As you and I both know, there are thousands of professions that require a human touch. Sales is near the the top of that list. In order for salespeople to succeed, they must be proficient at establishing and nurturing value-driven relationships.
The question now becomes, how does Sales Artificial Intelligence fit into all this?
Does it really play a vital role in sales?
Well, there are numerous ways that AI for sales can benefit a sales team. These include accelerating lead volumes, closing rates, and overall sales performance.
No. In fact, sales teams leveraging Sales AI are actually hiring more salespeople due to hyper efficiencies and more revenue.
Try to think of it like giving sales reps the insight and tools they need to work smarter, faster, and easier. For you the sales manager, this means forging better working relationships with salespeople and enhancing their ability to hit quotas consistently.
Thanks to Sales AI, sellers are also streamlining their workday and receiving automated and actionable customer intelligence. This turns a sales rep who spends too much time on non-selling activity into a trusted advisor that spends the majority of their time on customer engagement.
Would you like to know more about AI for Sales?
Continue reading, and after you’re done, I invite you to schedule some time with our very own sales artificial intelligence guru, Samir Majumdar.
Who is Using Sales AI?
Forward thinking companies are already catching on fast. Salesforce’s state of sales report shows that sales leaders expect their AI adoption to grow faster than any other sales related technology. Salesforce also highlighted that high performing teams are almost 5x more likely to be using AI than those underperforming teams.
But here’s the fun part. Artificial intelligence in sales is actually not replacing people. As a matter of fact, a vast majority of these high performing companies are also planning to increase their workforce.
The reason for this is simple – AI is creating practical value by augmenting, automating, and supercharging how they work. And this is with tons of real-world use cases and tools already in use today. Unfortunately, there seems to be so much hype around AI that a lot of sales leaders often miss out on this fact.
Of course, we can’t rightly blame anyone. After all, the reps have quotas to hit and there’s currently too much commentary of AI being aspirational as opposed to practical. In this pillar post, we’ll be sticking purely to the practical.
We’ll outline a working definition of Sales AI as well as what role it plays in sales. We’ll see how artificial intelligence is helping sales management and enablement. We will also check out some sales forecasting and automation software that use AI, and more misconceptions on AI. So buckle up and prepare for one super informative, all inclusive guide to all things Sales AI.
What is Sales AI?
Sales AI is any software that makes use of artificial intelligence to make sales teams more effective and productive. This includes tools designed to reduce the administrative burden on revenue operations and reps by automating non-selling activities. Some functions that benefit from Sales AI are sales forecasting, tracking and analyzing contact relationships, pipeline management, data entry, and much more.
Generally, artificial intelligence is an umbrella term covering a wide range of different technologies. These include computer vision, machine learning, deep learning, natural language processing, and much more. However, all these technologies help machines perform specific cognitive tasks just as well or even better than their human counterparts.
Take AI powered computer vision for instance. It helps self-driving cars to identify and avoid obstacles, just like our trusty eyeballs. And your favorite voice assistant (Siri or Alexa) also understands your words and responds using artificial intelligence.
So while there are a ton of different types of AI, the most essential point is that the term Artificial Intelligence refers to the use of machines to automate activities otherwise performed by humans. Sales AI can and will impact your career in sales, but always in a good way.
AI in Sales
Sales AI is a form of machine learning and execution that powers some of the most impressive sales capabilities. Predictive Sales AI, for example, constantly analyzes the sales activity of individual salespeople, proactively guiding the sales process and signaling the best time to perform outreach.
Unlike traditional sales software that presents data as it becomes available, Sales AI analyzes new and old data over time, exponentially increasing the likelihood that you’ll satisfy your customers and shorten their sales cycles.
So with sophisticated enough AI, you can analyze prospect and customer data, predict which of them is more likely to close, recommend the most effective sales actions to carry out, forecast results, optimize prices and much more.
Don’t believe me? Well, Harvard Business Review estimates that AI can create about $2.5 trillion of value in sales.
How is AI Changing Sales?
With all this talk about artificial intelligence, let me be clear on one important point. The power of selling will never move away from human interaction. Sales AI drives this point home by automating the non-selling activities that take salespeople away from human interaction. In fact, AI has literally obliterated several of these non-human sales functions.
Here are some of the other changes AI is making in sales.
a) Dropping Sales Costs
By simply automating non-selling activities with AI, sales teams are greatly lowering the time and cost associated with each sale. That’s because sales reps are spending the vast majority of their time on the activities that produce sales, and less time on those that don’t.
b) Decrease in Call Times
Since AI can help identify needs and align solutions, sales reps require far less discovery and questioning during their calls. According to research, call times have actually dropped by as much as 70% thanks to AI.
c) Rise in Leads
The same business review from Harvard shows that sales teams that adopted AI increased their leads and appointments by as much as 50%. That’s because AI powered machine learning has taken on time consuming tasks of connecting and qualifying leads as well as follow ups and relationship management.
d) Increased Personal Touch
Here’s one of the more covert impacts of AI in sales. Sales leaders predict that customers will manage as much as 80% of their relationships without the involvement of salespeople. But at the same time, salespeople will be more available for said involvement. That’s because AI will be handling mundane tasks which take up a lot of time for reps, leaving them with more time to engage with prospects and clients.
e) Automated/Visual Management Styles
Interestingly, sales managers’ roles tend to change as they adopt more and more AI capabilities. Since machine intelligence can progressively gather more performance data, recommend solutions, and make day to day decisions based on data, management doesn’t have to sift through hundreds of reports and spreadsheets to get actionable insight. This automation translates to managers rapidly making the right decisions at the right time for their sales teams.
Role of AI in Sales
We’ve already established that AI helps sales without replacing human sellers. In addition to improving overall performance of your sales team, it also provides curated data for management. This helps with prospecting and smoother decision making.
For marketers, AI allows for driving revenue, scalable growth, and a personalized customer experience. More and more marketing experts are realizing the value and power that AI brings.
But how exactly does AI help with sales management and enablement?
How is AI Helping Sales Management?
i) Integrating AI in the Sales Process
Successful executives and sales managers don’t waste the limited and valuable time of their workforce. Businesses have already invested heavily in hiring, training, and developing their sales force. But with automation creeping in quickly, there’s no fighting the incoming changes.
This is why sales managers need to use their organizational culture, experience, and ethical reflection. Sales leaders won’t have enough time to develop their staff while teaching them new skills. But by leaving unique sales and planning functions to AI, they can work smarter and faster along with their workforce.
ii) Streamlining Big Data
Any business model today is seriously flawed if management does not prioritize the gathering and analysis of data. Remember, AI doesn’t happen in a vacuum. The application of data mining techniques and machine learning requires increasing amounts of data. As such, successful sales managers make their teams data driven by collecting and utilizing economically feasible sales data points.
