Shifts in buying behavior, technology, and routes to market stress go-to-market (GTM) strategy and execution in unprecedented ways. Paradoxically, these disruptive forces also fuel an emerging revenue super cycle – an extended period of growth and transformation. To succeed in this new environment, we must unlearn much of what has made us successful in the past. In this video, learn about the dynamic future of GTM strategy, what it means for leaders at all levels, and which practices to now prioritize.
Featuring:
- Rick Bradberry, Executive Partner and Principal Analyst, Forrester
Full Transcript
Rick Bradberry: Thank you and good morning. Good morning. To understand where the world is today, and to understand where it will go in the future, we must first do something a little unexpected. We have to go back to the past. We have to travel back in time. Only then can we understand the full context about where we are now, and where we’re headed in the future. So you ready? Let’s do that. Let’s go back in time. We’re going to come over here, and we’re going to go back 30 years, to 1995. Some of you might have been in college in 1995, others of you may have been born around 1995. The 1990s was a decade of great transformation, optimism, and progress in many different ways. The Cold War as we knew it had ended. We ditched the shoulder pads and the big hair from the 1980s, and we put on baggy clothes and sportswear instead. I’m not sure how much progress was really in that, but there was a lot of excitement around that all the same. And around that same time period, we got something really powerful, something transformational actually, and it was the internet. The internet drove a period of economic activity, a tech boom that fueled e-commerce and a whole new generation of digital natives.
…
Rick Bradberry: This was something we had never seen before and never experienced before at all. In fact, it was so big that the internet drove a super cycle, an extended period of growth and transformation, like one that we hadn’t seen in a really long time. And this was great for companies. Time to innovate, time to come up with new products. All kinds of new stuff came out, and anybody who was in marketing or sales loved this because all of a sudden you were marketing websites and browsers and modems and connectivity and switches and routers and all kinds of new stuff. That is partly what drove this cycle. Fast forward another 10 years to 2005, and we got something new. So we moved on from the internet or we built from the internet and we got software as a service, SaaS, and SaaS drove a new super cycle on top of the one that we had just finished. Companies like Salesforce, Netflix, and others drove a lot of activity. They became big names in cloud, and the way that we started to buy things and use them was totally different. The recurring revenue model that we got, the decision-making around purchasing being decentralized and pushed into the business to buy software applications, this was a big, big change in SaaS. Cloud subscriptions, lots more.
Rick Bradberry: So fast forward another 10 years, you’re probably already following the thread. Let’s see where we go. We’re going over 10 more years, and we got a period of self-service technology. That’s probably not a label that would readily come to mind, but that’s exactly what it was. Companies like Dropbox, Uber, Zoom, Slack, they all innovated and built around this idea of digitization and self-service being pushed out to you so that you could use and interact and buy things in ways that you had never done before. Things like digital resources in the purchase process, mobile commerce, in-product purchases through product-led growth, the Internet of Things. All of a sudden, we had a world where we had software and technology connected powerfully right in our own hands. There’s a lot of inertia around that. Fast forward another 10 years to today, and maybe not surprisingly, what is the big thing that is right in front of us? It’s artificial intelligence, AI, with agents and AI-first approaches in our business, and automation, cognitive computation, really smart automation. Not the blue-collar automation of production in the past on the assembly floor in the factory, but all of a sudden, we now have white-collar task automation that is really powerful.
Rick Bradberry: That’s a whole new world. So guess what? Artificial intelligence is now poised to drive a brand new super cycle. This is the dawn of a new super cycle, and you’ve heard that theme of AI and agents already here. This is where this super cycle really begins. And did you catch the common theme in these super cycles? There was a common theme. It wasn’t really obvious. It wasn’t even obvious to me when I researched it, but it is this. It is that revenue is digitizing. The way that we attain revenue is digitizing. Even money itself, through blockchain and cryptocurrency, is digitizing. And this digitization throws off a lot of data, a lot of insights, a lot of buying signals. It’s a really powerful thing for us to take a look at digitization all through our go-to-market, our marketing, sales, revenue management approaches. This is a whole new type of thing for us to manage, too. So as you think about today, what are the dynamics? How is this playing out? Well, I’ll give you a handful of forces that are reshaping revenue and growth right now.
