This white paper distils two years of learning on how Professional Sales executives are using Technology to prioritize prospects, prepare for line of business meetings and present compelling solutions with value outcomes.

1. Precision, speed and
scale: how technology is
elevating enterprise sales
Anand Shah, Co-Founder and CEO, Databook

2. 2
Enterprise sales isn’t easy. In a world of global
competition, increasingly informed customers
and professional procurement departments
ready to negotiate down to the last dollar, it’s no
surprise that more than 50% of reps expect to
miss their quotas this year (see Figure 1).
As buyers become more sophisticated, so
must sellers. Investments in digital tools to
support activities such as sales analytics,
sales forecasting and prospecting are now
commonplace. These investments alone,
however, are unlikely to be game-changers.
In this article, I’d like to share my vision of how
technology can have a truly transformative
impact in enterprise sales. I believe that we
are on the cusp of a profound shift, fueled by
technologies such as machine learning and
data science, that will open up a new era of
enterprise sales.
57%
expect to
miss quota
42%
expect to
meet quota
<51% of quota
11%
51%-75% of quota
17%
76%-99% of quota
29%
Figure 1 | Source: Salesforce, State of Sales 2018 (Third Edition)
Until very recently, the idea of generating authoritative,
personalized, value-based insights for every customer or prospect
would have seemed an impossible ambition for any sales
organization. However, advances in technologies such as machine
learning, data science, and natural language processing are rapidly
pushing back the boundaries of the possible in enterprise sales.

3. 3
Precision selling: the future of enterprise sales
Although saving lives and hitting your quota may
seem far removed, I see a number of parallels between
precision medicine and the future of enterprise sales.
The five principles of precision selling
Personalization
Insights are tailored to the target
company, with content that aligns the
seller’s solutions with the customer’s
unique financial and strategic situation.
Trust
The success of precision selling depends
on the seller becoming a trusted advisor to
the customer, so the accuracy of insights
and supporting data must be bulletproof.
Quality
To consistently create superb
presentations and client proposals,
to amplify account-based-marketing
initiatives and accelerate the sales cycle.
Scale
To really move the dial on a sales
organization attaining its quota, precision
selling has to be scaled across more
than just a handful of strategic accounts.
Figure 2 | Source: Databook
Value focus
With precision selling, the focus is
always on the quantifiable value and
measurable financial outcomes that the
seller can generate for the customer.
Just as precision medicine can be applied across
different medical fields, from oncology to neurology, so
precision selling can support diverse sales
methodologies. Whether it’s Challenger, Force
Management, Miller Heiman or another
methodology, precision selling provides the
personalization and high-quality content needed to
supercharge your existing sales activities.
We are entering a new era where precision selling
will become the dominant and most effective way for
enterprises to sell. To win, sellers will need to develop
bespoke insights for each of their customers, based on
each company’s unique set of circumstances: its
financial case for change, strategic priorities, competitive
landscape and management focus. They will also
need to understand – and respond to – the personal
objectives and KPIs that matter to their buyer at an
individual level. To succeed, sellers will also have to
adhere to the five principles that underpin precision
selling (Figure 2).
While writing a series of reports on digital transformation
with the World Economic Forum, I was struck by how
precision medicine is revolutionizing healthcare. Precision
medicine ends a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach and seeks
to develop personalized treatments based on a patient’s
genes, lifestyle and environment. Precision medicine has
existed in its most basic form for a century – for example,
blood typing before transfusions – but new technologies
for analyzing vast volumes of data affordably have
enabled it to be deployed at scale. We are already
seeing the results, as precision medicine is being used to
develop more effective, personalized therapies for
diabetes, cancer and other diseases.

