I think AI is going to basically surround sales ops and chip away at a bunch of the little things that we do on a regular basis that consume a lot of time and are heavy lifts. AI is going to take them away, but it's not necessarily going to come in and fundamentally change our role. And I think most people who are going to continue to be successful in sales operations, that go to market operations or revenue operations in the next five years, are going to be really thoughtful around, okay, what pitch do I buy into? You have to be really thoughtful about discerning what's really value add, and more just hype: is it actually going to save my rep's time, make my information more accurate, save my company money? So we're going to have to be thoughtful about which AI tools we're bringing in.
Clari is a great example. And there are other tools that are doing exactly what Clari’s doing, where they're taking the forecasting model and saying, "Hey, you're already doing forecasting. Let's give you an app to manage your forecasting, and then let's layer in AI to help you better understand what historical trends tell us about how future quarters are going to play out." And so that’s one little area where AI is starting to add value. But I think it's going to come at us from multiple angles here, and continue to chip away at some of these different functions over time.
What's interesting to me, though, is that AI in sales is an even scarier idea because I can see the SDR function, which often rolls up underneath sales ops, being substantially automated in the next five years with these chat bot type technologies. If you can get to the point where you don't know if you're talking to a computer over instant messenger, and if we can get the Siris and the Alexas of the world to actually speak in intonation and with tone that makes it sound like a real person, then theoretically, you can basically automate an SDR altogether. Which, frankly, has pretty scary implications across not just sales, but all types of things.
And that's the space that we're actually seeing the most amount of innovation with respect to AI. There's Chorus and Gong for SDRs. There's Conversica, which has conversational chat agents. So there's a ton out there that's actually focused on SDRs.
One of the features of our product is called spot IQ, and that is exactly what it does, it just emails the owners of the pin boards or anyone on the distribution list with, “these are the 10 things that you should take note of.” Even my CRO doesn't necessarily look at the pin boards that we've created for him, so being able to have a tool that can analyze the data in real time, and send you an email saying these are the 15 things that you should make note of, is super helpful.
There is a platform that at least helps with sales planning, and territory splits. But beyond that, I haven't found anything else either.
There's easy wins for cleaning data up in Salesforce using AI. I think that's going to be a big thing. Because look, how much time do we all spend, if we go into a new company, just cleaning data and telling our teams, "All right, now we've got to keep this data set clean and lock it down, and deal with the duplicate fields, and everything else." I feel like there's going to be some advantages there. But I don't know of any great AI tool that's making my life easier as a sales operations leader, or my team's life easier.
Demand planning and pricing are a couple of good examples.
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