Rick Bradberry: And here’s the first one. It is that AI and automation challenge revenue foundations. What we’ve long known about how do we earn revenue, how do we make sales happen, how do we market, how do we stimulate demand, whoa, all of a sudden we are being challenged on what that really is and how it works. That’s hard for some of us who’ve been doing this a long time, looking out and saying, “I’m really excited about new innovation and new capabilities, but I really don’t know a whole lot about them and I don’t know how to really fit that in quite yet.” We need to learn how to do that. Here’s a stat, interesting one. 46% of sales reps who use AI-enabled sales tools at work say these tools already help them determine which leads are most likely to close. So imagine that, you’re working your pipeline, you’re trying to figure out which deals should I prioritize, which ones are moving ahead, like how do I spend my time as a rep? All of a sudden AI is helping me understand which deals are likely to progress, close, where I should spend my time, and what even is the next step I should take with each unique deal that I am working on.
Rick Bradberry: Wow, I’ve never had that in sales. I’ve never had that as a sales leader either. I’ve dreamed about it. As a former chief revenue officer, I knew that this capability was out there, but still emerging and too manual and very labor intensive and hard to find the skill sets to go and do some of this work to feed those insights to me as a leader, to my peers on the executive team, and to the rest of the organization who would deeply benefit from this. We always wanted this as leaders, but it was hard to get. All of a sudden, sellers are being aided by AI to help them do this and at scale. We’ll come back to that in a moment. The next one here, and you heard this earlier from Sunil on the stage, he talked about self-service. Self-service isn’t new. It was a whole cycle. Here’s what’s new though. Self-service started maybe with little transactions and interactions. Well, guess what? Self-service has now spread through the entire purchase process and it’s involved in purchases of all sizes. Even some of the largest enterprise deals, multi-million dollar contracts we work on, they involve some degree of self-service from the buying group that’s involved with that.
Rick Bradberry: Buyers are doing things on their own, on their own time, and on their own terms because they can and they will. They didn’t have that capability 30 years ago, at least not to the extent that they do today, but they do now and that is spreading and we need to be aware of that. The next one here, buyers and sellers navigate more complex purchasing processes. You would think with all of this great technology and better capability that purchasing would be easier. It’s not. What we see from the research right now, in fact these stats are very recent, is that purchasing is more complex than ever for buying groups. There are more options than ever. Those options need to be more integrated. They need to fit into platforms and partners and ecosystems and they move so fast. What you buy today could be outdated tomorrow so there’s more risk in the purchase itself. Buying today is complex. 86% of buyers said a purchase stalled at some point in the purchase process. It’s just going to happen. Whether it’s foreseen or not, stalls happen. And here’s the interesting stat. 80% were dissatisfied with some aspect of the vendor they ultimately purchased.
Rick Bradberry: So imagine that, the buying group goes through this process, a very complex one, and they get to the end. You all celebrate because you sold a deal. You’re like, “We have a brand new customer.” That customer, 80% of them say that they are dissatisfied with some important aspect of the vendor experience or the vendor itself that they ultimately chose. Wow, that is sobering. That means we are not doing a good enough job in the purchase process helping our customers buy. The next one. Partner ecosystems call for a route to revenue rethink. Boy, this is so different. When I started in sales, most of it was, “Hey, let’s go out and direct sell and let’s grow our business that way.” Oh, that’s not really how it works today. With partners and platforms, customers go back and forth. They’re omnichannel. They look at all available avenues open to them to figure out what’s going to work for them, what’s compelling, and they’re going to navigate through this. 63% of sales leaders say that their organization’s revenue is brought in via indirect channels, partner sales, and third-party marketplaces. More than half! More than half. Almost two-thirds in this stat.
