The call center is dead; may it forever rest in peace. But it didn’t depart from this world to leave you high and dry. Cold calling might be a dying art but sales has a stronger heart than ever. So what drives it? What are the successful sales techniques of the modern day that can improve sales team performance and put you on the path to greatness?
Let’s find out.
Remote Work: A Bright Future
Remember that little event a few years ago? The one that caused the whole world to shut down on and off for a few years. Well, it had some benefits too.
In February 2022, 84% of workers who had to work from home because of the coronavirus pandemic said they planned to carry out a mix of working at home and in their place of work in the future. In other words. The vast majority of people who were forced to work remotely indicated that they’d like to keep working remotely at least some of the time.
Hybrid work allows workers to have the perks of going to an office to meet their colleagues every once in a while, but also the benefit of working from home the rest of the time.
Technology for the Remote Worker
78% of corporate companies use video calling software for team meetings. But why just stop at internal calls?
If phone calls were the sales method of the past, video calls are the sales method of the future. Being able to instantly hop on a call with any prospect across the globe – not just with voice, but with your entire image so you can really connect on a deeper level – is a fundamental gamechanger for sales.
The internet was the first big technological breakthrough to upturn the way sales worked. It forced salespeople to also become web marketers. It allowed prospects to be able to find what they wanted themselves, leading to a rise in sales tactics that aimed to direct potential customers to their product, like adverts, sponsored posts, and SEO to make sure critical search terms funnel customers to their site.
So that was the rise of the digital world. Now it’s more expansive than ever. With video calls the norm and AI on the rise, what’s next for sales and technology?
AI: How Can It Help?
AI is the big thing lately. From ChatGPT to Google’s spectacular failure, Bard, every big tech company and their dog is trying to come up with the next big breakthrough in artificial intelligence. But how can the current state of AI be of use to you in regards to remote sales?
Well, GPT is smart in that it’s open source. This means anybody can get the source code and adapt it to make new innovations. As such, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of apps, extensions, and softwares that directly integrate GPT. Some have reprogrammed it in such a way that allows it to be more specific to one niche or another, while others have simply tidied up the user interface so that you can access it directly from the new software or app.
With call recordings, which has become ridiculously common over the last few years, this leads to some exciting ways to improve sales team performance.
@tldv.io Makes perfect sense. #meeting #comedy #corporate #meetings #9to5 #firstday
♬ original sound - tldv.io - AI Meeting Recorder
If you work in corporate jobs, you know how frequent meetings are… What if you could store them all in a library of sorts and then use an intuitive AI search function to scan the transcripts and group sales calls together based on certain criteria. What if you could get AI to make notes throughout the call so you and your prospect aren’t distracted? What if you could get automatically generated summaries sent straight to your inbox with the call recording and transcript just moments after the call ends?
You can with tl;dv.
And these AI features are just scratching the surface. Throw timestamps, clips and highlight reels into the mix and you’ve got yourself an incredible little helper for your sales calls. Oh, and don’t forget that you can get all of this in tl;dv’s free plan! That means you have no commitment to paying anything, and the price will never change! 🤯
How to Sell Better With AI
Leveraging technology like AI is crucial to selling better in the modern age. Here are 10 methods you can utilize right now so you don’t get left behind by the competition.
1. Customer Data Analysis
Want to be able to analyze your customer data from multiple resources all in one place at the click of a button? AI is the way.
What would previously take weeks of grinding, AI can make happen in mere moments. Combine data from various sources like social media, website interactions, and purchase history to make data-driven business decisions the smart way.
This data can provide valuable insights into customer preferences, behavior, and pain points, enabling you to tailor your sales approach and offerings accordingly. In other words, it’s something you’ll regret waiting so long to start doing.
2. Personalization
Nobody likes a generic pitch. Once you start using AI to create personalized product recommendations and marketing messages based on individual customer preferences, you won’t want to stop. The results will shoot you through the roof and you’re bound to notice a significant boost in customer engagement and conversion rates.
3. Chatbots and Virtual Assistants
Another great way to improve sales team performance is to integrate with chatbots and virtual assistants like GPT. This can be used to provide real-time customer support. With just a little modification, an AI-powered chatbot can be programmed with up-to-date knowledge specifically about your company, enabling them to answer an array of questions about your service or product.
This is great for handling frequently asked questions, assisting with product information, and even helping customers through the sales process. A responsive and more timely answer to customer queries is more likely to boost trust in the business.
The only caveat to this is customers who need to speak to somebody directly may get annoyed by being directed around by a robot. Make sure there is a way for them to easily bypass the AI if it doesn’t give them what they’re looking for.
4. Sales Process Automation
Streamlining your sales process has never been easier. AI allows you to automate most of your mundane tasks. Follow-up emails? Easy. Scheduling appointments? Easier.
You focus on the high-value tasks and let your AI automate the simple (but often time-consuming) stuff.
