Customer relationship management (CRM) tools are essential for managing relationships, collaborating with your team, and closing deals. The most forward-thinking CRM companies now integrate artificial intelligence (AI) into their software. The combination of CRM and AI uses machine learning to sift through massive amounts of data to help you better understand and qualify prospects, automate lead nurturing, and close deals more efficiently.
CRM tools help significantly enhance the potential of your business development team through strong relationships and personalized communication that translates to increasing conversion rate and sales revenue. You can further enhance the capabilities of CRM with the help of AI technologies. The high-end analytical capabilities, human-like learning, and smart automation features enable AI to help you get more out of your CRM software. Some progressive CRM products also simplify things for you by offering in-built AI capabilities and also facilitating seamless third-party integration that allows companies to connect their own AI software with the CRM. In this post we will discuss how AI can create immense value out of your existing customer database:
Automating monotonous jobs
Clerical jobs like data entry take up to 70% of sales employees’ time, effectively restricting them from exercising or enhancing their sales skills to the fullest. It significantly reduces the RoI of sales recruitment while also resulting in poor sales experience for customers.
With its smart algorithms AI can automate such clerical tasks with nil or least manual intervention which creates maximum scope for sales staff to fully concentrate on their primary responsibility, i.e., sales operations.
Leads follow-up
Capturing leads is not an easy task but nurturing them and finally closing the deals is even more difficult. Along with requiring time and attention, there is lots of guesswork involved. AI makes things less complex by recording important communication, auto-scheduling the required follow-ups, and organizing everything onto your calendar in a neat format. It keeps the sales staff updated and prepares their communication strategy accordingly. This long-term coherent communication multiplies the customer acquisition/retention opportunities while also exploring new avenues for upselling.
Duplicate contacts consolidation
Another major part of manual tasks is to identify and delete duplicate contacts every time a new list of contacts is uploaded. The AI-powered mechanisms can automate this mundane, time-consuming job by smartly detecting and omitting the supplicate contacts. It allows staff to quickly act on the new contact lists thus minimizing the gap between acquiring new lists and acting on them.
Creating efficient mechanism for lead scoring
Building lead scoring mechanism requires calculating many factors like geography, professional profile, industry, income, buying budget, etc. It is next to impossible for sales managers to manually build an accurate lead scoring model. So, the sales team works on different leads in a quite random manner and may end up losing convertible leads due to a lack of proper focus or immediate communication.
By integrating AI into CRM you can automate the entire process of creating a RoI-oriented lead scoring mechanism. AI extracts key data from CRM like demographic information, behavioural data, purchase decisions, and buying signals. Acting on the same it focuses on the parameters of successfully closed deals and accordingly designs a comprehensive lead scoring model.
You get the sorted out list of leads to identify the ones with the most potential and prioritize the follow-ups accordingly.
Identifying purchase intent
Purchase intent of prospects enables staff to take informed measures to follow specific leads through the sales funnel. With the help of AI, the sales staff can easily access this decisive information which eventually helps in enhancing the productivity of the sales department and closing more leads.
Along with sorting out the present leads logically based on their relevant potential, the AI can also enhance sales prediction capabilities and accordingly design/align the strategies for optimum outcome.
Conclusion
By integrating AI into your CRM system you can utilize the enormous system data to facilitate meaningful research, automate follow-ups, tailor personalized communication, manage contacts and filter out the most potential leads. It can significantly boost the overall conversion potential of your digital business by optimizing digital strategies to help you in customer acquisition/retention.
