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Artificial Intelligence Is Transforming The Future Of Digital Sales

Jamie Shanks
Jamie Shanks

As we continuously collaborate with customers within Fortune 50 organizations, we’re seeing them deploy the people, process, and resources that are shaping future best practices for the sales community.

For example, we’re currently working on a project with a global Fortune 50 company in their inside sales department which has 1,000’s of modern digital sellers. The sellers are working with in an office using big data and analytics to dramatically improve the velocity of their deals and the conversion rates of their deals.

In fact, the conversion of leads-to-opportunities, and the conversion of opportunities-to-revenue was the sole driver for scaling social selling globally. Along this journey, we have seen how they’re leveraging specific analytics to feed their sellers with the right customers to engage, at the right time, to highly influence improving their conversion of opportunities.

Here is the big revelation for you:

Content Engagement Clusters

Our customer found (pouring over hundreds of thousands or millions of leads and opportunities) that there is an absolute correlation between “content engagement clusters” and the conversion and probability of a specific account.

Let me explain – they call it a content engagement cluster, which is a barrage of digital fingerprints that multiple contacts in an account leave on all of their digital assets.

To simplify what this means, just imagine a particular account. To determine if a sales rep should spend adequate amount of time on that account, they know “hotness” = multiple stakeholders within the account start heavily downloading assets, reviewing the website, searching keywords on the web (that our customer is paying for) in a blitz or cluster.

There is usually not just one contact, but multiple stakeholders. This content engagement cluster first:

  1. Trigger the demographic and firmographic requirements of lead scores in Marketing Automation;
  2. These customers attack a problem, theme, product, around a similar timeline;
  3. These customers fill in lead forms properly… they legitimately want help and answers;
  4. These customers will learn, learn, and learn… for about 50% of all the information they need, before engaging a sales rep.
  5. The seller is fed insights from Artificial Intelligence from all internal data sources to contextualize their sales conversations. Each seller is given a unique “play” to run based on the customer.
  6. The seller does not treat each account equal from a time management perspective. They spend 80% of their time, on 20% of the “engaged” accounts (Pareto’s Law).

The seller is facilitating the learning and journey for the buyer, validating questions a buyer is asking.

The future of selling using technology is going to be able to put these content engagement clusters, which Sales for Life has always called the Content Consumption Story, science and evidence for the seller through technology.

content consumption story

Now the seller has a completely different sales cadence, sequence or motion:

  1. The seller is presented which accounts to concentrate on today, based on customer engagement;
  2. The seller is assisted Triggers & Insights plays that are best for this customer;
  3. The seller 10x down on personal engagement on only these accounts. Don’t spread your time over every account like buttering toast. Cut off a hunk of butter for 1 slice of bread, and savor that entire piece! Our customer realized that all “non-content engagement cluster” accounts had <10% conversion rate anyways… and time management is the secret to sales growth. Spend most of your time on the 5,10,15,20 accounts that really need help now and you’ll skyrocket your opportunities.

The Next Few Years In Digital Selling

I wanted to write this to get everybody in lockstep with understanding where the next few years are going to hold for the modern, digital seller. This is just one of the few companies recognizing the power of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning for sales, in a few years this will go from Best-in-Class to Standard Operating Procedures! Start learning about this now.

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