Artificial intelligence (AI) is a powerful tool that has numerous applications. Having such advanced technology can be a significant game changer for sales enablement. It doesn’t replace the human factor but instead enables more effective and streamlined processes. AI plays an essential role in understanding data and leveraging it to make better decisions in the sales process.
How does AI do this exactly? And how will it make a difference in your organization? Let’s find out.
First, let’s start by defining the technology behind the two letters. AI is an umbrella term that includes several subsets: machine learning, computer vision, natural language processing, and deep learning. In any medium, AI enables machines to complete a cognitive task.
AI helps companies improve sales enablement in multiple ways. It’s no longer a novel feature—it’s something worth the investment due to the ROI it drives. In fact, the State of Sales Report found that sales leaders expect AI adoption to accelerate faster than any other technology. Further, those teams using it are 4.9 times more likely to be high-performing.
The types of AI that drive sales enablement fall under machine learning and automation. First, they solve the challenges around processing lots of data to drive insights and better decision-making. Second, they can take over low-level tasks that don’t require human intervention.
Machine learning describes the subset of AI; it’s a method of data analysis that automates analytical model building. The premise is that the system can “learn” from data, identify patterns, and make decisions with minimal human intervention.
Machine learning is critical to understanding your sales engagement data. If you’re tracking the usage of content consumed by customers, then you should be able to draw conclusions. However, this data is often massive and would require a team of data scientists to decipher. You likely don’t have those resources, so machine learning facilitates it by speeding up the process of finding those patterns in large data sets.
From those insights, the technology can make predictions. The more data the system has, the “smarter” it gets about predictive analytics.
This capability is important because you’ll have a clearer picture of what content is working to convert in the sales process. You can also fine-tune presentations and other content to be very specific to your buyer.
Once machine learning is in place, your content will now have a new influence. Sales and marketing work together to create content, with sales providing feedback from the field and marketers developing the materials.
Achieving this model isn’t easy without technology. AI supports sales-marketing alignment regarding content because it tells a fact-based story based on analytics, so you have anecdotal feedback from sales and also data to enhance it.
From this, you can make better decisions about what content resonates best at every stage of the buying cycle. There’s no more guessing about what will make a prospect convert. You now have a data-driven way to execute on this.
The other major aspect of AI in sales enablement is automation. It’s one more technology tool for users. It doesn’t replace individual workers but rather takes over mundane tasks that don’t need human involvement, such as syncing information from your sales enablement platform to your CRM.
If completed manually, such a task would be a massive drain on time. Instead, sales and marketing can rely on this to do the small things to concentrate on higher-level work. Productivity is likely to improve as well. If saving time is a big concern for your sales reps, this is a technology to embrace.
The sales process is constantly changing. In the last 18 months, every industry felt the impact of the pandemic on their cycles. As a result, how your reps sell and their interactions with buyers are different now, but there are many opportunities ahead.
With AI alleviating some of the burdens around data analysis for actionable insights and automation of tedious jobs, your sales and marketing teams have room to be more strategic. First, sales and marketing have clarity around content performance, so they can more easily build out nurture tracks and personalized presentations.
Second, the sheer boost in productivity means sales have more time to prospect and qualify, while marketing can focus on content creation to support those activities. Having an AI tool in your sales enablement software will continue to pay dividends.
Technology is the foundation for any modern sales and marketing operation. The more advanced tools you have in your tech stack, the more likely you are to experience better outcomes. Leveraging AI helps you put the right content in front of the right buyer at the right time.
You’ll also have visibility into what actions close the most sales since you’re tracking the entire sales cycle. To complement all this, you’ll have the ability to automate low-level tasks, taking them off the plate of your team.
If you want to achieve these results, you’ll need a sales enablement platform that can track engagement data, identify patterns, integrate with your CRM, and automate tasks. vablet offers these benefits and more. You can learn more about sales enablement software and how it supports sales and marketing in our e-book, Secrets Revealed: How Marketing Can Help Increase Sales Using a Sales Enablement Platform. Download it today