How Sales AI Shows True Opportunity Health 

Revenue Teams live or die by the opportunities they create and close. But, understanding the true health of a sales opportunity isn’t easy for reps. And it’s especially hard for managers and leaders.

Experienced A-reps understand deal health instinctively. But less experienced B and C players often struggle to understand the health of their deals. Furthermore, they struggle to accurately convey the health status to their managers and leaders for assistance. 

Why is that important? Managers can’t effectively coach what they don’t see or understand. The result of this lack of alignment is that managers often provide the wrong coaching guidance or don’t coach at all because they don’t know enough about the situation. 

Sales AI Fills in Missing Information 

If a sales manager or leader reviews a rep’s opportunities in CRM, they will get a bird’s eye view at best: opportunity name, estimated size, estimated close date, stage, etc. Maybe there are a few activities recorded, but probably not many. Certainly not enough to uncover the health of the opportunity.  

In situations like this, sales managers are stuck asking the rep. Five or ten questions later they start zeroing in on the health status of a single opportunity. But this takes lots of time per opportunity and severely limits the ground that they’re able to cover. Plus, the information provided is mostly from memory, with the rep’s opinion mixed in. Meaning it’s subjective and potentially not reliable.  

Sales AI collects, processes, and refines the raw activity between buying and selling teams. It fills in the data gaps in CRM, completing the sales activity picture. Where does it get all this activity and behavioral data? As we’ve all experienced, the data is not in CRM. It collects data from many sources like email and calendar, calling records, web visit records, web conferences, Sales Enablement systems, LinkedIn, and other social media platforms.  

Sales AI Paints a Clear Picture of Opportunity Health 

Once collected, Sales AI combines and recombines the data into useful information and insights. It turns cloudy, hard to understand sales situations into clear pictures for reps, managers, and leaders. The visibility gain is incredible. Here’s an example. 

The visibility gain helps reps and managers understand sales situations much more clearly, resulting in better sales execution across the board. 

Sales AI Deepens Opportunity Strategy Reviews 

Instead of spending the bulk of an opportunity strategy session trying to determine the health and status, we’re now diving quickly into strategy: what to do next, what new personas to target, what plays to run, etc. It deepens the conversations resulting in more relevant and more targeted action plans to move the deal forward.  

With a clear picture of opportunity health as a starting point, we can discuss and create a lot more opportunity plans. What’s that worth in terms of win rates?  

Sales AI Transforms Pipeline Reviews 

I’ve never met a sales rep or manager that actually enjoys pipeline reviews. I hear all the time, “They are painful, but necessary.” But are they necessary? At least in their current form.  

Pipeline reviews, in the traditional format of going down the list, skimming the surface, don’t do anything to move deals forward. So, managers and leaders conduct pipeline reviews more for reporting and accountability than for advancing sales to closed-win status. 

Sales AI brings the facts to the table, serving up the sales situation based on what sellers have actually done and how buyers have actually responded. As a result, pipeline reviews get much faster and more direct. It eliminates the questions used by mangers to uncover the situation, and there’s very little banter about the health of an opportunity because it’s right there on screen—staring you in the face.  

The result: much less time spent establishing status and accountability, and much more time talking about strategy and how to win the deals. 

Summary 

Opportunities are the bedrock of sales. Creating and closing opportunities is the reason sales teams exist. So, it just makes sense to do everything we can to understand our opportunities in the best way possible and use that information to prioritize our efforts and move these deals forward. Sales AI can now help immensely, improving our visibility and understanding of our opportunities and buying teams they represent. I encourage you to put Sales AI to work for you. It will change the way you sell for the better. 

Hope you have your best year ever. 

Pete McChrystal 

Accent Technologies is the first and only SaaS company to bring together Sales AI and Content Management in a true revenue enablement platform. We provide both sales and marketing with better visibility into the performance of their teams. This drives revenue through intelligent recommendations for complex sales scenarios and provides the data for rich analytics that calculate buyer energy and power better coaching and forecasting for sales management. Learn more about our solutions or request a LIVE DEMO to see it in action.