Now here’s a topic about which a lot has been written. Even we have covered certain aspects of AI in sales in our blogs on Sales Engagement Transformation Powered By Artificial Intelligence, and AI-Powered Sales Enablement Features For 2021.

However, due to the sheer scope of AI applications in Sales, it is imperative to talk about it as much as possible.

AI has completely overhauled the customer journey, from how they learn about your product/service to how they drip down the funnel. And sales teams are doing their best to keep pace with the evolving trends and continuously tweak how they sell to these customers.

Behind the scenes, powerful AI algorithms are guiding every customer’s decision, sometimes without even their knowledge. As a sales leader/team, it is imperative that you understand every single way in which AI is transforming the sales journey. This article will hopefully serve you well in that journey.

Get More Leads Per Campaign

Inefficiently run lead campaigns are the bane of sales teams worldwide. From incorrectly optimized funnels to poorly written copy and too broad of a solution set, sales teams are doing everything they can to lose leads as early as possible.

But in 2021, we are seeing a rise in machine learning-powered models that are helping sales teams avoid exactly this problem.

Every step of the sales pipeline, from qualifying leads to following up, building a relationship and sustaining it for the long term, is easier with AI.

For starters, AI-powered sales intelligence platforms deliver sales teams with the ability to:

• Evaluate characteristics across industries, companies, and stakeholders to provide interpreted intelligence to align their solutions with current market trends
• Leverage multiple data sources to assess a prospect’s global footprint, their digital intentions, technology stack and even provides a deep dive into their outsourcing trends, thereby uncovering leads from unconventional sources and
• Extract contextualized information on their prospects/leads and their pain points

All of these factors together deliver sales teams with an increase in appointments by about ~50%.

Here’s another often-overlooked benefit – Sales teams often restrict their lead hunting strategies to proven grounds. Sure, this strategy works well. But here, they are competing with tons of other service providers and hence might miss out on other hidden gems. With the help of sales intelligence, they can broaden their vision to identify potential leads from hitherto unheard-of sources.

Understand Where The Industry Is Moving

Five years ago, urban air mobility was virtually unheard of. Yet today, service providers are scrambling to cater to a growing number of companies that are involved in this sector.

The point being that at any given point in time, new products/services could emerge from R&D labs and into the commercial sphere. As a sales team, you should know about these right from the R&D stages itself.

This will enable you to develop or customize your solution in such a way as to capture the market share right as the product hits the market.

In our example of Urban Air Mobility, it is evident that there will be a huge need for IoT-powered connected solutions, cutting-edge vehicle informatics/telematics solutions, charging infrastructure, and data analytics solutions.

Being aware of industry trends even before they become trends is vital to staying ahead of your competition. And this is where AI-enabled sales intelligence platforms outperform traditional sales tools.

By tracking real-time signals across industries/verticals, sales intelligence platforms such as Draup inform sales teams about business themes and digital solutions on the cusp of mass adoptions. This gives them an early-mover advantage and gives them ample time to prepare proposals or tweak their products/solutions to cater to a new breed of customers.

Engage Your Prospects With Personalized Content

This point cannot be stressed enough.

Personalized content boosts deal closure rates by 67%! Some studies even quote this number as high as 75%. Regardless, the message is that you need to engage your leads/prospects with highly personalized content.

AI-powered sales intelligence is proven to save about 63% of a sales team’s efforts and time. This is thanks to the ready availability of hyper-contextualized information that enables them to hit the ground running without spending too much time researching their prospects.

B2B sales are getting more complex with each passing day. The average buying cycle has extended by over 20% in duration, which some say is a result of WFH and might return to normal soon. But analysts note that this might not be the case. The sales cycle has indeed become too complicated for a team to handle.

There are multiple streams of customer data pouring in, and without AI-powered content personalization, sales teams might not be able to find the right context for the right customer.

Today, sales intelligence platform such as Draup For Sales, provides service providers with deep insights into:

• Outsourcing Intelligence
• Hiring Trends
• Organization Structures
• Location Insights
• Market Landscape
• Geo & Technology Focus
• Stakeholder Personality Traits and much more.

Armed with this data, sales teams are able to approach leads with highly contextualized proposals that target their specific pain points and are aligned to their digital tech stack.