The Impact of AI on RevOps: Part I
"Don't manage. Lead change before you have to." - Jack Welch
You can’t turn on the TV, pick up a (digital) newspaper, scroll through your twitter feed, see what’s new at Ted, or watch YouTube without seeing an endless barrage of content on the power of AI and how it will change the world. In the past several months – really since the emergence of GPT-4 and Midjourney – it feels like we’ve entered a whole new world of possibilities and the public has taken notice. It feels like we’re seeing incredible new advancements every day in conversational AI’s, domain-specific AI’s (legal, medical), video and photo processing, language translation, audio processing, music, video games and more.
For example – I can turn to Midjourney and tell it to create me a photo-realistic image of a Saint Bernard (go Ollie!) “Underwater and happy” and I get something like this.
I can turn to GPT-4 to help me think through problems I’m having in running operations day to day or come up with some creative content ideas for a blog or email campaign. I was having a meeting the other day and the CEO of a company said to me “it won’t be long before AI comes for your job.. and then my job…”. While AI won’t likely replace a senior RevOps executive or CEO in the next few years – if you pull back the lens and look at a longer time horizon there’s no doubt it will fundamentally impact every knowledge workers job in some way.
There are number of tools available to support RevOps organizations today that leverage AI. For example – if you want to leverage AI in forecasting you can take advantage of tools like Aviso, Clari, Gong, Outreach etc. There are also a number of tools leveraging AI to help improve sales execution and engagement, improve rep coaching, provide insights through conversational intelligence and more.
As a leader you can get a significant benefit to your company by adopting these tools (and you should). But - I think that the best leaders will start thinking creatively about how AI can transform the entire RevOps business in the future even if individual tools don’t exist today. Let me give you three examples that I’ve been thinking about lately.
Example 1: Enhanced Prospecting Outreach
You’re an account executive or SDR and you’ve been tasked with building a significant amount of self-gen pipeline this quarter. You have hundreds of companies in your patch and the process of truly customizing the pitch for your product based on the industry, company, and exec you are reaching out to is a herculean task. You’ve built a cadence approach that works for you (email, email, voicemail, email, voicemail, webinar invite, etc.) – but what you don’t want to do is send the same generic pitch to every customer and exec in your patch. Let’s say your target sales audience is the finance function (CFO, SVP FP&A, VP FP&A, Chief Accounting Officer, Sr. Director Collections). Why not use the AI tools and data available to you to do the following (paraphrasing here):
For each of the XXX companies in my territory (by name), please do the following.
First – read recent press releases 10-Q’s, 10-K’s and summarize the top financial issues the industries and companies are facing.
Second – identify the top finance executive at each company by title (CFO, SVP FP&A, etc) and search for any public press releases or comments that they have made on the top industry or company issues.
Third – create a unique 3-5 paragraph note tailored to each exec at the company summarizing the issues the industry is facing, the issues the company is facing, the value prop of how your company can help those issues and close with any references that the individual exec may have made on the relevant topics including direct quotes if possible.
Fourth – drop this customized outreach into a typical outreach cadence.
There are plug-ins today to tools like google sheets that would allow you to construct and consolidate requests like this (it will still take some work to stitch together) in a way that will more than 10X (maybe 50X) the productivity of the typical SDR or AE. Every exec at every company could have a slightly unique pitch that’s tailored to their specific needs. If your company is still putting out standard pitches to every potential buyer at every company with no customization – you are already behind.
Example 2: The Business Case
I have worked with many amazing sales executives (TK!) and companies over the years and in complex selling motions – and the business case is critical. You will often have a team of BVC’s (business value consultants) – or even use an outside consulting firm to help create a specific business case for every deal. When a company is spending hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars a year with you – they want to know exactly how your solution will either increase revenues, lower costs or reduce risk. Having a well put together business case is essential in closing that deal.
Here's where the advanced AI models today can really help (especially if you have access to the latest content on the internet). If you are putting together a business case – you really want to make sure you understand the issues the company is facing, what they’ve said about them (in public financial documents as well as speaking events, press releases, YouTube videos, twitter feeds, etc.). Tools like GPT-4 or Google’s Bard can instantly summarize the key issues that you need to help make your business case – as well as describe how your solution can help. Let me give you an example (note that I am not affiliated or working with any of the companies in this example).
