Knowledge is power in the sales relationship - Content + AI = Success

Successful salespeople are productive creatures, seamlessly able to engender trust, balance conflicts, impart value and close deals. Often referred to as ‘Superstars’, these successful salespeople are the model every sales manager tries to use to optimise the rest of their sales force.  Often the majority of an organization’s sales force is ‘busy’, not ‘productive’, the difference between busy and productive is a key indicator of organizational success.

History has shown over and over that if a Sales Exec is unable to impart value as part of the early selling cycle, the chances of a successful sales campaign in the account are very low.

According to Tom Searcy and his article entitled, “8 Traits of Great Salespeople” posted on Inc.com, two of the eight key traits of a successful salesperson which Tom describes are;

1. They challenge the decision maker — “The best sales representatives have a strong confidence in their understanding of the customer’s market and their own solution— enough so that they are comfortable challenging inaccurate statements made by the customer…”
2. They show up prepared — “This seems so common sense, and yet … the statistical fact is that most salespeople—greater than 70 percent—are not well prepared for sales calls and meetings. They lack research, pre-call planning, a complete agenda agreed upon by the contact, and a presentation tailored to the prospect. The best have all of these things.”

Creating a team of ‘Superstars’ is something the HR department works to accomplish every day, unfortunately hiring a team of Superstars is much more difficult than we all realise.

As the CTO for a company that builds a world leading sales enablement platform (bigtincan hub), I spend a large proportion of my day contemplating how to provide a high value, low complexity tool set to turn ‘busy’ into ‘productive’ or even better ‘trusted’.

Most will agree that the second trait Tom espouses above, “They show up prepared” is a key indicator of success, sure there are exceptions, however those are more often than not, a chance intersection of markets, or pure luck.

Since its inception, bigtincan has been building and leveraging machine learning as a key component of our sales enablement platform.  We believed early-on that if we were able to leverage the vast amount of behavioral data we collect, combined with key indicators of market success (sales data), and a way to understand the context of the content that is served via our platform, we would be able to successfully transform ‘busy’ into ‘productive’.

We have over the past few years deeply embedded our implementations of machine learning into our ContentIQ, SocialIQ, Content Recommendation platform, and now we are turning our attention to tackling ‘Preparation’.

If indeed ‘Showing up Prepared’ is a key indicator of success, why do so few people actually do it?  Leveraging the learning we have invested in and advances in Artificial Intelligence, the team here at bigtincan is actively transforming meeting preparation into selling preparation.  Providing tools for Superstars and those aspiring to be Superstars.

Dreamforce 2016: bigtincan will reveal our latest evolution of bigtincan hub with ‘MeetingIQ.  MeetingIQ provides the ability to actively interrogate a salesperson’s calendar, work directly with the salesperson to gather meeting success criteria, and then proactively construct the best content for the upcoming opportunity.

‘MeetingIQ’ takes the hard work out of meeting preparation. By leveraging our machine learning platform and interactive planning capabilities, bigtincan hub with ‘MeetingIQ’ makes sure a sales executive is prepared before they walk in the door. Combined with our existing post meeting follow-up capabilities, sharing the correct content post meeting, updating the CRM platform and reminding the sales executive to follow up at the best possible time, bigtincan hub with MeetingIQ actively turns ‘busy’ into ‘trusted’.

Drop by booth 226 at Dreamforce to get a view of the future of sales enablement, and arrange a chat with your bigtincan channel partner to see what MeetingIQ can do for your sales team.