Selling through the hype

INDUSTRY NEWS

Selling through the hype

If you’re feeling disillusioned after watching the latest Indiana Jones film, investing in NFTs, or struggling with a bloated tech stack, you know what it’s like to be the victim of hype. Sales and revenue leaders are bombarded with so many miraculous promises from tech companies, that it might seem impossible to separate hype from reality. Unless, of course, you’re a Gartner client. This week, Gartner published its “Hype Cycle for Revenue and Sales Technology, 2023,” to help revenue leaders make sense of the near endless parade of new and maturing sales tech. Learn why Generative AI is at the “Peak of Inflated Expectations” and why sales engagement has ascended to the “Slope of Enlightenment.” In this case, it’s okay to believe the hype (cycle).

Opposite of Prime Day

Speaking of hype, Amazon Prime Day concluded this week, but not before giving consumers the opportunity to save tons of money while shelling out tons of it in the process. Hopefully, your IT department was able to join in on the cash-saving fun, because Salesforce just decided to embrace the opposite of Prime Day. Salesforce just announced that it will be raising its prices by an average of 9% in August, including its Sales, Service, and Marketing Clouds – as well as Industries and Tableau. Before resigning yourself to this new reality, there are some actions you can take to help mitigate the Salesforce price hike, which Forrester VP and Principal Analyst Liz Herbert has detailed in her latest blog post. It’s prime reading.

Tell us how you really feel (about AI)

Yes. This is another article about AI. At this point, we imagine you’re fed up with all the hype around generative AI, LLM, and all of its ilk. But why imagine how you feel about AI, when non-AI people have already crunched the data? The Boston Consulting Group recently surveyed 13,000 leaders, managers, and front-line employees to understand how workers feel about AI in the workplace today versus five years ago. In a nutshell, curiosity has remained the same, concern has declined, and optimism has soared. Not surprisingly, there is a significant delta between leaders and employees. You could ask ChatGPT what it thinks about the research, but its dataset doesn’t go past 2021.

IN THE GROOVE

Hitting the big goals

Remember the New Year’s Resolutions you made back in January? We all knew those goals were long shots, but we wrote them down anyway. Hitting just one of those goals is grounds for celebration. Imagine hitting 150% of those goals – i.e. instead of just making it into the gym, you became a personal trainer. Accenture was tasked by a Fortune 500 transportation company to boost the productivity and effectiveness of its business advertising sales team to get them to their full run rate within three months. With Groove and Accenture, reps are now achieving 150% of their quota consistently. Lucky for you, we break down just how they achieved such a huge feat in our new case study. Now that’s what we call hitting the big goals.

LEARN SOMETHING NEW

Speedy sales

In America, we like things fast – fast cars, fast food, and making a fast buck. But research is showing that sales cycles are getting longer and slower. As the adage goes, “Time kills sales.” So what’s a seller to do when they want to hit quota but deals are spanning months and quarters instead of days and weeks? Erica Schultz, Chief Marketing Officer at RAIN Group, recently wrote an article on how to speed up your sales cycle with tips to drive urgency with buyers. With this advice, you can close your deals faster and finally take a break from all that speed to enjoy a well-deserved slow vacation. 

Facing the boss

In video games, a “boss” is “a significant computer-controlled opponent.” Approaching the big boss can be scary sometimes – both in video games and in the workplace. While your solution might get a quick win from entry or mid-level professionals, selling into the C-suite requires unlocking a whole different level. The C-suite today is bombarded with a series of challenges around keeping their company profitable and their employees happy in a tough economy. They have bigger fish to fry than listening to yet another sales pitch. So how can you beat the boss and win the prize? ValueSelling Associates wrote up “Strategies for Selling to the C-suite” to help you face your biggest sales challenge. Hopefully, that boss is more Queen Gohma from Zelda than Malenia Blade from Elden Ring.  

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