If you do not possess essential data or maintain it properly, then your decisions will be based on unreliable and highly incomplete CRM data. AI has really helped sales managers in terms of gathering and consolidating big data. However, this is not a one-time thing. Gathering and sieving through data is an ongoing process.
iii) Sales Managers are now Data Scientists
When it comes to sales context, AI is simply data science on steroids. As a result, sales managers have had to understand, discuss, and explain different data analysis methods. The most successful sales leaders not only grasp the basic principles of AI, they can also envision and appreciate more opportunities.
This makes them more than willing to invest in their people and data as well as supply the necessary resources to do so. Sure, AI in sales does have a risk of becoming just another buzzword. That’s why executives must set clear goals to their data science teams and make sure they get a solid return on investment.
How is AI Helping Sales Enablement?
Sales enablement equips your sales team on three primary fronts. These are delivering engaging content, prospecting, and building team competency. We’ve touched on all this and more in our past posts and on our sales enablement page. With the introduction of sales AI, these three areas have gotten a significant boost.
i) Delivering Engaging Content
After gathering a lot of data on prospect behavior and customer intent, you can make use of AI to personalize the info. This will help you develop, craft and pull relevant content depending on which stage of the sales cycle your prospect resides. You can then repurpose and format the content to align with your buyer preferences.
In addition to offering customers predictive insights, a fully configured AI also gives you access to buying propensities. This means AI gives you recommendations regarding the scope subject, length, style, timing, and content frequency. When it comes to creating and personalizing content, artificial intelligence in sales is a must.
ii) Prospecting
There’s no doubt about it – AI definitely makes prospecting more efficient. Sales AI can create highly detailed buyer personas (and sales personas as well) by analyzing a sample of existing customers based on the parameters you set. With these personas, it will then help you find other matches.
In addition to analyzing more sophisticated qualifiers like sentiments, personal values, and ethics, AI engines can work with basic data like the prospects behavior, location, peak activity times, and demographics. All these allow sales reps to engage more actively with leads and prospects that are more likely to convert and drive revenue.
iii) Building Competency and Team Productivity
We’ve already seen how Sales AI can relieve hundreds of man hours by automating various activities. For instance, the right tools can mine organizational email, workflow, calendar, and other apps to automatically populate CRM.
When it comes to competency building, AI will analyze a sales rep’s performance or manager’s coaching proficiency to identify behavioral aspects. An AI powered sales enablement tool will go a long way to guaranteeing the time spent by the rep in the field is spent productively with the most profitable prospects.
AI in B2B Sales
Early on, marketing and sales departments were the first to adopt digital transformation. That’s because the digital context expanded the touch points that they could use to personalize engagement. This same transformation has been especially useful for B2B sales teams since they typically have longer high touch sales cycles.
Steadily, Sales AI is changing the expectations of B2B sales performance. According to research, those B2B sales teams that outperform the rest are the ones willing to shake up their sales model and welcome next-gen capabilities. This has seen savvy B2Bs grow at twice the rate of GDP.
Your typical B2B sales rep carries out hours of research before reaching out to prospects. AI turns that process around by giving the rep valuable prospect intelligence. See, even though marketing might have intelligence based on analysis, it’s tough to beat the speed, accuracy, and efficiency of Sales AI.
Here are more reasons you need Sales AI in B2B sales.
• AI tools help optimize resources on highest value prospects
• New layers of data are added thanks to machine learning
• AI fuels a continuous feedback loop
Predictive Sales AI
As the name suggests, predictive sales AI makes use of statistical models and computer algorithms to analyze extremely large sets of data and assess the likelihood of different potential outcomes. The models are drawn upon the contextual, current, and historical data for the probability of a future event actualizing.
Naturally, the system incorporates more information into the model and updates predictions accordingly as new data is made available. This process keeps on happening and the machine learning model gets smarter by making its predictions that much more accurate.
Unfortunately, these models are never infallible – they tend to experience problems that many data scientists are all too familiar with. And that’s data limitations. Some of the applications of predictive analytics for enhancing sales and marketing ops include:
• Streamlining the sales cycle
• Optimizing lead scoring
• Providing timing information and sales messaging
• Identifying cross-selling and upselling information
Predictive AI Tools for Sales
a) Google Cloud AI
This platform offers various services such as storage, computing, network, big data, and many more to deliver personalized customer experiences. The AI has helped increase sales while lowering costs and giving sales people insight to make better sales decisions. It runs on the sale infrastructure that Google uses internally for end users like Youtube and Google Search.
b) Cortex
Cortex makes use of AI to optimize social media content. By employing machine learning, it can find patterns in a database of over 33,000 brands and over a billion pieces of marketing content.
The platform not only generates content briefs and calendars for the coming months, it also automatically fills the content for human scheduling and approval. It uses AI models to determine what features of marketing creativity have the largest impact on a specific brand against certain goals.
c) Hubspot
With completely free CRM at its core, HubSpot offers sales, marketing, and customer service. Basically everything a sales leader needs to track, organize, and craft better relationships with their prospects.
This all in one software can help manage social media accounts, create landing pages, and measure success of your results by leads and customers as opposed to more traditional page views.
d) Veloxy
Veloxy is an all-encompassing, AI Sales solution that empowers your sales force with artificial intelligence. It allows users to shrink their sales cycles, close deals fasterm, and exceed sales quotas consistently year after year.
Veloxy provides your sales teams with predictive analytics and relevant information for their next task depending on several factors. With the platform, you can even create and make use of buyer personas to predict exactly how different prospects will act at each stage of the buying cycle.
e) Drift
As the world’s first and only conversational marketing platform, Drift has been labeled a Cool Vendor in sales reports. The platform uses AI chatbots that have full conversations with people in real-time and connects those who are ready to buy with sales reps. Users can create the ideal conversation flow for your site in minutes.
AI Sales Automation
This is defined as an intelligent system that automates redundant sales processes to make it more efficient, error free, and effective. In the process of generating and qualifying leads, nurturing prospects and converting them to promising contacts, there are several labor intensive actions that are crucial.
Sales automation software simply isolates these repetitive actions and automates them with technology to save time and effort. Some examples include meeting scheduling, weekly reporting, and proposal reminders.
AI for Salesforce Automation
Salesforce automation is the process of automating sales activities to help sales teams in their daily operations of data, opportunity tracking, leads management and sales conversions. All this includes time consuming and monotonous tasks associated with data segmentation, data entry, prospect allocation, and other menial chores.
Thanks to the help of modern technology like machine learning and AI, Salesforce automation is now more advanced than ever. There are lots of tools which offer high level features such as customer intelligence reports, sales forecasting, and account based marketing to guarantee a substantial boost in sales cycle time. Some of the leading tools include:
AI Salesforce Automation Tools for Sales
a) Salesforce CRM
When it comes to sales and marketing automation software, Salesforce CRM is among the most popular and widely used brand. This platform is an on-demand CRM suite that extends its offerings to sales force automation too. Salesforce is recognized by Gartner Inc. as a dominant leader in Salesforce automation for thirteen straight years now.
