There’s no denying that COVID-19 affected every facet of business life around the world. As global organizations shift into a “working from home” model, many sales teams struggle to adapt to a 100% virtual selling model. According to the “2020 State of Virtual Selling” survey from Aviso, the new virtual environment has impacted every persona of a typical revenue team. While sales managers and VPs struggle to raise morale and enthusiasm, sales reps struggle with opportunity management.
Virtual Selling differs from in-person selling by, first, being digital. And rather than take place in a face-to-face environment, virtual selling can take place over a longer period of time. It involves everything from proposal presentations to phone calls, and downplays certain factors of an in-person sale while greatly amplifying others.
No matter the individual’s position, almost all of those surveyed agreed that AI offers the potential to help them in their work. Traditional CRM forecasts and activity inputs suffer sharp drops in accuracy under virtual selling, and so Aviso puts great importance on predictive intelligence tools to fill this gap. The problem isn’t expected to go away once the pandemic ends, as Gartner reports that in order to remain relevant, “60% of B2B sales organizations will transition from experience and intuition-based selling to data-driven selling by 2025.” That will occur because companies have gathered large amounts of data that they can now effectively use with AI.
But the increasing reliance on virtual tools puts a greater pressure on IT costs. Throughout the survey CFOs reported their companies spending around $500-800 per use per month on sales tools, everything from e-signatures, CRM, to sales enablement tools. Aviso suggests AI to combat this problem, letting it do all the combined work of these tools as one dynamic package with a fraction of the cost. This reduces the overhead for CFOs and provides sales professionals with another resource.
Recent additions to Aviso’s Advisory Board include Scott McNealy, co-founder and former CEO of Sun Microsystems, Subrah S Iyar, CEO at Moxtra and co-founder and former CEO of WebEx, Paul Chapman, SVP and CIO at Box, Bill Heil, former COO at WebEx and former SVP of operations at VMWare.
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