A significant way to tackle this is by improving cold-calling scripts and methods.
Your best sales reps and sales managers know how to think on their feet and bring the best to the table. So, what’s the buzz about AI in sales?
Artificial intelligence to improve sales is nothing new. AI made its grand entrance a couple of years back, and it’s here to stay.
However, not all sales teams are ready to jump on the bandwagon yet.
Inside Sales asked a couple of sales and marketing leaders what was holding them back and here’s what they said -
Artificial intelligence relies on data processing and analytics to run algorithms and has proven to be successful time and again. But, why should you care about it?
Let’s dive deeper into it in this blog post.
Although artificial intelligence sounds futuristic and untrustworthy, sales teams across multiple organizations throughout the world use it every single day - and its adoption is set to increase hugely in the coming years.
Artificial intelligence cold calling or AI-cold calling leverages artificial intelligence to provide sales teams insights into cold calls to launch previously scheduled meetings and deliver top-of-the-funnel results.
AI-cold calling can be a massive advantage for sales teams that especially rely on manual methods to make cold calls.
With AI, sales leaders get automatically notified every time their call connects with their customer, and can accurately detect if the call was fielded by a gatekeeper, or was sent to a voicemail.
According to a Salesforce State of Sales report, sales leaders expect their AI adoption to grow faster than any other technology.
Fast-moving companies have already jumped on the bandwagon and are witnessing a boost in quality leads, improve close rates, and supercharging their overall sales performance.
Traditional selling will never go out of business, however, to make a better argument, let’s see the differences between traditional selling and AI selling -
Traditional Selling
AI-Selling
No concrete way of choosing relevant numbers. The selection is random.
Sift through and make calls to accounts that will most likely buy from you.
Call random numbers that might not even be right.
Call proven numbers that belong to the right prospect.
Call prospects without knowing their background.
Leverage actual insights to talk about concrete topics with your prospects.
Re-use the same script repeatedly with every customer.
Personalize every pitch depending on your customer.
The modern buyer has a long journey that involves multiple decision-makers. To meet the new-age expectations, modern buyers typically utilize advanced tools and technology to achieve the same goal as traditional selling.
A Salesforce research found that high-performing teams are 4.9 times more likely to be using AI than underperforming ones.
Although AI is everywhere, it is important to keep in mind that technology will never actually replace the human workforce.
AI creates practical and insightful experiences to assist your sales teams to help them perform better.
According to Gartner, AI functionality has permanently transformed the form and function of guided selling capabilities
Having said this, how can AI improve your sales teams’ productivity?
Although sales reps may spend a ton of time selling to leads, sometimes, the leads procured might not be relevant or even be remotely interested in your product/service.
When this happens, it does not reflect your sales rep’s talent, but the lack of relevance of the lead.
According to MarketingSherpa 61% of marketing teams tend to forward leads to the sales teams. Out of which, only 27% of the leads usually get qualified.
Without a solid foundation in marketing and sales intelligence, it’s not easy for sales organizations to make a positive impact in the market.
But with the right data, the dynamics can change completely.
By leveraging AI for cold calling, you can take things up a notch by helping your sales teams to monitor prospects’ and customers’ online actions. This way, you have a better framework for which audience to sell to.
AI algorithms get automatically updated when new clients make a purchase, gaining insights on compatibility levels in the long run.
With traditional cold calling, personalization cannot always be achieved.
AI makes selling much easier by combining your customers’ good experiences with accurate targeting.
This essentially helps you make a robust pitch post personalization and provides an unmatchable experience to better suit your customers from your database.
For instance, about 35% of what customers buy on Amazon is a result of automatic product recommendations. This goes to say that consumers actually proceeded to buy various products whilst browning the website without having anything particular in mind.
AI has the ability to analyze a myriad of data points, browsing history, interests, and demographics.
Before introducing AI to your product base, it is important to visualize how the technology might transform the way you sell your products.
Identifying promising leads is only part of the sales work.
If you’re looking to make an impact on your prospects, you need to learn the art of making conversations and reaching out to them at the right moment.
Since most chatbots are supplied with AI, it is best to give them the job of answering some of the frequently asked questions to solve problems quickly and engage with customers in real time.
But, is that enough?
Human interactions are equally important. The trick here is to ensure that by the time a sales rep gets to engage with the prospect, they are well-informed about them beforehand.
AI-aided communications are way more than just chatbots.
By leveraging AI algorithms, you can recognize the best times to reach out to prospects. To get started, set up a trigger that identifies a visitor browsing through your products to initiate a conversation.
With the right kind of data, sales reps are better prepared in their method of approach, and language, their tone to interact better with the prospects.
Instead of just “winging it” with the sales rep, AI-cold calling can help your sales teams to streamline your production line and automate workflow.
