Artificial Intelligence: Turning Sales Reps more human than human!

Did you know sales reps only spend 32% of their time selling? If only there was a way to boost your sales team performance, right? There is!

The world is changing, becoming more and more digitized, and so are sales. So, while you should value face-to-face interactions, you should also give great relevance to digital channels, such as email, messaging, video, or VoIP, throughout the sales process.

If you are still skeptical about the importance of including digital tools in your sales process, let me tell you that today, reps spend 6x more time selling in front of a screen then they do personally! Impressive, right? And, here are the bad news: sales teams only spend 32% of their day selling! The rest of the time, they look at data, plan the next call, or are busy taking notes. In this article, I will guide you through Einstein High Velocity Sales and help you understand how it can power up a sales rep daily job.

First things first, let’s understand the concept of High Velocity Sales

High Velocity Sales is a streamline model created for inside sales teams (sales reps who typically don’t meet with prospects face-to-face, but rather through phones, email, video, or virtual meetings). It aims at accelerating the sales process and revenue, thus requiring highly specialized teams and tools to efficiently operate. For this model to run as smoothly as possible, you should implement consistent processes and settle on weekly metrics.

Forrester research shows that inside sales roles are growing 15x faster than outside sales, but it also shows an increase in demand generation from marketing teams, which can be attributed to the fact that companies can better understand buyer behaviors now. So, the focus now is on how to better automate the inside sales processes, taking advantage of technology to help reps be more efficient.

Unleashing the potential of Einstein High Velocity Sales

Einstein High Velocity Sales combines Einstein, the AI tool by Salesforce and Sales Cloud (the sales productivity app). As any other Salesforce tool, you can learn more about Einstein High Velocity Sales in Trailhead, the free and interactive learning platform.

What does High Velocity Sales give inside sales teams?

• Insights on how to prospect faster and more intelligently;
• Integrated tools to get rid off busywork and multiple logins;
• New levels of best-practice automation for scalable and continuous success.

Einstein High Velocity Sales allows for the first time, sales reps to access all data in one place, coupling it with the endless power of AI. More than ever, reps can now quickly identify and nurture the relevant leads, eliminate busy and repetitive work, boosting pipeline and increasing sales.

What about Einstein High Velocity Sales tools?

Einstein High Velocity Sales Cloud involves:

• Einstein Lead Scoring — Used to prioritize the best leads, the ones which are most likely to be converted, based on historic data. These leads enter the digital area of sales reps, and are full of information about the prospect, such as: location, purchase history, job title, etc.
• Einstein Activity Capture — Because sales reps need to stay on the ball at all times, with Capture they can connect their email and calendar to Salesforce. They can create customized email templates and scheduling to always appear on time.
• Lightning Sales Console — Lightning allows companies to customize their work environment to specific requirements. But, most importantly, Lightning Console guides, on a step-by-step path, sales reps along the selling process.
• Lightning Dialer — Full of calling capabilities directly integrated with Salesforce, it allows sales reps to: create call lists, automatically logging notes from each call to the correct contact; to use voicemail drop to access pre-recorded calls and chose the most relevant ones; to identify local-area codes. Also, with Dialer, when a prospect tries to contact a sales rep, all the data about that prospect immediately pops up.
• Salesforce Engage — Sales reps receive real-time notifications about the prospects engagement with marketing or sales assets right in the Lightning Sales Console and Salesforce1 mobile app. This notification may include important information to communicate with the prospect, such as its past website activities.

The above tools work together to offer sales reps a system that makes time for them to actually focus on sales activities, and to provide fast and smarter responses to customers. Ultimately, Einstein High Velocity Sales can even predicting their questions, needs, and wants.

How does it work in practice?

Salesforce High Velocity Sales allows sales teams to respond faster to customers’ expectations. Let’s see how a day in an inside sales rep look like with Einstein High Velocity Sales!

Managers can build Sales Cadences, based on best practices to create customized activity paths for their teams to follow. They guide inside reps throughout the prospecting process, enabling new reps to evolve faster in their training process.

1st Step: A manager builds a Sales Cadence to help Sales reps know how to reach out to prospects after an event. The manager creates the flow indicating the steps (call, send email, etc) and pause times between steps.

Sales Reps will then look at their Work Queue when they arrive in the morning to understand which tasks they have for the day. In the work queue they can see the next tasks for each of their leads. The leads appear in the queue prioritized by Einstein Lead Scoring, a feature that analyzes data to show as high priority the leads that are most likely to convert. The next steps associated to those leads are based on what sales reps have already done and the sales cadences.

2nd Step: An inside sales rep looks at the Work Queue and sees he/she has to call to a lead with high priority from the event. The sales rep can choose to use the Lightning Dialer to quickly call the lead directly from Salesforce. During the conversation, he/she will have all information about the lead available in the Lightning console. Moreover, the activity timeline shows the lead engagement with previous sales outreaches (emails and calls), engagement with marketing assets from Pardot engagement history, events attended, etc.

3rd Step: Using the Console, the sales rep can automatically log this call in one click, so that next time he/she or other sales rep has access to the result of this call. The sales rep can also create a new task or send a follow-up email directly from the console, or even see what is the next step in the sales journey for that lead by looking at the Sales Cadence card shown in the Console. If there’s nothing left to do with that lead for the day, the sales rep can easily look at the work queue in this same screen and move on to the next task.

With Einstein Activity Capture it is possible to sync emails and calendars from Inbox, Outlook and Gmail, so that your inside sales reps don’t have to be shifting their attention around 5 or 6 tools to get the information they need and do their daily tasks. Salesforce becomes the unifying source of truth for your inside sales team to work faster and more efficiently.

4th Step: Let’s imagine the call had the perfect outcome, and the lead requested for a proposal. The sales rep can send the proposal in an email from Gmail with a tracked link. Using Einstein Activity Capture, the email will be synced to Salesforce and the sales rep will be able to understand if the lead saw the proposal, as the click on the tracked link will appear on Lead activity.

Now imagine that the lead after all is not ready to buy yet, but still has interest in your solution and wants to stay in touch. With Salesforce Engage and Pardot, your sales rep can add directly from the console that lead to a Pardot engagement program that will keep the lead engaged with your company’s content, until the time for the next sales outreach comes.

Start practicing today…

The icing on the cake? Trailhead helps you getting started with High Velocity Sales! Sit, watch, and learn how the next generation of sales reps will boost! Ready to streamline your sales team?

Originally published at https://stellaxius.com on September 12, 2019.