The Future of Sales Development

Technology will probably never replicate the human traits of creativity, empathy and emotional connection. Yet the future of sales is filled with technology and blended models of support and engagement will enable the very best human experience for purchasing and sales success.

The problem today is that every buyer and every seller is confronted with massive amounts of data and ‘white noise’ that obscures the valuable and important. It makes it incredibly difficult for them to be effective in achieving best value for money and lowest risk of acquisition. Make no mistake, selling is expensive and we all need the best quality customers who are most aligned with our core value proposition and business values.

Much has been written about the coming apocalypse in white-collar professions as lawyers, surgeons, accountants, clerical staff, programmers (yes, computers are now beginning to write their own code for each other), office administration and others thin their ranks due to automation. Disruption is already well underway with blue-collar trades and the key to prosperity for them has been reskilling or being a true tradesman delivering real craftsmanship. White-collar professions need to adopt the same approach.

A timeless prerequisite for commerce is trust, and trust needs to exist in the brand (quality, value, service, and support) and the people (leadership and customer-facing). The future of selling has to include trust and that’s why it will forever involve people and technology where there is complexity or risk. Buyers expect education and insight rather than a pitch. Any engagement also needs to be all about them rather than the seller or their products.

So, if people are good at creativity, empathy and emotional connection; which tasks that represent weakness could be done by a machine and which companies or people are leading the way? There are two key areas for sales automation: 1) Opportunity pipeline creation, and 2) Opportunity management through to close. Salesforce, Microsoft and Oracle are the market leaders for the latter, and I will write about CRM in another article. For now, we will focus on the biggest problem confronting almost all commercial enterprises… not enough qualified sales pipeline.

I recently interview the co-founders of OutboundWorks, Bryan Franklin and Ben Sardella, because they have a well-evolved vision and they are executing effectively for transforming the sales development role (SDR) in B2B enterprise selling. I think they are building the Iron Man equivalent for sales pipeline creation - people and technology blended together for next level execution.

Here is an edited transcript of my conversation.

Tony: How much of B2B selling and buying will be a human experience in the future?

Bryan: Selling and buying have always been a human experience and our goal is not to replace salespeople, it’s to enable and support them to be more productive and effective in their day-to-day interactions.

Tony: Where do you think the biggest opportunity is to drive that productivity?

Bryan: To get them engaged with the right buyers who are in the window of being open to a conversation based on relevant context. But sellers typically spend way too much time fumbling with their systems trying to find 'the needle in the haystack' of where to invest their time and which channels to focus on.

Ben: Yes, the problem for sellers is the huge amount of data they have to sift through before they can even commence outreach with a prospect. Machines are great at dealing with big data so long as you construct the algorithms to work for what you’re looking for.

Tony: Some analysts say that 85% of B2B transaction will occur without human intervention in 2020 but that does not refer to the process of winning a brand new client. In your opinion, how much of customer acquisition can be automated?

Ben: Let’s first define sales roles. The senior sales rep who develops the opportunity once it’s basically qualified will always have their role. We call the person the AE, account executive, but the person who is pounding away with emails, digital outreach and on the phone, that role we call the SDR (sales development rep) and more than half of what they do can be automated.

Bryan: Yeah, we don't want to replace the SDR, we want to make them far more effective. We’ve already proved that the right approach with technology can yield ten-times the qualified leads and at less than half the cost. To answer your question; somewhere between 50% and 85% of what a SDR does can be automated. We’re about helping companies grow by achieving far more with their current level of resources. The current SDR team can deliver many more quality leads.

Tony: You hired Justin Michael right; to run operations? I regard him as the best SDR mind on the planet and encourage people to follow Justin's LinkedIn blog.

Bryan: We did. He’s providing a valuable piece of the equation around messaging and techniques that break through to difficult to reach executive buyers. One of the things we do with every new client is to ensure they have clearly defined their ideal customer and profiled their target buyer personas. We then audit their messaging and cut it back to what works with senior buyers. In essence, we create atomized messaging and then do split testing for 'role in industry' to nail which messages work the best.

