Sales is hard. Think of all the conversations you need to have, the metrics to track, and quotas to crush. And still, conversion rates can be low, and sales cycles can be long.
So, how can you improve? How can you sell more and sell faster? How do you save your time and effort while also maximizing the value gained from your sales processes?
Well, for starters, you need to take an objective look at your approach to sales and see where you’re going wrong. Perhaps you’re still relying on a traditional approach to managing sales and sales reps. Maybe it’s the inertia or lack of knowledge - but it's tough for sales teams to move past the sales methods of the days gone by.
The fact is that we live in a highly automated world. From playlists curated to our taste to notifications when our favorite restaurant has a discount, suggestions of the next books we should read to the places nearest to us that we must visit - all of it is possible with automation and artificial intelligence working at the back-end, in real-time, in one form or another. And it is all quite impressive, right?
Imagine this same awesomeness of automation and AI working alongside your sales team. The thing is - you don’t need to imagine anymore. Leading SaaS businesses have already shifted to AI-enabled sales assistants, and businesses around the globe are still catching up.
Here are ten reasons why the most efficient businesses have shifted to the frictionless world of AI sales assistants and why you, too, need to do it today!
1. Enable proactiveness, not reactiveness
AI-enabled solutions empower you to be more responsive than is humanly possible. By working closely with your entire sales cycle, AI-enabled assistants collect important data, track your sales communications, and understand user interactions to make informed predictions.
Let’s assume that you have an AI-enabled sales assistant that can understand conversations. In that case, you will be able to predict what your prospects are seeking just by observing and analyzing their interactions. You will be able to answer your customers’ questions even before they know what to ask. That way, you will be more proactive towards customer problems and not reactive.
AI assistants can monitor user activity and look for indicators that are important to understand your customers’ sentiments. That way, you get a chance to tweak things as needed to set them straight. For example, if your sales reps spend a lot of time talking and less time listening when communicating with your prospects, that might be a red flag. An AI-enabled virtual assistant can raise alerts and notifications whenever such red flags are encountered, in real-time, allowing you to be proactive and improve customer experience on the go.
2. Utilize social media messaging platforms
Thanks to the various social media messaging platforms available today, communication has become simpler. The number of people using these apps to communicate has undoubtedly increased over the years. Individuals are using these messaging platforms to not only communicate with friends and make acquaintances but also to interact with brands.
This creates the perfect space for businesses looking to improve their customer service. Businesses can design new revenue streams using customized, real-time customer service bots within these social messaging applications. This will make it easier for your customers and prospects to reach out to you with just a few taps.
At the time of writing this article, there were more than 300,000 active chatbots on Facebook alone - imagine the opportunity this holds for your brand. Chatbots enabled by conversational AI can help you cater to your prospect’s questions and capture leads that come to your websites. You can further leverage automated workflows using sales enablement platforms such as Hubspot to assign those leads to your sales reps.
3. Simplify sales training and onboarding
On average, it costs $3000 or more to hire a sales service agent, and this cost is appended with an additional ~$4000 that goes into their training. Clearly, this is a costly affair, and what makes it more challenging is that these costs can quickly scale in case of staff attrition, which is a major challenge for sales teams.
With AI-enabled virtual sales assistants (like Clari Copilot), you can empower your sales reps with end-to-end training when they are on live calls, or analyzing their call recordings later. A constantly-evolving virtual sales assistant can help turbocharge asynchronous sales training and onboarding for your existing sales reps and new hires in the following ways:
- On the basis of specific sales metrics such as talk : listen ratio and sales call duration, your virtual assistant helps you identify the best sales call recordings of the star performers on your team.
- It provides a quick, click-based approach to navigate the call recording, get to the critical sections, and bookmark certain moments that you would like to revisit.
- By leveraging the keyword-based search option of the virtual sales assistant, you can go through the best approaches to tackle common sales objections that the top performers have used with prospects.
4. Provide round-the-clock customer support
Automated solutions are not constrained by public holidays and time zones and are a lot more flexible when delivering round-the-clock customer support. This helps your sales teams resolve inquiries in real-time and enhance your customers’ experience.
Such an always-active approach to customer support ensures that your customers are happy, with their needs met and queries resolved. This directly influences customer satisfaction and churn - and also shows how deeply you care about quickly solving your customers’ problems. All of this aids in improving your brand reputation, trust, and customer loyalty.
