Strategy

Think about your last pipeline review. How many times did you hear “oh yeah, I just haven’t updated that”? Meanwhile, marketers, RevOps, and sales leaders are left with limited pipeline visibility, wondering which campaigns are actually moving the needle, and how far off the team will be from the original forecast. This CRM data quality issue is the symptom of a much bigger problem. And it’s quietly costing you revenue. With how much the CRM can impact sales performance and the buyer’s experience, it’s critical that marketing, sales, and operations leadership understand the case for CRM optimization.

For most revenue teams, the CRM has become the thing sellers tolerate rather than the thing that helps them win. That’s not a people problem. It’s a design problem. Sellers are wrestling with clunky interfaces and manual processes, while hunting down intel in fragmented systems, and buyers feel the friction when they’re waiting to be followed up with, or have to repeat themselves on a call.

In Sercante l Trilliad’s playbook, The CRM Paradox: Why Your System is Killing Pipeline (And How to Fix It), it dives into the statistics and impacts on sellers, buyers, and the overall business when the CRM is not set up to be aligned with how sellers actually sell, and includes a proven framework for identifying the friction and how to start solving it. Get the highlights on the case for CRM optimization below and download the playbook to get all the details.

The case for CRM optimization: Your real cost of a “broken” CRM

CRMs weren’t originally built for sellers. They were built for reporting, tracking, and management oversight. So when we drop a seller into a system designed for someone else’s job, friction is the natural result.

The numbers tell the story:

• 48% of sales leaders say their CRM is more of a burden than a help (Forbes).
• 76% of salespeople say their CRM is too complex, time-consuming, and outdated (Medium).
• Companies with low CRM adoption have reported closing  14% fewer deals (ARP Ideas).

Here’s the cycle every revenue leader knows but rarely names: friction leads to low CRM adoption. Low adoption leads to bad data. Bad data leads to obscured buyer views, bad forecasts—and lost revenue.

You’ve most likely felt the downstream cost of seller friction firsthand.

For marketers: 

• The leaky funnel: Marketing hands off a lead and loses sight of it. Without tracking, delayed follow-ups let hot leads go cold.
• Painful ROI reporting: Low CRM data quality hides campaign impact, making it impossible to prove what actually drove the deal.
• Limited personalization: Poor data tracking means limited customer insight, stopping teams from building the tailored experiences today’s buyers expect.

For sales leaders:

• Blind forecasting: Low CRM adoption leads to inaccurate deal data, forcing leaders to guess on pipeline numbers, making forecasting challenging.  
• Limited coaching: Without the right deal context in the system of record, managers can’t spot where sellers are stuck or guide them effectively.

For RevOps:

• Funnel visibility gaps: Siloed intelligence makes it impossible to accurately track funnel velocity and shifting conversion rates.  
• Legacy drag: Outdated setups force teams to build manual workarounds rather than scalable, automated workflows, making the data issue worse as well as efficiency.

For customer success: 

• Reactive support: A lack of proactive data insights means CSMs can’t identify or save at-risk accounts before they decide to churn.
• Eroded kickoff trust: Passing accounts with limited sales context creates a clunky onboarding experience that kills lifetime value.

Where the CRM friction actually lives

Before you can fix it, you have to find it. In most organizations, the drag clusters in five predictable places.

1. Administrative burden. Sellers spend 60%+ of their time on manual data entry instead of selling (Salesforce). Every redundant field and extra click is selling time you’re paying for and not getting.
2. The seller’s CRM perception. If sellers don’t see the CRM as being useful and only have frustrating experiences when using it, their view of the CRM will only continue to lead to low CRM adoption.
3. Siloed intelligence. Critical deal context lives in Slack, email, and “shadow” spreadsheets—everywhere except the system of record. When the insight isn’t where the seller is working, it may as well not exist.
4. Legacy configuration. Many orgs are running a CRM built for 2018 reporting needs, not 2026 workflows. The business changed. The setup didn’t.
5. The marketing visibility gap. This is the one that quietly breaks cross-functional trust. Marketing hands off a lead and loses sight of it. Sales picks it up with no context. And no one can prove what actually drove the deal.

Ask yourself: Which of these five is costing my team the most right now? You probably already know the answer.

