The initial stage of business development is often spoken about as being immensely challenging, and for good reason. After all, in the increasingly global world of commerce, competition is fierce, so getting an enterprise up, running, and profitable is by no means a mean feat. However, there’s a strong case to argue that modern businesses actually face their most daunting obstacle after reaching their first plateau.
As organizations attempt to scale with success, problems of progress begin to rear their heads, and many flounder for lack of a proper infrastructure to support a rapidly growing customer base. In the digital age, establishing such an infrastructure means leveraging the most innovative technologies available to drive sales and elevate the customer experience. Here, we will discuss some key AI-powered technologies that do exactly that, highlighting how you can use them to amplify the success of your enterprise.
CPQ
Given the pace of modern business, sales is becoming an increasingly demanding responsibility, and this is particularly true for teams required to provide quotes for complex products with varying configurations. In many cases, the first company to provide an accurate quote is most likely to be chosen, so expediting this process is critical to growth, and this is where CPQ software can be a game-changer.
CPQ, or Configure Price Quote, is a type of software that is purpose-built to streamline the quoting process. Traditionally, sales teams would be required to manually parse a large volume of product configurations and pricing data in order to create the quotes they need, but CPQ turns this time-consuming task into something far simpler and more intuitive.
By leveraging the power of AI and automation, CPQ software dynamically applies pricing rules and enables sales teams to quickly configure products through an easy-to-use graphical interface. Moreover, CPQ automates approvals workflow and contract management, reducing the administration burden involved and helping to shorten sales cycles significantly.
As you scale its operations, CPQ will enable your organization to provide faster quotes to bring in new business and ramp up the velocity of your sales pipeline.
Sales Forecasting
To truly drive revenue growth, effective strategic planning is critical, and sales forecasting is foundational to that process. However, forecasting sales is a highly demanding task, given the amount of data and number of variables that must be taken into account. With sales forecasting software, however, this process becomes considerably simpler.
Through the utilization of AI algorithms and predictive analytics, sales forecasting software can rapidly analyze vast quantities of historical data as well as market trends, enabling sales teams to accurately predict future sales. Additionally, the software can help sales teams gain insights into customer behavior and preferences, and provide guidance on which leads have the best likelihood of reaching conversion.
By enabling sales teams to predict future sales, sales forecasting software can enable your organization to engage in effective strategic planning at scale with regard to the supply chain so as not to lose out on potential revenue due to a lack of inventory. Moreover, by helping sales teams to better understand customers, the software can enable the efficient use of time and resources to achieve higher conversion rates for greater revenue.
Chatbots
The world of customer service is becoming increasingly fast-paced. With consumer expectations evolving, companies need to be highly responsive in how they address queries and requests for assistance, but this can be extremely difficult at scale when relying solely on employees. When dealing with a growing customer base, customer service teams can quickly find themselves overwhelmed as communication channels become bottlenecked. Over time, this can be extremely detrimental to your customer engagement and satisfaction, but AI-powered chatbots offer an elegant solution to this problem.
By leveraging AI and machine-learning algorithms, chatbots can help streamline customer service by eliminating the need for reps to deal with minor queries. This affords reps the time to focus on providing a high standard of service to customers who need it the most, all in a timely manner. Additionally, chatbots with Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities can respond more dynamically to provide personalized interactions with customers.
All told, chatbots can be a game changer in customer service. By enabling reps to provide a higher standard of care and offering personalized experiences, chatbots can boost customer engagement, satisfaction, and ultimately retention, to help you establish a solid revenue base that you can build upon year on year. Moreover, the improvement to Customer Experience (CX) may also encourage existing customers to advocate for your company, thus helping to grow revenue further.
Concluding
Achieving stability with a new business is impressive, but the biggest challenge of all lies in scaling that business effectively. Fortunately, AI-powered technologies can help your enterprise to deal with such growing pains. By leveraging CPQ, sales forecasting software, and AI chatbots, you can establish a robust technological infrastructure that will drive revenue consistently and facilitate the expansion of your business so that you can achieve your highest organizational goals with relative ease.
