What can AI bring to B2B sales?
- Personalization
- Data Sources
- Buyer empowerment
- Brand patronage
- Insight
Customers who do their shopping online benefit from the use of sales automation, particularly, artificial intelligence (AI), even when they are not directly aware of it. AI can make shopping quicker and more enjoyable through streamlined processes and helpful suggestions. Businesses can also use AI in B2B sales to give their potential buyers the same kind of positive experience. Here are a few ways AI will be influencing B2B sales more and more as time goes on and how you can use it to proactively improve your sales experience.
Personalization
AI can be used to analyze a user’s behavior and filter results for that user accordingly. This is traditionally used in online shopping to give the user recommendations based on their interests and avoid bombarding them with content that they would ignore altogether. It can also be used to ensure that messages sent to the user do not come across as overly generic, and are structured more like a personal conversation.
In a B2B context, you can also apply this analysis to the role of each user in the buying company. For example, a team lead in development might have very different interests than a sales representative. Good use of AI makes it easy to give each user personalized results based on their role, and it allows this level of personalization to be scaled up to a much larger user base than a single person can easily manage.
Data Sources
When you gather data about a potential buyer, what you obtain is usually limited to their interactions with you. You can get a more complete profile of the buyer through the information you can find online through blog posts, social media, news stories, and more.
AI is helpful because it can gather and process data much faster than any human marketing professional ever could. This saves you a significant amount of time in your research, which gives you more time to analyze the data, craft creative solutions specific to your buyer, and work the new solutions into your marketing campaign.
Buyer Empowerment
Machine learning can add a whole new layer to buyer empowerment. The data gleaned from studying the buyer’s patterns and searches lets you know their preferences. This information can then be used to empower and give more control to the buyer—ultimately giving them more than what they expected. From there, AI can help provide relevant suggestions as well as automated messages and explanations for certain products and services.
In a B2B setting, AI is the best assistant your buyer can have when looking for the solution that best fits them. AI assistants have already been a thing throughout the internet, mostly in the B2C environment. Well-programmed AI will not only help navigate through products and services, but it should also be able to identify whether an existing solution is good enough, or a more personalized solution is required.
Brand Patronage
Buyer satisfaction is a big part of B2B marketing. Not only should businesses be able to look for potential leads and buyers, but they should also be able to take care of their existing patrons. When current and future customers want more of your brand, then your distributors, suppliers, and partners will remain in a state of harmony and unity. This harmony should be taken care of in the best way possible. Although, annoying them with irrelevant and untimely offers will cause them to abandon your brand.
AI-powered messages are constructed for specific customers with relevant contextual content and are sent at particular times. Generic, constant, out-of-context messages are not something you want to send out to your customers. Relevant and contextual messages sent at the right time is what you should aim for.
Insight
Good AI can do wonderful things when it comes to predicting a user’s needs. We already see predictive analytics used to recommend videos or songs on a playlist based on what the user has watched or listened to previously.
AI can be used to find where your customers are struggling, which allows you to suggest unique, customized solutions to cater to their very specific needs. If you can actively predict your buyers’ needs before serious issues arise, it will give you a major advantage over your competitors.
Taking it on a whole new level, AI can also be used as a stronger predictive tool, possibly forecasting future wishes of customers based on accumulated data around buyer profiles, real-time customer interactions, and buyer trends and purchase patterns!
Key Takeaway
The rise of artificial intelligence may be slowing down through the recent years, but it’s not because of improvements are stagnating, rather it’s becoming more and more streamlined. Sales automation and AI is being integrated quickly into the B2B marketing landscape.
From the predictive analysis of a buyer profile to identifying eccentric points that are in need of a solution, AI will be able to provide you with the means to search, analyze, and act upon the data it collects!
