AI

Artificially Intelligent Selling

Sales, the final frontier...

Social, Mobile, Cloud and Big Data have dominated the ‘trend’ conversations in 2014, and all four will continue to gain momentum as change agents in B2B and B2C business. But in 2015 they will be accompanied by three complementary technologies – the dawn of AI (Artificial Intelligence; yes the scary self-learning type), micro predictive analytics (BI leveraging big data) and the maturing of mobility proximity (beacons and geo-fencing). All seven of these elements together coupled with the dawning explosion of sensors everywhere, will represent unprecedented technological synergies and the use-cases are limitless in transformative customer experience. It’s already happening and Amazon is an example.

But almost all the hype around these advancements has missed an important consideration… technology is ushering in an era of distraction and artificial connection. The appearance of connection is not the same as real connection. An ‘always on’ and ‘always connected’ world means no-one is really concentrating and ADD is a constant barrier to meaningful conversation and genuine engagement. There are 1,000 channels but there’s nothing on. The noise is deafening but no-one can hear. The sheer volume of content, channels and workload is killing quality. In short – people are skimming, misinterpreting, clicking away and tuning-out. Miscommunication and misunderstanding is everywhere.

But technology is evolving at a faster rate than any of the creators could imagine. Where could all this take B2B and B2C selling? Could AI and the enabling data sources mean that technology could create relevance in every dimension, even assessing our ‘mood’. When process automation crosses over into automated engagement, then sales people are facing an apocalyptic threat. By 2020, could the majority of salespeople be replaced by AI? If the value of a sales person is defined by providing information and enabling someone to transact; then the answer, sadly, is definitely ‘yes’.

How can sales people avoid digitally driven extinction? The answer is value – the creation of value for customers and employer through traditional concepts executed innovatively with technology. We live in a human world and emotional connections are what influence us, motivate us, and inspire us. Everything old (value selling, solution selling, insight selling, trusted advisor, etc.) will be new again because it is how to best differentiate in a human world. But only for those who can adopt blended engagement models where differentiation is created through the combination of online and physical presence with digital and human interaction. This is future for the most successful sales people… the ones who will prosper beyond 2020.

I predict a great future for you in sales but only if you learn to create innovative mash-ups of proven selling principles combined with new world digital engagement to meet and serve your markets and customers where they are and how they prefer to interact. Sales must move higher up the value chain to conduct the digital symphony. In many ways, this will bring you closer to the customer than ever: if they let you in. You must be the signal in the noise to break through so I will write more on how to do this strategically in upcoming posts, to in essence, future-proof you.

If you valued this article, please hit the ‘like' and ‘share’ buttons below. This article was originally published in LinkedIn here where you can comment. Also follow the award winning LinkedIn blog here or visit Tony’s leadership blog at his keynote speaker website: www.TonyHughes.com.au.

Main Image Photo by Flickr: OiMax

Let's Simplify Sales Before We Reimagine It

"Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler." - Albert Einstein

Futurism rules the day and predictions abound including my own on how we can reimagine the salesforce in the digital age. Some human beings will be replaced by smart AI robots that sift through huge amounts of data to automate administrative processes... even automate our campaigns, parse our emails and deliver us warm leads.

Wow, maybe they can even close the deals for us. I hope not! A few lucky managers will work the largest select opportunities from inside. So is it time to hang up your suit?

I think there's a great deal of forward thinking among the sales intelligentsia. I am not convinced access to vast data, social insight and mobility has fostered deeper engagement or connected our world in a better way. This is why I truly enjoy thought leaders that promote the channel as a means to deeply build awareness, meaningful engagement; that stop and read. I see a preponderance of endless self-promotion, clicks, feed clogging and meaningless curation where quantity is winning a silent victory over quality.

The hardest part of this new paradigm is just to slow down. You can search a Twitter feed and find dozens of amazing articles to read but where is the time left in the day to produce? Shouldn't we still be spending most of our time communicating powerfully with our dream clients?

