Name: AI-powered sales enablement: Stay ahead or fall behind
Uploaded: 2025-05-07T14:35:16.131Z
Duration: 59 min 24 s
Description: AI-powered sales enablement: Stay ahead or fall behind

Transcript for "AI-powered sales enablement: Stay ahead or fall behind": Hello, and welcome, everyone. Thank you for giving us five minutes of your patience while we, joined you live on screen. It's great to have you all with us today for this live session on AI powered sales enablement, which is brought to you by none other than the Sales Enablement Collective. So if you don't know me, I'm one of the community managers here that looks after the communities, at Sales Enablement Collective. Just a few things before we get started. Please feel free in the chat. You'll see that there's an audience chat. Let us know who you are, where you're dialing in from, and why you're excited to be joining this session. We'd love to hear from you. You can also feel free to chat in this chat function, throughout the session. We are here live, and we'll be keeping our eyes on it. So feel free to engage and chat with us. If you have any burning questions, which I'm sure most of you do, we have a q and a tab, which you'll see next to it. Please feel free to pop all your questions there. We have saved a little bit of time at the end of the session, so we will answer as many of them as possible. I'm not gonna promise you, but we'll try our best. As you can see, I'm joined on stage with two incredible speakers, and they are very ready to share all the insights with you. And I know they can't wait to dive in. So without further ado, I'm gonna hand it over to Laura from Highspot, and she's gonna kick off the session for us. Amazing. Thank you very much, Emma, for this introduction. And, what I want also to tell you on top of what Emma just presented is that this would be a very interactive session. So it would be just myself and Jaren speaking, but we will have two polls and a few questions for you throughout the session. So, I, I'm really looking forward to hearing more, from from you as we go through. I just as a matter of an introduction, I'm Laura Valerio, principal consultant, on the EMEA professional services team here at Highspot. And before joining Highspot, I spent many years in leading sales and enabling teams across companies like Expedia, Deliveroo, and Vodafone. And now in my role, I work closely with customers along with in in this region, to ensure that the go to market strategies aren't just good on paper, but actually drive measurable results across the business. And if you think about AI, AI plays a key role in making this happen. So, there is a lot of noise today, when we talk about AI. But what we want to do in our session today is to ground the conversation in the reality of your go to market teams. Think about what are the biggest, friction points on, in your go to market motion and how AI can help solve them in a way that is strategic, scalable, and performance driven. And to help us unpack all of that, I'm really excited to be joined by Jaren, global head of sales enablement at Siemens. Jaren has I've been knowing Jaren for quite a few years now. He has led, large scales enablement programs in one of the most complex global organizations out there. And, I've always admired him for his sharp focus in time enablement into business outcomes and performance, not just activity. So, Jaren, welcome, and it's really great to have you with us today. Thank you, Laura. Glad to be here. Very good. Very good. So, if we move to the next slide, what I want to start doing is to, start zooming in zooming out and talk about what's really happening, with AI in the go to market teams right now. And what we what what we are seeing today is that we have moved past the nice to have phase, and AI is actually becoming a competitive necessity. In our newly released state of sales enablement report, we spoke with over 350 leaders across industries and geographies, and nearly 90% of them told us that they're either embedding AI into their go to market process, or they're thinking to do so in the next year. But what we have also observed is that the companies that are seeing a real impact with AI are in the company that are just experimenting and testing it. The companies who are seeing an impact are the companies who are operationalizing it, and they are embedding it across sales, enablement, and the global go to market motion in a way that supports how the teams actually work. If we go in the next slide, we find the the answer to that. And this is because AI alone doesn't solve business problems. It's more the value of AI really comes from how we apply it, How it aligns to your strategy, how it supports your people, and how it powers the execution of your go to market plan. When AI is embedded into the workflows, whether it is about surfacing the right content at the right right time or guiding reps in the right moment or coaching at scales, that's when it becomes, I would say, a catalyst or a connective tissue between the strategy and the execution. And, what we see from the data is how AI helps us bringing consistency, speed, and insight in every part of the revenue engine. So if we move to the next slide, we wanted to share a few highlights that, really help us bringing this to life. We can see how 74% of companies say that AI helps them save time for strategic work. 61% report an increase in efficiency. 