SalesTechStar Interview with Sam Yang, President of Field Operations at People.ai

Sam Yang, President of Field Operations at People.ai talks about the various B2B selling trends set to dominate B2B sales in 2023:

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Welcome to this SalesTechStar chat Sam, tell us about yourself and your role at People.ai – what inspires you most about being in sales/associated roles?

Thank you for the opportunity. My career has spanned multiple facets of the go-to-market (GTM) team, including sales, customer success, marketing, services, support, operations and GTM partnerships and teams. Most recently, I led the GTM team at Data.ai. What drew me to People.ai is its potential to help customers unlock revenue during a challenging macroeconomic environment. This opportunity speaks to my passion for connecting people with the right solutions at the right time to solve their business problems and ensure their continued success.

Take us through some of your core sales strategies that have helped drive customer acquisition in new markets: what takeaways from your experience would you share with B2B sales/marketing teams?

A core strategy I’m taking with me to People.ai is driving customer growth through pre-existing and upcoming key partnerships. People.ai already has budding partnerships with major players, including Zoom and Oracle, and established partnerships with Salesforce and Slack. Making products accessible and easy to integrate into pre-existing tech stacks is crucial in today’s ultra-connected world. Providing value on top of an adopted, established system like a CRM has enabled much of People.ai’s growth.

I also have found value in selling products I have first-hand experience with. Like many of the People.ai executives, I’ve personally benefited from the product and have directly experienced how it helps accelerate revenue growth. Knowing how a product will help solve prospect pain points and believing in it goes a long way in moving deals forward and bringing value to customers.

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Over the years, how have you seen sales and customer service in B2B tech evolve? What do you feel the future for these functions holds?

First, the buyer is getting much smarter. We started seeing this trend 15-20 years ago, but now it’s on another level. People say the buying decision is 50-60% made before the first meeting; I think it may 70% or more. As a result, it’s so important that product messaging is very simple and clearly articulates a problem and solution. This way, the buyer can envision how the solution adds value before the first meeting. It’s all about efficiency.

Because the buyer is smarter, all engagement needs to be more consultative than selling. As a seller, you are there to help your customer solve a problem, not persuade them to buy. If you truly set out to help your customer, you can earn trust, and the financial commitment naturally follows. Companies like Amazon and Zappos get customer service right. You must be passionate about delighting customers. There is no higher priority. If customers love you, everything else can be fixed. If customers don’t love you, you’ve got problems.

In the future, I see current trends accelerating. Customers will get smarter and have more insight and resources at their fingertips. This means sales and CS will have to be highly intelligent and consultative. Customers in the future will have even less patience being “sold-to”; they will, however, prioritize and invest more time with partners they feel are subject matter experts helping them solve business problems.

How can brands strengthen their overall sales ops and sales processes to optimize output – a few challenges you still see in the market and tips you’d share?

Most sales teams today are still working with CRMs missing data and therefore lack insight from sales activity. CRMs rely on user-generated activities and information sales reps enter manually, which takes up almost 20% of their time and is a task they aren’t motivated to do. As a result, 48% of sellers cite incomplete data as their biggest challenge and 44% estimate losing at least 10% in annual revenue because of low-quality CRM data.

Instead, sales teams should leverage AI to automatically capture data and contacts from activities, including emails, phone calls and meetings. Doing so fills CRMs with accurate data while providing an additional layer of insight into buyer personas. That way, sellers have access to historical relationship context, allowing them to pinpoint who they should be talking to and which accounts they should target.

A few dominant features/trends that will dominate the B2B tech ecosystem through 2023?

With the current macro headwinds, there inevitably will be significant consolidation in the tech ecosystem. This will present amazing opportunities for well-capitalized companies to pick up great tech. Additionally, this will lead to a consolidation of talent, helping to accelerate innovation for those companies.

In the past decade, we saw the emergence of cloud computing and mobile become the most dominant platforms. In the future, it will be applications, artificial reality/virtual reality and artificial intelligence built on these dominant platforms that will transform how we operate within the B2B ecosystem. How we identify prospects, manage customers and collaborate with team members will all be enhanced with new tools, data and intelligence. I’m excited that People.ai is well-positioned to be an important player in the next chapter of B2B tech.

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