Rick Bradberry: And let’s just say it’s somewhere between 50% and 66%, half and two-thirds. More than half is brought in through these ecosystems and partnerships and webs that are available out there for buyers to engage in. That’s a whole new world for us as we think about how do we get our product to market? What channels should we leverage? What routes to market do customers prefer? Where are the volume pockets of activity happening that we need to hop on right now? It’s not just about our own digital properties or assets or our own direct sales team. It is about the entire ecosystem. And the last one, and this one may not be quite as obvious, private equity and venture capital raise the competitive stakes for all of us. Interesting stat here. There are more private equity-owned portfolio companies in the United States today than there are publicly traded companies. Back when I started in business, if somebody had told me that, I’d be like, “What’s a private equity company anyway? How does that work? What really is happening?” More private equity-owned portfolio companies in the US right now than there are publicly traded companies in the US. The interesting thing, too, among the composition of those companies is that the publicly traded ones have mega-sized capitalizations. They’re really big companies.
Rick Bradberry: And then the PE firms are a lot of small and mid-sized enterprises that are growing. So keep that in mind. I mentioned earlier that we got this world of AI and automation. And you saw that label AI first that’s up there. Here’s what’s happening right now. In the last one or two years, a brand new cohort of startups has emerged. Entrepreneurs who are flooding in and saying, “I want to build an AI first company. I want to start with AI only for all of my operations. As much as I can pack into my little company as possible using AI, that’s where I’m going to start. And as I need employees and as I need to scale, I’m going to add people to it.” And that’s an entirely different mindset for a leader and for companies. We’ve never, ever had to compete with an AI first company. Five years from now, we are going to be competing with this cohort that started last year and this year and maybe next year, starting up with brand new capabilities that are AI first. I’m a little scared of that, actually. They’re going to be fast and disruptive and well-capitalized. And that’s not something that most of us have really engineered for.
Rick Bradberry: So private equity and venture capital, they raise the competitive stakes for us. We need to be really conscious of how that plays out competitively in the markets that we choose to service. What’s the impact? Wow, we’ve covered a lot of ground already. Let me show you what happened over that 30-year period. We went back to 1995 and we fast-forwarded through these cycles and we got to today. Well, here’s a conceptual illustration of what the buyer has been experiencing with various different sellers. And we’ll call this B2B mostly. In the buying journey, there are three different phases, discover, evaluate, and commit. And buyers go through those stages just like sellers have stages, buyers have some periods that they go through as well. Take a look at the legend down here at the bottom because all of a sudden this slide is going to color code everywhere. And you’re going to be like, “What do these colors mean?” Let me refresh. So take a moment, look at the bottom. The dark green are account executives. That lime green color is, what do we call it, sales engineers. Actually, the middle green, I’ll call it lime green.
Rick Bradberry: The lightest of the greens are sales development reps. And then there’s a new one, our newest team member, the AI sales agent. Back in 1995, this is probably what buying looked like for the buyer or buying group who went through the process. They started in discover. And look at that, all of their interactions were with an account executive or sales rep. They needed the sales rep because that was the only way they could access information, get trained, understand the options, and move forward. Kind of in the middle under Evaluate and maybe popping up in the commit stage, you may have had a sales engineer who came in and came out and came back in a little bit. Fast forward 10 years. In 2005, we have this new role. We have a development representative at the front end of this and saying, “Well, maybe my reps aren’t doing prospecting quite as much in 2005 as they did 10 years earlier. So we’re going to have a development rep take inbound or do outbound prospecting. We’ll add that to the mix. Look at that. The buyer started the process a little later.” Some of that internet effect and technology, buyers didn’t really need to start quite as early. With somebody in person, they could do some things on their own.
Rick Bradberry: And then the rest of the process looks pretty similar. Sales engineers spent a little more time with these deals in 2005. 10 more years later, now all of a sudden, we’ve got, wow, development reps like really taking the front end of this machine. And boy, they’re everywhere. By 2015, everyone was talking about SDRs and deploying SDRs. You’ve probably been on teams where you’re like, “Do we insource this? Do we outsource it? Is it inbound, outbound?” There are a million flavors of what to do with sales development representative team. And you’ve probably experienced a lot of that. You see that buying activity happening or starting even later in discovery. And probably a little bit more interaction with those sales engineers. By 2025, that’s right now, today, maybe we have a new front end. Maybe that new front end is your new teammate, your AI sales agent. And maybe that’s the first touch point that a buyer or a buying group might have on your website, in your product, some other digital property that you deploy. That might be the new front end. You’ve heard a lot probably around this idea of the AI SDR.
