Enhancements in Conversational AI have made it easier for businesses to nurture and respond to customers in real-time, resulting in higher levels of customer satisfaction.
For a business to boost their sales outcomes and ensure a consistent pipeline, it is crucial to build stronger customer relationships using a multitude of online channels and mediums that provide a personalized and relevant experience to potential buyers.
Chatbots and conversational AI can help simplify and boost sales processes by making it easier for sales teams to identify sales-ready leads, prioritize the leads they should go after based on prospect buying behaviors and interests and streamlining how lead data is gathered into a centralized system to help both counterparts: marketing and sales people understand which leads should be placed into what kind of nurture or prospecting cadence (and why!).
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Why Are Sales Leaders Relying more on Conversational AI to Drive Customer Success and Sales Experiences?
Conversational AI platforms can be configured to respond like human representatives. Today’s leading platforms are built to recognize different kinds of speech and text inputs, decipher buying intent as well as different languages making it easier for distributed teams to collate customer data and behaviors, track buying needs and plan better next steps to drive conversions from online visitors and traffic.
There has been an increasing focus on conversational AI, leading brands now sport some very interesting, informative and interactive experiences delivered wholly via a chatbot on their company’s homepage.
As the use of conversational AI and chatbots grow and as customer facing teams, especially sales people open up to its various benefits, let’s explore a few of the top reasons that is driving this trend:
Helps Shorten Sales Cycles with Relevant Messaging
With consumers today wanting more personalized, relevant experiences from the brands they choose to interact with, the onus lies on sales leaders to use the right sales automation and supporting sales technologies to run different kinds of sales cadences on multiple channels.
Traditionally, website visitors may have often been put into typical lead nurture cycles to drive them to take purchase decisions until the recent past. But in a competitive marketplace where brands and technologies are constantly innovating, getting prospects to keep interacting with you requires sales people to use the right messaging and automation to keep 24/7 responses active in an always-online world. Visitors and customers who have interacted with your brand on one channel be it your website or social media need to be immediately nurtured to drive a sale.
Conversational AI serves these requirements by allowing sales people and marketers to program the king of messaging and responses that best suits their brand and product’s buying journey. When visitors are on a brand’s website or landing page, an interactive chatbot can further drive interest, guide them to book a call or product or even ask them what exactly they are looking for to help sales reps understand what the next best appropriate move should be to turn them into customers.
Strengthens Overall Sales Processes and Sales Strategies
By connecting a chatbot or conversational AI to your sales – marketing CRM or CDP platform, sales and marketing teams can strengthen their basic strategies and processes; the conversational AI platform will feed data into these centralized systems after monitoring, analysing and drawing the relevant insights from the different kinds of prospect conversations that were conducted.
This automated breakdown that helps interpret what stage the prospect is in can help sales people understand whether it’s the right time to pitch a price or send a customized offer or discount or whether the best next step should be to place the prospect into an email sequence to get them more aware and interested about certain aspects of the brand’s services or products.
This prioritization leads to higher and healthier sales strategies and closing rates in the long run.
Ensures an Always-On Presence On All Online Channels
In a digital-first selling environment where sales people and marketers have to actively run campaigns across an array of online channels including their own website, social media and other profiles, it can become challenging for sales reps to ensure an always-on presence, all the time without the support of technology and automation.
Chatbots and messenger services can be programmed to run conversations with prospects through your website, your LinkedIn page, your Facebook page and more, when sales leaders connect these platforms to their CRM, all this data is then centralized to also allow a unified vision on all multichannel conversations happening in parallel.
Using conversational AI to drive a 24/7 customer support experience can strengthen customer service initiatives and prevent churn.
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End Note
There is no dearth of ways in which conversational AI and sales bots can help improve sales productivity, enable sales teams, even field-sales people, while sharing the right kind of knowledge, product information, promotions and costs with prospects at the right time.
Sales leaders can deploy their conversational workflows based on their sales goals and to suit their existing sales processes and drive better outcomes.
The global conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI) market size was said to have reached USD 4.91 Billion in 2020, seeing how today’s customers are inspiring more changes in how sales people interact with them, the future seems bright for instant messaging and conversational AI platforms that can drive immediate replies and responses at scale to nurture high value prospects.