Automated assistants engage potential buyers before handing them
off to a human sales rep
By Angus Loten
This article is being republished as part of our daily
reproduction of WSJ.com articles that also appeared in the U.S.
print edition of The Wall Street Journal (April 30, 2018).
When the 100-plus sales team at Snowflake Computing Inc. had
more leads than it could handle, the company assigned each rep a
personal assistant: an automated, artificial-intelligence-powered
chatbot designed to engage with potential buyers by email or
text.
Sales showed a "tangible boost" after just four months, says
Denise Persson, chief marketing officer of the San Mateo, Calif.,
data-storage firm. Each automated assistant, developed by Foster
City, Calif., technology firm Conversica, speaks six languages and
works around the clock contacting, engaging and following up with
prospects who have reached out to Snowflake through its website,
email, text, social media or other channels.
When it determines that a lead is ready to buy, it alerts a
human sales rep, handing off useful tips, like the best contact
number or time of day to call.
The sales rep takes it from there.
Fewer dead ends
Digital tools powered by intelligent algorithms are changing the
way corporate sales teams operate. Automated assistants and other
smart tools take over repetitive, time-consuming tasks from harried
sales staff, who spend too much time chasing dead ends that don't
produce a sale, and not enough time chasing those that do, sales
managers say.
The use of AI is spreading in part due to the broad adoption of
cloud computing to increase computer-processing power, storage and
data-gathering abilities. With the cloud, businesses are able to
rent much-higher-capacity computer infrastructure from third-party
vendors, avoiding the hefty costs and additional resources needed
to run their own data centers. Indeed, many large cloud providers
are adding AI capabilities to their existing enterprise IT
platforms and services. Salesforce.com Inc., the cloud-based
business-software giant, last year announced a partnership with
International Business Machines Corp. to develop data-analytics
offerings for sales teams using AI. Each of the partners has its
own AI platform -- Einstein and Watson, respectively.
Sales departments are the most common business units acquiring
AI technology, largely because they are already awash in data and
need help analyzing it. In a survey about corporate uses of AI,
Forrester Research found that 46% of more than 400 business and
technology professionals identified sales and marketing as leading
AI spending and adoption, followed by product management and
customer support, at 40%, and engineering at 31%.
"That transactional data is so rich and clean, companies want to
pull value from it," says John Bruno, a Forrester Research
analyst.
Gartner Inc. estimates that 30% of all business-to-business
companies world-wide will employ some form of AI in at least one of
their primary sales processes by 2020. "Saving salespeople time is
important," says Todd Berkowitz, a Gartner analyst, "and these
tools can help them be more effective."
The conversation
Not all of the vendors in this space are cloud-based giants.
Conversica, the provider of AI sales assistants to Snowflake
Computing, says more than 2,000 companies are currently using its
product, generating $18 million in annual recurring revenue. "We've
found that the platform becomes part of the sales team, and I mean
that literally, with a name, a job title and an email," says
Conversica Chief Executive Alex Terry.
"The key piece is that AI has been trained to understand the
type of back-and-forth of a sales call," he adds. "It is having
that conversation."
Cindi Stevenson, sales director at Insperity Inc., a
Houston-based provider of human-resources and other business
services, says her company last July deployed an automated sales
assistant designed by Nudge Software Inc. that scours Twitter,
Facebook and other social-media data for potential sales leads.
"It has already paid off, big time," says Ms. Stevenson. "All
this intel and data is out there in the universe, and you have to
go find it." The firm's 450 sales reps have "too much on their
plates to go digging into every prospect's Twitter feed every
single day," says Ms. Stevenson.
Toronto-based Nudge has about 20,000 users spread across
thousands of different companies, says Chief Executive Paul
Teshima. Using AI, the platform "helps identify which relationships
need attention and what's going on in their world, so you can
prioritize sales reps' time," says Mr. Teshima.
Knocking on doors
John Stewart, chief executive of MapAnything, a Charlotte,
N.C.-based maker of software for designing more-productive sales
trips, says about 2,100 businesses currently use his company's AI
product. The software analyzes data from Salesforce's
customer-relationship-management platform, GPS and other resources
such as real-time traffic patterns to optimize sales routes for
traveling reps. The software identifies and links clusters of
customers and can fill any gaps in a schedule arising from
last-minute cancellations.
"This is computationally heavy stuff," Mr. Stewart says, "but in
the end sales is all about knocking on doors, and this allows them
to knock on more doors."
Vince Lowe, a senior vice president of sales optimization and
integration at branded credit-card issuer Synchrony Financial, says
that before his company used MapAnything, its sales reps would
"dump Excel spreadsheets" onto laptops as they headed out to meet a
customer.
"We have some 365,000 locations across the U.S., so you can
imagine the complexity of that," Mr. Lowe says, referring to the
retailers, manufacturers and other brand-name businesses that offer
branded credit cards through Synchrony Financial.
Now the company's sales teams travel with iPads, CRM platforms
and visualization tools to track customer data, Mr. Lowe says.
"MapAnything helps to aggregate all that data together on the go
and predict exactly where the next sales visit should be and when,"
Mr. Lowe says.
Mr. Loten is a reporter for The Wall Street Journal in New York.
He can be reached at angus.loten@wsj.com.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
April 30, 2018 02:47 ET (06:47 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2018 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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