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Today's Insights: Unlocking the Full Potential of Generative AI in B2B Sales
Many business sales and marketing personnel still regard generative AI as a new technological tool, ignoring its ability to revolutionize work styles. To use generative AI in a sales environment, it must be creative and interactive to improve business acumen and understanding of customers, ultimately improving sales staff performance.
The salesperson did everything right. In fact, they are doing better than before. They study challenges within customer organizations, fit perfectly into each other’s value propositions, and have a comprehensive understanding of their customers' business dynamics, key personnel, and pressing industry trends. All these tasks are closely linked to a highly contextualized and targeted business promotion visit. The best part is, it takes very little effort on the part of salespeople—just a little time spent on ChatGPT and some learning materials plugged into the organization’s artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted sales engine.
Challenges and Misconceptions
Following the development of the above plot, we should expect to see a glorious ending: a sales transaction that creates history, and the customer is ecstatic, feeling that the salesperson has finally "scratched the itch." But the reality is that customers who expected to talk to real experts about industry conditions and challenges were surprised to find that the salesperson only provided a standard conversation script. The harsh reality is that generative AI sets an expectation that salespeople cannot meet. Not only did the customer not have a thorough sales meeting, but he was also embarrassed by the business call and vowed never to see that seller again.
As generative AI takes hold in business transactions, such instances are becoming increasingly common. You may call it shallow knowledge or superficial professional knowledge—whatever you want to call it, the reality is that a large amount of important exhibition work that targets customers, although expressed in-depth through appropriate language and insights, falls apart in actual sales conversations.
Since OpenAI released ChatGPT-3.5 at the end of 2022, the discussion on generative AI has remained high. However, adoption at the enterprise level remains sporadic. Our third-quarter survey of 113 CEOs found that only 9% of respondents had plans beyond small-scale pilots, and only 26% had even done so. At the same time, their frontline teams are rapidly integrating generative AI into their workflows. In an on-site training we conducted with 50 frontline sales professionals, nearly three-quarters told us that they expected AI to play a significant role in their work within the next 12 months, with 94% wanting leaders to formally integrate AI into their sales plans.
Bridging the Gap Between Understanding and Usage
A gap between the use and understanding of programs can lead to behavior that harms customers, and we believe this has a greater negative impact than some of the more commonly cited issues, such as data or security risks.
In our consulting work at SBI Growth Advisory, we see too many salespeople thinking that generative AI is just another new technology. This technology can automate otherwise complex tasks. These are tools for creating shortcuts. Most organizations are approaching AI in the same way they have evaluated, purchased, and adopted other technologies for decades. They focus on minimizing risks (in this case, AI illusions and data privacy/security risks) and driving standardization adoption as a change management exercise.
First, introduce the tool, then provide training on its usage and benefits, and let supporters promote its benefits and value. Treating generative AI in this way misses its true power in driving new ways of working. As workers apply the insights and results generated by generative AI to their daily workflow, its use will be ubiquitous, in software programs and beyond. In this way, generative AI tools will look more like the Internet than a technology that can be purchased and deployed.
Creative Use of Generative AI in Sales
To use generative AI in a sales environment, it must be creative and interactive. Learning how to use generative AI effectively requires creativity and lateral thinking. Scholars call this the difference between knowledge transfer (increasing awareness and providing only resources) and tacit learning (learning rooted in application, experience, and practice). The key to minimizing the negative effects of AI is to make good use of it to truly understand the customer's business, rather than just treating AI as a convenient tool to obtain superficial knowledge.
Encouraging Creativity Over Codifying Guidelines
Many organizations are building libraries of generative AI tips. Just browse LinkedIn and you'll see that there's an industry of home-based OEMs that have emerged selling customized reminder tools to improve their sales teams and sales efforts. Thoughtful prompts are not a bad thing—they can indeed trigger humans to ask questions in ways they may not have thought of before and engage in more thoughtful interactions with generative AI.
However, the expectation of a specific cue rhythm limits the potential of generative AI. When it comes to sales roles, our research at SBI consistently shows that salespeople who prepare carefully before making sales calls significantly outperform their peers. Measures of “preparation” include preparation time and the amount of research and learning done before the interaction. Our latest research shows that salespeople who take an anticipatory approach to responding to customer objections, challenges, and hesitation points experience 12% faster sales cycles and 11% higher closing volume than their peers.
Leveraging generative AI as a conduit for inquiry, learning, and preparation is key. Inputting simple prompts based on the stage of the sales process may produce useful information and form a "hook" to pique the customer's interest. But this will never produce a deeper business acumen that is specifically tailored to the customer situation.
Business Acumen on Demand
Our sales training division is currently using it as an activity for the sales team, and the content goes back to the basics of consultative selling. The content includes "5 Whys" activities when using generative AI for customer research. Salespeople must understand things like what problem the customer is dealing with, why the problem is important to their business, why their current solution may not be effective, and why this may be an opportunity to help the customer.
