It seems that every day, there are more and more tech tools at our disposal. Many technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI), can seriously help a business’s bottom line.
Adoption of AI and machine learning allows companies to make needed improvements in the way they do business, but these technologies must be properly implemented if you want to reap the full benefits. Below, 12 members of Forbes Business Development Council share some ways sales teams can use machine learning to revamp the sales process.
Forbes Business Council members detail how sales professionals can incorporate machine learning.
Photos courtesy of the individual members.1. Making Pipeline Management Easier
An AI-powered tech stack for sales teams is no longer the future. It is all around us and has become an integral part of today's modern revenue organization. We can use these tools to shorten the administrative time spent by SDRs and AEs on managing pipelines and to surface risk signals in real time before they impact a deal. These capabilities are complete game-changers. - Tzlil Hadass, Science Exchange
2. Automating Follow-Ups
The more salespeople can focus, the more successful they will be. Leveraging machine learning and AI to automate much of the process of following up with sales leads allows prospects to move through the sales funnel. This enables salespeople to channel their time, energy and focus on the components of making a sale that require a human touch. - Adam Mendler, The Veloz Group
3. Addressing Gaps
There’s a lot of talk on how marketing automation (including AI) detects iterative processes and enables predictive modeling. This is what everyone is already doing. Sales professionals have to address the gap and offer what no one else does. That’s where exception handling comes in. Study outliers via machine learning. Find out why something isn’t working and address that first. - Wajid Mirza, Arthur Lawrence
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4. Streamlining And Scaling Client Interactions
Underlying every sales process are steps in a journey with underlying data. A massive benefit for sales teams adopting AI today is leveraging this data to understand ways to optimize their sales process. From the first interaction to a client advocate, how do we streamline these interactions and scale over time? AI helps answer this critical question. - William Merchan, Pathmatics
5. Accelerating Mundane, Repetitive Tasks
AI is great at recognizing patterns, analyzing, reporting and performing repetitive tasks at scale. It’s not great at building human connections or expressing emotions. The adoption of AI can help businesses accelerate mundane, repetitive tasks, allowing employees to spend more time connecting with prospects and customers. - Howard Brown, RingDNA | Inside sales & enterprise sales acceleration software
6. Providing More Clarity On The Customer Cycle
AI can help businesses better understand the customer cycle. It can use predictive modeling as well as machine learning to get to know customers and their habits better. This can translate into more efficient sales cycles that allow businesses to better anticipate when existing customers are ready to buy, and when new customers are in a position to close. - Brandon Batchelor, ReadyCloud
7. Uncovering Consumer Trends
Consumer behavior is shifting. Sales teams must be enabled with the right tools to handle these changes to ensure success. Streamlining time-consuming tasks with AI-enabled automation tools allows teams to focus more on building customer relationships. These tools can pull valuable information based on buying trends to arm teams with the right data and tactics for cross-selling and upselling. - Suhaib Zaheer, Bluehost
8. Gaining Insights On Business Interest
One of my favorite tools for AI is Sharpspring. One of the features we have used to revamp our sales processes is viewing which pages the website visitor viewed prior to exiting the site. That gives us valuable insight into their interest in our business. Our sales team uses that insight to shape the initial call with the potential client. - Janet Waring, ARTFORM Business Solutions, Inc.
9. Providing Meaningful Customer Information
Just like dating, you'll form a far more intimate relationship with your customers when you really get to know them! Empowering your sales teams with enough real-time and meaningful information to form deeper relationships with clients is key. Being able to do this in an automated way is crucial. This will help reduce efforts, make quicker decisions and make more memorable connections with clients. - Oluchi Ikechi, Accenture
10. Eliminating Manual Data Entry
If you can eliminate manual data entry, you can free precious sales time for customer engagement. At the same time, sellers hate entering data into CRM, but this is essential to better prioritize and forecast. AI can be used to "listen" to meetings, emails, calls and other activities to automatically correlate these actions to automate data entry, saving time and increasing CRM data integrity. - Tom Pisello, Mediafly
11. Improving Sales Training
We use Chorus.ai to help with one-on-one coaching sessions and sales training. Tools like this can look for key phrases and sentiment in emails, demos and/or calls to generate a feedback loop for managers to review. By pulling this data to the surface, sales managers can hone in on certain things and identify where improvements can be made in their process to increase close rates. - Christian Valiulis, Automatic Payroll Systems
12. Utilizing Predictive Lead Scoring
AI and machine learning can help sales teams better understand their prospects’ characteristics. At IBM, we use AI for predictive lead scoring. Not only does this help marketers send better quality leads to the sales development teams best equipped to engage with each client, but it also helps sellers segment and differentiate prospective clients based on where they are in their buying journey. - Rakhi Voria, IBM