Some of the capabilities that come with Salesforce include lead management, service post sale, database management, pipeline oversight, and customer relationship management. All these help enable contact management, deal tracking, lead capturing, and sales performance monitoring. The tools also offers easy collaboration between all business functions by synchronizing email, calendar, contacts and tasks across different platforms.
b) Zendesk Sell
Previously known as Base, Zendesk provides a standalone sales automation platform as part of its integrated CRM. This mobile and web based CRM app for B2C and B2B sales professionals claims to be reliable, flexible and scalable based on your team’s needs.
In addition to ticketing systems, sales forecasting easy to use UI and data driven analytics, and integrated customer support, Zendesk offers these and more advanced features. Needless to say, these state of the art features will enhance pipeline visibility, productivity and other processes for your sales teams.
c) Veloxy
Veloxy sale tool is an AI powered, integrated automation system that boosts sales productivity for an array of companies. Known for inbound marketing strategies and Salesforce integration, the plugin is a favorite among marketers for its Salesforce automation and advanced features.
From personalizing and tailoring emails to automation of follow up emails, Veloxy promises to build real connections for sales reps. Other advanced features that come with the plugin include document templates, predictive lead scoring, deal creation, and other basic sales force automation functionalities. Veloxy acts as your all in one sales software by providing easy integration with Outlook, Salesforce, and Office 365.
AI Sales Prospecting
Hands down, we can easily can 2020 the year of accelerated automation. We’ve seen lots of tool for automating prospect list building and outbound outreach to help companies generate new customer data, scale sales and save time. Some of the best tools can crawl the web to find niche leads, identify companies that exhibit ideal customer features and extract their company data to boost sales pipeline.
They can also use AI to turn cold calls into hot ones by opening source data and identifying buying signals. Similarly, AI sales prospecting allows reps to use machine learning to match missing data from your sales contacts and open source data on the internet.
AI and Geolocation for Prospect Discovery
Sales prospecting is the first step in any sales process. It helps search and identify potential customers for the purpose of creating new business. One of the most crucial elements or data for prospecting is Geolocation.
With information on where your prospects are located, it’s easier to cultivate a dependable and reliable database of people interested in your products or services. The question now becomes, how do you gather the relevant information to boost your database and make work easier for your Salesforce?
AI Geolocation Prospecting Tools for Sales
i)Badger Maps
Badger maps is a route planning app that automates territory management for outside sales reps. This tool visualizes your sales data on a map, generates meeting reports and optimizes daily schedules and routes.
Badger specifically focuses on the type of prospect and helps reps solve their problem in minutes by showing them the best opportunities and leads along the way. This means sales people can spend less time driving and planning, and more time in actual meetings and sales.
ii)Gorilla
Gorilla is an extremely user friendly tool that guarantees you never miss out on meetings or new contacts. With their Silverback Data Mining Suite, users can get al the company and customer contact information they need. All you have to do is type in a company name and URL to automatically gather titles, names and all the contact information you need.
The tool comes with features that allow sales reps to create an audit trail for customer contacts and back up links to all your phone calls, meetings, and written communications. Boost your margins and sales conversion rates by introducing agility into your pricing and forecasting with Gorilla.
iii)Veloxy
Veloxy has been called the best app for Salesforce currently available. In addition to automatically logging all emails, caller ID and other campaigns, Veloxy comes with AI based notifications and email tracking.
However, it’s the sales routes and geo-location based prospecting that sets this platform head and shoulders above the rest. With Veloxy Mobile, reps can find new sales opportunities using the prospect finder Map. No matter where your team is, they can get access to ay regions business landscape in one click.
AI Sales Forecasting
According to research, four out of five organizations struggle with sales forecasts often getting them wrong by over 10%. This leads to mistaken investment decisions, stock issues, or a lack of salespeople. But when used right, sales forecasting will help business leaders make smarter decisions when defining budgets, goals, and hires.
The smart combination of AI and data analytics has helped businesses improve forecasts. Artificial intelligence in sales helps create predictive models and examine datasets to reveal factors that impact profit. Overtime, machine learning algorithms have allowed software to train and improve data. What’s more, AI powered software can equip sales forecast with related data such as traffic or weather.
With AI sales forecasting, there are numerous areas that can be impacted. These include ecommerce and retail, manufacturing, banking and financial institutions, plus many more. All these can benefit from forecasting by enhanced accuracy, improved processes, and solving stock out issues.
AI Salesforecasting Tools for Sales
a) Salesflare
Designed for small to mid sized B2Bs, Salesflare is an intelligent CRM and sales forecasting tool for anyone looking to sell more with less work. The platform makes it super easy to keep a clear, visual overview of your pipeline and predict the kind of revenue you’ll make.
Similarly, Salesflare keeps track of every sales opportunity history automatically. This means you’ll always be onto of each and every deal and can follow up more easily. Just have a seat, chalk down your emails and enjoy watching your revenue grow.
b) Smart Demand Planner
Here’s a sales forecasting tool that really puts the mathematical pedal to the metal. Smart Demand Planner can accurately forecast demand for literally thousands of items in any unit of measurement. The platform pinpoints casual factors such as economic data and pricing to model their impact on demand.
It then proceeds to quantify the impact that promotions might have on future demand. As a user, you can create forecast hierarchies as well as plan at any level. Naturally, external forecasts can be imported into the platform’s workbench and closely compared to baseline forecasts where the consensus plan is crafted.
c) VeloxyIO
As the future of sales, Veloxy males AI powered predictive forecasting and sales enablement software that integrates seamlessly with Salesforce CRM. The plugin helps sales reps engage in Salesforce with integrated sales management software.
This means management can get better forecasts and analytics to see which actions truly drive the pipeline. With Veloxy Analytics, sales operations get more accurate forecasts based on historical analysis of biases. What’s more, the analytic tools examine how different sales activities correlate to the growth of your pipeline and reveal behaviors that directly impact sales.
What is AI Sales Assistant Software?
Also referred to as virtual sales assistants, AI sales assistant software helps sales reps by automating several different tasks using AI. Essentially, there are two categories of Sales AI. These are sales bots high automate the prospect outreach process and qualify leads.
The second category is internal sales focused sales assistants which focus only on conversational sales interfaces to assist reps in finding answers about sales leads and analytics. These Sales AI tools help marketing and sales departments to save time and energy on routine tasks so they can spend more time on higher level sales activities.
With the right AI sales assistant such as Veloxy, you can eliminate repetitive outreach, close more deals, and keep your sales team focused on solely generating revenue.
G2 is a software review site that takes pride in showing unbiased reviews based on user satisfaction. Recently, Veloxy got awarded the G2’s high performer and momentum badge in both 2020 and 2021.
