By Jim Lundy
The Path to AI in Sales Starts with Intelligent CRM
The title of this blog could have been – why revenue intelligence is not a category; that is really what I’m here to discuss.
This blog discusses why the focus should be on making your CRM Platform intelligent and stop worrying about revenue intelligence.
The Race To Intelligence – Did CRM get there first?
There is a battle brewing in sales tech stack land.
While a bunch of providers decided to go and declare a new market – all of the major CRM providers quietly made their platforms intelligent.
However, many of the providers that include Microsoft, Oracle and Salesforce have not hyped the benefits to their customer base.
Figure 1: Aragon has predicted that the CRM market will become Intelligent.
Revenue Intelligence is Another Path – That Might Be More Complicated
For many enterprises, for whatever reason, they may not want to spend the money to upgrade their CRM Platform – even though Aragon would advise that they should.
Suffice to say, the objective is to provide sales teams with more insights, but some of that clearly overlaps with Intelligent CRM.
What are examples of overlap between iCRM and Revenue Intelligence?
How about predictive forecasts and contact updates just for starters. However, Aragon feels that the future is Sales Enablement Platforms and Intelligent CRM.
The other argument is Conversational Intelligence (sometimes called voice or speech analytics).
Conversational intelligence provides information on what happens during a client or prospect call, such as talk time, sentiment and more.
While this technology emerged and there were a number of stand alone providers, today a majority of sales enablement vendors already offer conversational intelligence and they offer their platform with many more features than revenue intelligence vendors do – at lower prices.
Figure 2: Aragon recommends enterprises focus on Sales Enablement Platforms and upgrade their CRM to the AI version.
The argument might be that, “Hey with Revenue Intelligence you will get better forecasts.”
That might be true – but then we could argue why don’t revenue intelligence platforms become a full CRM?
Do Intelligent CRM Platforms Work?
The answer is, “Yes they do.”
Aragon has had an Intelligent CRM platform installed for over three years and I can tell you, it is one of the best purchase decisions we have ever made –predictive lead scoring, predictive opportunities and predictive forecasts.
Intelligent Sales Enablement and Intelligent CRM
The future of sales is about Intelligent Sales Enablement and Intelligent CRM. In fact, I did a webinar today with Allego and we discussed this in depth.
Aragon has extensive research in sales enablement and our new tech arc, The Aragon Research Technology Arc™ for Sales and Marketing, 2022 explains why Intelligent CRM (iCRM) is the new way forward.
Bottom Line
Enterprises need to be on guard relative to their sales tech stack and avoid unnecessary purchases.
While many providers in sales enablement have solid analytics on customer and prospect activity, Aragon advises that core applications such as forecasts are the domain of CRM.
That is why the new playbook for sales is Intelligent Sales Enablement Platforms and Intelligent CRM.
This blog is a part of the Digital Workplace blog series by Aragon Research’s CEO, Jim Lundy.
Blog 1: Introducing The Digital Workplace Weekly Blog Series
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Blog 2: Application Proliferation – Building out Departmental Tech Stacks
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Blog 3: Invest in Sales Coaching and Learning Now
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Blog 4: The Slow Return to the Office vs the Fast Return to Events
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Blog 5: The Shift to Industry Clouds is Here
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Blog 6: The Race to Intelligence and Why Future Revenue Streams Depend On It
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Blog 7: The Common Design Component Contributing to Apple and BMWs Success
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Blog 8: The Art of Sales and Why It Is the Secret to Fast Growth
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Blog 9: The CRM Market Is Now Intelligent
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Blog 10: The Return to Conferences and Why You Need a Plan for 2023
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Blog 11: AI Is Here to Stay! Product Teams Need to Embrace It
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Blog 12: Enterprise Dilema:Employees and Customers Want More Video Experiences
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Blog 13: Collaboration – Proliferation vs One Size Fits all
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Blog 14: By 2025, Team Collaboration Tools Will Overtake Email
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Blog 15: Hybrid Cloud Is the Way
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Blog 16: Product Names – Their Huge Impact & 3 Naming Tips
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Blog 17: Do Fonts and Font Types Make a difference for Reading?
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Blog 18: TikTok Has Gone Viral: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
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Blog 19: ChatGPT Gives Us a Glimpse into the Future of Digital Assistants