e-Book: PART3

The most important facts in brief:

• The increasing complexity of B2B sales can only be reduced through the efficient analysis and use of data.
• Today, AI is often only used in sales in isolation in order to save time at individual points by automating data processing. Teammate, on the other hand, collects, structures and processes data along the entire customer journey.
• Teammate analyzes this data and provides your sales staff with immediately actionable recommendations during their customer interactions.
• Teammate combines the strengths of Linkando's expert system "Linkando Playbooks" with AI applications such as the audio AI "Jabra Engage AI".
• The use of AI turns the increasing complexity in B2B sales into an opportunity: the analysis of available data sources enables better targeting, detailed buyer insights and more efficient sales pitches.
• Teammate takes your sales organization from "Assisted Selling" to "Automated Selling" and, in the long term, to "Autonomous Selling "^1.

AI is already finding its way more and more into sales practice today; it will be indispensable in the future. As technology advances, AI will take on more and more tasks independently. This will allow human sales employees to focus more on their core emotional competencies.

The majority of what we use today in sales as "AI" is "generative AI", i.e. artificial intelligence that can generate texts, images, videos or other data with the help of generative models. This includes, for example, the autonomous creation of outreach messages. In addition to generative AI, Teammate is also increasingly using AI technologies such as machine learning to independently recognize more complex correlations and derive forecasts and actions from them.

In this way, Teammate is leading sales organizations from "Assisted Selling" to "Automated Selling". In assisted selling, people make the decisions and use tools to carry out sales tasks. In automated selling, tools support people both in the decision-making process and in the subsequent execution of tasks. Humans and machines therefore make decisions together and carry out the tasks together. Linkando Teammate enables precisely this symbiosis of man and machine.

Practical examples:

• Teammate can "listen" to customer conversations, analyze them and independently create guidelines for sellers based on the information gained.
• In future, Teammate will create entire playbooks independently on the basis of newly acquired knowledge and continuously improve them.
• Teammate will analyze collected playbook data and derive forecasts for the sales forecast.
• Based on the analysis of sales conversations, Teammate will develop new sales arguments and provide them to your sellers as part of the deal-closing playbook.
• In addition to personalized outreach messages, Teammate will in future also create personalized content such as white papers that address the exact pain points of the respective customer. Teammate can then provide your sellers with the right content for the respective lead as part of the discovery playbook.
• Teammate will analyze the product and service offering of existing customers, identify cross- & upselling potentials, and make them available to your sellers as part of the cross- & upselling playbook.

Compliance as a success factor

We also take regulatory trends into account in the further development of our AI. The European Commission has adopted the "EU Artificial Intelligence Act" with the aim of minimizing risk factors. The regulation came into force on August 1, 2024 and will be implemented gradually over a transitional period until mid-2027. Data and consumer protection in particular play a central role here.

To ensure regulatory compliance at an early stage, we are also designing Teammate with the EU Artificial Intelligence Act in mind. For example, European regulations prohibit AI from analyzing customer conversations without the customer's consent. One solution is for Teammate to only listen to the seller. In this case, the seller must be trained accordingly and, for example, repeat relevant information from the customer so that Teammate can record it.

Conclusion: AI is not a nice-to-have, but crucial to success

AI will not replace human sellers outside of pure e-commerce. But human sellers with AI support are already replacing sellers without AI support today.

Technology concepts such as Linkando Teammate give sellers a superpower. They enable the structured use of data - not in theory in some database, but in practice directly in the interaction with customers. Teammate was developed from practice for practice. We specifically did not want to create an "ivory tower AI" that sounds good in theory but does not achieve any practical success.

Companies that use data to their advantage will dominate B2B sales in the future. They will benefit from higher win rates, shorter sales cycles and rapid growth. We are at a turning point in global B2B sales. Traditional sales methods no longer work. The sales organizations of the future will use their knowledge and data to maximize their success in the long term.

Availability of Linkando Teammate

We are already incorporating elements of the overall Linkando Teammate concept into our Linkando Playbooks platform, e.g. the generation of messages and dynamic recommendations for action or the audio function for one-sided listening during a sales call. We are gradually expanding the available functions. Current Linkando customers can already use parts of Linkando Teammate free of charge as part of their Linkando Playbook license. At a later stage, Linkando Teammate will become a product in its own right.

We expect Linkando Teammate to be officially available between fall 24 and winter 24/25.

Anyone interested in finding out more about Linkando Teammate can sign up to our launch mailing list today at www.linkando.com/teammate