Check out all our achievements on the G2 Website to see which of Veloxy’s features were rated a solid 5 out of 5 by sales reps and managers. You can also see how we grabbed some high user ratings on other software review sites such as Appechange and Capterra. Let’s have a look at a list of the top rated sales AI assistants out there.
Top Ranked AI Sales Assistant Companies
i) VeloxyIO
In addition to being among the highest rated, AI powered Sales Assistants, Veloxy is a revenue growth system that accelerates and multiplies your selling activities while cutting down on non-selling activities that cost you both time and financial resources.
As an all in one, integrated sales platform, Veloxy empowers your sales team with essential sales capabilities such as sales enablement, sales engagement, Salesforce adoption, and sales productivity. All in a single touchpoint across various devices to help you generate more leads and close more deals.
Currenly, thousands of inside sales reps, managers and field reps are transforming their departments into efficient revenue centers by using Veloxy.
ii) Hubspot Sales Hub
Sales Hub is a powerful, easy to use Sales CRM that lets users supercharge their sales process with configure price quote functionality, sales engagement tools, and incredibly robust sales analytics for growing businesses.
The Hub is built upon the Hubspot CRM platform where customer tools, data, and teams congregate to create a single source of truth for unprecedented rep efficiency. Managers and sales teams that have full CRM access get warmer leads, richer insights, as well as aligned enablement materials to help them run on max efficiency.
iii) Wingman
As the name suggests, this platform is the only wingman a sales rep will ever need. Wingman is a real-time sales coaching tool that empowers reps with the right information at the right time even while on a sales call.
The AI sales assistant tool automatically joins in on your sales call and based on the conversation, cue cards appear to help sales reps out with customer queries, objections, and behavior suggestions. You can also bookmark key moments in real time during a live call for future reference.
Misconceptions about Artificial Intelligence
Understanding AI is never easy – at least not with myths and inaccuracies about it being rife. But since artificial intelligence is steadily becoming a part and parcel of both life and business, everyone needs to learn more about it. In this segment, we debunk some of the most common myths and misconceptions surrounding artificial intelligence.
a) Artificial Intelligence Will Kill Jobs and Replace Humans
Hands down this is the most widespread and potentially dangerous myth about AI. Don’t get me wrong; artificial intelligence and automation is definitely leading to increased redundancies in the number of low skilled jobs. However, this trend is largely overblown in recent year. Research has already shown that companies that have adopted AI also plan to increase their staff as well.
This means AI driven automation will actually create more jobs that it will displace. All in all, artificial intelligence only improves how people work, not removing them from their jobs entirely. And to stand in the way of progress is foolhardy and backward thinking.
b) Humans will be Surpassed by Super Intelligent Machines
This misconception goes centuries back and has been popularized by movies like Terminator. But if we’re being honest, there’s definitely some truth behind the myth. AI is designed to run exponentially faster with a myriad of intelligent systems and learning capabilities. As such, it’s only a matter of time until their intelligence surpasses that of humans.
However, todays applications are still very context specific. Generalized intelligence capable of tackling a wide range of tasks is still not yet possible. In fact, scientists predict that the singularity won’t be happening anywhere near our lifetimes. And when it does happen, there’s no reason to believe that the ‘robots’ will turn against us.
c) Machines Learn Independently
While this is the impression most people get, the reality is that machines are not yet at the stage where they can make their own decisions on their field of application. Any seemingly independent decision they make is simply grounded on a considerable amount of work by humans upstream.
Experienced data and AI specialists still have to prepare models formulate problems, eliminate potential biases and determine appropriate training datasets. After that, they still have to constantly adjust the software in light of its performance – all reliant on countless brain hours.
d) My Company Doesn’t Need AI
Are you sure about that Mr. manager sir? This is one misconception that will keep your company stuck in the dark ages with smaller and smaller revenue streams.
AI can help with faster data analysis, quicker decision making, improve interactions with customers, and generate early warning systems. So why on earth would you deprive your sales teams of the advantage?
The Future of AI for Sales
In our previous post on Business AI: Assistant or Replacement, we had a close look at how successful integration of AI was more than just automation. A lot of the AI processes were about upskilling and workforce empowerment. This is what the future of work looks like in the age of AI.
i) Upskilled and Enhanced Workforce
Businesses need to evolve the way their workers view AI to guarantee a silky smooth transition to artificial success. As opposed to fearing AI, it’s all about getting your team members to adopt it as you read in our AI adoption post.
In his book (Human+Machine), Jim Wilson talks about how the new AI era will be marked by increasingly broader levels of employment. So while machines will take over high volume tasks such as calculations and other routine works, abstract tasks involving judgment, creativity and inspiration still require organic intelligence.
ii) Increased Productivity Boosts
Artificial intelligence allows humans to be more productive than before at the most general level. For instance, AI can continually analyze troves of data to understand customer priority, draw patterns and predict needs. A huge company could take weeks to analyze large sets of data that AI systems can knock down in a matter of hours.
iii) Broader/New Job Markets for the Missing Middle
Naturally more and more companies will need to ensure they can accommodate new skills and talents as they continually adopt AI. Research shows that an immense number of emergent roles will be taken up by the missing middle. This term refers to the dynamic space where man and machine collaborate in total symbiosis working towards a common goal.
Some of these new roles could include highly qualified trainers to teach AI systems how to perform with minimal errors. Others like explainers will be essential to explain the inner working of AI to non-technical staff. Similarly, you’ll need sustainers to ensure the artificial intelligence systems maintain responsible use and operate properly to make life easier, not harder.
Sales AI: Conclusion
To outperform the competition in this AI rich environment, it is of the utmost importance for businesses to start developing upskilling strategies while they still have time. Failure to fill up the ‘missing middle ’could lead to a persistent and harmful shortage of skilled labor in the market.
There’s already plenty of research that shows why businesses which commit to getting their workforce to collaborate with AI have more chances of success and long term viability to survive upcoming AI disruptions across various industries. Join the artificial intelligence bandwagon today with systems like Veloxy Engage and Veloxy Mobile which use AI to provide sales teams with relevant information for their next task depending on factors like where they are at the moment and the context of their current objective.
Take a closer look at Veloxy’s ratings by using the links below.
Thanks for your feedback! We would really appreciate your feedback.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Sauvik Sarkar
Sales AI is transforming selling activities for companies of all sizes, and one of the leaders in this movement is Sauvik Sarkar. While artificial intelligence can be intimidating to most, Sauvik helps improve adoption with one-on-one training, insightful blog articles, and more.
