Every organization grows by selling it’s products/ services. If the sales are more, the organization will grow with more revenue being generated from sales. Moreover, if the sales are meager, it is a challenging situation for the organization to grow further. To beat the competitors and grow meticulously to generate more wealth, the organizations have to adopt advanced technologies like Artificial Intelligence in the sales process. There are several ways AI can help sales teams.
What is AI in sales:
In traditional ways, the sales team does the hard work in finding the right customers, engaging and converting. Using humans in sales activities is based on the assumption that human beings can convince other human beings to buy products or services.
When we are talking of using AI in sales, we are not suggesting to replace this human factor, but rather sharpen or give more focus to this activity by automating the non-sales activities as we show in the successive sections.
Artificial intelligence could help the sales team in automating critical tasks and thereby enhancing their productivity.
According to the Harvard business review estimates, AI can create $1.4 to $2.6 trillion of value in marketing and sales.
Of the several ways, I’ve identified below seven ways AI can help sales teams to be more effective:
Traditionally, the sales team have to spend more time scheduling meetings like calling and asking the clients for available time to meet. Instead of calling and asking every client, Artificial Intelligence can help the sales team to automate scheduled meetings at the right available time of the client.
Every industry needs to know the customer’s wants and needs. This is a basic strategy for an organization to develop its products or services. To understand the needs of the customer, customers behavior is the most important factor for any marketing strategy.
For example, Netflix uses an AI recommendation system to show more movies to users from their interests, preferences, and past data. The sales team can use this information and can send automated emails regarding new movie updates to users. This strategy helps in increasing engagement and conversion.
Artificial Intelligence can predict customer behavior by taking factors like demographics, age, location, and sentiment analysis to generate useful insights.
Sentiment analysis is an essential factor for every business. Sentiment analysis tools measure customer behavior, like, how they are talking on particular products or services on various social media channels.
Artificial Intelligence can identify positive and negative sentiment analysis and provide useful insights like those who are more likely to buy the organization’s products or services.
The sales team can use the above information to pitch their sales to the customers.
If the sales team doesn’t find the right prospects, they can not be converted into customers. Artificial Intelligence can help the sales team in identifying the right prospects quickly and thereby, make good conversions.
Using Artificial Intelligence in social media, the news feeds are more personalized according to the customer’s interests and preferences.
Big companies are getting many mentions on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. However, handling these thousands of daily mentions on social media platforms is not possible for the sales team. In this case, Artificial Intelligence can help the sales team in segregating the mentions, like:
- which mentions are accurate and likely to convert,or
- which mentions are fake and not likely to convert
The sales team can use the above information and engage more with quality and accurate customers in social media channels and convert them into leads. Moreover, it will save time that was previously wasted on engaging with unrelated and fake customers.
Without Artificial Intelligence, the sales team is more involved in manual work like data entry than spending time on leads. Artificial intelligence can automate this manual work and the sales team can spend quality time on lead conversion.
Instead of a sales team spending hours on researching leads, Artificial Intelligence can help in generating quality leads by analyzing the organization’s website past and current data and provide information on customers who are likely to convert into leads like:
- customers who have wish-listed products more on an e-commerce store,or
- customers who have visited the website more and target them for re-marketing
The sales team can use the above information and send automated emails and convert customers into the pipeline. The artificial intelligence helps the sales team is spending more time converting the leads.
Artificial intelligence can analyze past historical data and predict for the future, like:
- which prospects are likely to convert into a sales funnel
- which prospects are likely to target next
- which new prospects are likely to be interested in buying the products or services
The above information is most useful for the sales team to take the next steps in their process.
Artificial Intelligence can have the capacity to analyze a huge amount of data and draw meaningful conclusions from the data. These conclusions can help the sales team to take further action. AI can help in every stage of the sales process. AI can analyze the data and provide meaningful insights. AI-driven data analytics provide error-free data. The sales team can use this information and start identifying the right prospects with the right marketing strategies to convert them into the sales funnel.
Artificial Intelligence can accelerate sales team performance. Every organization should motivate their sales teams to adopt AI to enhance the quality of sales process and thereby increase revenue.