Businesses that sell a large range of products to a large range of customers are burdened by an analytical challenge that drags down their yield on sales resources. The challenge, simply put, is to help each sales rep answer the following two questions:
- “Who should I call on this week?” (i.e. where are the opportunities or potential problems?)
- “What personalised messages/insights should I deliver in each call?”
At present, most sales reps answer these questions by accessing various systems and databases, where they shift through endless customer data, survey information, and transactional data, looking for opportunities or alarming trends (such as down trends). They manually identify the customers that should be visited, add those customers to their call plan, optimise the plan for the best logistical sequence, and then Google the customer before finally making the visit. What’s interesting about this process is that it has nothing to do with sales. This is an analytical task. It prepares the sales rep for the sales visit, and although it's important to be prepared, the task itself is not a sales task.
Now enter Artificial Intelligence. Instead of suffering through that manual process, each rep can access a cloud application and ask a machine (in this case Complexica’s Larry, the Digital Analyst®) to display the best opportunities in their territory. How? The machine is analysing each customer in real-time – including sales trends, complaints, returns, and so on – and augmenting this information with external data in order to make comparisons between volumes, behaviours, and opportunities between similar customers and segments. By analysing everything 24/7, Larry, the Digital Analyst® is able to tell each sales rep: "Here are the best opportunities right now” – “Go and see these them and deliver these messages/insights”.
To read the full article, please visit: www.crn.com.au/feature/artificial-intelligence-paves-way-for-intelligent-sales-461103
