How AI helps sales and five ways you may use it
If you want your sales crew to do better, you should use artificial intelligence. Only 37% of sales organizations employ AI in their operations right now, yet more than half of the best sales organizations utilize AI. That doesn't mean that your sales jobs should be totally automated. AI solutions, on the other hand, can help your staff save time and focus more on selling.
In this post, you'll discover all you need to know to get started with artificial intelligence (AI) in sales, including what it is, why you should use it, and 5 great ways to use it in your sales process.
5 great ways to use it in your sales process.
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How does AI work in sales?
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Why Sales Need to be Automated
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What's Good About Automation in Sales
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5 Ways Your Sales Team Can Use AI
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3 Popular AI Sales Tools
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The algorithms that make up artificial intelligence learn from data and use it in different ways, including Taking care of certain chores and making decisions. Using data from the past and the present to predict behaviour and make advice.
intelligently interacting with people.Why Artificial Intelligence is Needed in Sales.
Why Artificial Intelligence is Needed in Sales
An inside sales rep spends about 33% of his or her time selling. These experts can be pulled away from prospects by administrative tasks and meetings. AI gives you a great chance to boost this stat and take your sales operation to the next level.
Already, business leaders are getting it. A new study by Salesforce concluded that artificial intelligence (AI) is one of the top sales technologies that will be much more valuable in 2022 than in 2019. Forrester also thinks that by 2025, the market for systems that use AI would rise to $37 billion.
AI may help with a variety of sales tasks, such as:
Quickly changing to meet customer needs. Teams can adjust more quickly to buyers who are getting smarter and whose paths to purchase are shifting.
Personalization. AI algorithms take in hundreds of data points and figure out what they mean. With this knowledge, you may reach out to your distinct personalities more effectively.
Accessing real-time data. AI lets your team get to data right away. You can also make a source of truth that makes sure the information is correct and true. Getting information from several sources. Today, sales outreach takes place through many different media. AI can help your team keep track of all your leads, no matter where they are.
Most sales reps say that digital transformation has sped up in the previous three years. In particular, the sales technology demands have changed a lot throughout this time. Because of this, artificial intelligence has become a must for adapting to the shifting sales landscape.
The Good Things About Automation and Artificial Intelligence in Sales
AI and automation have been shown to be great ways to bring in more money. A Hubspot survey indicated that 61% of sales teams who met or beat their sales objectives did it with the help of automation.
And this isn't just a one-time request. AI is built into the plans of winning teams. The Hinge Research Institute showed that organisations with fast growth are more likely than their counterparts to have advanced marketing and sales automation systems.
Key benefits of AI and automation go beyond just making money.
5 Ways Your Sales Team Can Use AI
There are a lot of methods to use artificial intelligence in sales. But here are five apps that can change how your sales process works.
1. Access to more advanced ways to enrich, analyze, and use data.
Data enrichment is the process of adding information from outside sources to an organisation's database, which is usually a CRM. The purpose of this procedure is to get a better, more complete picture of a prospect, lead, customer, or process as a whole.Zoho's DataPrep product, which analyses data and changes it into new "types," is another interesting way that AI is used to enrich data.
Using artificial intelligence, you may improve this process by organising and using this data in the best way possible.
Zoho uses AI to figure out what information in a CRM means and then leverages that knowledge to produce new data points, such how a lead feels and what they are interested in. Then, these "new" data points can be used in a number of different ways. This involves assessing leads, putting leads in order of importance, and personalising outreach.
2. Improve performance using conversation intelligence enabled by AI.
Most sophisticated conversation intelligence software uses some sort of artificial intelligence to analyse sales conversations and bring out critical insights. Hubspot's "conversation intelligence" tool is an excellent example of one of these technologies. This tool employs AI to "find out why sales performance is the way it is."Hubspot, for example, has a predictive scoring tool that leverages AI to find high-quality leads based on parameters that have already been set. This programme also keeps getting smarter over time, which makes it more accurate.Getting things done better. Consulting firm Delloite found that for most top-level users, the main reason they want to embrace AI is to make their work more efficient. 33% of teams that used AI said that it made organisational procedures far more efficient.
