Over the next few years, AI is going to change sales and marketing: what do you need to do now, to combat these changes

Jeremiah Owyang recently said on his newsletter, the following 6 points about the future of the internet and I thought it was worth sharing and adding my insight as well.

Jeremiah's “vision: Over the next few years, AI is going to significantly change the internet, impacting big tech, startups, product leaders, marketers, advertisers, media, customer care, e-commerce, and all of us.”

So let's look at these 6 points he makes

“AI agents will autonomously handle laborious tasks for us, such as managing repetitive emails, filling out expense reports, booking travel, scheduling calls, doing internet research, and performing monotonous e-commerce tasks. It won’t be perfect, it will take time to refine.”

If you think the first iPhone wasn't perfect and is still being developed over time. ?It will be the same with AI.?

2. As a result, information will come to humans in just a few user interfaces where we can manage our agent workers, reducing the need to traverse websites. Can we reclaim some of those 7 hours?

The direction of travel seems to be that we will interface the world and the internet through a much simpler set of screens, for example our AI model such as ChatGPT.?

This means we will use Google less and less. If you think what we currently do with Google is we use it as a portal to the world, we search and then click a like which takes us through to a website. ?We will no longer need to come through to your website.

Clearly this will have a massive impact if your business is based on the 10 year old Hubspot inbound model and you expect to get MQLs for people coming to your website. ?I recently booked a holiday and used AI to do it, I didn't visit one holiday companies website.?

3. As AI Agents become the dominant entities on the internet, website owners will cater to them by offering Agent APIs that instantly provide information to our AI agents, rather than simulating a human click path as AI agents do today.

4. Websites won't go away, but they will need to evolve. When humans visit websites, the content could be AI-generated and personalized to the individual user. The era of thousands of web pages is no longer needed.

5. LLMs like ChatGPT, Claude, and other popular ones will centralize user behavior in one app, integrating e-commerce directly into the app so users can search, find, and purchase items seamlessly. I predict that happens in Q4 2024.

6. Google Search, fearing disruption, will integrate "sponsored sentences" to maintain advertiser revenues, transparently merging them with generative AI search results, Perplexity and OpenAI’s new Search GPT will follow suit. At first you’ll hate it, then get used to it.

As you can see change is coming and your business needs to be ready, setting aside budget, certainly in 2025 to meet these changes.?

So how are you going to meet these changes?

Your employees and your salespeople need to have buyer-centric social media profiles, profiles where buyer will look at you and think “I think this person can help us”.

You need to be connected to the people you are trying to influence and sell to. ?Not by spamming people, for example connect and pitch. But by connecting in a way that starts relationships, build rapport and creates conversations. ?Because conversations create sales. You need to be building a digital bridge, between buyer and seller. If you don't, you are invisible to the modern buyer.

And thirdly, you need to be putting out interesting content. ?Content that is insightful and educational. ?Not brochures and brochureware. Not self-indulgent content such as “here we are at a sales kick-off” or “we have won an award”. ?Content that helps your buyers.?

Jeremiah Owyang finishes by saying, “Users no longer need to use antiquated search methods to trudge through websites to find the answers they want. Instead, OpenAI’s generative AI search will bring the answers right to the user.”

As a sales and marketing organization, you need to take back control now.?

Here's a comment from a recent podcast.?

Let's look at some context about social media today

Linkedin is the world's biggest network site.

So let's take a step back for a moment. How about if I could pick you up tomorrow and I drive you to a place which is full of your prospects? ?All you have to do is grab a coffee or a tea and go up and talk to them. ?You can stay as long as you like.

Now, you wouldn't walk up to these prospects of yours and pitch to them. ?You would have a conversation. ?Maybe ask then how far they drove to get there? Had they been caught up in the traffic? ?You would have a conversation. ?You wouldn't pitch to them, in fact they will probably ask you at some point, “what do you do?" but more on that in a bit.?

Let's look at the data, cold calling vs our social selling benchmark

Here at DLA Ignite , we are always wanting to push forward the boundaries of sales, so we decided to put cold calling head to head with the DLA Ignite methodology for social selling and create a benchmark on 1st January 2023 (and business case) for our version of social selling.

So we took a team of "cold callers" cross trained them in our methodology for social selling and here are the results.

It's worth shouting out the team, Alex , Jordan and Jensen and they work for a company called Supero .

Don't believe me? Please check the team out on social and ask them about the results!

