Every entrepreneur yearns for one thing: more sales. In the old days, there was no shortcut for increasing sales. You had to make phone calls, send cold emails, and network at every chance you got.
Luckily, those days are gone. In this age of AI, you can automate sales to increase prospecting, forecasting, and lead scoring. Below is a comprehensive guide on how to leverage AI to magnify sales.
Targeted Ads
Targeted ads help you pinpoint your message to the person who’s most likely to pay attention. It relies on data related to customers’ demographics, age, browsing history, and visits to your website.
A good starting point for targeted advertising is your email list. People subscribed to your email list love what you sell. As such, advertising to them can lead to great success.
But what if you want to pay for adverts on Facebook, TikTok, and Twitter? The best way to narrow down your audience is by tapping on the power of AI. Use AI tools to craft creative messages for different customers.
Most social networks also use AI to group audiences into different groups. Use these features to target the right audience. For example, you can use AI to target customers targeted by your competitors. But if that doesn’t work, you can target people who visited your website.
Prospecting and Outreach
A study by Hubspot shows prospecting is the most difficult job in the lives of sales representatives. Yet, you can’t contact leads unless you’re sure they have an interest in your products.
To automate prospecting, find a chatbot that asks everyone who visits your website questions related to their expectations. Learn what your website visitors want. And if it’s related to what you offer, you can add them to your outreach list.
Speaking of outreach, this is another sales job that can be automated. You don’t need to send a personalized email to every lead, at least not during your first outreach.
Instead, you can use a tool like Formcloud AI to contact dozens of leads through their websites’ web contact forms. Your first email might be a warm pitch introducing yourself, and your business.
Based on the replies you receive; you can then customize a message to each lead. And if you want to take things to the next level, you can schedule a Zoom call to persuade your leads to become customers.
Improve Your Website’s User Experience
A beautiful website alone won’t convert visitors into customers. But if people can stick around on your website because you have intuitive features, they’re more likely to buy.
So, add a chatbot that can answer customer queries. Add helpful guides, videos, and tools designed to keep people on your site. Then use AI tools to find out how visitors spend their time on your website.
If the majority of web visitors spend time reading informational guides, consider adding calls to action to your posts. Alternatively, target these people with ads, collect their email addresses and work on persuading them to buy from you.
Sales Forecasting
Sales forecasting helps a business make important business decisions about hiring, products, pivoting, and assets to purchase. When a business understands what awaits it in the future, it can spend its budget more efficiently.
AI can help businesses in different stages of marketing. As we mentioned earlier, you can use bots to find the best leads. At a management level, AI can be used to forecast quarterly profits, demand and supply, and a company’s overall growth.
The biggest reason for using AI tools to forecast is that they can be fed tons of data points. Conventionally, you had to pick a few data points to predict where your business is headed. AI can use terabytes of data to create more accurate patterns.
Data Guided Selling
Although sales have vital data at their disposal, they don’t always know how to use it. This is according to research by Gartner, which ranked sales representatives below marketers and accountants in understanding data.
That’s alright, though. Data literacy can be taught, especially in this age of visualized data. Some AI tools use data to analyze buyers’ behaviors and factors that make them buy or walk away from your products.
By using data to determine why customers buy or avoid your products, you can empower your sales team equitably. They will know how to approach customers so that they close dealers quicker. Some tools will even offer recommendations on what your sales team can do to increase the chances of closing a deal.
Automating Repetitive Tasks
Automation is the future of work. All forward-thinking businesses automate various tasks to save time and minimize error. For clarity, every business has something that can be automated.
About sales, automation could be about content creation and publishing. It might be related to ticketed customer queries or automating data entry. All the same, automation is necessary for streamlining a sales strategy.
It can help your marketing department focus on the right activities. For example, AI can help with prospecting while sales representatives will focus on sending sales pitches.
AI can also be used to send follow-up emails. And if a lead continues to show interest, the sales teams can make calls to close deals.
Data Analytics
There’s so much data these days that we need smart tools to help us interpret it. AI-powered data analysis can help your marketing department interpret buyer behavior and performance much better than attempting to interpret the data manually.
When you have accurate data about your leads, you can help your sales representatives improve their sales pitches. That’s because they will have a better understanding of what leads expect from them.
Another importance of data analysis is to track a buyer’s journey. You can discover whether a lead is just interested in information or they got to your website by accident. Importantly, you can learn when they get serious about buying a product you sell and reach out to close the deal.