Preparing and planning: Using AI to approach sales targets
Puppies are cute, but they are even cuter when introduced to new friends. When they meet an unknown person or a fellow dog, they are first assessing the situation and looking up to their owner to get confirmation that it is safe to approach the new creature. Once the puppy feels comfortable and familiar with them, they are happy to play around with them. This is the pre-approach and approach stage in the puppy world.
What is the difference between pre-approach and approach in sales terms?
These merging stages typically have been examined together in sales research.
Pre-approach usually involves the “doing-your-homework” part of the sales process, and includes the tactic of lead nurturing, where sellers:
- Conduct more research about the prospective buyer
- Provide customized and personalized content related to a prospect’s interest
The approach stage is about building relationships. Here, sellers:
- Aim to establish rapport
- Build trust with a potential buyer
This means they gain more insight into whether and how a lead could benefit from a firm’s offering. It’s their job to communicate the value of it.
Before we dive deeper into how AI helps salespeople with these two steps, you can refresh your memory about our earlier blog posts about AI in Selling series here.
Don’t change your leads, change your approach
The big sales question is when and how to contact the customer.
AI can help automate some of the routine tasks around making contact, such as scheduling meetings or sending follow-up emails.
The most well-known AI automation to solve these needs is the chatbot. A chatbot (interactive agent or artificial conversational entity) is a computer program that can simulate human behavior when it carries out a conversation with a person. For example, many organizations use chatbots to make it easy to check if somebody is interested in their products and services and understand if it’s a good lead or not.
The great thing about chatbots is that they are flexible enough to allow the salesperson to take over the conversation, as needed, for more complex sales.
What does this mean for sales people? Clearly, members of any sales team will have to develop ‘machine intelligence’, since they will have to deal with machines at various stages of the sales process.
Additionally, AI enables the creation and delivery of highly tailored and personalized communications to sales leads based on an analysis of the lead’s behavior or profile. This is more commonly known as targeted advertising. Those cute puppies have finally followed me to the online world and are promoting high quality dog food for me.
Finally, AI can also be used to curate promotional content. AI tools can be used to help discover similarities in the characteristics of top-ranking content.
It is clear that from the approach stages, salespeople need to understand their customer’s journey and when the lead is ready to make the decision to buy. Luckily for us, we can rely on AI to do the work so we can focus on the next step in the sales process: Presenting a solution. Until next time my friends!
