AI has been helping sellers sell, but is it helping buyers buy?
The B2B buying process is still awful, with 77% of buyers saying their last software buying experience was confusing and frustrating.
Buyers are already seeing the benefits of using AI in other areas, like Customer Service. With 45% of customers preferring chatbots for help with the solutions they already use, why not apply the same principle to their buying experience?
When you make buying more accessible, you’ll see results like shortened sales cycles and increased close rates. Check out these three ways to use AI to improve your customers’ buying experience.
Enhance Buyer Research
Buyers love learning about products on their own. 65% of buyers purposely self-navigate through their buying journey. It helps them narrow down the list of vendors they have to choose from, and they can do it on their own time. You can help buyers do a more thorough job researching with AI.
A chatbot guide lets the buyer get recommendations for additional content, answers to any questions, and directions to other resources without making them dig through every webpage themselves. If you use an intelligent demo automation platform, AI can pull from the demo library and feed it to the buyer, giving them an instant personalized experience.
When they are ready to meet with an actual sales rep, your reps will be armed with the details AI gathered from those chats, so they’ll have a leg up on the topics your customers are interested in. Buyers will come to the meeting better prepared, too, since they’ll have more early questions answered by AI.
Buyer Created Personalized Demos
It’s important for buyers to get to see or experience the software they’re evaluating before they make the purchase and they often do so with a demo. Many organizations have the option for buyers to “Request a Demo” directly from their site. While this seems like a great way for potential customers to raise their hands and receive information, it often leads to delays.
The Sales Engineering Compensation and Workload Report found that most buyers wait six to ten days for a demo. That’s an awful lot of time for a competitor to swoop in with their demo first. You can remove that wait time with demo automation and AI. The customer can watch an interactive demo on demand but further personalize the content with AI.
As the customer interacts with AI, it will pull all the relevant information from your demo library and convert the public demo to a private one. After AI has compiled all that information into a deeply personalized experience, that lead can use that link to share their personalized demo or return to it later. AI plus demo automation can turn someone who was just browsing into an internal seller.
Make a Better Buying Roadmap
Customers have different needs at different stages of their journey. As buyers get further into the process, they will need more detailed information, and you often have additional stakeholders who need to catch up with the rest of the group.
Having AI scrutinize your sales funnel can help you align content to share for each stage. This analysis will help deal momentum stay high because you can equip your buyers with what they need before they know they need it.
You’ll also have clues about when to bring in secondary stakeholders, like IT and finance, so they don’t become blockers at the end of the deal. By following the insights provided by AI, you’ll be able to give your buyers the information they need and not overwhelm them with anything they don’t.
Let AI Make Things Easy
The last few years have been tough for sellers, but they’ve been equally challenging for buyers. Sales have been using AI to make their own processes easier, so why not use AI to make the buying experience easier as well?
AI can help buyers conduct their own research, create deeply personalized demos on-demand, and help sellers provide a better roadmap for the buying journey. Make the difficult task of buying software simple; your buyers will thank you. For more ways to use AI and other enablement tools to help your buyers, check out our blog, research, or even your own custom demo.
