4 Tips for Leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI) to Increase Sales

Whether it’s the rise of automated communication or the challenge of digital art, there’s simply no avoiding the AI discussion. No matter your opinion, one thing that is startlingly clear is the wealth of opportunities that AI brings to the table. 

One place that is seeing this the most is the business world. In 2022, over 30% of companies were using artificial intelligence somewhere within their operations, a four-point increase from the previous year. 

With greater accessibility and efficiency, the adoption of AI is only set to rise. Sales is an area that stands to benefit from this technology in particular, not by replacing human salespeople but by assisting them to work more effectively than ever before. 

We’ll cover all you need to know about AI in the sales industry, from the basics, the benefits, and the best ways to implement it into your business to increase efficiency and maximize your profits. 

What Is AI in Sales?

AI in sales is the automation of sales processes using artificial intelligence. Data can be processed more quickly thanks to cognitive algorithms and analytical tools. 

The information gathered from this helps optimize the sales process, giving sales teams the customer insights they need to make informed business decisions, which in turn leads to increased sales and improved revenue. 

Why Should AI Be Used in Sales?

The most revolutionary aspect of AI is the boundless opportunities it brings. As a trainable tool, the more exposure to customers and sales practices it gets, the more AI can grow to understand and cater to your needs, with the ability to predict behaviors, make smart, data-driven suggestions, and provide basic service interaction. 

Improved revenue aside, the main benefits include the following:

• Improved accuracy: Thanks to predictive intelligence, AI can help to provide accurate sales planning and forecasting, making decisions backed by fact, minimizing uncertainty, and maximizing precision with intelligent insights.
• Automation: AI can help to remove stress from your human agents, completing time-consuming administrative tasks and giving them the freedom to put their efforts where it matters most–driving sales. 
• Personalization: Over 70% of customers expect customized experiences from businesses; AI makes this easier than ever before, learning from exposure to adapt to buyers' needs and offer sophisticated suggestions based on analytics.

How To Use AI To Increase Sales

The ways you can leverage machine learning and AI in sales depend entirely on what resources you have and what goals you are trying to reach. Yet, some uses stand to benefit any organization looking to boost its productivity. 

Here are our top four ways to use AI with sales in mind. 

1. Automation 

Perhaps the most useful tool artificial intelligence brings is its ability to complete the tedious tasks we all dread in the workday. 

Automation is an easy (and reliable) solution to scalable growth. Including data entry and analysis, or even routine email responses, AI helps to improve efficiency by taking these low-value tasks away from employees, giving them back hours of their working day to focus on impactful jobs that require human brainpower. 

It can also be a big aid to enhance sales enablement. For example, a sales team can have all the contracts and agreements stored into a centralized repository using an AI powered contract management software that not only imports all the legal documents in bulk but also extracts important contract information in the form of a database. The result is hundred of hours saved from manual work and team focused towards building meaningful client relations.

Take email communication, for example. AI can be a great help in generating content that can be easily added to a custom email template by a human agent. By understanding customer behaviors and needs, human agents can then use suggested communication that tailors the email to the situation. It not only maintains professionalism by using a standardized email template across all communication, but also personalizes the experience to provide resolution (AKA a sale). 

By implementing smarter solutions, you have more budget to play with and a happier workforce who can spend their time on the things they are passionate about. 

Additionally, leveraging the best drop shipping tools can further enhance your sales process by automating product sourcing, inventory management, order fulfillment, and customer support. These AI-powered tools enable businesses to streamline their drop shipping operations, allowing for increased efficiency and focus on driving sales.

2. Advancing analytics

It’s no secret that data is one of the most valuable assets to any business. We’re in a period where increased digital activity (whether it be social media or eCommerce) means that data is in no shortage. 

However, this increase has surpassed the point where humans can manage all of the data accurately and effectively. 

And that’s where artificial intelligence comes in. 

AI makes organizing and applying data effortless, allowing you to pull data from all aspects of your company database without any of the legwork of sorting and analyzing it yourself. 

