How Artificial Intelligence Benefits Sales and Marketing Teams?

Artificial Intelligence is making significant changes in every field. Whether it be Netflix suggesting shows for you to select between options or Instagram marketing algorithm recommending products to buy after analysing your feed. While some can claim that artificial intelligence is not taking over the tedious processes and making us more efficient. The Sales and Marketing departments would like to disagree.

From chatbots to sending automated emails, prospecting new customers or even retaining relationships with the old ones, AI has made the day-to-day lives of these departments far more productive.

We hear that sales and marketing have been impacted by AI, so let's take a closer look into the how.

“It’s going to be interesting to see how society deals with artificial intelligence, but it will definitely be cool.”

-Colin Angle

A.I. Impact on Sales and Marketing

1. Opportunities

Everyone who visits your website can be a potential customer. AI allows you to convert your websites into a lead generation source. If a visitor comes to the website, the chatbots will interact with the customers, guide them through the site, collect contact information, and even persuade them to subscribe to the newsletter.

Once they fill out forms and other information, the marketing teams can qualify the leads based on the data and even schedule meetings if they are interested in the product.

Information captured by the CRM will be used by the sales team for prospecting techniques. In addition, these real-time insights can give an overview of how the strategies are performing and what can be done to improve them.

AI can even predict the churn risk for every customer from their previous data. The churn rate is the rate of attrition. It determines the rate at which a customer would stop engaging in business with the company. Measuring the churn rate is an integral part of every business. You will be putting in time and resources to convert that lead into a paying customer.

2. Productivity

Selling products and services is not the only task the sales and the marketing teams have to finish. They have to do a lot of administrative work along with planning new strategies and marketing campaigns. It is a common myth that all salespeople do is focus on contacting people and selling services. But that is not the case. Surveys show that only 36 per cent of their time goes into the sales process. The rest of it is devoted to other tasks.

These departments have several manual tasks, which are often repetitive in nature. For example, sending emails and messages, updating customers' information in the system, concocting reports for the sales cycle, and analysing the campaigns and strategies. and staying ahead of all the new trends.

An AI-powered CRM will do all these tedious tasks and give the departments more time to sell and retain relationships with old customers. In the time being saved, they can scour for more leads. Moreover, they need not do administrative jobs as the CRM will automatically capture the data and sort it for them. In addition, the Optimiser provides in-built reports and real-time insights for the departments to analyse.

3. Personalisation

Platforms such as Netflix or Amazon, suggest shows or things to buy based on what you have seen and explored before. However, establishing trust is hard enough with prospects because they are sceptical of the solutions you offer. AI provides you with the chance to bridge the gap and spot leads that are more likely to be interested in your products.

It will give you suggestions on how to approach the leads and move them down the funnel.

Accurate segmentation allows hyper-personalisation that can close the deals faster. Marketing campaigns and cold emails can be sent to new leads to capture their attention.

4. Alignment between the Sales and Marketing

The sales cycle can be incredibly frustrating as the customer will move at their own pace. You cannot force them to make a decision at your disposition. When the departments work together to keep the deals moving across the sales cycle, information can be miscommunicated. This communication difference can cost the company revenue. More often than not, these two departments work together and have their fair share of conflicts. With AI, all the data is stored, and the team members will get notified whenever there is any change.

The time saved from doing the administrative tasks can discuss how the two departments can align their activities and usher the customers into the sales funnel.

5. Nurture Customers

Nurturing customers is an essential aspect of every business. Having a means that will keep automating the process of going through the customer journey, learning from AI suggestions for business, and even creating personalised campaigns from accurate segmentation. Tons of data will be processed and sorted, with the teams having to go through them personally. Reports will be dished out from time to time that can be used for research and analysis.

This can allow you to forge long-lasting relationships with customers as they like to communicate with companies that engage with them.

SUMMARY

One cannot deny that the advancement in the field of AI has numerous benefits stored. From its use in the medical industry to business, we interact with AI on a day-to-day basis. Knitting together the modern technologies strategically, AI has created a joint base for knowledge to further business operations.