The Four Tab Rule and AI

Does your sales team have something like the “four tab rule”?

I spoke with a sales operations leader who said that no sales person in their org should need more than 4 tabs open at a time to do their job.

I think this mindset is more vital than ever. Sales people (well, don’t we all?) need to avoid disruptions that take them off task and away from serving their prospects and customers. 

An article in the Harvard Business Review from some of the top minds at Gartner had a similar conclusion. 

In that HBR piece, they discuss how throwing tools at sales people leads to greater friction and increased inefficiency. They recommend reconstructing the sales function around what can be actually managed. 

They conclude that AI can help in that reconstruction. How? By enabling sellers to move to progressively higher value activities and more sophisticated sales motions. Meanwhile, AI-enabled sales will move progressively from automation to autonomous. 

There were two things that jumped out to me from these two points:

• First, part of the challenge with too many tools isn’t just that it’s difficult to use them all. It’s that it’s difficult to leverage them as a unit well. Not only because you’re switching contexts between them, but because the data never really connects across solutions. My email, conversation tool, cadence tool, and calendar don’t talk. So, I end up with silos of sales data. And I can’t turn that into best practices across my team. The multiplicity of tools would be easier to manage if I could centralize the data. That’s where activity capture for your CRM or data lake comes into play. When the data is in one place and organized, it can be better used to make sellers more effective and serve prospects better.

• Second, they look into key use cases for sales-enabled AI and determine which are the best applications of AI to boost rep performance. They identify meeting summaries are perhaps one of the best uses of AI to enable sellers. While I agree, I think it is especially important to point out that meetings for non-transactional sales aren’t one-off meetings. They’re part of a buying process. That call you just took was the fifth call, and it was after 20 emails. So, an automated meeting summary – one that’s going to get you truly ready for advancing and winning your deal – needs to take into account all of those prior interactions. When you are up to speed for your next meeting, you’re able to ask the right questions, confront issues effectively, and win.

How do you ensure that you have fewer distractions? Or if you’re a sales enablement pro or sales leader, how do you help your teams do it?