5 Ways an Intelligent Virtual Assistant Can Help You Close More Deals
5 Ways an Intelligent Virtual Assistant Can Help You Close More Deals
It’s important to keep your sales cycle short, but it’s also important to keep the length of your sales cycle short. It’s also crucial to give prospects and clients a personalized experience throughout the process. While your employees are crucial in developing relationships with potential customers, technologies such as Intelligent Virtual Assistants (IVAs) can help businesses increase their speed and efficiency throughout the sales process.
AI-driven technologies like an IVA aren’t a substitute for human involvement – they’re an important tool that augments your Sales team to create a more efficient process and produce more leads. From helping to funnel prospects to answering pressing inquiries 24/7 and following up over months and months of email tag, AI-driven technologies like an IVA aren’t a substitute for human participation – they’re an important tool that augments your Sales team to create a more efficient process and produce more leads.
AI’s Expansion and Power
We’re not talking about broken experiences or muddled workflows when it comes to Intelligent Virtual Assistants. In recent years, AI technology has advanced at such a rapid pace that distinguishing between a “real” person and AI has become increasingly difficult. In fact, 27% of customers were unsure whether their last customer service interaction was with a human or with artificial intelligence.
It’s also not a fad. According to Finance Digest, AI will be at the heart of 95% of all customer interactions by 2025.
What’s the best thing about having an Intelligent Virtual Assistant on your team? It can be customized for your company so that responses that make sense, reflect your values, and describe your products are automatically generated. At the same time, you can use an IVA to update your database, contact numbers, and names, as well as automate meeting scheduling with your sales team.
1 – Intelligent Virtual Assistants Quickly Locate Prospects
Consider the impact of an IVA. It can use a trigger to follow up on old and dead leads if they haven’t been contacted in a year. These are leads that no Salesperson would have touched before, and you’re giving yourself a second chance with outreach that appears to be personalized if the AI is set up correctly.
As a result, AI is working as a member of your sales team, digging up old leads that would have otherwise slipped through the cracks. An IVA produces interested prospects through email, social media, webchat, and other methods with no employee involvement.
And here’s the greatest part: AI can learn from every encounter, making it more effective at keeping potential clients interested and bringing them in the door.
2 – Use Intelligent Virtual Assistants to Qualify Prospects and Schedule Meetings Quickly
When it comes to sales, nothing is more frustrating than a dead end. With a series of simple questions—the most essential of which is “are you interested in speaking with a Salesperson?”—an Intelligent Virtual Assistant can assist speed up the process of ensuring prospects are truly qualified. ”. An Intelligent Virtual Assistant can determine whether it’s worth your time to set up an appointment with someone else in the sales department by seamlessly incorporating these questions into a conversation. This would be useful in and of itself, but AI technology doesn’t stop there.
An IVA can plan prospect appointments on behalf of your sales team by acting as a digital assistant. And this is crucial: salespeople only spend 36% of their time selling. Non-sales activities such as admin work, meeting scheduling, paperwork, and email answering take up the rest of that time. An IVA relieves your team of this burden, allowing them to focus on what they do best: selling.
3 – Intelligent Virtual Assistants Assist in Product Presentation and Answering Questions
Though your certified Sales team will still need to keep up to date on your products and services, an IVA can assist speed up this aspect of the process significantly. For starters, an AI Assistant can help keep a customer engaged with an email or SMS message by encouraging them to download a guide or free eBook that explains your service. As a result, by the time a potential client meets with the sales staff, they will already have a solid understanding of the product.
For some businesses, the “objections” phase of the sales cycle is the most time-consuming and difficult. Prospective clients want to make sure they’re getting the best solutions for their business or home, so they’ll frequently ask follow-up questions about the product. So, what do you do if a client contacts you on a weekend with a question? Or in the middle of the night?
A simple question can take days to answer without a customer-facing AI solution in place. The sales cycle can be greatly shortened if AI is ready and able to answer questions quickly. One of the most appealing features of an Intelligent Virtual Assistant is that it is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
And if you don’t believe AI can effectively answer questions, think again. With support, AI was able to successfully answer up to 80% of frequently asked Tier 1 support questions. In Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success, similar effects are starting to emerge.
4 – Deal Closing and Beyond
With technological advancements and changing consumer expectations, an IVA can shorten the sales cycle by allowing your customers to ask critical questions right away, allowing them to make faster decisions – and then actually complete the sale online.
It’s a common misconception that the sales cycle ends with a sale. An IVA can be used for the following purposes:
Follow-up — Using AI-generated emails or SMS messages, your team can easily contact clients after the sale has been completed to confirm that they are happy with the product, ask if they have any questions, and continue the relationship.
Simple referrals – 90% of consumers still trust brand recommendations from people they respect. You can encourage your consumers to submit reviews, discuss their experiences on social media, and tell their friends and family about your product by implementing an IVA.
You’ve not only sped up the sales cycle from prospecting to sealing the deal if you’ve used the capabilities of an Intelligent Virtual Assistant throughout the process – you’ve also impressed your clients with a simplified, efficient, and proactive outreach.
5 – If your employees have more free time, they will produce more results.
Teams improve day-to-day operations and find time to brainstorm thanks to the power of an Augmented Workforce, which combines people and AI technologies. Having more brainpower and creativity on staff means reducing processes, strengthening team culture, and using innovation to shorten the sales cycle.
More than a third of CEOs feel that the time saved by having digital assistants allows them to focus on deep thought and creation. It will be quite difficult for your organization to break out from the cycle and generate fresh, creative ideas if it spends too much time on lower-level processes. Your team will be able to spend more time not only answering higher-level questions or managing high-level prospects, but also thinking of creative solutions to speed up your processes, thanks to artificial intelligence taking on lower-level tasks.
AI’s analytical prowess can also show your team where processes need to be streamlined. Machine learning capabilities can help you collect a wealth of information about potential customers. Who is visiting your website? What are the engagement demographics? What’s working and what’s not in each step of your process? How do you get better at everything?
Every aspect of your sales cycle is enhanced, improved, and shortened with an IVA.
When you consider how intelligent automation and Intelligent Virtual Assistants affect every stage of the sales cycle, it’s easy to see how well they integrate with your sales staff.
An Intelligent Virtual Assistant frees up your top Salespeople to focus on the hard questions by answering simple questions.
AI may convert those who are only looking for additional information into prospects, advancing them to the next step of the process, by engaging with them.
An IVA can re-engage former leads by sending them an email or SMS.
Artificial intelligence does not imply fewer human-to-human relationships. It’s all about maximizing the impact of those tailored contacts by taking care of little things, capturing data, and providing critical administrative assistance.
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