AI for Sales Helps You Solve Your Biggest Challenges
How To Solve Your Biggest B2B Sales Challenges With AI
Finally, people can count on technology to solve frustrating, seemingly insurmountable problems. AI for sales is designed to fix two of the greatest issues faced by B2B sales teams.
In this post, we lay out two of the most common problems in B2B sales environments, as well as the newest AI solutions to address them. We will be defining Artificial Intelligence, Conversation Intelligence, and more. We will also review how AI-powered tools boost effectiveness, increase wins, and even help improve onboarding and retention.
Challenge #1: Obsolete, Incomplete, and Irrelevant Data
During a complex and lengthy sales cycle, whoever interacts with a buyer is supposed to meticulously record each detail of a meeting or call in the CRM. But more often than not, people are busy tending to many other competing demands, which means that tedious, time-consuming tasks are deprioritized.
“Even if it’s just the call recording and the transcription. The fact that you can share those, it just pays for itself.”
And cumbersome data entry isn’t the only problem. Some of the information being entered about each client or prospect – like how many times a rep interacted with them – isn’t truly important for the sale. What really matters are the contents of each conversation.
Challenge #2: The Black Hole of Buyer Intelligence
From sales discovery all the way to a signed deal, there are dozens of contact points and conversations. Over time, buyers reveal not just their main product requirements, but also subtle preferences, unspoken objections and concerns, and many other nuances that are important for the seller to understand. Paying attention to these details can be the difference between winning or losing.
Artificial Intelligence is Perfectly Designed To Solve Human Problems
The good news is that AI for sales is here. Artificial intelligence is the ideal solution to capture sales data; it is infinitely scalable, analyzing each hour of conversations in seconds, and informing next steps in an objective, automated way.
Let’s look at the myriad ways that AI for sales can help improve the sales process. Feel free to skip this if you’re already familiar.
About the Tech: AI, ML, NLP, CI, Oh My!
Let’s geek out for a minute about the different types of AI and how they apply to sales.
- Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the science and engineering of making intelligent machines, especially intelligent computer programs. From your antivirus program to photo recognition software and much more, AI is already a big, somewhat hidden, and integral part of modern life.
- Machine Learning (ML) is the AI’s engine for learning. It is based on the idea that systems can learn from data, identify patterns and make decisions with minimal human intervention. These programs have countless uses, like identifying whether an email is spam or not, or determining if a certain photo is depicting violence and should be removed from social media. Over time, as ML processes more and more information, the AI keeps getting “smarter” (to use a human term.)
- Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a field of artificial intelligence that gives machines the ability to read, understand and derive meaning from human languages. In the simplest terms, NLP is the reason we can speak to our devices and have them do things for us, like a web search or answering a question. This is quite a feat because if you think about it, computers don’t really speak English or any other language… rather, they communicate in binary code.
- Conversation Intelligence (CI) uses NLP to capture, analyze, and summarize the buyer-seller conversation in an inside sales or call center environment. Until CI tools, we had a big blind spot on this type of content, because capturing it properly is a cumbersome, time-consuming, and often avoided task.
Ai for Sales Boosts Your Sales Efforts
AI for Sales (AKA Conversation Intelligence) is a revolutionary invention. The best tools:
- Eliminate manual note-taking
- Free up time for higher ROI activities
- Effortlessly capture the sales conversation in its entirety
- Provide a high-quality transcription and complete recording
- Automatically summarize and analyze the conversation content
- Deliver an engagement score and other hard-to-identify metrics
- Provide a complete call report on the threats, opportunities, and hidden concerns
- Become a highly valuable resource for the entire sales team
- Facilitate training and coaching
- Increase the win rate!
Multiplying Sales Productivity… and Wins
Each minute not wasted trying to take (or scrambling to find) manual notes is a minute that can be spent on something much more productive, like using AI reports from past calls to build a well-crafted sales narrative that will get the buyer’s attention.
Knowledge (of Buyer Needs) is Power
Through their conversation-capturing and AI analysis, CI tools provide much-needed insights to make each outreach effort more effective, empowering team members and leaders to always be prepared for the next customer meeting.
Analysis and Understanding of Each Conversation
CI tools allow leaders to access precise, updated information on the status of each current or past sales effort. Instead of resorting to incomplete and confusing CRM notes, client profiles contain complete recordings and transcriptions of the sales conversations, as well as AI-driven analysis of the threats and opportunities.
A Clear View of Processes, Pipelines, and Performance
As a sales manager, having easy access to conversation data is highly valuable, as it allows you to build more accurate quarterly or yearly forecasts, evaluate employee efforts in real time, and quickly see opportunities to step in and coach your team.
Efficient Employee Onboarding…
The high-pressure world of sales can sometimes mean rapid employee turnover. To onboard new employees more effectively, your department can develop training materials from recent real-life conversations instead of hypothetical case studies.
… and Better Employee Retention
Of course, it’s best to keep employees happy so they don’t leave. This is where CI tools can help, as well. By removing the dreaded notetaking chore and replacing it with automated conversation capture and AI-powered analysis, it’s easier for reps to focus on actually selling.
Artificial intelligence is the ideal solution to a sales team’s data capture challenges; it is infinitely scalable, analyzing each hour of conversations in seconds, and informing next steps in an objective, automated way.
Is It Time To Choose AI for Sales?
If you are looking for a way to optimize team performance, efficiency, and happiness, perhaps a user-friendly CI tool that doesn’t add complexity to the sales process is just what you and your team need.
Artificial intelligence is being adopted at a fast pace from Fortune 500s on down, and for good reason. In a competitive, sometimes unpredictable world, truly understanding your buyers – in fact, building an entirely buyer-centric sales organization – is most certainly worth it.
As more and more conversation data is captured over time, your AI for sales conversation intelligence platform evolves with it, providing insights that are increasingly accurate and effective. For many B2B sales organizations suffering from the data issues outlined above, the time is now to start building their very own, powerful, and ever-evolving conversation intelligence engine.
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