AI use cases 6 min read

AI business use cases: artificial intelligence sales

Practical, step-by-step ways to streamline your sales process using artificial intelligence. Close twice the deals in half the time.

AI business use cases: artificial intelligence sales

In the West, our economy is knowledge based; we transfer information, and its causes or effects, for money. Sales is the fundamental way in which we do this.

But what if I told you that software now exists that can do the job of a traditional salesperson thousands of times faster? The vast majority of customer-centric roles are in danger of being replaced... most people just don't know it yet.

You can take advantage of the upcoming artificial intelligence sales boom. In this newsletter, I lay out a roadmap to implementing AI in marketing and sales process to grow an AI sales business practically overnight.

Using artificial intelligence sales in business

Before we get into how to employ artificial intelligence in sales, let's break down the typical 21-st century sales cycle, so we can see where opportunities might arise.

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The modern sales cycle is: locate potential customers, qualify them as leads, understand their needs, propose a solution, and close the deal.

Locating customers

First, you identify potential customers through means like social media, public databases, or just scrolling through Google. The salesperson then reaches out to these leads and starts a conversation in order to qualify them.

Right now, this is a manual process that costs large sales organizations billions of dollars a year in revenue. Here's how you could use artificial intelligence and automation to do the same thing in a quarter of the time:

Qualifying leads

Then, you qualify those leads - i.e you clarify whether or not they possess the qualities that make them likely to purchase from you. This usually takes the form of a few questions, and your lead's answers determine whether you continue moving them through your sales pipeline.

Despite it's importance, lead qualification is one of the lengthiest and most expensive portions of the sales pipeline. Response rates are abysmally low, and it's usually because the qualification stage is heavily templated (and the lead picks up on that).

Here's how you'd increase your success rate by an order of magnitude in moments:

Green represents generated text.

Understanding needs, proposing solutions

At this point, most salespeople will 'jump on a call' with the prospect to try and understand their needs and attempt to sell. This is, understandably, a key part of the sales process, as it's here that you build a relationship with the prospect, grow comfort, and get to know them personally.

The artificial intelligence sales approach I've outlined earlier can't fully replace people yet. Intonation, logic, timing the offer - these are all hard to get right, and the closer we get to robots emulating human mannerisms, the worse the uncanny valley becomes (and the more negative the psychological impact).

For now, we can optimize around this step with the following:

I find adding a name in all caps at the beginning helps the model emulate a salesy tone.

Closing the deal

If the lead is qualified and you've got them to the point where they're interested in your product or service, now is the time to close.

Historically, closing is a messy affair. It's rife with inefficiency, from the types of e-contracts you're using to how you collect the money. Artificial intelligence can automate large portions of the process for you:

A simple scenario in Make: upon a PandaDoc signature, make a request to the OpenAI API to generate a customized email, and send it via Gmail.

Conclusion: improving the artificial intelligence sales cycle

Okay, that was a lot to take in, so let's summarize. In the modern age, you can use artificial intelligence (and good old common sense) to:

There are also dozens of other use cases we have yet to scratch the surface of which I'll cover in future posts (how about following up with completely customized, cute cards to a prospect's address with zero additional work? the opportunities are endless!)

In short, human-driven sales are awesome. Artificial intelligence sales are even more awesome. Move over, Jordan Belfort - the future is here.

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