Salesloft reposted this
Where's the value in application layer AI? Where it's always been-- in designing for the Jobs to be Done (JTBD). Here's how we based our strategy on JTBD, and how it's changed with AI. Three and a half years ago Kyle Porter asked me to join Salesloft. At the time the company had the market leading sales engagement platform, a nascent Conversations product and a killer Deals product. Those products were somewhat disconnected, and each competed in a different market. Salesloft was living in the world of Sales Tech Mayhem (hat tip Craig Rosenberg) where hundred of companies frantically chased whatever revenue seemed easiest to get. To break out of the mayhem, Frank Dale and I used the Jobs to Be Done. This is a framework that was outlined by Clayton Christensen in his book The Innovator's Solution. Its central idea is that innovation emerges not be at the level of stated needs but at the level of the core things a potential user or customer cares about. The good thing is, in Revenue it's pretty easy to figure out what companies care about. It's outcomes: win rates, deal cycle times, and average size. The sales process is actually a deep collaboration between buyers and sellers, sales managers, customer success, marketers and operations. And for most companies, it's very difficult to make those outcomes happen and happen repeatably. It became clear to us that customers need a platform to support this buyer-seller collaboration. The platform would provide capabilities for core selling jobs, like prospecting, closing and renewing. It would support revenue leaders in coaching and understanding trends. It would enable operations to forecast and orchestrate action across all those roles. Those core jobs were in what we called the "Revenue Lane." Adjacent and more bespoke jobs would be handled by Salesloft's robust partner ecosystem. The platform would provide the right context, and prompt targeted action, for every member of the selling team. More than three years later, we've delivered that platform. We've expanded our support of buyer-seller engagement to digital engagement by buying Drift, which provides conversational AI on a website. We're still building with the same strategy: to help sellers and buyers get to better outcomes. So how does AI change that? The new generation of AI language models is transformative-- of course. At Salelsoft we use LLMs to accelerate capabilities that deliver insight and action across Salesloft. We've used AI to imagine new ways to support sellers and buyers-- delivering things that were not possible before, like the AI taking the first pass at scoring a meeting for a manager. But the AI is always rooted in the value of a job, not there because it's new and sexy. As we all navigate this crazy AI hype cycle and search for the value in it, I think we'll find it in the same place we always did. It's in helping people do the jobs to be done. "The Revenue Lane" image, Salesloft Product Vision doc, May 2021.