Imagine the misery of being miles from shore and desperately dehydrated on an ocean swim. Immersed in water but without a hope of slaking your thirst. It’s an increasingly relatable struggle in the context of today’s information trends. These trends are pushing many of us away from the firm ground of decision confidence, setting us further adrift in the high seas of uncertainty and doubt.
That may be the deeper pain underlying our current craze around AI. Like this beleaguered swimmer, we are impressed by the expanse of fresh water surrounding us, but progressively unfit to stay afloat. We don’t just need a life jacket. We need a GPS and desalination system.
AI is making exponential advances at precisely the point when we have exhausted our usual approaches to decision-making. For sellers and sales leaders, the challenge ahead is far beyond traditional computing capacity. There is a surfeit of data, and we need a fundamentally different way to find the proverbial coastline.
LinkedIn’s investment in “Deep Sales” technology points to a new business frontier. Salespeople feel increasingly time-pressed and overwhelmed. There’s too much to know, too much to be done, too little bandwidth for effective action. Sellers’ attention, like their customer’s attention, is at a breaking point.
AI and deep learning offer glimmers of hope. Artificial intelligence mimics human intelligence, but it finds patterns and signals much faster than any human can. Just as Google revolutionized business-to-consumer (B2C) commerce with search intent, LinkedIn’s “Deep Sales” technology is transforming business-to-business (B2B) commerce with real-time insights from a platform of almost a billion active professionals.
Many B2B businesses today are experiencing a major shift in their use of data. The old world was about warehousing and retrieval. In a sales context, you gave sellers a comprehensive list of emails and phone numbers and then released the hounds. You told them to “play the numbers game,” increasing call/email volume to maximize the benefits of a predictable response ratio.
That’s not a smart or sustainable strategy anymore. In fact, it seems preposterously shallow. Cold calling puts an immediate stain and stench on your company brand. Customers are fed up with the mountain of emails awaiting them each morning. No one is surprised to learn that response rates are continuing to trend downward.
The new world is about data signals. There’s simply too much data for humans to process. We need help from AI to find the few things that matter. Sellers want to know who is most likely to buy from them, who is most likely to respond to their outreach, and which of their accounts are most likely at risk. These are not challenges that lend themselves to search and retrieval. They are signal challenges.
In education theory, someone’s understanding of a domain improves as they advance from data (inputs) to information (relationships between inputs) to knowledge (patterns across relationships) and ultimately to wisdom (principles underlying knowledge). Something akin to that learning progression in happening in sales and other industries as we develop more sophisticated forms of pattern recognition.
This is an exciting time for B2B businesses. We are moving beyond mere data-gathering to dynamic and predictive insights from the data foundations we’ve built. AI is proving to be a critical partner as we enter this new era, and our readiness to embrace it will likely determine the winners and losers over the coming years.
Great read