FINDING "YOUR IDEAL CLIENT" THANKS TO ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
While sales and marketing budgets can represent up to two thirds of the cost structure of some companies, the question of the efficiency and productivity of these sales forces is becoming more and more acute for them. This is typically an area where intelligence has enabled tremendous progress. Particularly, solutions (such as those of the American editor ZoomInfo) incorporating Machine Learning engines allow companies to find their "ideal" customers thanks to the analysis of more than 50,000 criteria allowing to define the ideal match between the company and its future prospects. The source of the data is the file of past sales wins and failures. This data is then analyzed by ZoomInfo's solutions to extract lists of ideal prospects and customers by division. ZoomInfo's artificial intelligence platform is continuously enriched with criteria such as the movement of people, the technologies used by the client company, its planned investments, past expressions of interest, the identification of the entity's decision-makers, but also advanced factors such as more granular information on the departments or human resources of the targeted company.)
CONVERSATIONAL AI TO STUDY SALES BEST PRACTICES AND DISSEMINATE THEM THROUGHOUT THE COMPANY
Another application of artificial intelligence that is very useful for sales functions is "conversational AI". This is an artificial intelligence engine capable of listening in real time to millions of telephone conversations, videos or emails between salespeople and prospects and being able to analyze them and transcribe them into correlations. Thus, it becomes possible to: 1) identify the most effective words, expressions and tone of the company's sales representatives; 2) create playlists of the company's sales representatives' "best practices" to broadcast them in podcasts to all the company's sales representatives so that they can learn them. ZoomInfo has invested heavily in this technology through the acquisition of the start-up Chorus.ai in July 2021.
SALESFORCE EINSTEIN: AI FOR SALESFORCE AND CRM
World leader in CRM, Salesforce Inc. has integrated an artificial intelligence module called Einstein into its platform to improve sales force interactions with their customers. The idea here is to: 1) provide sales forces with intelligent tools (bots, chatbots) that will enable them to respond to customers faster and more accurately; 2) make product recommendations to salespeople based on analyzed customer behavior (via data); 3) inform sales forces of the sales leads that are most likely to close; this helps sales forces prioritize their time allocation. Bret Taylor (co-CEO of Salesforce Inc) said in his quarterly conference that Einstein makes an average of 164 billion predictions per day for all its customers.