Tony: So you then tune your tools, right?

Ben: Yes, that’s part of it, but we then use a technology stack that includes AI ad we recently acquired a market leader in Hexa. It was an essential piece of the puzzle because effective outbound demands relevance, timing, and personalization. Our technology automates the process of researching companies and individuals for the purpose of personalizing emails. We enable personalization against hundreds of data points instead of just one or two. Without this AI, SDRs can burn huge amount of time achieve very little.

Tony: Wow. This is AI outside the firewall, unlike Einstein at Salesforce.

Ben: Our AI is designed to create sales funnel and hand-off to Einstein at Salesforce, or other AI within CRMs, so they can then manage opportunity progression inside their core systems of record. We’re all about creating high-quality engagement for sales pipeline based on having the right message at the right time, to the right person, and with the right context.

Bryan: Most personalization technologies fail for sales because they focus on fixed attribute like ‘name’ or ‘title’, but the reason our personalization works at scale, is that Hexa treats each relationship between sender and recipient as unique, which means that every personalized message changes depending on who is sending it. We contextualize with dynamic variables.

Tony: I love this! I’ve always believed that having the right narrative is essential but then you have to personalize to get their attention. Generic outreach is just perceived as spam. What does you SDR augmentation look like for the SDR in doing their job?

Bryan: Sifting through huge arrays of data and then creating hyper-personalization is the future. Scale and relevance has always been the biggest challenge but we enable an SDR to automate sales development activity. As an example, what used to take a SDR 20 minutes of research per email now happens instantly and in bulk. The quality of the messaging is also much higher. This means they can send exactly the right emails and then get on the phone executing follow-up.

Tony: My latest book talks about how effective combinations are… phone, voicemail, email and even text message all in quick succession. Can you support that approach now?

Ben: Yes. OutboundWorks with Hexa.ai combines humans and technology to deliver qualified appointments at scale and cost effectively. We apply the technology intelligently after understanding your value proposition, target market and buyer personas. We then tune the algorithms and technology stack to be effective with hyper-personalization at scale.

Tony: Should SDRs feel threatened by the advances in AI and the underpinning technologies?

Bryan: Not those who embrace what’s happening. This is an opportunity for the best SDRs to become orchestrators of the message and tools that drive pipeline creation. We can make a SDR hyper-effective to be one of the most valued people in the organization. Our goal is to allow human SDRs to have many more of the right conversations for high-end business development. We can accelerate their results and their career.

Tony: What’s the role of trigger events in how your solution works?

Ben: We monitor for trigger events with search algorithms and then automatically cross-reference against the ideal customer profile. If you sell to the CFO and manufacturing is a target vertical, then that person being promoted or joining the company triggers our platform creating personalized outreach. Everything is about timing, relevance and then personalization. We do it all so that it feels like a person, not a robot, and the real person takes over seamlessly in the workflow.

Tony: There must be a lot of data sources out there?

Ben: There are 1,000 different types of information out there but our Hexa AI filters and creates pathways with common points of relevance for the SDR or AE to originate outreach with the target prospect. The first exposure the AE gets is often a calendar invite.

End of interview.

I'm impressed with what OutboundWorks is doing and technology changes everything as you can see in this amazing video. Finding ways to create sales conversations that are relevant and timely is to secret to creating the revenue funnel that every business needs.

OutboundWorks is changing the way companies create quality sales pipeline. They are the market leader in blending humans and technology with the message and the medium for sales development as a service. They can be found at www.OutboundWorks.com/

Over to you. How will AI empowered technology transform sales and which other companies are leading the way? How could a salesbot assistant best improve productivity and results for salespeople?

I discuss the future of sales in my new book, COMBO Prospecting, published by HarperCollins and The American Management Association (AMACOM) and you can purchase it here on Amazon. 

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Main image: Yves Rossy flying his rocket wing jetpack. Embedded images in order of appearance: 1) Alex Knight on Unsplash, 2) Bryan Franklin, 3) Ben Sardella.