Patrick Welch
President and COO, Bigtincan

Sales Enablement is a sector of the martech universe that grown by leaps and bounds in the last few years. Bigtincan recently unveiled Bigtincan Hub, an AI-driven Sales Enablement Automation Platform. We spoke to Patrick Welch, President and COO, Bigtincan to understand how their product helps users achieve better ROI.

Tell us about your role and how you got here? What inspired you to be a part of a sales enablement company and Bigtincan specifically?

As the Chief Operating Officer of Bigtincan, I’m responsible for guiding the strategic direction of Bigtincan’s worldwide operations, with oversight of the sales, support, business development and marketing departments. This means that I help scale our business as demand for enterprise-grade mobile content management and productivity solutions expands. My favorite part of my role is working with our teams to identify innovative ways we can continually improve Bigtincan Hub to advance our clients’ objectives and sales enablement in general.

I joined Bigtincan because it presented a unique business opportunity. This company is changing the way that CIOs at Fortune 500 companies think about productivity and on-the-road capabilities of their growing remote workforce. Tablet adoption in the enterprise is exploding and Bigtincan is taking the next step by introducing a solution that’s extending the field workforce with all the right content resources, at the right time in the right location.

How does Sales Enablement pertain to marketers? How does Bigtincan help close the gap between sales and marketing?

AI is bridging the conversation and measurement gap between modern-day sales and marketing. Sales platforms that utilize AI are enabling tailored recommendations of content to sales teams trying to close their deals, in the precise moments that matter with prospects and customers. By overlaying machine learning as well, even the weakest link in the sales performance chain stands to become a profitable entity with the platform that ensures content that has worked well in the past is presented at the exact precise moment.

For marketers, this allows them to best understand which of the hundreds of pieces of collateral they produce are performing the best, in which sales situations (by industry vertical) – and ultimately allows them to be better stewards of their budgets, spending and refocusing content in formats they know are best delivering positive bottom line results.

Further, digitally savvy customers are constantly connected and putting mobile first because of the instant access to vast amounts of information. With customers in control, selling situations are becoming more complex. To maximize success, marketing needs to support sales through each stage of the sales cycle, and sales teams need to help marketing by providing feedback from the field, as they’re talking to prospects directly more often than marketing would be.

Bigtincan helps close the gap between sales and marketing by ensuring that both functional groups keep their efforts in alignment. Bigtincan Hub provides sales and marketing teams the insights, collaboration, customization, and mobility to properly approach and tackle any selling situation to drive more revenue to the business.

What exactly is a ‘Guided Selling Experience’?

The Guided Selling Experience is an approach that offers a real-world way to help salespeople be successful and give more targeted, impactful messages to customers. The B2B selling dynamic has changed dramatically. While historically, customers relied on salespeople for critical product, service, pricing, and performance information, today’s customers and prospects are far more informed and educated. This dynamic has limited the time spent in front of customers, and therefore, makes each interaction vitally important to the sales process. When the message and content are more timely and relevant, interaction time increases. When interaction time increases, win rates increase. By taking input data, Al-powered sales enablement technology helps guide the salesperson through the entire sales cycle, suggesting the best next steps, activities and assets based on the information. Acting as a virtual mentor, this technology guides a salesperson and recommends the right content to be successful while allowing them to benefit from marketing’s expertise, all while minimizing time spent manually determining these processes that will change from prospect to prospect.

AI provides the intelligence to recommend the right solutions during the conversation, without the rep having to do an arbitrary needs assessment. The Guided Selling component does that assessment for them.

How exactly does Bigtincan leverage AI technology? What value does AI bring to your product? How is this different from what other sales enablement companies are doing?

The Bigtincan Hub uses AI-driven features and automation to support each phase of the buying process. Specifically, this technology automatically delivers the latest and most relevant content to a user’s mobile device or computer, helping them create, customize, annotate and share content. Users can work where they are the most productive, with the help of automated data capture that eliminates manual processes and has adaptive learning capabilities to improve knowledge and skill.

With the use of AI in Bigtincan Hub, users benefit from embedded expertise and experience that improves business results and creates a better customer experience. This value enables sales, service and marketing teams to work more effectively to grow their pipelines, collaborate more effectively, move deals through the sales process faster, and increase win rates.

Bigtincan was the first AI-powered sales enablement automation platform. We approach the sales enablement process differently from our competitors by tailoring our solution directly to our customers’ needs – no matter what industry or job function they represent. It is not a one-size fits all solution – this versatility and functionality makes our approach unique and allows for an unparalleled experience for our customers to execute on their sales goals.

How does the use of AI in a sales enablement product help improve customer experiences and drive revenue? How can Sales Enablement help determine ROI from marketing efforts?

