Why AI is the future of Sales & Marketing?
The primary concern of any product-based business is to manufacture a product, while a service-based company focuses on offering specialized services. However, their common objective is to make a profit, for which they have to depend on their Sales and Marketing divisions.
The Sales process is easily the most important activity, as it is the means to achieve the desired revenues. It begins with initiating an interaction with the prospects, qualifying them based on their needs and demonstrating the product or service. Once the necessary insights about the prospects are gathered, they can be convinced to make a purchase. Price negotiation is also an important aspect of Sales, usually done before exchanging the offerings for money, which completes the sale.
However, Sales is the sub-domain of Marketing and would be unable to execute the required tasks in isolation. It’s Marketing that determines the need for a product or service and identifies a specific set of potential customers who want it. Also, setting a competitive price for the items is an essential marketing activity.
Marketing also involves various types of promotional activities, and paid advertising is one of them. Once the right prospects are reached, it lets the Sales takeover, but not before providing a platform or a location for the sale to take place.
Thus, these two important branches are interrelated and every business needs them both to achieve the ultimate objective of profit and growth. But, it’s not as simple as it sounds. It requires significant coordination between both these departments and these needs to be enough commitment to stick to the individual and collective targets. And, this is where Artificial Intelligence (AI) comes in, and has a significant role to play. Experts envision it to be technology that’s poised to streamline sales and marketing in the coming years. Discussed below are some of the aspects that would lead to better alignment between Marketing and Sales due to AI.
Maximizing lead identification accuracy
Knowledge offers a strategic advantage, and AI can boost this advantage by giving maximum knowledge about prospects and leads to the marketing and sales teams. For instance, lack of insight about their potential customers who visited the website could infuse confusion over qualifying the lead. And, if the leads were a misfit, the sales resources wasted on them could stifle the returns.
Now, having an AI Chatbot in place, the deeper insights gathered through actual conversations can be far richer than those collected by passive analytical tools. Armed with more specific insights, both Marketing and Sales can amplify the conversion ratio and boost the ROI.
Improving lead conversion efficiency
A chat support team that can handle the queries from prospect customers is an ideal way to identify the potential leads. However, having to search them through a huge stack of chat sessions can be a massive challenge. Using the proficiency of an advanced AI tool can help in segregating these leads better and it also improves the chance of converting them.
AI assistants can exchange emails with leads and even interpret their responses to determine the quality. Companies implementing AI for a considerable duration have found to have performed exceedingly well when it comes to increasing the number of qualified leads through email campaigns.
As a result of having implemented the intelligent qualification process, Marketing can now deliver a higher number of qualified leads to the Sales department, which in turn would maximize the probability of converting them and improve the overall efficiency of the lead conversion process.
Enhancing CX through knowledge base integration
Delivering an enhanced Customer Experience (CX) is initiated from the ability to help the customers find what they’re looking for. This also requires the Marketing and Sales personnel to educate the potential customers on best practices. For this to happen, the team members themselves need to stay abreast with the latest updates. Moreover, when a query is fielded to them by a prospect, they should be in the position to give out the answer within 5 minutes. It can be a daunting task if the team members do not have the right updates at the right time, and the issue can be solved by having a comprehensive knowledge base in place. However, it only solves a part of the problem, because you still need someone to be available all the time to face the questions.
A complete solution can be achieved by assimilating the knowledge base with AI tools that have to ability to scan for the right answer after being able to interpret the prospects’ query. The knowledge base integration with an intelligent tool can provide the right and updated information at the right time, and that too within few seconds, which can have a substantial positive impact on the overall customer experience.
Thus, by improving the ability to track the leads and convert them with efficiency, while also scaling the ability to be helpful, AI is enabling organizations to do more and appear bigger. These are some the factors that depict AI’s potential to define the future of Marketing and Sales.