4. 4
Personalization and a focus on financial
value drives sales
As a partner at a global strategy consultancy, I built a
team who generated customized, value-based insights
and sales narratives based on the financial and strategic
outlook of our major clients. The result: a multi-billion-
dollar pipeline and increased conversion and expansion
at these accounts.
The data also backs up my anecdotal observations.
Over the last couple of decades, many of the world’s
best sales organizations have developed a highly
personalized approach to landing and expanding
at strategic accounts. Sales teams who invest in
customized insights, communicating the financial
outcomes that their solutions generate for the customer,
have reaped the benefits. A detailed study found that
these value-focused companies outperformed their
non-value-focused counterparts across key metrics
(Figure 3).
However, I’ve seen that high-performing companies
have only been able to implement a value-based
approach to sales for a handful of their top strategic
accounts, because of the resources required in
deploying precision selling at scale. Current investments
in this area tend to focus on limited, often disjointed
initiatives. Business Value Consulting teams can become
overwhelmed by the volume of deals; ‘one and done’
value-focused training sessions can be quickly forgotten;
and sales leaders may lack the skills to effectively coach
reps in understanding corporate finance. Together these
investments rarely bring more than marginal returns.
That’s why I’m convinced a new approach is necessary.
Value-focused
companies
Non-value-focused
companies
Average annual
revenue growth
-20%
0%
20%
40%
60%
80%
100%
120%
20%
36%
4.6%
-2.6%
107%
-4%
Overall sales quota
attainment
Average year-over-year
increase in deal size
A focus on financial value drives superior sales performance
Figure 3 | Source: Aberdeen Group, Value-Based Selling: Building a Best-in-Class Capability for Sales Effectiveness
The reason I’m so bullish about the impact that precision
selling can have in enterprise sales is because I’ve seen
first-hand that this approach works.

5. Making the impossible possible:
delivering precision selling at scale
Enterprise sales has already seen one wave of
technological disruption, where new digital tools have
helped sales teams solve workflow challenges – for
example, finding prospects more quickly or improving
sales forecasts based on activity by account executives.
We are now seeing a second wave of innovation, where
artificial intelligence (AI) is helping sales organizations
automate high-quality, highly personalized content for
their customers at scale. Technology is enabling a level
of analysis and insight that the average sales rep would
struggle to produce and would previously have taken
even the most seasoned strategy consultant weeks
to deliver.
At Databook, the start-up I co-founded, we see
ourselves at the forefront of this second wave. The
graphic below shows how we harness AI and data
science to essentially encode the brain of a strategy
consultant and provide sophisticated value-based
insights and sales narratives instantly.
Companies that are investing in artificial intelligence
and data science to support their sales initiatives are
already seeing a return. Recent research by McKinsey
into companies that have embraced “the science of B2B
sales” found that these firms have already started to
outpace their peers across important financial metrics.
How data science and machine learning are automating insight generation
11
22
3
[S] Science [A] Art
The domain knowledge of a
strategy consultant, encoded
in software
Sophisticated analysis at a
price point that’s never been
achievable before.
Statistical analysis predicts
‘propensity to buy’ (P2B) based
on financial case for change,
management intent and named
strategic priorities
Advanced algorithms auto-generate
the necessary components for an
executive-level narrative
• Key buyers
• Financial case for change
• Overlapping Board priorities
• Recommended solutions and
case studies
• High-level business case
Unique algorithms synthesize
and normalize financial data and
contextualize performance within
industry and peer group parameters
Heuristics and NLG compare
historical performance with forward-
looking investor expectations to
predict management focus
NLP applied across IR data indexes
and identifies management intent
for target keywords
[KX]
Knowledge
[EX]
Experience
Figure 5 | Source: Databook
Figure 4 | Source: McKinsey, ‘What the future of B2B
sales growth looks like’
Higher revenue growth relative to
industry average2.3X
3% – 5% Boost to profitability above
industry average
+8% Uplift in total return to shareholders
above industry average
5

