Optimizing sales through AI and analytics

B2B-sales is traditionally focused on human interactions with limited support from digitization. However, digitization can boost the effectiveness and efficiency of your sales team. Besides ensuring the ability to target the right customers at the right time, digitization can help provide additional insights, support deal qualification and enable your team to hunt the long tail of opportunities efficiently.
Case: Selling the long tail opportunities through AI
In some businesses the smaller sales opportunities require almost as much sales effort as the bigger ones. For sound economic reasons sales teams tend to spend little time on these long tail opportunities. At the same time these opportunities could typically add 10-15% additional revenue when pursued.

What if digitization with AI could support sales teams in closing these long tail deals in an efficient way? Have a look at the following client case. With this client we worked to jointly develop a data product in order to predict (long tail) opportunities for their organization’s sales teams all over the world.

Here is how we did it. We used existing data to get empirical performance insights into what the most popular products were and what products were frequently sold together. We collected relevant market data, both from the client’s internal sources and external sources. We then created algorithms to detect specific issues in the marketplace and matched these with our client’s product catalog. These led to new sales opportunities and ultimately to increased product sales.

Technically we packaged these results by connecting the data sources to a data product. The resulting sales opportunities were published using an API that connected with the CRM system. The sales people are using this CRM system to manage their deals and pipeline. Quite pragmatically the automatically detected opportunities and their deal proposals were just added to the salesperson’s pipeline. Through this, sales people can benefit from the sales opportunities without having to spend a lot of time detecting the lead and devising a proposal. Now the long tail can be targeted.

Next to sales people benefitting the Product Development team can leverage the data on sales opportunities as well to help make their roadmap decisions.
The data appeared to be relevant for new opportunities, forecasting and financial modelling. The API and Cloud Platform enabled the build of a re-usable data-product within the company.

To conclude, using digitization, AI and data to make the sales process more efficient and therefore being able to address a wider range of opportunities is a great example of the benefits of digitizing sales. Especially in a profession like B2B sales we expect digital and AI to augment and complement people to their benefit.