The Evolution of Sales
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I agree that sales is going to get a major overhaul. The vast majority of companies seem to be struggling with the sales and marketing tactics that worked 5-10 years ago, but are just wasting money now.
I believe content and short form video will dominate as the primary way people learn about products in B2B sale world. Companies need to start thinking more like Mr. Beast and produce high quality engaging educational content that their target audience wants to consume on a consistent basis. Who wants to read a 10-page white paper when you can watch an engaging video solving your problem while also showcasing the product? This type of content should drive most of the learning about products for the next decade or so.
Sentient SDR was conceived with this in mind. At some point you will exceed what you can learn from videos and want to (or reluctantly have to) speak with a company in some way. People will want to get through this process as quickly and painlessly as possible. The biggest issue I see is that companies are still slow to respond to these inbound buyers and make them wait hours or days to get a call scheduled with a poorly trained SDR (this role is being phased out now), then they move to sales where they essentially have the same call over again with a more skilled individual, then a demo with a sales engineer, then a scoping call, etc. It drags the process out and increases the customer acquisition cost. If you can quickly gather information from the prospect (5 minutes or less), then get them what they need ASAP (deep dive demo, test environment, technical answers, etc), the buying process will be accelerated while also continuing to gather the needed information about the buyer and their use case.
Sentient SE, our other product, is a way to quickly train our models on all of your product documentation, use cases, FAQs, etc, so internal and external people can get their questions answered in seconds. With Sentient SE, sales, marketing, customer success and customers don't have to wait days for a sales engineer to find time to draft lengthy answers to technical questions. Sales engineers are extraordinarily valuable, but are stretched way too thin. Getting answers in a self-service model will help open up some bandwidth to deal with the most complex sales.
Combining Sentient SDR for lead capture and qualification, pass that qualified lead to sales then leverage Sentient SE to get level 1 and 2 technical questions answered in seconds, should dramatically reduce the time spent in the sales cycle. That is the idea anyway. People need time to grasp the gain in efficiency that is now available. It benefits every role in the organization. Even SDRs, that may be phased out of the inbound sales process, can be fully focused on outbound if the company is seeing returns in that area.