Over the last few months, the entire sales industry has seen dramatic changes in the way teams function and interact with customers. Technological innovations in AI and automation are creating a new generation of small and focused hyper-intelligent sales teams able to service and manage thousands of customers.
Our friends over at Groove, a fast-growing sales engagement platform, put together a list of the top 3 technologies that are changing the way sales teams function in a post COVID economy.
Conversational Intelligence Platforms
Companies are increasingly using conversational intelligence tools to improve efficiency for both the sales team and management. These tools use AI to enable sales teams to surface insights into their customers, as well as improve their approaches.
As companies look to optimize remote sales and streamline remote customer care operations, startups are embroiled in a heated battle for users.
Chorus AI, Deepgram, Observe.ai, Cogito, and Amenity Analytics all use proprietary natural language processing (NLP) algorithms to extract insights from recorded calls, enabling companies to identify potential sales trends and new approaches.
One company with a different approach is Gong, a startup that provides salespeople real-time, AI-powered feedback on their calls. Gong’s platform, users can easily scan all the sales in progress across their company, and managers can browse and benchmark assessments of their reps’ calls.
Sales Engagement Platforms
With many companies working completely remote, Sales Engagement Platforms have become the new norm for businesses around the world. According to a McKinsey and Company report issued last week, “Almost 90 percent of sales have moved to a videoconferencing(VC)/phone/web sales model, and while some skepticism remains, more than half believe this is equally or more effective than sales models used before COVID-19.”
Originally designed to help sales development reps manage and automate multichannel touch-points, Sales Engagement Platforms incorporate automation, intelligent AI, and integration with existing business platforms (such as Salesforce) to enable salespeople to vastly increase their effectiveness and ability to manage hundreds and even thousands of accounts. According to Topo Research, these platforms “are the next multi-billion dollar market”.
The three leaders in the sales engagement space, Salesloft, Outreach, and Groove.
AI-Powered Account-based marketing (ABM) platforms
Through utilizing advancements in deep learning and AI, account-based marketing (ABM) platforms are enabling companies to surface leads and target companies that align well with their existing client base. These tools help focus sales efforts on qualified prospects and reduce sales leads.
One leading innovator in the space is 6Sense, whose platform captures intent signals from known and anonymous sources, creating segments by account, behavioral intent, or a combination of factors to identify contacts and build out targeted customer buying centers.
6Sense uses algorithms to ingest historical intent data to reconstruct account-based buyer journeys for any given business, analyzing changes in intent and identifying potential leads.
Additional competitors in the space include EverString, Demandbase, Terminus, Lattice Engines, and Leadspace.
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