[0:00]For the longest time, the big bets we make when running sales have been familiar. Want growth? Great. We'll hire more reps. Less attrition? Sure, we'll adjust coverage and comp. More consistent execution? No problem. We'll upskill the team. But these big bets aren't working as well as they used to. I don't need to tell y'all how hard it's getting out there, but y'all have told us that it's just getting harder to close deals. And I could pull up a thousand data points to show you how it's getting hard in your numbers, but just take a look across the whole profession. How sales cycles have gone up every year over the last three years. I know you're feeling this. And every one of those big bets that we make, they're governed by limitations in capital, in bureaucracy. In market conditions, tariffs, anyone? The capacity of our talent and what our technology is realistically capable of. Guess what, folks, we're waking up in a whole new world. Because you're getting questions that you've never been asked before. Your boards, customers, CEOs, your executive peers, they're all putting pressure on sales to figure out how to chase a brand new revenue productivity frontier. And I know you're feeling the pressure. because you're getting questions like, can we raise quota from two to three million or expand our management ratios from six reps per manager to twelve reps per manager? Or, can we grow through go-to market unity so we can pursue new channels, address these ballooning costs of sales and address these crazy shifting buying preferences? Because guess what? That means that everyone from IT, finance, marketing, product, everyone's gotten an opinion on how to run sales now. And we're expected to drive these results through AI transformation. Because now your limited sales ops enablement strategy teams, we have to do more with less, all of this and hit your number. Now, the skeptics in the room might feel a little overwhelmed by this situation. But the optimists see this as a rare leadership opportunity. When people are under pressure, they do awesome things, and you are under pressure. That means you get to reinvent the playbook of what it means to run sales, change the DNA. And some of your competitors may already be on this journey, and perhaps that's why they're taking cash out of your pocket. Because the big bets for this moment, they're going to feel like the Industrial Revolution at the speed of COVID. Get a load of this guy, Industrial Revolution at the speed of Covid, what the heck are you talking about? All right, let me break this down for you. We're going to start with the speed of COVID. Because at that time, we transformed how we worked in days and weeks, not years. Yes, the circumstances were a little bit different, but you did it, in days and weeks, not years. And in sales, we can't afford to transform at any slower pace, because after all, you still have to, say it with me now, hit your number. Now we're going to get to the Industrial Revolution part. To my history buffs in the room, and I know you're out there, I'm a little sorry for what I'm about to do here, okay? So, during the Industrial Revolution, capitalists deconstructed craftsmanship and rebuilt it into manufactured assembly lines powered by steam engine. A new way of producing stuff, getting around, feeding people. Also, a new way to make money. But a whole lot of stuff had to swirl around in order for this to actually happen. We needed shifts in labor, meaning there was a bunch of available assembly line talent. Economics, meaning there was actual demand for the products as cities grew. Natural resources, meaning the supply chains necessary from the materials that were needed to power this catalyst of a steam engine. And that's what gave us that unprecedented mechanization and efficiency. Two things, folks. One, our steam engine for knowledge work has arrived, and it's called Agentic AI. And taking advantage of it means you're the leaders who get to deconstruct the knowledge of running sales to reinvent operations with AI. Now, quick flyover on this. Agentic AI is an entity that's capable of making a plan, data-driven decisions, and executing on those decisions.
[5:01]Within whatever environment we give it permission to. This technology works 24/7. It's not going to quit for more compensation, and it's going to do literally whatever you ask it to do. And what makes it different is that it's capable of having discretion over how it attains the goals we give it. That means your technology doesn't work in this if this, then that automation world anymore. It's if this, then decide what to do.
[5:31]And that's what makes Agentic AI feel so instantaneous for its value. And just like the Industrial Revolution, there's a similar set of factors swirling all around for the arrival of Agentic AI and B2B sales. We have limitations of exhausted talent, now buttressed by digital labor. We have blown up costs of sales, shifting buying preferences, and a highly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous market environment. Again, tariffs, anyone? We have an endless amount of information and data that's just sitting there waiting to be taken advantage of. And Agentic AI that gives us the power to deconstruct the craftsmanship of sales and rebuild it into a new way of working. Folks, just like the Industrial Revolution, it's the confluence of all these trends that tells us this isn't just a blip in time, this is the beginning of something so much bigger. This is the dawn of the Great Sales Awakening. Chasing a new revenue productivity frontier, deconstruct knowledge to reinvent operations with AI, and transforming in days and weeks, not years. We see the next one to two years, so in our world, four to eight quarters, as the window to get a competitive advantage with this technology, because we think it's going to be mainstream in three to five. Now, some of you may be thinking, Oh, great, here comes Gartner with another AI presentation. Look, I get it. We've been hammering you with this for years now. And for some of you, generative AI has been a little bit disappointing. And that's fair. But for others of you, you're twice as likely to acquire customers with GenAI-assisted solution configurations are 2.1x more likely to acquire customers.
