What I Learned About the Future of AI and Sales

I had the great pleasure of recently attending the AA-ISP AI Sales Summit. It was the first of it’s kind and it definitely delivered a really insightful experience. I was interested in attending to better understand how we can leverage AI to align sales and marketing to make more efficient decisions based on data.

Below are some of the things that I found interesting…

• AI can write content that is nearly impossible to detect that it’s not human. How does this effect creating relevant, on-demand content for customers?
• Majority of lost sales are going to “No Decision” (Victor Antonio – keynote speaker)
• Customer don’t want more information – they want insights about their business.
• We are losing quality interaction data by requiring sales people to enter it manually into a CRM system. The new corporate asset will be conversation data. (Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve)
• It’s not B2B or B2C – it’s about connecting with people – B2P
• Both Sales and Marketing must focus on Customer Experience (CX) to be successful in the future. We must remove the friction from doing business with us or customers will go with another provider.
• If we want to empower salespeople with new technology, we must start to speak their language and help them understand how it will help them sell more effectively. They want to win, hit quota, and make money!
• AI can help with lead scoring which has implications to helping both Sales and Marketing sift through leads and take action on the ones with the most potential to lead to new business.
• The CRM will become a nucleus or central repository for data throughout the entire company ecosystem. AI will sit on top of it and guide us to the optimal actions to take in order to achieve the outcome we want based on its learning over time. (We are in the future folks!)
• Companies have a lot of data but most of it is “dark data” which can’t be acted upon. (Arun Shastri – ZS Associations)
• 61% of businesses said they implemented AI in 2017, up from just 38% in 2016 (Narrative Science Report)