Jumpstarting productivity in RevOps
Using CoPilot, Notebook and Perplexity Collections today
Whether you are an analyst on a small startup RevOps team, or the SVP of global RevOps organization – you can use a variety of AI tools to dramatically enhance your productivity. I’m going to share three new capabilities across different tools that have launched in the past few weeks and show you specific examples of how you can use AI capabilities in your role today.
Let’s jump right in and start talking about Microsoft – which just this past week became the second company to join the exclusive 3 trillion club (market cap). On January 15, 2024, Microsoft released CoPilot Pro for $20/month. What does CoPilot Pro include (these bullet points are direct from Microsoft’s announcement)?
A single AI experience that runs across your devices, understanding your context on the web, on your PC, across your apps and soon on your phone to bring the right skills to you when you need them.
Access to Copilot in Word, Excel[i], PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneNote on PC, Mac and iPad for Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscribers.
Priority access to the very latest models – starting today with OpenAI’s GPT-4 Turbo. With Copilot Pro you’ll have access to GPT-4 Turbo during peak times for faster performance and, coming soon, the ability to toggle between models to optimize your experience how you choose.
Enhanced AI image creation with Image Creator from Designer (formerly Bing Image Creator) – ensuring it’s faster with 100 boosts per day while bringing you more detailed image quality as well as landscape image format.
The ability to build your own Copilot GPT – a customized Copilot tailored for a specific topic – in our new Copilot GPT Builder (coming soon) with just a simple set of prompts.
This post isn’t a review of all of these features – and no – I don’t work for Microsoft. Instead, I want to focus on just one thing from this announcement (even though I’m taking advantage of all of it on a daily basis) – the new CoPilot feature in Microsoft Word. Damn – it’s impressive.
EXAMPLE 1: The Power of Word
When you open up Microsoft Word now you get a screen that looks something like this:
With even a simple prompt now, you can generate an incredible starting point to a new AI document. Let me give you two examples. Let’s say we start with this request: “We’re a $10M B2B SaaS company and my manager has asked me to help build a business case to justify investing in sales enablement. Can you help me start a document that lays out the reasons we should do this and some high-level business case metrics we should look at to help justify the investment?”
What you’ll get from that simple request is something that looks like this:
Here’s the full text of what Micrsoft Word’s Co-Pilot generated for me:
Why Sales Enablement Matters for B2B SaaS Companies
A Business Case for Investing in Sales Enablement
What is Sales Enablement?
Sales enablement is the process of providing sales teams with the tools, training, content, and insights they need to sell more effectively and efficiently. Sales enablement helps sales reps to deliver the right message to the right buyer at the right time, and to overcome common challenges such as long sales cycles, complex decision-making processes, and competitive pressures.
What are the Benefits of Sales Enablement?
Sales enablement can have a significant impact on the performance and productivity of sales teams, as well as the overall growth and profitability of B2B SaaS companies. Some of the benefits of sales enablement are:
"Increased sales revenue: Sales enablement can help sales reps to close more deals, upsell and cross-sell more effectively, and generate more referrals and repeat business.
Improved sales efficiency: Sales enablement can help sales reps to reduce the time and effort spent on administrative tasks, prospecting, qualifying, and nurturing leads, and focus more on high-value activities that drive sales.
Enhanced sales alignment: Sales enablement can help sales teams to align with the marketing, product, and customer success teams, and leverage their resources and insights to create a consistent and compelling buyer journey.
Reduced sales turnover: Sales enablement can help sales reps to feel more confident, motivated, and supported, and to achieve their goals and quotas, which can reduce the risk of burnout and attrition.
What are the Key Metrics to Measure Sales Enablement ROI?
To justify the investment in sales enablement, B2B SaaS companies need to track and measure the return on investment (ROI) of their sales enablement initiatives. Some of the key metrics to measure sales enablement ROI are:
“Sales revenue growth: The ultimate measure of sales enablement success is the increase in sales revenue generated by the sales team. This can be measured by comparing the sales revenue before and after the implementation of sales enablement, and by calculating the revenue per sales rep, the average deal size, and the customer lifetime value.
Sales cycle length: The length of the sales cycle is the time it takes from the first contact with a prospect to the closed deal. Sales enablement can help to shorten the sales cycle by providing sales reps with the right content and insights to move prospects through the funnel faster. This can be measured by tracking the average days to close, the conversion rates at each stage of the funnel, and the number of touchpoints per deal.
