Growing AI for sales 

AI is helping to boost sales prospects for businesses and helping them to gain better insights into customer behaviour 

Technology for sales is constantly developing. Most recently, artificial intelligence (AI) is helping to process data, gain deeper insights into customer behaviour and buying habits, and is informing sales interactions for sales managers and reps. 

According to government research, around 15% of all businesses in the UK have adopted at least one AI technology, such as:

• Natural language processing: this is designed to understand and respond to human speech, both written and verbal, in a way that sounds human. 
• AI analytics: by looking at your raw data, AI analytics can look for and interpret patterns, detect anomalies and alert you to these in real-time. 
• Smart process automation: this recognises when human intervention is needed during an automated process in order to take the next step forward. 

AI can help sales managers to balance workloads, improve customer communications and expand sales leads in a number of ways.

• Managing data – AI makes big data analytics simpler by automating and enhancing data preparation, data visualisation, predictive modelling and other complex analytical tasks that would otherwise be labour-intensive and time-consuming.

• Engaging with customers – AI can help to engage sales leads across social media with conversational AI programmes, including chatbots and voice assistants. These tools enable social media communications channels to be managed 24/7 to keep existing customers engaged. Businesses can use conversational AI in the following ways: 

• Chatbots: can be used to assist website visitors by answering frequently asked questions, pointing visitors to relevant published content. This increases engagement, nurtures and generate leads, and they can also schedule sales meetings with potential customers for you. 
• Voice assistants: optimising your website for voice search, including voice assistants like Alexa and Siri, can help to bring leads directly to you when they pick up on keywords that are relevant to your products or services.

• Priority-based selling – AI can identify sales prospects by finding patterns in customer behaviours and shining a light on the most promising leads. This means that sales reps can focus on sales priorities whilst also expanding their pool of potential customers.