How Can AI Help You Drive Sales
Artificial intelligence used to be a concept that was reserved for scientific papers and science fiction novels. In recent years, the rapid pace of modern technological development has finally brought AI out of the lab, and into the mainstream. While we are still far from sharing our planet with intelligent machines (are we?), AI-based inventions are becoming more and more commonplace in our everyday lives.
One of the biggest selling points of AI-powered tech lies in its ability to process large amounts of data more effectively than humans. Furthermore, AI-powered systems also have the ability to make rudimentary decisions based on insights gleamed from this data, allowing them to automatically perform certain tasks. However, the most impressive aspect of AI is its potential for automated self-improvement through a process called machine learning — the more an AI is used, the better it becomes at performing similar kinds of tasks.
All of these features make AI extremely useful for modern sales departments. Sales are an area of business that is largely driven by data, which makes AI-based data analysis and manipulation tools extremely valuable to sales experts. To help you understand the impact AI is having on sales in greater detail, we have created a short primer on the topic, which you can find below.
Targeting
If people working in sales can’t get the right prospects, they won’t be closing many deals. This is where AI-based software comes into play. Platforms like Albert enable businesses to leverage big data for the purpose of targeting specific groups of potential customers, instead of going for the masses. For a human data analyst, it would take hours to sift through large data sets to find appropriate prospects, whereas an AI could do it in a matter of seconds. Once an AI goes over the data, salespeople can then use the resulting information to find potential leads, personalize their sales pitches, add more value to sales meetings, and close deals faster. Since data management will be handled by the AI, it will be much less error-prone as well, increasing overall conversion rates.
Research
One of the most prominent challenges that salespeople face on a regular basis is that of unstructured data. What we mean by unstructured data are things like feedback that people leave on Amazon reviews, or reactions to a social media update. If we wish to standardize this information and append it to a customer’s record, it would be a laborious, time consuming process that’s prone to errors. An AI could offer us a way to interpret this data with a minimal amount of direct supervision through the use of natural language processing. Sophisticated NLP algorithms would be able to analyze the intent behind otherwise unstructured content, giving salespeople insight into how a given prospect is likely to behave. To take things a step further, an AI could even be used for automatically assigning prospects to particular salesmen based on their mutual compatibility.
Chatbots
Chatbots are pieces of software that are built specifically to mimic the way humans behave in a conversation. This makes them the perfect candidate for performing repetitive interactions that would quickly wear-down a human sales rep. A chatbot that has access to relevant customer data, such as their purchase history, chat logs, and personal information, will have the ability to answer common queries as well as a human. In fact, a well-made chatbot can sometimes even outperform its human counterparts. If it has all of the information it needs available at any given time, its responses are practically instant, and it never tires of answering the same kinds of questions time and time again. And the best part? The more a chatbot interacts with prospects, the more data it gathers, data which can later be used to further optimize its performance.
Content Generation
Automated marketing is not exactly something new — from email drip sequences to automated social media posting, there are numerous automation tools available to help businesses generate leads. But an AI takes things a step further, allowing you to generate customized marketing messages that are relevant to the specific needs of a given prospect. A salesperson would have to work countless hours to create such content, whereas an AI can do it more or less without supervision. Moreover, newer versions of AI-based software can even make these messages feel as if they were writing by a human, through the use of natural language generation techniques. Some people even seem to prefer machine-generated content due to its perceived straightforwardness, and consistent use of language.
Conclusion
Artificial intelligence has the ability to improve productivity in all areas of business, including sales. It’s advanced data processing capabilities, insight-driven decision making, and practically limitless learning potential makes AI a powerful ally to have for sales departments. The future of sales is going to be closely intertwined with AI, and the sooner you adapt, the better.
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