Salesforce released its annual “State of Sales” survey this week. The company surveys more than 5,500 sales professionals each year from around the world to gain insights on the pain points and opportunities facing sellers. This year, as in recent years, AI dominates the headspace, but other positive surprises were revealed as well.
The most positive news was that 79% of respondents said sales have increased over last year. As we fully cycle out of supply chain and other post-pandemic issues, this is not a huge surprise, but positive nonetheless. Challenges still remain for sellers, as they cited changing customer needs and expectations, competition with other businesses, lingering supply chain issues, macroeconomic conditions, and inadequate or ineffective tools/technology as their biggest barriers to success.
Perhaps less surprising was the fact that while 81% of respondents claim to be using AI in some form today - sellers still cited that up to 70% of their time is spent on non-selling activities. There seems to be a lag between AI becoming the productivity booster vendors are claiming it to be.
Lack of budget, headcount, and training to effectively implement AI were the main reasons cited by those not seeing strong returns from AI investment to date. Nearly a third of RevOps professionals also have concerns about data security, completeness, and accuracy. The same amount expressed concerns about having sufficient human oversight of AI — for example, monitoring AI outputs to ensure they’re correct. RevOps respondents also pointed to customer distrust as a common obstacle they've faced while implementing AI. Only 55% of business buyers trust AI to be as accurate as a human, according to survey results.
While AI may not be a silver bullet, the survey did note that 83% of sales teams with AI saw revenue growth in the past year — versus 66% of teams without AI.
For those looking to improve upon existing AI investment, or just getting started - RevOps teams have the ability to take a more strategic and phased approach to where AI should be implemented. They can work with IT to provide both the training and guardrails that improve usage, effectiveness and security. RevOps leaders need to be a critical stakeholder when building out strategy, evaluating technology, and providing effective rollouts of AI to sales people as part of a larger enablement initiative.
