All companies lose some customers sooner or later, and to survive, it is crucial to get new ones. With enough new customers, you will not only maintain the business, but grow as well.
AI can have several applications here. For example, it can be used to recommend new leads for you to contact based on connections between companies or people.
It is possible for software algorithms to work out the relationship strength between different people, their interests, and whether they fit your ideal customer profile. In short, you can use AI for sales prospecting.
With enough new customers, you will not only maintain the business, but grow as well.
For example, there are tools that can help discover and recommend new leads to contact. These help eliminate the need for cold calls and give suggestions on who to contact, what to say to them, and when.
They crawl the Internet, mining and mapping the connections between companies and people in the process. Not only do you get new potential leads, but they come with why they may have an interest in your products or services too.
By using prediction models, software tools can help learn and understand what prospects works best to target and reach out to them automatically from your email account.
If you are interested in this, check out Node or Qualifier. Both companies offer solutions for sales prospecting. You may want to consider common tools available in more plain sight as well, such as LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator tool and ability to propose new contacts based on your extended network.
By using prediction models, software tools can help learn and understand what prospects works best to target
As we all know by now, the social media platforms are using AI-algorithms for most tasks these days.
You can also measure the relationship strength between your sales organization and a target account to determine the deal risk. You can get help identifying accounts where your relationships are weak or single-threaded.
This is where you only have contact with one person at the company, which means they might be customers you are vulnerable to losing.
One vendor providing relationship intelligence solutions is Nudge, which enables businesses to access new target accounts through their extended network and to analyze deal risk through precise relationship strength measurement.
I discussed their tool with Steve Woods, Co-Founder and CTO. He says that “Nudge gives an accurate assessment of pipeline health—where teams are ‘single threaded’ with just one strong relationship in an account. This enables sales to see where they lack access to the right roles in the buying center, which deals in forecast are most likely to slip.”
Nudge performs analysis that can highlight gaps in relationship coverage. Those gaps can be resolved by giving sales teams full visibility into the relationships of the entire company, from executives all the way to service professionals.
Woods elaborated further: “In order to do what we do, we need to create a map of all of the people and companies in the world. Then we can learn about how has relationships with whom. We use AI to piece together the signals of who everyone is and understand the result in terms of actual people working across different companies. Hence we can create a strong understanding of what relationships exist.”
While AI tools for lead and customer acquisition may not replace your sales reps, they can surely improve work efficiency and reduce meaningless cold-calling to people who have no interest in what you offer.
They can also help reduce risk of losing accounts with which you have a weak relationship.
