24% of a salesperson’s time is spent generating leads. With the introduction of better sales enablement tools, this number is seeing a downtrend.

However, there exists several more problems within the sales engagement pipeline that is severely hampering your sales team’s success.

These include:

• Outright bad leads (Although over time, better data collection have helped mitigate this)
• Complete lack of knowledge on stakeholder information leading to the sales teams to reach out to completely irrelevant profiles. This is an experience I personally have, since sales reps read my articles & try to pitch me services. If they had access to better tools, they would’ve known whom to target with their proposal and how to target them.
• Insufficient data on decision-makers. Even if they manage to reach the right person, sales teams routinely botch up due to inefficient communication strategies.
• Clueless about customer pain points. While most sales reps correctly identify prospects, they are unable to accurately pinpoint their pain points and hence not able to deliver proposals targeting those issues.

Poor sales engagement practices are not restricted to the above 4 points, though they turn out to be among the biggest hurdles.

Smart salespeople can identify, research & extract social information about a prospect within 30 minutes. From then on, the legwork begins; the endless trawling of the prospective client’s company reports, any mentions in the media, following the LinkedIn profiles of their top leaders etc. All of this, to end up with data that is at best 50% useful.

Yes, that number is entirely arbitrary because the practice itself is arbitrary.

The need of the hour is to follow data-backed strategies to empower your sales engagement pipeline. In this field, AI-powered sales engagement has proven to be highly beneficial.

When integrated with your CRM, AI-powered sales engagement platforms equip sales teams with a cutting-edge toolkit for the digital era.

Let’s dive deep into how Artificial Intelligence is reinventing the sales engagement process.

Identify New Customers That You Didn’t Know You Could Have

One of the biggest hurdles for sales teams when it comes to winning new deals is that they don’t know what they don’t know!

By this, I mean that sales reps often have a narrow field of vision. If their services have been in demand in one sector, they tend to concentrate their efforts in that and allied sectors only. However, imagine if you were given access to all the data related to all the sectors and real-time updates on the trending digital use cases.

Such a dashboard would fundamentally shift your sales focus.

Where previously you provided IoT services to the manufacturing sector, you can now instead think of expanding to different verticals like shipping. The sales intelligence platform notices an uptick in activity for your services and now indicates a high opportunity index in your services in the shipping industry.

Naturally, such a solution would pique any sales leaders’ interest.

This is exactly what data-powered sales intelligence tools are capable of doing. It allows you to cast your sales net wide and deep into different verticals and increases your chances of winning a deal.

But getting leads is only the start of the journey. The next step – approaching a prospect – is where most sales reps fail.

Approach Prospects The Right Way Armed With Deep Insights About The Decision Makers

If you’re trying to pitch to a new client, it goes without saying that it helps to know everything about the client beforehand. But having access to this data is one thing; making sense out of it and using it for your advantage is another.

This is where the power of data-powered AI sales engagement really shines through.

For example, Draup’s sales intelligence tool enables you to identify buyers based on:

• Verticals
• Accounts
• Business Functions
• Workloads
• Current Job Titles
• Locations

Once you set your preferences, you can bookmark potential leads and shortlist them further based on your own requirements.

This shortlisting process is aided by the fact that their profiles come pre-populated with information pertaining to their:

• Deal Size Influence
• Budget Control
• Personality Characteristics
• Sales Engagement Guidelines
• Personality Inference etc.

Here’s an example for the sales engagement guidelines generated for a key decision-maker in a Fortune 500 company: (Note: These guidelines are prepared by human curators based on their research from data on the Draup platfrom.)

• In a meeting with multiple stakeholders, [DECISION MAKER] could come across as a sole contributor. Hence, take up a role of the moderator and strategically accommodate others’ opinions without offending [DECISION MAKER], by suggesting others to follow suit and put across their views.
• Stay abreast of market standards and emerging trends. Show them how your product/service can help in overcoming their challenges, have a deeper understanding of [DECISION MAKER] ‘s competitors and provide insights on how they could compete with their industry peers using this.

Needless to say, such deep into the stakeholder equips sales reps with the power to craft highly personalized proposals.

Companies that use data & AI-powered processes to deliver personalized experiences report a 33% increase in ROI & 45%+ increase in deal renewal.

In other words, Artificial Intelligence has transformed sales engagement into a deeply personal exercise by trimming away unnecessary and useless metrics. Now, all that matters is how well you’re able to connect with your prospect and quantify the tangible value you are able to provide them.

Setting Your Sales Teams For Success

AI Sales Intelligence tools like Draup for Sales arms B2B sales teams with the ability to perform massive outreach at scale based on the most up-to-date data.

Today, Draup For Sales is helping sales teams in Fortune 500 enterprises with:

• Identifying obscure prospects that turn out to be huge buyers
• Refining prospect lists & narrowing down ideal targets for your products/service
• Hyper targeting prospects with solutions customized to their pain points.

The breadth of AI-driven insights combed from over 3500+ data sources allows B2B sales teams to adjust their strategies with evolving ecosystem demands & protects them from major disruptive events.