As a senior sales leader, you must scale your approach to succeed. And AI can enable you to do just that, according to Harvard Business Review, “With generative AI…sales planning tasks that took weeks can be performed in an hour, as managers dialog with the system to discover opportunities, formulate key account strategies, and determine how to allocate effort to geographies, customers, products, and activities.” Here are proven ways to use AI to achieve repeatable success and consistently exceed your goals.
Part 1. Pave the Path to Repeatable Success with AI and Automation
Step 1. Identify the areas of your sales organization that need to change. Start by identifying inefficiencies and the roadblocks standing in the way of your desired state. Then, start to think through solutions that will help get you there. Here are some challenges you may be experiencing.
Step 2. Align expectations with stakeholders.
Once you’ve identified the areas of your sales organization that need to change and how you propose to address those challenges, it’s time to gain support from senior leadership and align with your frontline sales managers. By aligning expectations with leaders, you’re making sure they understand the impact for themselves and the organization and gaining champions for your programs. And gaining the support of your frontline leaders is critical since they will be the one implementing any new programs.
Step 3. Define success metrics.
Determine appropriate program KPIs and reporting cadences for your programs and communicate those with leadership and direct reports. What does success look like for you and your team? For example, is it a matter of how accurate your forecasting should be? What behavior are you looking to change, and how are you going to measure success?
Step 4. Develop your AI roadmap.
Your new program should have a complete set of activities, assets, tools, and technologies — all clearly aligned to measurable and observable outcomes that can be assessed by you and your team of managers and reported to senior leadership. Here is a detailed explanation on how to develop an AI roadmap your organization can trust.
Step 5. Implement and iterate using the right tools.
It isn’t impossible to build AI sales tools in-house but it can be a months-to-years long process. There are many out of the box sales AI tools that can help make an impact right away. It’s important to select sales technology that offers A. the capabilities you need to help solve your challenges, B. the insights and reporting capabilities you need to measure success, and C. robust and up to date security and data privacy protections.
Part 2. Measure Success
Once you have the organizational alignment in place and the technology you need to implement changes, you can kick off your new AI-driven sales programs. Here is a table to measure if your new programs are working:
Learn more about how you can leverage AI and better data to identify and understand patterns in order to scale your sales strategy.