A well-functioning sales team can be transformative for any business. When reps have solid leads, your customer pipeline is strong and dependable, your business is healthy and your employees feel engaged. But with outcomes like this, of course it’s not going to be easy to establish. Particularly for smaller businesses, who can be forgiven for targeting growth at all costs, in a bid to keep pace with their larger competitors.
This is creating an ecosystem where, according to Gallup, just 21% of employees are engaged at work while HubSpot reports that sales teams have a 35% churn rate. But, if you work in sales, it’s not hard to understand why – with the reality being a high-stress, high-target environment often driven by incentives that encourage individualism, not teamwork.
But one thing that can change all this is dedication. And, for sales leaders today, the opportunity of returning it to the sales function is closer than ever.
To change the face of sales and bring dedication more into the fold, we need to return the function to its roots. Salespeople are ambitious communicators who thrive off human interaction. Therefore, if we want to drive dedication, we must empower them to explore these strengths and appetites, instead of discouraging them. Otherwise they risk growing sick of the daily list of calls, and looking elsewhere for a job that gives them more.
How we do this comes down to having the right tools. And, when choosing them, our North Star should be our customer expectations. With customers craving the human touch, what’s needed is a solution that can surgically preserve human input, while automating the admin and busywork that often dents workplace motivation. This might sound like a fantasy, but the solution is one we’ve all seen plenty of headlines about over the course of the past 12 months – artificial intelligence.
With the help of AI, we can return customer sales to the glory days – informatively pitching prospects and creating meaningful customer connections; understanding the person, the business and the need – and not just selling ‘at someone’. However, when turning to AI to bring dedication back to your sales operations, there are some key things to keep in mind.
A common misunderstanding is that AI is here to take our jobs. This isn’t helped by Goldman Sachs saying 300 million jobs will be disrupted by it globally. To counter this though, LinkedIn reports that 84% of global professionals believe AI will help their career progression. This highlights how we must not think so black and white about AI’s negative disruption, and embrace how the technology can bring some positive shifts.
For sales departments, AI offers the chance to improve workflows and automation. For instance, listening back to customer calls and voicemails is a hugely time-consuming activity, but with AI-supported tools such as transcription, these hours can be clawed back. Further, accessing the key topics and summaries of these calls is another ace up AI’s sleeve. But if sales reps are worried that the next thing AI will do is take their headset from them, then this is where leaders need to step in.
By pushing the idea of enablement, not replacement, sales leaders can paint an encouraging future for their sales teams that shows them (a) that they are not set to be replaced, and (b) that they’ll be getting a lot more meaning from their roles.
Nurturing great connections with customers isn’t easy. The human touch takes research, empathy and the ability to make someone feel heard. It’s a skill! But even if we find sales reps capable of delivering it, our processes are set up to keep meaningful conversations at arm’s length.
Within sales is a rising amount of busywork – something Aircall found customer-facing teams are spending 20.8 hours a week doing. In a role where time equals money, having to complete unintuitive admin processes can keep someone from delivering their best work, and does nothing for job satisfaction.
Yet they still have the same pressures and OKRs hovering over them. This is where AI comes in – to become your sales team’s ultimate sidekick. In an ideal sales environment there will be a seamless hand-off between data insights and the human touch of a sales rep. AI does the grunt work, and your reps don’t feel threatened, but supported, in how they deliver their people power.
This drives dedication, not just through returning sales teams the key reasons they signed up to work in sales, but giving them access to data they’ve never had before.
Investing in technologies such as AI is only half the battle to make your sales strategy a success. In today’s business environment, a great dedication-driver is coaching, training and upskilling. According to PwC, 74% of the workforce is keen to learn new skills to remain employable in the future – which could be why 76% of employees are more likely to stay at a company that offers continuous training.
Arguably, for sales, this has always been something out of reach, but now, with AI, teams suddenly have the time and metrics to assess and develop their teams. And to avoid the great employee exodus that typically coincides with the New Year, business leaders must implement these strategies sooner rather than later.
We want our teams to flourish. If they’re succeeding, growing, and feeling fulfilled, chances are the business is doing well and our people are happy.
But making this a reality requires investment, measurement, optimisation and communication. If businesses get this right, they can set themselves on a sales path that can build an incredible future. A future that, contrary to all the AI headlines, is defined by human connections.
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