Rick Bradberry: Everyone’s trying to figure out, can I rip and replace my SDR team and make it an AI team? Big experiments happening right now. It doesn’t work yet, but it will probably very shortly because the AI keeps getting better. It keeps learning and deploying. You’re not going to replace everything about a human or a human engagement with AI. But with some activities, depending on the nature of the activity and the type, you might get pretty close. Pay attention to that one. What will it look like 10 more years from now? We haven’t done that time period yet. By 2035, any guesses? I’m not really sure, but let’s take a look. It might look like this, where that purchase process starts even later. That’s a lot of self-service. The buyer doesn’t really need people to begin the process. Information is ubiquitous. Buyers can find information everywhere. Let me tell you a dirty secret I heard. It’s just gossip, but I believe it’s true because I know the sources and it’s reliable. Buyers today are going to ChatGPT and asking ChatGPT, what is the maximum allowable discount I can get off of? And pick a company.
Rick Bradberry: We started with Salesforce and cloud. Salesforce has a lot of available publicly out there. So if you’re a buyer and you’re using ChatGPT and ChatGPT is learning, it’s going to pick up a lot of information about some of these mega tech firms. Try it. Buyers are going and asking ChatGPT what discount they should get as they interact with the rep on the sale. Frightening thing? It’s really accurate. Really accurate. And buyers are coming back saying, “I’m not going to pay the price you quoted me. I’m not going to pay it because I know that two other buyers in the last three weeks on a deal this same size with my same volume and parameters got 15% off of what you’re quoting me right here.” That’s how transparent information is becoming. And so in 2035, you’re going to see those AI sales agents everywhere in the purchase process, not just up front at discovery, but as buyers get deeper into it and evaluate and commit, the AI sales agent will be a partner to both the buyer and the seller. We said we’re at the beginning of an emerging super cycle and we’ve already gotten a peek at what it might look like 10 years from now.
Rick Bradberry: What are the characteristics of this super cycle? What does it really mean? How do we define it? How does it come to life? Let’s explore that. Let’s walk through that here. The emerging revenue super cycle first is intelligent. We talked about being intelligent. We talked about artificial intelligence. Intelligent and smart is going to be a core characteristic of the next decade of selling. It’s just going to be that much more intelligent with AI agents and automation. We should plan for that and build for that and experiment with it right now. It’s not going to go away. It’s going to mushroom. It’s going to grow in exponential ways over the next 10 year period. The next characteristic is that this environment will be really adaptive. Most of us come from a world where we go into… The summertime we might have a leadership offsite and we say, “Let’s look at the next year and a half of our business and figure out what we want to do. And the fall is coming up. We’re going to have our annual planning cycle. We’re going to have to come up with numbers and do that.” And we set the numbers and we’re like, “Great, we’re good for the next 12 months.”
Rick Bradberry: We set it and we forget it. And then we set quota and we set maybe marketing budgets and we go off and we execute that. And yeah, we have updates and whatnot throughout the year to see how well we’re doing and if we should stay on track or make some additional improvements somewhere. Well, I just don’t think that it’s going to work like that in the future. We are moving to something that is a lot more fast and a lot more intelligent. And we are going to have to be really adaptive and resilient to that. It’s not about what is our approach. It’s about what is our degree of readiness. Because we’re not going to know what comes at us and we’re not going to know how fast it emerges. It is more important to be ready than it is to have a fixed plan about what you think you are going to do as you execute against this throughout the year. We need to focus on agile, customer-centric adjustments. Customer centricity needs to be a core component of how we think about and define the next decade. That revenue super cycle is going to be integrated.
Rick Bradberry: You probably already feel this inertia in your business right now. Marketing, sales, product, customer success, support. Often these are functions and silos that are coordinated, but they’re not tightly integrated. And our world is just getting more and more integrated. There’s more overlap, there’s more interdependence, there’s more activity that needs really tight orchestration. Not just coordination, not just alignment. We need to run this process in a way that’s really tightly woven and integrated. The roles, the technology, the processes that we use are going to look different for us in the next 10-year period. It’s going to look a little foreign and we’re going to walk into situations where we’re like, “I just don’t really know how these teams should be interacting. I don’t know how that person should be working with this person over here, but it seems like without the interaction of them plus AI together, the results that we’re looking for might not happen.” This next revenue super cycle is going to be accelerated. We’ve talked about speed already. Oh, it’s going to come at us so fast, so fast, which means we need more frequent improvements. How do we do that?
