If you are in sales, chances are you have already heard and implemented Salesforce strategies and sales enablement tactics in your organization. Despite its straight-forward approach, sales enablement hasn’t been fully utilized to benefit sales teams, especially those reeling in the sales plateau. Here’s what Bigtincan survey had to reveal for sales enablement practitioners.
- More than a quarter (28 percent) of non-sales enablement users reported a loss of 100 or more sales deals in 2017.
- Lack of automation drives the biggest loss of sales for non-sales enablement users.
- If you are in sales enablement, embrace AI. Sales enablement users are bigger believers in the power of AI.
In this Predictions Series 2019 for SalesTech Star, we sat down with Bigtincan’s David Keane. The founder and CEO of the company revealed the roadmap following their acquisition of FatStax, Salesforce Integrations and how sales enablement “arms the intelligent salesforce with the tools needed to transform customer engagement.”
How could sales enablement strategies improve further with maturity in data science and adoption of AI/ML?
Data science and AI/ML are already having a big impact on sales enablement. Sales Enablement Platform vendors, like Bigtincan, are using data science to automate processes, provide content and information recommendations to sellers, and even to use natural language processing to help sellers be more productive. But that is only the beginning – with the introduction of ontologies into sales enablement, data science can now accomplish these goals with significantly reduced setup and management needed by enterprise organizations.
We see the complete set of AI technologies and their ability to impact seller productivity and now marketing and sales operations productivity as key to a successful sales enablement deployment.
How did you zero onto FatStax to build further into sales enablement expertise?
As we engaged with our customers and prospects about where they were seeing benefits of sales enablement, we heard a common thread – that whilst sales enablement is having a big impact on both win rates and salesperson productivity, the technology was missing a critical factor. For many organizations, customer-facing users are looking for sales enablement that is built around product data – commonly called Stock Keeping Units (SKUs) – whereas most sales enablement technology is structured around information being document-based, for example, sales collateral, PDFs, presentations, video, etc.
Recommended: HPE to Acquire BlueData to Transform Hardware & SaaS Business with AI/ML
FatStax pioneered the idea of SKU/product-based sales enablement and we felt that a combination of the Bigtincan technology and FatStax approach would be ideal to solve this problem.
What impact do Salesforce technologies and trends have on your business outcomes?
Salesforce.com continues to bring out new technologies that offer Bigtincan opportunities to create even more powerful sales enablement technology, and we have done that with deep integrations into Salesforce’s Sales, Marketing and Service Clouds, as well as Einstein AI technology. Now with the recent announcement of the Apple/Salesforce.com partnership, we see a unique opportunity to take the Bigtincan technology – which was always at the integration point of Salesforce.com and Apple – and make it even more integrated.
Alfresco Announces AI Customer Experience Solution for…
Do you think that CRM platforms are not investing enough time and resource to improve their performance? What role could Bigtincan play in making CRMs more powerful and relevant to sales conversions?
We have designed the Bigtincan platform to understand the customer and to create a way to extend the power of CRM technologies. CRM will continue to develop as the database of the front-end of the business for enterprise and mid-market companies. But without a way to turn that data into a usable solution for customer-facing workers, the growing complexity of CRM will reduce its ability to continue driving revenue growth. Sales Enablement Automation is the user-facing tool that can tie all this together, drive adoption and produce the productivity gains that we need as we start to think about 2019.
How do you plan to extend the benefits of your latest acquisition to your employees, customers and technology partners?
We see our role as continually striving to impact the lives of our customers and help their customer-facing teams to be more productive and win more deals, and we see the FatStax technology delivering on both counts. Imagine a world that delivers all the power of the Bigtincan Hub platform together with the innovative SKU/Product based sales enablement technology of FatStax and it is easy to envision the impact this can have.
What are your predictions on the state of Sales Enablement and Revenue Management for 2018-2022?
We were fortunate to particulate in the recent Dreamforce trade show in San Francisco for the fourth year, and from what we experienced on the show floor and throughout customer meetings this year, there was no doubt that that sales enablement is maturing and will continue to do so in the 2020s.
Whilst many enterprise and mid-market organizations are developing plans for sales enablement, one thing is clear – success is all about ensuring that the technology is providing the right engagement needed amongst sellers, marketers and sales operations quickly and efficiently. Systems that are complex and hard to implement will fail to make the cut in the increasingly competitive market. It’s time for sales enablement to become part of our lives in ways that effectively drive usage and adoption.
Marchex Acquires Callcap, A Leading Call Monitoring Company
Thank you, David, for participating in our Predictions Series in SalesTech 2019.