Your buyer feels every bit of it

Here’s the part that’s easy to miss from inside a pipeline dashboard: internal friction never stays internal. If your sellers are fighting their tools, they aren’t fighting for your buyers.

In Part III of Sercante l Trilliad’s series, Built to Buy, industry experts explore what a broken seller experience looks like from the buyer’s side of the table:

• The delayed hand-off. A hot marketing lead goes cold because the assignment logic is broken or buried in a rep’s queue. The buyer raised their hand—and heard nothing back.
• The interrogation session. A prospect repeats their pain points, budget, and scope on a call because the marketing context never synced to the record. To them, it feels like your left hand doesn’t know what your right hand is doing.
• The missing follow-up. A customized proposal arrives days late because the seller is drowning in admin instead of engaging. By then, attention has moved on.

Your customer doesn’t think, “Am I in a marketing, sales, or success experience?” They just know they’re having an experience—and they want it to be easy. When your departments feel out of sync, buyers quietly move to a competitor who feels organized. A CRM that feels clunky to your seller feels clunky to your buyer.

Getting started on your CRM optimization

The key to getting started is acknowledging the impact that the state of the CRM has on your business for sellers, your buyers, and every department. Then it’s about spotting where the friction actually lives and mapping out the next steps for solving it. 

If you’d like to fast-track getting started with your CRM optimization, reach out to the Sercante l Trilliad team for a Seller Experience Audit. Then, receive a clear blueprint for quick wins with a big impact and a roadmap for your ideal CRM seller experience.

The B2B sales engine is at a tipping point. While revenue leaders have more access to technology and data than ever, the majority of a seller’s time is still lost to non-selling tasks. Even when sellers do engage, traditional training often fails to stick under the pressure of real-world conversations. In response, many teams have deployed siloed AI point solutions, yet these efficiency plays rarely impact the bottom line. To move the needle, leaders must shift from mere activity to true AI seller effectiveness, transforming AI from a basic writing assistant into a strategic co-pilot that expands revenue capacity and win rates.

This critical shift in approach was also identified as a must for leaders to make this year, in Trilliad’s 2026 Growth Imperatives. The traditional sales development playbook isn’t working. Therefore, it’s time to adjust to a strategy that holistically creates a sales performance system.

The State of AI in Sales

The pursuit of AI efficiency in 2025 often led to simply accelerating unchanged, low-yield sales behaviors. To avoid this, organizations must recognize where the true value of intelligence lies:

• Selling vs. Shuffling: Only 29% of a seller’s time is actually spent selling, with the rest lost to administrative tasks, manual data entry, and prospecting (Salesforce).
• The Pilot Problem: A staggering 87% of AI projects fail due to poor data quality (RAND), while 70% fail due to a lack of operational enablement (ADAPTOVATE).
• Systemic Intelligence: When asked where the most untapped ROI for AI exists, 42.4% of leaders pointed to system-level AI, tools built to enhance organizational intelligence, compared to only 5.3% who prioritized seller-level productivity tools (Varicent).

Unlocking true AI seller effectiveness goes beyond singular tools. It requires a holistic view of how intelligence empowers the entire revenue organization.

“Last year was the year of efficiency. This is the year of effectiveness. If sellers can do more of the same bad behaviors faster, that does not drive growth. Effectiveness is what turns efficiency into real results.” 

–  Seth Marrs, Chief Strategy Officer, Sandler, 2026 Growth Imperatives

By shifting the mandate to effectiveness, leaders ensure that every efficiency gain is anchored in better outcomes, not just faster cycles.

Shifting from Episodic Sales Development to Durable Performance Systems

For too long, B2B organizations have treated sales development as a series of episodic events, one-time workshops, or annual resets that decay as soon as the team returns to the field. To drive lasting growth, sales performance must be engineered as an always-on system that operates with the same analytical rigor as forecasting or finance.

The most critical hurdle to this transition is the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve. Without intentional reinforcement, humans forget 75% of new information in just six days (Harvard Business Review) and up to 84% within 90 days (Ardent Learning). In the context of 2026, training decay isn’t just an educational hurdle it is a strategic business risk that directly threatens sales revenue stability.

Just as Sercante builds change enablement plans focused on continual reinforcement to ensure technology adoption, sales leaders must move toward a mindset of performance engineering. This ensures that your investment in a sales methodology actually sticks when a seller is facing a high-stakes negotiation.