The results with cold calling

When the team were cold calling, that is, before we trained them on social selling. ?I'm not sure what results you get with cold calling but they did whatever they could in terms of warming up the calls with emails or webinars, etc.? And the results, they got about 2 calls a week. ?

As with any cold call, your job is to take the call to a next action, which might be a demo, discovery call and they averaged 0.3 of these calls.

Anyway, you will have your own figures for cold calling in your business and you will know what they are.?

The results for social selling

What is social selling?

The DLA Ignite? definition of social selling is

"Using your presence and behaviour on social media, to build influence make connections, grow relationships and trust. ?Which leads to conversation and commercial interaction".

(Please note these figures are for the?DLA Ignite ?methodology, we cannot speak for other suppliers, please check with them, before signing any contracts.)

I need to say, before I get any comments.?

There is no spam and no automation in the?DLA Ignite ?social selling methodology!

The?DLA Ignite ?social selling methodology does not use connect and pitch!

The?DLA Ignite? social selling methodology does NOT use inmails, which are spam.?

In fact the program is now back and certified by the Institute of sales professionals (ISP) , the only such methodology backed by a sales professional body.

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Let's get onto those results for DLA Ignite methodology of social selling

The team are getting a 9% response (on average) to social selling cold outreach, so for every 100 people they ask for a call, 9 say "yes".?

This figure is an average, so we think somebody with intermediate skills or an expert should be getting a higher figure should be getting a larger response. ?In fact, our benchmark for an expert is 13%, but I want to keep figures realistic and conservative.?

As we mentioned above, with every "call" based on cold outreach, there has to be some sort of next action. ?For your own company, you will know what your next action is, it will be a demo, a discovery call or something.?

We have found that with DLA Ignite social selling methodology 9% of the people (on average) that agreed to a call,?33.6% are converting to a next action.??

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This is exponential growth when compared to cold calling.?

Each salesperson is averaging 10 calls / meetings per week, the good ones are getting 25 meetings a week.

Just think if you scaled that across your sales organization!?

(The most successful SDR complains he has got too many meetings, which think is a great problem to have!)

Just think about that being rolled out across your sales team(s). ?

It's time to work smarter not harder.?

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Let's look at this with a business case

Let's take a sales team of 10.

We know that the average person can grow their network by 3,000 people a year. ?Let's assume of these 50% are going to buy, this gives you a network growth of 1,500 per person per year.

If you have 10 salespeople that gives you a total addressable market (TAM) of 15,000 new people to have conversations with.

With our ,?Institute of sales professionals (ISP) backed, DLA Ignite social selling methodology, (note: we cannot vouch for anybody else) based on our measured benchmark, you should be able to get, on average, meetings with 9% of this TAM of 15,000. ?This means your sales team can have 1350 new conversations every year.?

(As we know, conversations create sales.)

As we discussed above, with any cold outreach the objective is to get a next action and using our social selling methodology and using our measured benchmark we can get 33.6% of 9% of our TAM to a next action, which is 454.

Let assume you win 1 in 3, that's 151 new sales a year using social selling, average order value (AOV) $100,000, that's?

$15,120,000 = $15 million

That's an additional $15 million that you are missing by cold calling rather than social selling.

or $1,26 million you miss every month you delay moving from cold calling to social selling.

Of course, if you have more than 10 sales people, you can scale the figures up.?

Imagine you are at a conversation and. the day before the event, there is a drinks in the evening, you have a call and so you are late by 30 minutes. As you enter the bar, you see all of the conference delegates and you realise they are all your ICP (ideal customer profile). ?You also see that each ICP is talking with, and laughing with a salesperson. ?Now is that salesperson they are laughing with, your salesperson or is it the competitions??

That is going on out on social media, day in and day out and if your ICPs are laughing and talking with your sales people, will be if you have trained and coached your salespeople in a sales methodology.?

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Want to know more about social selling, check out my new book

"social selling techniques to influence buyers and changemakers - 2nd edition".

In this brand new edition, I have updated all the text, I have also got 15 practitioners, so people who are doing this already to explain how they are get (practical) business benefit. From the CEO ?that has been running a digital business for over 18 months to sales? leaders who use social selling every day. ?

Articles on how these business have and are implementing digital, from Mercer , Telstra Purple , Ring Central , Cyberhawk , Namos , Ericsson , DLA Ignite and more.

What does?Mark Schaefer , Marketing guru think of the book "social selling - techniques to influence buyers and changemakers - 2nd edition"??watch the video here

It's available on Amazon worldwide. ?Link to Amazon.com here and Amazon.co.uk here .