Empowering Sales in the Age of AI: Blending Technology with the Human Touch

Thank you so much, Gerhard, for having me. My name is Jaran Krishnavi and I'm heading sales Enablement at Siemens, a global technology company. And I'm really honored today to be the host of this panel with three distinguished guests. So the first one, Nev Lalana is VP of Global Sales Enablement at Miracle. And I met Niamh actually at a sales enablement event in Paris, France. We already did a panel together there and I was really impressed by the different programs and initiatives she was running. So I'm very happy to have you today, Niamh, on the panel. Kate Philpott is VP of Global Sales Enablement at Giddy Images. I also met Kate at the same event in Paris, France and she was on stage and she did excellent presentation about coaching and also transformation around that. And I also got some tips and tricks from her as I was moving into a new role, moving from business unit enablement leader to a division leader. So she has some great experience that she shared with me. And again, Kate, also, thank you for taking the time for joining us today. Sabina von Neuform is an established enablement leader and she's head of Sales Enablement at Autos Software se. And I also met her in person at a local enablement event in Munich, Germany, and she was holding a keynote there on digital transformation and revenue enablement, and she did a very impressive presentation there. So again, welcome everybody and glad to have you all with us. So sellers are under an immense amount of pressure to hit their targets. The sales managers and leadership, of course, are expected to do more with less. They also have to reach their ambitious targets and they need to scale successes through throughout their organization. And us as enablement leaders, we need to support these sales organizations and continuously drive revenue and growth.

So today we're going to be picking up the top topic of AI and enablement. And so one aspect that we're going to be looking at is looking at how three different sales organizations are using AI to drive performance improvements. Also how enablement professionals are using AI within their own teams to drive performance improvements for those enablers. And we're going to also leave you with some tips and tricks on how to avoid some typical pitfalls and big mistakes that you can make using AI in your sales organization. So let's dive in and first I'd like to start with a simple question just to get a feeling of the mood with you all and also in your sales organization. So perhaps you could just share with us one word that explain how you're feeling about AI. And also one feeling, one word that you think your sales are feeling about AI right now in the sales organizations. So Kate, why don't we start with you?

Okay, so my word would be pragmatic. And you want an explanation as to why.

Pragmatic if you want.

So for me the reason pragmatic is I think it's inevitable that AI is going to play some kind of a part in our existence. It's just for me a question of identifying the ways in which we're going to be able to do that that are genuinely positive. I think for our sales teams the word is nervous. And the reason I say nervous is that I think a lot of people are worried that AI is going to take my job.

Very good, Sabina.

Well, in my case it's more curiosity because that is one of the key elements that we are seeing with our sales organization. That AI is inspiring them to research more, to. Well, sometimes also be a little bit of lazy instead of reading complex texts are rather going for, hey, how can I have AI summarize these things? And what then also brings the risk of if someone is summarizing things, am I using my own brain or am I just repeating what is already existing? So that would be basically my lazy.

A little bit of like curiosity and risk.

Very good.

And nif I think personally I'm kind of re energized. I think enablement has gone through several waves. Like many organizations, many functions. I think AI is 3.0. You have the traditional training now, then the self paced with coaching and a lot of tools and enablement platforms and lots of tech stack around enablement and AI is the next wave and I think we just need to reinvent a little bit and re energize ourselves to adopt it, to embrace it. I think, I think for the sales teams, I think we've gone through a little bit of a roller coaster. But I think the ones that I represent in my organization are now pretty determined, determined to take hold and to go forth with this. So I feel that they're on board.

Very good. And nev. If we stay with you for the first question, how would you describe how you and your sales organization is using AI? AI at the moment at a high level. And how are you empowering them to do so?