Unlocking AI Seller Effectiveness

The path to seller excellence is paved with data. By prioritizing an integrated data layer, organizations can identify top-performing behaviors and fuel AI that personalizes reinforcement at scale.

Establishing your data foundation

Modern revenue organizations are often drowning in data but starving for insight. Despite managing an average of over 600 applications (WalkMe Inc.), sellers frequently lack the deep buyer context, such as specific pricing views or topics consumed, needed to lead high-value conversations.

The solution isn’t to connect every disparate system at once. That pursuit of “data perfection” only stalls progress. Instead, focus on untrapping the right data for the right outcome. Start by defining the desired end-experience: What data would empower your sellers to lead with insight tomorrow? This customer-centric lens serves as the ultimate filter for your sales AI roadmap.

Using AI to scale personalized sales development

With a solid data foundation, sales leaders can move from subjective coaching to evidence-based interventions. AI can monitor actual customer interactions in real-time to identify skill gaps and trigger personalized support for sellers. Some examples of what that could look like are: 

• Real-Time Behavioral Monitoring: AI detects the moment a seller stops setting upfront contracts or skips deep pain discovery.
• Triggered “Just-in-Time” Reinforcement: If a seller struggles to articulate value against a specific competitor, the system automatically pushes a relevant AI role-play scenario to their dashboard.
• Exemplar Pattern Matching: Technology identifies the unique behaviors of top-performers and codifies them into the training system for the entire team.
• Evidence-Based Coaching: Managers focus their energy only on the specific areas where data shows a seller is struggling, replacing generic sessions with precision coaching.

This shift turns the sales process into a self-optimizing, sales training reinforcement loop, closing the execution gap in real-time.

(Source: Sandler)

“Technology now allows us to have an always-on view of sales performance. That means we can move from point-in-time training events to sustained sales performance systems that reinforce, measure, and improve performance over time.” 

– David Braun, President, Sandler, 2026 Growth Imperatives

When AI Seller Effectiveness Impacts the Bottom Line

Focusing on AI-powered effectiveness rather than just efficiency creates a 15% growth in revenue capacity per seller (Sandler). By automating non-selling tasks and reinvesting that time into high-yield, reinforced selling behaviors, organizations achieve significant revenue expansion.

Furthermore, systematic reinforcement leads to 10% higher win rates (Sandler). When training moves from an activity checkbox to constant feedback loops, sellers are empowered to handle larger quotas with evidence-based precision.

Shifting your mindset: Critical questions for sales leaders

To guide your transition to a progressive sales performance system, move beyond asking “Did we train them?” and instead ask:

• Behavioral Clues: Which specific selling behaviors correlate with our highest-win-rate deals? 
• Data Visibility: Can our sellers easily access the customer data they need to understand buyer pain points? 
• Risk Identification: Where exactly is training decay occurring before it impacts the quarterly forecast? 
• Resource Allocation: Is our development spend personalized to individual skill gaps or wasted on generalization? 
• Performance Measurement: Can we connect our performance investment to measurable financial outcomes for the CFO?

Answering these questions not only starts to guide the team toward shifting its mindset. The exercise can also help to prioritize the data that will need to be unlocked and the AI initiatives to prioritize first to reach the most impactful sales goals.

Taking your next steps

Unlocking AI seller effectiveness requires a fundamental shift from episodic workshops to durable sales performance systems. It mandates an integrated data layer that provides sellers with context, identifies exemplar behaviors, and proves ROI to the highest levels of the organization. Getting started requires taking a step back to consider: What data can your team access today? Where is training decay hurting your win rates? Then get started by prioritizing the right data to access and the most impactful AI to set up for your sales goals.

If you’d like support with making the transition from siloed AI efficiency to AI seller effectiveness, reach out to the Sercante team. We partner with growth leaders daily to optimize CRM environments and technology stacks that empower sellers to expand their revenue potential. 

The traditional B2B search journey is undergoing a shift, moving away from static search engine results pages toward fluid, conversational AI interfaces. As buyer behavior evolves, AI answer engine optimization (AEO) has emerged as an imperative for brand visibility, serving as the new entry point for the modern buyer. To ensure brands stay top of mind during the critical buyer research, discovery, and evaluation phases, industry leaders in Trilliad’s 2026 Growth Imperatives have identified integrating a Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) strategy into the marketing mix as no longer optional, but a competitive necessity.