50% say it boosts effectiveness. And according to Gartner, by 2025, '70 '5 percent of b two b sale organization will augment traditional sales playbook with AI guided selling solutions. Now we said 90% are have either implemented or are implementing AI in the go to market motion. But if you are in the 10% of organizations that are not leveraging AI yet, the risk of falling behind is real. At the same time, we are just starting. So if you take the opportunity right now and you get it right, the impact is really, measurable and tangible. And that's exactly what we're going to talk about today. So it's the session today would help you really understand where are you in your AI journey and, where you can start solving real problems right now leveraging AI. And it can be start starting from, eliminating low value admin work, improving follow ups, or giving manager better visibility on coaching opportunities. AI has this power of removing friction, speeding up execution, and also drive alignment across all your teams. So as we go through the session today, I encourage you to think about your own workflows. And, there are three key questions. One is, what are the bottlenecks? Where does your team, lose time or, for example, struggle to make decisions? And where could AI free up time for more strategic and high impact work? If we start to identify those points of friction, that's a good start to then, start our transformation leveraging AI. If we move to the next slide. So when I was preparing to, the session today, I was thinking about a question that I usually ask the customers I'm I'm working with. And that the main question is, what's actually is slowing your teams down today? And I am really interested in understanding the key friction points because it's usually behind this, friction points that we have the biggest opportunities for change. And in this slide, I was looking at, I I was grouping three common challenges that I always find. Number one is follow-up. Did you know that 80% of deals need, more than five follow ups to close, but 44% of sellers actually stop following up just after the first one? And this is actually revenue that is working out the door. The second statistic on time spent on selling, it's more like popular. We know that sellers spend 70% of their time more on a beam work, preparation, searching for content. And these are a lot of hours that I've lost every day, especially if you multiply this across each single rep. And then the third challenge is is training and coaching. And, 55% of organizations still struggle with it even if it is, like, top priority for them. And if they struggle, this lead to inconsistent execution at scale. So if you think about these challenges and your own challenges, you can see where AI is not just a shiny tool, but it's it can actually be a real accelerator on how your team work. And, I, I was in sales. And I want to bring some real life examples of, where AI, where I really of what I really appreciate of AI. But, when it's taking off the pressure from the seller, especially when it comes to to follow-up, there's no more staring at a blank page. And sometimes, like, I found myself, okay. How do I respond to this persona in this industry, who has this this particular needs? What AI does, it actually surfaces, personalized messages in second that are tailored, relevant, and ready to go. It also help, like, surfacing fast reminder that helps you and helps the rep keep the deal going. And it scans past interactions. So reps can work into the meeting much better prepared. And they can also focus on what really matters, which is understanding what is value for my customer, and this is what helps me advancing the deals. And from a manager perspective, AI unlock something that we didn't have in the past, which is, real time coaching insights powered by conversation intelligence. I don't know how many of you are using conversation intelligence. I really use it a lot as our, sales team because it doesn't just tell you what happened, but it also shows you where to take the next action and so the coaching becomes more proactive and not just reactive. So here we're not just talking about inefficiencies. We're also talking about key friction point, friction for the team, friction for the buyers, and for the app revenue engine. So before we dive deeper, that's where I I'd love to hear from you, and we take a quick poll. If I was going to ask you, what's the biggest go to market challenge your team is facing today? So you can pick the one that resonate the most, between finding the right content quickly, personalizing outreach at scale, too much time spent on non selling task, lack of visibility into coaching opportunities, measuring what's working and what's not, or other. As Emma was saying, you cannot add text in the poll, but you can add text in the, in the chat. So if your challenges aren't listed here, you can, you can write them directly into the chat. Okay. I can see finding the right content, personalizing outreach at scale. Oh, personalizing outreach actually has, more votes. And could you scroll down so we can see also the other votes and see which is the biggest challenge across the team today. Oh, we have in the chat personalizing enablement content will be my number two after measuring what's working. Yes. So okay. I can go down. We have also too much time spending on non selling tasks. And, oh, wow. Measuring what's working and what's not across go to market efforts seem to be, like, 47% is, a lot about measuring what's working and what is not working. The second one is too much time spent on non selling task, and and then there is personalizing outreach at scale. Jaren, looking at these, statistics, do you see the commonalities with what you're seeing at, at Siemens? Yeah. I think in in general, we struggle as a as a profession to do the the measurement of our impact. So you see this also a lot of events. So also sales enablement collective events where we we try to come together as a community and really dive into, you know, all these measures that we're doing, whether it be coaching or training. Or adding tools into our technology stack, how can we actually prove our value, to our executives. So I definitely have seen that. And, of course, even within Siemens, we we we still find that as a as a challenge. It's a huge challenge, actually. And, actually, if we go, if you go back to the slides and, Emma, we can go to the slide with the title, yes, that one. You can also see from the, reports, state of sales enablement report. We've grouped, the top business challenges here, and, you can see, there is, consistent sales performance is the number one effective sales training. And, if you think about the ability to measure, if you don't measure, for example, what's not working, how can you tailor your training in a way that they could they can be effective? And so really identifying what is what are the knowledge gaps? What are the skill gaps that