Rick Bradberry: What does our cadence look like in the business? What is the operating rhythm that we set and go in and out of each week in order to make these faster, more frequent improvements? How are we thinking about revenue and go-to-market in terms of sprints that allow us to capture what’s really happening in the moment and build on it rather than saying marketing is going to generate leads and pass them to sales and sales is going to work leads and then develop pipeline and we’re just going to keep going on down the line, moving from sequential siloed activities one to another. How do we get to the point where we’re doing this work simultaneously, where we get together and we do work and we separate and we come back together and we go and we do this rather than building these sequential rhythms? We need to be more simultaneous as we work in an accelerated environment. And the last one, we talked a little bit about this earlier with ecosystems and partners and platforms and hyperscalers. Look, we’re just going to be in a more networked environment all around in the market. Commercial webs and ecosystems will define how we do this.
Rick Bradberry: So we’re getting into this like what does it mean for me and my job and what does it mean for you and your job? You might be thinking that already. Is this a risk? How much does it help me? How much do I need to rethink what I do? It’s going to be really hard for people who have a lot of experience, even myself. I look at these equations and I’m like how do I need to sift through this because my playbook and my paradigm have been really good, but they might not be good enough to help me go into the future. Let me share some implications. The what does it mean for us and our role. Seven of them. Not seven. Seven of them. Let’s take a look. The first, and we’ve talked about this. AI sales agents will be onboarded and trained to co-sell. This is an interesting concept. We’ve already heard this morning AI agents are going to be deployed and they’re going to be paired with a seller. Oh, but there’s more than just a pairing, more than just a partnership, more than just a co-worker.
Rick Bradberry: No, this AI activity is going to be deployed to co-sell with a seller. And that’s different. It means I, as a sales rep, together with my AI counterpart, we are now a team and we both sell. It’s not AI helps me to sell only. Oh no. That AI agent is going to get so smart, it’s going to be selling with me. I’m not going to do anything that I don’t want it to do, that we don’t need it to do as an organization because we’re going to train it. But we’re going to both be selling and we’re going to do it together in a co-sell motion. That’s what selling is going to look like. Next one, buyers and sellers will both use AI. And here’s what happens when I work with organizations. I’m like, “Hey, tell me about your AI strategy. What are your use cases? Where are you in terms of experimenting and deploying? What’s your progress? What are you thinking?” And almost always what I hear back is use cases and deployments that are about helping us be more productive on the backside. And that’s great. It’s essential actually. But I’m like, “Well, where’s the customer in this equation?
Rick Bradberry: What are you deploying for the customer to actually make their experience better, to help them purchase better, faster, to move forward from one task to the next, to eliminate or reduce some of that complexity in the purchasing process we talked about? Where’s the AI use case for that?” And oftentimes I get blank stares coming back, like, “We’re not really working on that. We’re working on like RevOps and integrating our data on the back end and serving it up for our employees. And we’re trying to really maximize that part.” Well, buyers and sellers were both using AI. So quick story. I worked with a global hospitality brand, big hotel chain. And they were like, “I want to figure out what my mix of people needs to be in region locally and centralized here at headquarters. We don’t think that the equation right now is working for us. How do we think about this differently?” In the region, the regional leaders are like, “Oh, we need those resources. We need to customize and localize and we need to understand how to do this work in a way that is really specific to the buyers that we interact with right here in market, not a headquarters person who has no idea what’s really happening.”
Rick Bradberry: And at headquarters, they’re like, “Oh, but all this resource you have down there is really expensive. And you’ve built these processes around it, where if one person leaves, the whole thing crumbles.” And so a little bit of a tug of war in this hotel brand. And I said, “Well, let’s put the tug of war to the side. And let’s actually understand, what are your buyers going to be doing in the next one or two or three years, particularly around RFP management.” Which was really the focus of these teams. Do we need RFP resources locally to do this? So we played it out. And we’re like, “Look, your buyers are already using AI. Already using it to help them craft this RFP.” And they’re going to continue using that. In fact, so much so that they’re going to build it into the actual tools and processes that they use to identify the best vendors out there to shortlist them, to create an automated list of trade-offs among the vendors, and to understand what kinds of questions they need to generate in the RFP and send it out to the different hotel chains.
