EPISODE 726: Impact of AI on B2G and B2B Sales with Forrester Analyst Seth Marrs

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Today’s show featured an interview with Seth Marrs, the primary sales AI and technology thought leader at Forrester.

Find Seth on LinkedIn.

SETH’S TIP:  “AI is going to make you as a sales professional a lot better. It’s going to make it a lot harder to be a seller, but for those who take advantage of it, it’s not going anywhere soon. Tt’s going to make sales more important and it’s going to make the true nature of a seller. The true nature of a seller is independence and really trying to find your own way to do things.”

THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE

Fred Diamond: We’re excited today. I’m talking with one of the top analysts in this space. Seth, I’m going to let you introduce yourself because I don’t want to short shrift what you do. Then we’re going to be talking about the impact of AI on B2G and B2B sales and what sales organizations need to be thinking about to be more effective. Seth, give us a little introduction. Tell us some of the areas that you cover, and let’s get deep into this.

Seth Marrs: Thanks for having me. I sit on the revenue operations practice for Forrester. The areas I cover are pretty broad in terms of sales process, compensation, and very heavily technology, which is all being worked through in terms of AI. There’s a use case for all of those different things, but I think the most relevant piece for this area is the work that I’ve done around evaluating this technology. I’ve written and evaluated sales engagement, revenue operations, and intelligence. Revenue orchestration is the latest one we’ve done, SPM, conversation Intelligence. I spend a lot of time understanding how to apply technology to process to improve outcomes.

Fred Diamond: Not everybody understands what Forrester does. I’m going to give you an opportunity to talk a little bit to get us kicked off here. A lot of people who are listening to the Sales Game Changers Podcast are sales leaders. They probably have some idea, and a lot of people are sales professionals, account executives, some cases at the BDM/SDR level. Tell us a little bit about what a company like Forrester does and why it’s so important for end users, for technology users at companies, the business to business and government, et cetera, why what you do is so important for them.

Seth Marrs: Before I started this job, I had never even knew it existed. We’re an analyst firm and what we do is guidance and advisory with clients. On one end, we write a lot of research and evaluate markets and understand what’s going on in technology, what’s going on in practice in terms of process. On the other side, we work with clients to share that. It’s this cross between consulting and research where we’re connecting those things together. We work side by side with clients. They get unlimited guidance with us. We’ll work through a project, say I’m trying to implement a technology, or I’m trying to fix a sales process, or I’m trying to drive more sales. They’ll engage with us, use our research, work with analysts like myself to help guide them through it. That bridge point between having to pay a big fee for consulting for them to come in and do it for you versus us working, using our models, our experience alongside you to be able to help you achieve your objectives.

Fred Diamond: For people who are listening here, just a little bit of an insight on Fred Diamond. I started my career with a company that was acquired eventually by one of your big competitors. I was an analyst in the beginning part of my career analyzing technology. Believe it or not, I was actually an expert on data encryption right after college, and had I considered continuing that we probably won’t be talking right now because I would probably be a billionaire somewhere on some beach. But nonetheless, I chose to go the route that I did.

I’m going to ask you a very broad question here. Where are we in the state of AI as it relates to sales?

Seth Marrs: There’s lots of companies that are talking about being further than they actually are. There’s cool technology out that handles all sorts of interesting use cases. But I think a lot of organizations are caught in this in-between where SaaS businesses are being disrupted by AI. That helps in terms of valuations and other things. They’re pushing very hard to be on the forefront of what AI is to the point where in some cases it’s not as far along as they say it is. When I look at where it’s going and some of the use cases that are coming out, they’re phenomenal, but they’re not as sexy as saying, “I’ve got an agent that can autonomously be your BDR or SDR,” or they’re doing really cool things like extracting conversation and turning them into insights, auto updating and doing things like that.

