Artificial Intelligence (AI) is changing so many aspects of our business life now – and Sales is no exception. AI impacts both how customers buy – and can also help salespeople sell more effectively. So if your organization is considering using AI to boost sales productivity, it’s not too late. But there are a few misconceptions about AI. Some people believe that this technology will soon replace humans in the workforce. The reality is that artificial intelligence will eventually change how we work and sell – but not at the expense of human interaction or labor. It will reduce our time in many aspects that humans currently do, but that frees up your time to do the human side of your business. This article will examine some of the ways it can help you sell more in less time.
Understanding your prospects
AI is powerful at gathering and analyzing data and in sales it uses this to not only identify your prospects but also to understand them so that when you sell to them you know what personality type they have, what language resonates with them and how they like to be sold to.
Finding targeted leads
There are several excellent AI-powered tools that can do your prospecting for you that can gather potential customer information. These tools can go online and find your ideal customers, and then send them an email to catch their attention. If they respond, it can respond. Only when they are ready to buy do you need to get involved. The AU can be used to determine needs, processing sales, taking product orders and preparing contracts. Teams using these systems are reported to increase their targeted leads by 50%. Note the word ‘targeted’. Not just any old lead!
Recommendation / Suggestion engines
Amazon was the first to use these to help assist the sales process but did you know that these can be employed by sales people to prospects by analyzing the prospect and identifying what topic and what item that person would be most interested in buying? We have been using these AI powered suggestion engine tools with physicians in the pharmaceutical industry for over a decade but now you can use them also. They work in tandem with location and association algorithms, using past behavior patterns to inform future decisions so that when you go on Amazon and type “headphones” it knows what kind of headphones you prefer, where you live and which people you like to buy from most often. This data helps shape its product recommendations for all three criteria: the style, color and price range that are. If you are selling online or on a sales call, these powerful tools up your game.
Relationship Building
AI-enabled salespeople spend 40% less time on researching and doing reach out and admin with leads and sell significantly faster as they have more time to actually develop the human part of the relationship.
More Time to Sell
By using AI to automate your customer research and understanding, and even what to say to them, as well as all the admin, sales people have more time to spend on actual selling. 63% of sales people time is spent on ancillary activities rather than actual selling. AI decreases the time on the ancillary activities and increases you time to actually connect and sell.
Time Spent on Sales Calls Decreases
AI does all the legwork so sales teams do not have to do so much exploration time in calls. The result is that the sales calls take far less time to close sales and sales go up. Just one of the tools in our AI-cademy training ‘How to Use AI to Improve Your Sales Call Results’ resulted in 26% increase in sales and a decrease of 44% in time to close each sale. Imagine using a few of these. And, by the way, these are not only for big corporates. That tool only costs $25/person/month!
Personal Touch
Interestingly, McKinsey report that AI assisted selling will reduce the human involvement in each sale by 85%. But, for the remaining 15% the sales people can really connect with their potential customers much more. Although, the flip side is that the AI will find a lot more targeted leads than humans could so you may even need more sales people to fulfill that 15%!
No More Human Analysis
Sales People will not need to analyze their sales and what worked and what did not and what to change, as the AI will do all that for you. The AI can provide soft skills sales coaching for you on every call.
Target Prioritization
AI can analyze data to identify which prospects are more likely to buy and therefore who should be a higher priority target. We have actually been doing this with Doctor targeting for pharmaceutical companies for many years. Now small and medium businesses should also be doing the same.
Pricing and Forecasting Optimization
Just as AirBnB use AI to suggest the optimal price, people using AI can leverage pricing and forecasting algorithms as well. Using these means you can get the sweet spot in your pricing for optimal sales and optimal profit. You could price higher and get more profit per sale but less sales, or lower and get more sales and less profit per sale, but AI can find that sweet spot in the middle that will get you maximum profit and maximum sales.
Upselling and Cross Selling
A lot of sale people spend time upselling and cross selling. This will decrease as the the AI can determine which prospects have the highest chance of buying an upsell or a cross sell so time does not have to be wasted trying to sell something to someone who is highly unlikely to ever buy.
Customer Lifetime Value
AI can analyze the customer relationships and identify which ones are starting to go south and what you need to do to revive them.
So, Where to Start?
Data data data. Many of the AI tools use social media data like Linkedin or others as there are so many hidden gems in social media data. But, do not forget your own data – CRM data, website log data, customer data.
You can get quick wins by using the AI prospecting tools that mine social media data and sale call AI coaching. Ultimately, with all AI tools it learns from the data so the more you use it, the better your results become. The next few years will be pivotal as organizations learn how to integrate this technology and make it part of their DNA before every single company is competing with it.
The benefits of AI in selling are clear: It can connect with new customers while improving customer relationships by streamlining data gathering and increasing efficiency. If you want to know which sales tools can accomplish some of these sales tasks for you, take our training course ‘How to Use AI to Improve Your Sales Call Results’ for a quick introduction to some of the tools that we recommend and use.
