Sold with AI - Edition 7 (The Shape Of Success)
Not all Sales AI solutions will work. But those that will - they will move the needle in an eye-popping way.
A lot is being written about the potential impact of AI today. IMF says that it will transform the global economy, McKinsey says that 3 out 4 workers (I would think they mean white collar) have already experimented with Generative AI and governments world over are gearing up to take on the challenges associated with the advent of widespread AI.
But ask anyone what’s the impact that they have seen today, and you get far fewer answers. In fact, during my hours of research on this topic, I could not find a single report that conclusively and objectively highlighted the impact of AI (especially Generative AI) that users and companies were already experiencing.
Does that mean that AI is all hogwash and this is all much ado about nothing?
To answer that question, we will have to dig deeper. And look at AI beyond Generative AI. It is perhaps too early to look for the widespread impact of Generative AI.
In 2021, Harvard Business Review published results from a survey done by CSO Insights to understand the impact of AI tools. They highlight two examples.
In the first one, SAP attributed €2B of its pipeline and €1B of its closed deals to its AI-enabled social selling program.
In the second one, Honeywell attributes $150 million in revenue to its forecasting & conversational intelligence AI.
At Humantic AI, we have seen significant and fast revenue impact, almost every time someone has managed to measure it well.
One of our customers, a NASDAQ listed SaaS company, recently measured its success with Humantic AI over the last 12 months. It compared the results between deals where Humantic AI was used vs. those where it wasn’t. The difference was stark. The SAL (Sales Accepted Lead) to Closed/Won for deals where Humantic AI was not used stood at 3.5%.
And those where Humantic AI was used?
4.8%.
That is 37% more revenue using an AI that hardly takes a minute per meeting/interaction, and costs only tens of thousands of dollars. A company adding $10M in new ARR in a year stands to make $13.7M instead. A scale not very different from what Honeywell and SAP saw - even with very different AI products.
And we have seen this pattern repeat. Again and again.
A Fortune 50 company piloting us reported $26M in new pipeline during a pilot that had 20 participants. For only a 1 month period!
Another Fortune 50 company that measures “engagement” of their Account Managers with customers saw a 6.5% increase in the score for the Account Managers that used Humantic AI - compared to 1.2% for Account Managers who did not!
Which brings me to my final point.
The impact of AI can be an order of magnitude more than that of traditional SaaS or cloud tools. Come to think of it, if I were to ask you what is the revenue impact of using Salesforce, or Hubspot, you will be hard-pressed to give an objective answer. A topic for another day, but those are workflow tools that became ‘must have’ in our minds because we badly needed a central system of record. They definitely help us manage effectively and quite likely help us impact revenue, but odds are that the impact would be significantly lesser. An order of magnitude lesser.
AI tools still haven’t proven themselves extensively, so I don’t recommend going all in right away. But I also do not recommend waiting it out, as many leaders tend to be doing. A good way to adopt AI is to adopt a ‘fast but gradual’ approach. Not every AI tool will move the revenue needle, but those that will, will move it significantly.
More than what we might be used to; or can even expect!
(If this is the first time you are receiving this newsletter, you can visit the ‘Sold with AI’ Substack for all the earlier editions.)