Magic Robot Miracle Cures

How's that AI project going in your sales effort?

Is such initiative the desperate rouse of under-fire boss nearing departure lounge jumping on the decade's buzzword? Or the determined journey of a clear plan, building on past success?

The Sales Dept can plausibly lay claim to being both most underwhelming for implementing new 'systems', whilst also victim to classic Cinderella function treatment where such tech investment and guidance, if it comes at all, lags well behind all others.

Chatbots have opened our eyes. Even if when we ask them about something we specialise in, we frown that its answer, no matter how rapidly returned, is more wrong than right.

Ever improving automation, particularly tantalising around everyday admin tasks, has given similar hope. Even if we must spend time refining whatever output is required.

Imagine a marriage of the two!

I shudder at the mountain of mistakes, lost sales, and careers set back, that are about to get repeated from a couple generations back. When paper got replaced by mainframe. Before desktops with first SFA then CRM. Morphing into the app world we inhabit have today.

Recall the way the inventors of spreadsheets, word processors and slideware are aghast at how what they made has overall, counter-intuitively and certainly not as intended, reduced productivity and effectiveness. Chaining the do-ers to tasks that now prevent them from said do-ing. Can any Sales AI 'solution' reverse such shattering imbalance?

Consider where we'd want time slashed from routine tasks, disparate information collated sped our way, hidden insight provided the instant before it is needed.

I am seeing Enterprise-focused salesteams move on this.

Yet how many are really making it happen their way is moot.

For one thing, there's that vast array of established system vendors rushing to tell you their kit will have all the answers. And phew, also to be fully integrated with what you presently 'use'. So trust, and glory shall be yours.

We've definitely heard that Wolf-cry all before, Peter the AI salesrep.

I, by the way, have always been more the bolt-on fan. Best-of-Breed, no eggs-in-one-basket, using each modular case's specialist, and all that.

What is it AI can do differently for commercial selling endeavours?

Do your call reports? Write your Proposals? Craft that slidedeck? Send an email/message without you getting involved? Proactively or when asked, produce some morsel from anywhere around your company servers? Scrape the publicly available data of prospects, known and unknown, for the ones you must call right now, with what about? Alert as to when a pattern of client or prospect behaviour that precedes relationship cessation is identified, steps ahead of when it would become critical, and take action?

Those seven being nowhere near an exhaustive list.

Twenty years back I came across a great piece of business tech. A tiny startup had created their own spider. Designed to crawl through all company docs as allowed on what were then company servers, including their own hosted email. It could rifle through plain text as well as documents, even like PDFs.

A few dispiriting evolutions hit. For instance, more docs than not began to get marked not-searchable. Staff were found through the logs to be spending too much time being nosey for the sake of it. And as usage was seen to trail off, there was precious little evidence people were actually using any found data as intended.

Are Sales AI openings set to suffer an updated yet similar fate?

Despite all these intimated barriers, it really does feel like the future though.

As you embark on your own AI ambitions, here's a trio of brief pointers. Beyond what standards should have been learned by salesteams through implementations past. General principles that ought help along the way.

Don't neglect TI; Traditional Intelligence. In our case, all those sales activities - macro & micro - that must continue or underpin where you want to go.

Avoid either scapegoating 'the algorithm' or blaming those who don't slavishly follow it.

Develop IA, Intelligence Augmented; try not to rely on the tech alone.

Good luck with your own magic robot.