What is the impact of AI in Sales?

AI will shape how sales organizations operate, align with cross-functional teams, and manage reps over the next several years. Sales leaders can leverage these insights today and will be rewarded if they do. If they don’t, they won’t only fall behind their competitors; they won’t be able to deliver the experience that customers expect.

How will AI impact the sales industry in the future

1. Increased Productivity

Companies expect AI to automate manual processes, such as entering new contacts, emails, phone calls, and calendar information into the CRM. Sales teams will have timely and accurate customer data.

AI-driven insights can help salespeople focus on what they do best—driving growth.  It isn’t just automation. Another part of the productivity story is augmentation.  The sales rep can use these insights to make the next action faster, easier, and more intelligent. This doubles the productivity boost you'll get from using data, and helps your reps get even more out of it.

2. Better data = Better forecasting

Sales leaders will no longer have to spend hours each week calculating their team’s numbers—they’ll be able to rely on AI to automate the process and provide them with accurate projections. This will help sales departments focus their energies on the areas that will most benefit the company, communicate any risks to higher-ups and take a data-informed approach to success.

3. AI Data Drive Actions

AI technologies can help sales teams determine which tasks are most likely to drive value. For example, you might find that to close a deal with a certain prospect, sales reps need to bring in the prospect's CFO at stage three of the selling process. Armed with that knowledge, marketers can launch a campaign to target chief financial officers early in the buying process.

As artificial intelligence continues to advance, we’ll be able to analyze more than just the number of emails we receive. We’ll also be able to see the tone of an email’s content.

4. Sales & Marketing becoming friends

AI can help sales and marketing teams work together better. AI will hold both teams accountable for the actions they take, eliminating confusion and helping marketers accelerate sales.

Ultimately, sales success is reliant on marketing; by having access to valuable marketing insights, sales gets real-time feedback without having to ask marketing.

5. Collaboration

Monitoring sales reps' activities will help sales leaders identify top performers, provide coaching to low-performers, and coach those in between. It’s important to note that data-informed feedback is critical to fast ramp-up time, high attainment and creating salespeople who are happy with the product.

Salespeople will not be replaced by AI but will instead be freed to focus on the tasks that are more valuable and meaningful. Rather than worrying about whether we’ll have fewer salespeople in the future, leaders should focus on how AI can help organizations re-engineer business processes and eliminate manual tasks to be more efficient and productive. Being able to focus on higher-value work will also result in more engaged employees.

Conclusion

Your customers are more informed than ever. The days of selling solely through relationship building are over, because your customers can find out almost anything they want through the Internet. Almost all industries are more informed, and your sales team needs to be as well.

Those companies that begin the process of incorporating artificial intelligence into their operations today will be better positioned to meet customer expectations tomorrow.