Artificial intelligence (AI), once a science fiction dream, is almost everywhere in your daily life from Google advertisements to Netflix recommendations. It’s been widely used in the advertising world, but have you considered how artificial intelligence can be utilised in the world of sales to completely redesign and innovate your current processes?
The benefits have already been proven as sales teams using AI tools see a 50% increase in leads and appointments as well as cost reductions of 40-60%, maximising profit from all angles. It’s also been noted that the highest-performers are 4.1 times as likely to see and take advantage of the tools and technology available to them than underperformers are.
There are many profound benefits that AI can provide sales people with, and while it can’t replace their natural talent, it can increase their effectiveness. Continue reading to learn about the 5 top ways how artificial intelligence will redesign your sales team.
Enhance your productivity
The number one way that AI can revolutionise the sales industry is through saving sales people a host of time on laborious tasks that can now be, reliably and speedily, autocompleted. Not only this, but tools that use AI and machine learning are always up-to-date and provide sales people with the most accurate and recent data to base decisions on. A few examples of the types of processes that can now be automated include admin tasks such as automated calendar meetings, booking room meetings, assessing pipelines, data analysis, cost forecasting and prospecting. By removing the manual labour from these processes, sales people can focus their attention on higher-value tasks such as building client/customer relationships and selling, which can bring in more profit.
Prospect only the most susceptible leads
You can cut back on the time-heavy job of prospecting by utilising the benefits of machine learning which learns and identifies customer patterns to inform you which prospects may be the most susceptible to being contacted. It can do this by analysing geographical location, company and job titles, as well as tracking whitepaper downloads and previous customer interactions. The benefits of using machine learning tools to complete these tasks are aplenty: AI can be more calculated and reliable than a sales person who may be relying on their instincts when choosing which clients to prospect. Although, it’s important to note that a sales person’s instincts are essential to their role as AI cannot assess or calculate human emotions which a sales person can pick up on.
However, the lead prioritisation method is fairly reliable as it can calculate a large mass of saved data in just a few seconds, allowing sales people the opportunity to home in on the most highly engaged prospects and easily close deals.
Create personalised sales strategies
AI has the potential to scan an entire database of customer orders or CRMs — thus creating a customer persona that includes risk prediction and sales potential through AI insights. This special analysis and understanding can be used to guide business decisions and implement innovative sales strategies. It’s also possible that with this technology, customers can have a personalised sales strategy based on their own preferences of when in the pipeline they would like to be contacted. This is beneficial for both marketing and sales teams and aligns them in their goal of enticing the customer. In addition, AI allows for an automated, yet personalised lead contact and qualification process through conversational AI — an enhanced tool, ahead of generic mass e-mails which likely disengage potential customers.
Optimise pricing
For a long time, technology has helped with the planning of business strategies and setting KPIs based on predicted sales through forecasting, but now, AI can help increase these monthly profits instead of just monitoring them. AI can help with business solutions by offering optimised sales strategies based on the fluctuating market of supply and demand. By incorporating machine learning tools which can analyse worldwide and national trends in your business, prices can stay at the peak of their most enticing and profitable margins. Such technologies find patterns in years of customer transactions on a specific product to predict the impact of a variety of promotions and present you with the most compelling ones.
Analyse and improve weaknesses
Prescriptive sales tools provide professionals with reliable, data-driven feedback which allows for constant reform to increase productivity. It is similar to a CRM except that it tracks and analyses a wide range of data and events to find areas for improvement. Such small correlations may be very hard to perceive or notice for those attempting to do it manually. Doing so can help improve sales best practises by learning what techniques are and aren’t working on customers and clients.
This technology provides sales people with a great tool to improve their performance and hit KPIs, all while saving time and reducing cost. AI can level the playing field and make every sales person a top performer by telling them exactly what they can do to hit their targets.
Hire with BMS
While artificial intelligence hosts a multitude of benefits, it can’t replace natural sales talent. Instead, it can redesign your sales team and allow the capabilities of your sales team to shine through. BMS performance can help you recruit talented sales people for your business today — contact us to learn more.
