Okay, everybody. We are going to start our webinar. What here at sales for life, what weve done is amassed a fantastic panelists. In fact, I think the best people in the sales community to talk about artificial intelligence and what Im going to do is instead of me. Introducing everybody and hearing me talk. I want to hear from these experts so were gon na start with Jim Jim. Give us your 30-second elevator pitch and who
You are well Jim. Maybe a lot of people know me from being one of the co-founders versio, some wind slides for two decades we were gathering data on what are the challenges facing salespeople now at sales? Mastery more focused on is: how do we move into that? Next, transition of sales and what does that look like as diffict, specifically around AI, so Im going to be sharing? Some of the initial findings were seeing on our studies and might people start learning about a new way of engaging customers and everybody youve
Been reading Jims research for decades now, Victor you and I met a few years ago at a conference, both part of the keynoting of a conference victor introduce yourself to everybody a little background originally from Chicago. If anybody cares, I started out in AI back in 1986-87, when it was more like an expert system rule-based system eventually from engineering. I went into sales so its really interesting to see the full circle war. This is coming now, where you see sales and AI coming together and that’s, why? I wrote the book fantastic and Chad, you and I are the
Worlds largest Denver, Broncos fan Chad and I have known each other for now half a decade through a ISP American Association of inside sales professionals, Chad introduced you in your business yeah. So you see the picture over my shoulder here, that’s, where I believe that this art of selling is headed. We all need to be able to put on an Ironman suit, and the challenge is: how do we make sure it doesnt send us
into a brick wall and make sure that the AI works properly because at the end of the day it still comes down to human to human interactions and Im gonna share some discoveries of deploying almost a hundred customers on AI for sales over the past 12 to 18 months and really excited to be here so thanks for having me fantastic and actually that’s a great segue because Chad talked about the practicality of AI for sales think of this webinar is going to be macro to micro and were going to start at the at the macro level with Jim.
and my panelists team if we could all turn off our webcams so that well we can focus on the presentation Jim you are going to be the quarterback but before we begin I want to set the tone for the agenda of this particular webinar what were going to talk about first through Jim is what does the data and trends tell us about artificial intelligence for sales then were going.
to switch to Victor and hes going to talk about the core benefits and case studies of AI for sales organizations then Im going to tell a real-life case study where it was my first exposure about 18 months ago of a global 50 company who is now doing this and what its done for the business and then as.
we go further down into practical examples Chads going to talk about how theyre actually executing on artificial intelligence what does it look like and then were going to open up the floor for questions so Jim you and the mic is now yours talk to us about the trends you were seeing and how you’re dedicating all this research to AI well its interesting Jamie that you.
know we keep hearing from people when we are talking to sales executives to the sales professionals people are making the statement you know sales today is harder than ever before and in fact Perry and I are flying out to Harvard on May 15th and 16th to sit down with Ben Shapiro whos chair emeritus of marketing at Harvard and a couple other professors talked about that very issue because they said were in the same thing but the question is is that a perception or is that a reality and I think that’s a really really good.
question so let me share with you a reality so if you can click the next slide for me Jaime this was one of the posts I put on LinkedIn last year and it generated the most views that I have the entire year I got got 17,000 people took a look at it because I said okay lets go back and take a look at 2012 you know.
were out of the Great Recession you know so with stable business environment and lets take a look at what sales look like then compared to what it looks like now and you can see here the trend is going definitely down from 63% to 53% I talked to our colleagues over at ESO insights you know for 2018 it was a little bit of flattening a little bit of upside but 63 250 3 8 is going the wrong direction and when weve done additional research in.
around the whole AI for sale Singh saying whats driving your interest in that people are coming back and saying there are external factors that are making sales harder you know the bycicle has changed the number of people involved in decision making processes increase competitive global competitions driving everybody nuts but there’s also internal changes that are coming in you know were moving into new markets you know were coming up with new products and the intimates and its just harder for salespeople to keep up and so there is so devlin and data that backs up the.
fact that sales actually is harder today than ever before but it was interesting because I was sharing this data with one of my old engineers from one of the AR projects I did you know years ago and hes currently data scientist and so as we were talking about things he says well there’s something you’re not putting in your equation you’re talking about Dom buyers and sellers and I said.
what am i leaving out and so if we go to the next slide Jaime when he pointed me to was he said you know in b2b sales you got to be thinking about Alibaba and Im going Holly Bob bug you know Im thinking about a Bob as being Amazon for China so you go there for your sunglasses your cell phone your tennis shoes and it goes all contrary Steves points at CSIS take a look at their tagline global trade starts here and they mean all trade and just like uber came in and disrupted the taxicab.
business you know what guys like Alibaba starting to do is saying you can actually go on their site right now and get information detail sales information on buying a million one or two hundred ninety thousand dollar piece of mining equipment a group of ten forty thousand dollar piece solar-powered communications towers a half million dollar blood chemistry analyzer and so theyre utilizing AI to say hey why talk to sales people come to Alibaba.
you know well have tools I hope you clarify your requirements will tell you the top three vendors who should be on your shortlist will give you a robust feature comparison and tell you what pricing is well give you feedback from existing customers and hey well process the order so not only is it hard there’s enough threat to this thing what is it salespeople gonna do in order to make sure that theyre part of the equation and people dont just go to technology and Jim a quick question you make a.
