How AI Destroyed My Revenue Enablement Belief System

Gerhard, thank you so much. It's a wonderful opportunity to be part of the AI Sales Summit. And I'm happy to present on behalf of Forrester Research and our revenue enablement and B2B sales research teams here with you and your teammates today. So the title of my session, how AI Destroyed my Revenue Enablement Belief System is based on this. So this, of course, is Bigfoot. Or it is, as most of the visuals in my presentation today are created by AI, a rendition of Bigfoot. Bigfoot is something that does not exist. We'd like it to. Conspiracy theorists would hope that it does. But let's just face it. I think we probably know Bigfoot is a myth. You know what else is a myth? The perfect, all knowing, all powerful industry analyst. Drawn, of course, me as the all powerful, all knowing industry analyst by AI. I'm not. And we are not. You know, there's this secret handshake, Gerhard, that we learn when we become analysts and we learn the code and the password and all this other stuff. And part of it is, repeat after me, I'm right about everything. I know everything. But guess what? It's actually not true. So a little bit of humility at play here today, and I will explain why before we get into the meat of my discussion. So, revenue enablement, previously called sales enablement, hailed from two different sources of expertise inside B2B organizations. The first was the snoozerama of training, sales training. Here is yours truly, drawn by AI, presenting to a bunch of board salespeople. Because like most sales training, it probably means that it has been delivered at the wrong time, in the wrong way, in the wrong modality, not in the motions and the deals and the renewals and the actions that matter to B2B sellers. Another source of revenue enablement that was pretty much equally as boring in our industry was the development of sales content. To this day, every week, I'm talking to customers who come to us and say, hey, can you help me make or assist or ask or influence our salespeople to pay attention to the wonderful things that I have designed for them? Well, you know, not necessarily. There's a lot more to that than that, but lo and behold, some years ago, we started to see the rise of enablement. Specific tools, platforms for content, platforms for readiness and learning. And that was going to be the magic bullet, right? That was going to be the thing that made enablers relevant. The capability and the offering and the discipline and the remit that suddenly got them a seat at the executive team table. But here's Where I personally had a problem with people who were in enablement leadership roles overemphasizing tools and anticipating that their appreciation from their internal constituents would rise so dramatically when they just handed software off to people. And the reason for that is a fool with a tool is still a fool. And what I found was that a lot of enablement professionals were talking about and, and posting about and coming to me and my colleagues for help with enablement, less as a discipline and more as just a reseller, if you will, of enablement platforms. And to see one's job as little more than just buying tools and then hoping that the salespeople adopt them. That's not a profession and enablement is a profession. So I got kind of tired of this. Last year I published this blog, Revenue enablement is not in the tool business. Obviously we all need tools in our personal and professional lives all day long to survive, to become efficient and productive, and to live our best lives. But enablement is a profession. The best practices and how to manage and deploy successful content and learning and methodology and communications are things that people learn how to do, not so much in an academic, but, but more in an on the job environment. And the best of them become very strong senior level leaders with a seat at that executive table. So this blog was basically a line in the sand that I drew for the community that said, of course you're going to buy tools and deploy tools, but if you see your job as tool centric, that's a problem. But this is where I'm kind of a little bit wrong. You know why? Because while my focus on that particular moment was you need to be amazing at your craft, whether it's in the arts, whether it's in sports, in business, in technology, in science, like all of these famous people were, it's not about the tools that they use. It's not about the tennis racket or the golf club or the PC or the equation. It's about what lies behind it. I did start to realize with the rise of generative AI that this is actually one of those unique moments in history. I still believe that a fool with a tool is still a fool. But this dramatic revolution that we're seeing now around tools specific to the enablement space and the sales space is so big that we have to think of it singularly as equivalent to a couple of other moments in history where the moment had to dictate the direction in which we took our thinking. One of them was in the early 20th century when Henry Ford revolutionized the automobile industry. With the first assembly line, with the first deployment of mass production of cars. He also treated people really well. He shortened their day, he raised their pay. That was pretty good stuff. But