#AI is Transforming Sales for Good, Forever.

Yaagneshwaran Ganesh, Director of #Marketing at Fiind, sheds light on how AI can be an instrumental tool for sales professionals

As we have seen historically, the market has continuously either created buzzwords or latched onto newly created buzzwords. And then some have challenged these buzzwords for its worth. One such buzzword in the recent past has been “digital transformation”.

Everybody has been talking about it – but what does it really mean? Does it mean “digital” is at the heart of every business? Yes, maybe to an extent but what we would like to think is that it is another term for business transformation which needs to continually innovate and adapt according to the changing consumer behavior. Today #AI is helping you, do it on scale – the transformation is here.

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Knowledge alone is no more power

Knowing your customer is a continuous process and is crucial, no doubt. But knowledge alone is not enough anymore. Application of knowledge is power . Especially if you are into sales, your success is directly proportional to your right pitch at the right time to the right customer. This is where artificial intelligence is changing the game.

In fact, it dates back to the story that initiated us at Fiind Inc., to build our AI platform. It was an idea in the moment, when one of our founders was visiting a restaurant in Seattle, and happened to see that certain customers preferred specific waiters majorly because; those waiters knew deeply about each ingredient that went into the delicacies on the menu and what their customers liked most, over a time period. That led to the thought of using AI and machine learning to empower the global marketing and sales fraternity in finding the right customer at the right time with the right pitch.

AI is changing marketing and sales

You might state that #CRMs, marketing automation tools, and analytical tools have been there to not only empower marketers and sales folks and also execute campaigns. But if you look closely, it has still been a hit or misses all these years. You might run campaigns to reach out to all the prospects in your CRM and also use marketing automation to nurture, but very few converts to sales and long-term relationships.

This is where AI changes the game. It can give you a dynamic 360-degree insight into each account in your CRM from both your internal and external environment. With that kind of information, you can not only plan your account based marketing and sales but also keep it dynamic, i.e., adjust your execution even if there’s a leadership change at your target account at the last minute. You exactly know what to say, when and why. Sell based on your customers' context as opposed to taking a generic sales pitch across your database.

Bring in the context, adapt now.

Further AI helps you in segmenting your customers and prospects based on their propensity to buy, their intent, product-fit, where they are in the buying cycle and more . This means, you know which are the customers to act upon now, which are the ones to nurture and so on. In other words, you spend your time only on the accounts that matter and maximize your productivity.

One of our customers in the Silicon Valley used our customer intelligence platform to level the ground for sales people within their company. He used our engine specifically to ensure that the new sales recruits get up to speed very quickly.

So, he went to the core of the problem –

He identified that the difference between the best and other sales folks was how well they understood their customers and how tuned their sales pitch was. He used the tool to make sure that every salesperson got a clear and decisive signal of what their customers were up to. In fact, he made sure that his team could hyper segment their customer list based on their immediate propensity to buy. The icing on the cake was the fact that he made sure this leveling the ground using AI sensors, also resulted in a hyper-personalized 1:1 resonating pitch than a generic email blast or a generic script.

Do not completely automate, augment it.

To sum up, let’s also be practical. Do not fully automate anything. Augment the available intelligence but master the available technology than to miss out, because eventually, everyone is getting there. Be the one to lead before AI becomes the status quo.

Hope it makes sense, let me know what you think.