I was a military & commercial pilot 20 years ago. Later, I became a technologist and then a tech founder who devoted his time to driving ever-increasing sales growth through constant improvement in productivity and predictability. Recently, I went back to flying helicopters and airplanes for fun this time, and I was amazed by how much has changed.
It made me think about the change my current company drives in the sales world. Sales professionals and pilots have much in common: Both deal with complex situations and uncertainty and stay cool while doing it! Both need to apply judgment and avoid mistakes while navigating to their destinations. Both get a lot of training and enablement to stay current and continue to improve in their work.
Pilots study all the relevant foundational principles of aeronautics, weather, physiology, avionics, airspace, regulations, and customary and abnormal operating procedures.Sales professionals study foundational salesmanship, the playbooks for the various sales motions and competitive situations. They also have to develop their domain expertise in the different offerings, use cases, pains and needs of multiple stakeholders and more.
There is, however, a significant difference. Pilots do not operate their aircraft solely based on memory or intuition. Regardless of whether one is a recreational student pilot or an experienced airline pilot instructor, adherence to checklists is mandatory for all operations. This strict protocol ensures that every procedure is completed correctly and safely.
You have the preflight, engine/s start, taxi before takeoff, climb, cruise, and other standard operations procedures. You also have all the abnormal and emergency procedures that help you navigate every situation, even the doubtful ones.
Sales organizations often implement all kinds of checklists, whether in documents or the CRM, but sales professionals prefer something else.They often feel that fixed checklists are not right for dynamic sales situations, that time spent on all the reporting duties is time away from sales, and that if they do them, it only serves their superiors and does not really help them win.
I agree with them—many companies have scattered CRM fields for sales professionals to fill. Many of them are text fields that require descriptions of various aspects of the deals, which will later be discussed verbally between the sales professional and their leaders anyway, so what's the use for the sales professional?
The only caveat is that the correct checklist at the right time can remind sales professionals of critical gaps that must be addressed to keep the deal from derailing. Still, sales professionals need to get those few essential items to focus on—they get the whole lot; back to my renewed flying days. Twenty years ago, we only had operating manuals and handbooks with pages and pages of operating procedures for every situation.
Now that I'm flying modern aircraft, I was very positively surprised to see that the avionics pull the proper checklist at the right situation; many of the manual tasks of the past (like searching for and setting radio frequencies) are now automated (based on course and destination) and that many aspects that required constant communications and situational awareness (like air traffic, weather and more) are now fully embedded into the display and alerts system.
The avionics still require that the pilot verify each item in the checklist manually, but at least it only shows relevant items and has automation that saves a lot of effort on those tasks.
It seems like a good analogy to what we created for sales professionals at Spotlight.ai. Spotlight pulls the relevant checklists and highlights the right action items in every situation. It also automates many previously manual tasks (like reporting, following up, customizing presentations, creating business cases with revenue analysis and more).
However, the spotlight goes many steps beyond what modern avionics systems do - it doesn't just highlight action items and automate activity - it integrates everything and drives autonomous action when it can. It gets the relevant data directly from call recordings, does the CRM data entry, validates everything itself, collects the evidence, takes care of the qualification (MEDDICC, BANT or other), checks items automatically for the sales professionals and performs the deal review and forecasting for their leaders, highlighting the gaps that require human attention, automatically triggering the following questions and actions and arming the sales professionals with everything they need to drive each specific opportunity forward, and more.
It uses an elaborate model of complex sales logic, with sales intelligence and value intelligence AI layers that guide the conversational intelligence to look for many signals in the call recordings. Based on that, it understands the complex big picture and automatically drives every action that supports the sales professional.
The sales professional no longer works for the system - the system is finally working for them in a fully integrated, end-to-end way while also giving their leaders everything they need - complete predictability and improved productivity.
Enough writing, have to prepare for my next flight!
Cheers,
Nadav
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