How Will AI Impact Sales and Marketing in Future

Introduction

Today, B2B buyers expect a personalized and seamless purchasing experience with value-added insights from a seller. Artificial Intelligence in Sales is the next step forward. A recent study indicates that 89% of business buyers rank the experience that a company offers at the same level as its services and products, and 82% are fine with paying more for an excellent experience. With this situation, Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) have the capacity to transform sales for good. These technologies provide organizations the power to create strategic, adaptive sales processes that enhance a customer’s experience.

The Power of Artificial Intelligence

A McKinsey research indicates that organizations that use AI in sales have seen many benefits. Some of these benefits include an increase in leads and appointments of more than 50% and cost reductions of 40% to 60%. Also, there have been call time reductions of 60% to 70%. Following are four important ways that Artificial Intelligence in Sales can help:

• Tapping the right customers: Prospecting is one of the toughest parts of a sales process. AI in sales can simplify this process by designing better customer profiles and buyer personas through pattern matching with prevailing customer data profiles. This helps sales reps discover potential high-value prospects to target.
• Boosting the value of sales content: Close to 67% of buyers depend on digital content for their purchase decisions. However, responding to this demand requires deeper understanding of how customers engage with various content assets. AI technology can offer a deeper understanding of the ROI of various content assets and thus help with content production.
• Supercharging sales teams with enhanced onboarding, training, and coaching: Sales teams feel that they need more training. AI and ML can address this issue by tailoring learning experiences for greater efficiency and effectiveness. AI-enabled training solutions can optimize onboarding and training by developing progressive learning journeys.
• Focusing sellers on actually selling by automating ancillary tasks: At the everyday level, sellers struggle as they spend very less little time selling and too much time doing other tasks. AI is emerging as an efficient solution in automating repetitive administrative tasks.

Challenges with Implementing AI

While AI solutions have become more prominent, there are some challenges that organizations need to address:

• Data: Data is the fuel on which ML and AI tools run. Organizations should ensure that they have the essential data streams to get a 360-degree view of customers.
• Processes: Building a comprehensive view of the customer needs breaking down silos between customer-facing departments and creating data-driven processes among sales teams. Organizations should make ease of adoption and integration a priority while searching for potential solutions.
• Management: An inadequate budget and lack of executive buy-in can be significant problems for an effective AI/ML implementation. Thus, it is necessary to create demonstrable use cases that can convince skeptics in the organization.
• People: Any talk of AI unavoidably comes with fears of redundancy and job loss. Even where such fears are negligible, sales teams may show unwillingness to restructure their processes significantly. Transparent and participative decision-making is the solution to this problem.

AI-Enabled Sales Is Here Already

Artificial intelligence in sales is no longer a wishful future; it is already here. Using effective algorithms and comprehensive analytics, AI solutions can improve decision-making and increase productivity. It can also improve the effectiveness of sales processes to offer a superlative customer experience.