How AI Is Changing Sales
Companies are using AI in all kinds of innovative ways to advance their businesses. If you’ve ever searched Netflix to watch a movie, AI (a recommendation algorithm) was no doubt used in your decision about what to watch. If you’ve shopped on Amazon, your decision about what to buy was also influenced by AI (via an association algorithm). If you’ve ever ordered an Uber, AI (a location algorithm) was used to have a car in your vicinity quickly. If you ever had a thought about a product or a vacation, and it seemed to suddenly pop up on your search page or in your email inbox, I can assure you it was based on AI (a classification algorithm) monitoring your online activity.
These same types of AI algorithms can be used to power any company’s decision-making process, helping you make better business predictions. Based on research for my book Sales Ex Machina: How Artificial Intelligence is Changing the World of Selling, here are five specific areas where AI algorithms can be leveraged to help your business grow by helping your sales team sell more:
Price Optimization: Knowing what discount, if any, to give a client is always a tricky situation. You want to win the deal, but at the same time you don’t want to leave money on the table. Today, an AI algorithm could tell you what the ideal discount rate should be for a proposal to ensure that you’re most likely to win the deal by looking at specific features of each past deal that was won or lost. Features could include: size of the deal in terms of dollar amount, product specification compliance, number of competitors, company size, territory/region, client’s industry, client’s annual revenues, public or private company, level of decision-makers (influencers) involved, timing (e.g., Q2 vs Q4), new or existing client, etc.
Forecasting: Sales managers face the daunting challenge of trying to predict where their team’s total sales numbers will fall each quarter. Using an AI algorithm, managers are now able to predict with a high degree of accuracy next quarter’s revenue, which in turn would help a company, from an operations standpoint, to better manage inventory and resources.
Upselling and Cross-Selling: The fastest and most economical way to grow your top-line revenue is to sell more to your existing client base. But the million dollar question is, who is more likely to buy more? You can spend a lot of money on marketing to those who won’t buy, or you can use an AI algorithm to help identify which of your existing clients are more likely to buy a better version of what they currently own (up-sell) and/or which are most likely to want a new product offering altogether (cross-sell). The net effect is an increase in revenue and a drop in marketing costs.
Lead Scoring: A salesperson with a rich pipeline of qualified potential clients has to make decisions on a daily, or even hourly, basis as to where to focus their time when it comes to closing deals to hit their monthly or quarterly quota.
