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The Future of Sales with Salesforce’s Tiffani Bova

The future of selling is here - and it's a revolution, not an evolution

For proof, look to the B2C companies: the rise of the customer-centric model, the growing power of the customer, and the product-led-growth movement show how companies must adapt to stay relevant...or die.

We sat down with Tiffani Bova, Chief Global Growth & Innovation Evangelist at Salesforce, to discuss how to evolve and adapt with the market and customer demands, the new customer and seller experiences, the rise of interoperability of tools, and the future of sales. She weighed in on the role of the AE of the future, automation, your tech stack, and the new power couple of AI and humans - and (we hope) you find these ideas intriguing, and controversial.

A huge thank you to Salesforce for sponsoring, and to Tiffani for joining us!

Topics

  • How selling and buying are changing, and what that means for your company's skills, scale, speed, and growth

  • The rise of automation in the selling process, and how to better utilize what you already have 

  • Setting up your tool stack to act on data more quickly

  • How to reskill and skill up your team

Surprising stats

  • Only 28% of sales leaders report that account management channels regularly meet their cross-selling and account growth goals.

  • 49% of sales leaders are measured by a single revenue goal that makes NO distinction b/w retention and growth.

  • 64% of sales leaders plan to reskill existing employees to meet staffing needs.

  • By 2025, 50% of low to medium touch B2B sales transactions will be conducted solely by self-service commerce, EDI, and intelligent bots.

  • 66% of sellers time is currently spent NOT selling.

  • By 2022, B2B sales orgs using AI based data-intelligence solutions for prospecting will cut the amount of time spent on prospecting by 50%.

key takeaways

  • This is the year of the customer: look to your current customers for revenue goals instead of searching for new ones. Meet your customer where they are in their journey! Think of it in terms of the gold rush: when they found gold in one hill, they didn’t immediately move on to see if there was gold in another. Only after maxing out did they search for the next.

  • The AE role needs to change. They’ll have to become more intuitive, be a master asker, and become more of a wraparound role.

  • It’s NOT possible that all deals are only going forward and never going backwards! If you only allow forward movement, you’re doing your sellers and yourself a disservice.

  • This is the first time tech has caught up to the promise of what it can do. At this point, there isn’t a technology problem; instead, there is a need to relearn the processes around using that same technology. You have to be willing to learn, and relearn, and relearn to be successful.

  • You should always be playing the long game. The work you do now won’t show up for another quarter, or year, or two - and that’s okay. “Friends congratulate me after a quarterly-earnings announcement and say, ‘Good job, great quarter … And I’ll say, ‘Thank you, but that quarter was baked three years ago. I’m working on a quarter that’ll happen in 2021 right now.'” - Jeff Bezos