[7:33]I'm pretty sure that's the job. The models keep getting better. We keep getting smarter in how to use it. Just to give you some context, I was at a vendor customer advisory board recently, and one of the product leaders said, As a product team, they're just beginning to understand what these models are capable of. We are early, early, early in the Great Sales Awakening. And yet, some of you may be listening to me right now and thinking, my company, not AI forward. This, not my job, and you've already washed your hands in my message. You're missing the point, because the Great Sales Awakening isn't about your company, folks, it's about you, the leaders. And what kind of leader you want to be with this opportunity. Nobody in the Industrial Revolution stopped and said, My God, Margaret, it's the start of the Industrial Revolution. They said, My God, Margaret, let's go make some money. You're here in this conference, in this room right now with eyes wide open. And so the question is, in the Great Sales Awakening, what kind of leader will you choose to be? To your customers, to your executive peers, in marketing, finance, IT, your CEO, your board or everyone that reports to you. If you see this moment for the tremendous opportunity it really is, then you're about to go through a period of massive personal and professional growth. And that should scare you. But that fear you feel inside, that is the invigorated feeling of being alive that tells you how awesome it is to be a leader right now. So we're going to give you three big bets you get to make as leaders in the Great Sales Awakening. So, first, you get to set the tone as leaders to chase that new revenue productivity frontier. Next, you get to lead the organization to become agentic by deconstructing work to rebuild it into something new with AI. And you get to set the future fit talent strategy that's ready to transform in days and weeks, not years. So, our first big bet is a bet on ourselves, our capacity to lead and secure the resources we need. I recently had a chief sales officer meeting, amazing CSO, by the way, and he was all of a sudden very overwhelmed by all things AI. Because the CEO had called him and said, she was upset that he personally didn't feel ownership and accountability and urgency to drive a new way of running things through AI. Not the company level, just personally. And I have a feeling that might resonate with nine out of ten of you, because that's what it says in our data. None of you got to where you are for being AI savvy, so it totally makes sense what we're seeing here. But I did find it more surprising that only one out of four sales leaders find themselves accountable to AI initiatives, especially when accountability is our thing. As a leader in an AI era, we get to get more AI savvy, so that we can incredibly command the resources we need to chase that new productivity frontier. So, you know what? Let's start right now. Why not? huh? Let's show me your hands. How many people here consider themselves one out of five? One being like a complete novice, five being a total expert. By the way, I did this one preparing for the keynote and someone said, is there an option less than one? So, raise your hands. How many ones do I have in the house? Ones? Twos? Twos, threes, threes. Lot of threes. Lot of threes. Fours? Okay. fours, fives? Fives. All right. I look forward to your feedback, fours and fives. Everyone below a three, I'm going to try and get you up a notch in the next five minutes. So let's start our micro segment. Agentic AI in five minutes or less. So, here we go. Agentic AI is goal-driven software that's been given permission by the company to make decisions and take action. And it uses reasoning models to plan, and then uses tools to execute the plan. And so we're going to explore what this means by executing the most classic of frontline workflows, the account plan. So, the goal of an AI agent is to create a killer account plan. So let's say an account manager gets a new account assigned. That is a trigger to activate the account plan agent. So, now it's going to use its knowledge and to create an account plan that looks like the account plan of our best people, because we taught it how it does that work. And so then it's going to use its reasoning capabilities made possible by all these generative AI models we've been talking about for the last two and a half years, in order to develop a custom account plan for this account. And so it's going to use all its tools to access the information, data, and system it needs in order to pull it all together. And it's going to use its capacity for taking action to execute all while referring back to its context, reasons, plans and tools along the way. So let's talk about what that really means here. That might mean gathering CRM and service records, industry reports, competitor analysis. What about feedback from all the last ten, twenty deals we've tried at this account, all packaged up into a beautiful 80%, 90% complete dossier for an account manager in seconds? So when we unpack what this means more broadly, Agentic AI shifts how we think about operating. Because now we can rely on technology to scale knowledge, meaning we're codifying the top performer's account planning tradecraft for everyone to benefit from. It makes execution more repeatable, meaning now we can raise our standards of execution at every level, as a rep, as a leader. And speed. I mean, imagine if this took place for every account in your book of business in seconds. How that changes how you think about the start of the year when everyone gets their book. We get to spend more time thinking about the actual execution of the account plan, which has always been the hard part in the first place. Agentic AI gives us a totally new lens on how we look at the fundamentals of sales. And that concludes the AI agents in five minutes or less segment. Now we get to go back to our regular scheduled programming. If you feel like you moved up a notch, I'm glad to hear it. So all that knowledge is completely useless if we don't put it to work. So there's three practical things you get to do as a leader in an AI era. Number one, you set the pace. Number two, you leave the organization to design a transformation portfolio, and number three, you adapt your operating rhythm to drive results. So, setting your pace, as operators, we're actually stuck between two races, the AI vendor race and the AI outcomes race. The vendor race is manifesting as CEOs of some of the biggest tech companies