If there’s one market trend that’s been stressed repeatedly in more recent SBI research findings, it’s that many CEOs have been noticing a dip in commercial productivity, with sales cycles getting gradually longer. This poses a difficult challenge to CEOs: How do we do more with less? How can we continue to grow the business without investing in that growth? How can we make our commercial teams more productive?
This was the main idea driving the discussion in the second episode of SBI’s GTM Value Creation Corner podcast, featuring SBI’s Nick Toman and Ray Makela. While there are certainly many ways to answer the questions above, the conversation focused on exploring two of the most talked-about ideas at SBI in 2023—sales approaches and their impact on sales velocity, as well as using generative AI to boost sales rep productivity.
4 types of sales approaches and how they impact sales velocity
This year, SBI Research carried out an interesting study on seller behaviors and profiles to identify patterns among the top performing sales reps, titled, “Delivering Sales Velocity in Today’s Market”. In the podcast, Nick and Ray touched on some of the background of that study and briefly explored the 4 sales approaches and how they perform.
“In my mind, I think it really equates to, ‘Well what’s the profile of the seller we have in place and what skills do they have to do that?’ I think it has some really interesting implications both on the training side and then on the manager and the coaching side—looking at those profiles and what’s most successful,” said Ray.
Going back to the shift in buying conditions in the current market, Nick highlighted that the increased scrutiny from the larger set of different stakeholders who are now involved in buying decisions has gradually changed the approach that achieves the most success for sellers.
“And so, we’re seeing a new and emerging set of commercial behaviors around which approaches win and which ones maybe aren’t so productive out there,” he said. The first approach, Narrowing, is all about driving urgency and momentum into a sale. According to Nick, this is the least effective approach out there—but also the one that sales managers promote the most.
Faced with pressure to close their deals quickly, sales reps try to push customers to the decision that they want, which does not sit well with customers today—especially with more stakeholders involved in the decision-making process. This leads to lower productivity, longer cycle times, and smaller deal sizes.
The second approach, Provoking, has a similar push-based approach. According to Nick, “This profile drives reconsideration—attempting to educate and reset how the customer is thinking about the business problem. I won’t go too deep here, but I will say that the results surprised me on this one.”
The third approach, Translating, takes things in the other direction and focuses on understanding the customer and their business problems. Sales reps using this approach put the customer first by talking about the solution they’re selling in the context of the customer’s business problems, using numbers to paint a picture of what the impact looks like.
The final approach, Anticipating, involves a lot of internal collaboration between sellers and sales managers to identify obstacles to the customer’s purchase decision and working to remove those obstacles, effectively easing customers through the buying process as much as possible.
The discussion did not go too deep into the findings, but more insights on which profile drives higher commercial productivity in terms of sales cycle times and deal sizes can be found in the full report, which you can download and read here.
Experimenting with generative AI to drive sales rep efficiency
All the talk on how the Translating and Anticipating approaches required ample research on customers segued into how generative AI could equip sales reps with capabilities to carry out those activities more efficiently. While generative AI is currently being talked about in just about every circle today, Nick believes that the full potential of the technology remains to be seen, especially with how rapidly the technology is continuing to be developed.
“They’re evolving so quickly that six months from now, it’s going to look a lot different. So when we look at seller approaches and skill development, my take on it is to be real pragmatic about it so we can get value today. And if we’re not using it in our sales motion today, I think we’re missing out,” said Ray.
When it comes to researching a customer, sales reps can talk to chat bots like ChatGPT to help them put together information much faster than if they were to do so manually. With the right prompts and follow-up questions, they can learn a lot about a customer’s industry, their biggest challenges, and what a customer’s key executives care about the most—effectively helping sellers in their preparation ahead of their discovery call. With such a possibility still in its advent in the Sales world, Ray advocates incorporating generative AI use into onboarding and ramping up new sellers today.
“I agree with you. Those who lead the way on this and begin incorporating generative AI into their processes can make some mistakes today and figure things out quicker to give them the leading edge,” Nick added.
At the same time, they agreed on the necessity of guardrails as companies begin experimenting with using generative AI in sales and marketing. Some key considerations include:
- Confidentiality – Data privacy is often a big concern to both organizations and their customers where generative AI is involved.
- Factual accuracy – AI pulls all kinds of information from the internet, but it is not always able to verify the accuracy and reliability of its sources.
- Human touch is still necessary – AI output can greatly assist in writing sales scripts, but human creativity is still needed to finalize a high-quality script.
“I think that’s where we need to provide enough guidance and training for sellers to try these use cases. At the same time, there are things that we want to be aware of and sensitive to. The sales manager also needs to be inspecting, coaching, and guiding to make sure that we’re not just spamming our customers with more AI-driven dribble,” Ray added.
Catch the whole conversation on “Delivering Sales Velocity”—episode 2 of the GTM Value Creation Corner podcast. Listen to the podcast here.
