With artificial intelligence continuously proving to be the next big thing in the technology space and the world at large, companies are leveraging their potential in different ways to boost their operations.
For instance, Netflix uses a machine learning or recommendation algorithm to help you decide what movie to watch. Amazon also uses AI to influence your purchase decisions. What’s more, Uber uses an AI location algorithm to get a car at your location quickly.
All these similar AI algorithms can be utilized in powering any business’s decision-making process in a bid to aid it in making better business forecasts.
The following are some of the areas where AI algorithms can be used in aiding enterprises to grow through assisting your sales to make more sales:
- Forecasting: Sales managers often encounter an obstacle when trying to forecast where the total sales numbers of their teams would land each quarter. Nevertheless, that challenge appears to have been eliminated thanks to the use of an artificial intelligence algorithm. With such a remarkable tool, managers can now predict the revenue for the next quarter with a high level of accuracy. In turn, this ability helps a business to manage its resources and inventory better, mainly from an operations point of view.
- Price Optimization: Identifying the discount to give your customer is a complicated situation. Currently, an AI algorithm can provide you with the perfect discount rate for a proposal in an attempt to make sure that there is a high likelihood of winning the deal. It does so through focusing on specific features of every past deal that was either lost or won. Some of these elements could be a number of competitors, and product specification compliance among many others.
- Lead Scoring: A salesperson with a wealth of qualified potential customers must make decisions daily or hourly when it comes to determining where they need to focus their attention when closing deals to attain their quarterly or monthly quota. This process is mostly based on incomplete information and gut instinct. However, an AI algorithm can compile a client’s social media posting, historical information as well as a salesperson’s client interaction history including text messages in a bid to rank the leads or opportunities available based on their likelihood of closing a deal successfully.
- Cross-Selling and Upselling: Selling more to your available customer base marks the most economical and fastest technique of growing your top-line revenue. The only issue here is determining the client with the highest probability of purchasing more. In this case, you can either continue spending a considerable amount of money marketing your commodity on those clients who won’t purchase or use an AI algorithm in to recognize which of your customers have a more likelihood of buying an improved version of what they already own (up-sell). It can also help you determine those clients that are likely to prefer a new product offering (cross-sell).
- Managing for Performance: Each month, sales managers ought to evaluate each of their salespeople’s revenue pipelines with a focus on fostering deals that may fall through or stall. Presently, sales managers can utilize AI on dashboards to see the salespersons that have a high chance of hitting their quotas.
Source HBR