Salespeople can learn to interact and collaborate with AI chat, asking "why" until they understand the problem more deeply. Not only does this activity quickly provide background information about the buyer and their organization, but it also gives salespeople extremely practical context and learning. Salespeople can ask these questions within the confines of generative AI, already having a perspective when meeting with a customer, rather than on an initial exploration while still trying to understand the customer’s business.
In this regard, generative AI has the potential to resolve a long-standing frustration among sales leaders: salespeople’s lack of business acumen and deep understanding of their customers’ businesses. The scope of generative AI use cases goes well beyond requiring such platforms to compose emails or summarize audio recordings in a certain tone of voice. Sure, these are administrative tasks that save time, but they absolutely do nothing to improve business acumen, understanding of customers, and ultimately, the effectiveness of sales professionals.
The job of sharpening business acumen often falls to sales leaders. However, new research from SBI found that only 44% of salespeople receive regular coaching on business acumen from their supervisors. Thoughtful, critical thinking discussions with generative AI provide salespeople with a very detailed understanding of the business problem and underlying causes (often with concrete evidence from the customer organization), which helps the sales team find the right fit for its own solution. Appropriate positioning within this business context, all without extensive supervisor involvement.
A New Working Relationship
Organizations have given salespeople free rein to experiment, so many salespeople have begun using generative AI tools in their day-to-day sales activities, often with wildly inconsistent and sometimes negative results. Even among organizations that block the use of generative AI tools, we are finding individuals accessing them on their own personal devices or in other ways.
As we mentioned, the intuitive approach for many leaders is to provide direction and discipline when trying to drive adoption of new tools. This is especially true in sales functions that are built on processes, strategy manuals, scripts, and templates. However, if you want to nudge salespeople to adopt generative AI, think of it as a new way of working (that is, guide salespeople in the direction of using generative AI in creative ways) and help them use it as a coaching and learning aid. It requires a completely different approach.
Four Steps to Effectively Integrate Generative AI
1. Show examples to illustrate "what can be done" rather than "what must be done." Busy salespeople need examples and cases to illustrate how to effectively use AI in sales activities. Truly understand the art of expanding the potential of AI. Organizations often use such examples as use cases for salespeople to follow, rather than simply using them as starting points to trigger their thinking about potential applications. Providing a "solution manual" is not only undesirable but also impossible. You can provide use cases in a sales brochure or sales coaching session and ask people to brainstorm possible next steps. What does this use case remind them of? How else can they adjust their workflow? And most importantly, how does this help them achieve their goals? Please share examples of using generative AI for creative chatting. Use it during deal reviews and "war room" meetings to identify new angles or pressing drivers for your client's business or industry.
2. Establish guidance, rather than provide advice. How to effectively promote generative AI is an art and a science. Provide guidance to salespeople on how to construct prompts with appropriate context, tone, and desired results. The presentation can be in the form of "notes" in the sales brochure, supplementary documents, or screen-sharing videos to show them how to use this tool to assist learning. It should be emphasized that interaction with generative AI is not to obtain "answers", but to engage in dialogue to stimulate thinking and construct practical countermeasures through iterations. Teach salespeople how to discuss with generative AI: correct answers when they deviate from useful content, or ask it to think of another approach. Direct it to sources closer to the customer, such as public documents, customer websites, product launches, presentations shared by executives in meetings, or other sources from which the AI can learn.
3. Focus on practical training, not information transfer. Sales professionals must understand the basic principles of how generative AI works and the considerations that should be taken when using this tool, such as accuracy, confidentiality, privacy, ethical use, hallucinations, and potential overdependence. But if your training only includes this (which is often the case), it may make them reluctant to change the way they work, rather than getting them excited about the potential of the tool. Please turn most training sessions into field exercises. Provide them with a real customer situation and handle the issue step by step through facilitation and group problem-solving. Then schedule a period of time that they can apply to one of their current clients. These tools can only be truly effective if salespeople see generative AI instantly producing responses applicable to their daily sales activities. Simple examples can be extremely educational, such as using AI to understand how customers make money, what key people care about when considering a purchase, or what objections buyers might have to their solution. Give your salespeople a chance to apply these tips to their own customers and challenges so they can “see the magic” with their own eyes.
4. Use executive-sales one-on-one meetings for joint learning, not feedback. AI is changing the job of a sales executive just as it is changing the job of a salesperson. With the application of AI, reporting, deal proposal management, sales force performance monitoring, and many administrative management activities will become more efficient. Sales leaders should hold regular generative AI “demo sessions” with salespeople to share how everyone has been using it over the past few weeks, what they learned, and how it impacts their work. Rather than focusing on asking salespeople to come up with reports and numbers on adoption and compliance, focus on creating an iterative work atmosphere and a continuous improvement mindset as the organization adjusts to new ways of working.
The use of generative AI is another skill that leaders must help their teams develop and learn. It gathers and applies knowledge. It also highlights the importance of human judgment, curiosity, creative thinking, and deep understanding more than ever. Driving deep intelligence with generative AI requires a very different approach than simply deploying new tools.
