As the pioneer and leader in AI-powered account intelligence, we have an inside view into the state of transformational AI’s use in Sales. That’s because every new user who creates a Poggio account also completes a survey that helps us understand where GTM teams are spending their time, statistics about their processes, and the state of their account intelligence prior to deploying Poggio.
This is a fully anonymized survey across thousands of enterprise revenue leaders and their GTM teams, including AEs, BDRs, SDRs, AMs, CSMs, and other customer-facing titles. Approximately 65% of these sellers are at public companies, and the remaining 35% are Pre-IPO or private equity owned. The survey results are pretty revealing in terms of both seller behaviors and the critical need for AI-powered account intelligence and tailored POVs (points of view) at scale.
Value framework adherence & POV creation
A stunning 2.9% of sellers admitted never following their company’s prescribed value selling framework while another 35.8% only sometimes follow it.
That’s nearly 40% of sellers who never or only sometimes follow their company’s sales methodology; methodologies and value frameworks like Command of Message, MEDDPICC, value pyramids, and 3 Whys that were designed specifically to position GTM teams to best sell and support customers.
The numbers are similar when looking at how often sellers come prepared to sales calls with an informed POV about the customer’s business to help differentiate their pitch from competitors.
Here 2.6% of sellers admitted to never showing up with an informed POV while 25.3% indicated they only sometimes show up with an informed POV.
That’s nearly 30% of sellers who show up to customer meetings some or all of the time without a tailored POV about their customer’s business—their priorities, needs, and challenges, and how they help uniquely solve them.
It’s no wonder that prospects are ignoring emails, phone calls, and LinkedIn outreach. Without a tailored POV, sellers all sound alike, showing up as vendors selling commodities, not as strategic partners with solutions.
Territory changes contribute to the deficiency
When you look at the percentage of a seller’s territory that was new to them in the last 90 days, it’s not surprising that they aren’t showing up with tailored POVs.
More than 58% of respondents noted that three quarters or more (75.7%) of their territory had changed in the last 90 days.
The percentage reaches nearly 90% of respondents who have had at least 25% of their territory over that same period.
That’s a lot of disruption to contend with, particularly without a trusted authority or system of record available to all sellers that continually maintains, auto-updates, and self-refines the account intelligence that underpins their POVs. Without always current, always relevant insights on each customer, it’s hard to create a POV that builds credibility, trust, relevancy, and urgency with customers.
Time, skill, and expertise make POV creation really hard
The reality is that rep coverage ranges from a few strategic accounts to hundreds. Researching just one can take days. Finding all relevant data across thousands of sources is hard. Turning that research into a winning point of view is really hard. Doing this across an entire book of business is impossible.
The time, skill, and expertise involved typically results in account plans getting done once a year and, then quickly growing stale. When sellers leave or territories change, the process starts all over again.
This complexity makes seller responses to our survey question on the amount of time it takes them to create a POV unsurprising, as well.
While nearly 20% can create an informed POV in an hour or less, more than 70% take up to 8 hours, while nearly 10% take more than 8 hours.
POV impact on deal cycles
Perhaps then it’s also no surprise that 35.4% of revenue leaders in the same, pre-Poggio survey noted that less than 25% of their qualified leads make it beyond the discovery stage. A whopping 81.6% of revenue leaders noted that 50% or less of their qualified leads advance on.
The good news? Leading CROs are already deploying AI and achieving enterprise value by building org-wide competency around account intelligence to unlock value selling at scale.
These CROs are enabling their teams with deep knowledge about customers—their priorities, needs, and challenges, and how their platforms, products, and services uniquely solve them. This is helping sellers to ensure relevance at every stage of the customer lifecycle to drive both business and customer success.
What matters in a POV, according to sellers
When researching an account to create a winning POV, sellers noted the top 5 (+1) things they want to know about a customer before a call:
- Business priorities and strategic initiatives
- Current technology stack and infrastructure
- Pain points and challenges
- Company financial health and news
- Key stakeholders and decision makers
- Competitive landscape and incumbent solutions
Fortunately, this is all customer intel that is delivered within an AI-powered account intelligence platform. When paired with the context of an organization’s GTM motion, value framework, positioning and messaging, case studies, compete battlecards, and other enablement content inside the platform, sellers show up smarter than competitors and win.
That’s because they are positioned to speak in the customer’s language, confidently lead with their solution’s unique value, and attach to the customer’s top priority—so customers buy, buy their solution, and buy it now.
Next steps
Revenue leaders looking to ensure their GTM teams show up to every customer conversation with a tailored POV can start a trial of Poggio today.
