Aviso AI Featured In Harvard Business Review 2022

Aviso AI is thrilled to be featured in the latest Harvard Business Review Issue (November – December 2022). It is an in-depth article called “Can AI Really Help You Sell?” by the incredible team of Jim Dickie, Boris Groysberg, Benson P. Shapiro, and Barry Trailer. 

In this post, HBR unveils a new tool ‘Sales Success Matrix’ to help companies determine what kinds of AI for sales solutions they’re ready to implement. The article delves deeply into how Honeywell leveraged Aviso’s AI platform to build a unified global forecasting process. It highlights:

“Honeywell worked with Aviso, a provider of AI-powered CRM tools, to completely redesign its sales forecasting and pipeline management processes and systems. This example shows a road map to organizations that want to make their processes more agile.”

A Secret to Skyrocketing Sales

With the pandemic lingering and an economic downturn looming, B2B selling has become more unpredictable than ever. Buyer priorities are changing, leading to a tectonic shift in demand throughout the global economy. This “new normal” is different. It’s not a Black Swan event like the pandemic. It is a Gray Rhino, and it is here now. 

Yet, a few industry leaders like Honeywell are not just surviving but thriving with a unified view across their revenue operations and AI-based guidance.

HBR's sales success matrix revealed that the secret to achieving the topmost level of customer relationships and sales processes is a combination of strategic AI assistance and sales rep creativity.

HBR’s Sales Success Matrix

Source: Harvard Business Review

Best salespeople are trusted co-creators who provide unique insights and customize how they sell. Whether they carry a sales title, work as engineering entrepreneurs, or are change-makers improving the planet, the best salespeople are elevating beyond a zero-sum game.

And augmenting this creativity are the emerging AI technologies! 

An AI-powered single pane of glass consisting of revenue operations and intelligence capabilities provides all the information any GTM member needs in one go. With such information at their fingertips, they can make better decisions about allocating resources and close more sales. 

The article also pointed out, “because these tools’ efficacy increases over time, first movers will gain a meaningful and sustainable lead.” AI is quickly becoming the industry standard, and leaders who fail to adopt this technology will be left behind.

Building Deeper Customer Relationships With AI

AI can help sellers at different levels of organizations' relationships with customers. AI tools can improve performance across the spectrum, from simple AI, such as chatbots, to cutting-edge AI technologies that generate meaningful insights and recommendations.

“In addition to helping companies sell more, thoughtfully applied AI can help move customer relationships to a higher level.”

Conversational intelligence can unlock deeper customer relationships and help revenue leaders and sales teams shine a light on every critical virtual conversation with their prospects and customers.

The best AI for sales companies, like Aviso, provide every customer with the maximum customization and configurability they need while surfacing game-changing insights and actions.

Honeywell is a stellar example of companies using AI to give their sales teams better visibility into their customers’ needs and insights, thereby improving performance. 

Honeywell leverages Aviso’s conversational intelligence to get relationship insights that help their sales teams understand the true level of customer engagement. Aviso’s forensics on sales reps’ relationships and activities over time helps resolve single-threaded deal risks.

Reimagining the Sales Process With AI

AI can revolutionize the way businesses think about their sales processes. It can improve business performance across the spectrum, from low-end to top-level processes, by improving efficiency, providing coaching insights, and mining insights related to customer needs.

• Increased Efficiency: Emerging AI technologies can automate all the important and repetitive tasks — from data enrichment to contact auto-population — in your CRM. You don’t have to waste time chasing down reps to do the manual entry to streamline your processes and enhance productivity. 
• Effective Coaching: Conversational insights allow managers to drive sales readiness in reps by identifying the areas of improvement and coaching the reps the way sports coaches do: play-by-play with persona-based "nudges" along the way. AI tools, such as Aviso can also provide real-time coaching to reps and send AI-generated context-based alerts during the call to ensure they get the right response to seal the deal.
• Insights on Customer Needs: AI can help account executives drive direct interactions with customers, understand their sentiment and purchase intent, and win more deals faster. 

"Aviso’s tools helped sales managers spot trends and deal opportunities and identify obstacles to closing sales and take action to mitigate them. Later, Aviso introduced Conversational Intelligence, which captures information from calls, web meetings, and email, as a solution on its platform, giving Honeywell’s sales management deeper insights into the status of all forecast deals. The results have been overwhelmingly positive."

Conclusion

As businesses strive to remain competitive in today’s challenging selling environment, AI for sales will continue to play a key role. It will help companies tightly interlock buyer and seller journeys, navigate uncertainty, grow revenue faster, and align CROs, CFOs, and CIOs on reducing sales tool spending. 

But in order to achieve 98%+ forecast accuracy, uncanny buyer intent analysis, and CRM cost reduction, it is not enough to have bolt-ons to CRM. You need a true single pane of glass tool with integrated forecasting, conversational, activity, deal intelligence, and embedded collaboration, so reps and leaders are not burdened with one-off tools that promise a mile and deliver an inch.

Read HBR’s full article here: https://hbr.org/2022/11/can-ai-really-help-you-sell

Book a demo now to know more about how Aviso is helping companies be ready for the Gray Rhino environment.