If you looked at the technology where it was a year and a half ago before all this kicked off and where it is today, it’s phenomenal. There’s all sorts of cool stuff that happened, but if you look at the way vendors talk about where they are, not quite there yet. We’re in this weird world where you could see the future of what it’s going to be and you have companies working really hard to get there, but pragmatically what it’s doing today, you have to be very careful about what it is you select and making sure that you validated it can do what you want it to do before you invest.

Fred Diamond: We’re doing today’s interview in October of 2024. Here’s the question everybody asks, will AI replace sales? If you’re a sales professional listening to the show, is AI going to replace you?

Seth Marrs: Not in the near future, not in any respect. You have all sorts of companies saying that they’re replacing the BDR, you have also a company saying that they’re replacing sales. They’re not doing anything close to that. What it is doing is it’s putting in the hands of astute sellers the ability to sell at a level they’ve never been able to sell before, to prospect quicker, faster, and more targeted than they’ve ever been able to do before, to be able to understand and evaluate themselves and improve how they engage with their buyers at a level they’ve never been able to do before.

What it’s going to do is it’s going to stratify the difference between a good and a bad seller in ways that are very, very noticeable. It’s going to change the way that sellers are actually measured, because a lot of the ways that we do that today are built in a world where I can’t see what’s going on in sales, so I have to hold you to a number. If you hit the number, you did great. If you didn’t, you didn’t do great. You’re going to see everything that’s going on and how a seller works, and you’re going to start evaluating them on their true merit, on how good they are at doing the job that you gave them, not necessarily how good they are at other things in the past that could have been manipulated to make you look like a good seller.

I think it’s going to make you a lot better. It’s going to make it a lot harder to be a seller, but for those who take advantage of it, it’s not going anywhere soon. One of the things that I talk about a lot is I think it’s actually going to make sales more important and it’s going to make the true nature of a seller. The true nature of a seller is independence and really trying to find your own way to do things.

Now imagine, to a large extent, companies have tried to suppress that because they didn’t know what was going on and they were trying to figure it out. Once they know everything that’s going on, they’re going to move away from, “Seller, I just need you to do exactly what you’re told.” They’re going to push their sellers to actually ignore and pressure test AI, any of the next best actions, all of that type of stuff, to find unique ways to sell that provide an added advantage for their individual company. The cool part about that is a great seller in the future is not only going to deliver value for themselves. When they do something really good, it’ll be picked up by the company. You’re going to start seeing sellers that are truly dynamic, that actually have a halo effect that 3x, 4x, or 5x the value of what a top seller is today. Because once they do it and do it really well and set the blueprint, they’ll be able to distribute that across all sellers to be able to take advantage of it.

Fred Diamond: Help us understand this. Companies that are B2B sales organizations, are they coming in with, here’s a handful or a dozen or whatever AI solutions for you to use? Or are you seeing sales professionals on their own? Because I agree with what you’re saying there, the great sales professionals view themselves, I’ve been saying this for years, if they’re not a VP, the VP of their own industry, of their own career, and they’re finding ways to be valuable. They’re understanding the customer, they’re looking for tools to help them with that. Are you seeing it?

Which way are you seeing more of? Is the company coming in and saying, “Hey, we’ve implemented this, this, and this. Go use it, try to optimize it”? Or are you seeing it the other way around where sales professionals are finding their own solutions, raising the bar of how they’re performing, and then other people are coming in behind them? Or both?

Seth Marrs: It’s a little bit of both. The way that I would put it is in the past, your sellers are always doing their own thing to try to find a way to win in their marketing. The thing that’s going to change is going to democratize data and how you go about it. I’m going to be able to see all of those interactions. I’m going to be able to analyze all those interactions. I’m going to be able to look across digitally to see what’s going on. As a seller, I’m not going to be asked anymore to enter anything. I’m just going to do my job and do it incredibly well. Instead of when I do that, that’s going to have the effect because the infrastructure behind it is going to allow for you to understand, “Wow, what did that mean and how do I deploy that to the rest of my sales team?”

