On this week in sales we’ll be looking at:
- Intelligent sales demo automation
- How only 24% of salespeople are high performers
- We say “bye-bye” to trade shows
And much more!
This Week In Sales hosts:
- Will Barron – Salesman.org/Youtube
- Victor Antonio – Youtube.com/user/salesinfluence
Topics:
Salesforce: “State of Sales” report
Salesforce surveyed nearly 6,000 sales professionals. Double blind survey from May-June 2020.
Sales teams using AI has increased from 21% in 2018 ro 37% in 2020. High performing salespeople are 2.8x more likely to use AI.
63% of sales professionals are confident in their organisation’s ability to train/retrain salespeople.
70% of orgs are retaining field sales reps to sell from home.
72% of salespeople say they’ve been “productive from home” during the COVID pandemic. BUT 48% say they’re less productive than they used to be.
c1.sfdcstatic.com/content/dam/web/en_us/www/documents/research/Salesforce-State-of-Sales-4th-Ed.pdf
Consensus – Intelligent Demo Automation:
The latest research makes it clear that the B2B buying process has become too complex and difficult and buyers today crave companies and experienced guides who make the process easier.
Focus on making buying easier and your prospects will buy from you faster and more often. Sales teams can shorten the sales cycle by as much as 68% when they learn to equip their champion—the people promoting their solution inside the target account.
Allego Expands Sales Learning and Enablement Market Leadership with Acquisition of Refract
Allego – Transform your organization with mobile, interactive learning and enablement technology built for today’s distributed teams.
Refract – Refract analyses every call and demo, profiling the revenue defining moments, revealing what leads to successful outcomes for your team today.
Bye Bye Tradeshows: B2B trade shows won’t recover for years
Live events like tradeshows and conferences have traditionally ranked as one of the top sources of leads, but that all but dissolved in 2020. As a result of the pandemic, the event industry is a shell of its former self, according to a piece by MarketingCharts citing data from PwC:
“PwC estimates that the U.S. trade show market will be cut in size by almost two-thirds this year.”
swordandthescript.com/2020/10/b2b-marketing-budget-trade-shows/
Chorus.ai launches “momentum”
It allows you to search for things like – Decision maker engaged, pricing discussed, next steps discussed etc and for these terms to help with analytics and forecasting within the CRM itself
Salesforce buys Slack
Covered on last weeks show which you can find here –
Salesforce Buys Slack! Facebook Buys A CRM?! – This Week In Sales
Book, “Selling is Hard, Buying is Harder” – Garin Hess
No Deal Brexit looking likely
“Very large gaps remain” between the UK and EU, despite a meeting between Boris Johnson and EU chief Ursula von der Leyen aimed at breaking the Brexit trade deadlock, No 10 has said.
And Mrs von der Leyen said the two sides were still “far apart”.
After their meeting, the prime minister and European Commission president “agreed that by Sunday a firm decision should be taken about the future of the talks”, a No 10 spokesperson added.
bbc.co.uk/news/business-55246706
Elon Musk is moving to Texas
Elon Musk is abandoning his long-term home base in California and relocating to Texas. The Tesla chief executive is the most high profile tech executive to leave Silicon Valley amid the pandemic. Musk’s plans to relocate coincide with the construction of Tesla’s new factory in the Lone Star state.
Musk has jousted regularly with Californian regulators in recent months, and began moving his personal foundation from California to Austin in October. While California has among the highest income tax rates in the nation, Texas has no state income tax.
linkedin.com/news/story/elon-musk-is-moving-to-texas-4293745/