8 Key Steps to Increase Sales Engagement By Leveraging AI

The digital sales landscape today is highly competitive. The best way to stand out in this environment is through impactful sales engagement. Sales teams should create a data-driven sales engagement strategy that simplifies prospect outreach and conversion. 

The best way to develop a data-driven approach to sales is through the strategic application of Artificial Intelligence (AI). In this article, we’ll explain how you can master the art of sales engagement by leveraging AI. 

What is sales engagement? 

Sales engagement refers to all those interactions between a sales rep and a prospect that take place throughout the sales cycle. In the current digital landscape, the majority of these interactions happen over calls, text messages, social media, and other digital modes. Businesses can easily make the most of these digital touchpoints to develop enticing sales engagement strategies and boost profit margins. 

A data-centric strategy leaves less room for generic assumptions. Instead, it leverages AI and a large volume of customer datasets to identify how, when and whom to engage for quick conversion. 

Sales enablement vs sales engagement 

Before we move ahead, let’s distinguish between sales enablement and sales engagement. Both of these terms may sound similar but are completely different. 

Sales engagement is efficiency-focused as it believes in creating stellar prospect engagement strategies to increase sales engagement. Sales enablement is effectiveness-focused. Its purpose is to ensure that your sales team can get involved in impactful engagement activities with proper knowledge of the team’s sales performance. 

The best approach is to combine both sales engagement and sales enablement to scale your business. 

8 Steps to boost sales engagement by harnessing AI 

AI is an ever-evolving field with several scopes of success. Recent developments in AI, including developments in big data and deep learning, have made remarkable changes to various outreach sales engagement activities. Let’s discuss the key steps to leverage AI in improving sales engagement:

1. Lead scoring with conversational analytics
2. Schedule prompt prospect meetings 
3. Personalisation to the rescue! 
4. Actionable customer insights 
5. Real-time sales coaching for better performance
6. Appropriate sales prediction at your finger-tips 
7. Boost productivity for your sales team 
8. Align sales with marketing 

1. Lead scoring with conversational analytics 

You can use an AI-enabled conversational analytics software like SalesKen to perform lead scoring. A business can have several leads in its sales pipeline. However, a more thoughtful approach is to nurture the prospects with high purchase intent. In this overly competitive digital sales landscape, you can’t spend your valuable time with prospects who have a low purchase intent. 

A conversational analytics software leverages AI to conduct lead scoring of your prospects. It analyses your reps’ conversations with the prospects to identify their intent, objections, and other expectations accurately. Hence, it becomes easier for your team to differentiate between the high-intent and low-intent leads and align your sales strategy accordingly. 

2. Schedule prompt prospect meetings 

How long does it take you to schedule a meeting after a prospect agrees to a quick demo? Prospect calls are major sales engagement activities and the best way to make the most of them is through automated prospect meetings. Various AI-based tools can amp up your sales engagement game by creating quick meetings. 

These tools can analyse your calendar within seconds to identify the available free slots to set up a quick prospect meeting. In case of any unavoidable delays, this tool can recommend other available time slots as well. Reducing manual errors and automating the scheduling process will speed up your sales engagement activities. 

3. Personalization to the rescue! 

The secret to successful sales engagement is personalisation. AI can help you access large datasets generated from different sources like cookies, browsing history, in-app data, etc. That way, it becomes easier for you to implement these insights into practice and create a personalized prospect engagement strategy. 

This could be anything starting from personalised sales pitches, emails, content, product recommendations, social media targeting, ads, and so on. AI can help you create a personalized journey for each prospect through the proper utilisation of data. 

4. Actionable customer insights 

Prospects and customers leave a long digital trail, no matter which platform they're on. AI can help you follow these trails to identify actionable consumer insights and make the best use of them to boost sales engagement activities. With AI, businesses can analyse customer feedback, interaction times, no. of sessions, service requests, etc., to understand their needs and preferences better. 

AI is the key to tracking customers’ digital trails. AI-enabled tools can analyse the suitable customer datasets and transfer them to the correct department to ensure the appropriate use of data that can lead to informed decision-making. It’s time that you start investing more in such tools to get in-depth customer insights. 

5. Real-time sales coaching for better performance 

An AI-powered sales enablement tool focuses on effective knowledge transfer among the reps. Salesken which is the best can provide 1:1, personalized, real-time coaching to the reps by analysing their conversations with prospects, offering in-depth insights and identifying areas for improvement during an ongoing conversation. 

The reps can make the most of these live suggestions to revise their sales engagement strategies and take a sales prospect to the funnel stage. It becomes easier to build trust and credibility with a sales enablement tool that guides your reps efficiently. 

6. Appropriate sales prediction at your finger-tips 

AI can remove all the guesswork and biases from your sales process. It can perform core data analysis to make the most accurate predictions on consumers’ future activities. That way, reps can easily position the target customers and their needs to plan appropriate sales engagement strategies. 

It’s time to move on from the traditional sales engagement strategies that are largely based on siloed data, with huge room for assumptions, which leads to countless missed calls and zero conversions. On the contrary, AI ensures that businesses enjoy accurate sales forecasts and drive higher sales engagement accordingly.  

7. Boost productivity for your sales team 

Sales managers already have too much on their plates! Do they have the time and energy to conduct 1:1 discussions with each rep to boost their productivity? Probably not! It’s better that you leverage the power of AI to motivate the reps. 

The AI/ML-enabled speech analytics tools like SalesKen can provide constructive feedback and suggestions to each rep regarding their sales process. Hence, they can figure out their improvement areas on their own, without any involvement from the sales manager. This can effectively boost their productivity and help them gain confidence. 

8. Align sales with marketing 

One of the most effective sales engagement strategies is to bridge the gap between the sales and marketing teams. Ideally, marketing teams can help with the lead generation process and help nurture leads, while sales reps may focus on converting those leads. 

AI can help you create a consolidated dashboard consisting of essential marketing metrics. Hence, your sales teams can have a 360-degree view of the marketing activities and gain better insights into lead generation activities. AI can help align your marketing and sales activities for higher sales engagement. 

Final Words 

We hope that you have a clear picture of sales engagement and the role of AI in maximising its potential. As mentioned, AI-enabled conversational analytics software SalesKen can help improve engagement. Book a demo to learn more!