Categories: Sales Messaging | Selling Technology
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a fast-growing new market sector. Recent estimates show more than 75,000 AI companies exist, with more than $107B invested in these types of companies over the last two years.
With funding come increased expectations to deliver on aggressive revenue and growth goals, but sales teams and leaders bringing AI to market may experience roadblocks and hesitancy from buyers. Prospects may question if they really need AI to accomplish tasks that they already have solutions for; they may fail to see how the technology is directly relevant to their business; or they may simply lack the urgency to allocate funding to something that’s seen as a “nice to have.”
How can sales leaders empower their teams to position their solution as a strategic driver of impactful business outcomes? Successful leaders enable these three critical sales skills.
If you are looking for ways to increase AI technology sales, check out our full guide Selling an AI Solution: Finding the Business Outcomes that Drive Buyer Decisions.
1. Attach Your Solution to Tangible Customer Outcomes
Selling an emerging technology often demands a change in mindset with the buyer. Your sales team needs to be able to communicate the value of changing the way things currently are done at the buyer’s company. Even for solutions that offer a new way to create existing outcomes, it’s important to paint a picture for the buyer of the future state that could be possible with your product. Enable your team to convert skeptics by equipping them to build a strong business case that moves the buyer to action.
In any sales cycle, sellers are looking to identify a pain. But customers often don’t know they have the pain that a new technology solves, or they currently have a solution that’s getting the job done. This is where attaching to an outcome can change the conversation. If you can demonstrate an outcome, you can always work back to the pain associated with not achieving it. What happens if you don’t get this outcome? If there’s a business outcome to be had, you can eventually attach it to business pain. Start with the outcome, then find the pain.
It’s also important to quantify outcomes in terms of hard costs to the business. Simply claiming your solution increases efficiency may not be enough to motivate the buyer to action. What takes your solution from a “nice to have” to a “must have” is the ability to demonstrate a clear, tangible impact on the business. Make sure your teams are articulating outcomes in ways that matter to an economic buyer.
Discover action items to take as a leader to get your sales team selling on outcomes for your AI solution.
2. Qualify Prospective Companies and Champions
Not every company or team will be a good fit for your new technology. Ensure your sales team is spending their time on valuable conversations by establishing company-wide agreement on the ideal customer profile. Create a clearly defined profile for the type of company that will buy your solution, and train your sales team to recognize the characteristics that make a good target. As they progress through the discovery process, sellers and managers should continue to check new information on the buyer organization, their team and processes against your qualification criteria.
Equip your sellers to find the right personas within each account. As they execute discovery, they should map the landscape of power within the buyer organization. Who are the economic buyer, the technical buyer, and the implementation owner? How have these decision-makers responded to new technologies or changes in the past? Who in the organization has access and influence with these decision-makers, that also has the mindset required to be an early adopter? Having a strong internal champion will be a huge asset to selling a new technology.
We share even more strategies for helping your team qualify great deals in our guide to selling an AI solution.
3. Leverage Proof of Value
Creating urgency with buyers requires showing proof that your solution can produce the outcome you say it does. One way to do this is to equip your sellers to leverage proof points. This means not only enabling the skill of inserting case studies and metrics at the right moments in their conversations, but also empowering them to gather data from successful accounts. Create a process around how success metrics are collected and documented to be leveraged in future sales conversations.
Because you’re selling a new technology, you may not have a library of case studies yet, or your prospective buyers may want more concrete proof that you can drive the impact you promised. In this case, you may want to consider a pilot or a proof-of-concept (POC) exercise. Pilots can be a way to get a foot in the door, but they can also be risky. It can sometimes be difficult to use them to make the case for a full purchase, so help your sellers to be discerning about how they navigate these requests.
If you do set up a POC or pilot project, make sure you tie the success of the project to specific success metrics that are relevant to urgent business outcomes. Before you begin, get mutual agreement with the prospect on a defined next step if you achieve your benchmarks - a signed deal, or a published testimonial that you can use in future business.
Get our full resource for more guidelines on how to execute a pilot project or POC when selling an AI tool.
More Consistent Sales Wins for Your AI Technology
Increasing sales for an AI solution is all about driving consistency in your process. Aligning your sales team, however small or large, on the above skills and how they are executed will help create a strong foundation for growth. We created a guide for sales leaders selling AI technology, with strategies to help your team drive urgency and commitment for your solution, navigate complex technical conversations without getting lost in features and functions, and differentiate your solution against the status quo as well as other AI competitors. Download it below.
