How Adopting AI for Sales Forecasting and Personalisation Will Boost Sales Productivity

Forecasting anything these days — be it the weather, the movement of the stock market or the buying habits of customers — can feel a bit like shaking a Magic 8 Ball and crossing your fingers that you get the “outlook good” response and not the “don’t count on it” response. 

But when it comes to sales, artificial intelligence (AI) can cut through the haze with clarity, delivering the insights that sales leaders need to drive success. Indeed, the recent State of Sales report found that high-performing sales teams were 1.9 times more likely to use AI than underperformers. And while only one-third of sales organisations currently use AI, over the next two years, a further 20% plan to adopt AI to improve efficiency and realise cost-savings. 

How sales teams can use AI for accurate forecasting

The power of AI and automation in improving efficiencies and reducing the burden of manual tasks is well established. However, it takes on fresh importance for businesses facing resource constraints and tight budgets. AI’s capacity for interpreting a vast array of data points means it can help sales teams develop ever more accurate forecasts, eliminating a huge chunk of work for your employees, while equipping them with more accurate forecasting information.

For AI, there’s no such thing as too much information. In fact, the more information it has to deal with, the better its predictive analyses will be. From the most granular details of a customer’s history and preferences, to big-picture shifts in the market and economy, AI thrives on a data-rich diet. 

Think of how many data points might be involved in forecasting the success of a single deal. You might be asking questions like: 

• Who is the customer and what information have they shared in previous interactions with the organisation?
• What is the opportunity or product in question?
• Which salesperson is making the pitch and what have their tendencies revealed in the past?
• What kind of success has the organisation had with this product?
• What has the marketing journey been for this opportunity?

All this to say — the variables are immense, and AI-powered tools can interpret them all to reveal an accurate forecast.

AI takes a huge amount of the guesswork — and busywork — out of forecasting so sales leaders aren’t constantly swinging between overestimating and underestimating their team’s prospects and abilities. 

For example, commercial retail property group Vicinity Centres has harnessed automated reporting. This means the company’s pop up leasing team no longer needs to spend hours each Friday compiling spreadsheets with tenant changes. The automation of this process alone is expected to save more than 1,000 hours annually. 

And what about potentially extended sales cycles or changing deal sizes? The right AI tool makes it possible to keep forecasts accurate, even as the conditions around the opportunity shift. With the real-time visibility provided by an AI-powered CRM, sales reps are never having to play catch up or rely on gut instinct to make their next move.

How AI can help sales reps prioritise personalisation

Just as it does with forecasting, AI-powered automation plays a powerful role in helping sales teams develop long-term, personalised relationships with their customers. For example, Salesforce research found that sales leaders rated understanding customer needs and personalisation as AI’s second top use cases.

AI-powered CRM platforms, for instance, can leverage automation to help humanise interactions between sales teams and their customers or leads by extracting and applying insights from data that can be used to build trust and deliver relevant and timely offerings.

 And sales leaders are reaping the benefits — in the State of Sales, 40% of high-performing teams believe AI has had a major improvement in their ability to understand their customers’ needs, while 39% report seeing a major improvement in their ability to personalise. And a good thing too, given 56% of customers expect offers to always be personalised — demand automation can help meet at scale by enabling faster response times, acting on relevant data at the appropriate time, prompting follow-ups, and ensuring feedback, complaints and enquiries don’t fall through the cracks.

How AI-powered automation goes hand in hand with forecasting and personalisation 

For sales teams, AI-powered automation combines with forecasting and personalisation to supercharge efficiencies, customer experience and sales success. The more customer data AI can interpret, the more personalised experiences it can deliver and the more accurate its forecasting will be. 

We’ve seen the impact of AI across forecasting and personalisation in action through our customers. Together, these powerful AI use cases — accurate forecasting and personalisation to meet customer needs combined with the enduring benefits of automation for improving efficiencies — can help sales teams cement their position as trusted advisors at the same time as driving growth.

Read more

• 4 ways to make AI the new team member your sales reps will love 
• Upskilling your sales team with AI smarts, me&u style 
• How to supercharge your automation for bigger cost savings and more efficiency 

This blog was originally published on 9 September 2021 and has been updated.