I would call for a return to the basics before going after all the cutting edge technology advancements in 2015. Excellence in sales requires excellence in sales process so you need a good one. I am a proponent of SPIN, TAS, eFox, Solution, Strategic and Challenger Selling. I even built a meta-framework of my own called RSVP. I feel it's valuable to learn many frameworks and methodologies, to then simplify them into something that you can always remember no matter how much pressure in your sales situation. You can make your own process and embrace your natural personality while selling.

One can take any system and make it simpler. Einstein's quote rings true. If you're going to leverage Twitter, why not know who every follower is? Why not pair it down to just an essential list of contacts that's manageable. If that seems impossible as you've already built out your strategy in an older era of Web 2.0, then at least build hyper focused lists by genre to segment your thought leaders so you can truly listen to them and engage in context.

As managers, let's ride along with our team members this year, joining our account executives on-site in the field. Let's challenge them to build a concise agenda. We should meet with them beforehand to talk strategy and afterwards for a debrief. What are the politics in the account? Who is in the power-base? Which competitors are in the deal placing it at risk, the biggest of which is usually "do nothing?" What is the strategy we will engineer to win the deal?

Each sales person should be paired up with a mentor and that mentor could be you. In the old world, apprenticeship was how sales was passed down. Great sellers taught the next generation how to read people, how to weave a strong story line, how to digest an annual report and how to diagnose problems, prescribing solutions.

Get on site with existing clients in 2015, hold quarterly business reviews, bring your insights on a giant poster-board and leave it behind to show you truly care. White board out the lifecycle with customers, let the customer show you in their own words and pictures, their own short-hand. Record it, reflect on it, get to know the accounts inside-out to foster explosive pipeline growth.

Could 2015 be the year of retention or will massive sales organizations hire 10 lemmings to send 6 off the cliff? I'm talking about retention of our sales talent and retention of our best customers in tandem here.

Why not take each complicated system we use in the enterprise sales force and simplify it. You will want to read Cracking the Sales Management Code by Jason Jordan and build a new dashboard in Salesforce that reflects the sales activities that you can actually influence, this could be connected calls, WebEx's and GoTo's held with Challenger demos, opportunities qualified or proposals sent out. Start to take a look at the Pareto Principle also called the 80/20 rule, the power law of distribution that governs your day in order to prioritize your opportunities. Step back with your manager and analyze the cause and effect relationship with your actions to outcomes.

Time management will be everything in 2015 with the onslaught of notifications buzzing in your pocket, updates from LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Google+, [insert the next buzzy social craze network] in a dissonant cacophony of chaos, keeping you from those five inbound leads you need to call back or taking twenty precious minutes to read the updates from the CIO you're about to call on who just spoke at the tech conference. We rob Peter to pay Paul when we rush through our day, when we click too fast, when we act before thinking.

Take all your tools and give them a New Year's pruning; simplify them to their essence. White board out what your CRM needs to show, the key insight your marketing campaigns must convey, the one key metric by which you're measuring progress, the key clients you seek to grow and visit with. How can you move from value proposition to continuous value creation? Try to hold every meeting as a video conference to see your people face-to-face, rather than a voice on the phone.

Start to write LinkedIn Publisher posts once per week as a summary of the key insights you're learning from visiting with companies in the industry verticals you serve. Practice thought leadership and share your subject matter expertise. Pause for 10 minutes when you arrive to work each day to simply think and map the day, to organize your time. Build agendas prior to every meeting on your calendar. Be open to sharing those agendas with prospects and clients to get buy in. Send them snippets from something they wrote on Twitter or a mention before the meeting to show them you are listening. Send them a white-paper directly pertinent to their greatest objectives the night before. Mastering the details takes just a bit more time so create it.

There's a simplicity to what motivates people. They tend to move toward pleasure or away from pain. Most people don't change from the status quo until there's no other choice, the organization is literally burning down, hemorrhaging revenue. Look at what is happening with cloud computing eroding the hardware based on-premise enterprise tradition. “Software truly is eating the world”, as Marc Anddreessen said best.

