Predictive AI: 5 Ways Organizations Are Using AI To Power Their Sales Efforts

Artificial intelligence (AI) is now part of our daily lives thanks to smart assistants, self-driving cars, recommended products on e-commerce sites, and the rapid adoption of ChatGPT. You’ll likely hear it discussed around the office, from predictive and personalized marketing to sales forecasting and competitive intelligence.

There’s obviously a lot of excitement and promise, but how do you engage?  How can you actually start using AI in sales? While AI technology is becoming ever-present, you may not know how to harness it for your sales organization or what tangible business benefits it unlocks.

The job of predictive sales AI is not to do the selling for you – instead, it provides the insights sales reps need to execute better. It enables businesses to leverage more data-driven strategies in order to sell smarter. Predictive sales AI uses historical data, patterns, and even external sources to forecast and enable businesses to make better sales decisions. By applying predictive algorithms to a company’s CRM or ERP data, sales teams can cut through noise and automate much of the sales process, allowing reps to focus on nurturing and closing deals.

5 Ways to Use AI for Sales

There are many practical ways that AI can power up your sales team. With predictive insights, you can:

1. Prioritize leads. Predictive lead scoring technology estimates a lead’s likelihood of converting to a marketing-qualified lead (MQL) and flags prospects to prioritize. The sales AI assesses which types of leads have historically led to conversion (using factors like a prospect’s company size, industry, job title, etc.) so reps can focus on nurturing leads that are more likely to convert.
2. Monitor customer activity to improve retention rates. Sales AI isn’t just for new customers. Predictive technology can help you judge ongoing customer satisfaction and even detect sentiment, helping you identify at-risk accounts to mitigate churn. Applying predictive algorithms to historical data gives you deeper insight into converting more cross-sell and up-sell opportunities.
3. Identify key purchase influencers. Sales AI points you to the right purchase influencers and enables better conversions. AI can accurately predict the specific relationships and conversations that are most likely to influence deals and even the number of touches required to close a deal based on historical sales data successfully. 
4. Create and improve your marketing strategies. AI can be used to identify prospects before they even enter the funnel. Identify hot prospects based on previous success and get them into the hands of sellers immediately.  Lead interest analysis allows you to create dynamic, multi-phase, highly targeted campaigns that drive more high-quality leads into your pipeline. You can send more personalized email communications that drive deeper engagement and eventual conversion with sales and marketing AI.
5. Launch new services, products, and initiatives. Launching a new product or service into the market requires several decisions, from branding and target audience to manufacturing and logistics. These decisions can be overwhelming, but AI helps you make smarter decisions that will result in a more successful product launch based on past launches and other market data.

The Benefits of Predictive Sales AI

Predictive sales AI helps identify opportunities and balances the risk of human error in the sales planning process. Instead of guessing or relying on gut feeling, AI enables you to make sense of the data you’ve already collected to accurately predict sales patterns and the probability of closing – without the hassle of doing it yourself.

More tangibly, sales AI helps you generate and score more leads, maximize lifetime customer value, improve sales forecasting accuracy, and tailor customer content and campaigns. It can even help you address goals like accelerating business growth, building relationships, understanding customers, and gauging overall business health.

What Do Customers Stand to Gain from AI?

Consumers now expect lightning speeds for every business interaction. They want you to respond to new lead requests in seconds or minutes or they’ve lost interest. They expect you to immediately reply to their customer support needs or risk a poor review. 

AI puts you a step ahead so you don’t miss key prospects or fail to address customer needs. In addition, AI enables you to serve viable leads faster while spending less time on false alarms. AI can monitor customer sentiment proactively identifying issues before they escalate.

Overall, AI gives you more time to focus on human relationships and value-added tasks with more precision and know-how.

The Future of Sales is Based on Data-Driven, Predictive Systems 

Predictive AI is not only a smarter and more accurate way of selling. It’s the sales strategy of the future. As AI advances in speed, accuracy, and ease of use, you can bet your competitors will begin adopting predictive technology as a direct path to winning.

No matter your organization’s size or industry, predictive sales software will help you work smarter, turn data into valuable insights, focus on key accounts and influencers, and increase speed to value – all of which to reach new levels of business performance and fuel growth.