you, as a sales enablement can help the team with and where you can remove those friction points so that my training becomes more effective and my seller are more prepared to go to market. And this is where AI can really help, really identifying what are the, parts of the conversations where, for example, my seller got stuck, or what are the objection handling that they couldn't really leverage. Or think about, just being able to identify what the, top performers are actually doing that works really well and, and scale it across the organization through the right training and the right coaching. So I agree with all of you guys, having the ability to measure and identify what works would be my top top priority, and that's actually where AI can, can help at at scale. So when we look at those, challenges, and, when we look at this slide, the first impression is that they seem to be all disconnected at first, but actually, the they they have a common root cause. And, the the common root cause is misalignment. If we move to the next slide, we can see, one that one, one sentence that it's, it's like my biggest belief. So and what I see happening in, across many of the organizations that I work with, it's that what's decided at leadership level doesn't always translate into consistent execution in the field. And, actually, this is, a reality since I started in sales, which was many, many years ago. It's always been a challenge. But the problem is that it's got it's gotten worse because, go to market programs are evolving so rapidly because they need to keep up with the new buyer expectation, and also the technology is moving very, very fast. So the pace has increased massively. And this is what is creating even more disconnect between the strategy to succeed and the execution in the ground. And this is what we call, usually the the the go to market gap. Because when we have marketing, sales, and enablement that that aren't not just fully aligned, but actually moving at the same place, that's when even the best programs, they lose momentum. And you see, for example, in content that never get used, in training that is not reinforced, or, for example, in messaging that changes depending on who you're talking with, or there are discrepancies before between, how your sellers are, presenting your content and the content that you have, on your website. And according to LinkedIn, this is the number one, reason of why customers don't, decide not to work with you. So lots of inconsistencies. And, and this shows up in your results, like slower sales cycle, missed opportunities, and reps not hitting quarter. The good news is that especially now and especially with AI, this is a problem that is, I would say, easier to solve. And, in fact, our research at Highspot shows that and we can move to the next slide. When go to market teams are aligned, reps productivity goes up, run time goes down, and the buyer engagement becomes more consistent and, much higher quality. So when we have misalignment, the opposite is true, which is teams struggle to land initiative, they struggle to adapt quickly, and they struggle to innovate at speed. And this is why go to market functions can cannot really operate in silo, and the same is for AI. And, for AI to truly drive impact, as I was saying at the beginning, it really needs to be embedded into the processes that connect your team from content to training, to coaching, to analytics. It needs to work across all the functions, not apart from from them. So we know that we have a content gap. So the main question is, how can we fix it quickly? How can we close it in a way that, we can also handle this competitive pressure? The reality is that the technology, and it again, it's always been the case, evolves much, much faster than people can adapt. And this is where AI becomes essential. Because AI helps us connecting the dots across people, processes, and platforms. And it makes much, much easier for the go to market team to actually execute, pivot, adapt, and stay aligned. There is one component. AI doesn't work on isolation. We need to remember that we also need to focus on the human side. And the human side is all about building the right connections between teams and ability to enable teams to adopt and apply AI in a way that is really meaningful and helps us tracking that, impact that we were saying before. So without any further ado, I want to pass it to Jaren Krchnavi because, that's exactly what organizations like Siemens are really starting to solve. Jaren, over to you. Perfect. Thank you, Laura, and, a warm welcome from my side. I really appreciate all those insights, Laura, what you and Highspot are providing to the community. If I just go to the next slide here. So, yeah, you really see that, that AI is is reshaping GTM effectiveness. And when I look at, this slide here, you know, it says it's not no longer about doing more. It's about working smarter and Laura. When when you think back about, the the pandemic and the the digital, you know, ecosystem, especially in The United States. It was all about growth at all costs, and the the companies were investing in more and more salespeople, and they were trying to grow as quickly as possible. And a lot of what was happening was it wasn't based on on good foundation, good fundamentals. And when then the economy started, having some issues there, and, you know, I mean, everything was exposed. And so what you really see here is a need to move away from this growth at all top cost to really being more effective in your go to market, and AI here can play a very important role. And you see that many organizations really do understand this, and many here, 49% are currently using AI. We, of course, at Siemens are intensively using AI, and others are planning to use it this year. You have this 10% that's not planning to use AI. I would really, you know, encourage this group to to really look at the, you know, the way to stay at the forefront and the way to actually stay relevant in a market. If you think about a company like Siemens, we're over a 75 years old. The only way we've lasted that long is that we're continually reinventing ourselves. And, Laura, you can probably