Rick Bradberry: That’s what your buyers will be doing in the next one, two, three years if they get on this AI train, because the capability will exist for them to do that. And so what are you going to do as a hotel chain? Are you going to, get this RFP and all walk over and sit in a breakout room for three days as you rifle through the questions and look at your inventory of answers and figure out which ones are best suited for this customer and then customize them and take some out and add some new? I’m like, “That takes forever. You’re not going to do that as a hotel chain anymore. No.” You’re going to use AI too. AI is going to go cut right through that RFP and figure out what you already have, figure out which answers you need to put forward, how you need to adjust or update those answers. It’s going to figure out what new data you have in your systems that you don’t already have in the RFP that would be contextually relevant and really compelling to this buyer. Build it in. You’ll look over it and review it manually to make sure it’s the right thing before you send it out.
Rick Bradberry: That is what RFP activity and travel is going to look like in the near future. Airlines, you’re going to encounter probably something very similar. You operate in an environment that’s congested with travel management companies, online booking sites, online booking tools in the corporate space, corporate travel departments, consolidators. All of these groups are going to be now using AI and it’s going to really create new network effects and new inertia and new dynamics. If we just sit back and say, “We are going to use AI and it’s going to work like this.” We may be applying it to a context that exists today but may not exist two, three, four, five years from now. We need to think about that, which means one of the best ways we can do this is to enable buyers to go through the process. If we are not actively helping customers buy, like building a discipline around that in marketing and sales and being experts on it, we’re probably going to miss really important opportunities. Everything from the website experience to knowledge and education requirements that buyers have, peer and customer validation, customers have that ubiquitous access we talked about, they’re going to validate, they’re going to see a lot of what’s out there.
Rick Bradberry: They’re going to want to get your product information readily accessible, like show it to me, give it to me, make it available. Don’t make me wait, don’t make me hunt, don’t make this painful or difficult. That’s what the buyer is really begging for in this equation as we enable them. They want to get into your product sooner, product trials or a sandbox or help me use it. I want to see it, I want to interact with it, I want to experience it. I don’t want to buy it and then find out later how it works or how it deploys or what problems it has that I didn’t foresee in advance. Oh no, that risk profile is not going to be something that’s attractive to buyers in this next super cycle decade of AI. Simplified pricing and contracting, buyers love that and they want to get into renewal and purchase pathways sooner. Do you really need me to interact with a person to have a conversation about something that I already want to do and could do on my own if you only made the pathway available to me? That’s what some of our buyers are asking for.
Rick Bradberry: So let’s build a new discipline around buyer enablement to help them move from one purchasing task to the other and push them through that rather than just saying, “I have content, I have education and I’m going to put it on my website. I hope you find it. Good luck.” That’s not really the way that’s going to work. Number three, implication for all of us, sellers will truly personalize customer interactions. Oh, we’ve talked about this one for like a decade, like personalization. How do we do that? How do we get more of that into the customer experience? Well, guess what? It got real. It got real in the last one or two years and now sellers will be able to do this. Let me give you two companies who are doing this really well. Spotify. How many Spotify users are there out there in the audience? Raise your hand. Big, big, big. Okay. That’s a pretty big group. I’m a Spotify user. Spotify, the app, is always listening to you. You’re not just listening to it. It’s listening to you.