Sales win rate: The win rate is the percentage of opportunities that result in closed deals. Sales enablement can help to improve the win rate by providing sales reps with the best practices, skills, and feedback to overcome objections and close more deals. This can be measured by comparing the win rate before and after the implementation of sales enablement, and by segmenting the win rate by product, market, and sales rep.
Sales rep engagement: The engagement of sales reps is the degree to which they use and adopt the sales enablement tools, training, content, and insights. Sales enablement can help to increase the engagement of sales reps by providing them with relevant, timely, and easy-to-use resources that help them to sell better. This can be measured by tracking the usage, satisfaction, and feedback of sales reps on the sales enablement platform, and by conducting surveys and interviews to assess their attitudes and behaviors.
Is it perfect? No. Is it an amazing and incredible start – absolutely. From that very short original request.
Here’s a second request just to show you the power of what I can do: “I work for a $100M B2B SaaS Company. Please write a document showing the important of updating sales compensation plans annually.” Here’s what it came back with.
Why You Should Update Your Sales Compensation Plan Annually
A guide for B2B SaaS companies
Sales compensation is one of the most critical factors in driving sales performance, motivation, and retention. However, many B2B SaaS companies do not update their sales compensation plans regularly, which can lead to misalignment, inefficiency, and frustration. In this document, we will explain why you should update your sales compensation plan annually and how to do it effectively.
Why update your sales compensation plan annually?
Market changes: The B2B SaaS market is constantly evolving, with new competitors, customer needs, and industry trends. Your sales compensation plan should reflect these changes and align with your strategic goals and priorities. For example, if you want to increase your market share, you may need to adjust your commission rates, quotas, or territories to incentivize your sales reps to acquire new customers. If you want to improve customer retention, you may need to reward your sales reps for renewals, upsells, or cross-sells.
Performance feedback: Your sales compensation plan should provide clear and timely feedback to your sales reps on their performance and earnings. By updating your plan annually, you can review the results of the previous year and identify what worked and what didn't. You can also solicit feedback from your sales reps and managers on how they perceive the fairness, clarity, and simplicity of the plan. Based on the feedback, you can make adjustments to improve the plan's effectiveness and alignment with your sales objectives.
Employee motivation: Your sales compensation plan should motivate your sales reps to perform at their best and achieve their targets. However, if your plan is outdated, inconsistent, or complex, it can have the opposite effect. Your sales reps may lose interest, confidence, or trust in the plan and feel demotivated or dissatisfied. By updating your plan annually, you can ensure that your plan is relevant, competitive, and transparent, and that your sales reps are rewarded for their efforts and contributions.
How to update your sales compensation plan annually?
Define your sales strategy: Before you update your sales compensation plan, you need to define your sales strategy for the upcoming year. What are your sales goals and priorities? Who are your target customers and markets? What are your value propositions and differentiators? How do you measure and evaluate your sales performance? Your sales strategy should guide your sales compensation plan and ensure that it is aligned with your business objectives and vision.
Analyze your data: To update your sales compensation plan, you need to analyze your data from the previous year. How did your sales reps perform against their quotas and targets? How did your sales compensation plan impact your sales results and behaviors? How did your sales compensation plan compare to the industry benchmarks and best practices? What were the strengths and weaknesses of your plan? What were the challenges and opportunities for improvement? Your data analysis should help you identify the gaps and areas of improvement in your plan and inform your decisions on how to update it.
Design your plan: Based on your sales strategy and data analysis, you can design your sales compensation plan for the upcoming year. You need to consider the following elements: pay mix, commission structure, quota setting, territory assignment, performance measures, payout frequency, and plan administration. You need to balance the trade-offs between simplicity and complexity, flexibility and stability, and risk and reward. You need to ensure that your plan is clear, fair, and motivating for your sales reps and that it supports your sales goals and culture.
Communicate your plan: Once you have designed your plan, you need to communicate it to your sales reps and managers. You need to explain the rationale, objectives, and benefits of the plan and how it affects their compensation and performance. You need to provide them with the tools and resources to understand and implement the plan, such as plan documents, calculators, dashboards, and training sessions. You need to solicit their feedback and address their questions and concerns. You need to ensure that they buy-in and commit to the plan and that they feel valued and appreciated.
Updating your sales compensation plans annually is a critical task for any B2B SaaS leader. It can help you keep up with the market, align with your business goals and strategy, drive the right behaviors and outcomes, and attract and retain top talent. By following the steps outlined in this document, you can update your sales compensation plans effectively and efficiently and set your sales team up for success.
Again – an incredible starting point. All of that text from that small prompt. Hats off to Microsoft for making this incredibly powerful tool very easy and useful to use!
