By
Yaagneshwaran Ganesh, Author, Speaker, Huffpost contributor, Top 100 MarTech Influencer and Director of Marketing at Fiind Inc., a platform that helps businesses find their customers efficiently using machine learning, talks AI and how it’s revolutionizing sales.
Digital transformation – everybody’s talking about it and it’s used to describe many instances, but what does it actually mean? The phrase “digital transformation” is a broad term used to describe the evolution of business in the digital age. It is something that corporations are sitting down to talk about, as it is a core component of their business strategies and is something that must continually be innovated and adapted according to changing consumer behaviors.
One technological advancement helping companies of all kinds and in various industries innovate is artificial intelligence, more commonly known as AI. Today AI is helping companies and sales teams increase efficiency and in turn, revenues – say hello, the transformation is here.
Knowledge + Application = Success
Before I go any further, I want to state that sales and sales teams are not going anywhere. They’re here to say, at least for the time being, and are getting a technological boost that improves 
the way salespeople sell. It’s known that learning about and understanding your current and potential customers is a continuous process and is crucial to success, no doubt. But, knowledge alone is simply not enough anymore, rather the application of knowledge is needed.
What does applying knowledge mean? It means that success in sales is directly proportional to the right pitch, at the right time, to the right customer. Take Fiind, for example, which was established after the founder had an experience at a restaurant that made him realize what sales are all about. The founder noticed that certain restaurant goers preferred specific waiters over others because the preferred waiters knew about each ingredient that went into the dishes and whether or not it would please the customer given their knowledge of the customer’s taste preferences. That experience, of witnessing the power of knowledge combined with its application, led to the thought of using AI and machine learning to empower marketing and sales teams digitally.
AI Boosting Marketing and Sales
Many people believe that CRMs and marketing automation and analytics tools do the job of empowering sales teams. Yes, these tools do work, but they don’t complete the pie – there are still gaps to be filled. But if you look closely and study the numbers, the current processes have been a miss. You may run campaigns to reach out to all the prospects in your CRM and use marketing automation tools to nurture some of the prospects based on the sales feedback, but very few of those contacted actually convert to sales and thereby long-term relationships.
Lead context
AI platforms can integrate your CRM and marketing automation to help you segment customers and prospects based on various factors such as their propensity to buy, intent, product-fit and more depending on where they are in the buying cycle. In short, it tells sales teams which customers are ready to act instantaneously, which may require a bit of nurturing and so on.
Hyper segmenting customers this way then gives sales teams the needed information to create super personalized campaigns that resonate with the end customer. These personalized emails, tailored to the customers’ needs and points of sale rather than a generic script blasted out to a list of hundreds of leads, improves conversions by at least 2x.
Dynamic insights
Gaining real-time insights (“buying signals” as the folks at Fiind call it) into each account in your CRM from both your internal and external environments is also possible when using AI. With this kind of instantaneous information, teams can alter their pre-planned pitch in real-time, even minutes before the campaign launch. An instance where this would be beneficial would be for salespeaple adjusting their execution plan even when there’s a last minute leadership change within their target account.
AI can also give sales professionals a fitting sales pitch for each account, meaning it can tell them exactly what to say, when, and how – giving them the ability to sell based on their customer’s context as opposed to taking a generic and widespread approach and hoping someone will catch it. In other words, teams can spend their time and energy on the most valuable accounts and thus maximize sales productivity.
To Sum it up
AI is something that everyone is slowly implementing into their processes to stay competitive. My advice to you? Be the one to lead before AI becomes the status quo.
About the author: Yaagneshwaran is among the top 100 global MarTech influencers, an author, columnist and also the Director of Marketing at Fiind Inc. He has a certificate in Strategy Management from the Indian Institute of Management, Kozhikode and an MBA in marketing from Jansons School of Business, Coimbatore. Yaagneshwaran’s social links: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn.
