Unlocking growth in a tough economic climate with AI

In the fast-paced world of business, achieving success across marketing, sales, and support (ie. revenue operations) is a constant challenge. Teams often struggle to find high-value customers, connect with them, close deals and provide high-quality support that keeps the business around. In fact, the number 1 theme identified after Enduring Ventures’s first five turnarounds was:

    1. Solutions to problems were always more hiring or more spending. Not enough leads? Hire a marketing VP instead of figuring out what channel really works.

Studies show that sales reps alone spend less than 30% of their time actually selling (source).

The majority of reps spend 3-11+ hours each week searching for answers to questions about the tools, processes, or information (source)

Over 70% of sales leaders spend four or more hours each week answering questions about the tools, processes, or information that sales reps need to do their job (source)

We’ve seen that investments like sales coaching can increase top-line revenue 20% (source). So why don’t more companies invest in enablement?

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Historically, organizations have implemented training programs or sales enablement teams to drive production gains. Due to their high cost, these investments are often exclusive to larger orgs, however, as they require:

Specialized Roles/Expertise:

Enablement is a leverage creating role. Not critical to the day-to-day for many businesses, and often technical (read expensive).

Effective Prioritization:

See tweet above.

Clean Data:

Most bizops rely on manual input of data, across a variety of systems, with no strategic oversight to ensure efficiency and accuracy.

Relevant/Accurate KPIs & Measurement:

You can’t manage what you don’t measure.

It’s incredibly difficult to implement all of these measures. Especially when dealing with legacy systems. Change management by itself can necessitate additional headcount. Yet, even after a “successful” implementation of an enablement function the constant monitoring of data quality, new integrations, and accurate analysis make enablement difficult.

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One of the primary benefits of new advances in AI is its comprehension of unstructured data across disparate systems. Everyday, a new company pops up that makes much of the value of a Sales Enablement or Revenue Operations leader available at a fraction of the price. If not already, soon, there are AI tools to help your team:

1. Increase probability of sale.

Generative AI could identify and prioritize sales leads by creating comprehensive consumer profiles from structured and unstructured data and suggesting actions to staff to improve client engagement at every point of contact. For example, generative AI could provide better information about client preferences, potentially improving close rates.

2. Improve lead development.

Generative AI could help sales representatives nurture leads by synthesizing relevant product sales information and customer profiles and creating discussion scripts to facilitate customer conversation, including up- and cross-selling talking points. It could also automate sales follow-ups and passively nurture leads until clients are ready for direct interaction with a human sales agent.

And many more use cases…

It’s still early, but we already have seen remarkable benefits from implementing AI. In their 2023 State of AI report, Hubspot found that sales and service reps each save 2+ hours per day on average.

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Are customer facing teams frequently blocked from closing a deal or customer inquiry because of a lack of technical knowledge? Is HR frequently bogged down with employee questions? Are you worried about contract compliance?

Many businesses utilize internal communication platforms like Slack and Teams. These tools have excelled at improving communication and collaboration across teams, but communication ≠ sustained knowledge.

QuestionBase is one of many new tools that business owners can leverage to empower their teams. It enables you to create internal chatbots to answer questions. Some use cases:

An employee could simply message your HR bot in Slack and ask “what’s our new vacation policy?”

A new salesperson on a call with a customer could message your Sales bot to find out specific product specs.

If you’re interested in learning about other tools and strategies to implement AI into your business’s operations, let me know in the comments.

Have a specific problem/use case in mind? Send me a message at redacted I’m not affiliated with QuestionBase