Using algorithms, AI can help to determine behaviors, patterns, and performance metrics that can be used to ensure your teams are targeting your audience in a way that speaks to them, maximizing potential sales opportunities in every interaction. 

This doesn’t just apply to text-based data. AI is effective with insights gathered from calls too. That’s why it’s important to prioritize all routes of customer communication as it can mean missing out on valuable insights. It might mean measuring VoIP value over traditional phone systems, allowing for communication to be handled via a Wi-Fi connection. 

Whether that’s personalized content based on browsing history, dynamic tactics that change as your customers do, or flagging an abandoned sale, AI is the big brother of your sales process, giving you all you need to drive revenue. 

Something to note:

One of the only caveats to the power of artificial intelligence is that it needs high-quality data to work. If you want to maximize the potential of AI within your business, you need to feed it quality information. Without it, you can’t expect reliable insights. 

That means pooling clean data from every data channel you want to use with full (successful) integration across all these channels.

Only with the right foundation do you stand to see the results you are looking for—some food for thought before blindly trusting AI with your data enrichment. 

3. Sales forecasting

Sales forecasting is crucial for businesses if they want to effectively measure their performance and improve their strategies to ensure maximum results. 

What is sales forecasting?

A sales forecast is an idea of what you expect your sales revenue to be. This is based on historical data, emerging and existing patterns, and current market trends. Rather unsurprisingly, to generate an accurate sales forecast, you need accurate data. 

Introducing AI into your sales forecasting gives you access to a range of up-to-date data, much more complex than anything that could be found by a human eye scanning a spreadsheet. With machine learning, forecasting is automated, including patterns and trends in customer behavior, to provide optimized and reliable predictions.

By using virtual processes to collate this information, you also minimize the risk of human errors impacting the accuracy of your predictions. 

4. Enhance customer interactions 

Without customers, businesses would be nothing. It’s as simple as that. And that’s why it’s crucial to prioritize the success of business-to-customer interaction at any stage of the customer lifecycle. 

The reality is, no human team can manage all customer interactions without something slipping through the cracks. And that’s no comment on the strength of a team; it’s simply the reality of businesses, especially if they are on a global scale. 

Yet again, AI can swoop in here and save the day, ensuring not only consistency in your customer interactions but reliability, no matter the time or location. Even if you have an HK domain, it doesn’t mean your traffic will all be routed from locations with the same time frame. 

Chatbots can be a great way to ensure around-the-clock assistance to your audience. Again, it's a tool that learns with exposure, so the more communication it has with customers, the more it can understand their queries, respond with helpful advice, and provide useful suggestions. 

Another bonus is that it takes some pressure off your human agents. Even if you have the best customer service tools available, and you’ve spent the time and effort needed to get virtual phone number, chatbots can add value to your customer service offering. Working in tandem with a chatbot allows human agents to step in only when a query requires escalation, instead of wasting valuable minutes redirecting customers to the returns page on your website. 

Virtual assistants are also great tools for understanding your target audience. By using the analytics collected (common queries, popular products, neglected baskets), human agents can direct their energy into solving these issues, minimizing future customer confusion with the goal of securing sales in mind. 

AI can also be used in addition to call center technologies to pull key insights from telephone communication. Collecting this data helps to guide future phone communication, helping AI to give predictive suggestions based on flagged words. 

Virtual assistants and automated suggestions may not be for every customer, but by correctly integrating AI into your sales processes at every point, you improve the service of your human agents too. No matter who delivers your communication, artificial intelligence is an invaluable tool for making it the best service it can be. It's this which will decide if you make the final sale. 

Final thoughts

As you may have gathered already, there are a vast number of ways to leverage AI into your sales processes to maximize results, and not every solution is ideal for every brand. 

The four suggestions explored in this article are a good place to start if you’re looking to dip your toe into the world of artificial technology. The two key takeaways are:

1. Data is invaluable–if you want to increase sales, it’s vital to have clear, up-to-date data, especially if you want to get the most from AI tools.
2. The key is optimization, even if it’s simply automating a process, by streamlining one aspect of your sales funnel, you make space for creative and powerful practices to be implemented (while boosting employee satisfaction, too).