- Feb 28, 2019
How Sales Teams Could Get More Value Out of AI
When it comes to Amazon and Netflix, Artificial Intelligence seems to be strongly associated with online selling. Most sales forces now have realized the value from AI and how the going is been easy.
The benefits of using AI to transform selling is huge. But the success stories rarely offer enough insight about the challenges companies must overcome to realize the benefits. So here are four major challenges and some surprisingly simple but often missed solutions:
- 1. GETTING A CROSS-FUNCTIONAL TEAM TO WORK TOGETHER
New roles with specific skill-sets are required to bring AI models to life. The team needs to include big data experts, data scientists,machine learning engineers and many more. Cross-functional teams tend to be more effective when they seem to come out of grassroots efforts. - 2. INTEGRATING DATA FROM DIVERSE SOURCES
There are vast amount of data which AI systems work with. It includes both structured as well as unstructured data. Assembling these data is difficult and also creating processes that continually refresh the data seems to be time-consuming. With the help of AI, you can improve the quality of your data and also they seem to work well with imperfect or incomplete data - 3. REALIZING VALUE QUICKLY
A complex AI implementation requires agile,phased and iterative design and testing with continuous feedback from the sales forces. There is a biotech company that has attributed its success with AI and has started small. - 4. GETTING ADOPTION BY SALESPEOPLE
The level of understanding and acceptance of any new sales tool or technology seems to vary across sales people. There are several strategies which encourage the adoption of AI tools by salespeople. You need to make sure that the tools align with how salespeople execute their daily work, and than deliver insights in the natural workflow.
Read more at hbr.org