Today, account executives are, by default, in an information overload state. They constantly deal with a barrage of product questions, technical questions, RFP requests, and more. 

These requests and queries eat into the productivity of AEs and lead to lengthier sales cycles.

Astonishingly, a company’s sales function, which is responsible for 90% of its revenue, is always overwhelmed with tasks that slow down its productivity, even when spending only rises yearly.

So you can see what handicap B2B sales are dealing with today.
 
However, we have seen a silver lining on the horizon after GenAI's advent into the mainstream consumer base. Today, these AI-powered platforms can substantially improve AE workflows so that they can get their lost time back and focus on closing deals and selling more. 
 
 Before that, let’s see the challenges AEs face today. 

The Growing Challenges Facing Account Executives Today

Let’s dive straight in and see what problems are modern B2B sales executives and account executives facing today:

Information Overload

AEs must sift through vast amounts of unstructured and structured data from various sources, conversations, calls, and more to find the information they need to sell efficiently. 

This could range from product specs, competitive intel, technical answers, and addressing specific customer pain points. Furthermore, due to the velocity of the ever-changing tech landscape, they have revisited their knowledge depending on current market trends.

So, with limited time, reps often skip this research and depend on teammates for ad-hoc information.

Inconsistent Data

Today, sales cycles are quick. Ensuring reps have accurate and up-to-date information is critical to winning deals, yet it is difficult. AEs often face this problem and craft messages on the fly, leading to variability and potential misalignment between clients and overall company positioning/product fit.  

Lack of Real-time Support 

AEs need on-demand access to information and answers during prospect interactions. Much investment goes into workflows that do this, but they are still overridden by breakdowns, manual intervention, and inefficiency. 

In some of our conversations with leading enterprises, we learned that they have even reached the point where they have created automated Slack workflows. If an AE asks a question on their #sales-enablement channel, relevant sales engineers are pinged every 30 seconds, so they leave everything and assist the AE. 

Do you see how jarring this experience could be?

It’s neither a good experience for the AE or the SE. 

Because of these issues, AEs generally address queries with made-up answers or misinformation, which leads to problems in the long run. 

Knowledge Gap and Steep Learning Curve

New or transitioning AEs face steep learning curves and see many gaps in their knowledge. Not quickly accessing and absorbing necessary sales, product, and marketing information slows their ramp-up time and reduces their early effectiveness.  

Companies spend considerable time and resources building a training program to address this issue. Additionally, these programs must be revised and conducted periodically to ensure everyone is in the know. 

They also spend much time filling this gap, followed by a detailed onboarding exercise for sales teams, only to see subpar activity where sales don't use the tool as expected. In fact, sales leaders and marketing managers spend a lot of time ensuring that AEs utilize these tools instead of asking for help on Slack or Microsoft Teams. 

Slow Turnover time for sales docs

With a clock ticking and a lack of productivity, you and customers alike expect that sales should also fill up documents requested by your clients. Docs like Infosec and RFPs keep coming in, and reps never have the time to fill them up. 

That’s why many organizations invest in sales engineers and pre-sales who fill out these documents and return them to the AEs. This generally takes hours or days to get done and share with clients. 

It results in AEs losing valuable time to close the deal, whereas if the docs are turned around in under 2 hours, there is a much higher probability of moving to the next step in the cycle. 

And what happens due to all these problems?

How Do these Challenges affect your Sales Cycle?​

In a statistical perspective, here’s what the current state looks like:

  • AEs can’t meet their quotas: Without quick access to accurate information, AEs struggle to have effective conversations and close deals. 70% of reps have reported that they often miss their quotas. 
  • Lower Productivity:  AEs spend up to 30% of their time finding information, which reduces productivity and, therefore, yields subpar results.
  • Setting Unrealistic Expectations: The resulting knowledge gap leads to AEs making commitments to clients that don’t align with actual product capabilities. So, if you succeed in onboarding a client, it is highly probable they’ll churn after their contract ends.
  • Added Expense: To help out AEs and provide appropriate support, companies hire more sales engineers, product marketers, and sales leaders to enable sales reps. It’s not just limited to people; companies spend a fortune upgrading their stack with new tools only to see subpar adoption. Both of these factors have an exponential effect on expenses.
  • Improper utilization of talent: Support roles like product marketers get stuck doing repetitive doc generation instead of more strategic enablement. Over time, these roles become redundant.

