Why AI is a Sales Persons new best friend
Technology is and has always been one of my personal passion and interest. It just intrigues me to think about all the things humans will be capable of, the more technology is implemented in our lives. Not only will it improve the quality of our lives, but allow us to focus on the more important things; like our health, relationships and goals.
Artificial Intelligence(AI) is all around us, without us even knowing algorithms are working away at lightning speeds to help us complete day2day tasks. A good example of this is if you have ever used the search option in Amazon Prime Video to search for a film or series a recommendation algorithm was used to present you with the results. When you think about it, It’s the simple things AI will make possible that will help salespeople perform at a much more effective and efficient way.
One of the main benefits of AI is the way that it can process massive amounts of data without breaking a sweat, in a faster and more efficient way than any human being ever could in the past. Through machine learning it can teach itself to come to new conclusions based on the data and the more it does, the more it learns, the better results we are presented with.
“By far, the greatest danger of Artificial Intelligence is that people conclude too early that they understand it.” — Eliezer Yudkowsky
Admin Slave
For those salespeople out there, I’m sure you’ll understand my pain when I say the word admin. It’s a universal pain point for us salespeople, it’s like the black hole just sucking up the majority of our time. According to a study done by Forbes, the average salesperson only spends 35.2% of their time actually selling & 65% on everything else but selling.
Now imagine if you had someone to do all the mundane admin tasks like inputting communication notes into CRM for you, the amount time that will then be available to sit on the phone and close more sales will make a huge impact on performance alone. AI will make this possible, it will automate activity logging, identify which customers are a high priority. Also when an email or phone call should be made and create new contacts for you, allowing us to focus more on relationship building and being productive with our approach, win/win if you ask me.
More Money — Less Problems
I think one of the most effective and obvious ways for any business to increase its topline revenue is not only identifying which customers will actually buy, but which existing customers will buy more. Think about all the wasted time & money spent on endless marketing campaigns to the customer that isn’t likely to spend more money with you. Introducing AI algorithms will allow you to identify which existing customer is more likely to spend money on a better version of what you’re selling.
On the other hand, it can let you know which customers are open to a totally different product/service that you offer according to their current performance and behaviours. Not only will this increase revenues for the sales team but also decrease the amount being spent on marketing which can be used elsewhere.
Past to Present
Looking back at all your old leads/opportunities that were won/lost to see if there is any potential in the new financial year can take up some serious time. Imagine not having to do the dirty work of rummaging through old stuff and identifying which customers have potential, how they should be approached and how your company can help them.
In comes AI to save the day, it will allow you to have all or any of that information available at your fingertips at any time you need. AI’s processing power makes it possible to collate and analyse millions of data points weather this is email or calendars and make calculated decisions to put forward the best recommendations.
Master of adaptation
Prospecting is another area which is a lot of hard work due to the background research that needs to be made and admin work that comes along with it. Just the time taken to figure out which lead is best for you to spend your time on and has the highest rate of success is mentally draining, because of the all the reports and analysis that you have to do before moving forward.
This is the same situation when it comes to the market, you think you’ve got everything pinned down to a tee and then a small change or news in the market makes an impact and you have to tailor your approach again. Machine learning could help us all with that, doing all the analysis and reporting in the background, keeping up to date with market information and how companies are performing, helping you make a calculated and well-informed decision to make sure your spending time on the right leads pushing you to the right results.
Something important to bear in mind is that AI is not here to take away traditional sales roles, It’s here to actually help streamline the conversations and improve our customer’s experience, just like the sales scripts we use currently. However, AI will be able to provide more personalised versions specific to each customer without even being told to do so.
I could ramble on for ages about how AI will improve the lives of salespeople and when you really think about it our customers too, the capabilities are endless. Some think it will take the humanity and emotion out of sales, but I truly believe it will remove the stiff robotic approach that we sometimes take allowing us to be more humane when speaking to another human being(Something all top salespeople are doing anyway).
So what do you think, will AI have a positive, or negative effect on society and sales and how so?
