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How AI Can Help Improve Your Sales Team
Ever wondered how AI can help with your sales? Check our blog to see the benefits your sales team will receive when you incorporate AI technology:
If there’s a profession that demands human interaction, sales is probably one of the top three. This is especially true since convincing someone to make a purchase is much easier if you’re pitching face to face. Because of this, you may have noticed that one of the best qualities of a successful salesperson is superior communication skills. Now, the question is, how can artificial intelligence (AI) help salespeople generate more sales since the job mainly gravitates around human interaction?
It may come as a surprise, but AI is very helpful for sales. In fact, in 2020, 54% of sales teams have incorporated AI into their strategies, which is a 155% increase from 2018. The number will grow for years to come.
Do note that AI doesn’t really replace the human touch of the whole sales equation. Instead, AI will provide the necessary insight and sales tools needed by your sales team to better establish connections with your customers. This will allow you to easily reach your business goals.
To paint a clearer picture, here’s how AI can help improve your sales team:
Provide training with AI
Even though there are plenty of ways on how a sales training or coaching software can help improve your sales team, many business owners or sales leaders still don’t exactly understand how these types of programs work, especially the benefits they can bring to the company.
As a start, a sales training program will conveniently share your sales training ideas among your team members. This means that all your employees will have the same foundation, which will help any employees improve any specific areas that they find difficult. Additionally, since your sales training is uniform, you can quickly improve a representative’s performance, onboard new hires fasters, and build a team of top-notch salespeople seamlessly.
Moreover, since sales coaching software uses AI, it can identify what your sales team is doing right and what areas need improvement. This way, you can easily modify any aspects of the sales pitch, allowing you to close more leads.
Allows your team to prioritize selling
Ideally, since they’re hired to be salespeople, your sales team should live up to their name and focus on making sales. Unfortunately, that’s not the case since they often spend the majority of their time on time-consuming, menial tasks, such as entering email notes into the customer relationship management (CRM) software. Research even shows that sales representatives only spend a quarter of their work hours selling to customers.
Fortunately, with the help of AI, your sales team will be relieved from doing tedious admin work. This can be done by automatically tracking any communication made by your sales team. The machines understand the texts and other data intended for humans thanks to the annotated texts used in the trainings. In this case, your sales team can now focus on building relationships with customers, as they’re no longer bothered by admin requirements. Your sales team’s morale will also increase as they’re now free from doing menial tasks, which translates to motivated employees.
Generate the ideal price
Did you know that 90% of consumers actually invest their time on the internet just to find the best deal for them? Now, coming up with a competitive price can be time-consuming as it involves plenty of research.
However, with AI, your salespeople will no longer guess an attractive price to offer your prospects. This is because machine-learning technology will crunch up the sales data about a particular customer to generate a recommended price, increasing your chances of a successful sale. AI will also make sure that your sales margins are safeguarded, especially if you incorporate a pre-approved price. The AI won’t suggest a price lower than your margin.
By using AI to generate the ideal price, not only will you hasten your sales cycle, but you’ll also shorten the time for new members of your sales team to make a sale as they can already start selling without worrying that they’re offering a deal that’ll hurt your company. Also, remember, an optimum price improves customer experience as you’ll no longer go through the whole negotiation process, which can be uncomfortable for most customers.
Improves sales forecasting with the help of AI
Since hiring, payroll, and the fact that a company will lose credibility if they miss their sales targets, it’s safe to say that sales forecasting is crucial for any business. Thankfully, with the help of AI, you can increase your sales forecast accuracy. This is done by giving you a real-time view of the status of every deal that’s in the pipeline. This will help sales managers make an informed decision when to park or advance any offering or deals.
As your deal is already supported by AI, make sure that your sales team will constantly monitor the forecasting process with relevant data. Doing so will ensure that the AI will always provide accurate forecasts. Remember, the accuracy of the AI will always depend on the quality of data you feed.
Increase engagement with AI
Gone are the days when people are shown news in a specific order––from local news, international, politics, weather, to sports. As technology improves, companies are now using AI to filter what people want to see, which means that most of what’s presented to you is related to what you always search for. This is achieved by AI’s capability to learn a user’s interest and behavior. That’s why one social media giant’s newsfeed is always personalized.
So how can this help with your sales team? With the help of AI’s algorithms, you’re given the opportunity to advertise to the right target audience, especially when their searches are related to your products or services. Since you’ve already filtered out those that are looking for your offering, it’ll allow your sales team to have an easy opportunity to transform these prospects into paying customers.
Takeaway on AI
What was once thought of as only a product of science fiction, AI has now been helping businesses of all sectors to improve how they conduct their daily operations, especially how they make sales. With AI, businesses can now make informed decisions and provide a good customer experience. Thus, in this competitive field, AI should no longer be considered as something optional. For the sake of your sales team to work optimally, AI should be essential.