The Ultimate Guide to Leveraging AI for Your Selling Engine

AI has proven to be more than a gimmick. These artificial intelligence tools are commonly integrated into businesses across the world. Yet not all AI applications result in increased productivity or hyper-efficiency. Not every company that turns to AI Seeks to Serve? their buyer for the better.

But leading B2B organizations have figured out how to incorporate AI tools into their selling engines to make them stronger, more-efficient and more-productive, supporting sustainable revenue performance. Their trick lies with empowering their sales force with the right AI tools for targeted insights and tasks — while keeping the critical thinking and human connections their sales professionals’ responsibility.

MASTER AI TOOLS FOR OPTIMAL SALES PERFORMANCE

USE AI TO BOOST SALES INSIGHTS

AI offers a way to increase your sales team’s knowledge on your target markets and audiences, while your leadership can keep an eye to future opportunities and risks.

• Forecasting and predictive analytics: Feeding an AI tool buyer behaviors, purchase histories, seasonal demand patterns and more can provide your sales team and leadership intelligent and accurate projections, while also helping your team make better decisions going forward.
• Lead qualification: By defining certain criteria when a prospect is at the stage for sales hand-off, your teams can enhance — and in some cases even automate — lead qualification efforts and stream better-quality leads to salespeople at key moments in the buying journey.
• Target audience insights and expertise: Especially for any new, emerging or expanding audiences and territories that lack a target Power Profile?, AI can help bring your salespeople up-to-speed on key audience intelligence to help them engage prospects and buyers with tailored expertise and as trusted advisors .
• Voice of the customer (VOC): While we at Mereo have written about how AI can be a poor mimic of the customer without supplemental real VOC input to back it up, AI can often help salespeople get a grounding to start understanding target market needs and preferences.

USE AI TO INCREASE SALES CAPABILITIES

AI can help your salespeople master tasks that used to take them multiple days a week of their time while boosting their selling skills.

• Prospect cold calls and emails: Your salespeople can create their own buyer emails and cold call templates with the help of AI in just moments. As I will share more below, AI should help at the start of building buyer communications but should not be relied on for the final cut. Salespeople can specify medium, target industry or buyer, voice and more to generate a solid first draft. Then, they should refine and enrich the message with more specifics and points of human connection gathered from previous touchpoints.
• Targeted sales presentations: Likewise, salespeople can tailor presentations to leads based on their pains, their market risks and opportunities, and other details relevant to their organization. Again, it is critical your salespeople verify the accuracy of the content and also imbue a human touch garnered from previous engagements and interactions. ?

USE AI TO OPTIMIZE YOUR SELLING PROCESS

AI can also serve as an objective outside source to analyze your current sales processes, help automate tasks to both reduce human workload while simultaneously better serving your audiences, and provide real-time performance insights.

• Pinpoint areas of improvement within your sales process: Break free from any current harmful status quo you might be stuck in with your sales process. AI can be another eye on your processes, pointing out areas for improvement and highlighting areas that are draining resources and bottlenecking performance.
• Automate routine tasks: From chatbots that answer buyer questions on your site immediately to email nurture campaigns and more, AI can take “if this, then that” prompts your team routinely sets up to serve your buyer with targeted and timely touchpoints along the buyer journey.
• Provide real-time performance insights: AI can help track data from your different platforms and interpret it beyond raw numbers for meaningful real-time insights to drive your decisions.

BUT! PARTNER AI WITH CRITICAL THINKING AND THE HUMAN TOUCH

Everything I have shared thus far comes with a big caveat: When you put too much trust in automation or AI tools, you sacrifice the critical thinking we humans do best. AI can help streamline your selling processes. It can help reduce the time and mundanity for your sales and marketing people to spend elsewhere on more high value activities. But your selling professionals should be prepared to?partner?with AI rather than expect it to do all the selling work.

For example, what once amounted to a week of research on your sales or marketing person’s behalf now can become a half-day review of information that your professionals can use to draft a report or tailor to a template or, even, write an email. For this to amount to a successful selling message or activity, your professionals must critically review and pull in extra content and insights that make sense. They serve a vital role as the layer of real intelligence to make for a truly meaningful and effective selling engagement.

You also cannot (and should not) automate or artificialize human connection. At the heart of value selling, human connection still wins. AI cannot know that you enjoyed a game of golf with this prospective buyer last month. AI will fail to reference or build on your buyer relationship. These tools cannot possibly adjust price or message based on years of knowledge you have accumulated with the buyer or one similar. Use AI for initial insights, for first drafts and for getting started. But be sure your team adds the personal touch and spirit of the message — the heart and human connection.

USE AI WITH AUTHENTIC INTELLIGENCE TO SEEK TO SERVE?

The heart of value selling remains in the actual heart — it is the human touch that machines and bots cannot replicate as they automate tasks. Value selling hinges on how you approach every buyer conversation, every interaction, every engagement. Are you in it for the transaction or to add value for your buyer?

If your selling organization commits to creating value, adding the human touch as much as possible is worth the investment personally and professionally. Download The Complete Sales Organization Guide to Seek to Serve, Not to Sell? to learn more.