there's this famous attributable conversation supposedly where someone said, why are you making these car thingies? No one ever asked you for them. Well, his response, as you might remember, was if people had asked me for something, I would have given them a faster horse. I give them what they need because they don't realize that they need it. Fast forward a bunch of decades to the mid-90s when Bill Gates, who some folks in this session may only know him as a philanthropist, but he actually started this little company called Microsoft. He went on David Letterman's late night show and had you should YouTube this, this is a great, great bit. So Letterman gave him a hard time and he kind of bit back at some of these technology innovations. But Bill wasn't going to back down. And they're friends to this day. Microsoft was late to the Internet game And in the mid-90s, Bill Gates saw the light and he actually said to the entire company this was change management at its best. Everybody stop what you're doing. If what you're doing is not related to the net, stop doing it. Because everything moving forward about our company is net related. So I humbly position to you folks today, before we get into the meat of our conversation in a moment or two that I was wrong that enablement and B2B sales best practices do require technology and this is a moment for us all to embrace it and leverage it. But I still stick to my guns when it comes to the fact of being great at enabling, being great at selling, being great at anything that we need to be good at is more than just owning the tools. It's a combination of the skills, the knowledge, the capabilities and the technologies to be awesome at what we do. So our discussion today is going to start where every discussion for go to market organizations should begin and that is with our buyers. We have some research here at Forrester from our large buying study that we do every year. And just this summer we developed developed some new content and some new information about trends in B2B buyers. We surveyed about 17 and a half thousand people and I've got a few highlights that I want to share with you today because it leads us to understand why and how to leverage AI most effectively as sellers and as selling organizations. Because guess what? Our buyers are doing it too. So we used to talk about how buyers became buying groups. Now at Forrester, we Talk about buying networks. A buying network acknowledges the fact that so many of the purchases in B2B interactions are now not a seller, not a buyer, but a consensus or a committee worth of people who are conducting these. And one of the most relevant statistics is how many people are involved in a typical B2B sale? 22. Yes, 22 human beings are involved in a typical B2B sales. Small ones, medium and large and extra large ones. 13 inside the buying organization, but nine other people. Who are these other people? Industry analysts, gearhards, strangers on the Internet. Right. It's people in our larger networks that don't belong inside or don't fit inside the buying organization. So 22 people are typically involved in the typical B2B purchase, and most of them now involve three or more different departments. Things are getting very complex, which means that sales as a profession is so far different, so much more different than it once was. What we're supposed to be good at, what we're supposed to know, what we're supposed to be able to do is being revolutionized, if by no other reason, by what our buyers are facing. But on top of that, there's some other hard news that I have to deliver to you from this survey data set. The vast majority of buyers tell us that at some point or multiple points during their buying experience, they were not particularly pleased. They were unhappy with at least something about the selling organization. The selling people, four out of five say at some point the purchase stalled during the process. And in addition to 13 people inside the organization, the vast majority of purchases involve, as we saw earlier, multiple departments. So what are buyers doing? They're also making sure that they're using some of their own technologies in places where we have a little bit less influence. Transactions for B2B buyers are rapidly moving towards self serve environments entirely. Self serve? Well, yeah, we're starting to see certain instances of where a bot buys from a bot with minimal to almost or no zero interactions from humans. We see big trends going on here in our B2B Buyer Survey research where we see more and more often that the purchase is made from the vendor's website, from the vendor's network, from the partner, from the reseller, or it's an upsell from an existing product and not just from the enterprise account executive or rep. And as our workforce becomes more and more dominated by the younger generations, zillennials are now more than 50% of the American and the American sales workforces. Buying from the account rep is becoming less of a thing. Buying from all the other Sources is more of a thing. So the interactions, and this is one of the most fantastic and interesting pieces of this research here, are changing very rapidly. So we talk about the stages of the buyer's journey here at Forrester as educate as discover, evaluate and commit. What am I learning about how