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.
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.
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 hand 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.