AI in a sales enablement platform helps improve customer experiences and drives revenue by vastly improving productivity and creating efficiencies. AI automates all the small, but critical tasks that are part of the sales process. By doing so, it frees up salespeople to do what they do best – spend time in front of prospects and customers. With automation that supports every phase of the buyer journey, Bigtincan Hub unlocks big gains in sales effectiveness, which translates to higher win rates and revenue.

Regarding ROI, there is a direct correlation between the performance of marketing and sales teams, as each is dependent on the other. If marketing teams are delivering the right content and sales teams are utilizing the content in a platform like Bigtincan where their usage and comments are automatically associated to the content, this will maximize business success and return on investment.  It takes out the guesswork, so marketing can do more of what works and what salespeople want, and spend less time and money on content mediums that aren’t performing.

Bigtincan’s value comes when the marketing folks can quantify pipeline and revenue contribution of the content they produced and use by sales folks. This is the last mile in marketing, being able to measure the success of the content assets produced to enable revenue growth.

How is technology like Bigtincan’s changing the sales and marketing profession overall and enabling the digital salesforce? How is it following trends in Marketing like ABM?

Bigtincan’s technology is changing the sales and marketing profession by helping these teams become more effective and efficient. Bigtincan’s technology is also enabling salesforces to be more productive through its mobile-first design. This design allows a salesforce to work whenever and wherever they want with customers. In addition, Bigtincan’s technology enables the digital salesforce to drive the sales process with the most effective and targeted sales content anywhere, anytime and on any device.

At Bigtincan, we strive to stay ahead of marketing trends. The emergence of ABM allowed us to bring a micro-level focus to how our solution can better target specific accounts. ABM can be tricky once sales become involved because it’s difficult to get visibility into the effectiveness of content.  With traditional methods, sales and marketing are still siloed, even in initiatives like ABM where alignment and visibility are crucial to success. With Bigtincan, marketing can create account-specific content and push it to the teams where it’s pertinent – the account owner/team – and keep track of usage.

Marketers can also tie sales content to marketing campaigns so that a prospect who interacts with content sent by sales, can be associated to a marketing campaign. Bigtincan then proactively checks CRMs to determine whether someone who interacts with a piece of content that sales sent out is already a lead, and if that lead should actually be a contact on an account as opposed to a dissociated lead.  This enables marketers to get an account-level view of conent interactions as opposed to lead-level. This increased visibility makes it easier to replicate success and optimize ABM strategies.

What industries would benefit the most from using an AI-powered sales enablement platform?

Though arguably any organization with a mobile sales or service team could benefit from an AI-powered sales enablement platform, the industries that come to mind as really natural fits are the retail, life sciences, financial services, and manufacturing sectors. Each of these industries is dependent on having efficient and modern sales teams that directly impact the bottom line because of the products and services they sell.

The retail industry has gone through a drastic change due to the digital and mobile revolution. With the rise of e-commerce through Amazon, brick and mortar establishments are declining because they are not catering to customers in a way that is complementary with their predominantly digital lifestyle. Key to creating repeat customers is delivering an in-store experience that the customers just can’t get online. Sales enablement platforms like Bigtincan allow associates to stay on the sales floor more to help customers through “eliminating the back-office corkboard,” and provide product knowledge they need, in real time, to answer customer questions and make the sale.

There are many sectors that fall within the Life Sciences industry. Whether it is pharmaceutical or biotechnology, these sectors are facing an unprecedented amount of complex regulations and compliance challenges, so there’s a critical need to change the sales experience. It’s imperative that salespeople, marketers and service personnel in the life sciences industry do everything they can to optimize the time they spend with clients and prospects, which can be improved through the use of automation technology with time-saving tactics.

Financial services companies are experiencing some of the same struggles of the retail industry – providing an experience in-branch that customers can’t get online. With a large portfolio of complex products and services, employees need relevant content at their fingertips to impart that trust, and truly become a trusted advisor for a client. That initiative, along with strict compliance, provide a real need for Sales enablement platforms.

Many companies in the manufacturing industry are plagued with an outdated infrastructure (slow to adopt) which makes improving their old processes extremely difficult in the sales, marketing and field service departments. Too often there are missed business opportunities because interactions with customers are not as productive as they should be. By replacing these systems with new technology and automation, this will increase efficiencies and reduce costs, improving overall customer-facing operations.

Where do you see the sales enablement industry evolving over the next 3 years?

With the digitization of sales becoming more prevalent, sales teams will look towards optimizing their strategies to become even more effective, efficient and productive. I believe in the next three years sales enablement will move beyond using AI-capabilities and focus on leveraging other emerging technologies. Sales enablement platforms will need to continuously evolve along with digital transformation to help deliver high-growth as a result of new products and services, access to technologies that improve productivity and speed administrative tasks and dynamically deliver the best, most effective content to support each customer interaction.

Unification reduces the number of point solutions and increases high-value experiences that transform the customer journey for sales executives.

Thanks for chatting with us, Patrick.
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