Is Gen AI the Future of Sales Organizations? In Dialogue with Gartner

At Bounti, we’re trying to do something very new. We’re trying to take a longstanding discipline – selling – and revolutionize how it happens. We’re early in the journey, but we’re confident that we’ll get there.

Recently, we were delighted to see that none other than Gartner aligned with our vision.

In their latest edition of The Chief Sales Officer Quarterly, Gartner offered a perspective that is neatly in sync with our own. Like Bounti, Gartner envisions a world where companies harness the best of GenAI to enable salespeople to do more intentional and productive work. They predict a selling environment where AI tools act as digital teammates, automating sections of work so that humans can focus on human work.

In this blog, we’re going to take a look at what Gartner had to say and map how their view of things lines up with Bounti’s. Let’s dive in.

The Present Challenges of Selling

“The current approach to sales technology is putting revenue at risk, overwhelming sellers, and making them less likely to hit quota. CSOs need to evolve the way sales technology supports sellers by elevating technology to become a teammate, rather than just deploying it as another tool.”

Gartner lays things out pretty starkly here. The current selling environment is broken, and it’s impacting how effectively people can sell. Here’s more:

“The B2B buying decision process is rife with delays, conflict and politics. Gartner research shows that 55% of buying groups experience moderate to high levels of dysfunction, which in turn reduces the likelihood of closing a high-quality deal by 73%.”

Indeed, Gartner’s recent polling reveals that a mere 25% of professionals “strongly agree” that they complete all tasks assigned to them while also meeting company standards of high quality.

This same dysfunctional selling environment is what inspired the Bounti team to start building. Our team has seen it time and again: sellers burdened by mundane and repetitive work, struggling to meet quotas, spending a minority of their time actually building relationships and selling. Instead of focusing on the subtle and human work of closing deals, they are drowning in quotas and unrealistic revenue pressures.

This is a real shame when sales has always been attention and personalization. Customers need to feel that their unique pain points are being heard. Anything less and they will walk away.

What the Future Holds

“As technology takes on more of the work that currently falls on salespeople, sales leaders can then focus the seller role on a much narrower set of responsibilities. Salespeople can use mentalizing skills to deliver value-affirming customer interactions and provide tech teammates with vision and guidance to carry out complex activities like prospecting and crafting messages. The net result is that a role that had become unmanageable becomes more focused and achievable for everyday sellers.”

Gartner envisions a future similar to the one that we see here at Bounti: one where AI technology takes over certain sales-related tasks so that BDRs and people in other selling roles can bring a new focus to their work, and dedicate themselves to customer interactions and closing.

Key to this is what Gartner describes as embracing a “Technology as a Teammate (TaaT)”

“Tech as a teammate (TaaT) is about giving your technology more responsibility for independently navigating portions of the sales process, rather than giving your sellers more technology. Rapid advancements in AI, particularly generative and emotional AI capabilities, have now made it possible for technology’s transformation from tool to teammate.”

This is key, and we couldn’t agree more. Salespeople have gotten used to being burdened with more tools, more metrics, more ways to measure themselves.

What generative AI unlocks – and what we’re building with Bounti – is a way for salespeople to fully hand off portions of the sales process, such as email writing or persona generation so that they can make radically better use of their time.

What Gartner defines as the best ways that generative AI can slot into the process is an uncannily accurate representation of the Bounti platform. Here’s the advice they offer to sales leaders:

• Seller Role Simplification — Delegate time-consuming and “administrative” tasks to a tech-teammate through automating activities so sellers can focus their time on the valuable uniquely human activities.
• Generative Value Messaging — Generate well-executed value narratives with a tech-teammate by turning customer data into customized value messaging, democratizing who can create custom content, and accelerating how quickly it’s assembled.
• Prospecting — Reduce the burden of prospecting by enabling the deployment of autonomous synthetic SDRs that can qualify prospects and automatically generate outreach for the leads they identify for sellers to review and approve.

Gartner estimates that salespeople can win back as much as 4-6 hours per week thanks to technology taking over these tasks.

Spoiler: the BDRs who are using Bounti are winning back much more time than this!

Towards an AI-Empowered, Human Future

Gartner's evaluation of the progression of Gen AI integration in sales covers distinct stages, beginning with human driven decision and machine executed support and ending with increasingly more machine automated decisions.

At Bounti, we find ourselves straddling the line between the second and third stages of Gartners’s evolution. In these stages, technology transitions from being a mere tool to acting as a teammate. This shift is crucial, as it allows technology to handle mundane tasks, freeing sellers to concentrate on activities that require a human touch – something no AI can replicate.

Another future-facing aspect identified by Gartner that resonates with us is the need for sales teams to develop their engagement skills with their tech teammates. This includes mastering use-case selection (AI application for a desired outcome), prompt engineering, hallucination spotting (false or made up AI-generated material), while especially continuing to develop their own creativity.

At Bounti, we've designed our platform to be intuitive and easy to integrate, ensuring that salespeople and technology are perfectly in sync, and can learn together.

The future of sales, as envisioned by Gartner and as being actioned by the team here at Bounti, is one where technology and human skills complement each other. We are transforming the sales landscape into one that is more efficient, more human, and ultimately more successful.

Here’s to a future of better selling!