imagine yourself, if you look about how you were working, how I was working just, you know, a couple years ago, and how we're working today and all the AI tools that we're using is just completely different. So if you're not staying ahead of these trends, if you're not personally using AI, if you're not encouraging your teams to use AI and then also embedding it in your go to market strategy, you're gonna be quickly left behind. So, again, moving away from growth at all costs, now we need to focus on efficiency at all costs. And the the sales the top sales organizations have really realized that it's not just about hiring more salespeople. Again, that was the the mantra in the past. We can just hire more salespeople, and, of course, each one will get a quota, and they'll come in and we'll, you know, reach bigger numbers. But what quickly happens is you have a lot of people coming in. These people need to get onboarded. There's, you know, silos being created. And so it really is and what we're looking at at Siemens is use the existing, you know, sales team. Of course, you have churn and people coming in and out, but make them be more efficient. And the way you can work more efficiently and be more productive is, of course, using digital tools and using using AI. And we have a very, yeah, professional technology stack in our go to market, and, of course, we're working with, with vendors, with partners, with technology companies, to support us. So if you if you really want to also break down, your your whole, you know, sales sales organization where people are spending time, I can also recommend a sales activity study. So if you see on the right hand side, this is kind of an example, what you could do personally just talking with your sales organization, your sales leaders depending on the size. We at Siemens here, we have thousands of sales colleagues. So we'd have some certain organizations that have worked with a Gartner or Forrester, and they've done professional sales activity studies, and you can really see exactly where the people are spending their time. And as you were mentioning earlier, Laura, then you could actually look at all of those different buckets of time, and you can think, how can I now reduce that area and be more productive in that area? And a lot of time, you can do so using AI technology and digital tools. You know, Jaren, why don't you, share the slide? I, first of all, I loved it because, usually when you think about creating efficiencies across sales, a lot of, especially operation think about, let's make process more efficient. But 20% in searching for information and prep time, we have, like, this friction of this challenge. It reduced from 20 to 10 to 5%. It's a massive leverage that we can have just helping in finding the right content at the right time. Yeah. So really loved it. Yeah. Exactly. Especially, again, if you think about the the massive size of Siemens, like, you know, we have multiple businesses and just say one of our business, you have a thousand plus sellers. So if you can make them a little bit more efficient across a thousand sellers, you're gonna have a real big big impact there. Absolutely. So so here again, you know, we're talking about earlier this, you know, measuring impact, and I've talked about it in the past to to panels or going to events, on on my own, my own blog. It's really important to that we, our enablement professionals, try as best as possible to tie in what we're doing to obviously, the business goals, the sales strategy, and, of course, ultimately, impact. And you, of course, do this by looking at leading and lagging indicators. So looking at lagging indicators, you can look at the sales velocity. So, you know, increasing your deal sizes. You can also, of course, you know, generate more opportunities. So I've been in one business where it was very clear focus. It's all about generating more opportunities because you just do the calculation. You know, you have three 30 to 40% of those opportunity closing. So how many opportunities do you need your pipeline to reach your end of the year goal? So it's it's a clear, you know, we need more opportunities in the pipeline. And so you if you think about, you know, any way that you can use AI and digital tools to increase, you know, the number of opportunities, increase deal sizes, reduce the sales cycle, this is, again, very, very important. So I was mentioning, we want to shift away from, you know, kind of this checkbox culture, which I've seen, in in some companies, some businesses, just getting things done to always thinking about, are we getting the right things done and we're doing things that move the needle and make impact? And what I'd like to share here is just a little bit of insight. Obviously, I can't go into the the the deep detail, and Siemens, is a global technology company, and we really have AI scientist. We have so many people working on AI topics within Siemens. It's really amazing. You can hardly just stay on top of things within Siemens of the expansion of AI. But just wanted to share a few things that we're doing, with AI within Siemens for the community. And one of them is, again, it's about creating a culture. So we have an AI learning channel. We're trying to make it as easy as possible for people to get out of their comfort zone and to start, you know, using digital technologies, trying to use AI technologies. Example, Microsoft Copilot. So we can go in there and as part of your day to day using Word, using Microsoft Teams. Just an example, I showed up to a meeting fifteen minutes late the other day. Copilot, summarize those fifteen minutes that I missed. I mean, this is, like, out of the future, and it's it's here today. So things like that are making a big impact. And we also have an internal GPT. Siemens, again, a massive global company. We have a lot of people. We have a lot of data, and we wanna protect that data. So we also have our own GPT where we bring, you know, in a safe environment, the ability for people to, you know, share information, ask questions, and get that summarized and, you know, support of AI. We also have, again, you know, supporting this whole culture around AI within a