AI and Automation Can Work in Tandem with Human-to-Human Sales Conversation
While the conversation in the public sphere around AI has shifted in recent months, thanks to ChatGPT and its ilk, we all know that the development and implementation of natural language processing (NLP) systems—which can understand our spoken or written sentences—have come a long way. Today, they bear significant fruits for businesses, particularly when implemented in sales functions.
NLP has been in the works for literally centuries; the philosophers Leibniz and Descartes both made proposals in the late 17th century for codes that could make translation simple, relating words between languages. It never got past the hypothetical stage back then (I’m no historian, but I’m willing to bet the processing power back in the 1600s came up a bit short for such an ambitious use), but their proposals are the first point from which we can start drawing a straight line to the most ubiquitous use of AI and NLP today: the chatbot. Chatbots, of course, can automatically process questions posed by site visitors and customers and help them on their journey.
Around 80% of buyers prefer to research on their own before they talk to a company representative; AI chatbots can assist with that early research and answer questions while keeping the customer engaged on the company site itself, preventing them from heading elsewhere as often. These bots also can cover off-hours site visitors when there are no representatives available. Additionally, these systems can serve a very helpful purpose in qualifying previously unknown visitors to a website, helping to identify their broad personas and needs even before someone at the business has spoken to them.
As we know, these systems are far from perfect or all-encompassing. AI-powered bots lack nuance—just try to interact with any of them for more than a simple, on-the-guided-path conversation and you’ll start seeing the cracks emerge.
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So how do we best make use of AI and automation technologies in the sales process? AI can go a long way to helping teams scale, but only when it’s used in tandem with human interaction. The nuanced, complex conversations should be left to humans—there’s an argument to be made that trying to have AI, even with good NLP, handle those key conversations is worse than having no one interact with the customer for a period of time, human or robot.
Everything a buyer does on a website can be tracked. This engagement data, processed by AI that is built to recognize buying patterns, can plot out the likely next steps and identify when the customer is likely to want to seriously start talking about a purchase, alerting sales teams as that window approaches.
Leave the unknown site visitors to the chatbots, who can weed out the ones not worth employee time and serve as a helpful and knowledgeable guide in the early stages for the rest. Once a potential customer can be labeled a “high-intent buyer,” that’s a sign that they would benefit from moving on from AI to a human conversation; that AI can then facilitate that handoff. AI can also be used along other parts of the sales process, even after that handoff, to help ensure customers are progressing through the pipeline, such as following up at ideal times or guiding the customer to late-funnel resources that are a fit for where in the customer journey they are.
The insights that AI can glean from buyer behavior are numerous, and combined with visibility into their behavior on a website—what links they clicked, where they lingered, what ads brought them there—salespeople can benefit from a huge head start.
AI is best when it’s utilized to juice up pipelines and prime potential customers to be handed off to salespeople ready to close the deal—salespeople armed with all sorts of valuable data on the customer’s behaviors and needs that can help them make the sale through high levels of hyper-personalization. Used strategically, AI is an additive, hugely beneficial aspect of any sales process—not a wholesale replacement of the process itself.
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