How Docket Solves These Problems

Docket - AI Virtual sales engineer

Increases Sales Productivity

Docket increases sales productivity in a few key ways:
  • Faster answering and documentation: By providing instant answers to sales reps' questions, Docket eliminates the time wasted searching for information and waiting for responses from teammates. It also fills out sales documents like RFPs in seconds, dramatically reducing the manual effort required.  
  • More time for selling: Docket handles information lookups and documentation, so sales reps can spend more time selling—conversing with prospects, tailoring pitches, and closing deals. They no longer get bogged down in busy work.
  • SEs work more strategically:  Sales engineers can reduce the time spent responding to basic questions from sales reps. Instead, they are freed up to focus on more strategic initiatives that drive revenue, like developing collateral, training reps, and providing technical guidance on large, complex deals.

By streamlining the workflow and eliminating inefficiencies, Docket enables sales teams to be more productive and successful overall. The time savings directly translate to increased sales velocity and faster deal closure.

Reduces Costs 

Docket reduces costs in two key ways:
  • Sales Engineers can look at critical deals: Rather than bothering your sales engineers with one-off questions and requests, companies can leverage Docket to handle many questions and information requests. This lets sales engineers focus on significant deals with enterprise or large-ticket clients. 
  • Fills documents instead of hours of manual work — Sales reps can delegate things like completing RFPs and InfoSec questionnaires to Docket. This saves countless hours compared to having sales engineers fill out these documents manually. Rather than dedicating headcount to handling documentation, reps can verify Docket's work in minutes. The time savings here are massive.

Overall, Docket streamlines workflows and reduces the need for additional headcount. Companies spend less on inflated teams and inefficient processes, and the cost savings from Docket quickly add up.

Identifies Knowledge Gaps 

Docket’s capabilities allow it to answer various GTM and product queries.  Its users can also regenerate, re-prompt, and verify answers quickly before sharing them with clients.

Additionally, Docket’s dashboard  provides a detailed overview of your organization’s activities, including:

  • Questions asked
  • Answers answered
  • Verified answers
  • Unverified answers 
This allows product marketers and sales engineers to quickly identify any knowledge gap in their sales process or product know-how and build a library to fill these gaps. 

Docket’s AI isn’t trained to cover up what it doesn’t know. Instead, it is built to highlight areas on which enablement efforts should focus. 

Teams can easily plug these gaps by:
  • Verifying answers 
  • Adding more knowledge sources 
  • Or, with a simple file or URL upload 

And Docket takes it from there. 

Docket's AI capabilities allow it to answer various sales and product queries. However, there may be instances where the answers provided are unsatisfactory or incomplete. This signals sales enablement and product teams that certain areas lack sufficient documentation and collateral.

Enables Continuous Learning

This is my favorite capability about Docket. 

It encourages continuous learning in organizations by providing an always-available resource that I can ask any sales or product questions. Even if a question seems simple or basic, I can ask Docket without fear of judgment. 

Hence, it removes the stigma around asking “dumb” questions that hold many folks back from proactively seeking information. With Docket, you can ask questions anytime without worrying about being uninformed in front of your team or clients.

This is how Docket enables continuous learning and inculcates a culture focused on learning. And the silver lining — The more you converse with Docket, the more it learns, and the better answers you’ll receive.  

Conclusion

The latter stages of 2022 have transformed businesses and how they function. GenAI has genuinely transformed how organizations approach problems today. We believe that 2024 will only build on the momentum, and today, we discussed how Docket solves the problem plaguing B2B sales. 

Today’s sales reps face many challenges, like information overload, lack of support,  burdensome sales documentation, and steep learning curves. These issues are why they miss their quotas and have low productivity, and many organizations face low conversions and high churn due to misaligned client expectations.

This is where Docket provides a solution that addresses modern sales pain points. By leveraging AI and your tribal knowledge, Docket is the virtual teammate that delivers fast, accurate, and up-to-date answers and documentation to your sales reps anytime and anywhere.  ~

If you’d like to learn more, request a demo or check out this short video about Docket. 

Book a Demo

​