Predictions for 2020: Sales Finally Goes Data-Driven
Today, most leading organizations use some form of sales analytics tools to report and determine the performance of their sales teams. While some forward-looking companies tend to use data to enhance sales practices and processes, most companies tend to use analytics merely as a post-mortem to monitor performance. While this is useful enough for top management to understand the productivity of their frontline staff, it sadly provides little to no value to actual sales reps in terms of how they can get better at what they do.
This is partially a failure of the analytics tools themselves. Current analytics tools do little for non-technical sales reps in terms of providing guided insights to boost their performance. And without easy access to clear, data-powered insights salespeople are left relying on their gut to make decisions and plan their activities.
While a strong reliance on instinct has worked for sales reps in the past, it is simply not a scalable way to boost overall performance. And, it does not help sales reps who are new to the game and require the added guidance and context — which data-powered insights can provide.
The question then becomes — that in this day and age where technology and data combine effectively to help nearly every other key business function to accelerate performance — why are sales teams being left behind? And what will it take for sales reps to leverage the data-led insights that can jumpstart high performance?
Augmented Analytics to the Rescue
Sales is unquestionably challenging. Depending on which business you are in, sales teams have to contend with one or more of low conversion rates, long sales cycles, numerous competitors and a virtual maze of product bundles and discounts that make for extremely complex deals. Customers are almost never waiting, credit card in hand, to buy what you are selling. Today’s customers demand some combination of demos, proof-of-concepts, competitive comparisons, continuous hand-holding and inventive pricing before transacting with you. As sales reps, you need to make calls, do meetings, address concerns and continuously be available to address their concerns post the sale, to ensure a healthy and enduring relationship with them. Considering all these factors, the last thing sales reps need is a complicated and overwhelming sales analytics platform that requires loads of tinkering to furnish the most basic of insights.
Thankfully for sales reps, in 2020, we predict a huge growth in the development and permeation of augmented analytics platforms — possibly the final piece of the puzzle required to make sales a more data-driven endeavor.
According to Gartner, Augmented Analytics is the use of enabling technologies such as Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence to assist with data preparation, insight generation and insight explanation to augment how people explore and analyze data in analytics and BI platforms. According to their research, augmented analytics will be the key factor that drives the purchase of new BI and analytics software. Further, they anticipate that the number of users of analytics tools that have AI-driven or augmented data discovery capabilities will grow at the twice the rate and deliver twofold the business value compared to their non-augmented counterparts.
AI and Analytics unquestionably go hand-in-hand. In 2020, AI-driven augmented analytics will help sales teams surface crucial, data-driven insights that generate higher sales while reducing the time spent in trying to operate unwieldy analytics platforms and reports.
Augmenting Analytics with AI
Without AI, the shortcomings of current analytics tools are fairly obvious. The main shortcoming is that insights can be hard to discover and tend to be backward-looking if found. Think about it — right now, you have to first ascertain which data is required to identify problems, opportunities, risks, and solutions. Next, your knowledge of the data is only as good as the dashboards you created — so finding information can be a challenge if there isn’t a pre-created dashboard to answer your question. And with data growing exponentially today, you’d find yourself studying your information for weeks without finding a single meaningful insight. Even if you found an insight, it will take another few weeks to really dig deep and find what drives the behavior of a certain measure.
By bringing Artificial Intelligence into the equation of analytics, it is possible to simplify data discovery and deliver insights that are prescriptive to users, in a personalized manner. Users can be alerted of anomalies, outliers and early warning signs in the data using ML-powered models. Users can query their data using natural language to do their own analysis of the data. In 2020, AI-augmented analytics will help sales teams drive better performance through simplified data discovery and prescriptive insights.
In fact, Capgemini recently found that AI-powered analytics:
- Boosted sales of new services and products by more than 10% for three out of four companies surveyed
- Increased customer satisfaction by more than 10% for 75% of the companies surveyed
- Increased operational competency by more than 10% for 78% of the companies surveyed
- Generated better analysis and new insights for 79% of the companies surveyed
In summary, in 2020, organizations need to understand that accomplishing sales success does not require ascertaining how AI works or how to develop a powerful algorithm. Augmented Analytics tools for sales teams are more than enough to jumpstart sales activities for your team. Without AI-driven analytics, your people are wasting your time trying to comprehend what has occurred, while your competitors are already responding to them.
