By Jordan Turner | 4-minute read | September 22, 2023
Big Picture
Technology powered by artificial intelligence promises to assume many core sales activities, freeing up sellers to concentrate on delivering value-affirming interactions with customers. To deliver sales impact at scale, sales leaders need to focus sellers on the unique human behaviors that drive high-quality deals — and treat technology as a full-fledged team member. Here’s how.
Sellers must relinquish some control over customer interactions and give AI-powered technology — generative AI, emotion AI and digital humans — more responsibility to execute core selling activities. For example, synthetic sales development reps (SDRs) can automatically identify leads and generate outreaches, reducing prospecting time to just an hour a week and giving salespeople more time to focus on other tasks.
Don’t use AI as just a sales tool; instead, define and scope tech’s role as a full-time employee, held responsible and accountable like any contributor. This is a paradigm shift that will require changes to how sellers interact with technology.
Let salespeople focus on where they excel: engaging buyers on a human level to understand their needs, motivations and objections, and ultimately validate that a purchase is right for them. This is known as “value affirmation” and is a key factor in driving more expansive, high-margin deals.
Critical sales skills involve “mentalizing”: active listening (being fully present as the buyer speaks), putting yourself in the buyer’s position to understand their perspective and experience, empathizing as they consider a purchase, and using the information you gather to predict how the buyer will likely behave.
When buyers have value affirmation interactions, they are 30% more likely to complete a high-quality deal.
Source: Gartner
Treating AI as a partner starts with your sellers’ willingness to engage with, trust and be influenced by AI. Without this seller-tech collaboration, technology cannot be a true teammate. From there, it’s all about experimentation: choosing the right AI application and refining inputs to get the best results, ultimately making the AI better.
The most critical skill for seller-tech collaboration is creativity. The power of AI is only unlocked when salespeople ask it to combine information in new and novel ways — bringing their AI partners to life to win a deal, craft an email or tap into a different audience.
“Sales leaders must combine the transformative power of AI with the uniquely human capabilities of their sellers to drive high-margin deals. While this future might seem like science fiction, competitor sales organizations (and likely your own salespeople) are already experimenting with new technology to reshape selling. By acting quickly, you stand to transform the seller and buyer experience, unlock a step change in seller productivity and achieve significant revenue growth.”
3 things to tell your peers
New AI technology has the potential to significantly reduce seller responsibilities, but only if you are prepared to treat it as a full-fledged member of the team — not just a tool.
With this added team member, get your sellers to be more effective, valuable and impactful by asking them to do less.
Use AI tools to take on some of the responsibilities historically owned by sellers, and have sellers focus on their uniquely human edge — mentalizing: the ability to listen, empathize and understand buyers in a way that nurtures high-quality deals.
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George Tobias is a Team Manager with the Research Talent Lab. As a Lab manager, Mr. Tobias coaches and develops the next generation of PPR researchers, helping them learn core research competencies and preparing them to contribute to increasingly sophisticated projects. He formerly worked as a researcher with Gartner for Sales Leaders, where he focused on sales force productivity, account management, customer buying behavior, and sales force structure and design.
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