Scale a Sales Conversation with Generative AI

Scaling Sales Conversations with Generative AI

Note: this post has been updated since it was originally published, to include the benefits of Generative AI

As the digital landscape continues to evolve, businesses offering internet marketing services are seeking innovative ways to differentiate themselves and drive sales. One emerging technology that has the potential to revolutionize sales conversations is generative AI. By incorporating this technology into sales interactions, businesses can create warmer and more robust conversations, ultimately leading to increased sales wins.

Generative AI, a subset of artificial intelligence, is capable of generating human-like text or speech. When applied to sales conversations, this technology can help sales professionals craft personalized, engaging, and informative messages that resonate with potential clients. By leveraging generative AI, businesses can create a more personalized and human-like experience for customers, fostering trust and building stronger relationships.

One of the primary benefits of using generative AI in sales conversations is its ability to provide real-time, relevant, and personalized information. By analyzing customer data and preferences, generative AI can generate tailored content that addresses specific pain points and interests. This targeted approach enables sales professionals to have more meaningful and impactful conversations, increasing the likelihood of closing deals.

Streamline the Sales Process

Another advantage of incorporating generative AI into sales conversations is its ability to streamline the sales process. By automating routine tasks and providing data-driven insights, generative AI can free up sales professionals to focus on high-value activities such as building relationships and providing value to customers. This increased efficiency can lead to a significant reduction in sales cycles, allowing businesses to close deals faster and increase revenue.

Enhance the Customer Experience

Generative AI can also be used to enhance the overall customer experience. By providing personalized recommendations and insights, businesses can demonstrate their expertise and thought leadership, establishing trust and credibility with potential clients. This approach can also help businesses to differentiate themselves from competitors, setting them apart in a crowded market.

Furthermore, generative AI can be used to analyze customer feedback and sentiment, enabling businesses to identify areas for improvement and make data-driven decisions. This data-driven approach can help businesses to refine their sales strategies, optimize their marketing efforts, and improve overall customer satisfaction.

To fully leverage the potential of generative AI in sales conversations, businesses must ensure that their sales teams are equipped with the necessary skills and training. This includes educating sales professionals on the capabilities and limitations of generative AI, as well as providing guidance on how to effectively integrate this technology into their sales strategies.

In practice, this could look like a sales team using generative AI to:

• Craft personalized emails and messages that resonate with potential clients
• Provide real-time insights and recommendations to customers
• Automate routine tasks and focus on high-value activities
• Analyze customer feedback and sentiment to refine sales strategies
• Demonstrate thought leadership and expertise to establish trust and credibility
• By embracing generative AI and incorporating it into their sales strategies, businesses can create warmer and more robust conversations that drive sales wins and fuel long-term growth.

In conclusion, the integration of generative AI into sales conversations has the potential to revolutionize the way businesses approach sales. By providing personalized, relevant, and informative content, generative AI can help businesses build stronger relationships with customers, increase sales, and drive revenue. As the digital landscape continues to evolve, businesses that adopt this technology will be well-positioned to stay ahead of the competition and achieve long-term success.

How To Scale a Sales Conversation: Let Machines Help

Remember the heartfelt conversation between astronaut Dave Bowman and the HAL 9000 supercomputer in 2001: A Space Odyssey? While that conversation didn’t end well, the movie’s depiction of software that could talk to humans is becoming our reality – and that’s good news for sales, marketing and customer experience teams.

Communications vs Conversations

As consumers and B2B decision-makers face a growing list of options, sales, marketing and customer success teams are increasingly expected to initiate, nurture and maintain conversations with countless individuals.

While we’ve had technology to communicate with all of these people, conversations require a customized, two-way dialogue. Until recently, conversations simply haven’t been scalable. That’s where the next generation of AI-powered machines come in.

Redefining Conversations

We may think of a conversation as a talk between humans, but that description is no longer accurate. The intersection of online shopping platforms, messaging apps, and voice recognition have led to the rise of conversational commerce. These conversations are entirely maintained by software, or automatically handed off to a human once a qualification or other milestone has been met.

Who wants to have a conversation with a machine? Well, the early indications are that just about everybody is happy to have a chat with a bot.

The Rise of Conversational Commerce

In a recent CIO article, 1-800-Flowers.com CEO Chris McCann discussed their growing use of conversational commerce, and their surprise at the overwhelmingly positive customer reaction.

But don’t customers miss the, well, human experience of communicating with a human? Not according to McCann. They respond to the machine just like they’re talking with a person.

Here are just a few examples of how companies are using machine-enabled conversations:

• Google Home: ​“Good​ ​morning​ ​Google​ ​Home”​ ​triggers​ ​a​ ​recap​ ​of​ ​your​ ​day’s​ ​schedule​ ​and​ ​news headlines.
• Amazon Echo: ​In​ ​addition​ ​to​ ​voice-assisted​ ​shopping,​ a partnership with Capital One enables Echo to answer a customer’s inquiries about their balance and recent transactions, and even make payments.
• Waze Planned Drives: ​Takes expected traffic conditions and other inputs to alert you when it’s time to leave for your appointment.
• Staples Enhanced Easy Button: An​ ​intelligent​ ​ordering​ ​ecosystem​ ​that​ ​helps​ ​Staples’ business​ ​customers​ ​order​ ​supplies​ ​using​ ​voice,​ ​text​, ​or email​s from a variety of devices.
• LinkedIn Messaging: The “Conversation​ ​Starters​​” ​tool​ gives users ​prompts​ ​to​ ​initiate​ ​interactions with​ ​other​ ​members.

But machine-enabled conversations aren’t suitable only for serving customers more efficiently. They’re also an astoundingly effective new tool for turning more people into customers.

Sales-Boosting Conversational Tech

While the bulk of tech for sales and marketing has focused on an infrastructure to make communications and processes more efficient, investments in machine-enabled conversations has become a focus for many companies.

That’s because we all respond better to a personalized conversation, and software is making this possible for virtually every prospect.

AI advancements supporting these machine-enabled conversations include:

• Natural Language Processing: companies like Convserica are incorporating natural-language processing into emails that can contact prospects and nurture leads.
• Automated Composition Engines: collect data from a variety of sources, assemble and deliver information in easy-to-read documents.
• Conversational Intelligence: analyzes recordings of sales calls to report metrics like the talk-to-listen ratio, number of engaging questions and adherence to the playbook.
• Signal Monitoring: BuzzBoard collects data that reflects changes to a prospect’s business performance, tech stack or marketing activity to identify needs and match them to the company’s solutions. At this point, sales is notified of the opportunity, and even given suggested content to initiate a conversation.

20/20 Foresight

Although it’s early, we’ve undeniably entered the age of conversational commerce. In fact, Gartner has made some predictions expected to occur by 2020 that show just how quickly we’re progressing:

• Machines will author 20% of all business content.¹
• Customers will manage 85% of their relationship with a company without interacting with humans.²
• Most people will have more conversations with bots than with their spouses.³

Who Will Be Talking to Your Customers?

If you still think of conversations strictly as interactions between humans, it’s time to change your thinking. It’s time to invite machines into the conversations you have with your customers and prospects. It’s a competitive advantage you simply can’t afford to ignore.

Because you can be certain that machines will be doing plenty of the talking for your competitors – and doing it quite well.

• “Gartner’s Top Strategic Predictions for 2016 and Beyond: The Future Is a Digital Thing,” Oct 2015.
• “Gartner 360 Customer Summit,” 2011.
• “Gartner’s Top 10 Strategic Predictions for 2017 and Beyond: Surviving the Storm Winds of Digital Disruption,” Oct 2016.