Are you sick of performing the same sales rituals (think: account plans, opportunity qualification, forecasting) over and over and not getting results? For most sales teams, it’s not the processes themselves that are broken. Instead, a lack of easily accessible data and automated workflows are to blame.
If you’re still running your sales team without leveraging all of your go-to-market engagement data combined with publicly available company information, you’re leaving money on the table. But there’s good news. The essential sales rituals you’ve been doing for years still have the potential to help you develop consistent processes, drive predictable revenue, and close more deals, faster. But for these rituals to work, they must be modernized using automation and data and available in your existing workflows.
This is the sales shift.
Improving the Fundamentals
During The Sales Shift webinar, People.ai SVPs of Sales Chris Albro and Chad O’Connor shared how sales organizations can update their practices for today’s challenging business landscape. Smaller budgets, larger buying teams, siloed data, too many sales tools, and inefficiencies in traditional approaches have all made selling harder. The SaaS heyday of the early aughts are long behind us.
The sales shift isn’t about returning to laminated sales methodology scorecards or your old-school sales playbooks collecting dust. Instead, this "return to fundamental rituals" demands modernization, powered by the strategic use of data and AI. Today’s teams have the potential to be more effective and productive with the help of an end-to-end revenue platform that can help scale processes, improve seller effectiveness, and increase revenue.
The four essential sales rituals
There are four essential sales rituals. Each one of them is critical to an efficient and effective sales process. Together, they help organizations build, manage, and progress their pipeline.
1. Forensics
Forensics is about understanding the who, what, where, and why of your accounts and opportunities. Here’s the reality many organizations face today: they’re drowning in data but are unsure how to use it.
Forensic sales tactics involve gathering insights like:
- Which accounts your sellers are engaging with
- Who within those accounts they’re speaking to (hint—decision-makers are key!)
- Whether they’re creating opportunities or nurturing the existing pipeline properly
Modern tools powered by AI allow sales leaders to surface this critical info almost instantly, offering a "single pane of glass" view.
Is Sally engaging enough of her territory?
Is she talking to the right people with buying power?
Is the deal multithreaded?
Relying on intuition and word-of-mouth to answer these questions is no longer sufficient. Ai data platforms exist to provide those answers with clarity and accuracy using data that is automatically captured. And for situations where outcomes are not as expected - engagement levels are low or the right people are not engaged, for example - an AI data platform can also offer suggestions on best next steps to take or a specific person to connect with.
2. Account Execution
An account plan is only as good as the strategy behind it and the execution that follows it. Chris referred to account execution as often being a "blind spot" for sales teams. Historically, creating an account strategy was fragmented and time intensive. Sellers relied on incomplete CRM data, spreadsheets, or PowerPoint presentations that were easily lost or misaligned. And they wasted hours combing through websites, listening to podcasts, reading press releases, combing LinkedIn, etc to fill in the gaps about every single account.
Now, automation helps sellers complete account plans with accurate and complete data in minutes. And modern revenue platforms provide data-rich insights that draw on historical sales activity data.
This approach bridges the gap between existing knowledge and new opportunities. You’re no longer limited to public-facing content like market filings but can uncover useful patterns in customer interactions.
With AI, you can do more than build out strategies—you can also measure how effectively your team is delivering on them, all within the same dashboard.
3. Opportunity Management
Opportunity management is the pipeline progression engine of sales. From the moment an opportunity is created to the time it’s marked closed (won or lost), a team’s execution and alignment here defines their success.
However, as Chad explained, managing deals with incomplete or unreliable data ultimately wastes time. Deals stagnate in the pipeline, or worse, fail altogether because:
- Decision-makers weren’t fully engaged or engaged early enough
- Procurement or legal agreements hit snags
- Unqualified opportunities were chased too long
This is where real-time, data-driven opportunity management can provide value. By qualifying deals early, proactively identifying risks, and advising sellers the exact actions they need to take with specific personas, sales leaders know that every deal in their pipeline is qualified, healthy, and progressing.
At People.ai, opportunity management is also totally customizable to an organization’s sales methodology or qualification framework. The tool is embedded right in the CRM and a feature called “Answer Assist” uses real-time data to complete qualification. Sales leaders also love it because it’s possible to keep track of which sellers have completed qualification and the health of every deal in the pipeline.
4. Forecasting
Forecasting is often described as the sacred ritual of sales—and for good reason. It's the ultimate measure of how well your pipeline activities align with your sales goals. But in today's market, forecasting accuracy has never been more challenging or more crucial to success.
Too often, data silos and a lack of visibility result in seller optimism outpacing reality. Deals forecasted for the quarter won't close, and leaders find themselves scrambling to explain discrepancies to the C-suite.
With AI-driven insights, forecasting can finally become what it was meant to be: actionable, precise, and grounded in reality. Real-time visibility across accounts, opportunities, and pipeline metrics allows for confidence in the numbers you report.
Leveraging previously unused data for maximum impact
Finding repeatable success with sales rituals starts and ends with leveraging the right data at the right time. Think about all the valuable information sitting idle in your team's call transcripts, calendar entries, emails, LinkedIn messages, and in various sales tools. It needs to be captured automatically and unified into a single place.
But capturing previously unused and idle data is relatively easy. Every sales tools says they can do that. The real magic that drives positive results comes from the way data is processed on the backend. The best AI data revenue platforms (like People.ai) filter out anything personal or confidential from captured data, organize it by accurately matching the activity to the right account/opportunity (no matter the complexity), and enrich it with crucial details about your contacts' roles and buying power. All that data is then combined with data in other sales tools and publicly available company information from across the Internet.
This means that instead of relying on gut feelings, you can:
- Know instantly if your team is engaging with real decision-makers
- Spot risks before they derail deals
- Forecast based on actual buyer interactions, not just rep optimism
- Spot underpenetrated territories in seconds
- Access dynamic engagement scores to validate deal and account health
Data is the missing piece of the sales rituals puzzle. When you collect and unify unused and idle data, it can feed AI-powered revenue tools that power bigger deals, faster sales cycles, and more predictable revenue growth are possible. Ultimately, AI doesn’t replace sales fundamentals. It enhances them.
Watch The Sales Shift to learn more about how to transform essential sales rituals into pipeline engines.