Rick Bradberry: What you stream, what you play, how frequently, how you found it. It has an entire catalog in the background of tags that it uses around genre and mood and type. And it catalogs all of these and it uses AI to suggest. And the app constantly runs micro experiments to figure out, “Hey, I’m going to serve Rick up a song from an artist that I’m pretty sure he’s going to like, even though he doesn’t seem to play this one a lot. Because other users like Rick and Rick’s data suggests this one might be a real winner for him.” And serve it up. And oftentimes, it’s right. It’s like, “Oh, I don’t know this song, but I like it.” And then I feel like, “Wow, Spotify knows me.” Not in a freaky way, because that can happen too. But in a way that’s like, it’s expanding my experience and my field of vision. Spotify has grown 1,000% over the last 10 years, has over 600 million users and 14 billion in revenue. Partly because they have mastered this art of personalization to a really large audience of customers. Cisco, that may not be a name that you would initially say, “Hey, you’re a leader in personalization.” But let me tell you what Cisco does.
Rick Bradberry: Cisco uses AI, and both of these companies are using AI for personalization. Cisco is using it to better understand, okay, we have a big portfolio of B2B solutions. And our customers have a hard time making sense of it. Quite honestly, our own team has a hard time making sense of it. How do we do that? We are going to look at all of the signals and interactions, marketing contacts, about meetings we have with clients. We’re going to look at financial news and other updates about these prospect or current companies coming back in. We’re going to crunch all of that data. And we’re going to start making suggestions to the sales team. Kind of like Spotify. We think, based on all of this data, that this next action or this interaction or this deal should be on your radar. Because we’re seeing signal patterns that suggest that it’s the case. The Cisco team sellers didn’t want to embrace this right away. It was like, “I’m a successful seller. Do you really want me to go into this thing and it’s going to tell me what to do?” Well, here’s what happened. It started suggesting activities and the sales team realized that it could actually grow new business without sacrificing the quality and size of the current business that it had.
Rick Bradberry: And so it was easier for account reps to upsell and cross-sell across this network of existing clients. And the sales team became a big fan of that. Spotify, Cisco, and others. Some of you may know Pavilion, which is a community online. You can access Pavilion either online. You can become a member. You can see posts on LinkedIn. There’s a great quote from Sam Jacobs, who’s the founder and CEO of Pavilion. I interviewed him for this research and I said, “Hey Sam, what are you seeing? What do you think the world will look like when it comes to personalization?” And this is what he said. “Relevant and contextual information will improve the art of storytelling at scale for sales organizations.” He continued, “Right now, that is a skill trapped within the top 10% of salespeople.” So only your top 10% of sellers can do this storytelling in a way that’s compelling at scale. The other 90% of our sales team, they can’t do this. They can’t do it. And here’s what’s going to happen. Let me ask for another show of hands. How many of you have either been in or seen Waymo and Uber self-driving cars? Raise your hand if you’ve done that.
Rick Bradberry: Okay, that’s a pretty good turnout. Here’s what happens with those cars. Let’s say I’m in Las Vegas and let’s say I have 100 cars in my fleet. Each car is somewhere else picking up and dropping off different people all throughout the day. Some roads are the same, some roads are different. Each car though has its own unique experience throughout the day. Every car is learning. Every car is taking all of that digital and sensor information, all that video, and packing it in and learning each day. What went well for me? What didn’t go well? What was it like a near miss accident that I didn’t see coming, but had I had new information or better information, I could have avoided that. Or maybe something hit me, or maybe the car hit something else. Doesn’t happen very often, but let’s say it did. That car is going to learn and adapt and change and improve. But that’s not where the magic is. The magic is that one car is going to retrain all other of the 99 in the fleet so that every car’s learning gets spread through the entire fleet and every car is now that much smarter.
Rick Bradberry: You heard this concept about 100X this morning. Wow, every car is teaching every other car and then they are improving. Imagine what could happen in sales if every seller was having experience guided selling with that AI sales agent right at my side co-selling, learning, adapting, suggesting, and then taking what we do as a pair and teaching every other seller in our organization the same tips, techniques. That’s a real art. What Sam said, this is like storytelling. There’s a lot of art in this. Well, what if our art can be faster and smarter and more adaptive? All of a sudden you can take a rep who has less experience and you can bring them up and give them in-the-moment coaching in ways that you never could before. Marketing and sales will be a lot like these Waymo and Uber self-driving cars. Guaranteed.
