If you were to ask an AI to help you improve your sales process, what would be the perfect answer?
I find myself using ChatGPT multiple times a day for many of my tasks. I even replaced a large chunk of my Google searches with ChatGPT questions. So I thought I could use ChatGPT to set a baseline that I could compare the answers I’ll be getting from the NovaceneAI® SalesInsights™ tool.
Setting the baseline
I asked ChatGPT “How can I improve the sales process” and as I expected, it gave a generic answer, like define clear stages, automate repetitive tasks, qualify leads early, leverage data analytics, shorten sales cycle, implement sales training and coaching, standardize your sales materials, nurture long-term relationships, and focus on customer success.
Although these answers are generally useful, they in no way take my challenges into consideration. Changing the question to “How can I improve my sales process” seems to provide more practical recommendations, but still not based on my specific challenges:
ChatGPT is trained using a large amount of public internet content. So, these answers are useful if you’re looking for a primer on sales process best practices. But of course, ChatGPT does not know about my specific challenges, so it can’t help me solve my real problems.
Unearthing specific challenges
Let’s take a look at how SalesInsights can help me improve my sales process. I generated a fake dataset of sales call transcripts and uploaded to the tool. After enriching the data with AI-driven insights, I see a dashboard with various visualizations.
The SalesInsights dashboard allows me to ask questions like I would with ChatGPT, and to visualize the data that underpins the answers generated by the AI.
Asking SalesInsights
I asked the same question I asked ChatGPT earlier: “How can I improve the sales process” and I got a very different answer:
“To improve the sales process, focus on enhancing customer service and addressing invoicing and delivery inconsistencies. Additionally, streamline the onboarding process and ensure the user experience is intuitive. Gathering feedback from customers can help identify specific areas for improvement.”
Let’s extract the specific problem areas:
- Invoicing and delivery inconsistencies
- Onboarding process
- User experience intuitiveness
Making the information actionable
Although these are specific, I still need more actionable details. To dig deeper, I asked SalesInsights:“What are the issues regarding invoicing and can you give me the exact words customers used to describe the issues they were having?”
Here’s what SalesInsights answered:
“The issues regarding invoicing include not receiving invoices on time and being hit with late charges, as expressed by a user: “We didn’t receive the invoice last month, and were hit with a late charge this month.” Additionally, there are concerns about discrepancies in data provided over the last few months. Overall, users have noted ongoing trouble with invoicing.”
I now have enough information to approach our invoicing team to discuss two very specific issues:
- How can we improve invoice timeliness
- How can we improve invoice data accuracy
But before I raise the issues, I need to make sure that the AI didn’t hallucinate and that the issues are in fact accurate.
Verifying the accuracy of the insights
The SalesInsights dashboard shows the data that underpins the insights provided by the AI. I can use the List widget to pinpoint the exact comments that mentioned the issue of not receiving the invoice on time. To do this, I type the words “last month” , which were part of what the customer said, to find the specific comment:
I now know for sure that this is a real issue and not something that the AI came up with. I could go one step further and see the specific customer that raised the issue. All I need to do is to click the filter icon next to the text, to filter the rest of the dashboard to only show the data associated with this comment.
I now know that Connors, one of our Real Estate customers, is the one that complained about late invoices.
Key takeaways
In this post, we saw how we can use SalesInsights to find specific actions I can implement now to improve our customer experience, and the sales process in general. Specifically, I follow these steps:
- Started with a generic question about improving my sales process
- Was told to look into invoicing, onboarding, and experience intuitiveness
- Chose to explore invoicing further
- Discovered specific issues like late invoices, charges, and discrepancies
- Validated the insight by reading the specific comment behind it
- Identified the specific client that raised the issue
I am now able to confidently approach the invoicing team with these very specific issues. I could also reach out to our customer to let them know we are looking into it.
