Sales processes have always been riddled with mundane, routine, and repetitive tasks. 

There are so many tasks that are just endlessly repetitive - but extremely important for the health of your sales processes. Think of tasks like - calling, following up, negotiating, sending reminders and alerts, blocking calendars, setting up times, and more. Oh, the headache. 

Luckily, sales processes don’t have to be like pushing a boulder up a hill, and sales reps, entrepreneurs, or business owners don’t have to be Sisyphus. 

Murphy’s law says “anything that can go wrong will go wrong.” While that may or may not be true, we have paraphrased it to mean “anything that can be simplified should be simplified.” 

In our case, in the case of sales processes, this can be achieved through virtual sales assistants. 

Virtual sales assistants, powered by artificial intelligence and advanced machine learning abilities, allow you to streamline your sales operations and lead generation, and make things simpler for your sales team. This leads to an overall improvement in efficiency in more ways than one. 

What even is an AI sales assistant? 

AI Sales Assistant, also known as Virtual Sales Assistants, or Sales Assistant Software, refers to tools developed to help sales teams use automation to boost sales and increase conversion rates in a cost-effective manner. These tools are powered by AI and use automation to streamline most sales tasks, including real-time tasks like data entry, meetings schedule, follow up, forecasting, lead qualification, etc. 

In doing so, virtual sales assistants ensure that most of your routine tasks are automated and taken care of - so that there are no chances of errors, and you get an opportunity to focus on more important responsibilities. Virtual sales assistants can also be extremely helpful for sales teams that work from remote locations and not from the field. 

Virtual sales assistants easily integrate with other tools and programs like CRM software, customer support tools, and so on to get more data to perform better actions. It should be noted that virtual sales assistants tend to be overlapping with sales analytics, sales intelligence, and guided selling tools. However, what sets them apart from the rest is the automation ability that they bring to the table. 

While there are thousands of virtual sales assistant software available today, you should know that at their core, the best ones include the following important features (and benefits to your business): 

• Built by marketing and sales experts: While it is true that the tool itself is backed by AI and enables automation, the virtual assistant tool built by market and sales experts integrates more smoothly with any business environment. And the reason is that it already takes care of all the hiccups or glitches that you might encounter. That way, you get a tool that, while using modern-day technologies, understands your business at its core and works alongside it. 

• Enables automation: Automation can take a significant portion of your workload off your back. Businesses that have adopted automation - regardless of their domain - have tended to be more successful and goal-oriented. No matter how big your sales team is or how skilled your sales reps are, automation’s help can take them and their abilities a long way. 

• Diverse deployment abilities: Virtual sales assistants can often be deployed in diverse situations and environments. This is beneficial for businesses as it allows them to have no constraint on their business environment while selecting a virtual sales assistant software. 

• Seamless integration with other business tools: Your virtual sales assistant easily pairs up with your important business tools and ensures a complete understanding of your business data. 

These benefits directly impact the working of your sales reps and how they handle your sales pipeline and sales funnel. These features also ensure that you and your teams get more time to focus on sales activities, tasks, and prospect outreach strategies that allow you to pursue new leads while the virtual sales assistant performs the mundane tasks. 

All of this has a direct impact on your business revenue. Here are the ways in which that happens. 

Improved sales forecasting and planning

AI-enabled virtual sales assistants work by understanding all of the past data and making predictions for the future. Because of their ability to derive insights and patterns from data, their predictions are highly accurate and well-informed. Some of the common forecasting and planning that virtual sales assistants can help you do, which will directly impact your business revenue, includes: 

• The number of potential customers likely to close. 
• The ideal number of prospects to target. 
• Potential customers that are likely to be interested in your offering. 
• The best target segment for different sales strategies or campaigns, and so on. 

You should keep in mind that the final accuracy of the predictions made by the AI-enabled virtual sales assistant systems will depend entirely on the quality and nature of data being fed to it. However, with the right data inputs, you will unlock capabilities of prediction and forecasting like never before. This will help you devise strategies, fine-tune campaigns, and basically align your efforts in a direction to close deals quickly and make more business revenue. 

Another thing that can be done with such predictive analysis is getting an idea of your sales team’s performance and making amends and improvements to it as and when needed. With AI by your side, you can have a proper overview of how different sales reps are performing, which prospects fit well with which salespeople, and so on. This will help you plan out things in a way that will enable business and revenue growth! 

Enhanced lead scoring and prioritization

Artificially intelligent systems are modeled on human intelligence, but they are very different from the way we operate. For instance, AI-enabled virtual sales assistants are capable of looking at large data sets of your prospects and potentials and informing you which of those prospects you should prioritize for better results. 

This process is called lead scoring and prioritization, and it can be simplified and made less time-consuming and more accurate by using an AI-enabled algorithm or tool. 

If you leave lead scoring and prioritization to human intelligence, it will be approached in a much less scientific and much more intuitive way. And that is ideally not the way to go about it, especially when you want to use this information to make future predictions and increase sales. There is not much room for gut feelings when making business predictions. 

AI algorithms, on the other hand, take a systematic and calculated approach to your past, present, and real-time data. That gives the algorithm an idea of how different parts move in your sales process, using which it can score different prospects and leads and help you prioritize better and make more efficient decisions on specific tasks.

Expert recommended sales actions

AI-enabled virtual sales assistants can go much beyond just prediction and lead scoring and even recommend informed sales actions. This includes helping sales reps and sales teams by telling them which of the possible actions makes the most sense based on their past experiences and outcomes. 

These recommendations can include all sorts of information - from how to price a deal to what services to campaign for, to whom to target next, and more. Being based on data and past outcomes, these recommendations are mostly spot-on and have a huge impact on your sales team's performance, which directly impacts your business revenue. 

Better automation and productivity

Needless to say - AI can automate your sales processes so much that your sales team can get all the time in the world to focus on more strategic and result-oriented, higher-value tasks. It also ensures you spend less time on administrative tasks, and more time cold calling, making critical phone calls, going through your directories - basically things that directly impact your customer relationships and business goals!

AI-enabled virtual sales assistants can take care of all the routine tasks easily, ranging from managing calendars, scheduling appointments, and assessing pipelines to much more. This gives you and all of your teams a lot of room for creativity and innovative thinking, which bears fruit in terms of helping your business revenue growth. 

So, are you taking a step towards AI adoption for sales?

Ever since automation has really shown serious, tangible results and benefits for businesses, one thing has been crystal clear - AI and automation for businesses is not a trend, it’s an evolution that will only keep getting better and more solid with years and progress in this field. The businesses that will truly thrive and move ahead in their journey towards their business goals will be the ones who will understand and adopt this transformation. 

That begs the question - have you met Wingman yet?

Wingman’s virtual sales assistant helps your sales team navigate the difficult terrain of sales. From reading and analyzing all of your data from different sources to providing live assistance - Wingman has it all under control. It provides you with data-driven insights and live alerts in real-time. For example, it alerts you to pause when you are taking too much time talking and less time listening and provides tricks to tackle sales objections on the go. Try out our demo and experience this difference for yourself!