AI is the New Entry Point for Modern Buyers

The way buyers discover solutions has been fundamentally reshaped by AI answer engines, with up to 80% of users now relying on AI-generated summaries to distill complex information (Bain & Company). This efficiency has led to a zero-click reality, where 60% of searches end without a single click to a third-party website because the AI provides the answer directly (Search Engine Land). For B2B brands, this creates the danger of “AI Invisibility”. If you aren’t cited in the AI’s synthesis, you can be excluded from the buyer’s journey before human evaluation even begins.

Brands that fail to optimize for generative engine visibility risk a slow decay in market share as AI assistants become the primary tool for synthesizing vendor lists and evaluation criteria. 

“The front door has shifted. Your website is no longer the first place buyers meet your brand. AI search platforms are now the front door, and if you are not showing up there, you are not even being considered.” 

– Marcus Hiles, SVP Strategy, Just Global, 2026 Growth Imperatives

To ensure brand visibility in AI answer engines, marketers must adopt a framework built for Large Language Models (LLMs) in addition to their traditional search engine strategy.

AI Answer Engine Optimization

Just as brands spent decades perfecting SEO strategies to appease Google’s crawlers, they must now develop a GEO strategy to ensure their brand is picked up by AI answer engines. LLMs look for authoritative, structured, and contextually relevant data that can be easily synthesized into a conversational response.

To improve your LLM visibility, focus on how your content is structured to answer the questions that the audience will be asking and the schema of the page.

Content Optimization for LLM Visibility Checklist

• Schema: Use an FAQPage or QAPage to provide clear, structured answers that AI can easily parse.
• Formatting: Use short, declarative, factual paragraphs along with bullets, numbered steps, and tables for clarity. Incorporate statistics, unique insights, and expert quotes that AI engines are likely to reference as primary sources.
• Optimize for Intent: Structure content around “How-to” and “What is” queries that address specific pain points in the buying cycle.

(Source: Trilliad 2026 Growth Imperatives)

By checking these boxes, you ensure your data is machine-readable, which is the first step toward moving from a hidden data point to a featured recommendation.

Getting Started with an AI Answer Engine Assessment

The most effective way to frame your GEO strategy is to understand your current baseline: how is your brand currently showing up (or not) in AI answer engines? An assessment allows you to see the gaps in your visibility and identify which topics your competitors are dominating within AI-generated summaries. By identifying where you are missing from the conversation, you can prioritize your optimization efforts for the greatest immediate impact. This same approach for prioritizing AI initiatives by the most impactful outcome aligns with pillar one of the 4-pillar playbook of The State of AI in Enterprise Report: anchor to the business vision. When teams have a starting point of how their brand is already showing up or not showing up in AI answer engines, it guides them toward establishing a clear goal with measurable outcomes to then guide the rest of their GEO strategy and effectively measure performance.

If you’d like to get started with an AEO Assessment, reach out to the Sercante team. They offer a comprehensive AEO assessment designed to help brands audit their LLM presence and build a roadmap for discovery.

Understanding your current standing allows you to pivot your strategy toward the ultimate goal: securing a spot on the initial vendor shortlist.

Winning with GEO: Brand visibility on the Day One List

Successful GEO can increase LLM visibility for a brand by approximately 40% (Aggarwal et al., 2024). When content is optimized for AI, brands significantly increase their chances of appearing in the crucial “Day One” vendor shortlists, the initial lists formed from AI answer engines that buyers discover and then move forward with for further research and evaluation.

Incorporating a GEO strategy into the overall marketing mix is critical to ensure brand discovery with today’s modern buyers. The landscape has changed, but the goal remains the same: meet the buyers where they are.

The promise of artificial intelligence has sparked a gold rush, yet many organizations find themselves starving for insight despite being drowning in data. While the potential is vast, the reality is stark: 56% of executives have yet to see a true impact on their bottom lines from AI investments (Oxygen Staff). The bottleneck is rarely the technology. More often, it’s a strategy problem. Organizations invest in AI capabilities without connecting them to measurable business outcomes. An effective AI roadmap for enterprise initiatives fixes this by anchoring use cases to concrete results.

Why Don’t the Majority of Organizations Have Operational AI?

