Salesloft’s Ellie Fields on the AI in Sales Report

foreign speaks we're talking about the role of artificial intelligence in B2B sales certainly a topic that has the attention of sales professionals these days to discuss that I'm joined by Ellie Fields Chief product and Engineering officer at sales Loft also a former long time executive at tableau Ellie good to have you with us today great to be here thanks James so I know you've come armed with some facts and figures as I understand it I know that sales Loft recently recently released its state of AI and sales report what are what are two or three key findings you can share with us yeah I think it's uh it's really interesting when we talk to sales execs about AI because they know it's important and we find that most sales leaders are trying to use AI they actually do want to use AI in their in their jobs um part of the reason they're doing that is that one of the things our survey showed is that non-selling activities take up a lot of their sales team's time so about 29 of exec surveys said that internal meetings and administrative tasks take up most of their team time and so that's 29 of execs but they're saying most of the team time is actually spent not selling when you think about why you hire sellers it's to do human things like guide buyers and strategize and so if they're not doing that instead they're attending meetings or doing data entry then you've got a real problem on your hands so all right that's is is there an additional finding an addition to that like yeah there's there's a number of findings I mean in addition to that um we see that about 39 of execs think that AI is going to take over some of those routine tasks right which uh which shows that they really do want um they want help from computers so that humans can do human things so it's so actually sales people are not spending enough time selling maybe the AI systems will be actually able to support them in that we hope they would be we hope anything else go ahead yeah yeah the the last one and there were a lot of findings in the report but I think the last one that sailing into this is that about 36 percent of execs believe that they are going to have trouble meeting their sales goals and so you you see a lot of Executives say hey we're uh our sellers are spending too much time we'd like AI to help and we don't think we're meeting we're going to be able to meet our goals and that's what we hear when we talk to high level sellers Chief Revenue officers and others is that they they definitely are worried about being able to meet their goals in this environment so I take it there's a sense that artificial intelligence will either streamline our overall support sales reps as they as they attempt to do real selling they do less administrative work more actual real selling with the help of AI yeah absolutely I think that's the hope and the dream there's a lot of uh a lot of work out there that sellers do even as technology is Advanced we find that sellers are swivel chairing from from one Tech solution to another and that is one of the things that's taking time even if you think about logging in and finding information at different systems that's certainly administrative and overhead time hmm I like that term swivel chain I instantly know what it means but I haven't heard it before I like that yeah and one of the other findings for my report is that 40 of it the execs that we surveyed say that their sellers have to log into four or five different applications to do their core job so that's that's that swivel chair in action right okay so they're really they're balancing between apps and of course every time they need to change from one app to another they have to kind of like it's it's a concentration break so it kind of takes more time to get into the new app so it's really it's definitely it's a definite slow down right right and if you've ever bought anything you know that one of the best um experiences you can have with the sellers when they're really focused on you right they're focused on your problems they're focused on your needs they're really engaged but if your sellers are more spending time going here going there trying to to do all these administrative tasks they can do less of that with Buyers right right and and buyers buyers definitely pick up on that um all right let's look at a larger Trend what's a what's a major influential Trend that you've noticed that's that's driving ai's role in sales here in 2023 I mean certainly we've known the AI has gotten a lot more attention this year but how how is it helping to support sales well I think that some of the things we talked about the seller spending time on things that aren't directly with Buyers is is the major Trend and so some of the applications we've seen come out with AI are summarizing meetings is a great one summarizing a long set of emails um uh pulling action items out of meetings or emails has been really helpful because these are things that sellers do and they have to sit down and actually read and then type and summarize and you know even sending a follow-up email for example can take a good 15 or 20 minutes if you want to review your notes and go log into over to your email and maybe log into where you have a recording of the meeting so we're seeing that trend of this this realization that sellers are spending so much time on administrative tasks really driving the need for AI um well it's all right then let's let's drill down a sales off and sell I mean how is sales off helping this process in terms of a AI supporting the needs of sellers yeah it's a great question we you know we think of ourselves as really supporting sales workflow helping sellers take action to get the outcomes and for me I'm a huge data geek I was at Tableau for many years as you mentioned right I really believe in the power of data but I think data has to be in the workflow to be relevant to someone like a seller not way over there in another system you have to log into and so what we do is we think about where are the big places sellers are spending time where they aren't with a buyer and one of those is I mentioned the the meeting recap and action items coming out of a meeting we've made that available to our sellers sellers on our platform and our customers so that they can get that automatically another thing that we've done is rank all the