Are you ready to revolutionize your sales process and skyrocket your team’s productivity? In today’s competitive landscape, the key to success lies in adopting cutting-edge technology. AI sales tools are transforming the way sales teams operate, automating tasks, providing valuable insights, and optimizing efficiency. Discover how these powerful tools can help you stay ahead of the game, improve customer engagement, and maximize
AI sales assistant software programs play an increasingly important role for sales teams. So, choosing the best AI sales assistant is crucial. There are many different AI for sales programs now available. Here at Veloxy, we are proud to say that we consistently earn recognition as one of the best AI sales assistant software programs available. But you don’t need
The average Salesforce instance has thousands of prospects, leads, and customers. Here’s the problem. Each of those contacts has a uniquely different propensity to buy. As a salesperson, every single day you have to find the proper balance between selling activity and non-selling activity. For example, you have to balance making calls and meeting customers with prioritizing your leads and
As you and I both know, there are thousands of professions that require a human touch. Sales is near the the top of that list. In order for salespeople to succeed, they must be proficient at establishing and nurturing value-driven relationships.
The question now becomes, how does Sales Artificial Intelligence fit into all this?
Does it really play a vital role in sales?
Well, there are numerous ways that AI for sales can benefit a sales team. These include accelerating lead volumes, closing rates, and overall sales performance.
Does Artificial Intelligence in sales replace salespeople?
No. In fact, sales teams leveraging Sales AI are actually hiring more salespeople due to hyper efficiencies and more revenue.
Try to think of it like giving sales reps the insight and tools they need to work smarter, faster, and easier. For you the sales manager, this means forging better working relationships with salespeople and enhancing their ability to hit quotas consistently.
Thanks to Sales AI, sellers are also streamlining their workday and receiving automated and actionable customer intelligence. This turns a sales rep who spends too much time on non-selling activity into a trusted advisor that spends the majority of their time on customer engagement.
Would you like to know more about AI for Sales?
Continue reading, and after you’re done, I invite you to schedule some time with our very own sales artificial intelligence guru, Samir Majumdar.
Who is Using Sales AI?
Forward thinking companies are already catching on fast. Salesforce’s state of sales report shows that sales leaders expect their AI adoption to grow faster than any other sales related technology. Salesforce also highlighted that high performing teams are almost 5x more likely to be using AI than those underperforming teams.
If you’re looking to increase the adoption of AI into your business, you can read all about it in our post, Getting Your Organization AI Ready.
But here’s the fun part. Artificial intelligence in sales is actually not replacing people. As a matter of fact, a vast majority of these high performing companies are also planning to increase their workforce.
The reason for this is simple – AI is creating practical value by augmenting, automating, and supercharging how they work. And this is with tons of real-world use cases and tools already in use today. Unfortunately, there seems to be so much hype around AI that a lot of sales leaders often miss out on this fact.
Of course, we can’t rightly blame anyone. After all, the reps have quotas to hit and there’s currently too much commentary of AI being aspirational as opposed to practical. In this pillar post, we’ll be sticking purely to the practical.
We’ll outline a working definition of Sales AI as well as what role it plays in sales. We’ll see how artificial intelligence is helping sales management and enablement. We will also check out some sales forecasting and automation software that use AI, and more misconceptions on AI. So buckle up and prepare for one super informative, all inclusive guide to all things Sales AI.
What is Sales AI?
Sales AI is any software that makes use of artificial intelligence to make sales teams more effective and productive. This includes tools designed to reduce the administrative burden on revenue operations and reps by automating non-selling activities. Some functions that benefit from Sales AI are sales forecasting, tracking and analyzing contact relationships, pipeline management, data entry, and much more.
Generally, artificial intelligence is an umbrella term covering a wide range of different technologies. These include computer vision, machine learning, deep learning, natural language processing, and much more. However, all these technologies help machines perform specific cognitive tasks just as well or even better than their human counterparts.
Take AI powered computer vision for instance. It helps self-driving cars to identify and avoid obstacles, just like our trusty eyeballs. And your favorite voice assistant (Siri or Alexa) also understands your words and responds using artificial intelligence.
So while there are a ton of different types of AI, the most essential point is that the term Artificial Intelligence refers to the use of machines to automate activities otherwise performed by humans. Sales AI can and will impact your career in sales, but always in a good way.
AI in Sales
Sales AI is a form of machine learning and execution that powers some of the most impressive sales capabilities. Predictive Sales AI, for example, constantly analyzes the sales activity of individual salespeople, proactively guiding the sales process and signaling the best time to perform outreach.
Unlike traditional sales software that presents data as it becomes available, Sales AI analyzes new and old data over time, exponentially increasing the likelihood that you’ll satisfy your customers and shorten their sales cycles.
So with sophisticated enough AI, you can analyze prospect and customer data, predict which of them is more likely to close, recommend the most effective sales actions to carry out, forecast results, optimize prices and much more.
Don’t believe me? Well, Harvard Business Review estimates that AI can create about $2.5 trillion of value in sales.
How is AI Changing Sales?
With all this talk about artificial intelligence, let me be clear on one important point. The power of selling will never move away from human interaction. Sales AI drives this point home by automating the non-selling activities that take salespeople away from human interaction. In fact, AI has literally obliterated several of these non-human sales functions.
Here are some of the other changes AI is making in sales.
a) Dropping Sales Costs
By simply automating non-selling activities with AI, sales teams are greatly lowering the time and cost associated with each sale. That’s because sales reps are spending the vast majority of their time on the activities that produce sales, and less time on those that don’t.
b) Decrease in Call Times
Since AI can help identify needs and align solutions, sales reps require far less discovery and questioning during their calls. According to research, call times have actually dropped by as much as 70% thanks to AI.
c) Rise in Leads
The same business review from Harvard shows that sales teams that adopted AI increased their leads and appointments by as much as 50%. That’s because AI powered machine learning has taken on time consuming tasks of connecting and qualifying leads as well as follow ups and relationship management.
d) Increased Personal Touch
Here’s one of the more covert impacts of AI in sales. Sales leaders predict that customers will manage as much as 80% of their relationships without the involvement of salespeople. But at the same time, salespeople will be more available for said involvement. That’s because AI will be handling mundane tasks which take up a lot of time for reps, leaving them with more time to engage with prospects and clients.
e) Automated/Visual Management Styles
Interestingly, sales managers’ roles tend to change as they adopt more and more AI capabilities. Since machine intelligence can progressively gather more performance data, recommend solutions, and make day to day decisions based on data, management doesn’t have to sift through hundreds of reports and spreadsheets to get actionable insight. This automation translates to managers rapidly making the right decisions at the right time for their sales teams.
Role of AI in Sales
We’ve already established that AI helps sales without replacing human sellers. In addition to improving overall performance of your sales team, it also provides curated data for management. This helps with prospecting and smoother decision making.
For marketers, AI allows for driving revenue, scalable growth, and a personalized customer experience. More and more marketing experts are realizing the value and power that AI brings.
But how exactly does AI help with sales management and enablement?
How is AI Helping Sales Management?
i) Integrating AI in the Sales Process
Successful executives and sales managers don’t waste the limited and valuable time of their workforce. Businesses have already invested heavily in hiring, training, and developing their sales force. But with automation creeping in quickly, there’s no fighting the incoming changes.