Rick Bradberry: Next one, budgets. I say sales budgets here. Could be any budget. Budgets that are heavy on headcount will be light on results in the next decade. Actually, that theme came out this morning as well. We’ve often thought, “Hey, in order to scale, to grow, to do more, to accomplish more, we need to add more heads.” That’s natural. And we do need to add more heads in the future as we do that, but not to the same equation. It’s going to be a brand new equation. And we’re going to have to think first about process and technology deployment and context and interdependencies and all of those five characteristics that we talked about, about being networked and integrated, adaptive, accelerated, and whatnot. We’re going to have to build that in. It’s not going to be headcount first. No, it’s going to be a different equation first. And that’s how we need to start thinking about how to run my team. I was having a conversation right here at Outperform, and I was like, “Hey, you know, if it were me and I’m looking at this dynamic, I’m like, my team’s going to stay about flat, probably. I don’t think I’m really going to grow the team in the near future. It’ll be about flat.” What does that mean for me as AI takes some of the lift from me and from the team? It probably means that every person on the team needs to be really good. With a big team, I can have A players and B players. It actually works really well.
Rick Bradberry: With a smaller team, I probably need to think a lot more about what the composition and skill level of that team needs to be. And this will be for all functions in a business. I was working with a CFO recently. He said, “My board is riding me hard on coming up with a vision of what finance needs to look like in the next couple of years.” And we talked about this theme. Well, maybe you don’t need that team to build reports and deploy it. Maybe you take financial data and you push it into self-service to all the executives. Maybe you don’t need that offshore team to do some of that accounting work. Maybe AI takes some of the lift away. And so he too was thinking about those dynamics.
Rick Bradberry: Number five, this one I don’t think is on our radar. It wasn’t on mine until I did the research. And this theme kept coming up over and over. And that is that employment and income insecurity will rise among B2B teams, among all employees, really. I put sales in here because I do a lot of research around sales. And it was true for them. And it probably is more true for sellers because they live and die by successful or failed deals all the time. They live with a high degree of both income and employment insecurity every week, every month. In our Forrester Future of Work survey in 2024, we asked employees, “Hey, what do you think about automation and your level of nervousness around that?” 60% of employees said, they fear losing their job to automation in the next decade. 60%. That might be what some of your team members are thinking and feeling as we’re experimenting with and deploying AI and some other things. Be really conscious of that. There might be an emerging wellness crisis in pockets of our company’s employee base or our culture that we would otherwise miss. But deep down, there is some insecurity brewing among those team members.
Rick Bradberry: Number six, and we’re getting close to the end because I said there were seven, post-sale outcomes will matter more than they used to. Consumption-based pricing, usage-based pricing, there are lots of reasons why the post-sale matters more than ever. We talked about hyper-competition, AI-first companies. We talked about private equity and venture capital-backed companies. Wow, there’s going to be a lot of activity for us, something to really think through. We have to shore up our existing book of business with our existing customer base and make sure that they are getting value right now from the products and services that we offer and that they have a pathway to grow with us and be really successful in the future. We can’t just rely on net new deals coming in the door. That’s not going to be the model going forward. We have to spend a lot more time on post-sale. Marketing, customer success, sales, support, the post-sale experience has to be awesome in the next decade.
Rick Bradberry: The last one here, number seven, and you saw it coming, go-to-market teams, processes, and technologies will just continue to merge. We’re going to have to think about that. It’s not discrete functions that are only specialized in the future. It’s specialization plus integration in ways that are going to be more tight for the future. As we wrap up here, we talked about learning, practicing, applying, we all have to do that. The unique thing about this next period is that we are going to have to unlearn and then relearn some things. That will be most difficult for senior leaders who have a long history of learning and seeing patterns. The patterns are changing and we can’t rely on those same patterns anymore. We have to be more aggressive about unlearning, relearning, and then reconnecting to this learning process. You may get to the point where you feel like, “Hey, what should I do? I feel a little paralyzed by all of this.”
Rick Bradberry: The last thought that I leave you with is this. If you arrive at moments where you’re like, “I just don’t know where to focus, this is a rapidly changing world.” Just remember this. Customer obsession is the surest compass you can ever have. If you obsess about and focus on customers and help them attain value from what they buy from you and they have positive, impactful experiences doing so, that is the best thing you could possibly do in this new super cycle. Thank you so much. It was a pleasure being here and I wish you great success.