Progressive sales teams around the world are harnessing the power of AI today. Statistics reveal that the use of AI sales tools increased to above 25% in 2021. Artificial intelligence in sales not only helps in growing business revenue but also enables sales reps to work more efficiently. They can streamline their most dreaded sales tasks besides fostering stronger relationships with the audience.
However, this does not mean that AI will replace humans in sales. Instead, they will only save your team’s valuable time so they can focus on the most important thing i.e., selling.
In today’s post, we will discuss the importance of AI sales management and the different ways in which you can leverage it.
Sales is one of the most significant functions of any business. Your company’s sales team plays a pivotal role in finding prospects and then converting them into happy and paying customers.
Sales AI tools can simplify and optimize the sales process. These tools leverage trainable algorithms to process large datasets and predict user behavior, make accurate recommendations, and enhance decision-making.
Here are some of the sales functions that AI can assist with:
The way the sales process is conducted has drastically changed over the years. Consequently, AI has become an indispensable tool for sales teams to accelerate their business growth.
Automation in sales has become increasingly important due to the following reasons:
Artificial intelligence in sales can be used in many different ways to transform your sales processes and boost your revenue engine. Here, we will look at the five most notable applications of AI in sales.
It is seen that human salespeople approach the process of lead scoring in an unscientific way. Often, their decision-making is based on half-finished data and gut instinct. Consequently, most of their time is spent chasing poorly qualified leads.
Ai can drastically change this situation by bringing a level of logic and standardization to the process.
AI algorithms can compile all information about a client, including their history, social media postings, and interactions with the sales team. Based on this information, these algorithms can rank the leads in the pipeline according to their chances of closing successfully.
In other words, they can help to identify patterns and determine which leads are most likely to convert, thus promoting logical decision-making.
Sales forecasting is the process of anticipating sales revenue that a business may generate over a specific period. Accurate sales forecasts prepare a business for any unforeseen emergencies and maintain resilience.
Using AI is an incredible way to supercharge your sales forecasting capabilities. With AI, sales managers can identify the current trends and understand their path to meeting sales goals each quarter. They can prioritize prospects that have a greater tendency to convert with sales forecasting.
Sales teams no longer need to rely on their instinct to arrive at a number. Instead, they can leverage AI-powered sales forecasting tools for the following:
Finally, predictive forecasting can also create value for sales teams internally. For instance, sales managers can use the same data analysis to forecast their team’s performance in advance. This way, they can take proactive steps to enhance their sales attribution based on factual figures.
This is one of the best examples of AI in sales that can streamline your sales processes and automate workflows.
AI tools can boost your sales team’s productivity in several ways. These tools augment the work and eliminate the drudgery that distracts the team members from focusing on higher-value tasks.
There are plenty of areas of the sales department where having an AI-powered tool can speed things up. For instance, there are predictive dialers that allow sales representatives to make outbound calls at scale. Similarly, there are AI tools that automate post-call reporting that liberates reps from manually typing everything after a sales call.
Apart from these, many more sales processes can be automated with AI, allowing your sales team to focus on actual selling.
As discussed above, AI is quite effective in identifying qualified leads. Now similarly, AI tools can also predict cross-selling and up-selling opportunities that a sales rep is most likely to be successful with for every individual customer.
Thanks to machine learning, these tools can analyze data from past interactions with a prospect and the previous sale history of each customer to predict the products/services that will appeal the most to every lead.
This boosts sales by eradicating the guesswork that the sales team has to do for cross-selling and up-selling. Additionally, it ensures that your sales team does not annoy the leads by recommending products they have no interest in.
Both cross-sells and up-sells are great strategies to boost overall sales. Statistics reveal that there is an approximately 70% chance of selling to an existing customer as compared to a 20% chance of finding a new prospect. And with AI, companies can make the most of this opportunity and enhance their bottom line.
Often, leads want to talk to a human representative before making the final sales decision. Other times, they just want to feel like they are talking to a human sales rep. And this is where an AI-powered chatbot comes in handy.
AI chatbots are a brilliant substitute that offers round-the-clock customer service assistance. They are trained and integrated call center software to address basic questions about a company’s products/services, make accurate recommendations, and even make up-sells and cross-sells.
This boosts the sales team’s productivity as it reduces their load of answering basic customer queries. Additionally, an instant response to the prospects makes them more inclined to make the final purchase.
Now let’s take a look at the three most popular AI sales tools along with their most noteworthy features. This will help you select the best tool for your team.
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Cold outreach is a crucial aspect of every business’s sales process. However, discovering the right information about every prospect and creating a strong introductory email is often a challenge for sales teams.
Warmer.ai is an excellent AI tool that enables sales teams to personalize emails using accurate data about the prospect. This includes details such as their job title, interests, awards, etc.
Thus, sales teams can improve the email response rate while saving valuable time for other core activities.
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Clari is among the best sales enablement platforms for modern sales teams. The tool allows sales representatives to convert more leads by arming them with data-driven insights and the best sales content.
The AI sales tool leverages actual deal data to automatically generate forecasts for every rep, region, channel, and product/service line. It also offers enhanced visibility into the sales team’s performance, prospect engagement, and deal status.
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Drift is an AI-powered platform that enables small and medium-sized enterprises to speed up their sales cycle. The platform works to engage the visitors from the word go, instead of making them fill out long forms.
The sales assistant works in tandem with chatbots to address customer queries and even schedule demo sessions with the sales team. Thus, it automates lead capturing without increasing the company’s headcount.
To conclude, AI in sales has massive potential. That said, there is no one way of using this technology in your sales processes. It is good to begin evaluating the aspects of your sales process that you wish to simplify and streamline. This will also help you choose the right AI sales tool for your team.
Ans. An AI sales tool is an advanced software solution empowered by artificial intelligence that optimizes sales processes by leveraging data-driven insights, automating tasks, and enhancing customer interactions to boost sales performance and revenue generation.
Ans. Using an AI sales tool offers numerous benefits, including improved sales efficiency, enhanced lead generation and qualification, personalized customer experiences, predictive analytics for accurate forecasting, streamlined sales processes, increased productivity, and better decision-making based on data-driven insights.
Author: Charu
Charu is an outreach specialist with over 4 years of experience in digital marketing. Her expertise lies in developing and executing outreach campaigns that drive engagement and build brand awareness. When she’s not brainstorming outreach ideas, you can find Charu exploring the outdoors or practicing yoga.