This is why sales managers need to use their organizational culture, experience, and ethical reflection. Sales leaders won’t have enough time to develop their staff while teaching them new skills. But by leaving unique sales and planning functions to AI, they can work smarter and faster along with their workforce.
ii) Streamlining Big Data
Any business model today is seriously flawed if management does not prioritize the gathering and analysis of data. Remember, AI doesn’t happen in a vacuum. The application of data mining techniques and machine learning requires increasing amounts of data. As such, successful sales managers make their teams data driven by collecting and utilizing economically feasible sales data points.
If you do not possess essential data or maintain it properly, then your decisions will be based on unreliable and highly incomplete CRM data. AI has really helped sales managers in terms of gathering and consolidating big data. However, this is not a one-time thing. Gathering and sieving through data is an ongoing process.
iii) Sales Managers are now Data Scientists
When it comes to sales context, AI is simply data science on steroids. As a result, sales managers have had to understand, discuss, and explain different data analysis methods. The most successful sales leaders not only grasp the basic principles of AI, they can also envision and appreciate more opportunities.
This makes them more than willing to invest in their people and data as well as supply the necessary resources to do so. Sure, AI in sales does have a risk of becoming just another buzzword. That’s why executives must set clear goals to their data science teams and make sure they get a solid return on investment.
How is AI Helping Sales Enablement?
Sales enablement equips your sales team on three primary fronts. These are delivering engaging content, prospecting, and building team competency. We’ve touched on all this and more in our past posts and on our sales enablement page. With the introduction of sales AI, these three areas have gotten a significant boost.
i) Delivering Engaging Content
After gathering a lot of data on prospect behavior and customer intent, you can make use of AI to personalize the info. This will help you develop, craft and pull relevant content depending on which stage of the sales cycle your prospect resides. You can then repurpose and format the content to align with your buyer preferences.
In addition to offering customers predictive insights, a fully configured AI also gives you access to buying propensities. This means AI gives you recommendations regarding the scope subject, length, style, timing, and content frequency. When it comes to creating and personalizing content, artificial intelligence in sales is a must.
ii) Prospecting
There’s no doubt about it – AI definitely makes prospecting more efficient. Sales AI can create highly detailed buyer personas (and sales personas as well) by analyzing a sample of existing customers based on the parameters you set. With these personas, it will then help you find other matches.
In addition to analyzing more sophisticated qualifiers like sentiments, personal values, and ethics, AI engines can work with basic data like the prospects behavior, location, peak activity times, and demographics. All these allow sales reps to engage more actively with leads and prospects that are more likely to convert and drive revenue.
iii) Building Competency and Team Productivity
We’ve already seen how Sales AI can relieve hundreds of man hours by automating various activities. For instance, the right tools can mine organizational email, workflow, calendar, and other apps to automatically populate CRM.
When it comes to competency building, AI will analyze a sales rep’s performance or manager’s coaching proficiency to identify behavioral aspects. An AI powered sales enablement tool will go a long way to guaranteeing the time spent by the rep in the field is spent productively with the most profitable prospects.
AI in B2B Sales
Early on, marketing and sales departments were the first to adopt digital transformation. That’s because the digital context expanded the touch points that they could use to personalize engagement. This same transformation has been especially useful for B2B sales teams since they typically have longer high touch sales cycles.
Steadily, Sales AI is changing the expectations of B2B sales performance. According to research, those B2B sales teams that outperform the rest are the ones willing to shake up their sales model and welcome next-gen capabilities. This has seen savvy B2Bs grow at twice the rate of GDP.
Your typical B2B sales rep carries out hours of research before reaching out to prospects. AI turns that process around by giving the rep valuable prospect intelligence. See, even though marketing might have intelligence based on analysis, it’s tough to beat the speed, accuracy, and efficiency of Sales AI.
Here are more reasons you need Sales AI in B2B sales.
• AI tools help optimize resources on highest value prospects
• New layers of data are added thanks to machine learning
• AI fuels a continuous feedback loop
Predictive Sales AI
As the name suggests, predictive sales AI makes use of statistical models and computer algorithms to analyze extremely large sets of data and assess the likelihood of different potential outcomes. The models are drawn upon the contextual, current, and historical data for the probability of a future event actualizing.
Naturally, the system incorporates more information into the model and updates predictions accordingly as new data is made available. This process keeps on happening and the machine learning model gets smarter by making its predictions that much more accurate.
Unfortunately, these models are never infallible – they tend to experience problems that many data scientists are all too familiar with. And that’s data limitations. Some of the applications of predictive analytics for enhancing sales and marketing ops include:
• Streamlining the sales cycle
• Optimizing lead scoring
• Providing timing information and sales messaging
• Identifying cross-selling and upselling information
Predictive AI Tools for Sales
a) Google Cloud AI
This platform offers various services such as storage, computing, network, big data, and many more to deliver personalized customer experiences. The AI has helped increase sales while lowering costs and giving sales people insight to make better sales decisions. It runs on the sale infrastructure that Google uses internally for end users like Youtube and Google Search.
b) Cortex
Cortex makes use of AI to optimize social media content. By employing machine learning, it can find patterns in a database of over 33,000 brands and over a billion pieces of marketing content.
The platform not only generates content briefs and calendars for the coming months, it also automatically fills the content for human scheduling and approval. It uses AI models to determine what features of marketing creativity have the largest impact on a specific brand against certain goals.
c) Hubspot
With completely free CRM at its core, HubSpot offers sales, marketing, and customer service. Basically everything a sales leader needs to track, organize, and craft better relationships with their prospects.
This all in one software can help manage social media accounts, create landing pages, and measure success of your results by leads and customers as opposed to more traditional page views.
d) Veloxy
Veloxy is an all-encompassing, AI Sales solution that empowers your sales force with artificial intelligence. It allows users to shrink their sales cycles, close deals fasterm, and exceed sales quotas consistently year after year.
Veloxy provides your sales teams with predictive analytics and relevant information for their next task depending on several factors. With the platform, you can even create and make use of buyer personas to predict exactly how different prospects will act at each stage of the buying cycle.
e) Drift
As the world’s first and only conversational marketing platform, Drift has been labeled a Cool Vendor in sales reports. The platform uses AI chatbots that have full conversations with people in real-time and connects those who are ready to buy with sales reps. Users can create the ideal conversation flow for your site in minutes.
AI Sales Automation
This is defined as an intelligent system that automates redundant sales processes to make it more efficient, error free, and effective. In the process of generating and qualifying leads, nurturing prospects and converting them to promising contacts, there are several labor intensive actions that are crucial.
Sales automation software simply isolates these repetitive actions and automates them with technology to save time and effort. Some examples include meeting scheduling, weekly reporting, and proposal reminders.
AI for Salesforce Automation
Salesforce automation is the process of automating sales activities to help sales teams in their daily operations of data, opportunity tracking, leads management and sales conversions. All this includes time consuming and monotonous tasks associated with data segmentation, data entry, prospect allocation, and other menial chores.
