How Important is Artificial Intelligence for Sales Professionals?
The intertwining of artificial intelligence in our daily lives is becoming significantly evident, from getting driving directions to product recommendations on shopping sites. While AI doesn’t fully take on human jobs, it automates significant business tasks. AI’s capability to use historical data, algorithms, and machine learning to forecast business outcomes can undoubtedly help businesses to increase sales. Leveraging artificial intelligence, organizations can devise predictive models to gather comprehensive insights into customer behavior, market trends, competitor data, and much more. Our analysts have noted that AI can play a significant role in different areas of sales. Let’s have a look at those areas here.
1: Precise Sales Prospecting with AI
While social selling generates higher queries for product information, brands face challenges in determining which of those prospects are ready to make a buying decision. However, not anymore! With artificial intelligence, businesses can now gather comprehensive insights into customers to create well-defined buyer personas. By leveraging customer profiles already stored in the database, companies can also identify and target audiences that point to a likely sale. In addition to this, brands can leverage AI to predict when to close deals accurately.
2: Automated Lead Nurturing with AI
Today, personalization is becoming imperative for businesses to drive conversions. This is where AI has come to the rescue. Artificial intelligence can trigger personalization by ensuring instant replies to all customer queries. By employing AI, various steps can be programmed to automate lead nurturing, providing customized experiences to customers.
As customers are spoilt for choices these days, it’s equally essential how your brand approaches a customer. AI can be used to devise a predictive analytics model that can monitor progress and identify when the prospect is ready to buy. AI systems can also help brands create the right sales offer for their customers while taking into account company size, budget, and much more.
3: AI to Reduce Churn and Upselling
It’s common knowledge that the cost to acquire new customers is quite higher than retaining existing customers. Consequently, significant companies are looking to restructure their current processes to take advantage of their existing customers’ recurring revenues. However, this requires ensuring better customer experience and satisfaction. The artificial intelligence system can help you evaluate your customer satisfaction rate.
4: AI can add insights into structuring sales teams
Artificial intelligence is a vital tool for sales management. AI not only helps brands to forecast sales but also provides insights into structuring sales teams.
More accurate sales quotas — While most brands set a higher sales target, it is advisable to have a realistic sales goal that is achievable. Leveraging AI, brands can analyze past sales patterns and set more realistic sales quotas.
Optimizing sales territories — It’s not always impactful to target all audiences with the same strategies. The predictive analytics system can help you overcome this challenge with the market segmentation process. Whether you’re selling by territories or verticals, analytics can help you segment audiences into smaller groups and streamline strategies accordingly. This will eventually help brands to get optimal business results.
Realigning sales policies — Other than providing accurate sales forecasts, predictive analytics can also point to new selling models. Additionally, brands can restructure their sales compensation based on the insights gathered using the AI system.
Revising staff — AI can guide hiring strategies for organizations. With AI, companies can identify the dips and peaks in the product demand over the coming years. By anticipating product demand in advance, organizations can better plan resources and train employees accordingly.
Refine Your Sales Funnel with AI
Undoubtedly, AI allows marketers to focus on the most valuable lead and drive higher conversions. AI also enables marketing professionals to analyze past sales patterns and predict future outcomes accurately. This eliminates the guesswork that the marketing team has to do while devising sales strategies.