really fantastic point so if you think about causation of youve got you know this giant dip in percentage of sales quota attainment youve talked about external factors and internal factors would you where would you say in lies the bigger risk is it internal maybe Millennials coming in less formal training all the issues that could be with the internal factors or if you were to bet on a risk factor would you bet it.
towards the external factor of buyer changing market conditions changing economics changing well what do you what do you think I think what were gonna find right now is you know Im a big believer in the golden rule that then what the gold makes the rules and so clearly buyers have the goal and so if were not in a position to really be.
adding value to what theyre doing you know why did they want to come to us and I think that’s where we take a look at our traditional ways of training our traditional uses of CRM our traditional ways of segmenting market places you know if those things were going to work theyd be working today and theyre not and I think that is really whats.
driving this mood now for you know another approach to things and that’s where I think a lot of people are making the bed Im saying if were gonna increase efficiency and effectiveness not just one or two percent but you know dramatically that’s were gonna have to start taking a look at AI and Im the next slide you know what I did was start to take a look at who are all the players in this face and you know there.
are a bunch of people that are making big bets on saying okay lets utilize artificial intelligence to generate the next generation of support systems to help you know telesales people in direct sales people and sales management and youll see a lot of you know you know well-known companies on this thing but theyre also a bunch of folks down here that are coming up and getting a lot of money from venture capitals to go and build these types of systems and on the next slide what I did was start to put all of this into a guide for solution.
selling its about 70 pages happy to send it out to all the attendees today to just give you an idea of whats going on there but what you’re going to see is kind of interesting that there are a lot of people that are trying to blow up processes its not how do I do everything one or two percent better its how do I do with things an order of magnitude better so we actually found examples of a bank that had the two and a percent increase in lead conversion.
rates we found a company out of Australia youll become their cell cycle length by 65% weve seen numerous cases where people had double-digit increases in wind rates and whats really happening is on the next slide were finding the people are not thinking about this in lets take a look at the day in life of a salesperson theyre moving in up to the bigger thing of whats customer lifecycle management look like because there’s a whole lot of things that we do to go from customers.
being blissfully ignorant do we exist in the marketplace to being wild at the Qatar is hopefully in the marketplace and its a much more complex job than just saying lets help organize the sales reps daily business so were seeing you know people come in and say how can we go through and do a better job of market segmentation persona analysis key account planning we move into the selling phase you know how could we do comprehensive needs analysis how do we do individual stakeholder based education how do we really.
configure solutions to a persons needs and then we move into the closing phase Ive actually personalized in that configuration building the ROI negotiating the deal and impose sales you know going on and making their whole customer experience things happening and what were finding is a I for sales is not a thing its a whole bunch of things when you take a look at that landscape of lokos again there are a whole bunch.
of people that are attacking pieces of this thing and saying lets just blow them up so were actually doing our first AI for sales study right now Ill share with you some of the preliminary data on the next slide where we went out to talk to people and say are you implementing AI for sales and we found a group of companies about 150 has said yes and we said what are you doing what were seeing is that theyre utilizing AI in a bunch of different ways theyre.
attacking really big problems number one problem entry descent for this year for 2019 was we need to optimize lean generation well AI is focused on that another things been driving everybody nuts is before accuracy has been dismal for years will a is addressing that and different types of tools to go in and help the sales percent more effectively engage with the customer better tools for coat salespeople are in sales managers so the managers can do a better job at coaching.
so there’s clearly a ton of technology that’s available today but the key thing is really understanding how do you apply that to solve real-world problems and if were gonna be living in this world when we need to be selling at the speed of change you know we cant say hey you know what next next January we got a big.
issue but next year were going to do the sales kick off meaning lets address that then that’s it Id be a really good time to address it we got to do it now and that’s why theyre really excited about you know the work that’s been done to kind of help educate the Marketplace on it you know Victor I love your book and I think youve done some great things but you know if theyre you know.
my my point of view is that there is clearly a reason that weve got to go out and fundamentally find new things to do so Victor why dont you share some of the case studies I know youve been gathering on how people are actually using AI not just in theoretical ways but in real ways today to solve these problems love it great transition Jim and thank you for the data I really appreciate that data if you can go to the next slide Jamie Ill just jump right into it.
so lets take a look at the state of cell again Im gonna retread some of the information youve already shared Jim but if you can go to the next slide I think its interesting just a touch on these now depending on whose study you want to believe we buyers are now 57% in the sales cycle or 90% and Ive seen people say its lower its higher and I really think its it depends statement.
which means depend on what market you’re in but the reality is as buyers are going online to look for information so we as salespeople have to be a little smarter if you can go to the next one the other thing is this is a your study your company study which is now I just found out Miller Heiman thank you for that Jim people are 50 percent 53 percent into as far as achieving or exceeding their quota or more specifically now 53 8 which that is a flattening out so that’s really.
interesting next slide and then this I thought was interesting because I come from a sales we all come from sales but I love looking at behavior and these are the act this is the amount of time being spent on real sales behaviors to actually close deals that’s not hi basically one-third of our time is being spent on trying to close deals so if you can go to the next slide so if we if we now look at the market we now know that again salespeople are not hitting or achieving quota only 53.
percent of the time are they doing that again customers have more information I think that makes help people more valuable but that’s another topic and the fact that theyre not spending enough activity time trying to generate a closing sales that could create a problem so I had an AI moment I if you can go to the next slide I was in Seoul Korea speaking to a large healthcare company and what they did was fascinating they have a telecentre where.
they had lets say a hundred people hundred people each have to make a hundred calls and what they did was they recorded the calls and then what they did is they split the tracks and so lets say Im the seller you’re the potential buyer they will then look at the seller track analyze it using natural language processing and look at keywords phrases velocity intonation a lot of different variables and they.
could determine who warranted a call back or not said another way if I the operator called a hundred people lets say I closed 20 deals that means I have 80 in my pipeline I dont know what to do it so I have to think about who should I call next and most salespeople would have to guess at this go with the gut reaction I kind of like that person maybe I didnt like that person and so.