company. We have AI train the trainer program. So, again, you wanna have your champions, your front runners, and you want them to show others, you know, don't be afraid of this. It's something that everyone can do. We can all start, you know, using AI to be more efficient and productive. We also have prompting communities. So, again, somebody going at the forefront and explaining how you could do more specific prompting because, again, the saying garbage in, garbage out. If you really, you know, do a professional prompting, you're gonna get a more professional response from AI. And we also even have, for example, sales prompting library giving clear examples of how you can do prompting. Again, as I mentioned, we have a very professional technology stack, and it's no secret we're, using Highspot. And Highspot if you think about Highspot also again just, you know, a couple years ago, it's a different platform than it is today. So that's what's so great and amazing about working with, you know, front runners in the market and enablement is that you are coming in automatically with these innovations. We're learning it. We have our champions community, and we're taking those innovations, and we're sharing it with the sales organization. For example, instant answers. This is amazing. You go in. You have a, like, 60 page PowerPoint presentation. So as sales to really understand that, be able to really take that information and present it confidently, you can go in there and you can chat with the Copilot, and you can grab the information out very quickly. And you can even do a knowledge check generated automatically by the AI. So, again, really great innovations coming in. And then, of course, on the other side, you have the content owners. You want that community to be, again, supported through AI, and it's always a challenge to make sure that the content is up to date. So anything that can reduce the friction, make it easier for this community will, of course, impact the sales. And one of them is the automatic description of the content. So, you know, a lot of people are kinda they don't wanna go in and have to think, hey. How do I describe this this document? AI is generating automatically from them, so they're now just having to review it and approve it. And, finally, just one use case in the past, when you were doing an account planning, you have to spend a lot of time going, researching, downloading an annual report, you know, spending the let's say, you have an important meeting on Monday and you're been asked to prepare, you know, an account plan for your your manager or executive level. Then these people sometimes have to read and do all this preparation on the weekend. Now AI can go in there and it can scrape the web and it can generate automatic, you know, responses to certain key fields, like what are the strategic objectives, what are initiatives that are running that customer. And, again, you're moving from doing all this effort, researching. There's a lot of hours in the sales organization to just going in and having to do reviews and double checking the information. Then from there, I pass it back over to you, Laura. Yes. And while you were talking, actually, I was I was also thinking, especially with the instant answer, functionality, that if on one side, it's a big benefit for the users, for the go to market team to find the content that they need, it's also a very good tool for those, who are producing that content to understand what are the recurring questions and, what is exactly that the seller is looking for or what is more engaging from a customer perspective. So it creates not just efficiencies, but it helps also identifying, opportunities to build, more effective content for, for the marketing team. So and this is how AI helps us connecting the dots across, across the go to market. So really good to see how Siemens is using AI, and I can see a lot of different activities from helping, like, thinking about how do I build my pipeline, what's the next action that I need to do to, for example, using chat t p t and, instant answer. So how do I create efficiency and how do I embed AI in my workflow? So what you're seeing here in this slide is an AI maturity level that we have developed here at Highspot to, really complement the, our, sales enablement maturity framework. And we have developed this to help go to market leaders, not just to assess whether they're using AI, but how, strategically it's embedded in in their workflows. So it's not just about a checking boxes exercise on AI adoption. It's about understanding how AI can evolve from isolated experiments. Well, for example, the follow-up emails is it could be just an experiment to core driver of productivity, decision making, and growth. And, and and so what we hope that this model helps you doing is really, understanding your own reality, benchmarking where you are today, identifying the gaps, and build a road map that is aligned to your business goals. So we're not going to cover all the five different levels right now. We had a lot of exam goals on for on how AI is used at each level. But I'd like to leave three questions for you to reflect, and start thinking about where you are on your AI journey. Number for us, the number one is, are you experimenting or are you seeing that you are starting operationalizing it? Are you just tracking usage of AI Or are you starting measuring its impact? And, do your teams trust AI? Or are they still unsure of where AI fits? Especially, if we think about your leadership team. The one thing that I would say is where wherever you are in the curve from best effort to value driven, one thing that is really important is about clarity of where we are and how we want to evolve because this is how you can transform AI into a real competitive advantage. So are you ready for the next poll? Thinking about these three questions, where do you think your team, your go to market team is in their maturity journey? You have the five level. Do you think you are at best effort where your teams are experimenting with AI using different tools? It can be, for example, chat GPT or it can be, meeting intelligence, and are doing isolated pilots, but