Author: Jessica Munday

May 08, 2019 by Jessica Munday

There’s a revolution coming for businesses. A revolution where sales automation will be the key to either seeing success for falling behind.

Automation Hero CEO, Stefan Groschupf sat down with AA-ISP’s Bob Perkins to discuss everything sales AI. They go over its developments and capabilities and where Stefan sees sales automation making the biggest impact in sales organizations.

Listen in on the interview or read the transcript below

Bob: Hey everyone, it’s Bob Perkins with Inside Sales Studio bringing you a special episode and an interview on artificial intelligence. With us today, we have Stefan Groschupf. Stefan, how are you doing?

Stefan: Good. Good morning Bob.

Bob: Good morning. Stefan is the founder and CEO of Automation Hero, they’re a supporter of AA-ISP.

This whole thing, Stefan, on artificial intelligence is coming on so strong. And it’s just not a new technology, it’s something that potentially can change the way we sell, how we sell and it’s going to help us sell better.

And I think it’s going to actually help the profession of sales grow. A lot of people think “AI robots are going to take over selling.” It may take over pieces of it, but I think it’s going to help us.

The Martech landscape has grown and surged in the last few years. What’s the current state of the Salestech landscape and what direction is it headed?

Stefan: There will be a very similar development in the Salestech landscape that happened over the last decade with marketing technology. We went from relying on gut instinct to know what was working to developing a data-driven approach and a lot of tools developed because of that.

What is critical is that we recognize that our sales reps are extremely busy with all the tools they have to maintain. An average seller uses four and a half tools on a day-to-day basis.

It’s really important to understand that our sellers are extroverts. If you look at the typical personality profile, like a Myers Briggs, sales reps are hired because they’re great at building relationships with customers, at talking and pitching the product. Now making them data entry robots and yelling at them if they don’t complete their Salesforce updates is not the right approach.

On the other hand, the innovations in sales technology are very exciting. However, I think we need to recognize we’re really working with a different type of target audience. Instead of making their lives more difficult and preventing them from spending time with customers, we must invest in technology that can simplify their lives and give them more time to be with customers.

Nobody likes to talk to a robot. If I call my bank, I don’t like speaking with a robot. So the key here is learning how we can support our people and give them more time with their customers.

Bob: Now you mentioned helping them enter information into a CRM. Who wouldn’t love to not have to do CRM? The best salespeople avoid it.

Thinking about AI for sales, what do you think are realistic or maybe unrealistic expectations of what AI can do for selling?

Stefan: Even though there are incredible innovations in the AI space, I think we all have to stay realistic.

Sales reps will not be replaced by AI. And as I just mentioned, I don’t like interacting with a robot on the phone or even per email. There’s a bigger opportunity to take away these pesky tasks that sales rep steps do every day. As you just said, updating Salesforce, rather than making these AI algorithms customer-facing.

At this point, I think the real opportunity is to help our sales reps with mundane tasks or help them to make the right decision rather than replacing the human touch with robots.

Bob: I was at a conference last week, and I spoke on rehumanize selling. I think that AI can help us do that, we’ve gotten away from the human-to-human piece, partly because of all this other stuff we have to do. So, I would agree with you.

What are some examples of technology that you’re seeing emerge relative to AI?

Stefan: Now for every company “AI” is the new buzzword. Like five years ago “big data” was everywhere and five years before that you put “social” or “mobile” everywhere. It’s important to be careful, not every company that does data analytics is doing AI.

The exciting innovations in artificial intelligence that are coming up now, is the concept of deep learning. This is where a massive amount of data storage and compute is used to simulate the human brain, where we have neural networks stacked on top of each other. So this, for me, is real AI.

There are now new capabilities around natural language understanding. AI that’s able to understand the intent of an email and then autonomously scheduling a meeting. It could also differentiate between a phone number, job title or address within an email and then can extract that data straight out of the email and update it in the CRM. Because nobody likes to copy-paste that data over.

