These days, you can’t turn on the internet without reading about artificial intelligence (AI). All sorts of think pieces discuss how AI will take over the world. At a bare minimum, much of the hype surrounds the idea that AI will displace millions of jobs.
At Next Quarter, we have years of experience in AI and understand how to address today’s sales challenges. We also know that AI has tremendous potential for your sales team. When used properly, AI can improve sales performance and enhance sales analytics.
As such, let’s look at key ways AI can help your business through improved sales.
Key Applications of AI-Powered Sales Analytics
Artificial intelligence can remove bias, provide a deeper look at data, and make connections that humans can’t. This information can serve your sales team in several ways.
- Sales forecasting and predictive modeling: AI can help improve sales forecasting and make predictive modeling. This ability points to AI’s skills at utilizing and integrating that data against macro and micro-economic trends.
- Customer segmentation and targeting: AI can also determine the sales performance of specific customer segments. In doing so, it can better target customers and help you decide what messages work for what customers.
- Lead scoring and prioritization: AI-powered sales analytics can help your business obtain better lead scoring. This information—generated by various factors, including a business profile and sales potential—can allow your sales team to prioritize leads. With this data, your business can better determine priorities and monitor staff time.
- Sales process optimization: AI can also help you optimize your sales process. For example, chatbots can handle mundane lead-generation tasks. Such examples include gathering data and inputting information into your CRM. AI can also provide you with recommended products and services that the customer may want. This information can enable your team to narrow their scope and find products that are most likely to apply to customers.
- Sales performance monitoring and KPI tracking: AI can monitor the sales performance of your team. It can also provide KPI tracking that gives you a broad view of your company’s sales performance. This allows you to identify high and low performers and adjust your team. You can also better determine the resources needed to help your team sell better.
Enhancing Sales Performance With AI-powered Recommendations
The insight provided by AI can be invaluable for increasing sales performance. For example, AI can provide your customers with personalized product recommendations. This data can operate based on a customer’s search history, overall online behavior, and previous orders.
Furthermore, a properly calibrated AI tool can help you identify cross-selling and upselling opportunities. It can often be difficult for a person to sift through the sales analytics and determine what products or services are ripe for cross-selling or upselling. Alternatively, your business can rely on AI to identify these opportunities. Doing so allows you to find more timely sales prospects.
Lastly, AI can also provide you with various dynamic pricing strategies. If your business attempts to deploy dynamic pricing, you know how difficult this can be. When you push the price too high, you lose a customer. Leave it too low, and you leave money on the table. AI can incorporate data and past behavior to give you a more accurate dynamic pricing plan.
What does all of this mean? Fundamentally, every second you invest in AI can save minutes or hours in mundane tasks. AI can cut through the data and make connections that you missed. Its insights can lead to more sales and reduce human work. Ultimately, AI can mean more money, smashed quotas, and additional leads in your sales pipeline.
Implementation and Considerations
As you can see, AI has tremendous power. However, there are a few things your team must consider before implementation.
- Integration: You must ensure AI solutions integrate with your existing CRM. Otherwise, you’ll have to relearn your entire sales process, which would force your sales team to waste time on unnecessary technical training.
- Expertise: You’ll also want to keep the experience of any AI provider in mind. After all, your AI vendor shouldn’t be some new, fly-by-night outfit. Instead, they should have years of experience in this area. Their expertise should enable your AI contractor to understand what works and what doesn’t.
- Security: Your AI solution must have robust security and privacy restrictions. These tools must ensure that you protect the critical information you enter into your CRM. There is not much that is more damaging to a business than a data breach.
- Change management: Your business must use change management strategies to adopt any new AI tool. Properly utilizing change management can incorporate many techniques. This includes surveying your staff and setting clear AI goals for your team. You should also plan to manage internal resistance.
Partner With Next Quarter
If you’re considering improving your sales performance via AI, you need the best. We invented the first-ever AI-based account planning tool. As such, we have been using AI for years, long before it was popular and the trend of the moment. This experience explains why many Fortune 500 companies trust us. In addition, our years of experience allow us to learn your needs and help your business grow.
Ready to learn more? Contact our sales team today to see how Next Quarter can improve your sales performance and grow your bottom line.
