Dr. Cindy Gordon, CEO of Sales Choice, discusses how AI forecasting achieves 91-100% accuracy by targeting key buyer signals and why a 99% Salesforce adoption rate comes from showing sales teams a clear path to wins. She emphasizes responsible AI requires transparency, regular monitoring for drift, and an ethical policy covering privacy and accountability.
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Hi, my name is Gerhard Schwadler and welcome to selling power TV. Today we have a very special guest, Dr. Cindy Gordon. She is joining us from Toronto and she's the CEO of an amazing revenue engine called Sales Choice. Welcome Cindy.
Thanks, Gerard. Good to be here with you on a Friday afternoon.
You've created a revenue engine that according to your website, at least it says 91% forecasting accuracy. How do you achieve that?
First of all, it's only as good as the data. Let's be clear, right? So we have to be very focused on finding the right buyer profile, some really good baseline data. Typically when we plug in, we get to levels of about 75%, but we get to 91, 95 and actually one account we're at 100% because we analyze the data that's most significant to the AI patterns. That gives us the clue to really double down and get those right rather than trying to get everything right. Get the critical few we influence so that the job descriptions get changed. We look at their KPIs. If they don't have some of the KPIs that we know are best practices, we guide them. So I would say what we've done is not just deployed a software platform that really can work well, but we look around the edges because the hard part is the people and the behavioral change.
99% adoption rate of Salesforce once they go to saleschoice. Why is that?
When sales professionals start to see that what we are giving them is, I would call it a window pane to say if you focus on these critical few, this is your pathway of least resistance to get to a win. That's where our science maybe is a little bit differentiated. The hard part though, honestly is the leaders need to be spending the time to understand the significance of data patterns and thinking, right? So integrating our science into the weekly reviews is super important. You need to have, I'd say the shift in the dialogue with the sales professionals and a cadence that resonates and you know, unless you change that, we can't always get to those levels. But when you start to see that dialogue shift, what happens is the sales professional starts to realize, geez, I've got some candy here that can help me.
You also talk about responsible AI. What do you mean by that?
First of all, we're not black box AI. That's point number one. Second of all is that we expose what's in the AI data model and we verify with our scientists and we educate the client. The whole objective is for them to understand that they have a voice and they bring in their intuition and pretty well all of our accounts. When we sit down and we go through the attributions, they have knowledge, some of the knowledge is still tacit in their own heads. And they basically say, you know what? Those particular fields are legacy fields and we haven't taken them out of Salesforce. The AI algorithm is only as good as what it sees, but that kind of dialogue builds trust. We sign off, then we, you know, redo the model again and we then look at the predictions and then we have a final discussion with them is are we set up so that the machine learning can go? And then we monitor every three months as we have learned that the models can drift. The bottom line I would say is just the responsible AIs knit. We have a corporate policy on ethical AI that we publish as well. We work very, very hard on educating our clients on responsible AI. And we're really taking the focus on privacy, the explainability, the transparency, but also the accountability so that leaders understand unless they change their behaviors, we're not going to get the optimal outcomes. And I think that change, that's where we get the uplift in our accounts.
Can you give me an example from the perspective of a sales leader who has deployed sales choice and how it has changed their leadership style?
One individual in particular said we can do this, but I'm not too confident this is going to work. But educate them a little bit on statistics has also made a bit of a difference I think Gerard, we're one of the individuals now understands significant factors, understands histograms, understands distributions and can see outliers. So part of it has been educating them to understand patterning recognition and spatial recognition in data. So that to me has been interesting where one person I would say was more 100% relationship centric and it's not to say relationships aren't important, but educating and uplifting their knowledge on the science and understanding that bringing those two aspects together, you're actually in a much stronger position. One other behavior that I've seen with one of the financed individuals where he says let's see what the coach says. And I think in time the analysts will start asking more questions, especially for mid to large companies or publicly traded. Are you using AI predictive forecasting to guide your decision making?
You're offering in essence three services, sales choice, where you have insights. That is an incredible achievement in such a short time to create a comprehensive solution where sales organization can install that engine connected to salesforce.com and get ROI within less than two months.
Usually the return on investments is just two deals. The ROI is a no brainer. The challenge is ensuring that the data is in good enough quality. So, you know, AI is demonstrating value and then influencing them to start changing some of their leadership and operational practices. And that's where the magic, I think is.
So where can people learn more?
You just go to www.salest.
Thank you Cindy.
Thank you Gerard. Really appreciate the time. Nice seeing you. Have a great weekend.
