Revolutionizing Sales Processes with AI Integration
Highlights
AI integration offers powerful ways to enhance core marketing and sales processes — segmentation, sales enablement, customer retention, and much more.
Because they can sort through much more data in far less time and keep getting better at it, AI-based systems outperform traditional approaches.
Integrating AI into sales and marketing requires an underlying data strategy.
No one has yet discovered that single, repeatable formula for successful sales that works everywhere, every time. However, organizations reporting better results tend to be those that focus on process.
While no two sales situations are ever entirely alike, they all follow a similar trajectory. Organizations that map resources to the various steps in this unfolding process — segmenting prospects, scoring them, creating awareness campaigns, tailoring proposals, personalizing content, focusing on the close — have a greater chance of overall success.
And now many organizations are discovering that the way to do this is by revolutionizing sales processes with AI integration.
This is the second in a series of articles on AI-Powered Sales Transformation: Teams, Processes, and Technology. Today, we’re looking at the impact of AI on sales processes.
THE RISE OF AI IN SALES
McKinsey’s global survey shows that — along with enhancing service operations and new product and/or service development — marketing and sales are among today’s top AI use cases.
Most Commonly Adopted Use Cases Within Each Business Function (% of respondents)1
SOURCE: McKinsey
1. Question was asked only of respondents who said their organizations have adopted AI in at least one business function.
2. E.g., field service, customer care, back office
The rapid rise of generative AI is supercharging the transformation. By 2025, according to Gartner, 35% of chief revenue officers will resource a centralized “GenAI Operations“ team as part of their go-to-market organization.
STREAMLINING SALES PROCESSES WITH AI INTEGRATION
AI represents a major advance over how computers have traditionally been used. To better understand how this impacts sales, consider a simplistic depiction of the process involved in generating a list of ideal candidates for a new product. Using a traditional (non-AI) system, a sales team might brainstorm a list of criteria (company size, profitability, industry, etc.) and use a computer to comb through records and find companies matching those criteria.
Using AI, the process is very different: The sales team might provide several examples of ideal customers and ask the AI-based system to search for patterns and develop its own criteria for the ideal customer.
In a head-to-head matchup, it’s arguable how much better AI is vs. an experienced sales rep at judging the potential of any given sales candidate. But what is absolutely not up for debate is that an AI-based system is able to sort through much more data in far less time and make those determinations far more quickly. What might have taken days, weeks or months for a team of sales reps can be accomplished by AI in minutes, if not seconds.
And in a major advantage over traditional data systems, AI keeps getting better at what it’s doing. Over time, as new data on prospects and actual customers becomes available, AI will keep refining its criteria. This is something a traditional computer system could never accomplish.
All of these benefits — finding underlying patterns across huge data sets and getting better and better at it — play out across a range of sales processes, including the following.
DATA-DRIVEN DECISION MAKING
AI can deliver a range of options to enhance data-driven decision-making:
Customer segmentation: The research to create accurate audience segments has long been a key marketing process and typically follows classic demographic, psychographic, behavioral, geographic, and firmographic lines. Now, marketers can use AI to go much deeper into those segments and identify unique and even obscure patterns that lead to entirely new and potentially more lucrative segmentations.
Customer needs identification: AI makes it far easier to comb through available information and learn about a prospect’s business, giving sellers more time to focus on telling a compelling sales story to match their solution to a prospect’s needs.
Analytics: AI empowers organizations to review and analyze massive amounts of data in a short amount of time, synthesizing dashboards and analytics. This makes it possible for sales organizations to surface the most powerful data and take action.
SALES OPERATIONS
But AI excels at more than just identifying potential customers. Its impact is felt throughout the sales cycle.
Sales enablement: Today when a sales rep has a question, they can pose that question via Slack or another communication channel and wait for a subject-matter expert to provide the answer. Now with AI, sales reps can pose a question and get an immediate response as well as the sources to back that answer. They can also be quickly directed to relevant content and training. In effect, sales enablement gets transformed into best-in-class, “just in time” microlearning.
Training: Managers can take advantage of AI to become more effective coaches, pinpointing where individual sales reps are underperforming and delivering targeted coaching
Going beyond omnichannel: Do your best customers prefer to be contacted via email? On the phone? Over social media? In the morning? The evening? AI can help you find out and make your omnichannel outreach much more effective.
INTEGRATION OF AI WITH CRM SYSTEMS
For years, customer relationship management (CRM) solutions have been a primary focus for companies looking to use tech investments to create better customer experiences and enhance sales performance. When fully utilized, CRM systems have a proven track record, but that doesn’t always happen.
In Sales Mastery’s 2022 Sales Performance Scorecard survey, as reported in Harvard Business Review, 15% of respondents reported that their companies were not actively using CRM, and 42% stated that they were using it only for storing information about customers and prospects.
In a survey by the CRM provider Sugar, 76% say their CRM system is either too complex, not intuitive or user friendly, or cannot be customized.
AI can now be used to track customer interactions and take over the administrative task of populating the CRM. According to HubSpot, sales reps doing this today save hours.
At the same time, more CRM systems, including those from Microsoft and Salesforce, are enhancing their platforms with AI capabilities. Using historical data and patterns from the CRM system, AI predicts which customers are most likely to jump ship and offer targeted promotions, discounts, or engagement strategies to keep them on board.
CHALLENGES AND SOLUTIONS IN AI IMPLEMENTATION
As this article has hopefully illustrated, sales and marketing are well-suited to the capabilities of AI. The interactions between buyers and sellers produce large volumes of data, including text from email chains, audio of phone conversations, and video of personal interactions. These are exactly the types of unstructured data AI models are designed to work with.
However, simply putting the latest open source model to work is likely to produce sub-par results. Even unstructured data needs to be carefully evaluated for what it contains and address the risk of privacy and bias. The value for sales teams is greatest when models are customized and fine-tuned on company-specific data and contexts. This can be expensive and requires scarce expertise, including people with significant knowledge of AI and sales.
HOW PRIME 8 CAN HELP YOU STREAMLINE SALES PROCESSES WITH AI
That’s where Prime 8 comes in. We have an extensive track record of working with leading companies to refine their data utilization strategies. We bring a range of skill sets to the table that are essential for putting AI to work:
Operational assessments: Our operational assessment skills can identify areas for AI enhancement in sales processes.
Process mapping and optimization: Leverage Prime 8's process mapping expertise to integrate AI effectively into your sales workflows.
Data analysis and performance measurement: Our data analysis services will help you track AI's impact on sales performance and KPIs.
Continuous improvement and quality management: Benefit from the continuous improvement strategies we’ve developed over hundreds of projects to refine AI-driven sales processes over time.
To learn more about how we can help you make the most of AI to effect meaningful sales transformation in your company, contact Prime 8 today.
To learn about AI tools and technology that can be used to drive sales transformation, read the next blog in our AI Sales Transformation series, Choosing the Right AI Tools for Sales Success.
