IoT for Sales: How Automating Data Capture Gets Sellers Selling Again

Avi Dalal
IoT for Sales: How Automating Data Capture Gets Sellers Selling Again

According to LinkedIn’s 2022 Global State of Sales report, sales pros spend less than one-third of their time (30%) actually selling, and far more time on administrative and other non-selling duties. Take a second to read that again. Today, sellers actually spend the majority of their time not selling!

And the most frustrating of these tasks? Manually updating CRM (ask anybody in sales).

It’s 2022. Do we really still expect salespeople to enter contacts and log activities in CRM like they’ve been doing for decades? There has to be a better way. That’s where “IoT for sales” comes into play.

Think about it—IoT has come for us, and it’s here to stay. It’s enabling manufacturers to digitally transform industrial operations. It’s empowering life sciences companies to create devices that predict medical events before they happen. And it’s allowing telecommunications and high-tech leaders to provide solutions that would have been unthinkable just 10 years ago (e.g., 5G-powered fleet management).

It’s time to shift the paradigm

We’ve been inundated with more data points and points of connectivity than ever before, yet almost half of sellers (45%) say their biggest data challenge is incomplete data. This begs the question: where is “IoT for sales?” How can we use technology to:

  • Forever eliminate manual CRM data entry, solving the incomplete data problem
  • Vastly improve the sales rep experience by connecting disparate systems
  • And boost win rates and deal sizes while we’re at it?

The answer? Automate CRM activity capture and unify all revenue activity data to dramatically increase alignment and accountability across go-to-market (GTM) teams.

Automated Activity Capture

But that’s much easier said than done. Enterprise CRMs tend to be “messy,” to say the least.  For that reason, activity capture solutions need to be able to perform in complex environments.

Let’s be real—while we like to think that work email accounts are solely used for work, they’re also commonly used to communicate with friends and family. And while we like to think of customers as purely that, sometimes they can be vendors as well. This greatly complicates activity capture and matching.

It’s critical that an activity capture solution be robust enough to not only filter out sensitive or non-business relevant information and keep it out of CRM, but also be advanced enough to match activities to the right places in CRM with a level of accuracy that bests human judgment.

What does it take to reach this level of AI-powered automation? We’re glad you asked. Here are the five key ingredients:

5 steps for automated activity capture

Sign on for GTM transformation. Tune in to our upcoming webinar.

People.ai VP of Sales Engineering, Jesse Dailey, and People.ai Senior Director of Marketing, Mark Gallant, plan to dive deeper into this very topic on July 19. Register for the webinar to learn more about how People.ai excels at automating CRM data capture and the results this has produced for enterprises like PTC, Zoom, and others.

It’s time to help sellers get selling again.

Register now!

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