// FEATURE // moves) with value or quality metrics( what you deliver and how it performs).
In our example, put in place the ability to track whether AI improves truly important numbers for your business health, like conversion, forecast accuracy, sales cycle length, retention, customer satisfaction or revenue per customer. There are many best practices or models a leader can employ to help guide this, ranging from the very simple to something much more structured and all encompassing, like McKinsey’ s five-layer framework.
More detailed advice from your tech partners should help show how any proposed solution should connect any productivity to commercial outcomes via a clear and understandable path.
Once that’ s clear, investments can be made with business risk more carefully managed. Taking the time to be forensic and logical in approach also helps small businesses avoid
Sean Evers, VP of Sales & Partner, Pipedrive
taking one-off or failed experiments that never become integrated habits or embedded into well-functioning workflows.
When moving forwards with implementation, it’ s likely that, as with all major technology installs, culture becomes the real crux of success. Not only does leadership want to set as few and clear rules for safe and useful employee adoption, they want to show that these will change in time and that’ s OK. Advice on using ChatGPT 3.5 is way out of date now – the important thing is that employees are both empowered and accountable for using their tools, and that training or fresh guidance arrives roughly in line with any new functionality or change in the power of the model / solution in question.
Every suggestion given is designed to support confidence in AI decision-making and its use in practice – but none of it is secret or hidden. Many tech providers, strategic partners, major analysts and so on, have freely available frameworks, questionnaires and best practice guides to support progress. Any SME can leverage what they have and who they know to better plan and to stress test their problems before they go to purchase. If helpful, take any lists of terms given in this article and turn them into a quick checklist to get the ball rolling.
Don’ t delay – start slow, start sure
SMEs do not need to adopt every new AI tool quickly. What they do need is a practical adoption plan that links AI to business value from the jump.
One thing to bear in mind above all else though is the critical issue of trust. Even well-implemented AI will struggle commercially if it makes the internal or end-user experience feel less human, less transparent or – if a business process – more pressured. Pipedrive’ s own recent research into Sales and AI uncovered that 55 % of the public do not fully trust AI, while 46 % say they value human connection. Faster outreach is not the same as a more trusted buying experience. Wherever it’ s applied, AI should offload digital admin so users can focus on areas demanding the human touch, such as customer service and relationship building.
Winners will combine enthusiastic experimentation with very structured discipline. That will look like investigating and understanding clearly stated problems, inputting in pre-cleansed and trusted data, setting accountable owners – and of course the right metrics that show real commercial progress in that particular operation. �
Intelligent SME. tech
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