Sales growth is critical for the survival of businesses. Although salespeople need no incentive to work hard, algorithmic-guided selling can provide quite a boost.
According to a recent survey by Gartner, nearly 51 percent of sales organizations have already deployed or plan to deploy algorithmic-guided selling in the next five years.
While it might seem a little confusing at first, algorithmic-guided selling is nothing but harvesting customer and market data through intelligent predictive models to help salespeople quickly determine close deals with hot leads and repeat customers and move warm and cold leads to hot or dead buckets.
Intended to augment more traditional sales tools, such as sales playbooks, Gartner points out that algorithmic-guided selling uses sales data to boost the seller’s ability to engage with prospects, manage the buying process, and generate quotes.
Often, the first step to setting up an algorithmic-guided selling solution is to build an effective CRM that integrates CPQ (configure, price, quote) functions as well as data about the target customer’s industry.
The next step is for data science professionals and business analysts to work with the salespeople to understand their leads scoring process and craft models that can help provide intelligent insights into customers and their needs.
“Although it is a newer, more complex sales technology, algorithmic-guided selling has tremendous potential. Compared to other technologies in the survey, algorithmic-guided selling stands out as one of the most sophisticated and complex sales execution technologies to improve sales productivity,” said Gartner Research VP Tad Travis.
Despite its potential, Gartner warns that the effectiveness of the technology and solution relies heavily on the data it draws on to guide sellers.
True, incremental changes in the quality of the data source can lead to disproportionate changes in the accuracy of its predictions — and ultimately ROI — however, in the real world, salespeople won’t really use the system unless it can provide its reliability.
Hence, business leaders exploring the technology must be cautious even if it means making slow progress.
For sales leaders considering the adoption of algorithmic-guided selling, Gartner recommends they:
- Identify points in the sales process where automation would have the greatest impact to augment seller judgment or automate manual operations
- Implement strict data hygiene principles prior to launch to ensure accurate recommendations
- Prepare underlying content for integration so that it is available for algorithmic-guided recommendations.
While those looking for sales growth can find a number of technologies to help support them, Gartner believes algorithmic-guided selling has a lot of potential — especially if reliable data can be fed to the system.
While racing to deploy such a system might not be a good idea, getting on in place, in the right way, will definitely provide a competitive edge to sales teams irrespective of their industry.
Source: techwireasia