I might handle this change? Discover what are the options in front of me to buy or build or change? Evaluate and then commit. I'm going to make a final decision and if it involves buying from someone on the outside, then they are going to be the winner and there's going to be some losers. But take a look at the most important interactions at each of these stages that B2B buyers tell us are important to them. At Discover, evaluate and commit. The number one interaction is now generative AI conversation search tools. When we combine all the data and do all of our math and we just want to come up with one overarching theme, how to B2B B buyers buy. These are the top influences. Most importantly is generative AI tools inside and outside their firewall. Social media and product experts. Do you know what you don't see here folks? Sales reps. I'm going to go back a slide for a moment because in 2025, numbers one, two and three were generative AI, social media and product experts. In 2024 it was product experts first, generative AI second, and sales reps in third place. They have fallen out of the top three interactions that B2B buyers tell us are involved in their work. Is that scary? Let's talk a little bit about how they're doing it. How do B2B buyers use generative AI as part of their process through the discover, evaluate and commit phases of the buyer's journey? Well, first of all, let's take a look at who's doing it. Everybody, I mean nearly everybody is now using AI as part of their process in making B2B purchases. And these numbers are actually even a bit higher for million dollar and up average sales prices. How are they using it? Specifically, what are the most important self guided interactions that B2B buyers engage in in every stage of the buyer's journey? Yet again it is generative AI conversation search tools. These are all the non human digital self and self self serve, right asynchronous capabilities tier. So we see vendor websites, classic search in there, industry associations that great, that's great. But generative AI has come out of nowhere just three years to top every one of these phases of the buyer's journey. So what are they doing with it when it comes to you and your organization. These are the things that AI users in B2B buying organizations are leveraging to make their decisions to conduct their searches for vendors. If we roll all this up to two key statistics, it's that 69% of B2B buyers considered more vendors because they were using generative AI. And just about two thirds were able to better define the evaluation criteria and how they were going to communicate internally the impact of the purchase that they made. So finally, I want to share with you before we move on to this next piece, what does all of this mean for B2B sales organizations? And in my particular patch, the enablement leaders who need to make sure that sellers are up to speed on not just what buyers are doing, but how do we respond to how buyers and their efforts are changing. So when we look at before and after generative AI at the discover, evaluate and commit phases of the buyer's journey, let's take a look at two variables. Variable number one, in the old days or up until these days was how many vendors were considered. And the other variable is what was the volume of personal interaction that B2B buyers or buying network members had with human beings in the selling organization. So the number of vendors would usually start, has traditionally started with a decent list. We probably add a few more as we do some research and then we slowly, slowly, slowly bring that number down to three, two and then one final choice over the course of of that life cycle. The interactions with humans generally start out kind of small because we're doing our research. Then they elevate quite a bit during that evaluate phase. When we're talking to sales reps, we're talking to solutions, overlays, talking to engineers, and then it drops off as appropriately towards the end. This is what we think is happening in the age of AI. Buyers are going to much more immediately maximize the number of vendors under consideration. We saw already that they're choosing more. That shortlist is going to stay larger for longer because the efforts to winnow down that list are all going to be able to be automated towards the final commit stage of the buyer's journey. Which means more of your competitors are in play for a longer period of time in your sales pursuits. And yet your ability to use your sparkling personality as part of those sales motions is somewhat diminished because the large language models and other AI tools that B2B buyers are leveraging allows them to, yeah, let's just face it, not deal with sellers and selling humans nearly as much until the last part of the journey when they can make it much more intense and have those conversations and have those negotiations and bring the need for much more personalized closing conversations to bear. On top of all this, we have some folks here at Forrester who look into trust. Trust of brands, trust of companies, trust of people. And when we look at who B2B buyers trust the most, and not so much, it's generally the people that are around them inside their bubble day in and day out, you know, who they're not trusting so, so, so much us, the sales professionals. Why? Because we have not evolved as fast as they have evolved towards the point where whether we are the product experts or the trusted advisors or adding value to what they do and what they know, we are still coming across too much as traditional, classic, close them and run on salespeople. This is something that has to change. So we have some thinking here at Forrester about what we call the new B2B supercycle. And this is where I'd like to share with you our thinking about where we've been, where we are, and where we think we might go over the next five to 10 years in terms of the roles and responsibilities that are going to provide for winning outcomes for B2B sales organizations. Come back in time with me, Gerhard. 