This way important tasks like prioritization and delegation will be automated based on different specifications.
AI does a fantastic job of boosting the efficiency of your sales reps because it automatically identifies the best-performing sales rep and allocates the conversation to them.
In addition, AI can also delegate a one-on-one meeting by figuring out the geographical location of leads and sales reps. This further reduces the burden to plan live arrangements and set them up.
Artificial intelligence exists to learn from previous patterns and predict the outcome to inform about the best future results.
Common predictions that AI can make are -
Although the accuracy of the data prediction depends on the system being used and the quality of data fed in, the fact is that, with the right inputs, AI is capable enough to show you who will most likely purchase in the future.
Predicting forecasting also creates immense value for internal teams to chase the right prospects.
With the same data analysis, AI can help sales managers and sales reps to forecast their team’s performance for the upcoming quarter to take proactive steps based on the numbers.
Business is all about relationships.
In sales especially, relationship management is everything.
Whether it’s nurturing the right leads or providing support to existing customers, success depends on the dialogue had.
Sales call automation is just the right tool you need to succeed in managing relationships.
Here are the five most important benefits of switching to sales call automation -
Knowledge is king.
In sales, having the right knowledge about your customers is everything.
Sales call automation is designed in a way to help you collect deeper insights about your customer to make that perfect pitch.
With the help of AI, your sales team can learn exponentially about the customer they are pitching to, to make a better deal, shorten the sales cycle, and close the deal quickly.
How can sales managers and sales reps oversee multiple active sales calls?
Enter sentiment analysis.
With Salesken’s good call engine, you can transcribe all sales conversations in real time and also, track the prospects’ sentiments from the calls.
Let’s say a customer says, “I’m confused”, or “I’m frustrated”, the tool can pick these up and mark them as negative. And if the customer says something positive, it is noted down as a positive analysis.
With the help of this insight, sales managers can easily keep an eye on the number of active calls and gauge which ones have a positive sentiment and which ones don’t.
With Salesken’s deeper report analysis and voice sentiment analysis, sales managers can easily pick up coachable moments from live sales conversations.
Sales call automation lets sales managers learn and gauge from previous sales calls to automatically pick up coachable moments and actions to help their team focus and perform better.
In addition, by creating easy-to-learn coachable cards, every time a prospect brings a topic from the archive, the sales rep gets notified of the same to use it in a live sales call.
AI can speed up things in various areas of sales.
Automation can pull in activity or call data without sales reps intervening to kickstart their sales process.
With AI, sales reps can also leverage post-call reporting that does not require much manual intervention. Pulling out vital sales information is not only tedious but also prone to human errors.
Sales call automation makes it easy for sales reps to focus on what actually matters - prospects and boosting the revenue engine.
Finding the right price for customers can be tricky, but AI makes it a lot simpler.
AI uses algorithms to look at past deals and their details to work out an optimal price for each proposal and communicates that to the salesperson.
Dynamic pricing tools leverage AI and machine learning to gather deeper intel about competitors to give the right recommendations based on this information and the individual customers’ preferences.
In sales, it is important to track and measure attribution so your sales teams can target future efforts in the right place.
Ai helps you use big data to attribute results more accurately.
Salespeople typically log in activities on a dashboard or a CRM. But many times, sales activities occur outside of the CRM or the dashboard, meaning it wouldn’t show up on the CRM unless the sales reps log them in.
This is where AI can help, by automatically logging all of the rep’s activities and then matching it with the right opportunity cleverly.
Instead of trying to upsell and cross-sell everything to every client, AI helps you identify which client is most likely to be receptive by looking at historic conversations and profiles for insight.
Salesken helps your sales teams identify the sentiment of every call to help you decide the best opportunity to offer a complimentary product.
Sophisticated AI can do everything - right from predicting which prospects are more likely to purchase to sales forecasting, to enhanced upselling and cross-selling, and more.
For instance, you can utilize AI tools to tell you how often your competitors are coming on sales calls, break down their pricing strategy, and understand if they’re solely relying on chatbots for their support.
With sales and AI, your teams can prepare better for prospects by always being one step ahead of your competitors - all in a unified sales platform.
Although it’s not yet possible to automate every single task in sales, AI can be your best internal tool to move the conversation deeper into the funnel.
AI cannot handle complex problems on its own and thus, has to be combined with the human touch to reveal its magic.
Whether it’s B2B or B2C, face-to-face meetings, or virtual calls, the sales landscape is quickly changing, thanks to AI.
With repetitive tasks and activities automated and sales cycles shortened, the future of sales will minimize the time spent on mundane sales activities to optimize it for the better.
Ready to jump on the AI bandwagon and take your organization a thousand steps forward? Book a demo with our expert to get started!
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