Most businesses face difficulties in two primary areas of sales – lead generation and lead management. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and data can assist in addressing both of these regular sales activities. In a recent webinar, Sanjit Singh, COO of Lead Crunch, and Daniel Sims, Product Evangelist at VanillaSoft, teamed up to discuss how to leverage the two to accelerate sales.
AI is becoming widely available. Consumers are now expecting personalization in everything from Facebook ads to Netflix recommendations. This expectation for personalization is all possible through data, which poses its own set of challenges.
Challenges of Data
Data is rapidly changing. Prospects are constantly moving along the sales cycle and keeping up with new developments can be challenging. When reviewing data, it’s important to question if it’s current and how complete it is. Data often does not show all companies in all industries. And sometimes it’s not categorized correctly either. These inaccuracies can significantly affect the analysis.
Then there’s the factor of whether the data is even factual. Depending on how the data was collected it may have been falsified deliberately or simply by mistake. If the data is obtained from a download, the form should be easy to understand to avoid any confusion on the part of the user.
When presented with a surplus of available information it’s important to be asking the right question – “What data do we need?” If you just dive into all available data without knowing what to look at, you’ll waste a lot of time and be thoroughly overwhelmed.
Fixing Data
By creating data attractors, businesses can look at more complete data, the fuller picture. A data attractor is any kind of download that requires an information trade for the download. It can be anything from a tool, a checklist, a whitepaper, etc. Then comes the task of connecting all the available data together.
Data analysis can be done manually or with the assistance of artificial intelligence. You should be looking for patterns, personas, segments and any insight you can distil. These models can then be used to prioritize targets, create new targets and score existing targets. It will also help in creating a snapshot of prospective companies to prepare the salesperson for contact.
“The purpose of using data is to dramatically reduce the number of targets you go after to the best ones, so you have time to set up the cases with personalization.”
Once you have the right data, it’s time to funnel it to your sales team. An artificial intelligence product, like VanillaSoft, can help to keep inside sales simple. The complexity of today’s sales workflow pales in comparison to the one from years past. The modern sales process requires advanced cadences and if/then workflows can greatly benefit inside sales reps on how they should react and move forward.
Benefits of Artificial Intelligence
TeleSmart.com says, “80% of the average sales rep’s day is spent on non-revenue generating activities, including not knowing where to find good prospects.” Tracking a sales workflow manually with a spreadsheet is irrational, today’s market requires automation. An automated system brings artificial intelligence into play by incorporating all the details and possibilities.
Today’s average salesperson only makes two attempts to reach a prospect, six attempts short of what it takes to get a response. Using artificial intelligence to do the thinking for your sales reps ensures each lead gets the attention it deserves. It also allows you to improve your strategy by collecting further data from prospects. When the data is collected, data labeling helps further analyze and identify it for training the ML model.
An advantage of artificial intelligence in the form of automation is to defeat the complexities of inside sales and keep it simple. Cadence, prioritization, qualifications, nurturing… all of this should be automated so the salesperson can avoid information overload and focus on what they need to do.
The ability to take information from a call and quickly analyze the data for improvements is a plus. Communicating in the sales world may be an art form, but with automation and AI businesses can pull science into the equation too. A/b testing can reveal what works best and executives can review communication data to detect bad habits that need to be eliminated as well as search for the positive elements that should be repeated. Each interaction can be fine-tuned for optimal results.
Learn more about how data and artificial intelligence can accelerate sales at your business in the webinar How to Leverage Artificial Intelligence and Data to Accelerate Sales. It’s time to modernize the transformation of leads into clients for greater efficiency.
