Less chocolate, more exercise and a promise this year will be different. Three weeks into 2023 and I'm sure some of you are already regretting the classic list of New Year resolutions that seem completely impossible (and how else can I get through these long, dark days without a snack or three?).
It's that time of the year where we pull out the crystal ball and speculate about what the big predictions are for the year ahead. Unlike our Christmas waistlines, this year already seems to be lean, with economic uncertainty driving cautious behaviours from organisations globally resulting in 25,000 tech layoff already announced in January.
What does this mean in the larger sales picture and will OpenAI's Chat GPT really be the dawn of a new technology era?
1) AI will not take over the world....yet
It is clear the power of AI will have a huge impact throughout 2023. Chat GPT is the start of a wave of AI driven technologies that will accelerate lots of manual tasks. However, this AI is still somewhat “dumb” - meaning, it needs humans to feed the information, pertinent data, thoughts etc. that it can build an answer from. Although Chat GPT is the quickest piece of software to hit 1 million subscribers, I suspect it will have a quiet period before true AGI comes to life.
2) Sales teams will be told to do more with less
Amazon cut 20,000 jobs, Meta cut 11,000, Salesforce axe 10% of their employees. The list is far longer, but you get the picture. 2023 appears to be the year the ever growing tech bubble retracts slightly. This means sales teams in particular will be asked to hit targets, grow accounts, find new opportunities and improve margins, with less and less headcount to support.
3) More cyber sales teams will be filled with none cyber practitioners
Following on from the above, the increase in tech talent looking for new roles will lead many to cyber security. I believe in 2023 we will see more none technical sales people joining cyber security companies, trying to wrap their heads around regulations, standards and other cyber security trends.
4) Show me the money (ROI, Value) - economic conservatism will mean tighter budgets
2023 is looking to be the year buyers really push sellers on the ROI and value for money. Sales teams will have to work harder, smarter and be more prepared, while really showing they understand the clients challenges and positioning their solution as the fix.
5) You're on mute
2023 will provide some return of the office worker, but there will continue to be a big remote presence / expectation. Alongside this, clients have become comfortable working remotely - do they really want to meet sales reps face to face? Sales teams will have to strike up strong relationships virtually, develop existing relationships and work out how to upsell their solutions without physically being in front of the buyer.
What will SalesLynk’s role be in 2023?
1) SalesLynk provides the information, intelligence, data and insights AI such as Chat GPT needs to build out really smart emails, cold call scripts, prospecting outreach etc. I believe our platform is a really powerful complement to what the Chat GPT AI offers. Try it for yourself - our platform can provide the insights from annual reports, credit records, LinkedIn etc. which can instantly be fed into Chat GPT to build your prospecting communications.
2) The most fundamental ROI SalesLynk provides is automating a huge amount of the sales tasks teams often perform manually. Preliminary research suggests SalesLynk can save users 10-30 hours per week of manual research on their client, their clients business and their clients cyber security challenges.
3) SalesLynk is the only sales technology available which has been specifically designed to be industry focused. We have deep cyber security insights and intelligence, including trends, news, industry regulations and standards, as well as any breaches the organisation has suffered.
4) SalesLynk has an incredibly powerful unstructured document reader has a cyber security taxonomy built over it, so users can instantly scan annual reports, financial models and much more and have SalesLynk present the key insights, information, initiatives etc. they want.
5) There was a huge paradigm shift in the way companies sold once the effects of the pandemic set in. SalesLynk continues to support virtual teams by providing the key personal information teams need to strike up quick relationships with their prospects and clients. This includes everything from sports teams they support, hobbies, to professional interests, events they’ve attended and key security challenges they are discussing
