Ensuring AI Adoption (Sold With AI - Edition 13)

Technology adoption is never easy with sales teams; AI adoption is harder. This post suggests a few methods to help Sales teams adopt AI (and technology in general).

Every organization and every function has a vexing problem when it comes to their AI initiatives.

Adoption.

But nowhere else is this problem more vexing than in Sales. Most salespeople almost seem allergic to new technology.

Why does this happen? And is this particularly an ‘AI problem’? Not really. This problem has existed in Sales forever. Ask ten organizations using Salesforce how effectively their reps use Salesforce, and seven of them will have significant problems with proper usage of Salesforce. For five out of the ten, the usage would likely be poor, or worse.

The core reason for this is simple. Technology often means change. And change is universally hard. The bigger the change, the harder it is for people to adopt. 

Why then do some functions adopt technology more easily? Engineering, for example, is often a fast adopter of technology.

This boils down to alignment of incentives. Humans are incentive driven creatures. In Engineering for example, an early adopter of a new technology would often be seen as ‘cool’. And that itself is a strong incentive for someone to adopt new technology, before any material gains even come into play.

However, in Sales, there is no such incentive. Money is the primary incentive. Even ‘recognition’ (which can be a strong incentive), is often tied to money. You don’t make ‘President’s Club’ because you adopted technology before others. You make it there because you hit your quota out of the park.

This lack of adoption is a bigger problem than sales leaders realize. Technology, in many ways, is the highest leverage instrument available to man, and the lack of will to exercise this instrument amounts to choosing to fight a sword-wielding opponent with bare hands. Or a gun-wielding opponent with a sword. 

We all know how that turns out. 

What therefore can sales, sales enablement and revenue operations leaders do to promote adoption?

A few things, it turns out.

Make ‘Adoption’ a key metric

I speak to dozens of sales leaders every week. And one question anyone barely ever asks is “what is Humantic AI’s adoption rate?”. Most leaders cite ‘adoption’ as a key concern, but they never use it as a metric to decide which products to adopt. Most of the questions tend to be around ROI, followed by ‘what/how’, compliance, cost, complexity etc.

I recommend that you make it one of your key questions. A product with 70% adoption and 15% average increase in win rates is more valuable than one with 30% adoption and 25% average increase in win rates.

‘Orchestrate’ tools and technology

If you ask a sales team “how many tools do you use?”, around 50-60% tend to say “we have way too many tools”. So do 1 out of 2 teams really have too many tools?

Given how sub-optimally technology is used in sales, I am pretty sure that is not the case. 

More often, the case is that the tools are not orchestrated well. That is, they are not pieced together in a way to not overwhelm the users. Put differently, they are lumped together in a way that they overwhelm the users (and the managers) of those tools.

This is a bigger topic, but a good thumb rule is to ensure that a user should have no more than one primary ‘workflow’ tool (this is often the CRM for AEs, and SEP for SDRs) for a given need; 1-2 ‘data’ tools for a given use case (ZoomInfo and Sales Nav for finding right stakeholders/their info) and 1-3 ‘intelligence’ tools (only if embedded inside the workflow or data tools, or running in the background). And for one kind of activity, they should not need to use more than 3 tools.

Problems arise when users have to use more than 3 tools at the same time, or input data into more than one tool. You will be surprised to see how often that happens.

Recognize & celebrate technology adopters

One of our customers, a mid-sized Unified Telephony company, instituted small awards for those using the new tools most actively. Within the span of a couple of weeks, there was a visible jump in adoption. Salespeople, it turns out, are more competitive than average employees, and a chance to show up on the top of a list is something that they get excited about.

What if your top adopters of technology were also eligible for the next ‘President’s Club’ and that trip to Cabo?

Prioritize ‘frictionless’ technology

At Humantic AI, we have a core product development principle - ‘bring product to the user, not the user to the product’.

What does it mean? It means that we have built the product in such a way that the user barely ever needs to come outside of their ‘flow of work’ (as Sandler’s former CEO Dave Mattson calls it). They can access Humantic insights inside LinkedIn, their CRM, Email, Calendar, SEP and more. This makes new product adoption extremely easy as there is no ‘behavior change’ involved for the salesperson. 

A few sales AI products have built browser extensions etc. to facilitate this, but very few tools adopt this mindset holistically. 

When evaluating new technology, you should care about this. A lot. 

Tie tools to results

While leaders spend considerable time analyzing the ROI of tools during evaluation, that visibility often does not percolate down to the salesforce. Salespeople do not know why they are being asked to adopt a particular tool. And when they do not know what is in it for them (a.k.a. the incentive), they subconsciously tend to stay away from those new tools.

However, when Sales Enablement or Revenue Operations teams take the time to help salespeople understand what they will stand to gain, it becomes relatively easier to drive adoption.

Training

I have seen too many cases where leaders think that training is a waste of their team’s valuable time. Even if they are open to using tools, they seem to believe that their job is to put tools into the reps’ hands. And after that, it is between the tool and the rep to fight and figure it out.

Even though tools today are a lot easier to use than 10 years ago, it is only the basic functionality that is often easy to use. More advanced functionality (which literally every tool offers) is too often not as visible and requires some level of training and education. 

Expecting advanced results without training is like expecting that just handing a good driver a fast car is enough to make them go fast. One could not be more wrong.

Leading from the front

From Alexander The Great to General Patton, there has never been a legendary army that hasn’t had a leader lead from the front.

Too many sales leaders still expect their teams to use tools that they never use themselves. It’s a given that not every tool makes sense for their leaders to use, but there are enough that do.

More often than once, I have seen an instant change in tool’s adoption when the leaders used the tool and shared personal examples of success with their team.

Summary

Sales/Sales Enablement/Revenue/Revenue Ops leaders have multiple methods available to them to increase adoption. No team needs to adopt all the methods; leaders should see which methods are more relevant in their context and accordingly use those methods to increase adoption of technology.

However, leaders should also keep in mind that at the end of the day, whatever they do, not everyone will adopt new technology easily. My experience says that the ratio of heavy-adopters to light-adopters to non-adopters is usually 33:33:33. There are teams that are great at adopting technology and that ratio can go up to 50:30:20. 

I have seen it go down, but I have never seen a team where at least 20% of the reps are not absolute laggards.