AI takes the guessing out by using different variables with machine learning program they have built they can basically prioritize the leads for sales people in this case the operator and again also divvy em up into a high probability of closing versus low probability of closing lets push it down the road and that really blew my mind so when you talk when you show that data Djimon lead generation if I recall the numbers today theyre investing about 10 percent AI and lead generation and now theyre going to 50 percent so I.
think that’s really where a lot of people are focusing in on and by the way this healthcare company if you could just stay on this life per second Jamie this sales company or this health care company saw a 67 percent lift in their close rate by being able to use AI to actually monitor the conversations now the other thing that was interesting was that the person who.
was calling make the call the the again everything was analyzed and what they did was use a different type of program AI to determine whether that sales person needed training or not based on how they responded to certain questions so if you look at five or six lines down on your chip on your data point again you see the investment from I think is 10% up to 25% to use AI for sales in.
order to train salespeople so I think this is very valuable if you can go back Jamie to work well and in fact this this in lies a question I was going to ask Jim or yourself because this was this is really interesting so you think about us as sellers right sellers and marketers coming together what is the most natural problem for us to solve and you see at.
the top of the list lead generation forecast management and so forth but its an interesting paradox because we not necessarily the best at thinking of human capital or capital allocation to people you see sales talent management is at the very bottom so if you if this if there were also if we were partnering more with the HR function and operations team I wonder what they would say about us focusing on all these data points of leads and forecasts and to not focusing on the human side of the the human.
capital allocation because you just said halfway down the thing of this chart is sales training and all the way down the chart people arent investing on their recruitment process so what talent should or should not be on our team onboarding should or should not be on the team and certain other aspects that could be analyzed to determine are they a good fit on or off our bus just a Victor Id love to know your thoughts.
your the data the data guy from an engineering perspective do you think its because we as sellers are only analyzing the thing we understand I think were you know in Ellen this is Jims chart so I let him talk about my date of my gut reaction is that people are looking for ways to invest in AI and one of the things they you know you ever hear the phrase eat the fish right which means that you’re gonna take a revenue hit when you invest in AI so you.
want to invest in something that’s gonna give you a quick return on investment and something that’s tangible and quantifiable ie lead generation forecasts management these are numbers when you move all the way down we start getting you more into the soft skills yeah that’s why its been deep prioritize for now Jim what do you think well let me explain one thing you know there are some things out there and what how would you we make our people better and that’s around the coaching and the training thing the sales talent management actually is around utilizing.
AI to go out and find new talent so you know traditionally people have been using you know old die hard assessments that you know based on you know types of thoughts that came out in the 80s and 90s on how to hire salespeople what were finding right now is if you can get AI you start analyzing win losses and no decisions you start analyzing what type of activities drive the sales needle etc yeah you go through and you set find out what whatever attributes of.
a sales person whos coachable or not you can do a much better job of doing an assessment of saying is this person going to be coming in my looking to hire this person first off to do the fit our corporate culture second all do they have the talent or can they acquire the skills to be successful here and third is are they coachable and I think those are the key things that we want to attract people who not only are.
successful here but want to stay here and I think those are things that are going to be other areas were gonna lighten it up where we just go out and we hire people who are have an unfair advantage from day one of being successful here because weve analyzed all the other success factors were doing a better job of interviewing and hiring yeah great point and Victor is I fast forward the slides look at the second bottom one price management you.
told me the story about dynamic pricing and I dont know if you want to bring that story up but Ill key into the slide you want but its something that the teams are clearly not thinking about yet as youve experienced dynamic pricing okay Im gonna go to it let me just kind of explain so once I left the I guess once I left that healthcare company I had this epiphany how AI is.
really impacting sales which is why I wrote the book sales ex machina which every this conference cut way to call a copy and these are the companies I looked at kind of my like my ecosystem I study Salesforce probably been the when I went most deep on and IBM Watson being second next slide if you dont mind and cuz Im.
gonna ask you answer your question Jim let me pass by this these are just two different examples of how AI was used and I want to be respectful of time so I can we just go to the next one you talk about to some other time and by the way this was an example how AI machine learning was used to find pieces of insight and in this case ups found out that by not making left turns they can save 10 million gallons of fuel here and actually reduced her insurance and again reduce their carbon footprint and I.
thought it was interesting because that was actually fed into their system and boom there’s a piece of insight next one this one everybody is familiar with right the story I love here is that you I guess the big headline is you gotta trust your data and that’s one of the biggest things I think people are gonna have to get over that you really have to learn to trust your data so when they.
