The Future of Sales: AI and the Promise of People-Centered Selling

Today we're unveiling the pilot of two new Generative AI (GAI) features within Sales Navigator, designed to allow sellers to embody the habits of top performers.   

Let me share some context behind LinkedIn’s approach to AI, and why this is a pivotal moment for Sales Navigator and for sales organizations.  

It’s challenging to be a sales leader today. Executives and revenue leaders are tasked with hitting ever-increasing revenue targets with fewer headcount and smaller budgets, requiring higher and higher productivity from their teams. We’re trying a variety of strategies, piloting new tools, making numerous investments, and pulling multiple levers to drive profitable growth in a world of compressed demand and limited resources.  

Salespeople meanwhile are spending more time managing the growing amount of information and tech available to them, spending less time cultivating relationships and doing the important work top performers do: developing creative account strategies, finding hidden allies, connecting meaningfully with customers, and building advocacy across stakeholders at target accounts.  

At the same time, buyers have unprecedented access to information. Buyers today do their own research, read reviews, do backdoor reference checks, and get farther along the buying journey than ever before. AI will only compound their ability to get further down the decision path without needing to engage a seller.  

In a world where the salesperson’s role is confined to the last mile, sellers need to be even more thoughtful and better informed in order to add value and help buyers navigate complex decisions. The stakes have never been higher and with where the future of sales is going, we need all sellers to perform like the best sellers. And the answer is not what you think.

The best sellers are a rare breed. They operate differently than the pack. There’s a reason they consistently outperform the majority of your organization. It’s because they are doing things differently than everyone else. 

Top performers are ruthless with their time, they invest in opportunities with the highest likelihood of success, they stitch together playbooks that are hard to understand. In reality, however, they’re doing two things that are highly replicable - they’re leaning into people-centered, human skills and they’re leveraging technology to help them focus on the most important signals. These top performers understand that cutting through the noise and knowing how to best engage is king. At LinkedIn, we have a term for this approach to selling - we call it deep sales.

As if replicating top performer habits wasn’t challenging enough, now GAI has introduced an entirely new variable. Leaders feel pressure to get up to speed on a topic that has the potential to fundamentally disrupt and reshape the sales organization of the future. But it’s confounding to know where to start. Revenue leaders feel anxiety about moving too fast with AI - wanting to capitalize on its promise, but also facing trepidation. “Should we embrace AI across the board or should we bite off small use cases and expand from there? I don't know the right approach but the last thing I want to do is go too slow and get outflanked by my competitors.”

Our data shows that more than 50% of sales skills will be augmented by GAI. In success GAI will become a seller’s personal assistant - technology that takes on time-consuming tasks like searching for qualified leads, updating CRM, identifying critical signals to act on, capitalizing on buyer intent, prepping for meetings, and more. As published in the Harvard Business Review, the Sales Mastery 2022 survey found that on average salespeople devoted only 32% of their time to selling — and 68% to non-revenue-producing activities. These stats haven’t changed in years. Despite the tech we’ve thrown at our organizations, sellers still are not spending enough time with customers.  

By making it easier to gather and process large amounts of information at once, GAI is estimated to free upwards of 20% of a seller’s time - according to McKinsey’s 2022 software seller survey. Outsourcing rote but important tasks to GAI will enable sellers to spend more time flexing the people-centered, human skills like collaboration, problem solving and sense-making with customers that ultimately lead to the outcomes we all want to see. And these are the things our very best sellers are already doing. GAI, when done well and built on the right kind of data, will augment the science of selling, allowing salespeople to focus on what they do best - the art of selling.

LinkedIn’s first party data, when used with GAI via Microsoft’s Azure APIs, is an example of the right kind of data, unmatched in the market. Our deep sales platform delivers actionable signals from more than 950M+ members around the world.  

Today we are announcing the pilot of two new generative AI features – Account IQ and AI-assisted search – to make account research and the process of finding the right people at a prospect or current customer more efficient and effective. This is available now in pilot mode for select customers in certain markets (excluding the EU) and will be generally available within months.   

With the launch of AI-assisted search and Account IQ, LinkedIn Sales Navigator helps all of your sellers perform like your best sellers, using the deep sales approach - ensuring they’re having more of the right conversations with the people that matter, driving better outcomes for customers and your revenue teams.