EXAMPLE 2: A New Type of Notebook
Microsoft also announced a new set of features in their general CoPilot (Bing AI) functionality called ‘Notebook’.
The Notebook interface allows you to work on prompts in a simple to user interface (prompt on left, output on right) to see how different prompts improve the output.
Let me give you a simple example – let’s stick with commission plan updates.
Let’s say you start with a prompt that looks like this: “We want to make improvements to our annual sales commission plans - how should we do that?”
The output you get would look something like this:
A good starting point – a good set of guidelines – but probably not as practical as you were looking for. You can now go edit that prompt – add more information – and see how the output changes. You add context to your prompt, and it now looks like this:
“Let me give additional context. We're a $100M B2B SaaS company and we pay our people quarterly based on bookings hit in the quarter. We'd like to move to a model that better aligns payouts with revenue recognition - how do we do that?”
The results are a bit better as you can see below – but I think we need to improve the query even more.
Thinking about this – you decide to re-write the query into the following:
“We're a $100M B2B SaaS company and we currently pay our sales team on bookings that happen in the quarter. Because our bookings often take two quarters before the company fully realized revenue - we want to make changes so that our payouts to the sales team are better aligned with when the company recognized revenue. Our first step though will be communicating why we want to do this to our sales team. Can you give me key talking points about how we should communicate this?”
The output you get is as follows:
The great thing about using the new Notebook feature is that you can keep making tweaks to your prompting and see the results right there. You can tweak, edit, and adjust until you think you have the question just right.
EXAMPLE 3: Perplexity AI Collections
So, I’ll start by sharing that Perplexity AI is my favorite new AI tool – and I’ve actually replaced my general google searches (no more blue links!) with searching on Perplexity for almost everything. Perplexity AI is a chatbot-style search engine that allows users to ask questions in natural language and uses AI technology to gather information from various sources. Some of the key features of Perplexity include:
Versatility: Perplexity AI can help with research, writing, investment analysis, and more, providing information, suggestions, and solutions
Accuracy and Research: It focuses on accuracy and research, providing concise answers with source links, making it ideal for fact-checking and academic purposes
Real-time Data Fetching: This feature makes it a reliable tool for current information needs
Content Creation and Optimization: Digital marketers and content creators can use the platform to generate ideas, create engaging copy, and optimize content for different platforms
Research and Data Analysis: Researchers can benefit from Perplexity AI's ability to sift through extensive databases, offering vital data and insights for informed decision-making
I subscribe to Perplexity Pro (again -- $20/month) – and one of the great things it allows you to do is change the underlying AI engine. You can access GPT 4, Claude 2.1, Gemini Pro and an experimental (even if you don’t subscribe to these) to answer your questions. If you use the default engine – the answers are SUPER fast. I’ve been spending most of my time in the experimental engine just to try it out (it all is super-fast and amazing).
But I want to talk about something else – something called Collections. Perplexity AI Collections is a feature that allows users to organize their threads into sharable spaces, providing more control over privacy and enabling easier collaboration.
By building a custom Perplexity Collection, you can:
Organize Personal Threads: Easily group related threads together for better organization, creating Collections for different projects, topics, or any other categorization you prefer
Collaborate with Others: Invite contributors to your Collections and work together seamlessly, sharing knowledge and ideas by adding threads or creating new Collections as team workspace. You can manage collaborator roles with owner and contributor access levels
Control Privacy: Adjust a Collection's share status between secret and sharable, giving you granular control over privacy. You can change a Collection's access without affecting individual threads
My favorite part about collections though is that you can build custom collection instructions to specify analysis and output that you want. Let me give you a really practical example.
Let’s say that you’re an analyst on the RevOps strategy team and you’ve been asked to start pulling together information on different RFP tools that the company might want to look at. Traditionally – the process would involve searching for the companies in this space, going to their websites and then pulling together summaries and sharing those with others.
With Perplexity AI Collections – you can have their AI capability do a lot of the work for you. With a few simple instructions – you can create a custom collection that takes a URL as input and provides you with the following types of data: summary of the product, key features, key AI features, value proposition and pricing (if available).