Absolutely. So I think I work at Miracle and we have just about a year and a half ago we actually have a chief AI officer who joins the teams. And so we have a. We have an army of AI people within the organization to help drive internal adoption, which is obviously Great to help to help that adoption internally. But I think the major thing that happened over the last year and a half was we first started working with obviously ChatGPT 2023, but in 2024 we switched to Dust. Some people may be familiar with Dust and it's a company we're partnering with because Dust is built, because it builds agents, not just chat. And I think it helps us to create agents that actually understand Miracle's context and how we work. It connects to Salesforce, to Gong, to Google Drive, to Confluence, but with enterprise permissions. And so these agents can do real work. But within those guardrails we're always talking about an enablement. And in practice, what does that mean for our sales teams on a day to day basis? Well, it means that they have an agent, for example, a meeting prep agent where they can get one pagers for their next meeting on their Persona, on the different industry papers, the competitive angle for that deal, even the latest Gong signals with citations though, so they can check the sources to make sure that that's correct and accurate information. And the impact is really simple because it goes from prep that used to take hours to minutes and that makes it seem miraculous. And I work at Miracle, but it's more consistency around regions. It's making sure that we have the same content, the same talk tracks, but reps still going that extra mile because they're adapting and customizing obviously within an enterprise sale, it's a must. And what the results we've seen is that 99% of our workforce now are users of Dust. But what's more impressive is they're building their own agents. So we have 50% of our organization and a lot of them in the sales teams who are actively building agents to reinvent or redesign their own work because nothing beats owning your own needs. And I think that's typical learning by doing and that's how we're really empowering them internally around AI.

Very interesting. Kate, over to you.

Yeah, I don't think we're quite as advanced in terms of building agents as Niamh's organization. I guess I would say we are about empowerment, but with very clearly defined guardrails. So as an organization, for those of you that don't know Getty Images, we're all about creative content, creative and editorial content. We're here to help you, your customers tell their stories in the most effective ways. And in order to do that, we need to respect the content creators, in other words, the people who take pictures. So the whole premise around AI, generous AI is really important to us as an organization. You know, we've got an unambiguous position, which is that we support AI provided that the creators are themselves respected, remunerated, recognized, all of, you know, all of that good stuff, because that then sustains the ongoing content creation that we know that our customers need. And so, you know, tools that we use that are of any kind of AI bent, whether that's generative or otherwise, have to be transparent. So they've got to be transparent regarding the data that has been used for the training set. They've got to be transparent that, you know, any outputs that are generated are indeed AI generated. And they've also got to take responsibility to address any misinformation, any misuse. And we know, obviously any of us that have used AI that that is a real risk around, around all platforms. And so, you know, when we did that and we launched our generative AI proposition for customers, it was really imperative that we kind of walk our own walk. So from a commercial organization perspective, we will not and have not launched any AI tool that does not effectively stand up to the same sniff test. Is it going to use only information that we are happy with? So, for example, we do have a version of Copilot, but it is guardrailed. We will not, we're not allowed to put into any external AI search engine company privileged information and any other tools that we use. For example, we use Salesforce, eci, we use Zoom AI Companion, we use Zoom Translation. Those have all been approved by our tech teams for use before they get anywhere near a seller. And I mean again, to nice point, the tools that we're using are all about efficiency. And that is one of the biggest upsides for me in terms of AI tools, given that I am responsible for a global team. I think one of the biggest, maybe even the biggest upside is this translation at speed. So we have sellers that operate in 14 languages globally. And pretty much from the day I joined Getty Images, which is now 10 years ago, I've had sellers who are not native English speakers saying, could you give this to me in the language that I sell in? And I have always had to say, I wish I could, I wish I could. I wish I could even run training in these other 13 languages. I am not that skilled, but at least now, pretty much at the touch of a button, I can provide content that has been created in one language in many others. And that's an enormous win for us as an organization.

I agree completely. I'm doing the same thing at Siemens.

Of Course I'm running it by sometimes the local just to get that, you know, final checkup to make sure that it's hitting the mark. But yes, being a big time saver.

