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Houston, we have a problem. It’s your sales team calling, and they are feeling frustrated. They need access to data that can help them clearly hear the voice of the customer so they can personalize sales strategies to drive conversions and competitive advantage. The problem is they don’t think the data you currently have is helping them achieve that goal.
Findings from a 2023 Salesforce survey underscore that your sales team is not alone. Nearly half (47%) of the sales professionals surveyed reported that they were not satisfied with the use of company data for personalization.
If you’re looking for a solution to help you build more complete views of your customers so you can sell to them better and enhance your bottom line, then look to artificial intelligence (AI). The right AI tools can create a lot of upside for sales teams, and this post outlines why.
Whether sales agents are paid solely on commission or receive a base salary plus commission, they want to do one thing: sell.
Sales agents in industries like automotive sales, insurance, and financial services receive base salaries but can earn an average of 32.5% more from sales commissions. That’s an extra $20,000 to $30,000 per year.
Here are four ways using AI for sales can help sales pros increase their chances of earning healthy commissions while boosting your company’s revenues.
Any efficiency improvement, however small, allows sales teams to manage more leads and close deals faster. And research from global consulting firm McKinsey shows that sales organizations embracing AI can increase their company’s revenues by 3% to 15% and see a sales ROI uplift of 10% to 20%.
AI can automate time-consuming, routine tasks because it can sort data quickly and be trained to learn processes. McKinsey estimates that 20% of a sales agent’s job could be automated using AI. That includes mundane duties like drafting and sending prospecting outreach emails, lead identification and qualification, and updating spreadsheets. Remove those tasks, and agents are free to focus more on the customer experience … and selling!
AI can do more than sort large datasets quickly. For one, it analyzes data far faster than any human can. That means it can provide data-driven insights as consumer trends evolve rather than after they’ve already changed. As a result, sales teams can make more informed decisions and be far more strategic in their approach to engaging with customers.
Let’s suppose your sales team’s pipeline is full of leads. It might take your sales team days to prioritize those leads and winnow out the time-wasters. AI can complete that assignment in just a few hours or less by scoring leads based on clicks, page visits, forms submitted, and other online data.
If you’re using a revenue execution platform like Invoca and including voice of the customer data from phone calls in your analysis, the AI can scan both online and offline data to provide a complete picture of the customer along with pinpointed lead scoring.
AI can also improve decision-making by using predictive analytics on sales data to forecast future sales and help your sales team allocate resources more effectively.
Being able to tap into large datasets and emerge with quick and accurate insights into customer behavior and preferences also enables sales teams to personalize outreach and interactions with greater confidence. Getting personalization right helps enhance customer satisfaction, elevate customer engagement, and boost conversion rates.
Here’s just one example of how AI can increase customer engagement: Invoca’s revenue execution platform includes AI tools like PreSense, which uses the customer’s pre-call digital journey to route incoming calls to the right sales agent rather than transferring the caller multiple times. The AI’s ability to analyze customer data in real time also provides the agent with a personalization package, including the caller’s name and why they might be calling, so that they may fully engage the customer at the outset of the call.
AI tools provide a big lift for sales teams across the board. Greater efficiency, improved decision-making, and enhanced customer engagement all lead to a more effective sales team. AI helps streamline workflows, giving sales agents more time to spend on nurturing leads rather than finding and qualifying them.
Ultimately, if your sales team is saddled with less “busy work” but equipped with more accurate forecasting, they can focus fully on succeeding in the business of sales, which drives revenue for your company — and helps your reps earn higher rewards for themselves.
So, let’s drill down further and look at some of the top AI tools for sales teams and their applications for the sales organization.
Call scoring is an integral part of the sales process. How else can sales agents learn how to be better salespeople unless there is a solid quality assurance (QA) program in place? QA helps sales managers see what’s working and what’s not. It also lets agents benchmark their performance to see where and how they can step up their performance.
Call scoring used to be a routine, highly subjective, and time-consuming task when handled manually. With AI tools like Invoca, call scoring is fast, accurate, objective, and complete. Invoca’s QA software uses AI and automation to review data from 100% of calls. It can mark sales agent performance against a standardized scorecard to provide immediate QA that informs managers and can be used to refine in-house coaching programs.
Agents can also use Invoca’s call scoring and reporting to refine their scripts, adjust strategies, and develop greater rapport with customers.
AI can also be used to score and qualify leads, sifting through huge data volumes to determine which leads are likeliest to convert. Prioritizing leads with the highest potential keeps the sales team focused and reduces the time it takes to convert those promising leads.
HubSpot Sales Hub is an example of a tool that offers sales teams “quality over quantity” by automating lead scoring and prioritizing high-potential leads so sales agents don’t have to do it.
AI can sift through years of sales data, as well as incorporate real-time data, to provide managers with more accurate sales forecasting and revenue projections. And if sales managers feel confident about their sales projections, they’ll have an easier time motivating sales teams to do what it takes to deliver those wins.
Using artificial intelligence to identify trends in sales and revenue data also extends to revenue intelligence, which detects risks and opportunities in the sales pipeline. For example, if data analysis shows a purchase date is delayed by several customers within the same short time window, is that a sign a competitor has reached out to them with a sweeter offer?
AI’s ability to handle many routine but crucial tasks for sales teams at scale can set the stage for increased personalization throughout the customer journey, which helps drive engagement and conversion rates. This extends from email outreach, where automation can assist sales in drafting and distributing campaigns, to touchpoints like answering a customer’s phone call.