in the world, battling it out in the media for Wall Street to debate the merits of. And this creates a tremendous amount of FOMO and hype, not great for planning. That's not the race you're running. You're running an AI outcomes race that can only go as fast as your people process tech and data in your company. And so when setting your pace, we tend to see two paces: AI-steady and AI-accelerated. So the steady sales team is focused on time-savings. We're trying to basically do what we already do just a little bit faster, but our ambitions for AI are more modest. The accelerated team is more focused on growth and cost savings. Their ambitions are to be AI-first, to reinvent how they work, and they're not afraid to take risks. The point here, folks, is confirming your pace is a exercise in wrestling back the narrative of how fast we're running as leaders in sales. And it gives you clarity to manage up, to manage sideways and manage down. So, what are we actually doing, though? That's where the sales AI transform portfolio, it gives us a chance to turn an ambition into a practical plan. And it's much more strategic than just building a roadmap. This is where our revenue times transformation matrix comes into play, or RxT. The whole point here is this can help you organize these myriad AI investments you might want to pursue based on cost, value, and risk. So on the X axis of the framework is transformation, and on the Y axis of the framework is revenue impact or expected impact on running revenue. And there's three ways to think about your investments here. The first is your defend investments. You can think of these as primarily investing in time savings. You can think of this also as kind of like, I'm just trying to defend my market position with our AI investments. Next is extend. This is where our AI investments have a direct line impact on leading indicators of growth or significant cost of sale reductions. And this is really about extending your market position. And last is upend. And upend is where we're straight up upending ourselves. We're pursuing self-disruption where significant transformation begets significant revenue opportunity. And so there's two ways to use this framework. One is as a decision framework on where to invest, but the second is how to communicate your vision. And so naturally, different portfolios yield different results. And we tend to see three types. The first is the FOMO. Our data says this is about six out of ten of you. And the FOMO is a classic AI steady pace where about 80% of our AI initiatives are focused on time savings with some modest playful exploration of impact on growth and cost savings. This is good for organizations that are a little bit more um, hesitant. They just want to show quick results, but our long-term ambitions are modest. Next is the best return portfolio. This is about three out of ten of you. And so the premise here is that 80% of our investments are in the extend bucket. And this is a really solid path to direct revenue impact, because you're trying to take on what's possible with the tech today, but also embracing the challenges of making it work at scale. And last is the disruptor. This is about one out of ten of you. And this is really reserved for industries that are rapidly being disrupted by AI in general. Organizations that have a really heavy top-down investment and interest in AI transformation. The whole premise here, folks, is this portfolio-based approach gives you a new way to organize how you talk about AI. So now you can say something to the effect of, here's the pace we set for our AI outcomes. Here's our portfolio of defend, extend, upend investments, and here's how it connects to our big goals for the year. We've turned our portfolio into a narrative. And I know, we love a good narrative in sales. But a narrative isn't what gets the job done. People do. And so our last pillar of leadership in an AI era requires us to play with our most precious resource of all, our time. So to quote my mother-in-law, you have to put your attention on your intention. Look, here's the point. What we've seen from sales leaders really driving results is that they're not letting this significant opportunity slip through their fingers with hope and luck. They're wrestling it and saying, I'm going to make sure that we're doing the right thing, placing the right bets, and we're winning with AI. And so just to give you an example of what this means, we have clients where the sales leaders are getting twice a month AI updates from their teams that are running those programs. And the teams that are actually executing the programs are meeting two to three times per week in order to get the work done to execute, report, adjust. We see AI getting plenty of airtime at sales kickoff. We see it at our quarterly planning events where we're trying to reflect on maybe where we can reinvest or divest. And we see it asking big, big questions in our annual planning exercises, like what is its real impact on velocity, or our vendor strategy, or how is it going to impact quota next year? One company that's really living leadership in an AI era is Accenture. They have had made major AI investments starting in 2023, and the AI effort was really led by the sales excellence team. So think of it as like a hybrid of ops and enablement. And they were already on this path to finding ways to transform sales. And their goal was to embed AI across the whole selling process. So their portfolio was made up of about 12 different agents and growing. And you can see how they're all aligned to the key skills needed to increase sales, reduce costs, and improve effectiveness. I like to highlight the proposal builder and the presentation coach as great examples. Every agent in this portfolio has its own roadmap. So they can manage transformation in days and weeks, not years. The sales excellence team meets twice a month with their leadership team so they can make sure they're making good choices on where to scale up or retire an agent based on what they're seeing. And their results tell them this is working. For example, the proposals, they used to take eight hours to create. Now it takes four to finalize. That is a 50% productivity boost, and that's what gives them confidence to say, yeah, let's go in on the proposal builder. So when we zoom out, we can see all three pillars of what it means to be a leader in an AI era. All of these things are totally in your control as a leader. You don't have to spend any money to do the things we've talked about.