Yeah, it's not foolproof. And there are certain languages that are very much less good quality when translated. But you know, it's a learning platform so eventually we will get gold standard translation I think for pretty much all languages. And that's as I say, that's huge.

Yeah, thanks. Thanks a lot. Kate and Sabina, over to you. We were talking about, you know, infusing AI into this tech stacks. So again from your side high level, what's going on with your company?

Well, we are a mid sized company so like even so, we are European market leader in workforce management, meaning managing employees, planning how they are actually working even for ourselves. Time is at essence and if I'm investing a lot of time in preparing content in different languages, it takes time. I want to basically use the collective information that is available at Fingertip, information about competitors that we have, information about our products that I want to package in the right way for this particular customer. And we have to imagine our customers are the head of HR that has a very narrow segment span of interest. So we need to hit the mark very fast. And AI helps us to scan through the entire information we have as a full richness from success stories to certain information that we have stored about nuances that these particular people have mentioned before in our marketing materials or events that they work to use AI to scan through all of this information is actually one of the key elements. So using.

Own developed AI agents that we are having where we set the guardrails to yes, use existing tools like Copilot and chatgpt in a restricted way with own agents on the top is giving our sales organization a very fast entry to the vast information material and then saying like hey, create me a presentation for this so I can be faster at the spot. Yes, I need to review these elements. And yes, we also have agents within Salesforce that are helping us to pinpoint the right information at the right moment in time to the salesperson what frees time for them. Because let's be honest, in the researches we've done, we identified that 40% of the time of an AE is searching for that one slide that they have seen two months ago somewhere and they don't remember where they stored it. And we want to streamline this and make it easier for them to use this. And this is why we are actually from a technology point, we integrate Salesforce High Spot, all the Microsoft suites to make sure that we are having a set of tools that are enabling the sellers to act fast.

Right. Just from my own experience I've identified that if you use Microsoft Copilot, I can also just describe, hey, can you please find that document that was talking about the skill assessment that we did, you know, from the person. So it's great because a lot of times I'm also just spending time looking for something I just put in there and boom, it surfaces. Three or four documents that could be it and usually it hits the mark. So I think our sales are going to benefit big one from that one. Just before we move on to the next question, Kate or Nev, Anything anyone said here that you want to address or pick up on or should we move on to the next question?

We move on to the next question, sure.

Then staying with you Sabina, how are you know your enablement teams using AI to drive their own performance? And what do you also see as risks within enablement using AI? And do you even think that perhaps enablement could be replaced by AI agents in the future?

Well, I'm torn in between two things. On the one hand side, I do see a great benefit for my entire team. I have a team, let's take a very simple example. I have some team members that are in India. So however we are a very strong still German based company. Now when they are creating learning content they are having the issue that their German is either non existing or fragmented. So to produce something that a seller accepts as a good training or training material, they need tools to fast react on it. Because we all know if you're waiting too long to create a content and it doesn't hit the nail within the 20 minutes of presenting.

The audience will get lost. So AI helps us to not only translate but also to provide. Even in trainings when we use teams we turn on the the automatic translation. Yes it has hiccups in the subtitles or in the live translation, but it helps my team to be more efficient and to be recognized as a source of knowledge. On the risk side is that being considered a source of knowledge also means like when there is failures, you're the first person they are running to to say like this is not right, this is not right, I got the wrong information, it's your fault. So it's always like a little bit of a tiptoeing between these things and setting things straight to make sure that you are also tapping in the right information. Will it replace us? No, I think AI Gives us the opportunity to free more time. Because one thing that AI cannot do in any case is the human factor. When I want to learn and I want to get an advice and coaching, I want it from a person. Even so, there are certain tools nowadays, AI driven avatars that can give guidance or coaching. They're never the same feeling of understanding that an AE has an issue like a human can identify. So as much as I am a techie geek and I love AI, I think that human factor and the empathy that a human person can bring over AI cannot replace. So sales enablement needs to shift more to the part of being there again the coach, what we've been in the past and letting the standard creation of material be done by AI. So no risk for me. I think we are safe.