looked at the data when Netflix looked at data they said you know what if we can find a director like David Finch get Kevin Spacey and we can use a popular shelf house of cards from the UK guess what we can create our show they were so confident in this data they greenlit two seasons of this without seen a pilot and I thought that was amazing that was an impressive next slide and then here I.
just want to talk about whats really happening in the market now every picture you post you’re able to get all this unstructured data and move it in structured data and bad ways for those listening the difference simply is and being simplistic you think of structured data as rows and columns think of unstructured data as movie clips or pictures and the AI is able to extract.
information and then put it in a structured format so it can be also analyzed next slide this is though this one gets me excited because now most people look at video as just video we put up videos on YouTube Vimeo or whatever it may be but now again with machine learning visual recognition what what you’re starting to see is now.
videos are able theyre able to extract data from the video so no longer should we look at a video as a video I look at it as a little data container because it can now look at the transition so you can now look at the backgrounds it can now analyze what was said tag words and so forth and all of a sudden we have so much rich data so if you think of YouTube think of that as now a massive container of data that we can now pull from next slide so now to.
answer your question Jaime and again it looks a little complicated but just focus on the first and third column here and these are the ones I emphasize what I think you know companies who are thinking of using AI can actually just jump into it the first one was lead scoring which is kind of the example I talked about how prioritizing your leads also a classification example we just you know what product you up so across out and we see that a lot on Amazon right and then price.
optimization and discounting when I was looking at salesforce com they have a cpq Ill call it an app that basically looks at the history of all purchases in May and it will come back with two things one will recommend some insights in other words things that maybe should be in the proposal and Im talking to b2b large sales and maybe certain things that should be in the proposal that were.
common across all deals that were want and will also recommend the average discount rate in other words if you’re gonna discount something were should you be and its really interesting is that you can you can change those discount rates and you will see in a very dynamic way how the risk of winning or losing actually changes and I think that’s fascinating the next one client.
churn when will we lose a client if were gonna lose a client what can we do preemptive it emptily to keep that client and again the last second last one is deals to cloak asan again the fact that AI can now allow us to look at dashboards to see what deals are close to closing or what deals need to be focused on I think that gives managers I guess one more information but two more reasons to talk to their salespeople about something specific and so these are the different areas that I see the.
sales improvements that we can make with AI in the future the big question I always ask for companies is try to solve one problem and not a lot of promise so what problem are you trying to solve is the biggest question I often when people say how do i implement AI my response is what problem are you trying.
to solve so I would if you go online if you just search the nine step framework I created it really walks you through how you should actually implement a I in a very general way next slide and so this this is my big statement is that you know and Im talking to sales people right now we used to see you know Jim you were joking about back in the day we you know we use databases how remember.
the Lotus 1-2-3 we went to Excel spreadsheets for those of you who remember act with your CD that was our little database fast forward you know we always saw the CRM as Big Brother and a way of management actually spying on us today I think that’s split so they we need to shift our paradigm and you the CRM not as Big Brother but something that will augment our Billy to sell and the only way that the CRM is going to be powerful enough to sell or help us sell.
is the amount of data and the quality of data we load it with so if your sales person listening to this and your resistance that in putting data into a CRM you’re only hurting yourself and I believe that is my last like J my trying to hurry I think there’s incredible advice because in an average company you have a CRM you typically have a marketing automation platform you typically lets say that you’re you are a software company or somewhere powering your product or service is a back-end database or a back-end database now all.
the sudden youve got three data points to pull from as you talked about from a customer churn standpoint net promote very simple thing as usage and Net Promoter Score on the on the customer engagement side but I am in full agreeance that between your sales data and your marketing data there are so many insights that you could extract and in fact that will be the story that Im going to tell now this is at a practical level as I said in this webinar were gonna go further and further down to use.
cases 18 months ago we win a global engagement with a fortune 50 company and as were rolling out modern digital selling now our job is skills and competency teaching this to the sellers to be able to create more pipeline that’s our that’s our core competency I got exposed for the very first time on what AI can do to complement modern social selling or modern digital seller and the results that Im gonna show in a second is this company doubled the lead conversion in a 90 day time frame let me show you how they did it.
so and I think what Victor said was incredible he said started the problem basically you structured thinking to say like what what is that what is the the problem and the bet that were going to take and that’s what the where they started they didnt start at the tool level they started at the problem and the problem was really simple they.
looked at their lead conversion and they said to themselves there’s no way that this could be best-in-class there are thousands of sellers and inside each seller which is a region which is sells into a region and some into a product these sellers received thousands of leads per seller per territory what that does is and if you think about it if they were if they were.
using outreach do or sales loft or they were running a playbook that had a cadence of giving equal amount of time and attention to each lead what would happen that means you’re only scratching the surface on each lead you’re going you know two miles wide and an inch deep and so the problem they wanted to solve was I have a bet and that bet is that not all leads that were dealing with.
are created equal now this might sound simple to you on the outside you might be a chief revenue officer or a VP of field operations watching this right now and saying yeah of course I know this intuitively the question is have you ever done anything about it and so the hypothesis made sense they felt that there was going to be a peretta law inside their leads but the question is.
what was the Paretos law and what should they focus in on so heres the analysis and they believe that there is no only one answer you see there is data and then there is the reality of relationships so heres what they did they analyzed thousands thousands of deals and the commonality of lead conversion they worked backwards they basically took deals that were won and they worked backwards amongst thousands of them and they started to realize there were two or three or four data points that were recurring over and over again only on.