The vast majority of marketing messages are focused on revenue growth, ROI and all the benefits customers can realize. But this makes all marketing messages sound the same. If you can move your campaign toward risk mitigation and away from pain, it's a very powerful differentiated message. It's a simple message. Executives are walking around with a major problem they need to solve. If they're seasoned, they've prioritized their biggest pain-point. They're obsessing on how to fix it. They've got a 10X moonshot in their head too. When you understand them and speak to these burning issues, you are instantly sent up the food chain. She will re-arrange her schedule to talk with you now.

So that's my advice. Climb out of the endless meetings with management and colleagues and focus the majority of time looking actual customers in the eye over Skype or if highly qualified, hop on a plane, train or ride your bike over there for coffee. Get off social media as a crutch, leverage it supplementally to make your real world interaction more meaningful. Fix your overcomplicated CRM, reducing the amount of stages to reflect a dead simple sales process. Collaborate with your team members in the field, in the arena. Get out from behind the desk, the flat screens, a manager's spreadsheet jockey comfort zone. Let's move from reactive to proactive management in sales and prioritize every action and system at our disposal.

Einstein also profoundly said, "Imagination is more important than knowledge." Let's iterate, test and fine tune our approach before we reinvent the wheel. When we do reinvent the wheel let's make sure to temper that discovery with a healthy dose of respect and understanding for what still rolls down the road as history tends to repeat itself and it's critical to factor in time tested wisdom and road-tested knowledge into the equation. Humanity remains a communications grid network so logarithmic technology tectonic shifts every ten years tend to have little effect on trend lines measured by tens of thousands. Are we clay or obsidian rock?

Infinite new sales inventions may come out but building trust and leading with new insight could remain the E = mc2, the constant or fundamental part which any future complex selling system can be distilled down into. Virtual reality, AI, wearables, holography, smart contacts, flying cars, interstellar sales, the singularity is near? The more technology, the greater the need for humanization. When you span your imagination out 1,000 years, it becomes evident that building trusted advisor relationships will still be the silver lining guaranteeing your success in any new medium. I predict Charles H. Green's books will be even more relevant in the year 3,000.

If you valued this article, please hit the ‘like' and ‘share’ buttons below. This article was originally published in LinkedIn here where you can comment. Also follow the award winning LinkedIn blog here or visit Tony’s leadership blog at his keynote speaker website: www.TonyHughes.com.au.

Main Image Photo by Flickr: Bill David Brooks

Will Artificial Intelligence Protect Sales Jobs?

I've written about how Artificial Intelligence (AI) is going to create a sales career apocalypse but not everyone agrees with me. I took the time to meet with Matt Michalewicz who is a global leader in applying AI to create opportunities and drive the productivity of sales people. His perspectives are thought provoking and profound.

Although Artificial Intelligence (AI) and automation is going to displace many people in current jobs, including white collar professions,  AI can also make certain jobs more productive. Matt believes that AI can actually make some jobs so much more productive that they will be protected from becoming extinct. I asked Matt to elaborate in the context of business-to-business (B2B) sales roles and here is his response (in italics).

The 'salesperson' job category is predicted to suffer significant job losses in the decade ahead but these predictions are based on a number of factors:

  • The growing sophistication of AI technology
  • The continuing move by consumers to online, self-service consumption models
  • The deteriorating return on investment metrics of many sales jobs (especially “in field” jobs)

Just look at what happened to the salespeople that sold vacuum cleaners, insurance, and encyclopedias on a door-to-door basis. Their demise stemmed from too much cost (salary, travel expenses, commissions, etc.), and not enough yield (too few sales to justify the cost). The same also happened to B2B sales people selling fax machines, radio paging and other technologies that became common-place.

