Nikolaus Kimla is CEO of Pipeliner CRM, an innovative sales CRM solution designed by sales professionals for sales professionals.
The hype around AI significantly ramped up in 2023, with 2024 as the year for adoption and implementation at many organizations. This year is about embracing AI, as we now have the use cases to prove the ROI. Organizations that invest in AI are seeing a revenue uptick of 3% to 15% and a sales uplift of 10% to 20%. Additionally, B2B sellers already using automation technology like AI report a consistent uptick in efficiency of 10% to 15%.
For those who aren’t yet sold on the benefits of AI, especially for sales, you may want to reconsider the possible efficiencies it can bring to your operations.
Empowering Sales Teams
Sales professionals don’t need to fear that AI in sales and CRM will replace them. At the end of the day, sales still largely relies on a human touch.
Instead, AI should be considered a tool to enhance your team’s capabilities. Leveraging AI for automation can help remove the burden of mundane, rote tasks like data entry, note-taking and reporting. While these are all critical aspects of the larger sales cycle, they can be time-consuming and take away from more strategic activities like one-to-one client communications, networking and strategizing.
By allowing AI to handle data-driven tasks that don’t require a human touch to be effective, businesses can give sales teams more time to spend on tasks that do require human intuition and intervention for optimal success.
AI Uses Cases In Customer Relationship Management
Many are relying on AI in sales with customer relationship management (CRM) software. (Disclosure: My company provides a CRM solution, as do others.) Already a critical hub for all sales activities and customer information, leveraging AI in CRM systems is a great opportunity to leverage its capabilities.
For instance, generative AI can help teams with client notes and call summaries. A sales professional can type in their notes from a call in a stream-of-consciousness format, using talk-to-text in some cases and, when they are done, ask AI to summarize. AI can evaluate the notes and pull out critical talking points such as agreed upon deadlines, availability for another call and key talking points discussed.
If a sales professional is conducting a recorded call, AI can also transcribe and summarize the call on their behalf. This can save time in the moment and make it easy for any team member to review the notes and get all the info they need to know.
Another example of how AI in CRM is helping teams improve their efficiency is serving as their account “assistant,” intelligently monitoring individual accounts to track important news like announcements and departures via social media content and other relevant sources of information. This allows sales professionals to know what is happening broadly with their customers without the time investment of conducting the research themselves. These insights can clarify where opportunities for increased relationship building and revenue growth exist.
Pitfalls To Avoid
AI continues to be the trending topic of the moment, and rightfully so. But that doesn’t mean it’s not without its pitfalls—its use is still relatively new to how we operate in our personal and professional lives. The trick is to pursue AI innovation without getting caught up in the hype. Easier said than done, right?
The benefit of being where we are in the current AI marketplace is that there are early adopters out there who’ve tested the waters and started identifying what works and what doesn’t. Look to these organizations as a starting point for your own strategy.
Additionally, don’t hesitate to take the time to research your options when seeking a new solution. Any new applications that you add to your tech stack should check off one of two boxes: improves back-end operations and/or improves the customer experience. If it doesn’t meet this criterion, it’s likely not going to provide the ROI you’re looking for.
Also, as the adage goes, “garbage in, garbage out.” Though this phrase has often become over-used, it still rings true—if your AI is operating off of bad data, you’re going to get poor results. Before implementing any new solutions in your tech stack, make sure your data is clean—you need to be starting with a fresh foundation. This means updating any missing or incomplete data and removing duplicates. You also need to establish clear data governance guidelines to help maintain that clean data moving forward.
Lastly, for businesses implementing AI for sales, you shouldn’t reach a point where you rely on AI so much that you lose the human touch. To avoid this, implement human-in-the-loop protocols that fact-check the AI and keep it honest.
Making The Most Of AI In Sales
If I haven’t already sold you on the value of AI in sales, I’ll leave you with this one last stat for consideration: 88% of chief sales officers in a 2021 survey were already invested in or considering investing in AI analytics tools and tech. Are you willing to be a part of the 12% waiting on AI?
Remember, AI is not a replacement for the human-driven skills that power successful sales strategies but rather an enhancement.
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