Our Distracted, Always-On Reality

In a recent Time-Warner Study, “Digital Natives” (Millennials in their twenties who grew up with digital) switched media venues 27 times per non-working hour. That’s roughly 13 times in 30 minutes or the time it takes to watch one episode of The Office. “Digital immigrants,” who grew up with old-school technology and adapted to digital, switched media venues 17 times per non-working hour. In addition, Millennial are trending to shift jobs 7 times before they are 30. This is a workforce where change is a daily constant. In addition, by 2020, Millennials (born from 1982 to 2004) are expected to make up nearly half the workforce.

Let’s add a health dynamic; ADHD (Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder) is growing at an alarming rate of 65% over the past ten years. Over 4% of the adult population is estimated to have ADHD, and many of them are in your sales organizations.

It is often estimated that 30% of Sales professionals suffer from ADHD. Yet, many do not know that they have ADHD or even if they do, they struggle with their desire to focus more effectively. Lack of focus decreases sales focus and impacts top line revenue growth potential. Few sales cultures invest to ensure they can help those with ADHD behaviors, offering training programs to help them or ensure they have the right medical support systems. They are definitely in your sales cultures, and smart improvements in this area can yield significant improvements in your top line revenue growth. More important to the lives of those with ADHD is reinforcing to them that your corporate culture cares about its talent, and invests in their promising growth potential.

What can you do to close this focus big gap, with AI or cognitive approaches?

Does this mean that the number of millennial sales people will keep growing because selling is a great profession for ADHD’ers and others who like to change their focus 27 times in 60 minutes?

What we all know is that our world is moving faster than it ever has in the history of mankind.

Knowledge used to double worldwide in less than two years. Now it doubles in less than two months. Technology has increased our connection rates, fueled by mobile devices, we have become the first generation where 7×24 is the new reality – always connected and always on.

This increasingly rapid pace of life has impacted both our work and home environments. A new vibe is in the air. It is a hyperactivity energy vibe, where the ability to focus uninterrupted on one task for too long is increasingly difficult to achieve.

It is well proven that a productive “fully engaged” brain will produce more, make higher quality decisions, when humans are calmer and more focused. This is one of the primary reasons that mindfulness is on the rise.

When I talk to CEO’s world-wide, one of their top concerns is the ability to focus on the critical few and execute flawlessly. When we speak to Chief Revenue Officers or SVP’s of Sales worldwide, their confidence in achieving their sales revenue targets is currently at an all time low of 14% confidence levels, further validated by Accenture & CSO Insights Research. Performance levels can increase when the middle tier of sales professionals is optimized.

Currently less than 30-60% of Sales Plans are achieved by middle tier sales professionals. The implications on top line revenue growth are a concern, as well as confidence levels in overall plan achievement realizations. According to Accenture and CSO Insights (2014), Chief Revenue Officers and sales leaders of the Fortune 500 have low confidence levels (less than 15%) in achieving their sales plans. Some of the reasons for this increasing lack of confidence are:

  • focusing on the right sales opportunities that will have optimal yield outcomes;
  • changing priorities impacting sales coverage models;
  • inefficiencies of sales rep ramp time (improving sales professionals’ productivity levels)
  • intensifying competitive market dynamics (i.e.: globalization, regulatory environments, disruptive technology innovations, talent attraction and retention, etc.)

With these declining confidence levels, harnessing sales teams to focus on the right opportunities to increase their odds of success becomes an acute improvement point for sales leaders to invest in.

Focus is core to execution capabilities.

Opportunities to increase focus with an organization’s talent assets with ADHD comes in many forms including meditation and yoga. Internal courses in companies has increased in market growth by over 20% annually. Other forms include calming music in office, nature walking clubs, and increasingly innovative cognitive behavior altering technology tools like AI driven predictive and prescriptive analytics that help prioritize all sales opportunities, continue to learn from all activities of the sales organizations on its wins and losses, and also ingest other data patterns to become a smart cognitive sense making highway for sales professionals to trust to guide them to achieving their quota plans. Another way of looking at this is you are ingesting all the knowledge of the firm against your highest performing reps’ behavior patterns and then guiding others with actionable insights. We call this our Sales GPS – always on, always getting smarter. Much like Uber takes you to the right destination, SalesChoice takes you to your quota realization with guided playbooks. I know had I had this at Xerox when I was leading sales, how much more successful my sales teams would be.

This is the first time in the history of mankind that AI can guide sales professionals. As we continue to improve our business practices and processes and ensure tighter data quality measures and feedback loops, we will have super charged AI sales driven highways to travel on.

Where will new breakthroughs in sales performance come from?

SalesChoice has developed an advanced predictive and prescriptive analytics platform, and is an ISV Certified partner of SalesForce.com.

As the founder of the company, I have been concerned by the growth rates of ADHD in adults and the fact that ADHD talent is highly concentrated in sales professions and entrepreneurship for many years.

Having been in sales most of my life, from early career experiences from Xerox and Accenture, I know first-hand that sales professionals strive daily to convert sales opportunities to successful wins.

Yet despite this fact, 40-60% of sales professionals in the majority of companies do not make their sales targets.

New solutions are now emerging where data sciences are fueled by advanced mathematics to guide and predict sales outcomes to help sales professionals focus and yes, win more.

SalesChoice’s predictive analytics has developed a user-friendly SaaS application that improves sales professional’s ability to focus by prioritizing what they should work on to win more.

How Predictive and Prescriptive Analytics can help Sales Professionals Focus more effectively?

Our advanced forms of cognitive science driven analytics can help sales professionals focus in a number of ways:

  • By analyzing large data sets of win and loss opportunities, using predictive analytics, sales opportunities are prioritized in ways that have never been possible before.
  • Everyone has been conditioned in the business world from years of schooling to communicate signals or indicators that an A is above average, a B is acceptable, but not a star rating; a C is below average, and a D is a failing grade, or significantly below average, in the cliff zone so to speak.
  • In addition, percentages with ranges 90-100% are much better than a 50% or below 25% etc.
  • Designing sales enablement software that overlays predictive analytics on top of funnel opportunities (pipeline patterns), using historical win and loss patterns, and continuing to learn (machine learning) as the business dynamics changes, offers sales professionals an increased opportunity to focus more effectively on the best patterns to win.

With predictive and prescriptive analytics, a pure sciences view overlays the patterns, to produce a more accurate prediction of the win or loss scenarios than human beings can easily predict, especially in the earlier stages of a sales cycle.

We not only prioritize all their sales cycles, we provide the reasons for the wins and the losses before they happen to guide them on how to win more successfully. We also are very unique in the market place that we also provide predictive forecasting, with an estimated close outlook derived by AI, as to when an opportunity will close from a statistical odds perspective. Our accuracy proprietary ALGO is running up to 95% predictive accuracy, with an immediate ROI on identifying the DUDS, which is uncannily accurate in mid to large enterprises.

We wanted to “connect the dots” to bring this unique value proposition to Chief Revenue Officers, or EVP of Sales that care about sales enablement tools that can help their sales professionals focus to win more. We definitively know that AI is a valuable cognitive sciences tool to guide sales professionals to achieve higher optimal results.

For more information, read our eBOOK which:

  • defines ADHD, and highlights its increasing growth rate,
  • explores why sales enablement tools, like SalesChoice, using predictive and prescriptive analytics approaches can improve sales professionals ability to focus to win more.

Moving this needle even just by 1% of all Fortune 500 companies’ revenue growth potential drives trillions of new value creation. We hope you will call me personally at (416)230-6538 or email me at cindy@saleschoice.com to have a conversation and help “connect the dots” to make our world a better place.