6. 6
Putting precision selling into practice
Even among the most technologically sophisticated
companies in the world (many of whom are based
within easy reach of Databook’s Palo Alto headquarters)
I’ve seen that tasking an internal team to build the
technology to support precision selling at scale is a
non-starter. Creating a precision-selling platform requires
multidisciplinary expertise (engineering, AI, strategy
consultancy and sales experience) as well as access to a
range of high-quality data and news sources.
At Databook, we’ve spent over two years assembling
those resources and building what we believe is the
world’s first precision-selling platform.
The platform offers our customers several core
capabilities that help them implement precision selling
across the sales cycle:
• Pipeline and territory planning.
Using external data and insights on companies e.g.
management intent, our propensity-to-buy analysis
combines with internal models to help focus sales
teams on the accounts which are most likely to buy
and expand in your solutions.
• Developing a customer point of view.
The platform, coupled with access to a network of
strategy experts, ensures that account executives
have a compelling perspective ahead of customer
meetings.
• Creating presentations and executive proposals.
Automated proposal and business-case tools,
along with strategy expertise plus CMS and CRM
integration, create compelling presentations for
introductory conversations and authoritative
proposals for C-suite pitches.

7. 7
Databook is playing a central role in helping Cloudera, a
leading cloud software company, with the transformation
of its go-to-market strategy, which was launched in early
2018.
Databook provided the company with software, training
and professional enablement services to help it focus – in
the words of Cloudera CEO Tom Reilly – on “increasing
selling and marketing efforts to line-of-business
executives”.
Databook’s impact has been seen at the macro level:
using data science for more rigorous territory planning,
to identify Cloudera’s accounts and prospects with the
highest propensity to buy or expand. It has also been
closely involved at an individual account level, providing
software-driven insights and a white-glove service to
help Cloudera close several seven- and eight-figure
deals over the last six months.
Cloudera’s new go-to-market strategy is starting to pay
off – between May and July 2018, it increased by 13%
the number of its top-tier customers who have an annual
recurring spend of more than $1 million.
Case Study: Helping Cloudera
implement precision selling at scale
A new era for
enterprise sales
I believe we are on the cusp of a new era for
enterprise sales, where technology transforms how
sales professionals sell. What excites me most is
the opportunity it offers for humans and machines
to work together. Precision selling is not about
replacing account executives but giving them
superpowers. Human skill, emotional intelligence
and relationship-building will always be at the heart
of sales, but my belief is that the right technology
will allow professional sellers to build wealth for
their clients, for their employers and for themselves.
Today, 50% of sales professionals miss their quota,
but I expect to see far fewer missing their numbers
in the future with the combination of technology
and daily sales operating activities.

8. 350 Cambridge Avenue, Suite 130
Palo Alto, California 94306
info@trydatabook.com | www.trydatabook.com
Cover photo by Christoph Deinet on Unsplash
About Databook
Company.
Founded in 2016, Databook tackles a core
problem of enterprise sales: creating high-quality,
personalized, value-driven presentations for every
customer, every time. Databook’s sales intelligence
software and services provide the content, insights
and training to scale precision selling across your
team. Bringing together industry, technology and
design experience, Databook’s team is on a mission
to make every professional seller more successful.
Products and services.
Databook’s core products are its web and iOS apps,
which use AI to automatically generate executive-
level presentations. The web app provides insights
into the financial performance, strategic priorities
and management intent of your accounts and
prospects. Its powerful feature set includes instant
downloads of customized PowerPoint proposals,
CRM and calendar integration, and a business case
tool. The iOS app keeps you updated about your
accounts and is designed for research on the go
ahead of customer meetings.
Customers.
Databook works with leading software and
professional services companies globally.
About the Author
I have 15 years of experience as an
expert in consulting Fortune 500
CxOs on how companies create
value for shareholders. In this article
I draw on what I’ve learned from
a decade of advising the C-suite
at a global strategy consultancy
and three years researching the impact of digital
transformation for more than a dozen white papers I
co-authored with the World Economic Forum.