AI — an important part of the sales process and the sales journey helps to optimize the process and saves your time by letting you take data-driven decisions quickly. In so many ways, AI makes the job easier. Let’s take a look at what a sales process is and how AI can optimize the sales process.
What is a sales process?
A sales process is defined as a set of predefined steps that the sales team follows to complete a sales journey with the prospect. The sales journey starts from the awareness stage and ends at the buying stage. In all, it has 5-7 stages which are:
- Prospecting
- Preparation
- Approach
- Presentation
- Handling objections
- Closing
- Follow-up
Sales process is a customer journey which should not be confused with a sales funnel.
A sales funnel is making a list of all the sales activities and conversations that happened between a sales rep and customers using the most powerful sales words which convert based on the data generated by AI. It’s like a hypothetical illustrated customer journey towards a sales process.
The sales team knows that it’s the same process. Still, they don’t create any outline or lay down the steps which salespeople have to do on their own accord. However, creating a standardized sales reporting and analysis process always helps and which can be easily done so with the help of AI. Let’s see how else AI can optimize the selling process.
AI saves up your time by letting you set your prioritizes
Sales reps need a lot of time to sell products but their time is often divided by doing other things. Usually, these tasks are admin related and time-consuming like entering data into CRM which is often repetitive. By using AI in their work, the sales team can be more productive. AI can easily handle repetitive, time-consuming and manual work which saves sales reps lots of time and reduces sales churn rate.
AI helps in improving customer engagement
AI offers different tools that lets you take a look into the customer insights and data to better understand your customers’ needs. Before selling anything to a prospect, it’s important to understand what they need and what they don’t. Try to get a complete 360 degree view of the prospect, their pain points, solution they need and how they engage with your company. Knowing all these things will help you to serve and interact with them better. While diving deeper into the customer insights, you can sort and prioritize your leadsfocsing on the more promising ones.
AI Enables Intelligent Price Optimization
According to McKinsey Research, price optimization alone can improve return on sales by 4 – 10%. Setting out the right rate can be a complex process as it has many moving parts that are interrelated. Creating the variable quotes with different pricing structures often needs a skill of higher value. However, AI can help the sales team produce variable quotes with appropriate pricing structures. The AI-based software takes different factors in mind, like the time of quote, client’s annual revenue, number of competitors and any other factor that can affect the pricing module.
Helps in getting more quality leads
Telling which leads are the right fit and which are not is collectively decided by both the marketing and sales team. Similarly, it goes for account scoring as well. Lead scoring helps in deciding many decisions revolving around sales like, how much effort, time and which medium should be used to convert those leads into customers.
Generally, lead scoring works on a certain criteria: if a prospect engages regularly, the lead is known as a “hot lead”. The category is based on the business’s experience. Still, social media, web and digitization have given an abundance of data, engagement opportunities and customer behavior contributing to lead scoring. In this case, traditional lead scoring will not work well.
AI can collect and evaluate those data, prioritize resources according to these leads and recommend actions for conversion, follow up or giving time in nurturing. Hence, the marketing and sales team can focus their attention on converting those leads into customers. AI-based software can also find out dormant leads and alert the team members so that they can actively work on them.
AI lets you provide better coaching
Sales members should know what they have to do next in the sales journey, what steps they should take, how to talk with prospects, etc., then they no longer have to spend most of their time just talking about the sales deals. Then, it’s the time to take action. But in order to do so, you have to coach your team members with adequate tools, resources, provide them with important information and give them real-life training. This can be achieved by AI itself. They can help in offering effective sales training to provide better sales outcomes. The training programs can be personalized for every sales member that aligns better with their sales process.
Conclusion
AI has helped us in every field of life. It has played it’s significant role in the sales department as well. Teams are using AI to streamline their process, make better decisions and provide more personalized experiences.
