Why customer interactions risk being anticlimactic without AI

These days, it’s harder than ever for B2B sellers to get in front of buyers – whether virtually or in-person. Fewer face-to-face events, combined with more companies competing in a limited number of digital challenges, has made it increasingly difficult for businesses to cut through the noise and win prospects’ attention.

What’s more, B2B buyers are basing more of their decision making on their own research into publicly available content – such as analyst reports, press materials, and webinars – than seller interactions. Indeed, Gartner suggests that 33% of B2B buyers already desire a seller-free sales experience.

But this is just one piece of the puzzle. When sellers do manage to secure a meeting, they must then be able to deliver an impactful, memorable experience. They must show that they understand the buyer’s situation and can address their specific needs. And they must be able to maximise the value of every interaction they have with a prospect or customer.

But they can’t achieve all this alone. Sales teams need access to a digital infrastructure that delivers the tools and insights required to help customer relationships thrive.

Reimagining experiences

Delivering a superior experience to customers and prospects is all about personalisation. In today’s world, personalising each interaction is essential to building trust and standing out from the competition. This has always been true with face-to-face engagements, and now firms need to think about how to apply the same principle to virtual meetings too. This is where AI has a key role to play, with the combination of data and intelligence having a significant impact in making meetings more effective.

On the one hand, AI-powered capabilities for virtual meetings can be deployed to automate content personalisation and serve up in-the-moment recommendations based on previous interactions and engagement data. AI can materially enhance sellers’ knowledge about a specific conversation, identifying new insights, behaviours and revenue opportunities from datasets that would have been too large for humans to process.

AI can also provide real-time transcription, sentiment analysis and conversation insights to help a salesperson through a call, eliminating the need for note taking while surfacing timely advice such as the next best action to take during a meeting.

On the other hand, embedded AI can ensure that the post-meeting experience is as impactful as possible. This can range from automatically capturing action items and suggesting the most effective product information to send as part of a follow-up, to providing training recommendations and pinpointing the parts of a call that generated a positive reaction. This all helps sellers keep customers happy and engaged through insight-driven post-meeting interactions that no longer risk being anticlimactic. And it’s critical to driving deals and relationships forwards in a time when a pool of competitors is always waiting to pounce.

Empowering sellers

At the same time, technology can give sellers the headspace to focus on selling by streamlining daily workflows and solving the endless tool switching issue that is hampering productivity. Today’s B2B salespeople use numerous apps and tools in their daily work but are challenged with bringing together the bigger picture across meetings, email, chat, and CRM. Because information is spread across multiple silos, it is very difficult and time-consuming to couple data together, analyse information, and pinpoint the specific actions to take to advance a deal.

AI-powered digital tools can cut down convoluted internal processes and workflows by empowering sellers in their natural flow of work, so they can be better prepared for upcoming meetings. This could involve surfacing information such as the sellers who have previously engaged with that prospect, and how strong the relationship was. Or connecting with LinkedIn to deliver additional insights into the types of content the prospect is engaging with.

The key is to make these insights easily shareable and accessible across applications and team members. Eliminating the friction in finding and logging key prospect information reduces the mundane busy work that distracts sellers from their main job. This means they have more time to focus on what they do best – engaging with buyers and closing deals.

Ultimately, B2B sellers are under pressure to deliver in a challenging and competitive climate. That’s why they need access to a technology infrastructure that can streamline daily workflows while delivering valuable insights and intelligence in real time. This is what will empower sellers to ensure that every interaction hits the mark and drive the most value for their company.