What to say when your CEO asks “What are we doing with AI?”
AI is the topic of discussion in every boardroom.
In every company execs are being asked how they are going to use AI to drive efficiencies across the business.
As a revenue leader you are going to be asked by your CEO what your position on it is - so you better have a base level understanding of how the technology can support you.
Defining AI
AI is a buzzword being attached to every product or solution out there.
No doubt your stationary provider is going to launch an AI-enabled pencil to keep up.
So you want to be able to describe it when you find yourself in a discussion about it.
“Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by humans or by other animals”
Perceiving, synthesising and inferring information - is the key phrase.
Being able to assess large amounts of typically unstructured data - images, videos, audio, text, raw data,
Process it to make sense of it,
And make a decision or output based on that information.
Some real world examples:
The weather forecast - large amounts of prior knowledge and current weather data is used to predict what is likely to happen in the future.
Self-driving cars - visual data processed to infer what is ahead and make a decision about how fast to drive and in which direction.
Amazon recommendations - based on your previous purchases, location and age recommend items that you are most likely to purchase.
ChatGPT - the flavour of the day - based on a string of words you input (a prompt) provide a text response that most likely answers your query.
So at its simplest level, AI is taking large amounts of different types of data, bringing it together, and producing some kind of output.
A second term to consider, which often gets conflated with AI is “machine learning”.
This is the idea that the technology can take its output, make an assessment of how close or far it was from the desired result, and use that as a new input into the start of the process.
In theory, the more a system like Tesla’s self driving mode, or ChatGPT is used, the better it will get as it has more training and real-world data to feed on.
AI in your revenue engine
Now you have a high level understanding of what AI is, let’s look at how it is being positioned by your revenue tech stack vendors.
All the way along your buyer’s journey from initial awareness through to upsell and renewal tech vendors are using this three step AI model:
Perceive - their platforms are generating huge volumes of data from buyer actions, product usage, seller activities, customer engagement, call recordings, email content.
Synthesise - vendors look to consolidate either their own multiple types of data, or even better, their data with other vendor’s data (i.e. call recordings and product usage data)
Infer - using the data they have perceived and synthesised vendors will make recommendations: This deal will close on this date. This is the best email to respond to this customer. This client is at a high risk of churning.
At each step of your revenue cycle your vendors will be providing you with answers or recommendations that you might otherwise have asked individuals in your team for.
What to tell your CEO
There are two main topics you can advise your CEO on:
Break the link between hiring and revenue growth.
Until now there has been linearity - a direct correlation between bookings growth and headcount.
Need more revenue, hire more people (sellers, SDRs, CSMs, marketers - more, more, more).
Now with AI, more of the manual activity can be picked up with technology.
I think of a car wheel, where only a tiny area is actually providing forward momentum.
Your sales team are doing the same - with just a small percentage of their time in front of customers.
AI can give them more time to focus on the activities that matter, meaning you can get further with fewer people.
Forecast accurately
Beyond hitting the number, knowing where you will land is a close second.
Accurate forecasting gives you the ability to course correct or mitigate the issue if you know in advance.
Big deals slipping on the last day of the quarter does you no favours - it demonstrates you aren’t on top of your business or your team.
Humans are notoriously bad at forecasting - you just have to look at the profits of casinos and bookmakers to know we aren’t good at predicting what will happen.
We are good at emotion, but not good at assessing large amounts of information, bringing different sets of facts together and making a determination of a future outcome.
Perceive, synthesise, infer - where have we heard that before?!
Prior to AI we relied on our teams to tell us what will happen.
Their forecasts however are laced with personal interpretation:
Your AE providing you their ‘gut feel’ forecast based on what you want to hear - which your sales manager then amends further to add her “buffer” to.
Your CSMs telling you this account is a definite renewal and upsell because they like the product owner at the customer, even though their product usage has stalled.
AI will take the human interpretation out of forecasting:
How much pipeline are we going to generate?
How long will these deals take to close?
How big will our deals be?
Who will we lose our deals to?
What will we close this quarter?
What will our churn rate be?
What will our Net Revenue Retention be?
You don’t need to get everyone in a room once a week to answer this - you can have these answers served up to you continuously and have confidence in their accuracy.
That answer
When the CEO asks, “What are we doing with AI?”
You say, “AI is helping us break the linearity in our revenue engine - we’re going to be able to ramp up revenue without continually adding in heads.
Its also going to give me much greater confidence in where we are going to land, so you can advise the board with much more accuracy as we plan our investments for next year.”
Get started
Whenever you are ready, there are two ways that I can help you accelerate your revenue growth.
Buyer Experience Audit - I’ll impersonate a buyer researching your segment and company and let you know what I find. Ideal for planning your RevOps strategy.
RevOps Impact Playbooks - I’ll help you implement one or more tactical processes across your revenue teams - content, referrals, testimonials, adoption and more.