Sales automation is capable of tackling all sorts of processes, but also what’s fascinating about this deep learning technology is that you can make fantastic recommendations. It requires enough data but helping you to understand which customers are at the right point in the buying cycle and also understanding which product might be most relevant.

For these systems to work you’d bring in datasets like online behavior, CRM data and historical success of sales reps which the AI can use to accurately predict and recommend next steps for better success. Who wouldn’t love to call a customer that is ready to buy at the right time? AI can help us be more precise and augment our intelligence.

Bob: It’s interesting, the growth potential when you think of marketing automation. It helped grow the SDR/BDR role. We added salespeople because we were getting more leads. If sales automation can get us better leads, I think again we’ll have the need for more salespeople. Much like the computer in the 80s; people thought it was gonna replace people, but instead, it spawned a whole new revolution of IT and a lot of other jobs.

So let’s let’s talk about implementing AI. What are some of the challenges that a leader might face?

Stefan: It’s not as much of a technology challenge, but a change management challenge. It’s really important that you bring your people along. AI is a scary topic, lots of people are afraid they’ll be replaced.

It’s really important to bring them in very early on. So what we do is bring everybody into a room and do a Use Case Discovery Workshop. We ask “Here’s what the technology can do. Where do you guys have the biggest pain?”

Most often sales leaders push tools onto their team from the top-down. The perception from the sales rep is, “Oh, here’s another tool that’s observing me.” Turn this situation around and ask your team for suggestions on how to use this innovative technology to help address the challenges they are facing.

So it’s really about change management, getting people to overcome these fears and then focus on high-value use cases, rather than what this feels good for you as the sales leader.

Bob: I recall back in the early CRM days we had to do change management for that as well.

Let’s talk about success stories you’ve seen in the field that might help people watching this interview. Can you share any successful implementation stories or examples and then any tips on how to get started?

Stefan:There are many, so ping me if you wanna know more. But maybe just as a headline: IDC predicts that by 2020, AI in combination with CRM and sales overall will increase revenue by $1.1 trillion.

These are fantastic uses cases. It starts by getting your CRM data quality up because you’re using sales automation for CRM updates. That will then trigger better quality marketing and sales automation, better forecasting, and so on. Our product helps people save an hour a day on these tasks. They spend more time calling customers and are focusing on closing deals.

We had customers with SDR teams that spend 30 percent of their time just scheduling meetings. It takes four emails to schedule meetings. And let’s be honest, it’s just two humans between two machines. The sales rep has a calendar and the customer has another one, and they have to figure out if Monday or Tuesday or Wednesday works better. So those are things that could be helped through sales automation.

You don’t want to automate away the human conversation. But other things like CRM updates, scheduling, cross and up-sell recommendations, best next steps recommendations are all things that can be incredibly valuable. We frequently see tens of millions dollars in ROI in larger sales organizations and significant cost reduction. With the same amount of people, you can work so much more pipeline.

Bob: That’s great. I want to end though with learning a little bit more about Automation Hero. I know you’ve attended AA-ISP events, we’ve partnered together on many things and we appreciate your support.

But just a minute ago, you mentioned saving people quite a bit of time with the scheduling feature of our sales automation platform. Can you tell us specifically what Automation Hero does to help sales reps?

Stefan: Let’s take a step back. So I built a market leading company in big data analytics, raised $100 million in venture capital and went from zero to the market leader in seven years. But as a tech guy, I had to run a sales organization and, boy, that was hard.

So the idea for Automation Hero came from an older observation we had there. What we’re building is a sales automation platform that uses advanced artificial intelligence algorithms to automate pesky tasks that sales reps don’t like to do. Fifty-nine percent of a sales reps’ time is spent doing administration work. Only 37 percent of their time is spent with their customers and that’s our KPI. We want to increase the time sales reps spend with customers.

We do a whole bunch of things, but for the end-user, our product is personified as a personal assistant we call Robin. So every sales rep now has a personal system that helps to schedule meetings with the customers, does CRM updates, provides them with best next steps or finds their next customer.

