The Impact of AI on B2B Sales for Startups and Scaleups

Jim MacDonald, Spinnaker Sales Group, LLC - Feb 5, 2024

I bet you’ve heard this one already - what’s an easy way to increase your valuation by 10x and raise all the venture capital you need? Answer: Just put the “AI” in your company name and mission statement!?

Everyone is talking about AI and its potential to dramatically impact the way we work and live. As a tech enthusiast and sales practitioner, I’m curious about the impact specifically on the sales profession, the sales process, and most specifically, the impact on Enterprise sales for B2B startups and scaleups. I’ll start with some background (what’s been happening historically) and then provide some personal insights on the short- and long-term implications of AI on B2B sales.? I hope you enjoy reading, learn a thing or two, and perhaps share your own thoughts by providing a comment.?

A Cautionary Statement

One thing I firmly believe: ignore AI at your (and your company’s) peril. As start up and scale up founders and founders, pay close attention to how AI may impact all aspects of your company, product strategy, customer needs and target markets in which you sell.? As a sailor I offer this simple analogy - imagine your business is one of many boats in a harbor - some are in boatyards next to the water, some are tied to the dock, others moored or anchored, and some are underway.? AI is analogous to a tidal wave headed toward that harbor, and only those who are underway may survive the impact. Everyone else will most likely be damaged or completely washed away.? Impacts of AI will appear to happen slowly and may be hard to see at first, and businesses won’t feel the full effect for some time (for those of us old enough to remember, the concept of AI has been talked about for >60 years).? But it’s here now, and you need to educate yourselves, keep up with the advances, and look to embrace/deploy it as part of your business strategy - otherwise risk being?overcome.?

Some AI (and ML, RPO, LLM, Generative AI) background

Let’s first make sure we share a common understanding of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its many flavors - RPO (Robotic Process Automation), Generative AI, Large Language Models (LLMs), etc. There’s already a lot of AI we are already using every day, like voice recognition, Google Search, Amazon’s recommendations, Spotify, Siri, and self-driving vehicles. These advancements are pretty significant when you think about them - but they represent just the tip of the iceberg.? AI is now fully leveraging the power of cloud computing in order to scale massively (scalable compute power, massive data storage and high speed network access) - that same platform most of you benefit from to accelerate your own business.

This infrastructure serves as the foundation for much more advanced/game-changing forms of AI, especially “Generative AI” and “LLMs”.? Generative AI is exactly what it sounds like - the ability for AI models to generate new information from existing sources of information, including text, images, and other forms of data.? LLMs are text/language based models that consume massive amounts of textual data in order to generate new text from these “learnings.”

ChatGPT - backed by Microsoft, and talked about frequently in the news - is one of the best known examples of an LLM, but there are many others - some (like ChatGPT) are general purpose, while others are purpose-built LLMs. Other LLM examples include BERT from Google, CLAUDE from Anthropic/AWS, Ernie, Cohere, etc.? Most have billions in funding from the biggest tech players in the world, while others enjoy massive similar support from VCs and other large corporations.? These LLMs each provide a base platform on top of which applications can be integrated and built to address all sorts of business requirements.

Startup/Scaleup B2B Enterprise Sales - the Near-term Impact

Available today and over the next several months, you will find a superabundance of new solutions that leverage LLMs and Generative AI, and hold the promise of not replacing salespeople, but making them much more efficient and effective. Want to improve email campaigns (the writing and personalization of emails, and then the sending and tracking performance and response rates)? Or perhaps you want help updating opportunities in your CRM, easily upload and track contact lists, take notes during meetings and provide a summary afterward? These are already almost common sales practices today with the help of AI.

The tools are getting better and better, and are freeing up valuable time for sales representatives to cultivate more meaningful relationships with prospects and customers, and with the promise of increased conversion rates and revenue.?The best examples of these tools can be found right inside your own CRM tool (if you have one) - like Zoho, HubSpot, and Salesforce. They all now offer lots of AI capabilities as extensions to their existing products to better update and manage important data.? Another place to look is new features available in the productivity tools that you’re already using - like those for online meetings.? Zoom offers an “AI Companion” that participates in your customer meetings, then generates a comprehensive summary of the meeting (including action items) and emails it to you (or your CRM).? I happen to use this tool, which is free for Zoom subscribers, and find it super useful.? If you use Microsoft, they offer Copilot for all their Office applications including Teams, and for Google users there’s Duet and AI Notetaker for their Google Workspace and Google Meet products.?