the ones that were winning but then there was this other x-factor the other x-factor and this is what modern digital sellers understand is that relationships produce asymmetrical competitive advantages meaning disproportionately larger competitive advantages imagine taking an existing customer of yours and reverse engineering who are they connected to who are their competition where have people trout had come from and joined into new companies that connectivity of first or second degree.
relationships hyper accelerates the probability of winning opportunities so they combined these two data points together so heres the data that came back the data that came back showed it was actually exactly parados law twenty percent of all of their global inbound leads yielded eighty percent of all of their deals so now I want you to picture you’re the chief revenue officer or you lead a division and now you need to give.
recommendations the first thing was the mindset they need to have some tough conversations both with regional vice presidents frontline sales managers and then the sales professionals thousands of them to say by the way were about to cut 80% of your lead flow out and imagine being a seller your first instinct because youve been classically trained to pound away on hundreds of leads a day every single day 20 business days a year to you you think that’s normal but so now you have the change of mindset internally that says imagine if.
we only focused on certain accounts so that was the mindset then they had to go to the action and they had to show the empirical evidence they just show what the action plan was and it was that were going to focus on what they would call hand-raisers and these hand-raisers that means that the data coming inbound these are people that are filling in.
forms properly that are showing up to meetings that have certain roles and responsibilities that are showing the certain this is think of this as buying intent but what theyre doing is theyre combining it with social data and what that means is how close in proximity are they did they to work at a previous customer verse they work at a customer of ours today.
are they a direct competitor or a customer of ours there’s this think of like six seven degrees of Kevin Bacon this is are they one degree of separation away from our own success stories and if they meet those two criterias you combine that data those are the leads that the sellers are going to double triple and quadruple down on theyre gonna spend all of their time on this 20 percent pile so that meant they were doing account segmentation there.
they were readjusting the total addressable market they I did a count segmentation and then they they had to retrain themselves to focus on the quality conversation and introducing modern digital things like lets humanize ourselves lets have video conversations with those twenty percent and so that’s the recommendation and as I said before the results think of just in a 90 day time frame they doubled their conversion they doubled their conversion at first you might say yeah.
but their volumes went down no no it didnt matter cuz the other 80% werent closing anyways so all that they did is they took the 20% that would close and they spend all their time and attention now a seller instead of making a zillion dials a day and spending absolutely no real human effort on a particular lead they were taking all that time and they were making videos they were sending personal.
invites and they were they were doing all things to surround that customer to make them feel important and that doubled conversions and it it was my first exposure to this and I went Sam to what Victor said mind blown when he was in South Korea for me I had that aha moment that Im and Im a believer and actually I would love to ask the rest of.
my panelists five years ago when I started really diving deep into social selling a CEO came up to me and he said social selling were in the caveman days means like were literally drawing on walls and were grunting and groaning you know posting stuff like there was no rhyme or reason it was the caveman days and we are far from the the you know the the golden age of digital selling yet but weve evolved I think in artificial intelligence machine learning or actually in the the caveman days like.
were the very beginnings of this team Id love to hear from you do you believe that we are in the caveman days and that these simple antidotes are literal well look back at this webinar three years from now and laugh and how caveman like some these simple wins are well Jimmy one of these Maxims was always when we have disruptive technology we overestimate what its going to do in two years and we underestimate what its.
going to do the intent so I think where young people are been waiting for a a to finally get here but there as they get into it you really are saying hey we really dont know what you’re excited but we dont know what to do with it so I think that there’s kind of you know realities kind of setting in but theyre figuring things out but I think the bills right about the two-year figure I think hes wrong about the 10 because machine learning is going to be there and its going to be pervasive and AI.
will get better by itself in addition to what we figure out what to do with it it will tighten the algorithms you know it will get better I think that that you know I think well figure it out were gonna go from caveman days to now a lot faster than weve ever done it ever before because of the machine learning capabilities of AI Jamie I would I would also echo what Jim just said and that is instead of these mini place like the 2x and conversion of 90 days theyll be all the plays will be done on the back end.
of the technology in a playbook so as a wrap Ill come in and the social proximity will be developed into my software um what I say when the person opens up and my tone of voice how I say it when I say it what do I you know I think if you look at insidesales com they’ve been working at this for the better part of five years and I think for a couple years there a lot of companies kind of looked at that technology and said huh this is a little ahead of its time and I.
think that’s that’s where the market is now headed to pull it all together under one PlayBook under one roof so the rep just has to execute their activity Hey I agree I remember when Dave elkingtons the CEO of Inside Sales was showing me that it was gonna take in factor like the weather and the time of the day I command your placing a call and based on external factors like the weather and the time of the day and the traffic in.
the city it would affect if it dialed into that company or not because it felt that the person on the other end of the line might be in a better or worst mood based on that day and I thought that’s crazy that’s bananas but probably point Im about yeah hey Jamie I think I would you use your analogy I think were coming out of the cave but were squinting in the sunlight hows that that’s my visual fantastic well and now from a so this is as I mentioned that global 50 company was my.
first exposure to it and where you combine what what I believe in wholeheartedly is is is using social data to empower account selection account planning an account engagement but now taking real other data and turning it into a use case now a Chad you’re actually in market doing this so walk us through whats here in 2019 yeah so you know if I if you go back to 2018.
