AI technology leverage is heating up in the world, with 61% of sales professionals using AI to serve their customers better and sell efficiently. Sales professionals considering generative AI in various ways, such as:
- 82% are using it for content creation.
- 74% leveraging it for market data analyzation.
- 71% are planning to use AI for personalized communication automation.
- 51% find AI useful for sales report generation.
AI in sales increases the number of leads by 50%, reduces call time by 70%, and cuts sales costs by 60% with intelligent automation, actionable insights, and predictions ahead.
The impressive stats determine the potential impact of AI in sales and how it is the future of B2B lead generation. This blog will walk you through an overview of AI in sales, use cases that play a vital role in sales success, and the road ahead.
What is AI in sales?
AI in sales is about the usage of Artificial Intelligence applications to optimize different areas of the sales process.
From repetitive task automation and insights generation to future predictions are the by-products of AI applications that are combined with human expertise to assess leads better and bring more leads down the sales funnel. Different subsets of AI technologies, such as Generative AI, ML, NLP, and DL, are used by top AI companies for AI sales application development.
AI sales applications bring a range of benefits to the sales department that make them a good investment that pays off endlessly. AI in sales improves productivity, efficiency, and job satisfaction, eliminates time-consuming administrative tasks, enables accurate B2B sales predictions, and nurtures customer relationships.
Seven ways to use AI efficiently in sales
AI is good for the sales team and sales processes when it’s used efficiently. Here are some of the efficient AI use cases that reveal different ways to innovate sales.
Conversational Intelligence to Uncover Hidden Insights
Sales teams and customers often converse over phone calls, video calls, or emails. Conversational AI can transcribe the conversation to text, extract valuable information with keyword analysis, and analyze data to identify customers' interests and frustrations. Thus, it becomes easier for a B2B sales team to reach out to the customer with a tailored approach in the subsequent follow-up.
AI in conversation tone analysis reveals customer satisfaction levels during the meeting. For example, the team can learn which parts of the conversation impress the customers or make them skeptical, which offer turns them into positive prospects, and more.
Generate High-Quality B2B Leads
High-quality B2B leads maximize conversion rate and business efficiency. However, identifying quality leads based on assumptions is not a good approach because it's like shooting in the dark. AI helps the sales team drive insights-based, accurate answers based on lead scores.
AI algorithms assign lead scores based on customers' demographics, sales interactions, and marketing information consumption analysis.
A high lead score signifies the lead's buying intent, which is thereby pushed down the sales funnel. AI can organize the large volumes of leads in the sales pipeline from B2B lead generation to closing, allowing the team to track each lead better, identify challenges, and understand the reason behind deals closing or failure.
Enhance Customer Relationship Management
CRM software works moderately in bolstering customer relationships, but sometimes, it fails to live up to expectations. It is due to the manual updating of customer and sales data in CRM, which is time-consuming, and gaining insights from data is tiresome.
Thus, a B2B sales team has less time to spend nurturing leads and strengthening relationships.
Integrating an AI call-tracking system with CRM software is a good solution that tracks calls and automatically logs them in the CRM.
Also, customer responses are captured intelligently with AI conversational bots. It eliminates manual data entry and provides an up-to-date summary of every call, which helps in the best customer relationship management.
Improve Sales Engagement
Strong customer relationships depend on sales closing and customer retention, which requires optimizing sales engagement. AI tools help the sales team improve sales engagement with customer interaction automation and content optimization. AI bots analyze customer sentiments in the interaction and then auto-generate responses based on their programming.
AI can respond to customers reaching out to businesses through websites or social channels by sending emails or scheduling calls. In email campaigns, AI helps with subject line, offer, or content customization based on customer preferences to increase email click-through rate and conversion rates.
Sales Analytics
Unbiased data and insights about sales performance are essential to making data-driven decisions. AI sales analytics tools analyze data such as CTA performance, buying habits, customer feedback, conversion rate, sales trends, and other areas for improvement. They help create a data-driven strategy and make the most of resources.
Various AI sales analytics used for improved B2B sales results are: problems are diagnosed with diagnostic analytics, comparison of past and present sales data with descriptive analytics tells what's happening currently, the best solution is provided by prescriptive analytics, and rich insights are gained with predictive analytics.
Accurate B2B Sales Projections
Sales forecasting is pivotal to sales success, but 100% accurate sales projection through traditional methods is implausible. Sales analysts cannot analyze large data sets in a few minutes and make accurate predictions. The AI-based sales forecast is faster and more reliable, as it generates impartial reports for present and future sales after analyzing sales data.
Navigating the favorable opportunities and undesirable outcomes enables data-driven decision-making. Continuous training will help AI make accurate predictions and enhance system performance.
Training Sales Teams Intelligently
AI in sales is revolutionizing the sales training process in an era where sales managers are too busy to train new hires. It ultimately impacts the sales representatives' performance, and they fall short of closings.
Personalized AI training programs using generative AI technology are the biggest savior. AI tools replicate real-world scenarios and play the role of customers, allowing new sales reps to practice and nurture sales skills without risking losing a customer in reality.
The AI apps can simulate real-world scenes on video calls with a human avatar, eliminating the hesitation that sales representatives may have during meetings. Also, the tools analyze B2B sales rep performance with phone interactions and email and provide suggestions for what to improve and how to handle customer objections.
Boost Performance and Productivity with AI!
The transformational impact of AI in digital marketing is viewed across the global sales processes. The sales organizations that embraced AI have experienced excellent outcomes with the automation of repetitive and time-consuming tasks.
Going beyond, it allows the sales team to complete complex tasks in reduced time and improve customer interactions. Sales projections and analytics enable accurate decision-making and create result-driven sales strategies.
The benefits speak for AI being indispensable for sales in the future and are likely to continue in the years to come. Work smartly by tapping the power of AI technology.
