Why Are AI and ML Sales Leaders’ Best Friends?

Over the past few years, AI and Machine Learning have raised the customers’ expectations from sales teams. The tougher benchmarks put sale leaders who operate without Machine Learning in a disadvantage. AI comes handy in converting more leads and retaining customers. Salesforce projects that by 2022 around 80 % of companies will have started using automaton at some levels and sales is on the top of the priority list.

AI Helps Leaders with the Pricing Structure

In businesses, especially the B2C ones, customers use AI-driven search aggregators to find out companies and their offers. Customers are aware of the best deals in the market. In this context, Sales leaders have to adopt a data-driven approach to competitively set prices without denting their margins. AI-enabled pricing tools like Incompetitor, Prisync, Competera and Vendavo scan the catalogues and price-list of competitors. They check millions of webpages to find product matches and help leaders build a competitive price structure. While pricing is not exclusively a sales activity, several modern organizations bring sales and pricing teams on the same page.

Say No to Manual Cold Calls, Free up the Sales Team

According to various studies, only 27 % of the leads get contacted. If the task of cold calling is passed on to AI solutions, the sales team can concentrate on adding the human touch to communications and sealing deals. In most cases, the customer would have received an idea on product specifications, price and contract terms online. AI-powered Virtual Assistants and Virtual Tours will help customers get an in-depth idea about the products and functions.

Analyze the Quality of Leads

Machine learning can analyze a company’s data on converted leads and identify what a probable customer would be like. This helps the sales team to work on high-quality leads. Even if the organization lacks categorized data to feed the machine, unsupervised learning allows the algorithm to identify patterns. Companies like Zoho, Sisense, Yellowfin, Hotjar and Looker provides analytics tools for analytics.

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Make Your Sales Executives Smarter

Salesforce says that 74% of the sales teams have shifted focus to being reliable advisors. They no more limit themselves to the role of consultants.

Help Your Executives Make Informed Decisions

Virtual Assistants can help a sales team makes informed decisions as the machine can access history to provide useful information. Similarly, they can improve sales desks’ response rate by answering repetitive questions. Sales Bots also are essentially virtual assistants. They use natural language processing, natural language generation, and machine learning to engage the customers.   

Make the Team More Dynamic

A sales team can become more dynamic if they have CRM software. The visualization of data and customers help sales team identify what can influence a deal, what to upsell or cross-sell. This way, the opportunity scoring will accelerate sales execution by aligning the sales team’s efforts on highly scored deals and improving win rates. Also, the processes such as scheduling meetings, sending of proposals, and approval of a contract can become more time-bound with AI.

Add a personal touch for customer retention

CDPs can help maintain raw data including contacts. Salesforce, Salemate and MyPhoner have some platforms that offer CDP solutions. The CRMs work effectively when the organization has an effective CDP. The platforms with their Data Visualization tools that can give you a bird’s eye view of the decay in contact data. AI also helps customers to frequently reach out to once tapped customers with Automated Sales calls.

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Analyze and forecast the sales better

The sales leaders can use AI to modify their sales goal. There are tools by companies like Salesforce, Mintigo, Clari and Appier that can help teams generate accurate sales forecast predictions. Based on this, the company can constantly adjust itself to stick to the road map for the quarter. The presence of a transparent sales pipeline can help team managers analyze performance.

Helps build a better team

Further, Machine Learning can coach managers with data-laden insights on how to build a strong team. The real ace performers will not be missed out from the sales leader’s radar. This essentially leads to increased team morale and help build stronger sales teams. Often the sales leaders have a say in hiring their team. The modern HR tech solutions can help sales leaders to get a visualization of the aspirant sales team member’s strengths and weakness.

Around 72 % of the workers in the US and 76 % in Germany want increased automation to make their offices smarter. A study published in the MIT Sloan Management Review reveals that higher sales growth is the factor that attracts 76 % of companies to machine learning.

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