when we launched the company we actually launched in December of 2017 the premise was leverage AI and sales acceleration to speed up our ability to go to market and then leverage humans to have conversations and move the you know move the ball down the field book meetings and build more pipeline that you ever could before and for a year we did that across nearly 100 clients and it worked like magic what started to happen is that companies would come to us and say hey you know wed really like to kind of.
cut the corner can we forego the people part of the process because you know if you could just do email and digital you know social and email selling then you know maybe thatll book all the meetings for us and its not as hard as actually talking on the telephone and and so we did a very interesting very experiment in q1 of this year by launching BD Rai and the thought experiment was lets go.
sign up a bunch of customers that do digital and email only and what Im here to report on is the big no-smoking sign on this picture that’s the cover of my book and its that the human is so important in the equation good news for all the sales people and more important than I may have expected when I when I set out to launch BD Rai so next step forward there fantastic yeah so we provide sales acceleration as service.
powered by AI human in the middle right is again is the most important thing scale xai is the company where weve launched almost hundred clients in the last year go ahead and click so the vision is how do we make people 10 times more effective and that is using AI to write a better email AI to help with responses to emails AI to tell us who to call when you’re building the list so everything that Jim talked about on the.
top of the slide that’s the most important thing people are focused on that’s what were trying to solve with our customers so weve worked with companies from a visa who does the forecasting piece of that if you’re not familiar they help you with AI for forecasting all the way up to Vonage where were helping their team deliver AI for sales through personalized personalized email sent and everything in between next slide so this is a typical program think about what would it take if I were if I hired an SDR and they do 50 to 75.
sales activities per day through a tool like outreach or sales loft a normal outbound outbound campaign like that they would deliver about 10 to 12,000 total sales touches in a year at 50 a day and if you look at topo and bridge group theyre still reporting that most companies are between 50 and 52 touches per day so they do 10 to 15 dials they send 30 to 40 emails some companies.
crank the knob on their emails up to 100 to 200 per day we go at it from perspective of lets go deliver 30,000 touches in a quarter so accelerate the ability to go to market powered by artificial intelligence and powered by sales acceleration regularly customers see between 50 and 100 meetings so billing tree here was a customer that you know launched with us in the middle of last year and within a quarter in a.
brand-new market that theyd never gone into before 50 meetings showed up on the calendar that would have taken three people an entire year and they were able to do in a quarter and decide if they wanted to go into that new market next slide when you go to scale this is what it looks like so a customer called in Stannah whos grown from 300 thousand to.
three million 16 million all in three years weve been partnered with them from the time they are about two to three million dollars and now theyre about 15 to 20 million dollars well that’s because we were able to help them book 173 meetings in two quarters with Fortune 1000 Citibank chase salesforce com lots and lots of companies and IT buyers.
by the way oh no they dont pick up their telephone they dont respond to email they dont respond to social well it turns out when you drive this level of personalized activity powered by AI they actually do so maybe do you want to open it up to conversation here before I move forward does this shock anybody that that to SDRs using a I can deliver 173 meetings in two quarters yes or anything Chad that you can share without getting into IP and secret sauce you.
know you’re back I think whats amazing is you’re balancing not you’re not just hammering one medium and I think were technology had done this in the past is it took a big bet on only one communication medium but you’re showing here that and I Im a huge believer in omni-channel well tell us a little bit and what you could reveal why you made a.
bet on multi media mediums and to what are some of your findings around this just anything that you can add here yeah for sure well if I had those active tabs at the top call activity email activity social activity what you would find Frank Swain from Astana says it well he says look email and social are the air cover and talking on the telephone.
is is where you’re in hand-to-hand combat and the air cover is important because then people see your logo they see your brand in some cases they respond they book a meeting the the million dollar finding and Im covered Im gonna share with you some actual stats and numbers but the biggest takeaway in all of this is that you cant devalue the phone there’s such a huge percentage of of meetings that get.
delivered on the phone and Ill also I thought Id play for you this short clip check this out I hope this comes through on the audio Ill just play the first 30 seconds so this is a call that happened on April 23rd by one of my BD ARS using this social proximity type of approach so check this out Stuart Jordan here with store one I know Im an interruption you’re connected on LinkedIn to my boss gal native work yes let me give you a call you have a quick minute I can tell you great thanks so.
much so we truly believe that weve discovered a breakthrough I noticed you are connected to my boss hmm that sounds an awful lot like the 2x multiplier that Jamie just talked about a few minutes ago and that’s a major one of the major breakthroughs I think you know Ill give a shout out right to Bruce from joy AI who really helped us discover that opportunity so that’s that’s a big one but the million-dollar takeaway you leverage the phone in addition to email and social I love it.
fantastic and and Chad weve got some kind of screencasts here and if I when I flick through them there it kind of shows progressive conversation you just tell me when you want me to flick but tell the team a little how that’s all work this gives you a really good idea of what the a I can write so the way.
that the AI works is that it goes out it looks at Facebook LinkedIn and Twitter and when you’re about to send an email whether you’re using our standalone platform whether you’re using outreach or sales loft weve developed the plug-in to those two platforms so when you go and send an email its gonna look at Rajiv and its going to point out something about him that maybe not all the other salespeople would figure out and normally according to topo this takes an average of 10 to 15 minutes for reps to go figure out how to write that first.