20 years, 30 years, actually, to 1995. Over the course of a sales cycle, this is what we normally put in front of buyers. Predominantly an account executive, a sales professional who from start to finish would guide and own and interact with the customer during their entire discover, evaluate and commit journey. Things started to get more technical in the 90s. So this evolution of the sales engineer started to evolve and they would pop up in a couple of moments. But 20 years ago, we started to see the rise of the revenue development rep, the inside seller, the bdr, the adr. We started realizing, you know what, there's some repeatable, not so complex, highly scalable work here being done that the AE shouldn't really be handling. Let's bring in these younger folks, newer in their careers, eager to learn and have them do some of that work early on in the buyer's journey. Okay? And that played on and on and on. It really has grown quite a bit more and more. Flash forward to just 10 years ago. We started to see a lot of RDR teams. Big, huge floors of folks on the phone, on the web, using sales engagement technologies, et cetera, to blanket all possible prospects out there and create the MQLs and the SQLs and then pass them along to the closers. We believe here at Forrester that the age of the RDR has peaked and that it may already now start to be in decline. Why? Because this is today, in 2025. We now see the introduction of AI sales agents starting to have interactions between buying and selling organizations towards the very beginning of the buyer's journey, where RDRs 20 years prior were actually introduced. As you can tell, as we've moved through this chronology here, the ae, the typical traditional rep, is having fewer and fewer touch points with the buyer. The engineer is still there. It's part of those technical matchups which are so important. But we think that this agent capability is going to take us to a place where it actually starts to pop up more and more in different places during the buyer's journey. Not just at the beginning to qualify in or out opportunities, but to handle at technical metrics. Looking at negotiations, looking at closing, looking at handoffs to service personnel, we think the RDR role has peaked and is probably going to decline. If there is one job that might start to look a little bit less voluminous or go away because of AI, it could be that RDR job. But look at the number of touch points that your account executive or traditional account owner or B2B sales professional has with the buyers. Fewer and fewer over time. Which means that those interactions need to be better, they need to add value. And we, as sales leaders and as enablement and ops leaders need to laser focus ourselves on making sure that every one of those interactions is supported as much as possible in ways that AI today at least cannot yet do. How do we do that? By finding and helping sellers where they live. If I'm a B2B sales professional, from the moment I wake up to the moment I stop working at night, the only thing I care about are my deals, my opportunities, my, my renewals. This is late September. I think about my September, my quarter and my year and nothing else. Anything else my employer asks me to think about, talk about, pay attention to. I'm going to ignore it if it doesn't help me get to my number, if it doesn't help me get to club. So what we see high performing B2B sales organizations embracing is the idea of activity based enablement. Meaning instead of having me go get anything that I need at the moment when I need it, during my buyer's journey, it comes to me. This requires obviously some technology infrastructure and we'll get there in a moment. But work with me around the fidget spinner visual here and we'll talk a little bit about how we see this working out. Every time I have an interaction with my buyer or my colleagues, or I have interactions with members of the buying group and the buying network, something changes. And if it's entered into the CRM or if the buyer opens up document or artifact that I sent to them or they forward it to someone else, that is a trigger event. Because my deal, which looked like this, now looks a little bit like that. Maybe I increased the likelihood to close from 20 to 50%. That's the moment in the context of my deal, which is all I really care about, to provide me with what I should show and what I should know. The artifacts that you suggest I send to and provide to my buyer now that the deal looks a little different after that trigger event and the artifacts that are going to help me