there is no defined plan or strategy. Are you more at the structured level, where AI is used in a more coordinated, way with initial applications and early metrics subtract? I think, Jaren, would you say that you are more at the structured level looking at the five levels? Or are you at intentional level where your AI supports your go to market motions? Yeah. Good question. I think, again, Siemens at the very highest level there, we have a a clear, you know, strategy for AI. When we then break it down into the individual businesses in there, I think you have varying degrees of maturity because, again, Siemens is the big brand, but within it, you have, like, multiple portfolios and businesses. And so I see that some are, much more advanced and are using much more intentionally, and some are at the stage of a little bit more experimentation. Very good. And I imagine that a lot of, best practices, there. So what we see is that best effort is 69%. Structured is 19% intentional. It's wow. It's 11.54%. And actually, if I think about, all the customers we work with, this is very much in line with them with what we are with what we are seeing. I would really be interested to those who voted intentional. If you can pop in the chat, like, how, AI is really supporting your go to market motions and what are the biggest, the biggest impact that you are seeing right now. You might be at the at the early stages of intentional, but it would be super helpful, also for these audience to see where you are and, the impact that you were seeing. Just another example, Laura Valerio, that, within Siemens, we have some businesses that are very digital. And within these businesses, they also have, I think, more advanced way of thinking and digital technology now, so to embed them within the go to market motions and team. And there you'd see, for example, you know, a community working within the sales operations team thinking and planning how can we use AI across, you know, our whole sales organization compared to another organization that's a little bit more con conservative, and they wouldn't be as advanced. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. And are you using those business cases to then, ramp up faster the others. That that's exactly what you're doing. That's what in my role. I used to be in the business unit. Now I'm heading sales enablement, but looking over multiple business units and working with the heads of enablements in the regions. And one of our, clear mandates is to find the best practices and bring it up and spread it around the organization. That's great. That's really great. Great to hear. I wanted to check-in the chat if there are any best practices shared. And if not, the other question that I have for you, if you want to pop, in the chat, Thinking about what's the one thing that is holding you back from reaching to the next stage or one initiative that you would like to start, stop, or scale moving forward, thinking about your utilization of, of AI? There aren't any. Let me see. In the chat. Is there something, John, that you would, think about starting or stopping soon as as an activity. And and you mean for the sales, like an activity that they would be doing? And Yes. I mean, like you said, it's important to try to free up the sales time because a lot of like you said, and we see it within let's see it as with all these companies. They're spending too much time doing admin work, internal meetings, reporting. So anything that you can do to free up that time and get them in front of the customer where they should be, spending their time and doing discovery and really, you know, working with the customer to understand the pains and issues that they're facing so they can come with a clear value prop, then this is where we wanna focus our effort, of course. Yeah. No. Absolutely. And, there is one question that is, I think, a good segue to, your next slide, which is, I'm going to read it from Katie. Integrating AI with sales processes also takes investment. And in a time of economic uncertainty, we know our company will invest. But can we trust it to be valuable? And I think that where to start slide that you prepared, Jaren, can respond to this question. How to start and how to, in a way that we can we can create trust around how AI can be valuable. Yeah. Over to you. No. Thank you, Laura. So I do get that question often, and, I mean, for us, at Siemens, it's it's one quite easy answer. Again, if you made the right investments early on, and I was involved in the the very early stages of pushing Siemens to get best in class technology, then you're in a very good position because, again, it's not about going out, from my perspective and finding that one shiny solution, that one point solution, but getting a more comprehensive, you know, platform that's gonna support the go to go to market. And, again, I have to say here, a very good investment, and I may be a little bit biased here, but it's a Highspot because, again, as I mentioned, you have your team, you have your software engineers, you're talking not just with Siemens, but you're talking with so many customers out there, and you're seeing all the issues and challenges that they're facing, and you're bringing innovations automatically in. So automations, AI. So if you make that proper investment and you work with the front runners in the market, then it's gonna come pretty much automatically. Just to add to that, though, there's, other things that you could do. As we mentioned, you know, starting with a real problem, again, you think about the sales activity study. So anything that you could do to analyze where your sales reps are spending time, As we're mentioning, any of this admin work, if you can reduce that and give more time for them to spend in front of the customer, this is gonna be very impactful. And, again, you can do really surveys or you can just talk with your sales organization and sales leadership. Again, beginning small but impactful here, so tying in whatever you're doing to the sales strategy, you know, the business, the business objectives, and making sure that, you know, you're relieving any pressure that can be found, and and there could be multiple