One of the benefits of the analyst’s role at Forrester is engaging with B2B leaders to understand their business challenges and priorities. This month, I was fortunate to spend time in person with a broad range of sales and operations leaders at Forrester’s B2B Summit EMEA and other events in London. Much of the conversations focused around how generative AI (genAI) is impacting and will impact go-to-market (GTM) efforts, specifically within sales. I came away from these valuable discussions with three clear conclusions:
1) Revenue leaders are confused by the pace of change around genAI.
2) Leaders are bombarded and frequently bamboozled by vendor hype around their new AI ‘game-changer’ for sales.
3) Sales and operations leaders are slow and hesitant to react because they lack a clear AI strategy — or even a broader technology strategy — to help understand AI changes and guide their decision making.
Keeping up with the pace of AI change
Busy executives face the challenge of keeping up-to-date with the rapid changes in genAI, including the relentless pace of large language model innovations from Anthropic, OpenAI, Microsoft, and others. They must understand these changes and their broad implications, while addressing their own concerns (and those of others) about being left behind. They share concerns about other functions in their organizations moving faster, or competitors and peers finding ways to leverage AI innovation for competitive differentiation. This sense of ‘FOMO’ among revenue leaders is also partly cultivated by the messaging from providers of sales tech selling to these personas.
AI snake oil messaging is core to sales confusion
Several leaders expressed their frustration with the ambiguity around what’s being defined as AI across sales tech by providers. For example, leaders are cynical about attempts to dress up basic rule-based functionality as AI agents by providers who are desperate to differentiate in the market and garner the attention of sales leaders — think of it as ‘agent washing‘. As a result, revenue leaders are struggling to separate fact from fiction, or separate tomorrow’s vision (e.g., fully autonomous multi-agent workflows) from today’s reality (most newly launched agents are simple reflex models responding to triggers with predefined responses).
AI ambiguity distracts from strategic clarity
Across these conversations, it became obvious that there was frequently an absence of strategy, not just in terms of AI, but more broadly with regards to technology management and the need to envision, design, deliver, and evolve solutions that meet the changing needs of B2B organizations. The ambiguity around AI and resulting market confusion isn’t helping; it distracts sales leadership from focusing on strategic foundations. In what is a highly confusing and fast-paced environment, AI creates new pressure for impactful technology leadership in operations to help guide GTM AI investment.
Taking control of your AI and tech strategy
It’s critical that revenue leaders take ownership for developing a proactive strategy for applying AI for performance impact. It’s also critical to separate reality from vision (or hype) in order to make the right decisions moving forward. Don’t wait for others in your organization to address your needs and use cases for you. Forrester recommends three steps to get started:
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- Put rev ops in charge of your go-to-market AI strategy. Rev ops is the glue across GTM functions — its primary purpose is to unify data, insights, technology, and processes. Rev ops is ideally positioned to leverage AI to enable the unification of buyer and customer orchestration efforts.
- Help elevate the tech capabilities of your ops team. Like any other tech, AI must deliver value, from enhancing buyer experiences and perceptions of value to transforming frontline productivity and effectiveness. Delivering against this requires operations teams to not only balance technical capabilities with delivery and management, but also requires strategic vision, change management, and the ability to demonstrate and communicate investment value.
- Define and align your AI themes and use cases. Creating key themes for AI provides an opportunity to define your goals and objectives clearly, align with strategic initiatives, and avoid the many distractions surrounding AI. Define and prioritize your specific use cases under themes to provide clarity and purpose for communicating to stakeholders and building support and buy-in.
If you could do with help bringing clarity to your understanding of AI’s impact on sales or if you’d like to talk further about your AI or tech strategy, please reach out to me at [email protected].