While marketing has been blessed with AI-powered tools for quite a while now, the sales department has been slow in acclimatizing. Nevertheless, sales teams have recognized the full potential AI has to offer and are getting on the bandwagon for their own good.
AI can help any firm perk-up its decision-making process and by helping the sales team with better lead-scoring, forecasting, and pipeline management, among various others. Gartner predicted way back in 2018 that 70% of customer experiences in the future will be fuelled by machine learning and AI. Isn’t it a clear indication of an upcoming surge in the application of AI in sales?
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Let’s have a look at how AI can help boost sales:
1. Build pipeline easily
Salespeople can use AI tools to their advantage to build and fill their pipeline fast. These tools can find new leads from an existing database and can also help obtain the right contact information of your prospects. InsideSales, LeadCrunch, Pipeliner, FreshSales, and LinkedIn Sales Navigator are some of the best in the area.
2. Increase in the number of leads and appointments
Most of the time-consuming tasks in the pursuit of lead generation can be automated, thanks to Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. Salespeople can collect customer information, take orders, and prepare contracts easily. In this way, establishing a connection with leads, lead qualification, following up with them, and maintaining relationships with prospects take much less investment in terms of the time required. Quite naturally, AI-driven tools will only help generate more number of leads in much less time. McKinsey reported that AI-adoption has almost doubled the number of leads and appointments.
Copper, HubSpot, Conversica, Node, and Pardot are some of the most famous names out there that can help the cause.
3. Decrease in call times
AI apps and tools can take over the task of initiating conversations with prospects way before sales reps hop on a call to understand their requirements. This results in a significant reduction in the call times as broad requirements of the clients are known well in advance. Apps like Gong and Chorus record and transcribe customer calls to helps sales leaders with expert analytical assessments to make meaningful investments and profitable business decisions.
Sales teams leveraging AI in their operations see a drop in call times by as much as 60-70%, as per a study by McKinsey.
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4. Automation to close deals faster
With AI-aided tools and software at the helm, salespeople spend 40% less time on clerical tasks, leaving them more time to build relationships and focus on selling! Salesforce, Pardot, MailChimp, Helm, Zapier, etc. have enabled sales teams with the right tools at various levels of interactions to cut down the time and labor involved. When sales teams emphasize more on the bottom of the funnel operations, the immediate effect – fast closures!
5. Engagement with a human touch at crucial touchpoints
While a major chunk of the client-customer interaction will be automated in the next few years, there’s a chance human touch may be left-out in the process. But this has to be borne in mind that even in the age of intelligent automation, the human touch is the home run!
B2B buyers tend to do a lot of research before even interacting with a brand digitally, but at some point or the other, they need to talk to a human. Thankfully, tools such as RingDNA, Chorus.ai, CallRail, Gong, etc, have been built to help provide the desired human touch to the interactions, while presenting sales teams with much-needed foresight into the sales cycle.
The human v/s digital debate is here to stay, but the need for human interaction at crucial touchpoints of a B2B sales cycle remains uncontested.
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