AI Thinks. Therefore AI am.

We're just at the beginning of how AI will impact RevOps. Let the revolution begin!

Every week it feels like we’re getting an entire year’s worth of announcements when it comes to AI right now.  Some of the demos I’m seeing are absolutely astonishing – and we’re truly just at the beginning of AI's impact.  There are a lot of great sources for info, and I subscribe to a ton – but there are two that I find particularly useful and thought I’d share (again – I have no affiliation with any of these links – just sharing things that I personally find valuable, and I think you will too).

The first is The Rundown by Rowan Cheung (therundown.ai).  He constantly searches for the most interesting AI news and publishes a near-daily newsletter.  It’s one of the few I read daily to see what’s new.  Worth the free subscription (he’s got 200K+ readers).

The second is One Useful Thing by Wharton professor Ethan Mollick.  He’s focusing on the impact of AI on work and education, and you can follow along as his thinking and insights evolve as he learns more.  Very thoughtful, and you can find it here at (oneusefulthing.org).

There are a lot of startups in this space right now – companies focused on solving forecasting, data exchange, providing real-time communications feedback, improving insights on your potential customers – the list goes on and on.  I’m going to put together a directory of all the ones I’m seeing that apply to RevOps – if you know of any and/or want to be included – please shoot me an email (smith.stephen.m@gmail.com)

In AI Part 1, I talked about AI can and will change the role of the BDR.   I’ve been spending time thinking more broadly about where AI can impact all areas of RevOps and talking to several folks about where they see this changing as well.  A lot of the AI focus these days is on the multimedia aspects (creating pictures, video, music) – and that’s sexy and awesome – but the real power in the future will be leveraging AI to understand and solve extraordinarily complex business problems and make recommendations to improve processes and workflows.  Here are just a few of the areas I see AI enhancing and changing our GTM motions in the future.

Sales

• Lead routing.  Today many companies either use a round-robin approach to getting leads to BDRs or have a specific geographic or industry they cover and get all leads in those respective areas.  While that works given the data and systems constraints we have today – what if your company AI could learn which BDR handles which specific types of leads best (based on customer, stage of lead, location, industry, title, multiple other factors, etc.) and routed them to the BDR based on past and predicted performance which has the highest likelihood of them moving it forward.  You would have to obviously have rules in place to make sure that the best people don’t always get the vast majority of leads – but if you could increase your lead conversion rate by 10% or 20% it could have a major downstream impact.  You could do the same thing with deals, but in both cases, you must also consider the structure of your compensation plans to make sure they can support this.

Marketing

• ICP.  Most companies I’ve ever worked with take a simple approach to figure out their ICP (industry, company size, some sort of business need, or technical infrastructure that they know exists). A good AI model could dramatically improve your ICP.  A more modern model could look at many more variables (industry, company size, growth rate, competitive position, systems/solutions used, funding sources, rules/regulations, current leadership, past companies, product offerings, and more).  You could also more easily do product-by-product ICP, which not everyone does.  The interesting follow-on analysis would be leveraging the AI to find adjacent spaces and/or making recommendations to tweak your product or service to enhance your fit.

Talent Management

• What are the characteristics of the best salespeople for your company?  What are their backgrounds?  What sales methodologies have they used?  Where did they go to school?  Who are they connected to on LinkedIn? How deeply do they really engage with company training? How well do they follow company processes? What is their level of industry expertise?  How do they sell your product or service?  Does their temperament fit our company culture? Finding the right talent is a challenge for every company – and finding the right sales team is critical.  The tools and insights we leverage today are simple and we find anecdotes about what we think works to create good hiring profiles.  A great AI can help us create an ideal IHP (Ideal Hiring Profile) for the best salespeople for your company.  This will, of course, impact HR and talent management systems as well as the search communities - the gains for a company could be substantial in getting hires right the first time with the best performance overall.

There are also other areas that AI will have a major impact on, including overall sales and marketing alignment (automatically providing the latest common metrics and recommendations to dynamically adjust/improve), pricing strategies (particularly insights on discounting to improve real-time margins), customer success (improving the customer journey to increase NPS) and really helping in overall profitability (better real-time management of CAC/LTV).  We’re only at the beginning of what we will see from AI, and it will impact every part of RevOps.

AI models that run in local environments and get trained on smaller private datasets will drive this type of innovation.  Every day there are announcements about new open-source models that can run on something as small as a 16-gig machine.  Performance increases substantially with each new release.  Having a model that can be trained on a company's data in all forms will allow for amazing improvements in innovation and dramatically improve the end customer experience. 

Some of you may have seen the announcement that a four-week-old startup in Europe – Mistral – raised €105M.  They are extremely focused on business workflows with generative AI and making sure a company can use its confidential data effectively.  It’s too early to know if this startup will be a success – but it’s certainly focusing on this from a business and privacy perspective, which will allow a lot of innovation for companies without them having to share their confidential data.  Here's a good article on the announcement: https://sifted.eu/articles/pitch-deck-mistral

If you really want to geek out and get deep into AI and understand how the models work and the implications – Andreesen Horowitz put together an amazing canon.  It’s by far the most comprehensive collection of work I’ve seen (thank you, Gopi, for the link!).  You can find it here: https://a16z.com/2023/05/25/ai-canon/

We will see incredible advances in AI over the next weeks, months, and years that will impact everything we do.  This kind of tech will allow real breakthroughs in GTM models and touch everything in a RevOps organization over time. I’m personally very excited to see where this leads. 

As always – ending with a photo of Ollie doing one of his favorite things – sleeping on the couch next to me.  If you come across any cool AI tech or startups that you think should go in the directory – please reach out!

Best,

Steve