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By Francis Brero, Co-founder & CPO at MadKudu
A couple weeks ago, I ended up taking Steli’s click bait and read his thoughts on sales automation and AI. There isn’t much novelty in the comments nor objections presented. However I felt compelled to write a answer. Part of the reason why, is that MadKudu is currently being incubated by Salesforce as part of the Einstein batch. Needless to say the word AI is uttered every day to a point of exhaustion.
The Mythical AI (Aka What AI Is Not Today)
The main concern I have around AI is that people are being confused by all the PR and marketing thrown around major projects like ChatGPT, DALL-E, Meta’s Ciscero, Google’s LaMDA and others – think Infosys Nia, Tata Ignio, Maana.io the list goes on. I think back to a truly inspiring demo of Salesforce’s new platform at the outset of the incubator. The use-case presented was to help a solar panel vendor identify the right B2C leads to reach out to. A fairly vanilla lead scoring exercise. We watched in awe how the CRM was fed google street view images of houses based on the leads’ addresses before being processed through a “sophisticated” neural network to determine if the roof was slanted or not. Knowing if the roof was slanted was a key predictor of the amount of energy the panels could deliver. #DeepLearning This reminded me of a use-case we discussed with Segment’s Guillaume Cabane. The growth-hack was to send addresses of VIP customers through Amazon’s mechanical turk to determine which houses had a pool in order to send a targeted catalogue about pool furniture. Brilliant! And now this can all be orchestrated within the comfort of our CRM. Holy Moly! as my cofounder Sam would say. To infinity and beyond, right? Well not really, the cold truth is this could have also been implemented in excel. Jonathan Serfaty, a former colleague of mine, for example wrote a play-by-play NFL prediction algorithm entirely in VBA. The hard part is not running a supervised model, it’s the numerous iterations to explore the unknowns of the problem to determine which data set to present the model.
The Pragmatic AI (Aka How To Get Value From AI)
Aside from the complexity of knowing how to configure your supervised model, there is a more fundamental question to always answer when considering AI. This foundational question is the purpose of the endeavor. What are you trying to accomplish with AI and/or automation? Amongst all of the imperfections in your business processes which one is the best candidate to address? Looking through history to find patterns, it appears that the obvious candidates for automation/AI are high cost, low leverage tasks. This is a point Steli and I are in agreement on: “AI should not be used to increase efficiency”. Much ink has been spilled over the search for efficiency. Henry Ward’s eShares 101 is an overall amazing read and highly relevant. One of the topics that strongly resonated with me was the illustrated difference between optimizing for efficiency vs leverage.
With that in mind, here are some examples of tasks that are perfect fits for AI in Sales:
- Researching and qualifying
- Email response classification (interested, not interested, not now…)
- Email sentiment classification
- Email follow up (to an email that had some valuable content in the first place)
- Intent prediction
- Forecasting
- Demo customization to the prospect
- Sales call reviews
So Steli is right: No, a bot will not close a deal for you but it can tell you who to reach out to, how, why and when. This way you can use your time on tasks where you have the highest leverage: interacting with valuable prospects and helping them throughout the purchase cycle. While the recent advent of sales automation has led to an outcry against the weak/gimmicky personalization I strongly believe we are witnessing the early signs of AI being used to bring back the human aspect of selling.
Closing Thoughts
Generative AI, Machine Learning, intelligent automation… are becoming ubiquitous in B2B. It is therefore our duty as professionals to educate ourself as to what is really going on. These domains are nascent and highly technical but we need to maintain an uncompromising focus on the business value any implementation could yield. Want to learn more or discuss how AI can actually help your business? Feel free to contact.
