Companies have varied sales cycles depending upon their target market and audience base. Every business team out there has one common intention of closing deals faster and one of the best ways to fast-track this is by implementing Conversational AI for your sales cycle.

CX automation entails employing tools that replicate human cognition capability such as problem-solving and logical reasoning, to reduce manual labor in support processes. It involves identifying repetitive tasks across customer engagement cycles and automating them with the help of tools such as AI-powered chatbots, voice bots, and live chat. 

There’s a difference between conversational AI and mere chatbots. Conversational AI is designed in such a way that it can actually recognize the conversation flow as well as human cognition. It optimizes the entire process of lead generation and helps you better understand your existing and potential customers.

What is the relationship between the sales cycle and conversational AI?

Sales cycle refers to a repeatable and tactical process followed by the sales teams to convert leads into customers and minimizing time-consuming repetitions falls right in the domain of automation. Conversational AI helps you acquire more customers in a shorter period of time. It substantially helps convert the leads into actual sales. 

Here are the top five ways to fast track sales cycle using conversation:

We’ve listed how conversational AI boosts the sales cycle and facilitates B2B and B2C communication.

1) Lead generation:

Lead generation is a key task every business has to perfor. 

That is the reason lead generation is highly significant when it comes to businesses. Lead generation can be done in a better way using conversational AI. Manually generating the leads involves a lengthy process ranging from cold phone calls to online forms and despite all the efforts, it doesn’t guarantee that substantial leads would be generated. 

Whereas, using conversational AI lead generation is quicker, easier and precise. A Conversational AI system communicates with customers via human-like conversations, smoothly asks them about their preferences and allows users to self-serve contact information along with these preferences. 

The data is recorded in real-time and is sent to the CRM segregated. 

2) Automatic lead scoring and qualification:

Spending time on leads that are not interested or relevant leads is a sure shot way of slow sales cycles.

It becomes crucial that leads are scored on the basis of relevance, interest levels, product fit, demographics, budget, and other product-specific factors.         

Conversational AI facilitates the automated scoring of leads as per relevance and multiple conversational triggers such as depth of conversation, sentiment and intent.

Once the leads are qualified, conversational AI can also move them further down the sales funnel by answering any questions they may have about the product and sending them hyper personalized offers.

In the case of high value sales, qualified leads are handed over to sales reps with complete context - helping them close the sale.

3) Behavioural and preference based retargeting: 

Conversational AI uses NLP and machine learning and AI trained models to interact with the customers and potential clients.

This includes observing and learning from the behavioral and conversational pattern of customers.

This enables chatbots to retarget and nudge prospective customers who are stuck in the middle of the purchasing funnel, resulting in the creation of new opportunities without extra human effort. 

Conversational AI re-engages with customers, provides context relevant information and guides them to closure in the most optimal manner - automated.

This saves your sales time and effort - helping them focus on the most warm leads by jumping into the conversation at the perfect time. 

4) Response time optimisation: 

No customer or prospect likes to wait.

As per latest research trends - 35-50% of sales go to brands that respond first. Web leads are 9 times more likely to convert if you follow up within 5 minutes.

Conversational AI allows your brand to create instant and immediate experiences for your prospects.

You can stay in touch with the audience 24/7.

Conversational AI also has the ability to handle multiple customers simultaneously through even some of the most complex use cases.

This helps you be there for the audience when they need you most and when the purchase intent is at the highest. 

5) Conversational Commerce:

The popularity of social media and messaging channels is increasing each passing day.

This highlights the need for businesses to be readily available on their customers' most preferred platforms. That’s where conversational AI comes into the picture.

Conversational commerce is the process of conducting business over messaging apps like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and more. It enables companies to meet customers where they are and drive up to four times more conversions by creating relevant conversational experiences. 

The world of customer communications is evolving at a faster pace than ever before.

Your business needs to be accessible to your customers at the most relevant points in their purchase journey. 

A well integrated conversational sales augmentation system like Convert AI can fast track you sales cycle with intuitive humanlike conversations and automation.

Here is how Global brands are using Convert AI to accelerate their sales.