Understanding Predictive Intelligence for Sales: Why Do I Care?
Predictive intelligence, also sometimes referred to as predictive analytics, is a sophisticated method of delivering unique sales experiences to your clients. Using the power of artificial intelligence (AI), predictive intelligence uses algorithms to deliver content to customers, or potential customers, based upon estimations of what they may want or need.
Anticipating the intentions of a customer and subsequently providing recommendations based upon that is the ultimate in personalization. Why is this important? Well, personalizing the sales experience helps sales teams sell more, sell faster, and sell smarter.
Providing a Superior Customer Experience
Creating a superior customer experience is one of the top key performance indicators (KPIs) used by sales organizations to measure their success. To truly rise above your competition and win at selling, it’s imperative that you help your customer win, too.
Helping your customers win means uncovering their needs and goals and exploring and proposing ways that your organization is uniquely positioned to help them. Gone are the days of product pitches and blindly making cold call after cold call. Today’s sales calls include tailoring a personalized customer experience rich with information and win-win solutions.
How it Works
Predictive intelligence works by capturing data such as web clicks, purchases, dropped carts, and email opens. This information is stored within a model that builds a 360-degree view. This includes buyers who have engaged with your company, regardless of whether or not they’ve actually made a purchase. Once a buyer is “known� you can begin to gain a historical view of their activity.
This information can be gathered online, but it can also be gathered within a sales call, via phone, or in-person, wherein sales representatives record or track data that is then entered into an AI tool that helps build insight into a client’s interests, preferences, and needs. Modern project management and customer relationship management (CRM) tools can also contribute valuable customer data to the AI data pool to further augment the insights about individual customers. Find out more about integrating your project management tool with AI data here.
The data collected about each client or potential client is ultimately used to personalize content directed toward them. The algorithms used by predictive intelligence make decisions and recommendations based on implicit and explicit observations, and then automates the delivery of content for you. Every time your sales team and your AI tool interact with your customer, the tool is improving its ability to anticipate your client’s needs, therefore improving your ability to continue personalizing their experience.
Why You Should Care
Outside of the fact that you may be taking a risk by not adopting predictive intelligence, consider what this tool can do for your customers and ultimately your business. AI tools are able to scan through millions of tasks and events to find patterns that sales representatives cannot possibly track or notice on their own.
Predictive intelligence will notice what behavior results in the best results. For example, an AI tool might notice that sending a weekly email yields results for the next eight weeks, or that sending a pitch to a client in advance leads to better conversions.
The idea behind predictive intelligence for sales is that it gives your sales team an advantage as it relates to reading clients and identifying patterns they wouldn’t otherwise see. This means that sales representatives have a tool and data set to rely on outside of just being able to “read people really well�.
Consider how you can differentiate yourself in the marketplace as you begin to create personalized sales experiences with your clients. When your customers know that you not only understand their goals and needs but that you anticipate those needs and show up with recommendations and solutions at just the right time, you’ll make that critical shift from provider to partner.
As AI and predictive intelligence continue to disrupt virtually every industry, it’s important to consider what this means for sales organizations. Predictive intelligence is already proving to be the future. While AI technology cannot replace the work of a talented sales force; building quality relationships, understanding nuances of clients’ businesses, and creatively adapting to the changes in industry trends, it will absolutely be one of the strongest competitive advantages you have.
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Jessica Barrett Halcom is a writer for TechnologyAdvice.com, with specializations in human resources, healthcare, and transportation. She holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay and currently lives in Nashville, TN.
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