Across the enterprise landscape, activity hasn’t translated into traction. Pilots are multiplying across departments, yet 92% of companies have yet to operationalize AI in any meaningful way (McKinsey & Company). Instead of a unified force, AI initiatives are often stuck in siloed efforts where marketing, sales, and customer success are running separate tests without a connective tissue to bind them.

These teams are set up to fail when they’re answering to too many stakeholders instead of working as a cohesive unit. Without an overarching vision, organizations focus on AI point solutions to maximize output, yet they neglect the core process alignment required to see a return on investment.

Transitioning from these isolated experiments to a state of systematic effectiveness requires a strategic shift in how teams define and sequence their goals.

The AI Roadmap for Enterprise

The foundation of operational success is shifting the question from “What can AI do?” to “What value is AI going to bring to the company?” An AI roadmap brings structure to ambition,  connecting what organizations want from AI to how they’ll actually get there. Unlike a simple list of cool features, a roadmap is highly sequenced, helping organizations understand which capabilities to build first and how each piece creates a foundation for the next.

By tying every integration and deployment to a clear end goal, leaders can cut through the noise and move forward with a prioritized plan. This is the foundation of the first pillar in the playbook for scaling AI for success in the State of AI in Enterprise report. This roadmap ensures that AI is not just a line-item overhead but the essential machinery that enhances internal capabilities for high-resolution customer experiences.

A successful roadmap relies on the ability to turn these high-level visions into measurable, tangible targets.

Getting Specific with Your Metrics for Value-Driven AI Use Cases

One of the primary reasons AI projects fail to scale is a lack of measurable outcomes. For example, many teams may have efficiency as one of their goals, but efficiency can mean a lot of different things. To find real value, you must define exactly what you are measuring, whether it is revenue per customer, faster conversion behavior, or the accuracy of RFP turnaround times.

• Establish a Baseline: You cannot prove impact without knowing your starting point.
• Define Success Early: Connect every AI use case to clear KPIs, remember to get specific!
• Avoid the Capability Trap: Don’t lead with the technology. Lead with the specific business outcomes you intend to solve.

Once these outcomes are defined, the focus must shift to the fuel that powers them: your data.

Establishing Your Data Foundation

A significant barrier to scaling AI is the illusion of data perfection. Shattering this preconceived notion was one of the core disciplines that industry experts across the Trilliad organization emphasized as being critical for operationalizing the data layer for impactful AI in the 2026 Growth Imperatives.

Many leaders feel pressure to connect every application before they can begin—a mindset that stalls progress before it starts. An AI roadmap cuts through this by sequencing which data to unlock first and how each step builds toward the next, keeping focus on the data that actually moves the needle. 

Distrust in AI outputs usually traces back to the data layer. A standardized, well-governed data foundation is what transforms AI from a source of noise into a reliable driver of decisions.

Equally important is designing for adoption and ensuring change enablement is built into each phase for the people who will actually be using the solution.

Addressing the Human Factor in AI

70% of AI project failures are organizational (ADAPTOVATE). When teams only focus on the technical aspects and do not consider the human factor, it results in low AI adoption and limited results. Change is inherently hard, and people are bringing varying levels of uncertainty and AI mindsets to an AI rollout. Therefore, to sustain adoption, you must incorporate impactful change enablement strategies that include: 

• Transparent Communication: Address your team’s fears and questions, such as “Am I being replaced?” early and honestly.
• Persona-Based Enablement: Tailor training to the specific journey of each role to ensure they are set up for success.
• Continued Reinforcement: Enablement should not be treated as a one-and-done engagement. How will you continually reinforce the best practices for using the AI solution to maximize results?

By engineering sustained execution, you ensure that your AI investment sticks and reflects in real-world situations across marketing, sales, and customer success.

“Recognizing the need for humans in the process design is key to AI success… including pinpointing where human expertise and intervention are essential.”

– Debra Engles, Change Enablement Director, Sercante

Your Path to Delivering Real Value with AI

When you organize your people, processes, and data around a cohesive, sequential AI roadmap for enterprise initiatives, you move past the pilot phase into a state of competitive advantage. By grounding your strategy in measurable outcomes and the human factor, you transform AI from a buzzword into a high-performance growth engine.

If you’d like support with creating your AI roadmap, reach out to the Sercante team. We partner with go-to-market leaders daily to help them bring their AI vision to reality and achieve their business goals.