Most companies use Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems these days, at least in the B2B space. These systems can be made more efficient if the customer data are enriched with supplementary data from external sources to provide sales reps with better insights on leads and prospects.
This is why CRM tool suppliers like Salesforce and HubSpot are moving into AI to make contact management more efficient. This is no surprise, of course, and we’ve seen Salesforce pushing their Einstein system, while HubSpot acquired Kemvi.
Clearly, there are strong financial incentives for them to do so.
In a whitepaper from June 2017, “A Trillion-Dollar Boost: The Economic Impact of AI on Customer Relationship Management,” IDC calculates that “AI associated with CRM activities will boost global business revenue from the beginning of 2017 to the end of 2021 by $1.1 trillion … Net-new jobs associated with this revenue could, if respondent opinions bear out, reach more than 800,000 by 2021 in direct jobs, and 2 million if you add in indirect and induced jobs. This is a net-positive figure in that it includes an estimate of jobs lost to automation from AI.”
This is big money, any way you see it.
AI associated with CRM activities will boost global business revenue from the beginning of 2017 to the end of 2021 by $1.1 trillion
How can AI help do this? Large manually managed customer relationship databases are like searching for a needle in the haystack; it is very time consuming to find the prospects most likely to convert and to annotate all activities with a lead.
With AI-infused insights and contact data enrichment, you are much more likely to focus on the leads that are close to making a purchase. You can generate and monitor more information and insights about them while spending less time in the process.
AI can be used to enrich the customer data you have in your CRM system, thus filling data voids. Tools performing such tricks can arm a sales team with customer information collected from a large number of external sources, dramatically improving the effectiveness of finding and understanding the background and activities of each lead.
With AI-infused insights and contact data enrichment, you are much more likely to focus on the leads that are close to making a purchase.
With AI-assisted CRM, tools can harvest data and highlight useful information like identifying new leads or source contact information and predict what content or activities might have the best results with each person.
This helps you to prioritize which leads to spend time with. Many companies can harvest data from hundreds of data sources, cleaning, unifying and enriching customer data in real-time. Examples include Zylotech, Squirro, Maroon, Smarter Codes, and Everstring.
AI can be used to enrich the customer data you have in your CRM system, thus filling data voids
AI can also be used to analyze and improve the sales organization itself.
People.ai provides tools for this. They promote a solution that detects what activities and behaviors lead to repeatable sales success and provides a rep-based and account-based view of the sales process. This solution can be used by sales managers to coach sales reps for improved future sales results.
