Providing personalized experiences across the buyer lifecycle doesn’t need to be complicated or time-consuming — with AI, it can be as simple as clicking a few buttons and turning on a few capabilities. By doing so, you can optimize seller impact, reduce time to customer value, and power revenue outcomes.
Read on to discover how AI achieves these outcomes — and how you can bring that impact to your business.
Sellers aren’t machines — but today, their work can increasingly be augmented with artificial intelligence (AI).
To prioritize efficiency and effectiveness, more and more organizations are incorporating AI into their enablement initiatives. But not every AI-powered strategy is made equal, and many overlook the fact that sales productivity isn’t the only metric to measure success.
“We see many organizations focusing on optimizing themselves, which does not necessarily optimize the customer experience,” said Karl-Philippe Clément, vice president of sales and customer experience at RIB Software. “But by doing so, you can make a major breakthrough in improving the customer experience.”
Already, organizations are successfully harnessing AI to deliver exceptional customer experiences and power revenue generation. Doing so is simply a matter of maintaining a customer-centric mindset — and employing a few best practice behaviors and technologies.
To restore the human touch at every stage of the buyer lifecycle, infuse AI within a customer-centric go-to-market strategy. Learn a few best practices to do so below.
Automate Manual Tasks to Optimize Seller Impact
It all starts with the discovery call: When done right, that conversation can lay out the roadmap for success. Better yet, it can establish sellers as trusted advisors seeking to provide prospects with the best solution for their needs.
“The most important thing is listening to your customer,” said Clément. “It’s not about a sales pitch, it’s not about selling what you have to sell. It’s about listening to their needs and ensuring you have an added value.”
Proving that your sellers are true partners can be easier said than done. Recalling pain points and long-term goals is difficult enough for a single customer, let alone at scale — and that doesn’t even touch on the time spent recording that information into a CRM or producing relevant follow-up communications and content.
The personalized touch that marks a true partnership requires intense investments of both time and energy that time-strapped sellers can’t always commit. Conversational intelligence simplifies that investment, freeing up sellers to more fully engage with customers in the moment.
“If you want to be a trusted advisor, you don’t want to be taking notes during sales calls,” said Chris Book, global head of enablement at commercetools. “Having conversational intelligence to keep notes for you and pull out the most important things from the call for you makes you a more effective seller.”
But the impact doesn’t end when the call does — from that call recording data, you can instantly generate personalized follow-ups and surface relevant content to keep the momentum going.
To accelerate the sales cycle and empower sellers to provide value-first experiences, automate day-to-day responsibilities with AI. When unimpeded by manual tasks, sellers are enabled to deliver the impact that transforms prospects into customers.
Enable Post-Sales to Reduce Time to Customer Value
As any sales organization knows all too well, no deal truly ends at closed-won.
To secure your accounts and maintain a happy, healthy customer base, empower your post-sales teams with an AI-powered enablement platform designed to track — and act on — essential customer data.
“Recording calls, getting emails into a system alongside those calls, tracking customer engagement activity with content that has been shared with them, it all builds a model of what is actually happening in the sales cycle,” said Book.
Having 360-degree insight into every account prepares post-sales teams to course-correct before churn happens. With AI funneling buyer engagement data into your CRM records, your teams can quickly identify customers’ needs. From there, they can move with urgency, crafting and sharing personalized messaging to support the customer in more effectively achieving their goals with your solution.
“We spend a lot of time training our post-sales teams to focus on value so that what was said when selling the product actually comes to fruition after it’s launched,” said Book. “Having a single platform for content that gives you the ability to share it with your customers digitally is really important to do so.”
Well-enabled post-sales teams are a force multiplier, lending customers the expertise they need to realize value from their investment. To secure your customer base and boost your retention rates, provide post-sales teams with the data and tools to deliver personalized engagements that prevent customers from slipping through the cracks.
Harness Real-World Insights to Power Revenue Outcomes
By providing personalized, customer-centric experiences at every stage of the sales cycle, you turbocharge your ability to generate net-new and secure existing revenue streams. With a throughline of AI thrumming through your pre- and post-sales processes, creating that harmony can be quite simple.
Ultimately, you and your customers share the same goal. For them, that may look like realizing ongoing value from their investment. For you, that translates into boosted win rates, deterred churn, and secured expansion revenue. To realize both their goal and yours, ensure that every customer-facing team can deliver and scale personalized touchpoints and track their impact over time.
With AI to synthesize that real-world data, you can easily identify the next steps your teams should take to drive a deal forward, help a customer realize value, or move an account toward expansion.
“A question AI will help us solve is: ‘What’s the next most impactful thing I can do to drive revenue from that account?’” said Book. “That’s where we’re at with sales and sales productivity: actually finding signals in all of this noise to understand what the next action step is.”
Put simply: AI can instantly craft a data-informed path to success, providing every customer-facing team with an actionable roadmap to achieving their goals and beating their targets.
Now is the Time to Build for the Future with AI
From the next big bet in enablement technology, AI has swiftly transformed into a must-have for every organization. Already, sales enablement teams across the world are harnessing it to spark bright futures and impressive impact.
“It’s a matter of time,” said Clément. “With AI, it’s not a question of if, it’s a question of when. How you manage this change is key.”
Seed your go-to-market motion with AI — it’s a strategic advantage with massive potential to scale personalization across the sales cycle.
And with a future-oriented, AI-powered enablement platform designed to amplify the impact of every sales activity, you’re primed to win better, bigger, and faster — all while providing the optimal experiences that funnel prospects into life-long buyers.
To achieve the perfect union of effectiveness, efficiency, and experience, harness AI to personalize and power modern sales.
