When B2B buyers consider a purchase they spend just 17 percent of that time meeting with vendors. When they are comparing multiple suppliers‚ time spent with any one salesperson is 5 or 6 percent.
Self-directed B2B buyer online research has already changed procurement. IT vendors are less likely to be involved in solution assessment. Now, more disruptive changes are on the horizon.
By 2028, 60 percent of B2B seller work will be executed through conversational user interfaces via Generative Artificial Intelligence sales technologies -- that's up from less than 5 percent in 2023, according to Gartner.
Generative AI Market Development
"Sales operations leaders and their technology teams must prepare for the convergence of new forms of artificial intelligence, dynamic process automation, and reinvented deal-planning activities that will transform the sales function," said Adnan Zijadic, director analyst at Gartner.
According to the Gartner assessment, Generative AI (GenAI) stands to revolutionize how sales organizations capture, understand, and utilize an array of more complex data signals.
Before GenAI, sellers would review disparate data sources to inform their tactics and messaging. GenAI tools will enable sales leaders to streamline these processes, saving hours of B2B seller time.
"By combining external and internal data sources, and automating complex manual processes, GenAI will unlock a richer understanding of target audiences and usher in a new era of sales decision-making," said Zijadic.
This significant shift will see sales enablement technology moving from being just a tool to truly becoming a co-pilot teammate.
A combination of Sales Force Automation (SFA) data and GenAI prompt engineering will facilitate the next generation of dynamic process automation, which enables leaders to make real-time adjustments to market strategies.
GenAI can combine compelling buyer data and creativity to automate business value creation messaging, producing high-quality content. Gartner predicts that in the next two years, 30 percent of outbound messages from large organizations will be synthetically generated.
GenAI will also drive impactful process automation use cases through mobile and smart devices, desktop computers, and website bots.
Conversational experiences will be used to execute up to 14 percent of sales planning, 15 percent of customer meeting preparation, and 14 percent of deal negotiation.
Gartner analysts believe one of the most transformative use cases of GenAI will be process automation.
Gartner says that Chief Sales Officers should invest in GenAI readiness and data maturity to ensure they're prepared to embrace this highly impactful use case.
Successful adoption of GenAI adaptive sales and deal playbooks will provide new gains in sales productivity, presenting an opportunity to re-analyze how go-to-market (GTM) resources are allocated.
Outlook for GenAI Applications Growth
Gartner expects that the most significant impacts of GenAI on SFA platforms for planning purposes will materialize in the areas of guided selling, forecast management, visualization and analytics, integration or platform composability, and collaboration.
"In the next few years, Gartner expects 35 percent of Chief Revenue Officers to resource a centralized 'GenAI Operations' team as part of their GTM organization," said Zijadic.
That said, I believe GenAI applications will further advance self-directed B2B buyer enablement within the business technology vendor arena. The buyer's journey for complex B2B SaaS solutions can be accelerated by GenAI-assisted procurement offerings. This is a topic I'll continue to study and report on in my Digital Polymath magazine.