Sales leaders love to evaluate their team's performance and always find ways to improve their efficiency and results. No matter how hard they try, they cannot change the fact that the future of their business will lie on how quickly (and well) they implement AI (artificial intelligence).
Here are four different ways of how AI can help you grow in sales and revenue by predicting potential customers:
1 - It Prioritizes Leads Automatically
Have you ever found yourself covered in leads with not enough time to contact each one? It happens, and it usually takes a dedicated team to prioritize each of the leads.
Today, many sales representatives prioritize their leads based on a few criteria, some of which include: how well-known is the company, or the size of the organization. Unfortunately, this means that the leads that can lead to higher conversion rates will have to wait or even be stolen by your competitors.
With artificial intelligence, you can implement historical data and reveal patterns to show what the best leads for your company will look like. AI is continuously analyzing data and factors in the elements that contribute to a good lead. This way, sales representatives can focus on the leads recommended to them with the help of AI. To you, this means more conversion with less time, thus boosting sales productivity.
How would you know if you need an AI to help prioritize your lead? You can find out by doing a few tests. First, ask your team if they can contact every lead regularly. If they cannot determine the criteria, they will use AI to prioritize the leads. With this, determine the conversion rates and compare it with an A/B test utilizing predictive lead scoring to help determine how impactful an AI will be to the conversion rates.
For example, at Ubico, we look at historical CRM data of customers in order to determine common patterns and find new prospects and leads that most resemble your best customers. If you come from the marketing world you can think of it as Facebook's Look-A-Like technology applied to B2B targeting.
2 - It Identifies Opportunities
AI doesn’t only prioritize leads, but also opportunities. While a sales representative can solely focus on one occasion at a time, AI can keep track of multiple ongoing ones, keeping your company from losing out.
For example, AI can find the attributes of a closed opportunity with ongoing ones. Those criteria can include the account engaging with the sales team more than seven times within two weeks, or the purchasing department working with the account's contacts profile. Any factors that may contribute to an opportunity being closed will be taken into consideration by AI.
Identifying opportunities in this way can unlock greater revenue as your team is benefiting from improved conversion rates and is focused on the accounts that matter. If you find yourself lacking opportunities, Ubicos lead engagement platform could be the driver you need to find, engage and qualify with more leads that matter to you.
3 - It Highlights Important Emails
AI will assist your sales reps by prioritizing the most important emails first, saving precious time for the reps. It also increases the reps' response time to customers. AI technology can help you go through the titles and content, looking for new keywords or relevant topics, such as a discussion of pricing.
This way, your representatives will never miss another message from your customers, thus building a robust client-customer relationship. With automatic capture for emails, contacts, and meetings, your reps will spend more time selling and less time entering data.
Gmail is experimenting with these features with it’s new “smart compose” technology and “smart follow up” which will attempt to surface relevant emails that you should respond with to the top of your inbox along with helping you write better emails. Although the technology is relatively nascent, it shows great promise moving forward as breakthroughs in NLP continue to rise.
4 - It Enhances Forecast Accuracy
The hardest challenge you can ever face is to tell what the future holds. No one can 100 per cent accurately predict what is going to happen next. However, with AI, you can get close. AI will help you determine the trends that are happening within your sale cycle, right down to each sales representative. It can also tell you when the forecast will arise and show you the different factors that have a part to play. With AI, forecasting is much more accurate and straightforward.
Do your business and your sales representatives a favor and implement AI into your workflow. The competitive advantage you will gain is too much to ignore.
If you’re looking for an AI assistant to help with automatic lead outreach, engagement or qualification, get in touch with us today to see how we can help. Having helped generate millions in pipeline for customers across various industries we know we can help your current sales or marketing stack become more efficient.
