During our Future of Sales Festival in June 2021, we sat down with Winnie Palmer, Head of EMEA Marketing at Seismic, to discuss how to deliver compelling buyer experiences and maximize your Go-to-Market effectiveness with AI-guided selling.
Check out the highlights of the conversation below 👇s
Why is customer experience so important now?
A: In B2B, the customer experience comes down to how they consume information, the style of the presentation, but also whether the story is clear, understandable and resonating with their particular problem.
Purchase decisions are often made by a committee, not by just one person, so you need to be able to multi-thread, sell, convince and negotiate on fronts across the entire organization.
You need to be able to do that in a highly tailored customized fashion but also at scale for consistency.
You want to make your customer feel like they’re in the driver's seat. You want them to be able to interact with the content.
If there's a pop up a chat box embedded in that dynamic content, the customer can directly interact with their account managers and then the whole experience becomes so much more powerful, and certainly helps you as a vendor to cut through the clutter.
Ultimately, if you want to provide a great customer experience for your customers, the message as well as how you tailor it needs to resonate with the buyer's expectation. Otherwise, you lose that lead straight away.
Q: What's the secret for driving revenue?
A: It's important to stay focused on the critical path to success. Every business is different, so you have your own unique context for growing business.
Ours, for example, is heavy on acquisition, so a lot of our focus is on how we establish more brand understanding from education, etc. However, more established firms need more focus on defending their market share and retention.
Fundamentally, we need to clearly understand and articulate what our value adds to the prospects and be able to come down to excellent execution. We need to be able to see the  organization behave as one unified entity.
The focus these days is around innovation and how we can make the existing machine function and perform better and more effectively than before, but organization-wide alignment is of greater operational importance.
Q: Besides a good CRM, what are the key tools?
A: A CRM system is pretty much the foundation. Data needs to feed AI so you need to have a very strong data infrastructure, and a CRM system is typically where your customer database is.
One key takeaway is to think about how different tools come together. Integration is key! In the world of virtual selling, there are about 50-70 tools that sellers and marketers are using even for small businesses. It’s overwhelming.
Ideally, you want the system to integrate and meet the sellers where they work. You don't need to open another tool, you don't need to open up a window, your seller is reading and looking at the prospects easily because the AI system is talking to me within the CRM environment, and that's super helpful.
Q: How does AI selling help us meet buyers’ expectations?
A: AI-guided selling is the methodology, the process, or the technique that combines human intelligence with machine learning in order to create a more intelligent, wider engagement, which drives a better buyer experience and better business outcomes.
Every buyer engagement generates data that drives and delivers insight into sales activities.
When data like this is aggregated across multiple systems within your entire Go-to-Market tech stack, the organization can then create a comprehensive view of sales activities.
When you combine contextual data and collect the data at scale, it becomes a lot more valuable than any data an individual seller can analyze.
Algorithms can be deployed to help identify patterns, behaviors and insights that can lead to new revenue opportunities. Your sellers are enabled with just-in-time information to deliver a truly engaging and compelling buyer experience dynamically in real time.
Q: How is AI/ML used to maximize Go-to-Market effectiveness?
A: In the aftermath of the pandemic, all sales communication and marketing communication had to migrate online. Sellers are selling virtually and buyers are buying online too.
The number of companies implementing AI-related technologies has grown by around 270% over the last few years, which coincides with the rise of artificial intelligence in product.
AI-guided selling is the digital assistant model, but being adapted for sales. Artificial intelligence and machine learning can and are being used to maximize Go-to-Market effectiveness, and changing the dynamic between the sellers and the buyers.
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