behind the firewall learn, know, remember and reinforce the things that are the competencies that make me a better seller. We use AI to scale up the provision of these manually created tag taxonomy oriented suggestions from enablement specifically to the seller. AI is not smart. AI just does a lot of our work for us a lot more often, which is why a fool with a tool is still a fool. If you're doing bad things and you automate them, you're going to be doing a lot more bad work. We don't want anybody having that happen. In most sales organizations, then the seller takes the suggestions or doesn't take the suggestions from the ecosystem of enablers and operators and tools around them. They have that human moment where they're like, I will send that to the buyer or no, thank you, I will not review the 60 seconds on how to best negotiate with financial services buyers. It's my choice. But then we need to close the circle. We need to close the loop by gathering analytics on which artifacts were sent, were not sent, which documents were opened, not opened, how long were the PowerPoint slides viewed? Was the PDF forwarded? Did the seller take that 60 second refresher course? Did they ever take the training? Did they look at the battle card? And we need to compare all of those findings with what happened to our deals. Did we win them or did we lose them and become better and better at enabling and supporting our sellers with what we provide to them and when we provide it to them. And that's where machine learning kicks in. If I have an interaction with my buyer and I change something in the CRM and I shouldn't have to do it with my fingertips, right? It should just happen organically. But for today, let's just pretend, you know, it's 2023, I hit enter and boom. The what to show and what to know suggestions come to me with properly deployed technologies integrated into those CRM. At the opportunity level, those suggestions a month from now are going to be a little bit different. And everybody who supports sellers will get better and better and smarter and smarter and more and more accurate and drive more adoption of what they provide to sellers over time. So let's just wrap up with a quick use case as to how we see this playing out. Let's remember when it comes to seller learning, development, training and readiness, human beings, especially B2B sales professionals and everyone in this environment today, we don't learn by reading, we don't learn by listening, we don't learn by watching. We learn by doing. That is why when person A is teaching person B how to do something on the computer, person B needs to sit at the keyboard while person A doesn't give them a fish, but teaches them how to fish. I'm going to fly through some graphics here relatively quickly, but this is how activity based enablement features into activity based learning. So all of us have our buyers journey stages. We all call them different things. Hopefully most of us have our CRM stages built out that map to each of these buyer journey stages. At each of these stages, when something happens that is a trigger event that should happen based on the activities that are taking place by me, the seller, or me and my colleagues on the selling team to the buyer or the buying group or the buying network. This is where we need to make sure we understand what a rep does in each of these stages and then how we can make sure that what they need is to provide to them at each of these stages. So remembering that sellers learn by doing, we need to make sure that we're always providing information, whether it's static or interactive, in the moment that their deal on that pane of glass is in front of them, we then need to give them examples of what good looks like. Ideally videos of their peers launching the same exact pitch or conducting the same sort of discovery meeting or negotiating or whatever it might be. We need to give folks the opportunity to practice. Not talking about the game, it's just talking about practice. That was a different kind of AI. If you remember the YouTube video from Allen Iverson talking about practice, it's the, not the game and we need to make sure that we're using these role play opportunities to double down on that. And I'll wrap up with that in just a moment. We also want to make sure that when folks do want to go find things that they are available to them, whether they're reference materials or more formal learning artifacts and activities that they can participate in. So when it comes to learning, we started talking earlier about how enablement evolved from a lot of learning and development to poorly executed training environment. We're not doing a live quiz here today, but I want you to sort of think to yourself, how do you folks think salespeople in B2B organizations are most interested in learning? Which of these modalities is most popular? I don't know. What do you think? This is what our research tells us. Our research tells us that These are how B2B salespeople most prefer to learn things. And when we highlight some of them, we recognize that role play and video married together are probably the direction in which most B2B sales organizations are likely to find better adoption, better participation, and better impact. Because we need to remember that human beings typically learn on the