Use AI to Improve Sales
Learning Objectives
- List key benefits of adding artificial intelligence (AI) to a sales process.
- Explain how Sales Cloud Einstein improves its predictions and recommendations over time.
AI, It’s What’s for Dinner
In the Sales Cloud Einstein module, we met Ava Cado and her sales team at Honeydew, a small company that makes inventory apps for the food industry. The team was struggling with sluggish sales and wanted to use technology to increase their bottom line.
Ava heard about other companies using AI to spend less time figuring out what to do and more time actively growing revenue. Those companies avoid repetitive data entry tasks, easily identify prospects to target, gain insight about their customers, and accurately predict revenue.
In her insightful blog post, Why AI Will Be Your New Best Friend in Sales, Salesforce SVP of Product Marketing, Lynne Zaledonis, articulates the main challenge that sales reps face: “A sales rep can only be as productive as the time spent selling.” Passing off the admin work to an AI helper allows reps to spend their time in more productive ways.
But Ava was skeptical that artificial intelligence could help her team without breaking the bank. Like many, she assumed that it would require adding staff, writing code, compiling sales info, creating algorithms, and building apps. It didn’t take long for her to realize how easy and affordable it can be, when you have Sales Cloud Einstein at your side.
Welcome to Sales Cloud Einstein
Using Sales Cloud Einstein is like having your own data scientist in your Salesforce org. It’s more or less ready to go out of the box. And like all good AI solutions, it learns from your CRM data and sales activities so that its predictions and recommendations get better over time. Plus, Sales Cloud Einstein helps sales teams throughout the sales process, freeing up reps’ valuable time, helping reps know what needs their attention, and giving sales managers a better understanding of their forecasts.
It didn’t take long for Ava to recognize the benefits of Sales Cloud Einstein. She immediately bought 50 Sales Cloud Einstein licenses. Then, she proudly skipped into the office of Honeydew’s Salesforce admin, Eleanor Chang. “Let’s get this AI party started,” Ava beamed, and then quickly skipped back out the door before Eleanor could reply.
Eleanor isn’t the first Salesforce admin to be handed Sales Cloud Einstein without much guidance. Sure, she could probably figure out how to set up the features and learn how they work. But she knows that to get the most out of AI, and have high user adoption, she needs a plan.