tasks all the incoming tasks a seller has to do put them in one place and use AI to prioritize them so a seller can now go to one place and say hey I've got to take these five actions they're the most important actions to move business along and I can take them right here send the email make the call what have you that's informed by data and driven by AI or is is a salesperson able to look at that that list of five and go oh no it can't that that can't be the system made a mistake it can't be number one let me let me let me help the system and learn help the system learn I mean what happens if sales person actually disagrees with the prioritizing yeah and it's a it's something that happens a lot and I think um in our system you can skip the task we still put sellers in the driver's seat again you you hired a seller because you want them to apply what they know another thing that we've done is make sure that explainability is front and center with all the AI so we're not just telling a seller hey call this buyer we're telling a seller hey call this buyer because we know that they were on a product comparison site like G2 and they're actually in your Market comparing products right now so why don't you give them a call you've been engaged with them in the past so when you give that explainability the seller is much more likely to take that action or understand why they should take it again if they don't if they don't agree they can go ahead and skip it and go on to another task so how does uh sales Loft know that the a buyer was on G2 is there an alliance for G2 yeah what we have is an open system it's a signal to action engine really that takes any kind of buyer signal and translates it through this AI into a list of actions for Sellers and so G2 is a partner of ours and they will send sales off a signal saying we know this buyer this buyer is on these sites it should go to this seller and uh and then we're able to surface it for that seller so they can reach out to the buyer interesting okay so it's a profitable Alliance I would think are there other other alliances like that for sales law yeah absolutely we have a over 100 integration Partners but in this signal to action engine in particular G2 vidyard which allows you to send kind of custom videos to buyers um High spot and seismic and DocuSign are all partners and what's interesting about that is that it's it's been really hard for sellers who have this kind of very ad hoc workflow that's different day-to-day to be able to work through what they they need to work through but with DocuSign for example sending a signal saying that the buyer has your contract but hasn't signed you know maybe they've looked at it a few times but they're still not signing we can really take that time out for the seller and and uh include some of these other tools that are so important huh well and also going back to an earlier point you mentioned about um sales love gives a recap I think of the meeting is it like a transcription well we work with platforms like zoom and teams we don't want to be a conference provider we work with some of the biggest ones out there in WebEx right we take those transcripts and then we do uh actually quite a bit of AI on top so things like telling you if your seller is talking a lot more than the buyer you know we know that a good practice is to listen to your buyers so if your seller's talking 80 or more of the time you can see all that and and uh and Coach your seller but we also are able to use some of these new large language models um to pull out a recap and action item so what's interesting when you talk about that swivel chair work is we don't just put it on the page for the seller to to find we actually queue an action that says hey seller you had a meeting yesterday but you didn't follow up it's always good practice send a follow-up email we cue the email for them with a template and with those action items inserted so instead of having to go to their email go to the conference system look all around the seller can just click on that action the email is mostly written for them they customize it a bit if they want they've got the action items right in there and they've got a follow-up in 30 seconds or a minute rather than 15 minutes okay so the really speedies of the essence there yeah I say let's look for the the big question is the future of the future of AI and sales I'm sure a lot of people want to know about that what is your sense of key milestones in in the years ahead I think you're going to see AI take over just about everything that you don't need a human to do and we keep asking that question ourselves as we design products well what do you what do you want a seller for and you go back to those things strategizing with a buyer guiding a buyer now buyers are way more informed today than they used to be in the past they do a lot of research on their own and so you don't necessarily need a seller to do those things for the buyer but you do need the trust the relationship the ability to to help the buyer through the process and everything else whether it be looking up information uh whether it be checking to see what the buyer has done these buyer intent signals whether it be summarizing a lot of information for a Deal review all of these things will be done by a computer many of them are done today but I think there's more and more places where we can look at time that sellers spend and it's a right target as we heard we think most uh many sales leaders think their sellers are spending more time on administrative work than selling so there's a lot of places to take time out of the process foreign yeah I've heard from AI experts that sales actually sales people will be one of the few jobs that wouldn't be touched as much I mean certainly to be supportive but we're always going to need sales people I would think and that there's that human element to sales and so there's some things the computer do some things that the human can't do but I think the whole point you're saying is let's offload this stuff to the computer and let the humans do what they they really need to do absolutely yeah Ellie I think you said it uh interesting stuff I learned a ton it's going to be a fascinating area to follow in the years ahead I hope you come back and talk to us again sometime thanks for having me James

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