Key Takeaways
- Sellers currently spend hours struggling to find the right information about their deals due to CRMs that are missing data or full of bad data, changes in internal teams, and changes at customer companies.
- Sellers need context in order to win with customers. Context is the answer to the “what happened?” questions.
- AI has recently advanced to enable some sales AI solutions to provide that context - but most tools still lack the data foundation to do it properly.
- We built People.ai with a data-first approach, making it one of the few sales AI solutions that actually solves the data context problem.
Sellers are losing deals because they don’t have all the information they need to win and they’re too consumed by busywork to spend time selling.
They spend hours piecing together data from the CRM, call notes, other sellers, and more to find clues that will help them build better customer relationships. On top of that, your sales processes – like account planning, sales methodologies, and QBRs - are highly manual time-sucks.
The common thread is a need for easier access to information. But not just any information. Winning sales teams have instant access to the right information, compiled instantly and in one place, so they have all the context they need to work every deal the right way.
What is context and why do most sales AI solutions fail at it?
Giving every seller the right information, at the right time, for every single account is easier said than done.
How many B2B go-to-market tech solutions have you purchased that promised to “harness the power of your data”? Probably more than a few. And nearly all of them - including your CRM - fail to live up to expectations, leaving your sellers to gather information and contextualize on their own.
Every team, in every company, across every industry needs better and faster access to relevant information. But distilling millions of data points to find what is actually valuable is incredibly challenging. Which is why most companies in the sales AI space today are failing at it.
Relevant signals that can help move a deal forward are hidden in the records of many different interactions with customers. It’s easy to miss those signals since only a tiny percentage of all of that data is actually useful and all of those data points are unstructured.
Unstructured data means anything that doesn’t fit nicely on a spreadsheet. Think: call transcripts, calendar logs, chats, data from other point solutions, and emails. The process of collecting all that data, identifying what is valuable, and then presenting it to sellers in a useful way is an incredibly complex process.
But it’s not impossible.
Better data processing = better context
While many of today’s sales AI solutions were built to capture unstructured data – most were not built to correctly process that information. They fail at organizing and correctly matching that information to accounts, contacts, and opportunities in a company’s CRM.
Data must be correctly organized with the appropriate context captured to answer all of the “What happened?” questions your sellers are spending hours trying to figure out. Questions like:
- Are the right executives engaged?
- Are my deals multi-threaded?
- Are all of the relevant departments engaged?
- Where do deals with this customer usually stall? (i.e. they have a months-long legal process)
- What are the biggest risks on this deal?
- How much revenue is at risk because the deal isn't through procurement?
- Which competitors are surfacing the most in these deals?
A well-built sales AI platform can help capture all of the nuances of each customer relationship and deal journey and then recall that information to help sellers with future opportunities.
The in-between moments are what matter
Uncovering and organizing trapped data helps you truly monetize it for the first time and use it as a competitive advantage. This is what People.ai excels at - but only because we’ve been working on creating sophisticated solutions for these incredibly complex problems for nearly a decade.
Public and low-quality generative AI tools only have access to a subset of your data since they rely on data entered into your CRM by sellers. No seller enters every detail about every interaction with customers - leaving your CRM with only a partial record of every account and opportunity. Without the ability to capture ALL of your data and high-quality data organizing happening on the back-end, all of those sales tools’ outputs are going to be generic and only offer a partial view of what’s really going on.
Try asking ChatGPT to write a biography of your life. It will summarize your career from your LinkedIn profile and maybe pull your birthday from your Facebook but it’s missing all of the key moments in between – the stuff that is stored in your memory bank. Those are the moments that matter and that make you special. Sales relationships are no different. It’s the in-between moments that need to be captured and shared with sellers so they can use that information to build more meaningful relationships.
Join us for an interactive AI Innovators Lab so we can show you how to use a high-quality data and AI platform to build more valuable customer relationships.