In an ideal world, what would you want your BDRs to focus on? Closing deals, of course. So why is it that on average, they only spend only 22% to 37% of their time actually selling?
The rest of your BDR team’s hours are most likely filled with activities that don’t generate revenue directly. Often that means preparing for meetings, creating decks, researching customers, or doing paperwork. Managing and making sure the CRM software is up to date can alone take up to 18% of any given rep’s day. That leaves very little time for closing deals, but even that time is often spent engaging cold leads.
As if this is not enough, the more BDRs you hire, the more paperwork and administrative tasks there are to check off. That’s why most AI sales assistant technology is focused on delegating or automating the most time-consuming and repetitive tasks that every BDR does on a daily basis. Luckily, with the rise of AI sales assistant technology, it’s become much easier to get inefficiencies out of your sales process.
However, the focus should really be on increasing the time your BDRs spend with the right visitors, not just increasing their sales time in general.
Review: What’s AI Sales Assistant Technology?
For years now, artificial intelligence has been trying to find its way into practical corporate applications. While you’re still better off leaving the closing of deals to actual sales professionals, AI is more than capable of handling mechanical and repetitive tasks that tend to take up a lot of time but produce little value.
Today, AI sales assistants are able to help your BDRs in two broad categories:
- Improving internal sales processes
- Engaging and qualifying leads
The first category of internal sales processes refers to keeping your CRM data fresh and providing timely analytics on how certain channels are performing, for example. The second category is about outreach and leading prospects through the first few steps of the conversion funnel — all the chatbots and lead scoring tools would fall here, and it’s also here where a huge amount of time can be wasted in frustration.
Now that we’ve established what AI sales assistants are, what would be some examples of services you can already use to improve your workflow?
The Best AI Sales Assistant Tools To Try Right Now
If your team has never used AI sales assistants before and is spending a lot of time trying to keep a CRM like Salesforce up to date, they might become much more productive with Dooly.
Dooly is an AI sales assistant that takes the grunt work out of Salesforce, promising to save every BDR up to five hours per week. Described briefly, Dooly is an intuitive app that combines all the most important Salesforce fields in a single interface and seamlessly syncs all your updates. Its AI technology learns from your notes, suggests additional information to include, and even autofills some fields based on your calls.
Another popular AI sales assistant is Conversica, which is essentially a conversational tool that helps both sales and marketing teams engage leads at any point of the conversion funnel, whether it’s awareness, interest, consideration, or purchase. This app easily integrates with your existing sales stack (Salesforce, Hubspot, Microsoft Dynamics 365) and leverages your sales information to proactively approach potential customers that BDRs might not necessarily focus on.
Last, but not least, there is the ubiquitous Drift — a revenue acceleration platform. Drift includes live chat for sales powered by artificial intelligence to generate more pipeline for your team. Its chatbot can understand natural speech, reply within a given context, schedule demos, and escalate to a live representative in real time. Thanks to its software integrations, Drift can even personalize messages and provide comprehensive conversational analytics.
How To Make AI Sales Assistants More Productive
You can see live chat for sales tools such as Drift on nearly every website today. These tools work well on customers that are already known to you, either through your CRM or their cookie settings. For customers that are unknown to you, they’re shots in the dark.
For example, if a web visitor is anonymous to you, there would be no way even for an AI sales assistant to know how likely they are to convert. Because of that, the assistant or chatbot would enrol that visitor in a standard “cold” strategy (or none at all). We already know that chatbots can’t convert traffic like a live agent can, and they can often introduce friction in the user experience. Because of this, you’re not engaging your anonymous visitors effectively. Why does that matter? Well, these anonymous visitors can constitute over 90% of your daily traffic, which is a huge revenue opportunity that’s being missed.
One good way to understand the value of an anonymous visitor (or to know when to engage them) is by scoring their buyer intent in real-time using Lift AI.
Unlike other artificial intelligence tools, Lift AI uses a proprietary model that relies on more 15 years of sales data across various industries, incorporating one billion customer interactions and 14 million live sales engagements. The result is a real-time buyer intent solution for anonymous web visitors.
Lift AI scores every single visitor in real time, even if they haven’t been recorded in your CRM or any other sales tools. Once a visitor receives a score, they will either be directed to any chatbot of your choice (Drift, Salesforce, etc.) or connected directly with your BDRs, depending on their buying intent.
Trying out Lift AI on your website is easy. Just get in touch with us Today — and install a small JavaScript snippet. Find out how you can drastically shorten your sales funnel today, starting from the very first anonymous visitor who turns out to be a high-quality lead. That’s the power that only the best artificial intelligence software can give.