Intelligent call routing (ICR) delivers callers to the right agent at the first time of asking. AI analyzes the pre-call digital journey for signs of intent. So, if a caller to a travel agency was on a sign-up page for a Mediterranean cruise before picking up the phone, the call can be routed to an agent specializing in cruises — or even Mediterranean cruises.
AI tools like Invoca’s PreSense take personalization even further by delivering additional details an agent can use to deliver a positive customer experience. For example, if the aforementioned caller had been looking online at a particular type of cabin on the Mediterranean cruise, the AI would indicate this to the agent in a pop-up window.
Follow-ups, CRM updates, and scheduling — these are just some of the tedious but necessary tasks assigned to sales teams that take them away from selling.
AI tools like Outreach automate these repetitive tasks and streamline sales team workflows, taking a huge load off your reps and freeing them to focus on what they do best: nurturing relationships and closing deals.
AI tools like Salesforce Sales Cloud and AgentForce provide visibility into the sales pipeline, tracking deal stages and identifying bottlenecks. Your sales team can address and remove these bottlenecks, but they don’t have to do it on their own. AgentForce creates autonomous virtual agents who can assist your team or customers 24/7.
AI learns from experience and can recommend actions to your sales team that can keep deals moving steadily (or even swiftly) through the sales funnel. It can even use predictive analysis to provide insights into what may happen further in the cycle, giving your agents an opportunity to optimize the entire sales process.
Customer segmentation is a time-consuming process when handled manually. With tools like Blastpoint and Optimove, your sales and marketing teams can use AI to quickly deliver detailed customer segmentation insights for more effective targeting and customer outreach.
AI tools can accurately segment customers based on parameters like behavior, demographics, and purchasing patterns and create buyer personas using that data. Your teams can then use these custom personas to create strategies tailored to improve engagement and boost conversion rates.
You can also use data from sales calls gathered from AI-driven conversation intelligence tools like Invoca to bolster online data and refine customer segmentation. The more data at your fingertips, the more AI can help you understand your customers’ needs.
Another task AI can easily handle for your sales organization is wading through thousands upon thousands of words from phone calls with customers and prospects to find common threads and weave them into actionable insights.
For example, you can train conversation analytics tools like Invoca to highlight common objections brought up by customers on calls with your sales agents. If several customers indicate your product is too expensive, it might be an opportunity to change the sales script to emphasize the additional value they get from your product that competitors can’t deliver.
The beauty of AI is that it can pick up and analyze customer sentiments in real time, so sales agents can adjust strategies on the fly and increase their chances of closing a sale.
Sold on AI for sales? OK! Here’s how to integrate these tools into your sales process.
Don’t go all-in. AI is a quick learner, but we humans need to get comfortable partnering with it in our everyday work. Start small by using AI to address a single pain point. If you are having trouble with lead scoring, for example, then find an AI tool to address that issue and work on it.
As your team becomes more comfortable training and using AI tools, and they start seeing good results from those efforts, that’s the time to scale up by addressing other pain points or focusing on processes that may be undermining sales productivity.
Make sure the AI tools you select integrate easily with your existing systems, like your CRM solution, so that data flows smoothly.
If you don’t already have it, create a culture where data is shared, and everyone knows that regular updates to customer data and the CRM are the order of the day. AI won’t be as effective if your data is old, has holes in it, or is duplicative. It certainly won’t help if your business is siloed, and marketing and sales don’t share data.
Also, make a point to capture data from as many relevant sources as possible to develop a full picture of customer needs, preferences, and behavior. For instance, you can complement online customer data with data from phone conversations using AI-driven conversation analytics software like Invoca.
As is the case with any new technology you introduce into your business, AI tools come with an initial learning curve for users. Make sure your entire sales team receives comprehensive training so that they understand how to use these tools effectively in their daily work.
You can make training more interesting for your reps by introducing elements of gamification or creating competitions to come up with the most creative ways of using AI in the sales organization. Also, provide continuous support to your teams to ensure they are using the tools correctly. AI is advancing every day, so ongoing training is essential.
We encouraged you to start small and scale up with AI for another reason: to help you avoid selecting AI tools that aren’t designed to meet your primary business goals, or solutions that address several pain points but also come with features you’ll pay for but likely never use.
That said, you should consider investing in powerful tools that can benefit more than one part of your business, like Invoca. We’re talking about AI for sales in this post, but Invoca can also provide a single source of truth for your marketing team as well as help your contact center agents provide seamless customer experiences.
And finally, be sure to measure performance to make sure AI is really moving the needle for your sales team, or whatever other function it is helping to support. Are conversions moving higher? Is productivity increasing? Are you getting higher-quality leads into the sales funnel? If you aren’t seeing the results you want or expect, why continue the investment?
Equipping your sales team with AI capabilities is a big decision, but in an increasingly AI-driven world, it’s becoming a necessary one for sales team leaders.
Implementing Invoca’s revenue execution software is one way to bring sales and AI together to drive bottom-line results. Our AI bridges the gap between a customer’s online and offline journey by providing valuable data from an often overlooked source: customer phone calls.
You can use Invoca’s AI to analyze phone conversation data and get actionable insights to inform your sales strategy, create hyper-personalized outreach to boost customer engagement, slice, dice, and segment your customers to pinpoint accurate customer personas, smooth the customer journey with tools like ICR and PreSense, and much more.
If you’d like to learn more about how AI tools can help you boost sales performance and revenue, check out these resources from Invoca:
To explore how Invoca’s AI-driven tools can help your sales team deliver more sales and increase revenue, contact us today for a customized demo.