And the beauty is that our system continuously learns from the individual sales rep, not the whole organization. Which is really critical, because the way Johnny sells is very different from the way Susan sells. So Robin learns from you, the seller, and then helps you every day by doing the tasks that you have to do, but that aren’t helping you drive revenue.

Bob: I want to hire Robin. I need Robin. Well Stefan, thanks so much for sharing this great information on AI.

If you’d like, what’s the best way for somebody’s seeing this interview to contact you or reach out to you.

Stefan: Just head to our website, saleHero.ai. Follow us on LinkedIn, we have a lot of really interesting information there. I think it’s fast moving, at this point. Sales automation makes a very big competitive difference, so don’t miss out there.

May 08, 2019 by Jessica Munday

Picture this. A sales organization in which data automatically flows into the CRM like a clear, clean river. Sales organizations have a full view of their pipeline and can easily streamline their processes. There’s peace throughout all levels of the sales team. Forecasts are always precisely on the nose and revenue flows in abundance. This a perfect paradise for sales operations and the sales team as a whole. This is the reality with sales automation.

Sales operations know that clean, accurate customer data is essential for a smooth-running and efficient business. Sadly, this is far from reality for most sales organizations.

CRM data is often linked to a variety of sales tools such as external prospecting or forecasting tools. It also guides critical business decisions like expectations of how much a company can spend or grow. Not to mention it provides a holistic view of the sales pipeline.

Unfortunately, too many organizations rely on manual data collection, rather than sales automation tools for data entry. This ends up in disappointment across the board. Data is inaccurate, delayed or straight up just missing.

Think about it. If a sales rep is having a busy week (Yay! Maybe this means more sales!), it’s likely that their CRM duties will fall by the wayside. And I’m sure you can figure out the repercussions.

And this isn’t just a one-off problem as 79% of opportunity-related data that sales reps gather never make it into the CRM system. At all. As for the data that does make it into the CRM, 88% of CRM users admit to entering incomplete contact information and 62% say they don’t log all of their activities.

All of these issues with data collection leave sales operations teams with a lot to clean up:

• 30% of B2B contacts are outdated within a year.
• At any time, 20% of CRM contacts are no longer valid.
• 69% of users have outdated CRM data.
• 63% have duplicate contacts in their CRM.

The problem here is not with the sales reps. It’s a much larger issue with your current sales processes.

It’s time to get out of the way of your sales reps and let them focus on selling by removing data collection barriers. Introducing sales automation.

Sales automation tools that take on data collection can be a huge lifesaver. This task is one of the most time-consuming undertakings (and often cited to be the most boring).

75% of sales reps said they could be more productive if they spent less time on data entry. And 81 percent of reps said that the accuracy of their data could be improved by capturing quality contact info from people they meet or email with.

There are tools that can collect all of the important sales data without requiring anyone from the sales team (or even the ops team) to put in any grunt work.

Sales automation tools use intelligent mining and sourcing technologies to capture customer and business data, whether it be structured (like spreadsheets) or unstructured (like emails) and input them into the CRM. Magic!

With data collection done on a regular basis and done with better accuracy, the reliability of the sales data increases. Sales management and operations team then have more accurate forecasts and reports, which leads to smarter business decisions.

It’s imperative for sales organizations to find the right tool for the business problem they’re facing. This has given rise to the importance of the sales ops role as the optimizer of the sales process and owner of the tech stack.

As sales automation with AI becomes increasingly relevant in business processes, it’s more important than ever for sales operation to focus on keeping their teams competitive through automation and augmentation.

May 08, 2019 by Jessica Munday

Most salespeople spend only 15 hours of their 40-hour work week selling (36 percent of their time). What’s taking up the rest of their time? According to Salesforce, one quarter of a sales rep’s time is dedicated to valueless administrative tasks.

Sales operations managers often try to combat this by rolling out “productivity tools.” But these tools tend to inhibit productivity even further by adding more steps to the sales process and making optimization even less of a reality.

