3 Ways Artificial Intelligence Is Uprooting Sales Posted on : Sep 20 - 2019

In 2015, Forrester caused a storm to brew when it announced that artificial intelligence (AI) would replace one million B2B sales jobs by 2020. This bold headline, however, failed to capture the entire picture. Sure, if sales reps continue to rely on age-old practices like cold calling and distributing spray-and-pray marketing collateral, their days are surely numbered. Yet, on the other hand, artificial intelligence has failed to live up to business expectations. Case in point: according to a recent white paper by Pactera Technologies and Nimdzi Insights, 85% of artificial intelligence projects fail to deliver on their intended promises to business. Artificial intelligence and human sales reps are not mutually exclusive entities. If sales reps adapt and exploit the ever-increasing capabilities of AI, they seek to gain from the emergence of AI.

Automating repetitive tasks

The majority of a sales rep’s time (63%) is consumed by non-revenue-generating activities. AI has enormous potential to free up sales reps’ time so that they can focus more effectively on selling, building relationships, and closing deals.

According to McKinsey, about half of a sales rep’s workload consists of activities that can be automated by AI. Consider, for example, time management and scheduling. Less than one third (28%) of sales reps adhere to a structured time management methodology. AI-powered scheduling and calendaring solutions go a long way in terms of transforming time management into time intelligence. Woven, for example, is an AI-powered calendar app created by Tim Campos, the former CIO of Facebook. Woven uses natural language processing to scan users’ email inboxes for signs of meeting requests. Its virtual assistant then generates suggested times to meet and sends emails to attendees to select a time option. The app even uses location data to account for travel time between meeting destinations.

Taking it one step further, it’s not all that hard to conceive of an app that gives sales reps recommendations as to how they should prioritize their days, depending on their chronotype.

In addition to scheduling, sales reps squander hours each day on email. The majority of sales reps’ time is spent on sales technology (62.8%), with sales-related email ravaging most of their time (33.2%). AI-powered apps can liberate sales reps from living in their inboxes. Crystal Knows, for example, uses AI and natural language processing to predict customers’ personalities and, in turn, create personalized email templates that will garner the best responses. It offers sales reps recommendations for specific language and phrasing, thereby saving them a lot of time scribing emails from scratch. View More