SALES TECH

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Sales organizations are heavily inundated with AI tools claiming to supercharge their workflows. Platforms for prospecting, waterfall enrichment, and conversational intelligence have all become legitimate parts of their arsenal. While AI has been shown to have its benefits, many sellers are still navigating this relatively new territory and finding inefficiencies along the way.

In a new report from AI enterprise software and research organization Vivun, less than 40% of sellers say that AI agents have improved their productivity. The survey finds that this statistic doesn’t reflect a rejection of AI tools, rather it shows discrepancies of how it’s used across the sales funnel.

Going deep

Vivun’s report shows sellers prefer that AI lives inside their deals, not around it, with 63% saying they want AI to support core moments in the sales cycle instead of focusing on administrative tasks. These core moments are broken up as follows:

• Prospect research and lead generation (37%)
• Proposal and solution creation (22%)
• Qualification and discovery (18%)
• Deal management and forecasting (13%)
• Post-sale follow-up and renewal (10%)

The results show that sellers want AI to help improve outcomes more than save them time. In terms of their relationship with AI, 46% say they want it to work as an assistant, while 35% say they want it to be a partner.

Keep reading for more on how trust issues come into play.—LI

      

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AI’s pricey, and that’s why cost control tools for it aren’t uncommon. But they may not be enough.

The problem is that everyone’s trying to use AI everywhere, so even if token costs are dropping, totals are not.

PwC notes that with how fast AI spend is growing, AI value per cost is pretty crucial for the C-suite to have down pat. It soon may be what allows you to transform operations, enter new markets, and stand up new business models while competitors may still scramble to find the funds.

In this article, PwC explores how CIOs and CFOs can scale AI with discipline to achieve cost efficiency.

Give it a read.

REVENUE MARKETING

Dinner Table Club

As AI places sales leaders at a crossroads, the benefits of brand growth and pipeline expansion in other channels are more crucial than ever. Enter events: These often glitzy gatherings of peers in occasionally far-flung locations are becoming essential for elevating a brand and growing relationships.

It seems B2B event intelligence and marketing platform Vendelux wants to make that trip more of a sure thing. It’s attempting to walk the fine line between what AI can do well, and how that can help humans optimize costly and time-consuming in-person encounters.

The best of both worlds: Alex Reynolds, Vendelux’s co-founder and CEO, said many companies were looking to different mediums to find pipeline.

“We’re seeing budgets definitely be reallocated toward events,” Reynolds said. “It was 25%–30% a year ago. That’s going up to 30%–40+% as people are shifting dollars over.”

For Reynolds, this means showing up prepared is more important than ever. The platform’s AI technology integrates with CRMs to make sure that event data is integrated quickly, so humans can capitalize on the potential pipeline. In practice, AI makes sure calendars are booked and the correct personnel are sent to meetings with ICPs at each and every event.

“You should be able to say: Based on your pipeline, based on the exact companies that you’re working on deals with, you should go because you have $1 million or $5 million worth of value that you can touch at this event,” Reynolds said.

Not only can this data be used to determine proper deployment for events and teams, it can be used internally to help event marketers get the most return on their investments.

Read how to use events to optimize human interaction.—BS

      

REVENUE STRATEGY & LEADERSHIP

Amy Kodl

For the first months of the year, the share price of data platform Snowflake foundered as investors soured on a slew of workplace software stocks. Then, after its most recent earnings report, the company’s stock surged 36% in one day, where it’s more or less stayed in the weeks since.

Amy Kodl, Snowflake’s SVP of worldwide alliances and channels, said the moment was a reminder that AI is still only as good as the data supporting it. The company wants to position itself as a “control plane” layer as more companies adopt AI agents.

We spoke with Kodl about what this concept means, how AI has changed how her team works, and what the future holds.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Snowflake’s stock dipped earlier this year amid the whole “SaaS-pocalypse” narrative, and then shot back up after earnings. What do you think investors had misunderstood about Snowflake?

AI is a changing landscape. Let’s just say that. We obviously have really strong partnerships with a lot of SaaS companies and with the AI frontier model providers. I can’t really comment on the markets per se, because I’m not an analyst and I’m not our CFO, and that’s not my domain. But I think what we’re seeing is really a deep understanding of the role Snowflake plays in this changing landscape, and I think…there’s just a lot of clarity now around Snowflake as this agentic control plane.

We saw this in [the Snowflake] Summit, which followed our earnings announcement very closely. We saw a lot of clarity for our customers, and then obviously that would translate to the analysts, around the role that data plays in this new AI agentic era. As we said on stage, models change and will continue to change, and data stays. And that applies to obviously the frontier apps, and the large enterprise tech apps as well, but I think this [is about the] idea of the role that data plays, and that data is your differentiator.

Read more on how Snowflake’s revenue team operates.—PK

      

active pipeline

Stat: 8%. That’s how much Snap’s stock jumped after reporting better-than-expected Q2 earnings and revenue. (CNBC)

Quote: “While our playbook ​is working around the world, we see an opportunity to raise the bar in the US and ​accelerate performance in our largest market.”—McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski (the Washington Post)

Read: The AI boom is transforming the American economy beyond recognition. (the Wall Street Journal)

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