No longer just a fun sci-fi trope, AI now features regularly in every aspect of our day-to-day lives, including sales. From identifying potential leads to after-sales support, AI is revolutionizing the way we sell. If you don’t keep up with the technology, you risk being left behind.
Machine Learning
A subset of AI, machine learning is used to figure out the best way of achieving a given result, such as increased sales. Thanks to big data, companies now need a way to handle the huge amounts of available information. You’ve probably already come into contact with it today, whether it’s Amazon’s recommendations or the directions from your satnav.
The variety of algorithms provide a range of options for solving sales problems, from initially identifying potential customers, optimizing sales messages, to powerful recommendation engines, making it indispensable to businesses.
The Essential Assistant
While the media panics about how AI will put millions out of a job, many believe it will serve as an assistant, helping people do their jobs better.
For example, rather than taking the place of a human, bots could analyze a customer’s query and provide relevant information for your team to review.
AI can also handle some of the more basic but time-consuming tasks, such as booking meetings and onboarding clients, allowing you to spend time on more important work. In this way, AI will allow salespeople to optimize and scale their process.
Sales Automation
For new businesses, the main objective is to start more conversations. The more chats you’re having with potential customers, the more money you’re going to make.
So how do you talk to more prospects? The traditional solution would be to increase the size of your sales team. However, it’s challenging, as well as expensive.
A better way is to automate your outreach, using software like Reply. While the conversion rate may be lower than a dedicated salesperson, automation provides higher overall results for a lower price.
Bot to Bot Sales
In the near future, AI will be a common occurrence on both sides of the sales process. Sure, we’re already able to use AI to automate the sales processes, but soon people will be able to use bots to control the buying process too.
AI will be able to make smarter buying decisions for you and your company, based on your criteria, budget and the information it’s able to source. It could then contact the seller’s rep, whether that’s a person or another AI, to arrange the sale.
It might sound scary, leaving your buying decisions to a computer. But think about the steps you go through when you’re making a purchasing decision. There’s no reason an AI can’t carry out a majority of those steps, from the initial search right through to arranging delivery details.
Importantly, realize your customers may soon be delegating their purchasing decisions to AI. It’s essential your purchasing funnel is clear enough for anyone, human or AI to interact with.
The Future of AI
The most exciting aspect of AI is its ability to improve itself without human intervention. These systems will soon be able to optimize themselves over time and learn to deal with unforeseen challenges.
They’ll be able to analyze your sales team’s actions, learning from their successes and mistakes, picking up on patterns you’ve never noticed. In turn, they’ll be able to build up and maintain their own knowledge base and improve their performance.
If this all sounds sci-fi, then you should know it’s already happening. The big companies are already investing millions into their own AI solutions. But soon generic solutions will be available for use by companies of any size.
Conclusion
In the next few years, AI will be able to carry out our daily tasks better than we can.
Rather than putting us all out of work though, I believe it’ll allow us to reach our full potential, taking away the boring parts of day-to-day selling and letting us focus on what we do best.
Ready to get started with AI and automation? Learn how Reply can scale your sales and help you achieve your business goals with a free trial today.
