Technology is revamping the sales process by aiding your sales team in generating more leads, fueling more effective sales conversion tactics, and getting prospects to convert. Salespeople can leverage technology to improve their visibility and generate more leads, establish long-term relationships with prospects and customers, build a killer sales pipeline, enhance responsiveness, and ultimately move toward optimizing the nurturing and conversion of leads.

Although sales is a relationship-driven endeavor, tech can be used to strengthen those relationships. It can also keep a company top of mind and enable salespeople and prospects to learn more about each other, solving problems in the process.

Here are five emerging technologies that can boost sales conversions and help sales professionals develop solid relationships.

1. Voice search-enabled SEO for lead generation

With digital consumption trends becoming more and more mobile-oriented, voice search will soon become the norm. People are preferring voice search on mobile and smart devices over typing their queries in search engines. It’s not sufficient to have an SEO-optimized website to generate more leads; it has to be optimized for voice search as well.

The business landscape is making a gradual shift toward becoming a voice-first market, and optimizing your business website to appear in voice search results is a paradigm shift from traditional lead generation. The SEO optimization of your website content is aimed at ranking among the top results. But with voice search, your content has to be designed so it’s the only result that shows up. Use of long-tail keywords that specifically address the questions that users may be asking establishes your business as the primary source of information, and it’s the key to voice search SEO.

Pages with site authority, natural language, security, and upkeep regarding reviews and responses enhance your page authority online and increase your chances of ranking in voice search. This combination of factors gives you expert status, making search engines more likely to trust what you have to say.

2. Cloud computing for improving collaborations

Cloud technologies help sales teams improve their effectiveness and become more agile. The work flexibility, interoperability, and collaboration among the members of a sales team improve significantly when sales data is stored on cloud servers.

It also opens up avenues for remote working, which allows salespeople to better utilize their time and concentrate their efforts on actually closing deals and increasing lead conversions. Data storage on cloud servers is also a cost-effective option, which improves scalability while ensuring data security. Cloud-based sales CRM software will soon become a standard practice for businesses.

3. Predictive analytics for sales pipeline management and forecasting

Meeting a company’s existing sales targets and forecasting projected sales and revenue is critical to an organization’s success. Predictive analytics makes use of techniques like data mining, modeling, machine learning, and artificial intelligence — as well as big data — to analyze current sales data and make reliable predictions for the future. It involves discerning patterns from the historical and transactional data already collected via a sales pipeline tool or sales CRM and using it to identify future risks and opportunities.

Using technology to analyze datasets enables the sales team to become more effective at closing deals. Predictive analytics leverages algorithms, which take into account all the factors that have an impact on a customer’s purchase decision. These predictive models consider several factors while mapping historical data like the current sales pipeline, average deal size, past rep performance, and time in stage, which helps in unearthing the “buy” signals in customer behavior. The sales team can thus connect with the right prospects at the right time and pitch them a product that’s relevant to them, directly leading to an increase in sales conversions.

4. Artificial intelligence in sales

Artificial intelligence has the potential to be a salesperson’s new best friend, one who’s there every step of the way, from initial contact to closing the deal. AI-powered mobile apps that function on machine learning and natural language processing and comprise an artificial neural network are soon going to be a salesperson’s closest companion. Within a few years’ time, AI-based sales assistants will be used for voice-to-text data entry, saving valuable time spent crunching numbers within the CRM software and manually updating the sales pipeline.

AI-powered assistants can also help a sales team make data-backed decisions and improve its business predictions. AI consultants could also play a role in building products for upselling and cross-selling by providing the sales team with relevant product recommendations.

Another AI sales application that’s increasingly seeing widespread adoption is the use of chatbots. Chatbots on webpages and SaaS websites have become a common occurrence. They can collect the demographic information of an inbound lead — like name, contact number, and email ID — and help in the formulation of a personalized sales strategy for the lead captured. It can also be used to respond to the website’s FAQs, thus saving valuable time.

5. Automation

A salesperson’s effectiveness is equivalent to the time he or she spends doing actual selling. Sales automation saves time spent on repetitive tasks, letting the sales team focus solely on selling and closing deals more effectively.

Sales CRM software has the functionality to automate and schedule follow-up emails to prospects and leads over time. The message can be personalized to suit individual needs and ensure effective follow-ups. When sending emails, you can also utilize templates to cut down on decision-making — no need to type out repetitive messages or copy and paste the same dialogue over and over.

It’s not just emails that can be automated. Voicemail automation software can actively send out voicemails to prospects and clients, saving the sales team crucial hours. A sales automation tool can also optimize the sales funnel for increased conversions.

Leads are tracked and sorted as they enter the sales funnel. Appropriate nurture campaigns and outreach programs, specific to the target group, are designed. This helps businesses formulate a better sales plan to manage leads and convert them into potential customers.

Technology is truly transforming sales; we’ve come a long way from sending out handwritten letters. These emerging technologies are the driving force that can result in your sales team being able to close more deals and solve more people’s problems.

Vinati Kamani

Dr. Vinati Kamani writes about emerging technology and its applications across industries for Arkenea. She is an avid reader and self-proclaimed bibliophile. When Dr. Kamani isn’t at her desk penning articles or reading up on recent trends, she can be found traveling to remote places and soaking up different cultural experiences.