“Productivity tools” just aren’t going to cut it. Decreasing the complexity of the sales process and maximizing selling time is true optimization. Sales operations must shift gears and integrate a solution that eliminates steps in the sales process and enhances sales team abilities.

How did we get here?

Between 2011 and 2018, the number of marketing tools out there multiplied nearly 47 times. The landscape went from about 150 tools to almost 7,000 in just eight years and is still on the rise. This same trend is underway in sales.

This is the current sales tech landscape, currently with over 700 tools. In 2015, there were just over 300. Soon sales technology will skyrocket in the same way MarTech has, with thousands of tools adding noise to the sales industry.

Adding a tool to the tech stack means wading through this maze to solve an organization’s specific pain point. Until recently, the only option was to waste hours researching products, talking to vendors and unraveling the complexity to find the right tool or just hope that the first tool they came across was a good fit.

This is inefficient both for the sales operations specialist and the sales team. Sales ops has more productive initiatives to work than finding “the needle in the haystack.” It’s also inefficient for the sales team because these tools are adding more complexity to an already convoluted process.

It’s time to look to the future of automation.

Intelligent sales process automation

It’s time to introduce sales operations to intelligent process automation. It’s likely that operations have already heard of robotic process automation (RPA) and artificial intelligence (AI); intelligent process automation is the powerful combination of these two technologies.

The RPA involved in IPA automates repetitive tasks that bog employees down, while AI analyzes, learns and solves problems. This allows IPA solutions to automate complex tasks that waste human worker’s time and augment employee decision making.

This is the future of productivity. According to McKinsey, companies experimenting with IPA are automating between 50-70 percent of repetitive computer tasks, most often with triple-digit ROI growth.

When it comes to what sales can do with IPA, the potential is limitless. Imagine an organization that automated 50-70 percent of the repetitive tasks that sales reps do daily. This means accelerating email creation, eliminating data entry, quickly generating documents and reducing meeting scheduling, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. This frees up their day to connect with customers and further drive revenue for their business.

Sales process automation is the highest level of optimization a sales team can achieve, as the only tasks the sales reps need to worry about are directly related to selling.

Larger business shift

Gartner estimates that global spending on RPA technology in 2018 hit nearly $680 million. In 2019 they predict that the RPA industry will grow 57 percent, making it the fastest growing software category. And according to Market Research Future, the global intelligent process automation market will see a compound annual growth rate of 40 percent by 2023.

While market growth means little to sales operations, it shows that this technology is on the cutting-edge and will soon be implemented across organizations and radically transform them. The next era of business is a term Automation Hero has coined “Business 5.0”.

Business 5.0 borrows its meaning from the previous industrial revolutions (see Industry 4.0) but focuses on the development of organizations. We predict that automation will liberate information workers from their computer tasks, allowing them to dedicate more time to work that drives real value for their company. In the coming years, businesses will go through another digital transformation and sales process automation will become commonplace.

Future of sales operations

With the onset of sales process automation, the operations role will need to shift, both in mindset and in knowledge base. Here are some of the changes we see coming:

Move away from short fixes:

Rather than implementing short-term productivity tools to solve existing problems, sales operations will begin thinking about long-term changes for their organization. They must pragmatically implement a solution that can scale with their organization and automate well into the future of the business.

Become technology experts:

Sales operations needs to cut through the noise more quickly and precisely than ever. To do this they must have an excellent understanding of the technology in the market and how it can impact their sales organization. It’s important to understand which features they need and ignore products without the right technology under the hood.

Specialize in systems integration:

It’s critical that any solution is integrated seamlessly into the existing tech stack. Sales operations needs to be knowledgeable on their integration needs and work even more collaboratively with IT for installation, configuration, maintenance, training and support of these systems.

Data engineering:

Sales Ops is already the delegated owner of the sales data, now they will need to work on properly collecting, storing, processing and analyzing these huge sets of data through the lens of sales process automation. They’ll need to learn how to build automation flows and manipulate data using their IPA solution.

