4 Ways to Use AI to Supercharge Opportunity Identification

Editor's Note: This is a sponsored blog post from Evalueserve.

If you want to succeed in a competitive environment, your business needs to develop approaches and marketing content based on customer preferences.

With 84% of business say their industry has gotten more competitive in recent years and 53% business say the majority of their sales deals are competitive, as found by a 2021 SCIP survey. The most successful businesses are leveraging AI in their sales process to focus reps time and outcompete competitors.

The predictive analysis capability of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) helps companies build an efficient sales engine that focuses on ripe accounts and helps sales teams succeed against their competition.

AI-powered analytics tools use data to tell you a story about your customers and prospects, helping you to identify opportunities and increase conversion rates quickly in four ways:

1. Trigger-Based Account Selection
2. Account Monitoring
3. Objection Handling
4. Deal Forecasting

1. Trigger-Based Account Selection

Cold emails have an average response rate of 1%. When your job is to generate meetings and business, predicting which companies have a current need is essential.

For your salesperson to be as productive as possible, they need time to sell the product or service. However, significant time and resources go toward prospecting leads instead of engaging with qualified leads for many sales teams.

Using account triggers to reach out to accounts when your solution is relevant to them will help focus your time, improve quality meeting generation, and improve your brand reputation (no more spray and pray!).

Most companies have a large addressable market which a human cannot both track manually and run campaigns to with efficiency. AI helps sales team track key accounts and alerts them on proper timings for outreach. Further, it can track your key account, so sales have a more personalized campaign for that prospect.

Trigger-based AI can track new office locations, product releases, new executive team member, and A LOT more. Furthermore, when configured well, AI can also filter out prospects who have already signed with competitors so your sales team can really focus on prime accounts.

Companies who are taking this approach are seeing a 60% increase on top of funnel lead generation since they can focus on ripe accounts.

2. Account Monitoring

Mass sales campaigns are the default approach for so many sales teams today. Personalization tokens make it so easy to fake personalization, but messages often fall short since the message still lacks relevancy when sent at such scale.

Pairing trigger-based account selection with AI powered account monitoring makes highly relevant messages far more scalable. AI account monitoring will highlight which accounts you should focus prospecting towards, and it sources and summarizes key information on the account that can be referenced in your messages. Essentially, AI can research and summarize the information for sales so they can focus on what they do best—selling.

3. Objection Handling

With 53% of deals being competitive, sales teams need to be prepared to handle competitive objections. AI can track competitors and highlight key objection points for sales, so they aren’t caught off guard on a competitive call.

Furthermore, once AI sources and filters relevant information from news, social, review sites, etc., workflow tools help arrange the information so it’s easily consumable in battlecards and SWOT-style formats and accessible in tools like Slack, Teams, and CRMs so it’s easily accessible and ready to use by sales teams.

4. Deal Forecasting

The quickest and most economical way for your business to grow its top-line revenue is to sell additional products and services to your existing customer base. Still, the million-dollar question remains: Who is most likely to buy more?

AI also helps with executive-level reporting. It can monitor trends in activities and market signals that will expose which deals are at risk or have high potential to move forward quickly.

This monitoring helps sales with their prioritization and outreach techniques and is incredibly useful for sales managers and executives to easily see a data-backed pipeline which helps them make investment decisions.

If you’re ready to make significant strides in your sales opportunity identification, the time to optimize AI for your business is now.

Learn more on how you can optimize your AI.