Reimagining the learning process with AI: How BairesDev uses revenue intelligence to increase transparency and transform coaching

Process improvement is the nexus of my work. And right now, it feels like there’s a revolution happening in my field.

Improvement plans are everywhere. It seems like everyone’s beginning to understand the value companies can realize when they identify potential optimizations using a well-connected system — especially when that technology better informs decision-making.

At my organization, this means fully embracing revenue intelligence. We’re using it to empower our teams with unprecedented access to customer interaction data in a unified data platform. This is reshaping how they engage with new information (like new messaging), as well as their ability to take accountability for their work.

Revenue intelligence is also playing a significant role in how we use AI to maintain our market advantage. Specifically, it’s enabling better coaching and greater revenue predictability across our sales org. We’ve been astounded by AI’s capabilities, and want to remain at the forefront of using it to lift numbers across our revenue teams.

I run the strategic sales and commercial processes at BairesDev, including sales operations, enablement, and governance. Like many process-oriented people, I’m a learner at heart — whether that’s by ingesting information through books and podcasts, or imparting it and gaining new perspectives. I’m eager to help others learn too, which is why I was a lecturer at the School of Business at the University of Victoria and an instructor at the School of Business at MacEwan University.

My experiences have taught me countless lessons about the learning process, chief among them: viewing sales and revenue teams as receptacles for “taught information” is a recipe for disaster. 

Conversely, if you engage people in the learning process — not as recipients of information, but as active participants in understanding where it comes from, how it fits into a broader picture, and why it matters — everyone learns much more. In my experience, if you miss out on that perspective, your teams will be less engaged and will struggle to adopt new processes, tools, or anything else you launch.

I’ve found that two tactics can mitigate disengagement: delegation and revenue intelligence. With the latter, I can give our revenue teams access to the right level of information to help them take accountability for their knowledge and overall performance. The former means I don’t hold onto information “at the top” but rather encourage it to flow across our unified platform. 

When you give people access to information and trust them to use that information wisely, the results are incredible. 

Like most teams, AI is at the core of our improvement strategy this year. By keeping tabs on some AI-backed metrics, we can see where we have outliers, recognize trends, and make informed decisions. 

One of the best places to start with AI is analyzing calls and providing reps with direct feedback. Our revenue leaders rely on this technology to review calls quickly, often reading the summary of a call’s highlights or tracking the key concepts that matter most at that point in time. That way, it’s easy to understand whether reps have discussed the right topics at the right time, and tailor coaching and training accordingly. We use these insights to create individualized coaching that’s more effective than what we provided before AI. 

We’ve also used AI, and its ability to track key concepts, to clarify whether or not our reps offer in-person and client-facing meetings. We can know which reps offer in-person visits, correlating that information to their win rates. That makes it easier for us to show reps the connection between the behavior we’re asking for and the wins (or losses) in their pipeline.

AI’s tracking capabilities also help us monitor whether or not non-sales team members adopt the right messaging. When everyone across our teams uses the same messaging, our customers have a more cohesive experience, which translates into higher win rates. If non-sales team members deviate, however, we can use AI to know when to step in, help them understand its importance, and shift delivery.

Since we experienced success using AI at the rep level, we’re now using it to support larger projects, such as audits. This year, we’re going to examine our entire sales process with this technology, covering everything from when a rep receives a lead through every touchpoint until a deal closes. We want to learn as much as possible so we can identify exactly where to make the kind of improvements that change outcomes. 

Most revenue organizations suffer from a lack of predictability, which is often rooted in using data to focus on the wrong issues. If you want greater predictability in your numbers, focus on the quality of your teams’ work. 

Here’s why that’s important: High-quality interactions respond directly to your potential buyers’ and customers’ needs, and these change periodically. If you’re able to respond to their needs — and market shifts — in real time, you’ll consistently deliver a high-quality experience that reliably wins deals. This helps you achieve predictability in the long term and ride out any changes that might negatively impact your growth. 

Our sales leaders use revenue intelligence to bring their teams’ quality into focus. They assess the quality of reps’ interactions with buyers and use what they learn to adapt their go-to-market strategy. With revenue intelligence, we’re able to answer critical questions, like:
 

With revenue intelligence platforms like Gong, we find the key data outliers that help us make improvements to our customer interactions. Positive outliers lead to immediate optimizations, with critical information helping the entire team make process improvements. Our sales leaders get the answers they need to achieve better outcomes, and reps feel more empowered with a clearer path to success. Win, win.

BairesDev has entered a new era — one in which knowledge transparency, higher-quality customer interactions, and revenue predictability reign. Our sales leaders and reps will never be able to go back to life without access to valuable insights derived from customer interactions and the power of AI. 

Revenue intelligence has given everyone access to the insights and information they need to iterate and make improvements quickly, at every point in our sales process. At BairesDev, we know that AI will only continue to serve as a linchpin for our evolved learning process — and a catalyst to our growth.

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