For the past three years, AI has been the buzzword on everyone’s mind. The incredible progress it can bring regarding automation and data analysis cannot be minimised. But you may be wondering what its impact could be on Sales, a domain that has long relied on human touch, with empathy, charisma and the ability to nurture personal relationships at the core of it.
Some of the biggest challenges the Sales world faces are increasing complexity when it comes to buying processes, handling increased competition, or even accessing decision-makers. Discover what AI tools exist to support your efforts and help you navigate an ever-changing Sales space.
What are Sales Tools?
Prospecting and generating leads, outbound communications, and analysing your response rate and revenue… These are daily tasks for Sales professionals, which is why appropriate marketing tools have been developed to support sales growth and boost sales performance. Customer satisfaction can also be at the core of such tools, from understanding customer sentiments to identifying areas for improvement.
Those are all areas where AI can shine. Artificial intelligence can analyse massive data sets and translate them into actionable insights – and as data is at the core of all those considerations, Sales optimisation is a perfect domain to innovate.
AI for Sales: How does it work?
The arrival of ChatGPT in early 2023 was a sign of the unprecedented pace of technological advancement we are currently experiencing. From large language models to text-to-image generators, AI solutions have never been more visible to a broad audience. While it may have gained an image of ultra-high-tech whose inner workings seem out of reach, we must remember that many of its uses can be boiled down to automation.
The correct AI solution for Sales can be a boon to a company, especially one experiencing rapid growth, where keeping on top of leads and ensuring client satisfaction is crucial for further development. Let’s dive into what those solutions could achieve.
Types of AI Sales Software
Search for software specialising in AI for Sales, and you’ll find dozens upon dozens of results. Lead generation, CRM, analytics and other valuable features are at your fingertips – and plenty of those can be found in Salesforce products.
Lead Generation and Qualification
Engagement with potential leads is always at the start of a successful strategy. And for this, automated outreach can do wonders. But how can you identify and qualify promising potential leads from others that would be a waste of time and effort? AI lead generation tools can help by automating the analysis of open rates, lead source, and likelihood to buy, allowing you to focus more on what will drive results.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
CRM for sales should not be underestimated. The right solution can identify the probability of future outcomes based on trends and patterns within existing data sets. Go beyond diagnostics of past events and create forecasts to anticipate the consequences of decisions and trends. Turn to predictive analysis: with historical data turning into statistical insights, it takes little to become a master of Sales.
Sales Automation and Engagement
Avoid the dreaded “send all” email when it comes to your clients. Reduce human error and the risk of bad publicity by leveraging AI-powered tools to personalise email outreach. Beyond ensuring you address your clients by their correct name, personalised outreach strategies are much simpler to implement with better technology. Segment your audience beyond what a human could manage, make sure you send communication for a new product to the most relevant population… And automate repetitive follow-up tasks as well to ensure they won’t be forgotten and leave something on the table.
Sales Intelligence and Analytics
Keeping an eye on your activity can be essential to your commercial efforts. An AI-powered dashboard can give you up-to-date information on your sales performance and provide reports and insights that inform a change in your strategy as early as needed. Stay aware of your conversion and win rates, revenue, average deal size, and more. Having AI at your disposal also means being able to adapt metrics to the person needing them and personalising reports and insights for the C-suite and sales representatives alike.
Why Use AI Sales Tools? 6 Advantages
More efficient, more competitive – the benefits of using AI sales tools are hard to miss when considering the challenges a company faces in the digital landscape. With sales automation comes the opportunity to save money and time, leading to an improved bottom line and use of your resources.
AI also has a role to play in producing sales intelligence that will benefit a smarter, more modern sales strategy. Here is how.
Accelerate Lead Generation and Qualification
Casting a wide net in the hope it will land you some leads is time-consuming and repetitive for sales professionals. If your ideal customer is a young professional working in a specific industry, leveraging customer demographic information can be a boon: no need to trawl through tonnes of data to find someone fitting that persona. Cross that info with historical spending, and you have reduced the time needed to reach prospects, thanks to better-qualified leads.
Personalise the Customer Journey
A completely personalised funnel is not necessarily a pipe dream. A human could craft a perfect introductory email and carefully nurture a client relationship all the way through to after-sales, but scaling such a procedure with human resources is unrealistic. However, such personalisation becomes possible with the right AI tool and can be implemented at scale with minimal input from CRM teams. A sales automation solution can provide effective, tailored communication and offer customers a bespoke experience for audiences as wide or granular as desired. Adapt your welcome or outreach email not just to include the recipient’s name but also change the copy depending on their age, spending habits, job industry, and more. Personalise your after-sales strategy depending on their communication preferences, and you have a well-rounded sales strategy for CRM.
