The use of artificial intelligence, AI, has proven valuable in nearly every area of business operations from manufacturing to marketing. AI has had a profound impact on marketing, facilitating, and influencing the way companies obtain customers and clients as well as how they manage the customer relationship. For marketers, there is intrinsic value in working on using AI to make some tasks easier so they can focus on more creative and innovative aspects of marketing.
AI is a defining characteristic of B2C marketing
Many are more familiar with AI applications that are used in business to consumer marketing. The most visible form of artificial intelligence in B2C marketing is evident in online banner advertising, Facebook targeted advertising, and Google in-box advertising. In all of these cases, AI analyzes demographic characteristics, online behavior, and user location to determine which recipients to target for a company’s ad campaign.
Implementing AI in a B2B framework
Artificial intelligence can have an equal, if not far greater, impact in business to business marketing. While there are many ways to use AI in a B2B context, one that can have the most impact is in sales call analysis. B2B sales people use technology to make communicating with clients more efficient. Speech-to-text engines have transformed voicemail into written transcripts of conversations. But, an up and coming use for AI is in sales call analytics.
What is Sales Call Analytics?
AI can be used to track, analyze, and improve prospecting and follow-up calls as well as client service and retention calls. B2B salespersons and sales managers can use AI to gather sales conversation intelligence. Like the software used in call centers, sales call AI systems can record and transcribe entire telephone conversations. The data can be quickly analyzed to flag points when the client mentions competitors, pricing, and their specific priorities. This information can be entered into a CRM and used to assist the salesperson by suggesting a value proposition for the clients, identify appropriate content to send to the client or prospect, and develop email and telephone scripts for follow-up calls.
How AI benefits sales departments
Reviewing sales calls with employees, coaching through closing techniques, and identifying problems and opportunities on every phone call with every salesperson is time consuming and nearly impossible with a larger staff. AI can help to eliminate much of the guess work by providing metrics and factual data for every call. Companies are already analyzing sales calls with AI software. As the demand for AI grows, more cloud-based and custom solutions will be available to sales and marketing departments.
