Our cutthroat digital age has started to implement AI applications in our everyday lives, various industries; and businesses, and sales are no exception. The way how AI is changing sales activities and strategies, affecting customer relations and developing partnerships between sales representatives and AI, recently became a fundamental buzz in the industry. Research shows that using intelligent technologies in the sales reporting practice can improve forecasting, one of the daunting challenges of working in this industry. When thinking about the potential that artificial intelligence can offer to this industry, AI can surely become one of the main resources for developing a 21-century sales strategy. Here is an overview of how AI can improve sales processes, and provide exceptional results.
1. Automating Sales Processes
“A sales rep can only be as productive as the time spent selling.” – Lynne Zaledonis, Salesforce
This quote summarizes the importance of automation: chatbots can take over simple conversations with clients that would usually hold the attention span and alienate the sales representative from other important tasks. By providing a timely response to a number of customers’ questions, there is a high chance to increase the level of customer loyalty, number of interactions, and potential leads. Recent studies found that 56% of sales teams declare growing the leads number and acquiring new customers as their top sales objective. The same research defined artificial intelligence as the top growth area for sales teams – 139% plan to use it in the next years. Hence, chatbots can speed up sales processes and create valuable new opportunities.
2. Taking Part in the Evolution of Customer Experience
A personalized experience for customers is important. Imagine having an AI assistant who can detect emotional responses, deliver optimal customer experience, and increase sales performance while you can concentrate on other, more human-centric activities.
“By 2021, 15% of all customer service interactions will be completely handled by AI, an increase of 400% from 2017,” according to Gartner. They have also developed a Hype Cycle methodology to predict how this will evolve over time.
If you can use these findings for sales advantages and capitalize your digital assistant to do the work that you don’t want to do, sales performance can be automatically increased.
3. Letting the Machines Do the Hard Work
Using artificial intelligence to gather data and algorithms to predict customer behavior can be a valuable asset. Salespeople often spend quite a lot of time to manually analyze all the big data they collect; by utilizing AI algorithms and letting AI analyzing all the incoming leads, monitoring orders, and identifying the most promising ones, the sales team can focus on increasing conversions. Although the hype how artificial intelligence will take our jobs and affect the workforce, you can benefit from it by letting AI do all the non-automatic tasks you did before, for example, complex calculations that would take a lot of your time and resources.
4. Trusting Your Data
Let’s face it, implementing artificial intelligence into your workflow can be a bit overwhelming. Trusting AI that will deliver important data in a timely manner, and, more importantly, accurately, for salespeople can be a bit daunting. By setting the right parameters and monitoring your results, you can compare the data you received in a specific time frame. In comparison to endless spreadsheets, CRM and software solutions that are implementing artificial intelligence by using advanced machine learning can provide you with e-commerce recommendations, identify more sales opportunities, or create more predictive marketing journeys. It’s not just about collecting data, but the possibility to generate practical insights based on large volumes of data, visualizing them and sharing with clients or colleagues, for example, by using a dashboard maker, the accuracy of data increases, minimizing the human-error factors.
5. Using Algorithms to Your Advantage
Artificial intelligence can come in many different forms. Predictive analytics combine data to forecast the future, chatbots gather data and interact with clients, digital assistants could tell you where and when to use your resources to maximize your sales efforts – the possibilities are endless. And although changing the workflow and trusting all the new data you can discover, it is important to do so and test the findings. If you have contacted your potential leads usually on Mondays, why not change the approach if the algorithm has predicted it would be better to do so on Tuesdays?
Conclusion
To conclude, we can see many advantages of using artificial intelligence in sales. The development of intelligent machine learning has become a practice that is becoming more and more implemented in sales activities. Some salespeople resist the change, but considering it as an adjustment and tool that can improve results and expand your knowledge will provide new insights and grow your sales opportunities.