Let’s say that you are a contact center company (Five9) – and you are trying to close a deal at a company like JSX (a private jet charter company). The starting point might be to ask GPT-4 the top challenges for the company (JSX) and how Five9s could help and you would get an answer like this:
Customer Service Quality and Efficiency: JetSuiteX, like any airline or travel service company, likely needs to manage a high volume of customer inquiries about bookings, flight statuses, refunds, and other services. Five9, a provider of cloud contact center software, could help by providing tools to manage these calls more efficiently, including automatic call distribution (ACD), interactive voice response (IVR), and workforce optimization tools.
Scalability and Flexibility: As JetSuiteX grows or experiences seasonal fluctuations in demand, it might face challenges scaling its customer service operations to match. Five9's cloud-based software can be easily scaled up or down depending on demand, making it easier for JetSuiteX to manage peak periods.
Data Analysis and Customer Insights: JetSuiteX might want to gain deeper insights into its customer base to improve its services, identify trends, and anticipate customer needs. Five9's software includes tools for data analysis and reporting that could help JetSuiteX understand its customer interactions better and make data-driven decisions.
This is absolutely the top-level starting point. In order to bolster the business case – I might drill down further into #1 and ask something like “how would I start to quantify the benefits of a state-of-the-art IVR to the issues in #1”? You would get back something like this:
Reduced Wait Times: An effective IVR system can quickly route callers to the right department or agent, reducing wait times. You could quantify this benefit by comparing average wait times before and after the implementation of the IVR system.
Increased First Call Resolution: An IVR system can help ensure that callers are directed to the agent most capable of resolving their issue, thereby potentially increasing the rate of first call resolution. This can be quantified by tracking the rate of first call resolution before and after implementation of the IVR system.
24/7 Customer Support: An IVR system can handle basic customer queries around the clock, even when live agents are not available. This could be quantified by tracking the number of queries resolved outside of business hours.
Cost Savings: By automating routine inquiries, an IVR system can free up agents to handle more complex calls. This can reduce the total number of agents needed and lead to cost savings. This could be quantified by comparing staffing costs before and after the implementation of the IVR system.
Improved Customer Satisfaction: An efficient IVR system can lead to improved customer satisfaction by providing quicker, more accurate service. This can be quantified through customer satisfaction surveys before and after the implementation of the IVR system.
This won’t give me the numbers I need to show the financial business case – but it will help point me in the key areas to focus on and give me a great direction to go to. This could dramatically jumpstart any business case an internal or external team is building. As a last point – I asked if JetSuiteX has mentioned any of these areas as problems as obviously I would want to focus there. What it mentioned were tangential areas (e.g. lack of awareness of the brand pilot shortages, operations restrictions) that I could decide if I bring into the summary.
Example 3: Sales Engagement and Training
Imagine that you are delivering a sales pitch today and in your meeting environment you can see every person and have icons showing their sentiment (engaged, bored, angry, happy, etc.), are they watching you, doing something else, what part of the slide are they focused on. There are tools out there today that can already show this level of insight in zoom calls. But now let’s take that and extend that to provide a summary at the end of every meeting for the seller and the seller’s manager that shows:
1) How engaged the customer is overall and an estimate of buying intent.
2) A summary of each participant and what their level of engagement was, what section of the presentation engaged them positively or negatively.
3) A detailed summary of the meeting – one for internal use and one that can be emailed to the customer summarizing key points and next steps.
4) A specific set of coaching actions that the manager or sales training team can use with the seller to improve their sales process/pitch.
Many of the technical solutions exist today (at least for #’s 2,3) – and we’re not too far away from #’s 1 and 4. The biggest challenge will be changing the cultures – the feedback, coaching and training processes to effectively incorporate this type of information.
AI is going to impact every part of the RevOps business. Provide real-time information into every key metric in the sales process to providing dramatically improved business cases and outreach content to improving training and customer support. We’re just at the beginning of what we can imagine and what we’ll see. Every few weeks I’ll talk about how AI can potentially improve other areas that RevOps touches (regardless of whether there is a tool there today or not).
As always – here’s a picture of Ollie (not swimming) – but waiting patiently for a plate of steak.
If there are any areas/topics you’d like me to discuss – please let me know. Thanks!
Best,
Steve
Great read! One thing to note here is that despite the ability to have enhanced prospecting, this also means that the organizations that don't integrate this into standard procedure will fall behind - especially in a sales development world with so much noise.