Ignite the revolution:

It is operations duty to spark the digital transformation for the sales organization. They will need to articulate the long term ROI this technology will bring for the business and influence stakeholders to be on board with this shift. One aspect of this is combating the fear of “automating away” the sales team. It’s important to express that this technology is meant to make sales reps more productive and encourage more human work processes, rather than replace them.

May 08, 2019 by Jessica Munday

Let’s say you’re a salesperson, looking to increase your overall productivity. Take a look at these six tips on how to work with both sales AI tools and our automation assistant, Robin.

Tip #1: Understand Robin’s skills

According to InsideSales Labs, about 67 percent of sales reps rank administrative tasks, such as researching and data entry, as the least effective of all sales tasks. Lucky for you, Robin can handle much of those tasks that you hate doing.

Here’s what our rockstar automation assistant Robin can do for you:

1. Create: Create new leads and contacts in your CRM system or suggest promising, new accounts.
2. Update: Update existing lead, contact or account information, keeping phone numbers, titles, company descriptions and other information up-to-date.
3. Log: Log your activities such as emails and calendar events to their respective CRM records.

And that’s just the beginning. Robin can be customized to handle a whole range of tasks in our enterprise model.

Tip #2: Prospecting made easy

Sales reps waste 50 percent of their time on unproductive prospecting, according to B2B Lead. With Robin, that’s time you can now spend talking to hot leads.

Robin prospects for new accounts based on past historical success. In other words, it only brings you accounts similar to accounts you’ve previously won or closed.

*NEW FEATURE ALERT*:

We’ve recently updated Robin so that you can customize its prospecting capabilities.

Now, not only will Robin bring you accounts based on historical data, but you can also set your parameters by region, annual revenue, employee size and industry.

Say you close medium-sized businesses in insurance on the West Coast. You can set those parameters and Robin will bring you the best accounts that fall within them.

Tip #3: Data entry done right

A study by DMC Software found that 88 percent of customer data records contain errors.

Robin can eliminate errors by finding the empty fields in your CRM and pulling in the most up-to-date information from your emails, calendar, or the Automation Hero database. These can be details like a phone number or job title.

And ESNA found that 79 percent of opportunity-related data never makes it into the CRM system to begin with.

Robin will proactively log your emails and calendar events for you. Now you can measure your account health and opportunities without the pain of data entry thanks to sales automation.

Already using another tool to log emails? No problem. Robin will never create a duplicate. It will only find what’s missing.

Tip #4: Improve week over week

Sure, your daily to-do list email from Robin is awesome, but you can also design Robin to send a weekly email that shows how your activities stack up week over week.

Each Friday, Robin might emails you an at-a-glance summary of the week’s activities to help you see where you measure up compared to your goals. This report includes all of your Salesforce activity around email and calendar events, plus lead, contact, account and opportunity creation.

This helps you see how you’ve either been more or less productive compared to the previous week.

Tip #5: Your personalized automation assistant

There are no surprises in your relationship with Robin. It’s easy to customize the tasks you want (or don’t want) it to do, and it learns from your interactions over time to bring you a better to-do list every day.

If you don’t want Robin to perform a certain skill set — say you don’t want it to log any calendar events in your CRM — simply go to the Robin interface within Automation Hero and click “Disable this skill.” Robin will not generate any more of those tasks until you re-enable it.

Robin is also learning from the individual tasks you accept or reject. Say you constantly reject tasks related to a certain account. Robin will learn from this over time and stop offering you tasks related to this account.

So, if you see something you don’t want updated or logged into your CRM, just reject it and Robin will take care of the rest.

Tip #6 Behind-the-scenes security

Your privacy and security are of the utmost importance to us. Which is why all your data is strongly encrypted and each user has their own unique encryption key.

No data is shared between users and no data is ever made available to anyone inside or outside of Automation Hero. Basically, the only person that can see your data is you.

May 08, 2019 by Jessica Munday

It shouldn’t be surprising that most workers are worried about a future in which artificial intelligence performs human tasks and replaces the human worker. That’s true for almost three-quarters of American workers, anyway.