That’s been the dream for the longest time. But the reality of it is, companies would try to force a seller to enter all their stuff in CRM and they just wouldn’t do it. We’re starting to see some of that change. But what’s going to end up happening is companies are going to have to invest because you have to have the lock-in of all that data that’s coming in if you want any insights from AI. That’s the dirty little secret and that’s why you see companies shifting away from chief technology officers running their AI programs into chief data officers. You get the data in the system, it allows you to analyze it and give insights back to people like sellers to be able to go do a better job. I think it’ll be very hard in the future for a seller to try to do all of that themselves because they’re going to need in a big complex deal to see all the different people that are engaging, all the different ways buyers are engaging, and get the cumulative effect and analysis of that to deliver them insight.

Fred Diamond: Like you said, a lot of times entering data into CRM, the admin stuff is going to go away because AI is going to take all of that over. Now the sales professionals will be able to differentiate and delineate themselves. That’s true selling professionals with all the weight and the stuff that you don’t like to do, that we forced them to do for the last 20, 30 years is going to go away and AI’s going to take all that over.

Seth Marrs: Yeah. If you think about it today, the best way for a seller to hit their quota is to figure out a way to get a lower quota. That’s actually easier to do than it is to sell in most companies. In the future though, it’s going to be how good are you at really selling? How do you differentiate that? Those are going to be the people that are truly valued rather than the ones that have found the workarounds and the different ways to manipulate their company to try to find those insights to achieve individual objectives that aren’t really aligned to sales.

Fred Diamond: You spend a lot of time analyzing companies, I presume, who are bringing AI solutions. I saw a graphic recently with 100,000 logos on it, all the various sales technologies that are out there. So many of them are little piece AI type things. Give us some insights into that or how can those companies survive? Are there great tools out there? I’m not going to ask you, but if you were to create a list of the top 10 essential AI tools, could you easily do something like that?

Seth Marrs: There’s a list that goes out. MarTech is probably where you saw that list, because MarTech has been exploding for forever, but Sales Tech has been too, and it’s up to 3,000 or 4,000 tools. In the last year it went up like 15%, 20% largely because with AI, with these tools, it becomes very easy to develop and implement them. Most of those companies won’t be around in the future. They’ll either be acquired or go out of business. But what they do is drive innovation into the market. Because when smaller providers come up with something really cool, then they’re pushing the next tier provider to be able to create and implement that in their system. While they may not survive, if they have something innovative, they’ll get swallowed up or they’ll get copied. It’s a good effect to see those smaller providers in because they’re forcing innovation, because a big provider wouldn’t innovate if they didn’t have to. These providers force you to innovate because if you don’t, then you’re going to be out of date.

If you’re talking about AI tools, to me, we have a category we call revenue orchestration, which from our perspective is the place where a seller works. It’s not CRM. CRM can be one of those, but it’s typically not at the level that you’d see of other providers that are in revenue orchestration. The idea with it is, is it should be one place to go for the seller to do everything. That’s been a concept that’s been around for a while. This is the closest I’ve ever seen it to becoming a reality, where a seller can log in and do the majority of their work. There’s still work to do, there’s lots of stuff they can’t do. But over time I think you’re going to see that manifest into a true platform built for a seller, not an add-on to a CRM tool that allows them to manage their Rolodex.

You’re seeing a lot of the AI, the technology being infused into that and then displayed for them through that platform. Then also their ability to engage being integrated into that too. When I’m working in that platform, I’m not only seeing insights and information and able to get what I need, understand what I need to do, but I’m actually able to actively engage and work with clients directly through that. There’s a whole host of things behind that that you would integrate in it. But to me, that’s the front end piece that any seller should be working on and any company that’s trying to support a seller should be trying to build.

Fred Diamond: You deal with a lot of end user organizations, IT data infrastructure, et cetera. My listeners here for the Sales Game Changers Podcast are B2B and B2G sales professionals and leaders. What are some things that you’ve heard over the last year? A little bit of a different angle here, Seth, what are some of the things that you keep hearing from customers who are buying the technology or services that these people are selling? Give us some insight.