Let’s say that you had identified three companies you wanted to look in to: loopio, avnio, and proposify, and your manager was asking for some preliminary information. You can easily build a custom collection in Perplexity (no programming required) – in fact the instructions look like this:
… and when you use that collection with those URL’s – you will get output something like this:
LOOPIO:
Summary
Loopio is a RFP response platform designed for growth-focused companies. It streamlines the process of responding to RFPs, RFIs, DDQs, and security questionnaires, making it easier for businesses to scale their response process and improve collaboration
Loopio is trusted by over 1,500 companies worldwide and has been recognized as a market leader in response management
Key Features
Intelligent content management and automation features for streamlining response processes
Unlimited projects, library entries, and reviews for teams to work on multiple projects simultaneously
Customizable permissions for controlling user access and roles
Multi-language library, advanced collaboration tools, single sign-on, and guaranteed uptime for more robust functionality
Key AI Features
AI-powered assistance for proposal management
Expert-vetted answers for responding to proposals, questionnaires, and sales questions
Value Prop
Loopio's platform helps businesses harness intelligence from every corner of their organization, making every request for information an opportunity for growth instead of a blocker
The platform's intelligent automation and collaboration tools reduce the time spent on responding to RFPs, allowing companies to focus on winning more deals
Pricing
Loopio offers flexible pricing plans that scale with your business:
Essentials: Unlimited projects, library entries, and reviews
Plus: Everything in the Essentials plan, with additional features like customizable permissions
Advanced: More robust functionality and workflows, including multi-language library, advanced collaboration tools, single sign-on, and guaranteed uptime
Enterprise: Customized plans for global organizations with unique needs
For specific pricing details, please visit Loopio's pricing page
AVNIO:
Summary
Avnio is a B2B RFP Response & Automation Software designed to help organizations increase their win rates, process more responses, and gain insights for better decision-making and customer experience
Built natively on the Salesforce platform, Avnio leverages AI, machine learning, and natural language processing to automate the RFP process and provide intelligent, dynamic answers to questions across the business
Key Features
Avnio Response Cloud: A Salesforce-native RFP, RFQ, RFI, and DDQ automation solution that builds a smart knowledge library, automatically answers hundreds of questions in minutes, and includes built-in GO/NO-GO qualification scoring
Avnio Tables: Allows users to easily manage, organize, and take action on every aspect of their Salesforce data through simple, fully customizable views
Avnio Assistant: A conversational assistant that provides intelligent, dynamic, and consistent answers to questions across the business, making the phrase "let me get back to you on that" a thing of the past
Key AI Features
AI Auto Answer: Avnio's intelligent auto-response system changes the way RFIs, DDQs, RFPs, tenders, and bids are answered
Contextual Understanding: Avnio uses AI, GPT, and natural language processing to understand the context and find the right answers to hundreds of questions
Built-in GO/NO-GO Qualifiers: Avnio's fully integrated scoring system helps users focus their resources where they're needed most and spend time on the deals they can win
Value Prop
Avnio's core value proposition to a B2B SaaS company lies in its ability to streamline the RFP process, increase win rates, and provide valuable insights for better decision-making. By automating the RFP process and leveraging AI, Avnio enables businesses to save time and resources, allowing them to focus on their customers and grow their business
Pricing
Pricing information for Avnio is not available in the provided search results.
PROPOSIFY:
Summary
Proposify is a proposal software that helps businesses create beautiful proposals, streamline them in the cloud, and get faster sign-off with online signature.
It offers a range of features and templates to help sales teams create professional, error-free proposals, and maintain consistency and visibility across the entire sales team and cycle
Key Features
Flexible design editor for creating professional proposals
3Pre-approved content and templates for brand control
Online signatures for faster sign-off
Analytics and reporting for sales teams
Key AI Features
Proposify does not explicitly mention AI features on their website. However, it is possible that their software may utilize AI technologies for features like analytics and reporting.
Value Prop
Proposify's core value proposition to a B2B SaaS company lies in its ability to help sales teams create professional, error-free proposals while maintaining consistency and visibility across the entire sales team and cycle.
This can lead to increased productivity and a more streamlined sales process.
Pricing
Proposify offers various pricing plans, with the starting price being $49/user per month, billed quarterly or annually. They also offer a free 14-day trial for users to test the software before committing to a subscription
You will obviously have to do a lot more research to get to all of the details on the products – but as a way to jump start this and build a collection that you can easily share – it’s just incredible. It took seconds to build the custom collection and use it – and I can easily share it with my team.
WRAPPING UP
Every week there’s more and more coming out that RevOps teams of all sizes can use. Hopefully this gives you a couple of simple and practical ways that you can start to use these different AI tools this week to drive productivity. What would have been incredibly challenging two years ago is now becoming incredibly easy.
As always – ending with a photo of Ollie. He was waiting very patiently for some fresh off the BBQ NY Strip Steak.
If you have any question on how to do any of this or would like some help in your organization – please reach out – steve@revopz.net
Best,
Steve
Incredibly effective summary Stephen! Many thanks!