Thank you. Kate, what do you think about that?

Yeah, I completely agree. I mean I liken my team to a set of in house consultants and you know, our goal is to, as we teach our sellers to do, understand what the need is and then come up with solutions. Where AI helps us is in providing those solutions in a speedier way. But we still have to evaluate the solutions. I mean, I was talking to somebody else about this yesterday. You know the idea that AI, which is a giant machine, no matter what anybody says, it's a giant machine that is programmed by other humans. The idea that that's going to infallible, you know, be infallible and routinely provide you with 100% the most accurate information I think is fanciful. And we will need to continue to use our own brains and remind other people that they need to do the same for fear of, you know, blissfully just assuming that what the computer has told told you is, as I say, factually correct. So yes, it will help us with the speed. No, it will not replace the humans. I mean we have an onboarding just as an example that is probably 40% online learning and the rest is in person delivered over zoom, which was the still with the use of AI, but humans talking to other humans. Our feedback from our new hires is they love that combination and they would very much not like it if the entirety of the onboarding was just go and sit in front of a computer and have it talk at you, even if leveraging AI. So I think it's really important for us as enablement professionals to really reinforce that point. Again, to Sabina's point, there are tools out there that talk about coaching that say that they coach or provide reps with coaching. The truth is, in my view, what it's worth. That is not coaching, it's feedback. If a machine is telling you the 10 things that you didn't do on a call, that's feedback. What it isn't doing is helping you to understand the reasons why you didn't do those 10 things in the first place. What were the barriers? What is your motivations? How can I help you? What will be different next time? That's the human part that I believe until somebody proves to me otherwise can only be done by a skilled coach. And I think that's where we continue to be able to add value. Where the AI comes in is it can provide me with an example of 10 keywords that were missed in a call that I would otherwise have to watch in entirety. As I say, it doesn't replace the follow up conversation, which is what stopped you talking about those 10 keywords.

Absolutely.

Very good. And I actually just recently saw again a couple of mistakes in AI and I always think to myself, it sounds so good what I see on the screen, but it's flat out wrong.

Usually it sounds perfect, but we have to really be critical and really look at it. And like you said, a lot of times it's just a machine, it's just algorithms and a lot of times it is actually wrong.

Aniv, what about you?

Yeah, I was going to kind of jump on what Kate said a little bit as well. So definitely the onboarding feedback. Same here. You can push out all of the agents, the bots that you like or the self paced and they still want the human interaction and that's really reassuring for enablement teams. I think the other angle is how can we use AI to get a better return on investment for certain programs. For example, example, we recently rolled out the Challenger sales methodology and what we did was we took the workshops that were worked on internally. So all of those documents as well that were made by marketing during the implementation phase and we put them into an agent and that is called Challenger Maestro internally. And we're seeing how adoption is. We're using that as a way, a mechanism for reps to test their mails, to test their calls. And then they come to us with like, oh my God, that was really good. And I think even from a CFO CRO perspective, they love that because they're saying, okay, neve asked for this training, we implemented this training, we're seeing adoption through call recording, et cetera. But there's also the AI piece at the end and also the other piece to that is as I mentioned earlier, we implemented dust, but we also were able to consolidate our tech stack so we no longer have a traditional enablement platform. We have managed to, to get rid of that and obviously make cost savings around that. And that has been something that I think the C suite sit up and listen to as well. So I think it's about positioning ourselves, as you said Kate, consultants internally, but also looking at the investment pieces and how we can help with AI to make things better.

100%.

Very good. And what pitfalls are you all seeing in your enablement teams or in the sales organizations and how they're using AI?