Sales roles in B2B selling are at risk, especially with commoditized products such as liquor, food, carpet, electronics, paint, hardware, among many others (where the average sale size is low, but the costs of keeping reps on the road is high). Unless these companies can increase the yield and sales effectiveness of the in-field reps, they will suffer a similar fate as those that sold vacuum cleaners, insurance, and encyclopaedias. In other words, these sales job types need to become more productive to stay viable from a business (cost/benefit) perspective

But then Matt took the conversation in a surprisingly positive direction.

"Imagine if you had a digital assistant who did your research and created the insights you can take to customers to create value."

All B2B sales people need to lead with insight as their key point of differentiation. I've been following IBM's Watson closely but Matt has founded his own company,  Complexica, focused on the application of Artificial Intelligence to help organizations capture both profit and productivity gains. The application of his technology can change the game for those in B2B selling, especially where there are huge amount of data that can be analyzed. Matt and his team of AI “lifers” have worked in the area of Artificial Intelligence for more than 20 years, written dozens of books on the topic, and Complexica is their 3rd AI company (with their previous being acquired by Schneider Electric in 2012).

Complexica’s core product – an AI-based software robot called “Larry, the Digital Analyst” – has been specifically designed to make sales people more productive. How? By using advanced AI to automatically capture and analyze countless data sets (both internal and external), to determine:

  • The most promising customers and prospective customers to visit (where the wallet share potential is the greatest)
  • Value-adding insights that can be shared with the specific customer or prospective customer (such as “businesses just like yours are doing/buying/selling xyz at the moment” or “this is what’s selling well in your area” and so on)
  • The exact offer to be made to each customer or prospective customer (based on analysis of similar customers and transactions)
  • The exact price (again, based on analysis of similar customers and transactions)

Where IBM's Watson is currently focused on medical diagnosis (after winning Jeopardy against the best people on the planet), Complexica began life with a different approach.

Matt explains that Complexica's Larryhas been designed from the very beginning to enhance the value that sales people provide their customers while dramatically improving their efficiency. “We observed that huge productivity gains could be achieved if we could just tell sales reps where the most promising opportunities are, arm them with research and value-adding insights for each visit, and suggest the best combination of products, services, and price for each sales conversation. If we provided this information automatically and simultaneously to hundreds of in-field reps and telesales operators, they would immediately become more productivity and their yield would increase, because they would be targeting better opportunities, with the right products at the right price. From that initial observation, the idea of building an AI-based software robot was born, so we could automate all the complex data analysis to provide right the insight, to the right person, at the right time, without any of the complexity for the end user. That was the moment Larry, the Digital Analyst was conceived.”

Matt Michalewicz is a global leader in AI and the video interview with Sky News makes for fascinating viewing (Click this or the image below to view)

While technology and automation can destroy jobs it can also enhance sales careers and the value being provided to customers. Those sellers who embrace technology to create the necessary value to fund them in their roles will be the ones who prosper.

Matt Michalewicz is co-founder and Managing Director of Complexica.  

If you valued this article, please hit the ‘like' and ‘share’ buttons below. This article was originally published in LinkedIn here where you can comment. Also follow the award winning LinkedIn blog here or visit Tony’s leadership blog at his keynote speaker website: www.TonyHughes.com.au.

Main Image Photo by Flickr: Sean Davis

Humans Need Not Apply For These Roles

The bots are coming, make no mistake, and they're not just taking blue collar or low skill roles. Manufacturing bots have been here for decades and now writer-bots are disrupting journalism, driver-bots are taking over warehouses, and software-bots are driving web traffic and eCommerce. If you think that Uber is disrupting the taxi industry... wait until Google Self-driving Car. Ashley Madison was using software sex-bots to dupe male members... cheating the cheaters; how ironic. Buy-bots and Sales-bots are here now; you just need to open your eyes. Not convinced... watch this compelling short video and then we'll discuss how you can bot-proof your own career. Seriously, watch the video now.

