How do companies use AI to present their products and services?

“If you don’t know what you want to achieve in your presentation your audience never will.” — Harvey Diamond

Turning the invisible into the visible is challenging. Especially, if you are creating a new product and you do not have a prototype, or you offer a service and the solution is rather impossible to see with your eyes.

In the sales process, presentation means exactly that: presenting the solution. This step is about showcasing the best of your company’s services and/or products by providing a prototype of the product or solution being offered, or a strategic vision of the value to be delivered in the future.

Presentation is the middle stage in the seven steps of selling.

If you would like to refresh your memory about the first three steps of the AI in Selling series, you can find the first step here.

Let’s get this presentation started!

Most companies rely on prototypes (or proofs of concept) to showcase an early sample, model, or release of a product built to test a concept or process.

Rapid prototyping has been around since the late 1980s and has been used to produce samples and prototypes without suffering from the diseconomies of scale of short production runs.

Today, machine learning and other AI techniques have boosted the power of rapid prototyping. The obvious change is when the AI algorithm can take ideas from the prototyping drawing board and turn them into actual products almost instantaneously.

While AI can be used for presenting solutions to clients, it is widely dependent on your company’s product and solution. Rapid prototyping works mostly for those companies that offer a product — these firms can easily create a physical prototype. On the other hand, service-based companies focus on leveraging other unique aspects of AI.

Another way to use AI in a presentation is to analyze the emotions of the audience to determine sentiments or themes that can provide useful insights about potential concerns from customers about the prototype (Syam & Sharma, 2018). The method used for this is called ‘computational linguistics’ and it can help the salesperson to understand non-nonverbal cues in:

• Marketing communications,
• Verbal expression of emotion, especially in product reviews,
• Video and pictures, and
• Eye gaze, speech hesitations, gestures, clothing, and posture affect buyers’ impressions of the salesperson in an industrial selling context.

Artificial intelligence can help the salesperson to recognize their ‘leads’ emotions during a sales demo.

Without a doubt, analyzing consumers’ buying behavior helps salespeople succeed in many different ways. For example, Airbnb uses an AI system that is trained to recognize the company’s standard hand-drawn design sketches and render them into actual computer programming code. The automation of these tasks allows sales professionals to deliver tailored prototypes much faster than what was traditionally possible.

How are you going to present your solution to clients, and will you be using AI for that? Let me know in the comments!