sentence the AI takes that 10 minutes and makes it about 10 seconds it serves up about 10 to 15 different choices look at this one Sarah I see you know Italian awesome how did you learn it next congratulations on publishing working to learn oxygen press right we know that by using these types of sentences youll get a two times open rate and a two to five times better reply rate so the values while I hammer this home the value is you take that three to four hours of time that these.
folks are doing building these emails and you make it down to next to zero and so the AI writes the email that means the person can use the time to now talk on the telephone so that’s the magic if you want to just transmit yeah fantastic and then you know how but this is where the technologies probably progressed you know for some of the people on the call.
today they might be weary because they might have been part of generation one you know the cyborg generation where it you know it different font Edyta or it it couldnt somehow take their name properly and it would just say brackets name you know like it was being pulled from a dirty database or something like this what maybe you can give some tips and pointers for teams on whether data cleanliness or whatever it is that has made this become the 2 0 version of where they might be fearful of this kind of technology from years past yeah well.
you have to trust the data I think back to Victors comment earlier you know it would be impossible for you to go and build this I mean I nearly possible it took my partner two to three years to develop this technology to do that with your own ability to go into LinkedIn and and copy and paste and put it in an email that that’s hard yeah so its important to partner with a company who has this type of a I powered.
one-click personalization technology to make it work as far as the data really all you need is an email for the sender and an email for the receiver and then the system does the rest of the heavy lifting on the back end there is some secret sauce an IP that knows how to tie your Facebook LinkedIn and Twitter accounts together so that I know that if Im sending a note to Jamie at Yahoo and.
Jamie it sails for life that it knows you’re the same person and got you ya know and itd be interesting if it knows you know bills turn to will you know there’s nothing that I think infuriates the Williams of the world that’s right the bills of the world theyre their street name is bill but you know they’ve they’ve named themselves William and when they receive something you know a message dear William they go okay this person doesnt really know me but yeah.
well that’s why we have a human in the loop before we push the send button on these its a good idea like this case Dan from ADA Ive known him Ive spoken with men events if I sent him this Congrats on your six months that might be cool but I wouldnt want to say how you like they say dude I talked to you a month ago what do you mean how have I liked it I might want to change those in.
sentence there right so the AI can get you so far that’s a great point and do what do you want me to keep flicking go through these these builds lets get to the next one after the builds hey hey Chan I just want to add because I think there’s something special about this that you know we take it for granted that you know this is really a.
Kickstarter right to a conversation so that saves you the I call it the mental energy of having to come up with a Kickstarter but whats also interesting from a time management standpoint is that what I was reading a study when it talks about interruption in other words if you’re focused on something and you’re interrupted it takes somewhere between 15 and 20 minutes to get back to where you were at mentally and I see.
this a lot with people who want to write emails on social media and they lose track of what they have to do and it takes a little while to jump back in so I think this is amazed because I think there’s there’s a bigger time saver here then probably what were able to quantify I dont know if that makes any sense but that’s great I think that mental gymnastics of switching topics is much more taxing than people realize think about Steve Richard our friend whos also been part of the ISP for a.
decade you know exact vision CRO and he says that to move from system one the system to thinking that’s really the purpose of a cold call interruption and the you know its an important factor in an email as well so getting them to go like if Matt got this hey good to see you’re on the board its great to see you giving back hes gonna say hmmm spark interesting let me read the next sentence where a lot of times if you dont have that first two sentences.
you’re just gonna delete that email and its gonna go on your spam box like yeah tie it all in here the learn is authenticity matters so whats having lived in this software now for a year every day I go in I personally send 50 to 100 of those personalized sentences well there’s days where I say oh man Ive got that webinar coming up with Jamie I better get through these faster and I go and I now I lose the authenticity.
because I dont read it and then I end up sending Matt mcgarvey on my board a note that says hey congrats for being on the book of scalex and hes like you doofus whyd you send me that though you know leverage the technology and I said dont fly yourself into a wall when you put the Ironman suit on and that can be easy to do when you deploy this to multiple people inside of an organization and then when I get to the.
next last couple slides here the vision is take a tool that automates the bots powered communication look at tools like converse Iike that that was covered in the conversation with with Victor and in his book sales ex machina and there’s a few players coming on the market hint hint were in were in dialogues to bring some very interesting technologies to the market ourselves where its a.
two-way in between the AI and so now you can you can let the AI do its thing right send an email follow up on a download white paper download or a webform request correspond with that person so now there’s four hundred twelve people that are engaged in that screenshot right there well guess what that’s where you turn on agent assisted dialing and call those four hundred and.
twelve at the time of the email open so let the bots do the bot work let and then let the people do the people work but instead of hiring a team if you go to the next slide this is a this is exactly what I did at RingCentral a tale of two of two teams if you will you know a team getting 2000 leads a month across ten reps for inbounds costing a million dollars a year in Lieb costs and a.
million dollars a year and people cost but there’s leakage they dont get the message right they dont call on time theyre out sick etc now look at a team that has the same two thousand leads except instead of all rep follow-up the AI takes on the art of emailing and when there’s referrals it automatically creates a lead in CRM and then the two really really good BTRs who are the.
best on the phone Id rather have having 50 to 100 conversations a day than having 10 reps have five conversations a day you clean it up you create more revenue and that’s what the game is about its not about cost savings that’s just an add-on value its about revenue enhancement and doubling your conversion rate from lead to this you know as we said segue into wrapping up you know I look at salesbenchmarkindex com allocation and how great chief revenue officers VPs field operations are.