For startups and scaleups, the potential efficiency gains from leveraging the enhanced tools mentioned above, and working directly with a LLM like ChatGPT should not be overlooked - they can help you “do more and better with less,” and even make your young company appear more well established to prospective customers.? I highly recommend accessing ChatGPT, CLAUDE or another LLM, and have it write something for you - maybe a few prospecting emails, a press release on a topic, a Blog Post, or an article that is relevant to the customers' problem you target.? I suspect like me you’ll be surprised at how good the results are, and how much better the results can be if you learn how you better formulate your queries (known as “prompting”).?Note to self: ALWAYS proofread results for accuracy and completeness. It’s still early days, and AI tools are prone to mistakes, errors, and misstatements.?

Today and near term, AI is driving impressive advancements in business reporting, intelligence and predictive analytics.? While these can deliver tremendous benefits to many, at Spinnaker we are less convinced there is measurable value for most early stage startup or scale up companies.? You are likely still trying to figure out or penetrate deeper into your target market and ideal customer - and of course establish a market validated product (MVP). You are likely not dealing with the volumes of data that necessitate investment in these tools, at least not for growing sales and go-to-market.

AI and B2B Sales - the Longer-term Impact

The tactical improvements in the near term will certainly continue to provide improvements to sales productivity. On the not-too-distant horizon is a more vertically-integrated “AI-driven selling platform” -?capable of “reading” in your historical sales data, “learning” about your target market, demand generation techniques, sales process and stages, target prospects and buyer types, etc. This knowledge will improve with every new interaction, be guided and tuned by sales leadership, and provide consistent and continual guidance to sellers for sustained performance improvements. This AI sales platform will work best with companies who collect and centrally manage their data from which the AI platform learns, and with those companies who sell in a higher volume and more repeatable and consistent manner.

Emerging AI-powered sales solutions might recommend tasks and follow ups for prospects and customers, provide feedback to reps on ways to improve their sales process, and apply best practices from top performers to an entire team.? Imagine starting your day selling with a dashboard showing a prioritized list of customer-facing actions based on the previous week's activities (or inactivity!), reviewing and directing a trained virtual sales agent to perform tasks on your behalf, review alerts on accounts at a given sales stage that need attention, consuming news and external information (industry, customer, competitive) collated and oriented toward the active prospect base and action list, etc.? The salesperson's days are more organized and productive, with more outward facing time - in front of and/or taking actions on behalf of their prospects and customers.? These platforms have the potential to supercharge seller performance.??

This consolidated AI platform will also dramatically advance sales forecasting and pipeline management offering accurate visibility into future revenue opportunities, allowing businesses to identify potential risks and opportunities and adjust their strategies accordingly. And of course there will also be predictive analytics leveraging this intelligence, so B2B enterprises can better optimize the allocation of resources, identify new opportunities/markets for growth, and react more quickly to competitive and market changes.?

Furthermore, AI-powered sales forecasting and pipeline management tools offer valuable visibility into future revenue opportunities, allowing businesses to identify potential risks and opportunities and adjust their strategies accordingly. By leveraging predictive analytics, B2B enterprises can optimize resource allocation, prioritize leads, and maximize sales performance, leading to accelerated growth and profitability.

Remember, these new AI-enabled sales capabilities will only be achievable by companies who possess the data - and the most important is the "first party" data that you own - that is highly relevant to your product, your sales processes, your target industry and customer stakeholders, and reflects current and historical interactions with your prospects, partners and customers.? Now this platform vision, at least initially, may not make sense for a startup or scaleup stage business venture, but perhaps your company will be big enough to adopt a platform by the time it becomes available.?At the present, and at the very least though, you should have a good data collection/management strategy so you are prepared when the time comes.

AI and B2B Enterprise Sales - Some Conclusions

Embracing AI-driven innovation in the near term - specifically around data collection and process automation - will help startups and scaleups adapt more quickly to changing customer preferences, personnel changes, business pivots, new emerging technologies, and competitive pressures.??

Like every other disruptive technology trend - it all begins with relevant, clean, and comprehensive data.? Otherwise the old “GIGO” adage holds true (Garbage in - Garbage out). Even if you are unsure how you may want to leverage AI in your sales motions, incorporate some form of data strategy to collect and centralize your corporate data now.

Finally, while some believe AI will eventually replace salespeople, we believe everyone is going to see: (1) good salespeople who embrace AI become great salespeople, (2) good salespeople who don’t embrace AI struggle, and (3) marginal salespeople (the middle ground of any profession) will be forced to seriously “up their game” or change careers.

Startup Sales Field Notes (from Kent Summers' "B2B Sales for Startups" IAP course at MIT), now available on Amazon in paperback and kindle editions .