The Impact of AI on RevOps: Part II
“By far, the greatest danger of Artificial Intelligence is that people conclude too early that they understand it.” – Eliezer Yudkowsky
In the first article, I wrote on the impact of AI on RevOps (https://bit.ly/revopsaipart1) – I covered three examples of where AI can impact RevOps today (or in the extremely near future). In this article – I’m going to look at three additional examples – but they’re going to be a little further into the future. How far is anyone's guess – the only thing I can say with certainty is it will be sooner than we think. Please note that I have zero, zip, zilch affiliation with any of the companies or links I’m mentioning in this article. They are just technologies and reviewers that I’ve come across that I think highlight what’s ahead. Will they even be around in a year or two? Who knows – but they show what’s possible today.
Example #1: Your Video Avatar for Selling
Imagine a scenario where you could give your product or services pitch perfectly every time. You’ve got it perfectly scripted out. You’re hitting every key value proposition, you are positioning it perfectly for the customer’s problems and the needs of their industry, and there are no unnatural “um’s, er’s, eh’s” or other language hiccups. It’s your exact voice, your exact image – a perfect digital twin of you that you can use to reach out in the prospecting stage to hundreds of companies – without having to record yourself hundreds of times.
I haven’t found a single service that lets you do this yet – but we’re not far off. Let me give you three examples.
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The first is a tool that lets you make an AI clone of your exact voice – it’s available today at descript.com. You train the tool, and it creates an AI clone of your voice – and then you can type in any script you want, and it will read it and you will be hard-pressed to tell that from your actual voice. For a good demo of this in action – check out the 2nd AI tool in this review from Hayls World– it starts at the 1:49 mark.
The second element of this is to create a perfect avatar of you. I haven’t found the perfect tool to create this yet – but it will show up soon. Let me give you two examples that when combined - will be able to do this. The first is the site synthesia – an AI video creation platform. They have a number of built-in avatars that look and sound incredibly lifelike. You can create amazing presentations with the avatar of your choice, the text of your choice, and the voice of your choice.
Now take a look at this – the deepfake technology shown at a recent Ted event. It lets you map your face onto another face in real-time – and your voice as well. At some point, you’ll be able to take a picture or scan of your face – create an avatar from it – and use the AI clone of your voice to do anything.
Once you have that perfect video and audio clone – you can combine it into the first example I highlighted in Part I, and send our perfect video pitches on your product or services to dozens or hundreds of potential customers where everything is perfectly customized. Are we there yet on this – no – but honestly – we aren’t more than a year or so away so people need to start thinking about how they can utilize these tools. Even the AI voice clone today can be used in a lot of different ways.
Example #2: Getting deep insights into both High-Volume vs Complex Systems selling issues
Many companies are in either high-volume sales business (low price, fast sales process, minimal stakeholders) or Complex Systems sales (high dollar, long sales time, lots of stakeholders). Some are in both – and that makes life significantly more complex from a planning and execution standpoint – with multiple sales teams, KPIs, plans, marketing approaches, demand gen approaches, etc.
So, let’s talk about high-volume sales businesses for a minute. To optimize a high-volume sales business, you must be great at demand generation, price optimization, fraud detection, supply chain management, inventory management, sales forecasting, and more. Effectively managing any one of these things is a challenge – effectively managing all of those things requires a level of insight into all parts of the business that is difficult for individuals and teams to manage. It can be done – and done well (look at how Apple manages the iPhone business) – but for many companies, this is extraordinarily difficult. The emerging AI and analytics tools will be able to look across all of these areas at the same time and give insights into where there are hiccups, slowdowns, and challenges – and how to proactively address them before they impact revenue. Today we’re reactive – but we’re not too far away from being proactive. Technology exists to pull this together – it’s more a matter now of building the tools to watch and manage the orchestration.
Complex systems sales are another beast entirely. They are long, often drawn-out sales processes that require major investments in time and effort to get a deal done (often a year or more). Many companies get to the 11th hour only to find the deal go sideways because they didn’t get to a key stakeholder, or they missed a critical step in the client's internal process, and that scuttles the deal. How do you know what you missed? Many companies use sales processes like MEDDIC and that helps a lot – but that doesn’t give you the full picture.
There was a company I was helping a few years ago that had an incredibly complex sales process. We ultimately learned that they had to get approvals from more than a dozen client stakeholders in order to get the deal done – and these stakeholders often had competing agendas that made it difficult to get them on the same page. A sales process like MEDDIC says you need a champion and an EB – but is largely silent on other key constituents.
The challenge this company had is that some deals were getting to the 11th hour and never progressing. The question was – why? It clearly wasn’t the product – it was being used by major companies across industries – and it worked great. The sales team was all trained in the sales process – so what was going on? We did detailed interviews with the sales reps who were succeeding and over time we learned that they had figured out on their own that there were a number of other key influencers and stakeholders that had to be involved (the dozen mentioned above) – and when they had to involve them. That was a miss on training and a miss in the sales process implementation into salesforce.
So where does AI play in this? Smart systems are already doing a great job at forecasting high-volume businesses – but they struggle in complex sales environments (partially due to the limited amount of data). We’re not that far from an AI tool that looks at all of the sales data (every field from a salesforce record – the account record, the deal record, the implementation record, the config record, the customer success record) – and integrates that with the transcript summarizes from every zoom meeting with that client, every e-mail – every digital interaction (chatbot, engagement with marketing content) – and give insights into the winning process that we just can’t easily figure out today.
We’re not that far – and it’s only a matter of time before someone (Salesforce, Microsoft, Gong, Aviso, Zoom) starts putting all of it together across tools/platforms. You can already get summarized transcripts from Zoom/Teams meetings. Email is easy to plug into. It’s a matter of pulling it all together and focusing on the key insights/learnings.
Example #3: Integrating sales capacity, financial planning, revenue modeling, demand-gen, and core operating metrics
It’s rare to find a company today that really has integrated its real-time sales capacity, demand gen, and revenue models. Least of all, integrating these models with their ongoing financial budgets and core operating metrics. Bringing it all together? Something I have yet to see. Anywhere.
There are a number of companies out there (including a couple of stealth RevOps companies) that are working on parts of this – but no one is bringing it all together… yet….
The analogy I have used many times is that RevOps should view a business like a high performance factory. You have all of these inputs (TAM insights, leads from demand gen, marketing material, salespeople, products, training material, systems/processes/policies, SPIFFs, compensation plans, analytics, etc.) – and your job is to optimize all of these things (like a perfectly tuned factory) to create the optimal output (sales and satisfied customers). You are constantly tuning this machine to keep it in optimal condition. The next article I write will be on this exact topic.
The point of this last section is to highlight that there’s a level of integrations we don’t have today – and a set of tools that we don’t have today – but we’re approaching the point where in a year or two we could have them given the advances we’re seeing in AI models/systems today. The smarter ways we’re looking at the business, and the level of instrumentation we’re creating will allow this – but we’re not there yet. While we may be optimizing certain parts of the business – the entire “factory” is running sub-optimally.
So – the next article will be about the “Factory Process” approach to RevOps. Something I worked on extensively in the past with a great colleague - Giggsy Jayaweera.
As always – ending with a photo of Ollie. It’s almost summer and he’s getting ready by smelling all of the flowers in the neighborhood.
Please let me know if there’s anything of interest you’d like to cover. I hope you all had a great May!
Best,
Steve