General AI does not work for sales

"Because we were so integrated with our partners, with SAP, depending a lot of the sales on the way that we work together with our most important partner, to go from that to becoming a professional sales organization was quite a big step."

When big partners brings you most of your deals, they're also bringing the story, the credibility and the qualifying work that comes with them. You deliver well, the numbers look fine, but you've kind of built a delivery business.

1) The reality before:

"Our portfolio is very broad, but it was also set up in a bit of a chaotic way. Sometimes there was even conflicting information."

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Conflicting information actually does more damage than missing information. If something simply isn't written down, a seller goes and finds it somewhere else and gets on with their day. But if there are two versions of the same answer, or not even the same answer, you lose trust in your won system. And they'll just message the colleague who closed something similar last year.

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"We had a lot of use cases, especially in the cross-industry, where we could say, 'Oh, but we did this, and we did that.' Yet there was no documentation whatsoever."

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For services business, a lot of what you're selling is evidence that you've done this before. And we all know in this industry, how important reference cases are. Every project that finishes without leaving a trace is a piece of proof that quietly disappears as soon as the team moves on to the next thing.

2) What about MS Copilot and SharePoint?

Anyone who has tried to fix this internally knows which two suggestions come up first, and msg global got both of them:

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"Of course, our internal IT said, 'What about SharePoint?' However, we tried that already, and it is not that easy."

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"Is Copilot really the right tool? Because it's quite a generic tool. Would it work for us, for our specific problem relating to sales, to marketing, to lead generation?"

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And, it turns out, it's harder than you think.

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"You probably need to build things on top of it to really make it work."

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Both are a starting point rather than a finished thing, and everything that would make them useful for specifically selling, you'd have to build yourself. Managing your sales feedback, portfolio, customer feedback, ... So the work comes back to you, and it usually lands on whichever internal team has the least time and the least authority to see it through.

3) Sales takes over the pre-sales role

This is where it stops being about tidying up information and starts being about growth.

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"Sales is really in the driving seat, prepares fully for the conversion of the lead, and then comes with an offering and really contacts that customer for the first time, without the involvement of pre-sales."

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In this kind of selling, the thing holding you back most is the handful of technical people who have to sit in on the meetings, because sales can't answer the hard questions on their own. Every meeting those people have to attend is a meeting the company can only have one of at a time, so how fast you grow ends up being decided by their calendars rather than by your market.

We've seen the same thing at Plat4mation, where it worked out as a 30% reduction in pre-sales cost.

4) 3X sales output increase

Four or five people covering ground that would once have needed fifteen, and nobody is working longer hours to manage it. This skyrocketed adoption too.

Salespeople will use anything that makes their next meeting easier, and they'll quietly stop using everything else somewhere around the second quarter, whatever the rollout plan said.

The same shift showed up in how quickly they could get a new service into the hands of the team.

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"In the old days, just to introduce a new service, it would take sometimes weeks or even months."

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"[now] it would take basically less than a day to load everything up into uman, to test it, to see whether it works fine, and then it's basically ready to be sold and to be adjusted where needed."

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Your product staff finishes something, and then some amount of time passes before anyone can go out and sell it. And then again, take a while to give feedback or gather the data for that feedback analysis.

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Peter also puts his finger on the reason these systems usually fall over.

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"You need to remember as well that salespeople like to do sales, they don't like to document."

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Common knowledge, which is why uman fixes this.

• CRM integration
• Auto draft mails and call scripts
• Proposition drafts
• Sales team reporting
• Portfolio reporting
• ... more on uman.ai

None of our customer's user's asked to document anything, and the documentation happens regardless.

5) Quote: 'An explosion in revenue'

"In the countries where we actively use uman, if you see the explosion of our revenue in this area, it's quite big, even if you're considering that we only went into the Nordics region quite recently."

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"It really helps us to drive sales, which normally we couldn't do."

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Those are the countries where it's actually been rolled out, and the rest of the region isn't onboarded yet. He brings up the Nordics himself without being asked, which people tend to only do when the number holds up even once you've taken the caveat into account.

Sales simply wasn't set up to run before, because everything it needed to know was sitting with people who could only be in one place at a time. Now that they have a reliable partner in uman, they can scale without dramatically increasing headcount.

And we'll leave it at that.

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