AI in Sales Changes Everything

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Did you know that there are 261 individual sales funnel signals we can track from our prospects already? We can track our clients' whole customer journey from engagement created by awareness to conversion that turns into loyalty and even advocacy. The amount of data this process generates for every single prospect is so vast that even our best sales reps bend and crack under the pressure of making sense of it all. This article will give you a glimpse what the future holds for AI in sales.

AI in sales radically reshapes sales processes

In a very near future, many businesses will have to radically rethink their sales strategy solely based on the pressures from the competition enhanced by business AI. Businesses, where sales process can be automated, will be automated. If the sales process doesn't require complicated judgment, it will be automated, and it will happen sooner than you would expect.

Most of the changes towards complete automation will happen in companies where there are only few touch points with the customer. In practice, this means low ticket B2C products and services. B2B oriented organizations where sales is still a long process of negotiations and intuitive compromises between both parties, sales won't be automated, but instead, sales people will get augmented with artificial intelligence. We have already covered how AI augmented lawyers are shaping the legal profession in case you're interested.

Sales don't occur in a vacuum so when we evaluate how artificial intelligence will impact sales we have to look at the whole customer journey from awareness to advocacy.

Starting from the beginning of the journey

When a prospect hits your marketing message, there's already many variables in play. What was the context where the prospect experienced the message? Has she heard of your company before? Did she click the ad first time she saw it or on 15th time? Did the channel where she saw the message tie social context to the ad like telling her how many of her friends has liked you?

All this information is a relevant context for what should come next.

Lead pipeline of the future

The requirement of AI augmentation isn't driven by sales process itself but the ever-expanding lead pipeline data generation. As we discussed before, there are 261 signals we can track at the moment. All new leads will come in with at least 100 signals depending on the source and the length of the marketing funnel.

How can anybody, without the help of AI, process 100 signals into a cohesive, personalized sales strategy in the traditional time frame given to sales rep to process a potential lead? The answer is they can't and they shouldn't.

At the moment many companies are already putting their sales rep under this type of pressure. Their CRMs and digital advertising platforms are generating an insane amount of data which is dumped on the sales rep to process. Then the management is wondering in the board meetings why sales targets are off even there was a massive investment and push towards "digitalizing everything."

A human brain is capable of holding maximum seven things in the "working memory" at once. For most people, it's five. It is physically impossible for sales reps to synthesize all the data points from sales support systems, even if they are crunched into summaries or profiles.

Prospect reports and profiles are helpful, but they don't help busy sales rep as much as you would think. If you have ever done sales where most of the leads don't pan out you understand what I'm hinting at. Prospect reports and profiles give the sales rep a quick, superficial glance who the person was who initiated the contact but profiles rarely give sales rep the information she needs to perform better and create more sales.

What she is looking for is a personalized sales strategy based on the company and who she is likely to meet there. If the meeting is initiated by a project manager and she finds herself sitting with the manager and vice president, she needs to adjust her presentation to fit the vice president's aspirations. AI can easily find a probability of who will attend the meeting by analyzing primary contact's previous new connections from Linkedin, then analyzing who of the new connections are similar to the sales rep and then finding out who else those new connections "friended" from the target company at the same time. Of course, this isn't bulletproof, but it does offer an edge against the competition.

AI controlled sales strategy

The easiest way to benefit from artificial intelligence in sales is to allow it to take control of the sales strategy adjusting with every new piece of data it gathers. As discussed before, executing a complex sales strategy with personal meetings is still very much in the human realm so where sales rep need the most help is to find the correct, always up-to-date plan based on the behavior of the prospect.

Does your working memory still have the number of the marketing funnel signals?

You can expect the number of signals to grow exponentially when we start applying AI to analyze sales rep's performance and more importantly, prospect's behavior. We have already written about a startup called Chorus.ai that has developed an artificial intelligence capable of analyzing sales meetings and calls. The amount of data increases exponentially when we first enrich behavior data by monitoring people who are likely to influence prospect's behavior and then factor in prospect's company's performance data and overall market situation.

All this aims to help AI augmented sales reps to focus purely on the prospect while AI does the heavy lifting to find out how she can best create better deals for all parties involved.

Sales abortion and ROI

One interesting addition to most businesses is the intelligent abortion of the sales process. Unlike a sales rep, AI will be in a constant contact will all the data related to all internal and external business processes. This means that AI will be able to forecast the ROI of the sale in real-time, and if numbers don't match, it can craft an exit strategy for the sales rep that will make aborting the deal comfortable for both parties.

Don't be surprised if in the near future your vendor will increase prices during negotiations based on AI forecasting a large price increase in vendor's supply chain due to potential natural disaster in the particular region of the world where vendor's suppliers' factories are located. This might sound like a science fiction, but in fact, this is already possible and happening. AI will make it so easy and affordable that all businesses can benefit.

Achieving the holy grail of customer acquisition

Another advantage of letting AI handle the whole customer journey is the seamless integration and iteration with the marketing side of the funnel. Most businesses haven't found any sustainable way to merge the data gathered from the sales process to the marketing. When the whole process is controlled by an AI with human supervision, new insights from the field are easily integrated into marketing. This could be matching marketing message to actual expectations of the prospect or where and how to display advertisements.

Interestingly a genuine integration between marketing and sales will cause indirect pressure for advertising platforms. Many platforms which are now successful due having a lot of eyeballs will face a sudden loss of advertisers if their advertising platform doesn't provide enough targeting flexibility or their overall user base are not converting for the advertisers.

Waving goodbye to manipulative closing

Closing as most sales-oriented people know it today will cease to exist because AI will either terminate the sales process before closing is ever attempted or in the traditional point of the sales process where closing would occur, AI has matched prospect's needs so well that the prospect closes herself.

As a side-note, it would be naive to think that only sales reps will be augmented. Professional buyers will be AI augmented as well. This will cause more pressure on the selling company to have a great public image and a delivery history that signals reliable partner. If you would like to read about how AI will change the buying process, leave us a comment on Twitter or Facebook.

Are we there yet?

Everything I've described above is already being worked on, and most of it exists in some form because most of it is not really AI, it's simple statistics and number crunching. The challenge to accomplish proper AI in sales is distribution and integration of legacy systems.

Currently, marketing and sales departments are facing challenges with poorly integrated systems that each tries to lock them into their own ecosystem. It doesn't help that even though customers are demanding more integration between advertising, marketing, and CRM systems, vendors are responding by trying to expand their own platform to cater all needs instead of building value with the whole ecosystem.

Based on the recent ad/mar/sales tech vendor behavior I don't see a quick ready-to-deploy solution from any of the existing vendors. Luckily most of the platforms provide APIs which means that companies can create their own integrations. We are at the situation where "you make your own luck." If you are interested to know how to take things forward, send us a message and let's see what we can do.

For those willing to risk it and wait, there are many startups already launching or launching soon who are actively working on the problem. I have no estimations where these solutions are ready for production use. If your company has a solution that could help businesses to achieve some of these goals highlighted in the post, let me know.

Sales in the future will be very interesting field because it combines mechanical number crunching, which is computers' bread and butter, with a requirement to understand human psychology which is the challenge AI industry aims to crack.

Original post: AI in Sales Changes Everything at AI in Companies - Machian Future