SALES STRATEGY
Computer security solutions leader McAfee Enterprise (now Trellix) has an impressive success story in applying AI in its sales process. And artificial intelligence in McAfee Enterprise’s internally developed platform analyses a billion sensors across its customer systems, and identifies and prioritises security threats.
It predicts the impact that each threat could have, alerts customers and prescribes corrective actions. While enhancing the effectiveness of the security teams, AI also helps improve the company’s sales.
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Its sales professionals harness artificial intelligence to understand potential risks for non-customers and current customers who aren’t using the platform. By aggregating the sensor data, AI offers salespeople targeted recommendations about which firms in their territories they should proactively contact and why.
Salespeople then follow playbooks on the company’s high velocity sales (HVS) platform, which describes how they should engage prospects and provide them with supporting materials.
This approach has changed the dynamics between salespeople and buyers. Instead of requesting potential customers to share information from their systems, salespeople offer to share the risks that AI’s analyses have identified for their companies, as well as advice on how to mitigate them.
Since incorporating sensor generated insights into HVS in January 2020, the company has been tracking the performance of its salespeople who use them and found a tenfold improvement in their ability to initiate conversations with prospects.
The number of initial conversations that they’ve converted into sales opportunities has also risen threefold. And they have achieved a five percent increase in renewal rates. Their managers have benefited too – because before HVS, managers were spending between nine and 10 percent of their time coaching team members.
But since the platform was established, they receive a continuous analysis of their salespeople’s activities that indicate who needs what type of help on which opportunity. Managers no longer have to waste hours trying to figure that out; and the amount of time they need to dedicate to coaching has jumped to about 30 percent.
Researchers Jim Dickie, Boris Groysberg, Benson Shapiro and Barry Trailer – who co-authored the article ‘Can AI Really Help You Sell?,’ in the Harvard Business Review (HBR) – claim that while McAfee Enterprise had deployed AI to boost its sales, most companies weren’t using it effectively… or not at all.
Even CRM systems (and digitally savvy sales organisations have had customer relationship management in place for decades) remain largely underutilised.
A global survey of nearly 1,000 sales leaders by specialist B2B sales research firm CSO Insights found that the percentage of salespeople meeting their annual quotas decreased from 63 percent to 57 percent between 2012 and 2019.
They were struggling partly because buying processes were evolving faster than selling processes. Buyers are better informed than ever with uninhibited access to a world of online resources that help them evaluate products before meeting with a salesperson.
Therefore, to help companies determine what types of AI solutions they’re ready to implement, the researchers designed a tool that they call the ‘sales success matrix.’ It has two axes – i.e. relationship level and process level.
Sales organisations can identify their position on it; and this will point them to the types of AI tools that would best boost their sales now, and what steps they should take next. For most, the ultimate goal will be to climb up to the highest levels of relationships and processes, where customer loyalty and competitive advantage are the strongest.
But before they can pull it off, businesses must articulate their AI strategy – what they are trying to achieve and whether their structures support that strategy. Are their teams set up to secure their AI goals?
The tools are part of an integrated framework that encompasses people, processes, traditional technologies and knowledge. Are all those components perfectly aligned? Or is anything missing?
Companies must ensure that they have the right systems in place for data gathering, performance management, training and communications. And the right culture is also needed for success.
These initiatives must begin with senior executives; but support from involved employees is a prerequisite for effective adoption.
The culture must support experimentation and learning, and the roll out process should be managed carefully by employing the change management strategies that are essential to the success of any new initiative – this should entail goal setting, benchmarking and accountability.
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