Thanks to the help of modern technology like machine learning and AI, Salesforce automation is now more advanced than ever. There are lots of tools which offer high level features such as customer intelligence reports, sales forecasting, and account based marketing to guarantee a substantial boost in sales cycle time. Some of the leading tools include:
AI Salesforce Automation Tools for Sales
a) Salesforce CRM
When it comes to sales and marketing automation software, Salesforce CRM is among the most popular and widely used brand. This platform is an on-demand CRM suite that extends its offerings to sales force automation too. Salesforce is recognized by Gartner Inc. as a dominant leader in Salesforce automation for thirteen straight years now.
Some of the capabilities that come with Salesforce include lead management, service post sale, database management, pipeline oversight, and customer relationship management. All these help enable contact management, deal tracking, lead capturing, and sales performance monitoring. The tools also offers easy collaboration between all business functions by synchronizing email, calendar, contacts and tasks across different platforms.
b) Zendesk Sell
Previously known as Base, Zendesk provides a standalone sales automation platform as part of its integrated CRM. This mobile and web based CRM app for B2C and B2B sales professionals claims to be reliable, flexible and scalable based on your team’s needs.
In addition to ticketing systems, sales forecasting easy to use UI and data driven analytics, and integrated customer support, Zendesk offers these and more advanced features. Needless to say, these state of the art features will enhance pipeline visibility, productivity and other processes for your sales teams.
c) Veloxy
Veloxy sale tool is an AI powered, integrated automation system that boosts sales productivity for an array of companies. Known for inbound marketing strategies and Salesforce integration, the plugin is a favorite among marketers for its Salesforce automation and advanced features.
From personalizing and tailoring emails to automation of follow up emails, Veloxy promises to build real connections for sales reps. Other advanced features that come with the plugin include document templates, predictive lead scoring, deal creation, and other basic sales force automation functionalities. Veloxy acts as your all in one sales software by providing easy integration with Outlook, Salesforce, and Office 365.
AI Sales Prospecting
Hands down, we can easily can 2020 the year of accelerated automation. We’ve seen lots of tool for automating prospect list building and outbound outreach to help companies generate new customer data, scale sales and save time. Some of the best tools can crawl the web to find niche leads, identify companies that exhibit ideal customer features and extract their company data to boost sales pipeline.
They can also use AI to turn cold calls into hot ones by opening source data and identifying buying signals. Similarly, AI sales prospecting allows reps to use machine learning to match missing data from your sales contacts and open source data on the internet.
AI and Geolocation for Prospect Discovery
Sales prospecting is the first step in any sales process. It helps search and identify potential customers for the purpose of creating new business. One of the most crucial elements or data for prospecting is Geolocation.
With information on where your prospects are located, it’s easier to cultivate a dependable and reliable database of people interested in your products or services. The question now becomes, how do you gather the relevant information to boost your database and make work easier for your Salesforce?
AI Geolocation Prospecting Tools for Sales
i)Badger Maps
Badger maps is a route planning app that automates territory management for outside sales reps. This tool visualizes your sales data on a map, generates meeting reports and optimizes daily schedules and routes.
Badger specifically focuses on the type of prospect and helps reps solve their problem in minutes by showing them the best opportunities and leads along the way. This means sales people can spend less time driving and planning, and more time in actual meetings and sales.
ii)Gorilla
Gorilla is an extremely user friendly tool that guarantees you never miss out on meetings or new contacts. With their Silverback Data Mining Suite, users can get al the company and customer contact information they need. All you have to do is type in a company name and URL to automatically gather titles, names and all the contact information you need.
The tool comes with features that allow sales reps to create an audit trail for customer contacts and back up links to all your phone calls, meetings, and written communications. Boost your margins and sales conversion rates by introducing agility into your pricing and forecasting with Gorilla.
iii)Veloxy
Veloxy has been called the best app for Salesforce currently available. In addition to automatically logging all emails, caller ID and other campaigns, Veloxy comes with AI based notifications and email tracking.
However, it’s the sales routes and geo-location based prospecting that sets this platform head and shoulders above the rest. With Veloxy Mobile, reps can find new sales opportunities using the prospect finder Map. No matter where your team is, they can get access to ay regions business landscape in one click.
AI Sales Forecasting
According to research, four out of five organizations struggle with sales forecasts often getting them wrong by over 10%. This leads to mistaken investment decisions, stock issues, or a lack of salespeople. But when used right, sales forecasting will help business leaders make smarter decisions when defining budgets, goals, and hires.
The smart combination of AI and data analytics has helped businesses improve forecasts. Artificial intelligence in sales helps create predictive models and examine datasets to reveal factors that impact profit. Overtime, machine learning algorithms have allowed software to train and improve data. What’s more, AI powered software can equip sales forecast with related data such as traffic or weather.
With AI sales forecasting, there are numerous areas that can be impacted. These include ecommerce and retail, manufacturing, banking and financial institutions, plus many more. All these can benefit from forecasting by enhanced accuracy, improved processes, and solving stock out issues.
AI Salesforecasting Tools for Sales
a) Salesflare
Designed for small to mid sized B2Bs, Salesflare is an intelligent CRM and sales forecasting tool for anyone looking to sell more with less work. The platform makes it super easy to keep a clear, visual overview of your pipeline and predict the kind of revenue you’ll make.
Similarly, Salesflare keeps track of every sales opportunity history automatically. This means you’ll always be onto of each and every deal and can follow up more easily. Just have a seat, chalk down your emails and enjoy watching your revenue grow.
b) Smart Demand Planner
Here’s a sales forecasting tool that really puts the mathematical pedal to the metal. Smart Demand Planner can accurately forecast demand for literally thousands of items in any unit of measurement. The platform pinpoints casual factors such as economic data and pricing to model their impact on demand.
It then proceeds to quantify the impact that promotions might have on future demand. As a user, you can create forecast hierarchies as well as plan at any level. Naturally, external forecasts can be imported into the platform’s workbench and closely compared to baseline forecasts where the consensus plan is crafted.
c) VeloxyIO
As the future of sales, Veloxy males AI powered predictive forecasting and sales enablement software that integrates seamlessly with Salesforce CRM. The plugin helps sales reps engage in Salesforce with integrated sales management software.
This means management can get better forecasts and analytics to see which actions truly drive the pipeline. With Veloxy Analytics, sales operations get more accurate forecasts based on historical analysis of biases. What’s more, the analytic tools examine how different sales activities correlate to the growth of your pipeline and reveal behaviors that directly impact sales.
What is AI Sales Assistant Software?
Also referred to as virtual sales assistants, AI sales assistant software helps sales reps by automating several different tasks using AI. Essentially, there are two categories of Sales AI. These are sales bots high automate the prospect outreach process and qualify leads.
