gartner report states.
Adnan Zijadic, director analyst in the Gartner Sales Practice, used similar phrasing at the Gartner CSO & Sales Leader Conference held earlier this year.
“While sellers are ready to embrace data-driven insights, leaders must prioritize equipping sellers with playbooks for effective selling that build that human connection through contextual understanding. Incorporating AI technology as a teammate will lead to sales playbooks that are more balanced while encouraging organizations to achieve competitive advantage,” he said.
‘Yet Another Thing to Learn’
In an article entitled “Sellers are Overwhelmed by Technology,” published by Harvard Business Review last year, Gartner Sales Practice analysts George Tobias, Craig Riley, Colleen Giblin and Betsy Gregory-Hosler state, “Technology has long been used to boost seller productivity, but sales leaders are telling us that efficiency gains have become slower and more expensive. This is because technology intended to help sell frequently makes the salesperson’s job more cumbersome. From the salesperson’s point of view, more technology hasn’t made their job easier or less expansive — it’s just been yet another thing to learn.”
The Gartner team identified four stages of sales tech maturity:
Stage 1: Simple automation – Salespeople use basic automation tools and AI that assist with simple activities. Technology supports efficiency, but its benefits depend on seller adoption.
Stage 2: Assisted selling – Salespeople use AI-assisted automation tools to improve productivity. Technology is integrated into the sales process to provide passive assistance around prioritization and execution.
Stage 3: Automated selling – Technology is a full part of the sales team and plays an active role in decision-making and execution.
Stage 4: Autonomous selling – Technology can completely automate the sales process and make decisions on its own. Salespeople act as strategic overseers providing guidance and helping prioritize, but technology performs nearly all tasks.
Many organizations are stuck at Stage 2, the Gartner team states. Sales organizations that embrace technology as a teammate will advance to automated selling (Stage 3) quicker and gain a significant advantage in sales productivity.
Sales reps must get comfortable with technology owning some aspects of the sales process, including prospecting, CRM steps and other data capture, generating customized value messaging, and solution design. By doing so, they will free up their time to tackle the human aspects of sales in which they can add value.
“In the future, the role of the salesperson will be about doing fewer things, but doing them better. Sales leaders must combine the transformative power of AI with the uniquely human capabilities of their salespeople to drive high-margin deals,” the authors state.
Tech As a Time Creator
Freeing up sellers’ time is among the most important tasks of technology. According to the Hubspot 2024 Sales Trends Report, sellers spend only one-third of their time actively selling. Use of AI tools to accomplish administrative tasks can save as much as two hours per day. “That’s two extra hours for connecting with customers, building relationships, progressing pipeline, and of course, closing more deals,” the report states.
“Let’s say you want to send a message to an existing customer about a new product you just launched. Your customer platform has the demographic data for the customer; every webpage they visited, every transcript from every sales call, every customer support interaction. You have deep contextual data,” states Hubspot founder Dharmesh Shah in the Trends Report.
Forbes asked technology experts last year about common mistakes that lead to overspending on technology. Jesse Stockall, chief architect at Snow Software, a Stockholm-based provider of integrated software asset management systems, said tech stacks — plopping SaaS subscriptions on top of SaaS subscriptions — is a main culprit.
“Many companies unknowingly overspend on cloud services and software as a service applications because they over- estimate needed capacity or SaaS users during the initial purchase and/or allow tech purchases to happen outside of IT. Companies must regularly audit their tech stacks to right-size cloud environments and remove unnecessary SaaS application users, as well as train employees in FinOps,” Stockall stated.
Bots Don’t Close Deals
On a recent conference call scheduled by Salesforce to preview its newly released “State of Sales” report, a journalist posited that both buyers and sellers are arming themselves with AI-driven tools to tackle large chunks of the buying process. How long will it be, he pondered, before buyers’ and sellers’ qualifying bots will hand things off to respective deal-making bots, and multimillion-dollar sales deals will never need to involve humans?
Unlikely, was the answer. Sales involves human connection. It’s what many professional salespeople enjoy most about their job.
Writing about the importance of the human element in B2B sales, Justin Zappulla, managing partner of sales training company Janek Performance Group, cites a LinkedIn study from 2021 that found 65% of sellers believe they put the buyer first, but only 23% of buyers agree with that statement. He chalks a good deal of that discrepancy up to sellers’ overreliance on technology.
“When buyers feel like the salesperson does not understand their needs, is just another number, or does not appreciate the nuances of their business, no technology can unite that disconnect,” Zappulla states.
“Selling is a human endeavor. Technology can enhance outcomes in the sales process, but it requires all the pieces to work together,” he adds. “Building a healthy sales team is a lot like building a healthy body. Sure, it’s nice to have the Peloton, but eating your broccoli and avoiding ice cream is boring but effective. As they say in fitness, you can’t out-exercise a bad diet. In sales, you can’t out-technology bad behaviors. If you want your sales muscles to grow, you have to feed them right and exercise. Technology is a great tool to make sales reps more efficient, but it will rarely get you the full result on its own. Be sure to look at the whole picture when identifying and solving a sales performance problem.”
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