Companies are incorporating AI into all areas of business, including CRM systems, to simplify and speed up routine tasks such as writing letters, drafting documents, and processing large amounts of text. However, for AI to work effectively, it needs well-designed business processes, without which it will not be able to perform the functions assigned to it.
We tell you how to automate B2B consulting sales so that AI helps rather than harms.
Automating consulting B2B sales
B2B sales with long and complex transaction cycles have their own peculiarities of work that need to be taken into account when building automated processes and implementing AI tools:
- Trusted relationships and seller expertise
The main focus of consultative selling is on building trust between the client and the salesperson, and demonstrating the salesperson’s expertise. In the short term, full automation of the salesperson-client interaction may not be feasible; it is likely that this area will focus on face-to-face communications between people for a long time to come.
- Large amounts of transaction data
The salesperson has a large burden of filling in quite a substantial number of fields and links between entities in the system, because of which the data in the CRM may be irrelevant and inconsistent. This work can be delegated to AI, it is able to structure and analyze information about transactions.
- Data quality in CRM
In consultative B2B sales, every record in the CRM system becomes extremely important for management decisions. AI-enabled automation eases the routine filling out of client cards, the system takes care of the detailed structuring of data, resulting in more complete and reliable information.
- Sales and marketing integration
To make effective management decisions, it is important to look at sales not in isolation, but in conjunction with marketing. Marketing deals with macro-differentiation, i.e., working for a broad segment of potential customers across the market, while salespeople deal with micro-differentiation, i.e., working with a specific customer and creating a unique set of problem points for that customer to work on and the criteria that that customer uses when choosing a solution.
In consultative B2B sales, you need to gather information about the problems and pains of cold customers who are not currently ready to make a decision to choose a new vendor, as well as the criteria used by customers who have already made a decision to change their current system. Tracking this information and working through it must be done in conjunction with marketing and sales – this can only be achieved through rapid information exchange between departments, realized by AI tools. Automated preparation of methodological materials and recommendations, intelligent analysis of deals allow to accelerate the flow of information between marketing and sales.
What it takes to implement AI in sales
- Re-engineer business processes
Artificial intelligence, unlike a human, has no experience in the company and cannot access any specific context or internal operating procedures that are not described anywhere. The only thing that can be transferred to artificial intelligence is well formalized knowledge.
Imagine that the AI is an external expert who has not worked in the company. For it to be able to understand the processes, it is necessary to update regulations and knowledge base, to build work in accordance with best practices. Therefore, it is important to put these processes in order, i.e. to describe procedures, structure data, make them relevant and consistent.
- Select the processes that can be automated
When there are well-described and well-formalized procedures, among them you can select those that take the most time from employees and put them on the shoulders of AI.
Modern generative neural networks allow the same instructions and descriptions of procedures that were previously used to guide humans to be passed to AI. If the instructions are of high quality, you can get a consistently working solution.
- Ensure data security
Conversations between salespeople and potential customers in a large segment are quite sensitive information, so for a company, leaking data to an external service carries high risks.
There are two ways to integrate AI into a company safely:
- Secure cloud services
Located in a secure cloud and performs only data processing without data storage. Connection to the secure cloud is through an encrypted VPN channel, or a dedicated physical channel protected from interception of this data. All data, both sent and received, is stored exclusively in the client’s system instance.
- Placement in a secure circuit of the hardware and software complex
In this option, the company purchases specially customized hardware containing its own neural network processing. This method costs the company much more – in addition to the cost of equipment and operation, it is necessary to maintain a team of expensive specialists: MLOps, DevOps, ML engineers who will maintain the infrastructure, customize and work to improve performance. This option is often not economically feasible.
These methods are equally safe in terms of privacy and data security. Nevertheless, in the cloud option, performance, reliability and availability of the service are guaranteed, while in the second option, all the issues of ensuring the quality parameters of the system fall on the shoulders of the customer.
In addition, such hardware and software complexes quickly become obsolete and begin to lag behind cloud solutions both in terms of performance and the level of cognitive neural networks.
The cloud option allows the use of AI in a pay-as-you-go mode, i.e. payment for use based on the volume of requests to the AI.
What processes AI automates in SimpleOne B2B CRM
In the specialized B2B CRM platform SimpleOne AI performs the function of an assistant: it takes over the routine actions of filling out a transaction card, analyzes the quality of calls according to pre-configured criteria.
- Filling cards based on calls and emails (Smart Filling)
The system integrates with corporate telephony, and calls made by employees are automatically uploaded to CRM. The audio recordings are further processed using several neural networks:
- It recognizes text from the audio recording.
- Performs diarization, i.e. splits the text into salesperson and customer replicas.
- Distributes information to pre-configured fields in CRM.
Customization of this mechanics is done without programming and promtion. It is enough to specify the fields to be filled in.
- Intelligent call analysis
In SimpleOne B2B CRM, you have the ability to customize criteria for evaluating the quality of a call, such as specifying questions the salesperson should ask. With automated call screening, you can determine the quality of deal development and compliance with corporate sales methodology.
SimpleOne works in partnership with the developers of software product Ainergy, which is integrated into the platform and all business applications, including B2B CRM. The cooperation allows us to jointly develop the capabilities of artificial intelligence in automating sales and other company processes.
Summary
The integration of artificial intelligence into B2B CRM systems for consultative sales is not just a technological upgrade, but a revolution in the way we approach customer interactions. AI tools minimize routine tasks, improve data quality, and facilitate better management decisions.
However, it’s important to remember that automation success depends on careful planning and methodically correct, well-described business processes.
