When sales teams were first becoming the new norm for businesses who wanted to capture leads and turn them into customers, the best salespeople were the ones who learned their customers’ names and interests. They’d change the way they talked (and what they talked about) to suit the prospect so that they had the best possible chance of scoring a sale.
The problem is that as businesses continued to scale and the amount of data that we created continued to increase, we had to rethink the way that we carried out sales calls and built relationships. We started using CRM systems so that we could gather and process the large amounts of data that we needed to carry out sales programmes at phenomenal scales. Now different reps can speak to the same customer and carry out a seamless conversation by tapping into a handy log of every interaction that the prospect has had with the company.
But that’s still not enough, and there’s a new technology on the block that’s coming to cause even more disruption. I’m talking, of course, about artificial intelligence (AI). Here’s why it’s so exciting.
AI and Machine Learning
The goal of artificial intelligence is effectively to create a digital brain that can “think” on our behalf. We’re not quite at the level of true AI yet, but thanks to the rise of machine learning and other related technologies, we’ve got a pretty good approximation. In fact, AI can now diagnose heart disease and lung cancer more accurately than doctors, so it surely won’t be long until it can close a deal better than a salesperson.
That’s because AI can process huge amounts of data at a much faster rate than human beings could ever hope to manage. At the same time, machine learning can start to spot patterns that have previously gone unobserved and use that information to make accurate predictions. For example, Netflix uses machine learning to determine which content to suggest, and they make these suggestions based on what similar people have enjoyed.
Now imagine that your sales team had access to a similar system that could use machine learning to fully understand who you’re talking to. It could provide suggestions for salespeople based on the data and would become more and more powerful the more you used it thanks to the very nature of machine learning. If it was built into your CRM system – and many CRM providers are indeed doing more and more research on AI and machine learning systems – then it’d give you such a strong advantage it would almost be unfair.
Conclusion
We’re still in the very early days of artificial intelligence and machine learning and so it’s hard to tell where the future will lead us. Still, it’s already pretty obvious that AI will be a powerful tool for the sales teams of the future and so if you want to stay relevant, it’s a good idea to get familiar with AI now before it’s too late.
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Dane
Dane Cobain is a published author, freelance writer, book blogger, poet and (occasional) musician from High Wycombe, UK. Before going freelance, he worked as a social media marker, now specialising in writing about publishing, technology and marketing.