There will always be a role for human-to-human (H2H) selling but if all you do is provide a form of connection or information dissemination... then you're doomed just like the dinosaurs. The machine age is upon us and singularity (the moment individual computers match the level of human intelligence and become capable of recursive self-improvement) is projected to will occur in approximately 2030 (2050 at the latest).

An article published here by BBC News summarizes research carried out by Oxford University and Deloitte that reveals 35% of jobs are at risk of being computerized in the next 20 years (thanks Jonathan Farrington sending this to me). It is worth reading and ranks jobs in order of which are most likely to be lost to machines.

Natural language has been one of the biggest challenges for computers due to nuance, ambiguity, humor and syntax. English language is one of the most difficult but look at the progress Siri, Google Now and Cortana have made in dealing with these challenges plus the problem of accent. When a computer first beat the world's best chess player we thought that was no big deal because chess is game of pure logic and what-if scenarios. But A.I is a whole new game... Watson reads online encyclopedias and trolls the internet to create its own databases. It doesn't forget and has photographic memory. It can also understand weak links and attribute meaning to obscure questions. ... it can understand the spoken word and then respond at lightening speed to mop the floor with the very best Jeopardy players in the world. It's a stunning achievement. This video clip is short but the full documentary is worth watching.

So, how important is it to fire-proof your sales career?  According to Andy Hoar at Forrester Research, there is only one segment of professional selling that will continue to grow. In his April 2015 report, Death of a (B2B) Salesman, he details the results of surveying 236 buyers. Andy says “B2B buyer behavior has changed significantly in the past few years” and he believes that more than 1 million sales reps in the United States will lose their jobs by 2020. That equates to more than 22% of sales roles that will be gone and he claims that 93% of buyers prefer buying online when they’ve already decided what to buy.

Here is the brutal reality for those in sales concerning job prospects:

   - Order Takers: 33% Job losses by 2020

   - Explainers: 25% Job losses by 2020

   - Navigators: 15% Job losses by 2020

   - Consultants: 10% Job gain for those who can adapt

I've mapped Andy's [Forrester Research] terminology into my own quadrants that I've used for years (from my first book in 2010) and here's the stark picture.

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Forrester says that only 25% of B2B businesses actively sell online today yet the cost of sale reduces from $24.50 to $1.50. Any business selling a commodity must explore ways to reduce cost of sale and those who operate on the left side are in trouble. Those in the bottom right need to elevate because relationships alone are not enough... insight and value is the new black.

So how can sales people avoid digitally driven extinction? The answer is value – the creation of value for customers and employer through traditional concepts leveraged through technology.

We live in a human world and emotional connections are what influence us, motivate us, and inspire us. Everything old (value selling, solution selling, insight selling, trusted advisor, etc.) will be new again because it's how to best differentiate in a human world. Challenger Selling has a real role but only for those who can adopt blended engagement models where differentiation is created through the combination of digital and human interaction.

"I predict a great future for those in sales but only if they can create relationships of trust with the most senior people and then provide value through insight and innovation"

Learn to also innovate in the way you sell through mash-ups of proven selling principles combined with new world digital engagement to meet and serve your markets and customers, where they are and how they prefer to interact. Sales must move higher up the value chain to conduct the digital symphony. In many ways, this will bring you closer to the customer than ever – if they let you in. You must be the signal amidst the noise to break through and this is why leading with insight and having business acumen is so important.

Finally, watch this short video that captures the thoughts of Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking... the bots here are real (no CGI) and online salesbots are more advanced than those seeking to navigate the physical world to go to war.  Look at marketing software such as Hubspot for lead scoring and nurturing to see how automation and disruption is real for professional selling. Wake up if you don't want to be replaced; define the value you bring your employer and customers.

If you valued this article, please hit the ‘like' and ‘share’ buttons below. This article was originally published in LinkedIn here where you can comment. Also follow the award winning LinkedIn blog here or visit Tony’s leadership blog at his keynote speaker website:www.TonyHughes.com.au.

Main image photo from Flickr.