#55 - Cindy Gordon, CEO of SalesChoice - On how AI can help sales teams beat their numbers every month, quarter, year

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation in the sales execution space that has the power to help companies gain 99% accuracy in their sales cycles, hence achieve big leaps in productivity, and my guest is Dr. Cindy Gordon, Founder and CEO of SalesChoice, an AI SaaS Predictive and Prescriptive Guiding Selling Company.Cincy is an expert in SaaS, AI, business innovation, early-stage software commercialization & sales /marketing practices. She has held senior leadership and partnership roles in global B2B Enterprises, including: Accenture, Xerox, Citicorp and Nortel Networks. In addition, Cindy has also been a founder, VC, and an angel in emerging software companies. She is recognized for her innovation and thought leadership, has written over 13 books, and won numerous awards.Cindy’s passion is the constant pursuit of sustainable innovation and the creation of differentiated experiences to make our world an incredible place. That’s what triggered me, hence I invited her to my podcast.We explore the large-scale challenges sales professionals have in making their targets. The fact that 30% of sales professionals suffer from attention deficit disorder, and that attention span has dropped 50% over the past 10 years, is likely making this worse than better. AI is coming to the rescue here. It’s interesting how Cindy defines it: AI is not new energy then, it’s the new oxygen – we have to breathe it to be able to do things we’ve never held possible.Here are some of her quotes:“What drives me day to day is probably just ensuring that what is possible is real, and giving people the confidence that they could actually mobilize the change.It's all about building the confidence to just simply be, enjoy, and make it happen. Too often, we get paralyzed. And I think with the speed that has accelerated in businesses worldwide, people need to make more choices about where they're spending their time and what they're working on,The roots of the company are very much focused on that specific problem. The problem is that 30 to 60% of sales professionals don't make their sales plan targets or quotas in the B2B market segment.The speed, acceleration, or the age of distraction dynamics, B2B sales professionals have one of the hardest jobs in the world because of the noise factor.So that's the backdrop and we thought the thesis was: “Could AI, with predictive analytics and other AI methods, absorb all the historical dynamics of a firm and actually guide them?”During this interview, you will learn four things:Why it’s key to always look for audit trails once you add AI to your solution – Someone needs to be accountable for the predictions. And if you can’t stand in for it, the legal issues will be pretty significantThat the new way to deliver your solutions is not to give your users individual insights, but rather universal intelligence of all ‘the moves’. This will enable them to add even more value.That one of your responsibilities and opportunities as a vendor is to ensure the data keeps improving – that bias isn’t there – and that your predictions are transparent.Everyone knows that to succeed you have to stay focused. Possibly more important is to stay curious. To be looking around the corner for the market dynamics and the edge plays. Leave yourself and your people time to pause, reflect and time to think.