Getting rid of administrative tasks that take up a lot of time. A research by McKinsey indicated that roughly 30% of sales tasks may be easily automated utilising existing sales technologies, such as artificial intelligence. Making it possible to plan and estimate sales accurately. More than half of salespeople think that the most essential thing they learn from their sales analytics tool is how to make forecasts. AI and automation can help you improve your sales strategy in a number of ways, such as by giving you insights based on AI and giving you predictive intelligence.
Getting people to be happier at work. AI can also boost the morale of your team. In fact, 82% of people who answered a 2022 Delloite survey said they were very certain that AI would help them do their jobs better and be happier with them.
The programme finds out important things, such trends and problems. Then, this information can be used to find areas of weakness or poor performance.
Chorus is another tool that uses AI to help with conversation intelligence. This technology uses artificial intelligence to understand the context of a discussion, pick out important parts of sales calls, and even keep track of when competitors are mentioned.
3. Automate and optimise sales enablement.
Sales enablement is the practise of giving your salespeople and sales teams the proper resources and tools to help them close more deals. There are several ways to do this, and different applications can be used. Which tools you use will depend on which parts of the sales process you want to improve or make more efficient. Take responding to RFPs, which stand for "requests for proposals." Loopio's "2021 RFP Response Trends" survey indicated that organisations send out an average of 150 RFP responses each year, which bring in 35% of their revenue.
But writing and sending in good responses might take a lot of time because these proposals need a lot of information. In this case, sales enablement means coming up with ways to handle this process.Specifically, artificial intelligence gives us a lot of chances to streamline and improve.For instance, RocketDocs uses AI to assist its users develop and manage libraries of dynamic information. This tool shows pertinent information when it's needed and can even collect data from these libraries and put it into proposals automatically.
AI may be used to improve sales enablement in more ways than only RFP solutions. It can be used in sales intelligence solutions, sales outreach platforms, and even CRMs.
4. Get better at managing pipelines and making predictions.
Even though most sales reps follow best practises and do sales projections from time to time, new data shows that most sales reps make wrong predictions about their pipeline. But by using artificial intelligence, you can greatly lessen the chance that your sales crew will make mistakes. Take a look at Aviso, an AI-powered forecasting tool, to see how this works.
AI is used by Aviso to analyse data and provide insights about deals and the pipeline as a whole. Some of these ways AI is used are:
Insights from WinScore. - This is a score that shows how likely it is that a deal will be closed successfully, based on predictions made by AI. This can be used to figure out how many new deals, renewals, and churns will happen in a certain time frame.
What-if analysis. - The "what if" questions are taken into account in these dynamic projections.
Suggestions made by AI. - These ideas explain both the past and the present.
These AI-powered features can be the deciding factor in how well a sales staff can create projections, learn from those forecasts, and make judgements.
5. Make sales engagement easier and better.
Sales engagement is all of the interactions between the buyer and seller during the sales process, from the first contact to the customer being brought on board. AI can help you use data and insights to speed up this process in two different ways.
First, AI can assist you figure out what your customers want and what hurts them. According to Salesforce's State of Sales report, the best way to apply AI in sales is to help salespeople understand what customers want. Your awareness of a customer's wants affects everything you do with them, from your pitch to the sales content you use and how you reach out to them as a whole.
Second, AI helps to make client interactions more personal and to automate them.Apollo is a wonderful sales engagement solution that can help you do this. With AI and this platform, you can:
Set up automated outreach messages utilising customisation fields that have already been set up.
Run A/B experiments to improve how well your outreach works.
Get information from AI about your outreach campaigns, such as how interested a prospect or lead is.
Use the "rules engine" to make changes to pre-set sequences or outreach campaigns when certain conditions are satisfied.