One thing that we hear a lot is that the customer’s already 60% to 70% down the road before they even need to bring in sales if they even do. That’s performed a lot of challenges on the sales side, is how do I provide value generally in that 60% to 70% space? What are some things that you keep hearing from end user customers about how B2G and B2B sales organizations are approaching them?

Seth Marrs: First off, I don’t buy that at all. That has been around since way back in the challenger days when CEB was around, and it’s still talked about today. Here’s my take on that, because I have a little different view. I think sales are as involved, and we have data to show this, where we break the phases of a sales cycle into three different phases and we look and ask, who do you engage with when you need information in those cycles? Sales is in the top three of all three of them. It would actually be easier if a buyer would go, “I’m working with a marketing use case and then I’ve decided to transition to a sales use case and now I’m talking only to sellers.” That would actually be much easier. That was the case way back when.

Now, pesky sellers are like, “I’m going to engage a seller whenever I want to engage a seller, and I’m going to engage marketing whenever I want to engage marketing.” At any point in time, depending on what that individual buyer wants, they’re going to engage a seller. If they need something from a seller, a product person, a customer, they’re all over the place. As a team, you have to work together to be able to do it. I do a lot of work around alignment. You could imagine if you are a buyer. And most sales and marketing organizations are like oil and water, they don’t talk to each other. They do their own thing. The only person in those organizations that actually understands what a company presents to them from a sales and marketing perspective is the buyer.

The sales team has no clue what’s going on with marketing. Marketing has no clue what’s going on with sales. The buyer’s the one seeing these disjointed messages. Now imagine also they’re engaging when they want to, so now they have all of these messages coming over the top of each other. That to me is creating a major opportunity for sales leaders and marketing leaders to come together and at least unify, and AI data structure is the foundation of doing that, because it isn’t about being friends between sales and marketing. It’s about taking your technology and information and putting it in one place so everybody could see what’s going on.

When you engage with the buyer, you know if you’re a seller that they just engage with your website. If you’re engaging with the marketer, you know they just talk to a seller and they’re doing a webinar or they’re doing a demo in a week and a half. To me, the way buyers have been engaging, the way I look at that is they’re engaging whoever they want to engage at any point in time. It is up to the company that’s working to win that deal from that buyer to be able to align all of the different ways that you engaged in a fashion that provides the best possible opportunity to win the deal.

Fred Diamond: I’m just curious, as you’re having these conversations with customers, and the thing is, in some cases the customer is the only one who knows what messages are coming from across the organization, which is quite spectacular. How do customers express their unhappiness or happiness with that? Do you constantly hear things like, “Company X, they don’t know what the hell they’re doing because this side’s talking and this side’s talking, there’s no synchronicity”? Do you see companies on the other hand who are nailing it, who are not knocking it out of the park, where there is this amazing communication integration because they’ve already implemented solutions. I love the way, as we’re bringing this together, of how AI can communicate to everyone involved in the sale. We hear this so many times, sales makes the sale and then they’re onto the next thing. Most of the opportunity comes once the customer is a customer for upsell, cross-sell, new organizations, et cetera.

Seth Marrs: Very few companies do this well, and that actually saves you from being disjointed. Because if I’m disjointed and everybody else is disjointed, then my messaging looks just as bad as everybody else’s. The thing that’s starting to happen as companies, and we’re starting to see companies do this, is they’re starting to win more deals. Not because they have a better product, but they have a better message. The way they’re syncing the message, the way they’re aligning it and sequencing it, it started to happen in tech with the BDR and how all of that stuff is getting connected together and now you’re just going to see more and more of it. But I still think there’s a significant opportunity for organizations to be able to link those messages together and provide a much better opportunity.

Even something as simple as a seller not going in and doing their base pitch because they understand that that buyer and the people that are in that meeting with them have spent three hours on their website scouring everything on there, and you know exactly what they’ve been looking at. You should come in with not a standard pitch, but a modified deck to align to what you could see they wanted.