5. Improve brand reliability
Sales service powered by virtual, AI-enabled assistants provides a level of reliability that wasn’t humanly possible. AI-powered sales assistants are free from biases and afflictions that generally creep up in human interactions and take things south. They are designed to be objective in their approach and can be used to escalate queries or issues to managers in difficult questions. All of this helps in building a sales ecosystem that is extremely reliable, free from vulnerabilities, and as efficient as possible.
According to a study by Zendesk, most customers continue purchasing and engaging with a brand that has provided them with good customer support. On the other hand, around 60% of people stopped engaging with a brand after one bad customer support interaction. With an AI-sales assistant, you get a chance to keep your customer support reliable and efficient. The best part about virtual sales assistants is that they resolve queries in real-time. In case of queries they can’t resolve - they quickly escalate the matter to the supervisor. That way, important queries get the attention they deserve and need, while the regular query resolution is automated - saving a lot of time in the process.
6. Cut costs while being innovative
New technologies are known for improving legacy processes and delivering efficient solutions. The same is the case with AI-enabled virtual assistants for your sales cycle. A simple example of this can be seen in the form of call computerization solutions. These combine the power of speech recognition and machine learning to improve legacy IVR systems, and have been shown to cut costs drastically, when compared to traditional methods.
7. Resolve issues or respond to queries quickly
Nobody likes to wait for answers - especially in today’s age of instant gratification. This is even more true for questions that are pretty straightforward, and answering them should not take time. Customers are bound to get frustrated if they reach out to your support team and are constantly kept on hold or asked to wait.
AI-enabled virtual sales assistants can help you nip this problem in the bud. Virtual assistants empower your process with automation - which lets you quickly respond to user queries and provide instant solutions. This gives your human sales reps and your sales team much more time to focus on important and more result-oriented tasks.
8. Empower customers with a self-service option
Customer-brand interactions have evolved drastically over the last couple of decades. No longer are the interactions formal and restricted to one platform. Today, with a multi-channel presence, brands and customers have many options to get their voices heard and communicate with each other.
One of the results of this evolution has been people preferring to avoid human interaction as much as possible for customer support. A recent study revealed that 70% of millennials prefer self-service over talking to a human agent to resolve their queries. They don’t like making phone calls!
The upcoming customers are going to be even more tech-savvy. These digital natives prefer solving their problems by turning to FAQs, forums, etc. With AI-enabled sales assistants, you can simplify their lives and build strong relationships. Automated customer support is crucial in these times to provide digital-only, human-free interactions. These algorithm-based solutions empower your customers to take query resolution into their own hands, all the while backing them and being there for all kinds of support!
9. Personalize as much as you can, and some more
AI-enabled assistants analyze all the data you have - including real-time data streams and legacy data. This data can also deliver an unparalleled level of personalization to your customers throughout their customer journey. There is no limit to personalization, and it can range from simple, personalized product recommendations to real-time website design tailored to the reader’s browsing habits.
Any approach to personalization that you take will make your customers feel more connected to your brand, which directly improves conversion rates, customer satisfaction, and repeat interactions. AI and automation, together, can help you achieve all of this and more - by mining the power hidden in your business data.
10. Keep things scalable and efficient
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, hiring and training are difficult! Sales teams often face challenges when they have to tackle 10x the requirements and aren’t able to scale quickly. The challenges are understandable. After all, it’s not just hiring, training, and getting the new people up to speed with all of your business processes. There is a lot of room for errors in this approach, and we should look for something better.
AI sales assistants are an ideal solution to tackle this problem. Your business gets the chance to scale like never before. With AI-enabled assistants and conversational chatbots that continuously learn from all the interactions, you can transform your sales processes and achieve shorter sales cycles. You can simplify onboarding of sales reps using AI assistant and keep it more objective and standardized. That way, hiring, coaching, and training your sales team becomes much more data-driven, quick, and streamlined.
Prepare for a better tomorrow - with a smarter today!
The sooner you welcome AI-based sales assistants, the faster you will reap the benefits. These benefits aren't isolated and independent in any way.they are all highly interconnected, influence one another, and provide compounded results to you in the long run.
Let’s get you those results with Clari Copilot!
Simplify your sales process and achieve shorter sales cycles with Clari Copilot - your conversation intelligence platform. The tool analyzes all of your big data from different sources, including CRM, finds patterns, and delivers actionable insights to optimize your sales processes. Further, it provides real-time support and assistance by raising alerts and notifications whenever required. Clari Copilot performs natural language processing to figure out when things are going wrong with a salesperson’s communication and raises alarms to correct things in real-time. Check out our demo and experience the transformational advantages of AI in your sales!