I think we touched on one of them and it is that risk of losing the ability to engage one's critical faculties. So you know, taking completely at face value what a search engine might provide to you and just assuming that it's correct without verifying it, I mean there's a reason why at the bottom of the copilot chat it says AI is not always correct or words to that effect. And you know, woe betide anybody who forgets that part. So there's that. And you know, and I think if you extrapolate that we were talking, I think when we met yesterday, you know that there is a generation of sellers who are digital natives and for whom all of this is just bread and butter. AI. Yes, of course I look at AI. Yes, of course I will default to whatever Google tells me at the top of the search screen. Now I will not go and scroll down and see what other people might be saying. Of course I talk by tapping things into a phone. Of course I talk to my customers via email. What we risk losing is the ability to actually use words. Use words in a spoken form. And particularly when it comes to persuading somebody, that's really important. I have yet to find somebody who can successfully negotiate over email. And yet we continue to find sellers who think that it's possible. Those are the pieces that I again I, I don't see a time anytime soon where that's going to change and as I say, dangerous to assume otherwise.

Yeah. I also noticed sometimes the, I wouldn't even say younger gen, sometimes I see colleagues, they're, they're like doing too much email. Sometimes I try to encourage you, hey, don't forget, pick up the phone. No, just call people, interact, you can speed things up and yeah, yes, the.

Old fashioned world, the old fashioned talking, yeah.

I think from, from an enablement perspective as well, I think, you know, I see people coming on board generally the more junior people saying oh my God, this is a shortcut, you Know, we can make training modules really easily. And I always say, you know, step back. What value have you added? What has your human brain added to this? And I think that's about the authentic voice. And I think sellers will really warm to anything that feels like it's been done by an expert within the company. And obviously you can get most of the way there with AI now, but there's always that touch on top. And that's where I think enablers need to be careful as well. It's like, where's your value? Add what's your authentic voice? And it's something that we need to as leaders in enablement, need to coach our teams on regularly. Really.

Yeah. But it's also leads into the pitfall that we are falling into of like if we expect our sellers today to move away again from the phone. And after the pandemic there was a wave where people tended because they always were on the screen, they started to be a bit of afraid of human interaction. Maybe the word afraid is too much, but like now we are bringing AI into it. What means basically another past way to avoid real human interaction. And I think like one of the things that we need to teach not only our sellers but also us as selling the content and the the subjects to our sellers or other individuals in the company is to make sure that they're like human interaction is necessary because we learn from each other. And AI won't teach us something. It only repeats something that I put in a string with words of a question that answers in the way how it thinks I want it answered. That's a total different scope. If I go into a negotiation and the customer doesn't react like AI told me so oopsie. So then we need to do something. So AI has its pitfall in the part of like really still understanding human behavior. It's learning, but still presuming it's not real life. Well, I always say if you go into a negotiation about salary with your manager feels the same like negotiation with a customer. Would you ask AI to do this for you or would you do it in person? Well, the answer is usually pretty simple.

Very good.

And just, just as an example of the human piece, we have this year gone back to doing role playing. Now don't get me wrong, there's a lot of resistance to the at the beginning. But by the time we got to the fourth round of in person role plays in small groups in zoom, so nobody was feeling horribly exposed. We had sellers coming back going, that was really useful. Can we do some More and, and it was literally managers, my team playing the customer and the sellers with a brief coming and selling for real like they would if they had to physically go and talk to somebody. And it is, I think it was interesting to see, see the levels of fear in the first round that once it was overcome I think people really thought, oh, okay, so there is stuff I can achieve in that 30 minute in person meeting that Jaron, to your point, I would have to do probably 10 emails to arrive at otherwise that's. And again that's a value add that we can bring. There was a bit of chipping away in the first instance to get people to buy into it, but it was, it was super worth it.

Very good. I'm also going to be doing a global role play exercise here after a whole rollout of a sale enablement program. So I hope I get the same feedback that you're getting.

I'm sure you will.