Fred Diamond: Like you just said, a lot of times we hear from sales professionals where they go about it the wrong way, as you’re alluding to here, which is they’ll finally get engaged with the customer and they start from the beginning. Even though the customer, I agree with you, they might not be 60% down the road, but they’re probably a percentage place down the road.

Seth Marrs: They’ve done something.

Fred Diamond: Yeah, they’ve done something. What we’ve heard from a lot of customers end user, and you’re hearing the same thing, I guess, is, “We’re here. I don’t need you to go back and tell me your company’s history, even though I’ve just reached out to you, because we are here, let’s start from here. Maybe make sure we’re on the same page.”

One of the greatest lessons a VP of sales ever told me when we were talking about this whole concept which started with the challenger at 57% and then 70%, whatever it might be. The guy said to me, even though they might be down the path, the customer, they don’t know what they don’t know. They may think that they read some websites, they read a report maybe from you or something, or an article. They might think they know, but they really don’t. Everybody wants to present their technology as easy to use, standard, easy to implement, et cetera. Reality is, most of it’s not, which is why companies that we work with at the Institute for Excellence in Sales, the Oracles, the Microsofts, the Salesforces, the Dells of the world, it’s why they have jobs, is because customers still need to integrate. They still need to implement things that work in legacy systems. They need you, sales professionals, to understand.

Seth, is there anything else you want to say that we haven’t talked about here in this short podcast that sales professionals and leaders in leading B2B and B2G organizations need to know?

Seth Marrs: As you’re evaluating this stuff, make sure you keep the main thing the main thing. Because I think a lot of this technology gets exciting and you see companies going in and buying it for the technology. In the last year and a half, it’s actually been very much like that because you’ve actually had funds released and you’re going out and buying tech. Instead of buying for break/fix, look for a strategy, build a strategy, and deploy that to be able to implement and deliver value versus shiny cool looking AI tech.

Fred Diamond: You’ve given us a lot of great ideas here for sales leaders. Give us an action step for them to take right now, something specific for the sales professionals who are listening to take their career to the next level.

Seth Marrs: If you want success from all this stuff that’s happening, you need to rev up your sales ops, rev ops teams to be able to handle this. They’re going to be the engine that delivers all the value for this stuff, and you want them to be. You want to be able to give that person the tools, the support, the expertise to be able to take all of these tools and turn them into reality. It’s not going to be you, it’s your job to sell and go hit the number, but get your sales ops teams, your rev ops teams empowered, funded, staffed to be able to deliver that. They will deliver 3x, 4x the value back to you if you do that.

Fred Diamond: One of the key things that we talk about is how do we remove blocks for sales professionals to be successful? One thing that we’re getting from this conversation is there’s going to be more and more tools to remove those so that the sales professionals can really focus and have the content, the research, the insights. That’s one thing we tell people all the time. People ask me all the time, how do I become super successful at B2B or B2G sales? I say you need to be three steps ahead of your customer. You need to understand where their industry is going, where compliance is coming into play, where the market is going, where their customers are going, their customer’s customers are going.

Now with AI you’re able to more effectively figure out through the insights that these tools will provide to you what their industry might look like down the road. I love that answer to show the great sales professionals will begin to use these tools to have valuable conversations with their customers about what they’re challenged with. Not just like, “Hey, I got this great tool to sell you,” or, “It’s time for you to renew,” but here’s where we think the industry is going and here’s how we can help you.

Seth Marrs: Ops today is mostly going and trying to figure out what’s going on to help a sales leader make a decision. Ops in the future is you’re going to know what’s going on and need to be able to strategically make decisions so that the whole go get information is going to go away. It’s what do I do with the information that’s going to be valuable in that role, which is a step change difference, but in a good way.

Fred Diamond: That’s going to delineate the wheat from the chaff, as they say, to use a very overused expression. It’s going to help sales professionals take their career to the next level.

Once again, I want to thank Seth Marrs from Forrester. My name is Fred Diamond. This is the Sales Game Changers Podcast.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

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