Blade Runner, Ex Machina, I Robot, Her, 2001: A Space Odyssey...
These are the names that often come to our minds when we think of Artificial Intelligence.
Hollywood has successfully (but incorrectly!) ensured that a commoner’s definition of AI revolves around robots, the mass extinction of humans, flying cars, and other preposterous myths.
In reality, AI is anything but the above. The advantages of artificial intelligence are endless, and you can find them in everything around us. And this includes sales!
Yes, you heard it right. AI, over the years, has become an indispensable asset for sales teams and businesses across the globe to carry out their everyday sales operations.
And in this post, we are going to discuss some of the most popular benefits of Artificial Intelligence in modern-day sales.
Top 7 artificial intelligence benefits in sales
Undoubtedly, sales is a rewarding career, but it comes with its inherent challenges. Competition and customer expectations are on the rise. Beating other players and luring customers to your business is not easy anymore.
This is where AI can help. By integrating AI into your sales processes, you can gain a significant competitive advantage in your sales cycle in the form of quick decision-making.
On that note, here are the top seven advantages of AI in your sales process -
Automates everyday tasks
AI frees the sales reps from mundane day-to-day tasks that are uncreative, unattractive, and time-consuming. By embedding AI into their everyday operations, you can automate most of their routine tasks. Thanks to this, the sales reps can efficiently and effectively prioritize and manage their work. Some of the functions that can be automated include managing workflows, data entry, research, answering repetitive questions, and more.
AI-enabled platforms like Rafiki (https://getrafiki.ai/) take it one step ahead. It records all your reps calls and meetings, transcribes them, captures key topics and moments, and finally generates notes by topics - All this with no human intervention. Remember - Transcription and notetaking are two of the most time-consuming activities for a sales rep, and Rafiki frees them of those tasks entirely during the meeting, so they can focus on the customer and edit the notes later from the transcript or the generated notes.
Aids in lead generation
Effective prospect engagement is often the driving force behind the lead-generation process. AI helps to draw these potential customers into your sales pipeline by intelligently engaging and delivering additional value to them. Growthbot by Hubspot and Conversica are two of the most popular AI-based lead generation tools in the market presently.
AI also helps sales reps identify ICP (Ideal Customer Profiles) by unifying multiple data sources across the organization like CRM, social media, and more. Adding to this, it comes up with actionable insights and prescriptive suggestions regarding the medium and communication channel to use, which aids quick closures.
Helps in optimizing the pricing model
Pricing is another critical component of a deal. Optimal pricing models reduce the negotiations period and increase the chances of conversions manifold. Along with keeping up with customer expectations, a good pricing model makes sure that the expected margins are not compromised.
Rafiki smartly parses the conversations between your reps and customers and points out the pricing topic in the entire conversation. Tools like Incompetitor and Wise Athena use AI and ML to determine the best pricing model for your product.
Expands business horizons with lookalike modeling
Lookalike modeling, powered by AI, is an excellent way to reach and explore newer audience groups for your business. Here’s how it works -
AI filters out the winning audience profiles from your primary customer segment. It then identifies the highest-value audience in that list. Finally, it applies the criteria to the lookalike segment for better targeting and improved growth prospects.
The best part is, the model keeps on evolving as new data gets fed into it. This dramatically improves the performance of the model in the long run.
Tools like LiveRamp let businesses move beyond Facebook and LinkedIn to conduct cross-channel lookalike prospecting on the internet.
Pinpoints upselling and cross-selling opportunities
Upselling and cross-selling are among the top focal points of salespeople. With the help of artificial intelligence, they will have enough customer intelligence to come up with suitable recommendations.
AI has always been the key ingredient in building recommender systems based on collaborative and content-based filtering. By segmenting and clustering the prospects based on their psychographic, demographic, and geographic profiles, AI can recommend the right product (or solution) to the right customer at the right time. This increases the likelihood of yet another conversion for you!
Analyses and predicts customer churn
The acquisition cost of new customers is abnormally high compared (25 times according to an HBR study!) to the retention cost of existing ones. Therefore, to decrease CAC(Customer Acquisition Costs) and increase the adoption rate in the long run, the companies must minimize their churn rates.
AI helps forecast the churn risk by crunching voluminous amounts of data from multiple sources. Through deep analysis, it defines the complexity of behavior changes and the reasons for customer churn. It also offers helpful insights and restorative actions, thus empowering the sales rep to re-establish a churn-less business.
Through its robust AI engine, Rafiki helps you understand the reasons why customers are leaving you. It intelligently records, transcribes, extracts, and segments topics and uses them to identify churn signals.
Facilitates better coaching and guidance
Coaching is an ever-evolving process. When your sales team is spread across geographies and time zones, it becomes practically difficult for you to impart guidance and accurate knowledge to your team.
AI helps you with individualized observations and evaluations for one-on-one training of the reps. It helps you design sales programs that will help team members stay connected and upscale their skills consistently and collaboratively.
AI-driven platforms like Rafiki promote self-coaching. It helps the reps to manage their calls and deals better by learning from their peers. For example, your reps can review their call metrics, compare them with their teammates’, identify where they are going wrong, and finally correct them.
And the best part - Rafiki is 100% cloud; this means your reps can access the tool 24X7 from any part of the world.
Wrapping Up
Businesses are transforming rapidly, and this leaves key stakeholders with shorter decision-making windows. Luckily, AI comes to their rescue. Not only does it help in making decisions quickly, but it helps them drive top-line growth and stay agile in this data-driven world.
Considering sales is a high-touch profession involving intelligent conversations and persuasions, AI is not going to completely replace sales reps any time soon. Tools like Rafiki will augment the effectiveness of your sales process by infusing it with agility and scalability. This leaves enough room for your sales rep to innovate and create highly personalized customer experiences.
To know more about Rafiki and to get a peek into its wonderful AI engine in action, sign up for a free trial now.