5. Predictive Lead Scoring
Want to find the best leads? AI can help you here too. Give it the right prompt and it can analyze historical data and customer behavior to predict lead quality and likelihood of conversion.
While it’s not 100% accurate, neither are humans. It’s better for your sales team to prioritize closing deals with prospects that have the highest potential of converting, rather than trying to find those prospects themselves. The more energy you can put into closing a sale, the better it will go. That’s even truer when the prospect in question already has one foot in the door…
6. Sales Forecasting
Sales forecasting is another way that AI can revolutionize sales. If you want to improve sales team performance, an AI-powered forecasting tool is a good way to go about it. These tools can analyze past sales data and market trends to provide accurate predictions for future sales.
They’re a great method to help businesses make informed decisions about inventory, resources, and strategies. It hardly needs mentioning that it’s faster, cheaper, and more accurate than most human models as it can aggregate data near-instantly.
7. Social Selling
Combine lead scoring, chatbots, and personalization and what do you get? A social selling AI that can engage with hundreds of potential prospects on social media in mere moments. It allows salespeople to build relationships and trust with prospects in a more organic way.
8. Voice Commerce
With the increasing adoption of smart speakers and voice assistants, voice commerce is becoming a new frontier in sales. AI-powered voice assistants can facilitate purchases, answer product-related queries, and provide a seamless shopping experience.
Sounds like the jackpot.
9. Augmented and Virtual Reality
Now we’re verging on the futuristic. Virtual reality sounds like something out of a sci-fi movie, but these technologies can revolutionize the way products are showcased and sold online.
It sounds bizarre, but some metaverse projects are actually selling digital real estate as NFTs, one of the reasons being that some investors think they’ll be able to rent out certain areas of virtual reality to marketers in the future. If everyone enters virtual reality from the same place, and that place has your brand all over the walls, it’s going to be noticed. But, of course, this is predicated on the assumption that virtual reality and the metaverse will become as popular as social media is today.
All we know for sure is this: customers will one day be able to visualize products in real-life settings through some kind of augmented reality (it’s already happening). This enhances buying experience and reduces the likelihood of returns. As weird as it sounds, it replicates the experience of going to a shop, only it’s online.
10. AI-Driven Sales Coaching
AI can be used to help improve sales team performance by analyzing sales calls and interactions and then providing valuable feedback. It can monitor things like negotiation skills and customer interactions.
With tl;dv, you can record your meetings and use them to analyze your own skills, really knuckling down into why you did or didn’t get the sale. Too many interruptions? Not a clear argument for the prospect’s objections? Missing their true pain points? Rewatch your meetings and get to the root cause yourself.
It’s also great for onboarding new employees and even training your current staff. By bringing together several videos of sales pitches into one reel, you can highlight what works and what doesn’t on a regular basis. Creating reels like this is easy with tl;dv’s intuitive editing feature.
What Can We Expect From the Future?
While we touched briefly on future technologies above, we can expect a whole lot more to arise. Let’s just hope one of the future technologies is not rogue AI…
@tldv.io Written by ChatGPT #inception #chatgpt #ai #openai #meeting #corporate
♬ original sound - tldv.io - AI Meeting Recorder
Hyper-Personalization
While it’s already great at personalizing user experience, future iterations will only extrapolate on that. It will become even more proficient at understanding individual customer preferences and delivering highly tailored experiences. The more data people give AI, the more it can use it to personalize your experiences: for better or worse.
Predictive Pricing
AI will be used to optimize pricing strategies based on demand, competition, and customer behavior, maximizing revenue and profitability.
Emotional AI
It’s widely assumed that AI will one day be able to detect and respond to customer emotions during sales interactions. This could lead to more empathetic and successful sales engagements, but it could also lead to creepy crying robots.
AI-Driven Sales Strategy
AI will be utilized to formulate data-driven sales strategies and identify new market opportunities. This is almost already happening, but imagine it on a much deeper level.
Blockchain in Sales
We spoke briefly about how blockchain technology can improve trust and transparency in the supply chain industry here. However, it can feasibly bring trust and transparency to all industries if adopted widely. This is great, especially for B2B sales, as it ensures secure and traceable processes.
AI in Sales Team Collaboration
AI tools might be employed to facilitate collaboration and knowledge sharing among sales teams, improving overall team efficiency. Maybe somewhat of a pipe dream, but it would be pretty amazing if AI could create bridges to increase interoperability between distinct apps and softwares too. This would allow data to be shared across the whole internet as if it was one sprawling web rather than millions of interconnected threads.
Get On Board With the Future
The possibilities for leveraging technology and AI in sales are vast, and businesses that embrace these advancements stand to gain a competitive edge and provide a better customer experience. However, it’s essential to strike a balance between technology and the human touch, as successful sales still rely on building relationships and understanding customer needs.
tl;dv does exactly that, empowering you to utilize all the tools and gadgets of the modern era, while simultaneously opening up a whole new way of connecting more deeply with your prospects. Download tl;dv for Zoom or get the Chrome extension for Google here.
