How Artificial Intelligence is Revolutionizing How We Sell
In this special guest feature, Adam Honig, CEO of Spiro, discusses how proactive relationship management isn’t leveraging AI to replace humans, but instead is helping highly paid sales professionals work more effectively and providing sales leaders with critical insights into their pipelines. As Spiro’s CEO, Adam is focused on the company strategy and vision. Previously, he co-founded a software company which he led through its successful IPO and sale. Afterwards, Adam founded Innoveer, one of the largest CRM consulting firms, which was successfully acquired by Cloud Sherpas (and then Accenture). Adam is passionate about helping sales teams make more money using artificial intelligence, and is the driving force behind Spiro’s proactive relationship management.
Managing big data has been an ongoing challenge for companies – especially in B2B sales, where they are managing tens of thousands of leads working their way through the sales funnel. To help address the challenge, CRM was introduced to the market in 1999, the same year that the Palm Pilot came out.
Today, a Palm Pilot can be found in a museum, but CRM is still being used by sales teams. CRM projects have a high failure rate, because the technology hasn’t evolved. As a result, CRM projects place a heavy emphasis on getting salespeople to be data entry clerks and orient sales processes around data collection, not deal closing.
The good news is that it’s no longer 1999 and artificial intelligence (AI) holds great promise for companies, especially sales teams. An emerging product category, proactive relationship management, is leveraging AI to revolutionize the relationship between salespeople and technology. Proactive relationship management has three defining characteristics:
It’s natively built on artificial intelligence and consolidates CRM capabilities, sales enablement and telephony into a single solution. This consolidation is important because the artificial intelligence, which underpins the proactiveness of this platform, relies on having a full view of the data.
Proactive relationship management doesn’t need to be “used.” It can create contacts based on who you’re emailing. It can update opportunities when a proposal is sent.
