Sales Enablement vendor RingDNA released Guided Selling, a set of Next Best Actions (NBA) for sales reps. Guided Selling advises sales reps on what to do, when to do it, whom to contact, and what messaging to employ. Sales managers can create and deploy preferred playbooks to their salesforce, even without face-to-face training. Both inbound and outbound selling plays are supported, helping “implement proven playbooks at scale.”
“When you know what winning deals look and sound like, you know exactly where to focus to improve outcomes,” said RingDNA CEO Howard Brown. “Guided selling uses artificial intelligence to provide revenue teams with tools, insights, and next best actions necessary to win deals, grow accounts, maximize revenue.”
“It’s a fool’s errand to expect a 22-year-old sales development rep (SDR) fresh out of university to develop a consistent, scalable, repeatable prioritization, execution, and qualification process. Be prescriptive in your expectations and methodical in the tools you arm your teams with…for the overwhelming majority of your team—who have never held full-time, quota-carrying roles and aren’t able to think strategically yet—you must be prescriptive. You need to show them how to think strategically and tactically as they approach their daily work.”
TOPO analyst Phoebe Conybeare
Guided Selling is embedded into the Salesforce Sales Cloud and delivers prioritized actions for opportunities, contacts, and leads, helping reduce sales rep planning time. The AI-powered task list recommends the tasks that will put sales reps on “the shortest path to revenue.” The task list is dynamic, updating based upon prospect behavior. Thus, priorities are reassessed based on prospect interaction with e-mails, web forms, multi-media, and social media.
Guided Selling includes a set of best-practices templates based upon billions of sales interactions monitored by RingDNA since its 2012 launch. Salesforce Dashboards help managers optimize cadences and messaging, allowing them to test and refine rep workflows. Cadence activities across e-mail, phone, text, and social are synchronized with Salesforce.
Gartner stated that 51% of sales organizations have deployed or plan to deploy algorithmic-guided selling over the next five years.
“Intended to augment more traditional sales tools, such as sales playbooks, algorithmic-guided selling uses sales data to boost the seller’s ability to engage with prospects…Algorithmic-guided selling leverages artificial intelligence technology and existing sales data to guide sellers through deals, automating manual sales actions while reducing the need for individual seller judgment in the sales process.”
Tad Travis, Gartner VP of Research, “Algorithmic-Guided Selling to Have Significant Impact on Sales Productivity”
“In this new remote paradigm, companies are having to do more with less,” said Brown. “Guided Selling is a total game-changer for sales teams, as it uses AI to focus reps on next best actions while empowering them to build stronger relationships and better solve customer problems.”
Guided Selling is Generally Available.