Those fears seem to be legitimized when robotics and AI companies build machines to perform tasks typically carried out by low-income workers. Self-service kiosks are replacing cashiers, apple-picking robots are replacing field workers, and down the road, driverless cars will replace taxi drivers, and so on.

These are notable examples of how far we’ve come in the development of AI technology, but it’s critical to take a step back and evaluate how AI will realistically affect your organization and role.

Harvard Business Review says wasted time and inefficient processes cost American companies more than $3 trillion every year. For any organization, the real value AI brings to the table is simplifying and improving inefficient processes when they augment employees’ intelligence.

What is augmented intelligence?

Artificial intelligence is often designed to mirror human intelligence, while augmented intelligence elevates human intelligence and helps people work faster and smarter. Augmented intelligence tools are created to help, rather than replace, humans.

Augmented intelligence follows a five-function cadence that allows it to learn with human influence. It repeats a cycle of understanding, interpretation, reasoning, learning, and assurance. Here’s how it works:

Understanding: Systems are fed data, which it breaks down and derives meaning from.

Interpretation: New data is inputted, the system then reflects on old data to interpret new data sets.

Reasoning: The system creates “output” or “results” for new data set.

Learn: Humans give feedback on output and the system adjusts accordingly.

Assure: Security and compliance are ensured using blockchain or AI technology.

Having humans and machines work hand-in-hand is a win-win for both parties. The machine grows smarter and more productive while the human workload is streamlined. With humans guiding the learning process these tools learn and adjust their models more quickly than intelligence tools with no human feedback loop.

What can augmented tools do?

Augmented tools are currently used across a number of fields to help drive productivity, improve efficiency and save people time and organizational dollars. Most often augmented tools are used to clean data sets, give predictions, improve decision-making, and to respond to customer service needs.

These systems are already in use in the healthcare, financial, retail, manufacturing, sales and marketing sectors. They’re helping diagnose and suggest treatments for ill patients in hospitals. They can perform risk analytics and regulation tasks in banks. And augmented tools can automate CRM updates and suggest new accounts for sales teams.

The beauty of augmented intelligence is that these systems use historical data to help make predictions, but the human-user always has the decision-making power. Some common-place examples include suggestions from online retailers and streaming services.

Let’s use Netflix as an example. Say you recently watched “Orange is the New Black.” Netflix may then suggest other shows with prison themes, or documentaries about life behind bars, or shows with a strong female lead, etc.

Based on past data (your recently watched shows and movies), it’s able to make a prediction about what you will want to watch next. Once you make your latest selection, it will adjust its algorithm to further customize your experience.

Why augment employee intelligence?

Augmented intelligence impacts decisions about company spending by increasing the accuracy of everything from invoice processing to sales forecasts. Sales representatives, for example, can make smarter decisions about what accounts to sell to based on their past closed deals. And finance employees can make better decisions about procurement when they have real-time invoice data and can see patterns over time. If such tools tools can save employees up to an hour each week, imagine the hundreds of thousands of dollars it can save the company annually.

Why now?

The global value derived from AI tools as a whole is expected to surpass the trillion dollar mark (~$1.2 trillion) this year and hit nearly $4 trillion by 2022. We’re on the bleeding edge of the next industrial revolution with AI tools at the epicenter.

Gartner predicts that within the next ten years AI will be the “most disruptive class of technology.” At Automation Hero we see this coming in the form of autonomous business processes, reducing waste and saving time for employees and companies.

Eighty-five percent of executives think AI will give their company a competitive advantage, but only 20 percent have already incorporated it into their business processes and less than 39 percent have an AI strategy in place. Companies that implement now will be ahead of the curve.

And those who were early to adopt are already seeing the rewards. Eighty-three percent of the most aggressive adopters said their companies have achieved either moderate (53 percent) or substantial (30 percent) benefits. The stakes are high; the earlier you implement AI the better your advantage and the later you implement the longer your strides will need to be to catch up.