pressure spots within a go to market motion, again, freeing up the time. So we're talking about enablement. We want to be validated. We wanna see as a value add and not be seen as a cost center, but really seen as an investment center. So if you can do anything using AI technology and I'll tell you the Siemens colleagues that, around the world, they're hungry for this. They're hungry for, you know, using AI and being more efficient and effective, and I'm pretty sure that's common, for for sales organizations, then they're gonna, you know, trust in you. They're gonna give you that trust because you're gonna be freeing up the time you're making their lives, easier. And, of course, also, you know, using anything with, with coaching. So AI, we have at Siemens, different ways to support giving some tips and tricks for the sales and what their next, move could be also getting them in front of, an AI coach where they can practice pitching and giving receiving automatic feedback. So So anything that can help scale coaching is also gonna be impactful. Measuring what matters. Again, here, working very closely with your operations teams, your revenue team, you know, your sales leader CRO, and understanding what it is that we need to focus on. And here, again, it's really important. I think this is what you talked about earlier is kinda widening gap. I think, it's very challenging because you could be in a in a market, a very, very healthy, everything's going very smoothly, and then something changes, some dynamics, are hitting the business. And one business that was flourishing is suddenly struggling. Another one that was struggling is suddenly flourishing. So you need to make sure you're in a good conversation, you know, constant conversation with your sales leadership to understand what are the measures that they're focusing on so that you can make sure that any initiatives that you're running are directly impacting that. And AI is support, not replacement. Of course, there is a lot of talk, openly about replacing jobs, replacing people with AI. Again, I think the the common answer here is that if you don't get in and start experimenting using AI, then, of course, you're running more of a risk. But I really see AI as a supercharger for myself. I see it now also becoming more efficient, and I see it also within the sales organization as well. So we're also, again, using these learning channels and, you know, educating people, of course, giving them guardrails as well. So making sure that they know what's what's capable of, what what it cannot do, and also what information you should be sharing. So that's, of course, also important, but at the same time, being very positive and promoting use of AI within your organizations. And then building this this momentum, and and you build the momentum again, as I mentioned earlier, again, by just having AI embedded in the different aspects. So if you think about targeting your customers, engaging them, managing your opportunities, thinking about how you're gonna close and operate and expanding, like, where can you use AI, which tools they're supporting, which, you know, areas of the the customer journey, the buying, you know, selling process, and making sure that that's just, you know, part of their everyday. And, you know, I think people at one point, they won't even really think about, you know, using I think right now, you're many of us, you may not even be aware that you're, you know, being touched by the AI. Like, when I'm just searching Google, now it's just automatic AI response comes up at first, and that was happening in the past. So I think there's just a lot a lot going on, and you can do a lot to also, you know, encourage this, this flow and this momentum by making it easy as possible and just part of the regular workflow for the the go to market team. Yeah. And, and also, like, another question for Katie was, that AI is, it's sometimes it's difficult to understand what are the effective tool of processes and where to focus the energy. Going back to what you're saying, John, there is, start with a with a use case. Start with identifying what are the frictions point. And, I would, also add having a unified approach where, like, we have all the content, the training, the coaching in one place so that we can make the experience from a rep perspective much, much easier and smoother. So thinking about from from a seller perspective, how do I find the information that I need when I need them? And also the training and the coaching are really connected to the key challenge that I need to solve is a good way to to look at at that. Before you move to the key takeaway, there was a question for you on coaching, and it says, are you using AI sales coaching at Siemens? Yes. So something that we're using is so just imagine you have, a new digital portfolio that sales are not familiar with or they're familiar selling, a more traditional business. And now we're asking them, please go and talk about, digital transformation with your customers, talk about selling this digital portfolio. And to help them get comfortable in doing that, you can go and, you know, offer web based trainings. We can then also do an advanced training where we actually go on-site, which we just did a few days ago in Germany here. And we give them activities, and they practice, But then they can actually go, you know, into a safe environment and practice, you know, pitching and talking to the customer. And you, of course, design that that coach that digital coach in a way that, for example, you don't want them, too early to jump and pushing a product. You want them to, you know, take the time to do proper discovery, asking enough questions. And if the sales quickly says, like, oh, but we have this product, and we can offer this and that, then the coach, you know, gives a slight nudge, slight reminder, like, you need to still ask some more questions to really understand the issue, the pain. So, that way and we are there's also research that shows, like, to get good at something, you know, practice makes perfect. It really is about practicing and doing things over and over, and you can do that in a safe environment, even even better