Future of Sales

What does the future of sales look like over the next 5 years? According to Gartner, it looks a lot like what XANT is already doing on Playbooks!

In an article published this week by Gartner titled Future of Sales 2025: Data-Driven B2B Selling to Drive Digital Commerce, they reveal, “60% of B2B sales organizations will transition from experience- and intuition-based selling to data-driven selling by 2025.” 

Why does selling need to be data-driven?

Because buyers have changed forever. Research from Forrester has shown that B2B buyers navigate 60-70% of their buying journey in digital channels before ever engaging with a vendor’s reps. 

Buyers expect easy, quick access to information. They expect a multi-channel experience. And they’ve been infused with so much of their own data insight that traditional sellers can’t keep up.

What kind of impact do these changes have on sales teams?

Managers and leaders have lost visibility and control over process and performance. Reps waste time chasing bad leads, accounts, and opportunities. 

In fact, reps spend only 25% of their time actually selling. And how effective is that time? Our research shows reps spend 297% more time on deals that will never close vs deals that will. 

What do you need to do?

Sales leaders and managers need more effective ways to consistently improve performance and enforce repeatable processes. Reps need more effective ways to prioritize and connect to the right prospects and customers earlier in the buying process.

The biggest sales questions have become even more critical to answer: Who should I sell to? How should I engage? What should I do next? 

Left to intuition, though, it has become next to impossible to answer these questions. And it reinforces the need for a solution that automates mundane tasks and interactions while taking the guesswork out of selling, pointing sellers to the next most valuable activity. 

To do this, Gartner lists 3 actions sales and IT leaders need to focus on:

1. Build an advanced sales technology roadmap
2. Prioritize AI-based guided selling
3. Invest in technology that attracts new talent and enables virtual selling

What is XANT doing to help?

A core tenant of our approach to accelerating revenue results is infusing unique data insights into sales workflows. 

We call it Collective Data. Collective Data is an anonymized and encrypted metadata set of over 27 billion interactions and outcomes. Nobody else in the world has this data. 

The significance of the data is that it contains real-time insights into buyer behavioral changes, which we infuse directly into prioritized workflows in the form of predictive recommendations.

From day 1, our customers enjoy the benefits of having real-time, data-driven recommendations guide reps through their engagement with customers and prospects. 

We’ve packaged the growing list of intelligent features into two product capability sets:

1. Embedded Propensity Scores

Propensity scores are just what you’d expect: scores on behavioral tendencies. Currently, we deploy a number of models that score the likelihood of a lead or contact to engage with your reps, and the likelihood of a contact, account, or opportunity to lead to a closed-won deal. 

Our robust prioritization engine gives you the flexibility to sort tasks according to custom business rules, AI scores, or a combination of both.

2. Buyer Intelligence

The most exciting application of our Collective Data is Buyer Intelligence. Simply put, Buyer Intelligence guides rep engagement through the funnel with accurate insights into your buyers. 

Buyer Intelligence includes unparalleled behavioral profiles with recommendations on how best to engage buyers (Buyer Hints), recommendations for additional people who may be relevant to the buying decision (Buyer Maps), recommendations on when to send emails to increase the odds of connection (SmartSend), verified contact data, collective data append, task value scoring, mobile and email bounce detection, and much more. 

Automating the Mundane and Prioritizing the Right Things 

Of course, none of these insights matter if you can’t prioritize the right things or enforce the process. That’s why we built the most robust automation and prioritization engine on the market. 

Eliminate your team’s obstacles to efficiency by using automation in the right way. The combination of our AI and automation focuses reps on the right activities, automates reliable data entry, and makes workflows more efficient.

Reps save time with auto-sending and auto-data entry, enabling them to turn their focus to the optimal activities recommended to them through AI. And when you combine advanced automation with Custom Sorting and Task Filters, you ensure teams spend their time on only those things that can drive an impact on results. Through automation, cadences and workflows can be standardized and set to ensure reps are consistently successful.  

–––––––––––––

Get ahead of the future of sales, according to Gartner, by using Playbooks. Utilizing data is no longer optional for sales. AI and automation are not only the future of sales, they are necessary for successful sales now—and they will only become more vital as the world becomes more digital. Don’t get left behind, get ahead—Demo Playbooks now.