actually investors and if you really think about every dollar you spend as you know it could be human capital allocation or sales performance capital allocation I think that that’s ultimately what you’re saying chad is i think that the average sales leader looks perhaps at the wrong part of the P&L and they just there might only be thinking about the expenditure or the.
cost saving but theyre not looking at as a total in vestment and i think that’s the part that you’re hammering home here so yeah start with that start with the outcomes and then oh yeah by the way you’re gonna get a better a lower cost to deliver the outcomes that’s where the magic happens so if you go to my last build here I think there’s a Excel slide and build that out there’s it says two two and ten yeah this is the secret right we measure low medium high how many emails are sent whats the open.
rate whats the positive and negative sentiment you know on average in our digital outreach with PD REI we booked two three meetings a month from email with book two three meetings a month from social that’s the pure channel when you add sales acceleration and talk to more people right the air covers on the top and the lotta trench fighting is.
happening on the phone then weve seen customers get 10 20 even 30 meetings in a month the best we did was 44 meetings in a month and that was in Stano with those 178 meetings over the course of three of three months talking about the phone email and social are excellent I think you and I talked about it earlier and it was the accelerant part of the program yeah no III think this is.
fantastic and you know we only have a few minutes left and George perhaps you can feed us if there’s any anyone that’s put any questions in the question box and if you want to do that now put it in the question box or in the chat box George might feed us up one or two questions here this was Chaco block full.
of IP market trends and real world scenarios I think this was really valuable for everybody and maybe we can go on our webcam as we finish this off George was there any particular question that you think that we should address a recurring question yeah so lets give me a second cuz theyre coming in now second floor we through them there’s a lot of congratulations congratulations.
for offering a great webinar great there you go by the way I want a high-five chant for that great line let the but do the bot work let the people do the people I dont know why I think that’s an important one how many I dont know how many times I was told this as I try to evolve as a CEO $10 an hour tasks – $10 an hour people $500 an hour TAS to 500 but that’s all its really its just capital allocation right who should be involved in forces and Ill leave it to.
you guys can you kick off yeah yeah so who should be involved in implementation that would impact sales well one of the things were been advocating getting back again this whole customer lifecycle management concept is if you map out all the steps that you go through in customer lifecycle management and column a of a spreadsheet and then it columns beyond over you list all the functional areas in your company that are involved in those steps you start to see that this is really going to be an enterprise.
related issue because you’re going to have to have marketing me involved in certain things of customers for and down when your negotiation finance and then when you’re spreading things out product development and delivering distribution so I think its really the type of thing is if you’re saying were gonna transform this whole process of customer lifecycle management its much bigger than sales problem and by the way it improves everything for everybody if I can really get the data flowing back and.
forth then were gonna make everybody within the enterprise more effective yeah Jim I want to piggyback off that I dont know if it was your studied CSO inside or somebody elses but they talked about 10 2 beany average decision-makers involved in signing off on a deal and on my tenth point – how do we go through six point eight to ten point two decision-makers and as they moved up the complexity implementing technology now even lawyers are involved because of the the IP you know the data security part and I thought that was.
interesting talk about really making this complex yeah Im involved in one of those right now and and its they actually said lets get the lawyer on the call tomorrow and this is the lawyers have already signed off on the entire deal with multiple pieces in it weve peeled it down to one piece and the lawyer still wants to get involved and say hey this is very important to our future business dealings so the end of the sales cycle when the lawyers involved Im sorry yes.
the our is that sounds expensive right so people are like looking at and go hey like this sounds expensive here do what I want to 63 percent to 53 percent that’s expensive the cost of doing nothing is killing us right now and its you know its taking a year to get somebody on board it you know forecast accuracy is 47% when the odds are winning at Vegas 49% I mean come on these are things were already incurring a huge cost and the cost of fixing that problems order of magnitudes less than.
the cost of doing nothing were already eating every day yeah I think that yield and throughput piece is just a huge one yeah automation that’s out there already though I think people dont realize that they had gone to hire all these data scientists and you build some of these algorithms the cost will be astronomical the fact that you can apply some of these applications was scalex not a hire some of these other ones you can jump.
into it and almost I dont see a smaller known expense but you know its a way of getting in gently dipping the toe in the water yeah that’s what I was gonna say I did 169 dials this morning myself before this meeting I talked to seven CMOS and CR o–s of companies and the immediate reaction of AI for sales is well that sounds like a boil the ocean and I say I.
tell you what Im gonna send you a short video after this call but Ill record for you itll take me about 60 seconds if you promise to watch it and Im gonna show you one thing that may have a two to three times impact on your pipeline would you promise me you’re gonna watch it and theyre like okay you got it and when I send that email I just this is in brand-new process I invented this.
morning theyre like its awesome yeah cuz I can I can show you something for $1,500 for three months and show you a two to three times impact in pipeline AI doesnt have to cost a lot of money know what your problem you’re trying to solve and then try it easy fantastic team were at the top of the hour this was a fantastic webinar thank you panelists.
support Im looking at my my grid here thank you for great work and team reach out to Victor Jim or Chad and/or I on LinkedIn or through their website for more information and well be sending out the supporting recording and all the other assets after thank you everyone take care.
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