Increase Forecast Accuracy
Tired of targeting an audience that won’t respond to your sales efforts? If so, you should turn your historical data into a goldmine. Rather than try to remember off the top of your head the likelihood of a prospect responding to your latest outreach, have a trusted AI tool analyse past exchanges and predict sales potential. Suppose a company has historically reached out in Q3 to spend its remaining yearly budget with you but has remained unresponsive when you discussed annual contracts in the past. In that case, AI will flag their deal closure potential as low at certain times of the year, allowing you to better focus your efforts.
Automate Repetitive Tasks
How many emails does it usually take to agree on a meeting time? Your answer is probably “too many”. Several online tools allow salespeople to share their availability and put the onus for booking a specific time on the client. The result is fewer emails sent by your sales team and happier clients who can book the time they choose in a few clicks. This is how you free up your sales team’s time and ensure they get to spend their time on what matters most: building relationships with customers.
Cold email tools will also free up time by allowing you to personalise your outreach at scale and generate more leads. Automatically creating new customer records from inbound emails can simplify record-keeping. Finally, email templates can be helpful at the company level for consistency across your communications – and AI can again help with that.
Gain Actionable Insights
A lot of time can be spent on market monitoring. With market trends and customer behaviour to keep an eye on, your Data team could easily spend half of their time on such projects – but would that indeed be the most efficient use of their time?
Thanks to advanced algorithms and machine learning techniques, AI can compile and analyse vast amounts of data accurately and efficiently. The predictions that would derive from such insights would have a reduced margin of error. On top of that, an AI solution can provide real-time market trends analysis, unlike human analysis, which suffers from delays in data compilation. Such reactivity would allow your company to make agile, data-driven choices faster than your competitors.
Within your business, the advanced analytics abilities of AI also give you new insights into sales performance and allow you to adjust your strategy as soon as you hit a bump, rather than discover that you hit one in the first place weeks later.
Strengthen Collaboration and Teamwork
There can be such a thing as too much communication when excessive information muddles a message. Facilitate communication and information sharing within your business with the right AI tools.
AI assistants can analyse and summarise live meetings and provide helpful email recaps afterwards or transcribe and auto-translate speech. This would be particularly useful for live meetings shared in multiple countries or languages.
The result? Better alignments across departments, easier teamwork, and a happier team.
The Best AI for Sales Tool: Salesforce’s Sales Cloud
Salesforce proudly presents Sales Cloud, our #1 trusted AI CRM for sales.
Many of the above features are part of our automated sales tool. It boasts advanced CRM capabilities and supports lead management, customer segmentation and sales forecasting efforts, thanks to lead scoring, personalised messaging and customer segmentation. Its AI-based predictions are not based solely on historical data but provide the relevant logic, factors and business trends that underlie its decisions.
Sales Cloud will provide your sales team with valuable insights into their forecast and pipeline. These insights are presented in easily digestible reports and personalised dashboards that display the most relevant metrics to your business. This ensures your team has all the information they need to sell faster And thanks to our standard and templated quotes, you can enjoy a speedy contract approval process directly within Salesforce.
Gain Actionable Insights
Automation keeps Spotify’s ad business growing year over year. The transformation of their ad sales is the result of leveraging automation and personalised web content, elevating the quality of ads for millions of users.
By adopting a holistic 360-degree perspective of its advertising operations, Spotify ensures the delivery of the right ads to the right customers at the most opportune moments. As Dan Walsh, Global Head of Business Strategy at Spotify, puts it, “We’re using Salesforce to give our advertisers real-time information about the audiences they’re reaching.”
In the past, it took Spotify Advertising several months to gather and act on campaign data. However, with Salesforce now serving as a single source of truth for Spotify’s ad inventory, this process has been significantly expedited.
Thanks to intuitive dashboards and AI-powered insights from Sales Cloud Einstein, both executives and ad reps now have full visibility into the sales pipeline.
Opportunity Scoring assists reps in selling faster with AI, by prioritising leads based on their likelihood to close. In less than seven days, data flows into Spotify’s marketing environment for follow-up. This has led to a fivefold increase in the number of marketing campaigns.
The power of personalisation has also been harnessed, resulting in a 53% surge in click-through rates.
AI for Sales
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