On this week in sales we’ll be looking at; AI on video calls, revenue operation platforms, answering your questions and much more!
Sales news:
The Emergence Of The Revenue Operations Platform
Revenue Operations – they are generally trying to describe a better way to manage the people, process, and technology of growth.
Unique closes $6M seed for its AI-driven video calls platform aimed at sales teams
Unique, a video calls platform that uses AI to teach sales teams how to improve their pitches, has closed a $6 million seed round from a bunch of angel investors. These include Philipp Stauffer (U.S based founder and general partner of Fyrfly Venture Partners) and Daniel Gutenberg.
Unique uses AI to analyse customer conversations. The video recordings of these then help sales people work out which parts of their pitch work best.
Sales Automation: The Puzzle of Reducing Salespersons’ Workload While Maximizing Profits
The sales automation process has 7 stages:
- Automated guidance: The sales teams get reminders and notes from the sales automation software.
- Lead management automation lets the sales manager build a more curated list of leads using rules and filters.
- Communication automation is critical, with everything from sales emails to automated voicemails, appointment scheduling tools, and personal email sequences.
- Automated data entry: A pre-programmed system automatically fills in sales data such as price, product, and contact information for leads and customers.
- Automated Research: The AI analyzes data to build and update lead profiles, score leads on their likelihood of winning, and marks possible sale opportunities.
- Automated activity logging: Important information needs to be logged in real-time. It helps to know how far one has proceeded with a customer.
- Automated record creation: A sales automation platform can easily create new records and profiles. As a result, sales people are no longer bogged down with time-consuming responsibilities.
Sales Talent highlights the dangers of long-term working from home for salespeople’s mental health
Paul Owen, CEO of UK sales transformation specialist Sales Talent, has raised concerns around the lack of attention being paid to this.
“The problem is rarely immediately obvious but, over time, I have serious concerns about the mental wellbeing of work-from-home salespeople. We are extroverts, we feed off interaction with other people – a type of interaction we often don’t receive from prospective clients, so need to find elsewhere. In the office, we have plenty of places to feed the extrovert’s need for connection; at home, we’re alone. Very alone. And that can be very dangerous.”
Owen explains the conundrum at the heart of a salesperson’s DNA, saying that most people come into sales because they get on well with others, giving them a high sociability factor. Most good salespeople connect well with 90%+ of people they meet, often 95%+. However, when they start in sales, they fail for much of the time and that 90% is reversed: they might not be disliked by 90%+ of those they meet, but they are usually rejected by them.
