There’s no time to waste when it comes to winning over B2B customers. The sales landscape is evolving quickly and customers expect interactions to be frictionless, fast, and highly personalized. Sales and revenue teams that aren’t on the cutting edge of changing preferences and technologies will lose leads and customers to those who can quickly adapt.
AI needs to play an increasingly strategic role in every sales and revenue team’s strategy. The data-driven insights, actionable intelligence, and competitive advantage that the right AI tools and platforms offer can super-charge a sales team. The benefits are too powerful to ignore.
There are several major benefits sales teams can tap into when they use AI in a thoughtful and strategic way.
1. Dive into data with Conversation AI
Sales teams collect a lot of data, but that data is considered useless if teams aren’t proactively using it to identify trends, inform decisions, and become more competitive. Conversation and business intelligence deliver huge advantages here.
Use conversation AI to mine data that’s generated during sales calls and customer interactions. Doing so can provide insights that help identify the characteristics of different personas, as well as shed light on which sales tactics are working and which aren’t. All of this will help teams grow more efficient, target the right customers, and close more sales.
Conversation and generative AI can comb through large volumes of interaction data, identifying patterns and roadblocks while providing sales reps with real-time insights to help them tailor conversations and drive conversions.
For all its many benefits, AI is only as strong as the data feeding it, so clean data is a must. Investing in data annotation is one way to ensure AI models are accurate, comprehensive, efficient, and driving the results your teams require.
2. Make chat engagement more personalized
Most sales and revenue teams have embraced messaging since it delivers speed, efficiency, and can scale results other channels just can’t match. But if messaging is going to positively impact and spur customers to buy, it has to be highly personalized. Nothing turns a prospect or customer off faster than receiving an irrelevant or poorly timed offer.
First, teams should know when to choose messaging over chatbots. Scripted chatbots are usually best for simple front-end interactions, but AI-powered messaging tools can seamlessly hand off to a salesperson or rep, which makes them better for delivering higher-quality, more personalized experiences.
Organizations also need to know what messaging will resonate best and when. AI and customer intent mapping can help get to the root of what your prospects and customers want. With those insights in hand, teams can craft strategic and personalized engagement that will resonate with recipients and drive more conversions.
3. Strengthen team performance
Among the many benefits conversation intelligence can bring, voice-of-the-seller and voice-of-the-customer technology can listen to inbound or outbound lead-generating and customer calls and provide real-time insights into how your revenue engine functions. This is your force multiplier with eyes and ears on the ground to identify strengths, weaknesses, and gaps.
Gaining a better understanding of how your revenue teams interact with customers will help ensure your internal cross-functional teams are working in tandem instead of separate silos.
Your processes and workflows should foster a continual, two-way flow of feedback among sales, operations, customer experience and marketing. This will ensure that marketing efforts are best meeting sellers’ needs and that sellers’ needs are informing marketing priorities.
Having real-time insights from conversation intelligence ensures this process is based in data, not a guessing game – which helps everyone work as efficiently as possible toward the same goals.
4. Measure sales engagement effectiveness
Sales engagement tools and platforms are critical to a team’s operational success and the only way to understand if (or how well) they’re working is to measure results.
Be sure to consider tools with robust tracking, reporting, and analytics capabilities. The greatest benefit of these tools is the wealth of actionable insights they deliver.
Make sure someone is responsible for reviewing the impacts they generate, implementing changes when needed, and sharing best practices. And be sure to consider tools with built-in flexibility so you can pivot as needed.
With the right AI tools and a thoughtful revenue strategy behind them, your teams can navigate the always-changing revenue landscape in a way that helps you learn more about their prospects and customers and makes your team considerably more knowledgeable and efficient.