So, coming to the final round of questions, we're already at the 30 minute mark and I know we want to do a short Q and at the end so let's try to keep them a little bit short. So over to you, Sabina. I think we see AI is here to stay, reshaping how we prep, coach and support our sales. Looking ahead, what do you think enablement is going to grow? Shrink, simply evolve. And what skills will matter most for enablement leaders over the next three years?

I think enablement will stay number one because you always need someone to teach someone.

The part of like, will we grow? Yes, because people will want to have more of this coaching personal interaction again because now they have more time. And this basically also means if. Never mind. If you're a sales leader or if you're an ableman person, freeing time by not doing research will enable you to actually really go into the human interaction and building on what is the most important learning from each other. If we are looking at like what will bring the future, AI will stay. AI will be now the third team member that we have.

That is going to be there for us and will enable us to actually be faster with certain things. But it's not going to go away. It will even come with more aspects that we will like or hate.

Very good. And Kate, what advice would you give to enablement teams to stay ahead of the curve?

Well, I think the key things, and again, it's probably what you all are saying to your sellers. Be curious, always be questioning, always be asking, is this as good as we can be? Are there other things that we can Be doing that is going to shift the needle in the direction that we want to move in. Just as we train our sellers and our agents. You cannot provide a solution if you don't first diagnose what the issue is. That remains our primary goal as enablement professionals. With the overlay now of in what ways can AI help us to do this more effectively, more efficiently, or to, next point, deliver a faster roi? I think all of that remains, you know, pretty much as we're doing now, as I say, just with the overlay of the technology. And I think it's also true at the moment to say it's not a given that there's an AI solution out there that can do everything that we need it to do, or solutions in plural, even if you've integrated them all into your tech stack. You know, what makes successful enablement teams and what makes a successful technology stack that supports those enablement teams is trust and credibility. And the trust is earned by your professional expertise and the value that you bring to your role. And the credibility from. It's certainly, in my team's case, having been in sales in the first place. So we're able to speak from a place of confidence and knowledge. And that I think, again, is not going to be easily replaced by a machine.

Very good. And Niamh, what is one thing that you're doing right now for yourself, for your enablement team and for your sellers to prepare them all for the future?

Yeah, I think it really echoes what Kate just said. One of the core values at the company I work at is success that succeed through expertise. And I think we sometimes want to take those shortcuts with AI and I think we really need to be that expert, whether it be enablement teams, but also the sales teams, because at the end of the day, that's what competitive advantage is going to look like going forward is being that expert on topics and not relying simply on AI, feeding it to you. So be that expert, be that human being, have that interaction and shine using AI, but not through AI.

Thank you so much, Neve. Kate, Sabina, Great insights, great stories. I learned a lot. I hope everyone else learned a lot. And yeah, Gerhard, welcome to the stage again.

I second that. I think you summed it up really well. I think that all your perspectives were refreshing, insightful, practical and hopeful. I think you represent.

A, the type of thinking that we need in the United States that is humanity focused. And I loved your insights about, especially Sabine, the way you describe that we need to teach people to be more human, to shed their inhibitions. And I love the way Kate introduces live role plays with real people.

And.

We in the United States, we feel that AI has isolated people much more than ever before. So there's greater levels of loneliness and the ability to communicate and relate is atrophying, which is so necessary for the profession of selling. What do you think, Stephanie?

I 100% agree. I love the combination of the two here. And even just this panel alone, you know, it was the in person event virtually we had to or we had the opportunity to evaluate all these enablement leaders and. And that's how I met Jaron. And you know, meeting in person and then the connection virtually. I mean, it just all goes hand in hand. And I love that all of you are really adopting that mindset and that model and supporting your people and forcing them to still do some of those in person role plays even though we.

Know people don't love it.

But it is such an important part of that. So well done and congratulations, all of you are on the right track here.

Thank you very much. Great to see you all. Have a good rest of the event.

Thank you. Merci Boku Dakishun.

Thanks everybody. Bye bye.

Congratulations.