By Venkat Malladi, Co-founder and CTO, Vymo Technologies
Before we leap into the future, let’s go back to the basics. The seven parts of a sales lifecycle are prospecting, making contact, lead qualification, lead nurturing, proposal, discussions and negotiations, and lastly conversion. Sellers go through this journey with every lead and we all know how rocky and challenging the actual cycle is.
CRMs were introduced to accelerate the sales lifecycle and help the seller. And help sellers with a centralized data repository, better lead management, streamlined processes, structured activity and task management, reporting and to an extent analytics. Although the CRM is ubiquitous to a sales hierarchy today -- we know that it is largely disliked by sellers and hardly used.
The quest now is to increase CRM adoption among sellers. Making the tool intuitive and easy to use, mobile-first and a single interface vis-a-vis the multitude of systems sellers need to access are top of mind challenges that sales teams are looking to solve to make this happen.
Here is where cloud-based sales engagement tools and platforms are raising adoption numbers. These tools provide an app-based, unified experience, remove the need to toggle between systems, retrieve data from CRMs and give it to sales teams as nugget-based insights, and capture activities easily allowing them to close their daily targets faster, and improving their daily productivity.
So far. So good.
Can sales performance be boosted further? What can sellers look forward to in the coming decade? Tools that can navigate a seller from prospecting to conversion via a least resistance path with intelligent interventions? Playbooks that can pinpoint sellers to best actions that steer towards conversion? Technology that can understand a lead status and tell the salesperson exactly what to do based on another seller’s recent experience?
The need for such intuitive technology coupled with Generative AI is just the turning point sales teams need towards the future.
Here are four ways AI tools can help sales transform the way they work in the coming decade.
- Sharp Solution Building - It is almost like you can read the customer’s mind! Beyond relying on historical data that an organization has, generative AI can help analyze real-time customer conversations and enrich existing customer information. Such thriving data thanks to AI and ML can help sales teams design products and solutions that are bespoke and personalized. Not only this, with such deep customer insights, AI opens up the potential of cross-sell and upsell opportunities helping sales teams do a lot more with the data on hand.
- Heightened efficiency of day to day working - Imagine a Donna Paulson (of Suits) to help your sellers through the day! With effective use of AI, tools can track activities, help with daily planning, take notes and remind sellers on their meetings, a quick update before a meeting, the best solution to pitch based on customer profile and explain the next best steps.
- Transformative Training and Onboarding - Sales training is a high priority across industries. For example, in the Insurance industry, attrition is a significant problem. 89% of agents quit within the first three years of joining. And coupled with this is the retirement of baby boomers - seasoned agents who have a wealth of knowledge. So the insurance agency is looking hard at two things:
- How do I train new recruits faster so they start selling as soon as possible?
- How do I retain the rich knowledge that a tenured agent has, to pass on to the new recruits, younger workforce?
AI can prove to be quite a lever here. It is possible to analyze seller behavior and performance across thousands of salespeople to understand best behavior and practices. This becomes a rich source of learning and can be built into effective training programs for sales, empowering them to get on the ground faster. And intervene with tailored lessons as they need support on the ground. Likewise, AI can encapsulate best behaviors of senior sellers and guide the newer teams to mirror this behavior.
- Better Sales Leadership: Rich, real-time information on sales team performance, and customer profiles can help leaders get both wider and deeper visibility into engagement and gaps. It is almost like gazing into a crystal ball. But this is no magic - it is technology. Such clarity can help leaders rework on strategy, intervene and coach as appropriate and ensure that both seller and customer engagement is optimum.
It is a great time to start exploring AI and ML in sales technology. As customer profiles evolve, sellers should up their game by understanding customers better than ever. AI provides the means.