The second category is internal sales focused sales assistants which focus only on conversational sales interfaces to assist reps in finding answers about sales leads and analytics. These Sales AI tools help marketing and sales departments to save time and energy on routine tasks so they can spend more time on higher level sales activities.
With the right AI sales assistant such as Veloxy, you can eliminate repetitive outreach, close more deals, and keep your sales team focused on solely generating revenue.
Read all about finding the best Sales AI assistant here.
AI Sales Assistant Software Rankings on G2
G2 is a software review site that takes pride in showing unbiased reviews based on user satisfaction. Recently, Veloxy got awarded the G2’s high performer and momentum badge in both 2020 and 2021.
Check out all our achievements on the G2 Website to see which of Veloxy’s features were rated a solid 5 out of 5 by sales reps and managers. You can also see how we grabbed some high user ratings on other software review sites such as Appechange and Capterra. Let’s have a look at a list of the top rated sales AI assistants out there.
Top Ranked AI Sales Assistant Companies
i) VeloxyIO
In addition to being among the highest rated, AI powered Sales Assistants, Veloxy is a revenue growth system that accelerates and multiplies your selling activities while cutting down on non-selling activities that cost you both time and financial resources.
As an all in one, integrated sales platform, Veloxy empowers your sales team with essential sales capabilities such as sales enablement, sales engagement, Salesforce adoption, and sales productivity. All in a single touchpoint across various devices to help you generate more leads and close more deals.
Currenly, thousands of inside sales reps, managers and field reps are transforming their departments into efficient revenue centers by using Veloxy.
ii) Hubspot Sales Hub
Sales Hub is a powerful, easy to use Sales CRM that lets users supercharge their sales process with configure price quote functionality, sales engagement tools, and incredibly robust sales analytics for growing businesses.
The Hub is built upon the Hubspot CRM platform where customer tools, data, and teams congregate to create a single source of truth for unprecedented rep efficiency. Managers and sales teams that have full CRM access get warmer leads, richer insights, as well as aligned enablement materials to help them run on max efficiency.
iii) Wingman
As the name suggests, this platform is the only wingman a sales rep will ever need. Wingman is a real-time sales coaching tool that empowers reps with the right information at the right time even while on a sales call.
The AI sales assistant tool automatically joins in on your sales call and based on the conversation, cue cards appear to help sales reps out with customer queries, objections, and behavior suggestions. You can also bookmark key moments in real time during a live call for future reference.
Misconceptions about Artificial Intelligence
Understanding AI is never easy – at least not with myths and inaccuracies about it being rife. But since artificial intelligence is steadily becoming a part and parcel of both life and business, everyone needs to learn more about it. In this segment, we debunk some of the most common myths and misconceptions surrounding artificial intelligence.
a) Artificial Intelligence Will Kill Jobs and Replace Humans
Hands down this is the most widespread and potentially dangerous myth about AI. Don’t get me wrong; artificial intelligence and automation is definitely leading to increased redundancies in the number of low skilled jobs. However, this trend is largely overblown in recent year. Research has already shown that companies that have adopted AI also plan to increase their staff as well.
This means AI driven automation will actually create more jobs that it will displace. All in all, artificial intelligence only improves how people work, not removing them from their jobs entirely. And to stand in the way of progress is foolhardy and backward thinking.
b) Humans will be Surpassed by Super Intelligent Machines
This misconception goes centuries back and has been popularized by movies like Terminator. But if we’re being honest, there’s definitely some truth behind the myth. AI is designed to run exponentially faster with a myriad of intelligent systems and learning capabilities. As such, it’s only a matter of time until their intelligence surpasses that of humans.
However, todays applications are still very context specific. Generalized intelligence capable of tackling a wide range of tasks is still not yet possible. In fact, scientists predict that the singularity won’t be happening anywhere near our lifetimes. And when it does happen, there’s no reason to believe that the ‘robots’ will turn against us.
c) Machines Learn Independently
While this is the impression most people get, the reality is that machines are not yet at the stage where they can make their own decisions on their field of application. Any seemingly independent decision they make is simply grounded on a considerable amount of work by humans upstream.
Experienced data and AI specialists still have to prepare models formulate problems, eliminate potential biases and determine appropriate training datasets. After that, they still have to constantly adjust the software in light of its performance – all reliant on countless brain hours.
d) My Company Doesn’t Need AI
Are you sure about that Mr. manager sir? This is one misconception that will keep your company stuck in the dark ages with smaller and smaller revenue streams.
AI can help with faster data analysis, quicker decision making, improve interactions with customers, and generate early warning systems. So why on earth would you deprive your sales teams of the advantage?
The Future of AI for Sales
In our previous post on Business AI: Assistant or Replacement, we had a close look at how successful integration of AI was more than just automation. A lot of the AI processes were about upskilling and workforce empowerment. This is what the future of work looks like in the age of AI.
i) Upskilled and Enhanced Workforce
Businesses need to evolve the way their workers view AI to guarantee a silky smooth transition to artificial success. As opposed to fearing AI, it’s all about getting your team members to adopt it as you read in our AI adoption post.
In his book (Human+Machine), Jim Wilson talks about how the new AI era will be marked by increasingly broader levels of employment. So while machines will take over high volume tasks such as calculations and other routine works, abstract tasks involving judgment, creativity and inspiration still require organic intelligence.
ii) Increased Productivity Boosts
Artificial intelligence allows humans to be more productive than before at the most general level. For instance, AI can continually analyze troves of data to understand customer priority, draw patterns and predict needs. A huge company could take weeks to analyze large sets of data that AI systems can knock down in a matter of hours.
iii) Broader/New Job Markets for the Missing Middle
Naturally more and more companies will need to ensure they can accommodate new skills and talents as they continually adopt AI. Research shows that an immense number of emergent roles will be taken up by the missing middle. This term refers to the dynamic space where man and machine collaborate in total symbiosis working towards a common goal.
Some of these new roles could include highly qualified trainers to teach AI systems how to perform with minimal errors. Others like explainers will be essential to explain the inner working of AI to non-technical staff. Similarly, you’ll need sustainers to ensure the artificial intelligence systems maintain responsible use and operate properly to make life easier, not harder.
Sales AI: Conclusion
To outperform the competition in this AI rich environment, it is of the utmost importance for businesses to start developing upskilling strategies while they still have time. Failure to fill up the ‘missing middle ’could lead to a persistent and harmful shortage of skilled labor in the market.
There’s already plenty of research that shows why businesses which commit to getting their workforce to collaborate with AI have more chances of success and long term viability to survive upcoming AI disruptions across various industries. Join the artificial intelligence bandwagon today with systems like Veloxy Engage and Veloxy Mobile which use AI to provide sales teams with relevant information for their next task depending on factors like where they are at the moment and the context of their current objective.
Take a closer look at Veloxy’s ratings by using the links below.
Be sure to read Dejan Dekic’s list of Sales AI tools!