Welcome to The Cirrostratus Group April newsletter.
Getting the right talent in your Saas business is always a challenge. OpenView Partners does an annual survey about SaaS talent acquisition and they just released the 2023 results. A lot has changed since the 2022 results including candidates doing more due diligence on the companies they interview with. One interesting result is that 78% of candidates rated alignment about the role across the interview team as the top quality they look for throughout the interview process. 71% of candidates say they use company financials and metrics to evaluate a company. Clearly transparency is a key area to focus on and in the case of interview team alignment, this is something that your company has a lot of control over.
Harvard Business Review recently published an article about "How Generative AI will Change Sales". Reversing administrative creep, enhancing salespeople’s customer interactions and assisting sales managers are all things that the article indicates that Generative AI can do to improve the sales process. Most CRM vendors have come out with initial offers that use Generative AI and the progress is described below.
Paul Ressler
The Cirrostratus Group
Generative AI and CRM
In last month's newsletter I provided a lot of information about Generative AI and some of the tools available to integrate Generative AI into your SaaS application. Over the past month we've seen some specific providers, particularly in the CRM space, add Generative AI to their products. This announcement about Salesforce and Microsoft is probably the most visible, but as explained here most of the CRM providers have added capability. Hubspot, a CRM provider, has a good description of some of the specifics of how Generative AI can help in the sales process including:
Access to advanced data enrichment, analysis, and applications
Enhance performance with AI-powered conversation intelligence
Automate and optimize sales enablement
Improve pipeline management and forecasting
Streamline and optimize sales engagement
These enhanced CRM tools are something that you can make use of in your business. Secondly, it's clear that providers are moving quickly to incorporate Generative AI into their products to solve real business challenges. If you haven't thought about how to incorporate Generative AI into your products yet, I suggest you spend some time on this topic and hopefully some of the resources fromlast month's and this month's newsletter will help.