job primarily, also socially, but barely from the standpoint of formal structured learning. So we believe that what you can do right now is to take a baby step with some of the tools that are available to you. And think about this through the lens of AI roleplay coaching. The advantages of this particular approach are many. First of all, it is infinitely scalable, right? This is no longer a manager doing role play with their human sales rep and using up time to do it or taking the time to review videos. This is the machines and the AI capabilities doing this. There's also a consistency here and a lack of judgment. We actually have some data coming in very shortly where we're asking B2B sales reps, are you more comfortable doing role play with a machine or a human? I'm kind of hoping that the answer is machine because the machine scores me, but it doesn't judge me. It's not my boss getting frustrated with how many tries it takes me to get my pitch right. I can practice 10,000 times if I want, and there's nothing wrong with practicing 10,000 times. Our research here into how B2B chief sales officers think about lowering or increasing the cost of their expenditures on sales technology supports this because the revenue enablement, content or readiness platforms show the biggest gap between the in politics, they would call it the favorable and the unfavorable ratings. Here we call it about the investment or divestment of all the different technologies that we're seeing here. So finally, to wrap up on this whole role play coaching and AI inspired environment, we have two classes of providers that are showcasing these efforts. The first class are the traditional revenue Enablement platforms. These names are I'm sure familiar to everyone. As of a couple of weeks ago, bigtincan and Showpad are now becoming Showpad. So there'll be six big names pretty much left in the space that offers end to end. Content readiness, coaching, roleplay, AI inspired and everything else. These folks all started either as content or readiness. Those first couple of slides where AI driven Peter was boring people to death. But there's another category of providers and these are just some of the logos out there of companies that have come from a generative AI native space. They're not full on providers with everything that a modern revenue enablement platform tends to provide and they're not at the cost point either. But there's a lot of them coming out of the woodwork and many more besides these representative logos where just doing a quick little pilot might be an interesting way to learn to what extent coaching and role play and helping folks get to where they need to be at the moment, where they need to get to those places with activity based enablement is going to be successful for you and your organization. So Gerhard, that's it for me. I wish this was me. I wish I was all knowing and all wonderful and this regal, but I'm not. I'm just human. I think that enablement has sort of come full swing from folks who thought it was very tool centric to me saying no, you still have to be good at your job to maybe, maybe the pendulum is swung from like the mama bear to the papa bear. Now we're kind of in the baby bear middle of things. I talked a little bit a moment ago about 10,000 different ways. And that's Mark. That's Thomas Edison's favorite quote, right? Took him 10,000 tries to invent the light bulb. I haven't failed 10,000 times. I've found a thousand, 10,000 ways that won't work until I figured out what has. So we encourage everyone to take the leap, start experimenting with these tools if you haven't already and do your own research as we said five years ago and learn what are the components of these AI capabilities that help you attack these challenges of AI provided buyers, aggressive buyers, buyers who don't want to talk to sellers as much to create better capabilities amongst the humans who we still have in these diminishing number of touch points between buying and selling organizations. So Gerhard, thank you so much for the chance to share with everybody today. I hope the conference is a success for all parties involved. I have one quick question. Thank you so much, Peter. This was so eye opening for me. What kind of advice do you give to enablement leaders? You have so many papers on Forrester.com, where should they go to get more information about AI and sales and revenue enablement? We have a lot that's outside the firewall. There's the blogs and that's the best way for non customers to access that content. The general idea here is we at Forrester are conducting research. So what we're putting out there about AI is pretty reliable because what we put out there about everything is pretty reliable because one of the things I love most about my job is our research doesn't have an end goal in mind. We are not opinions in search of facts. We are actually still basing our opinions on the facts that we gather. So wherever the research takes us, that becomes what we find. The AI stuff is obviously changing and we probably publish something on it every single day here across all of our different disciplines. But in the blogs which are publicly available and there's a few other pieces that are publicly available, everybody can have access to those. Wonderful. Thank you, Peter. Take care everyone.