When and why should you consider AI for your Sales & Performance Marketing functions?

As a business, if the product or service that you are selling requires you to have an interaction with your prospects, engage with them in a dialogue, answer their questions and a mere website or a brochure wouldn't do this job, then you are doing what we like to call - "Consultative Sales".? Most lead-gen suited offerings fit here. For example, most buyers wouldn't just buy a health program or a financial instrument only through a website. They will have questions and concerns and they will want to reach out to someone from the business to get answers and solutions.

For certain kinds of very high priced items like luxury cars or yachts, a business can afford to have a very highly qualified human resource who will do the job of engaging with the prospects and possibly convert. However If the price point of your product and service isn't high enough to justify a human employee doing this for every prospect, then you must surely consider Sales Engagement with AI. Most businesses who are not relying on an ecommerce model for sales, would fall into this category.

For the businesses relying on "Consultative Selling", you could use conversational AI in multiple ways.

1. Lead Qualification: Have AI do the task of assessing the lead quality, intent and overall qualification. This can ease up a significant load from your call center / sales desk. For one of the clients we are working with, our AI agent does the qualification of all the leads (>20000 leads/mo) and ends up passing only 10% of the most qualified leads to their sales desk and yet resulting in an overall higher conversion.

2. Organic Leads ( from website, search & social media): Implement a solid well-trained AI agent on your website and your social media handles. I am not talking about the "chatbots". They suck. AI Agents, while they look similar in their appearance, are exponentially more intelligent and effective than their ancestors. This is the real estate that we have seen going to waste pretty much entirely. The chatbots can barely hold a conversation let alone drive any type of sales motion.

3. Digital Paid Ad Campaigns : You could drive your ad clicks to a conversational Agent on the Website or directly on Whatsapp. In India, we know that whatsapp is a portal into our lives. A lot of things happen there and people are accustomed to interacting on whatsapp. Having an intelligent AI agent on this medium which can be trained to engage, pitch and sell your products and services can be extremely effective. Meta’s CTWA ads are very effective and with older rigid/dumb chatbots being displaced by much more intelligent and flexible AI agents, this model of paid media is becoming extremely popular. 4. Print Ads: They have been predominantly used for your brand building. You have some antiquated methods of assessing reach and their effectiveness but they are all very vague and broad estimations of actual facts. The Physical - Digital bridge has been mostly just an SMS number of a number to give a missed call to register interest. With AI, you can now provide a QR code or a whatsapp number on your print ad as call-to-action for the readers. This can directly start a conversational engagement between the User and your business’s AI agent. I had just very recently shared a post about doing this for one of our clients. 5. AI Concierge: If your business relies on having your buyers stay in your service or make repeat purchases, then it is extremely important that you engage with them MEANINGFULLY at regular intervals and be available at all times, whenever they need you. I say meaningfully because sending templatized emails or messages is mostly just noise for your user. An AI agent can be deployed as a concierge or a relationship manager who can provide a 24/7 availability and continuous engagement based on their activities & responses. This will not only raise your customer experience score but also significantly increase your long term retention. Zigment’s AI agent deployed for such use-case can result in almost 40% bump in the long term retention metric.?

AI is providing significant efficiency gains in the landscape of selling. This is real AI that I am talking about and not a moniker slapped to an existing, legacy software’s name. A modern AI engagement platform which is focussed on sales can be a seriously effective driver or transformation for your business.?

If you are curious about how this can be deployed for your business or what should be some of the considerations, feel free to comment or message me and we can talk (100% human I promise :)).?