to get to, you know, sales more comfortable. Very good. Yeah. So talk about a few key key takeaways. I mean, in the big big picture, I think a r AI is already transforming enablement. And if you're an enablement role, enablement leader, and and you're not seeing that, if you're not, you know, being the compass in your organization and guiding and driving this topic, I think it's gonna happen automatically. Sales are gonna be using it, and what you want to do is you want to really, you know, unify it all. You want to, you know, have a strategy behind and make sure that it's all going in the right direction, breaking down silos, getting that go to market motion as, you know, as smooth as possible. So, really, the high performing teams, they're not leaning back and relaxing here, constantly reinventing ourselves. Within Siemens, we're constantly doing this, even myself. You know, I'm challenging myself, also in my free time, also privately to constantly test and use AI to, you know, just get more experience of that, and then I bring also those learnings into the workforce as well. Starting small, I mean, we can all feel overwhelmed. Everybody has so much work to do. We're all stretched thin. So to reduce that stress, that pressure, think about, you know, really making small steps, taking that growth mindset. So really thinking about constantly, you know, learning, going a little bit out of your comfort zone. So some people might still be a little bit, uncomfortable using, these tools. Don't be afraid of it. You're not gonna break anything. Just just go out and experiment with it. And if you do this more as yourself and you start getting more comfortable, you also become better at encouraging and enabling and being that, you know, thought leader within your organization and helping the sales team, you know, improve their muscle memory around AI and making an impact there. And then, of course, this alignment across GTM, I mean, we're seeing this and this is also, I think, this whole discussion about revenue enablement. You know? Is there a way that we can help break down the silence? Is there a way that we can really support the broader virtual organization, whether it be sales, marketing, customer success, or if you're just focused on sales, how can I work with the other parties to to break down those silos? And you'll see that analytics, AI, this is, of course, helping dramatically, in this space. Absolutely. And, and as as we said, like, having this alignment, it's alignment alignment on objective, alignment on pace. Prioritization is also very, very important. AI will help us keeping, especially, like, our go to market team keep up with the pace because as we said, it it would be much easier for them to find the information. The training will be more tailored to what they need, and we can also make sure that the the coach the coaching element is personalized. And this will help us go not just at a faster speed, but also becoming more effective at what we do, both in enablement and, if we if we are in in in the go to market team as, sellers or account managers. So thank you very much, Jaren Krchnavi. I would say we've covered a lot in, in the session today. We've gone, from the challenge that go to market teams are facing to what's possible when AI is actually embedded with purpose, and how organization like Siemens are putting this into practice. And if you're thinking of how you want to move forward with your teams and you're curious to know more about AI, there are a few, appointments, ahead. If we move to the next slide, there is one event happening on the May 22 in London. But if you're not in London and you cannot attend in person, you can always register and follow us online with the biggest benefit that the most of the sessions are recorded, and so you will be able to listen to them in the in your own time. Many sessions focus on AI. You will be, able to hear more customers, sharing on how they are starting their journey on on AI and how they are embedding it into their go to market practice. Together with the vision from, Highspot, How are we thinking about AI and, especially thinking about what are the future features and their applications to make our go to market teams even more impactful. So I strongly recommend you can, connect to that QR code and register for for the session at Spark. Again, if you cannot come in person, I will be there. So we will I would be, really pleased to meet you all in, in person. If not, join us, join us online for those session. You can find the agenda, as you, as you go through the registration. I'll also be there in person, though. I just wanna say if anyone that will attend, then please do come up to me and introduce yourselves. I I love meeting people and then hearing from them. Absolutely. Absolutely. And, the next, opportunity that you have is to you can actually download the state of sales enablement report. So the data that you've seen in the slides before are just a few of the data and insights that you can find in the in the state of, sales enablement report. I would say, if you're building a case for enablement, if you're building the case for AI, or if you want to use the data to educate, your teams, this is a really good study that you can that you can leverage. So I encourage you to, download the state of sales enablement report. And, as Jaren was saying before, we can connect directly at start or another way to connect and ask us more questions about how we use AI, how we see other customers using it, what are the best practices, what are the things that we should avoid actually doing. You can connect directly with Jaren on LinkedIn or with, with myself on on LinkedIn, and, we can answer to, all your questions. I know that there are quite a few questions on the chat, but I think we don't have time to go, through all of them. So I think we are on time, actually. So what I would say, connect to us on LinkedIn, and we will be delighted to come to come back to you. Thank you very much for joining us today. Thank you so much, John, for sharing your experiences, and I'm looking forward to see you in person at Spark. Thank you as well. Thank you to everybody for joining today. Bye.