Changes in Sales and Marketing Due to Influence of Ai

In the recent years there has been rapid advances in the fields of Information Technology, Processing and computing power, Data handling methods, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence. These advamces are impacting the businesses all over the world and playing an important role in their growth and development. Artificial Intelligence a buzz word these days is changing the way companies are working. Due to its enormous potential and applicability it is being implemented in many fields like Information technology, Retail Industry, Space Science, Automobile Industry, Entertainment, Medical, Transportation, Biology, Social Sciences, Business management, etc. In this Sales and Marketing essay we explore the advances of AI and how they are impacting the growth and evolution of sales and marketing field of different sectors. Also this paper discusses how different techniques and methods of AI are changing the activities and functions of Sales and marketing. Finally we will conclude with analysis on impact and role of the AI in sales and marketing and its future.

Sales and marketing departments are often considered as a head part of the organization, without a strong Sales and marketing department it is not possible to run the company towards a meaningful goal. Often Sales and Marketing are considered to be same thing but there exists some fundamental differences between them. Sales activities are mainly concerned with selling the goods and services to the consumers. Marketing on the other hand deals with the activities to promote the products by different strategies to attract the consumers. Cespedes et al. describes “Marketing has been characterized as being more long-term and product oriented, and sales has been characterized as being more short-term and customer relationship oriented”. Nonetheless sales and marketing both has an important role and a company inorder to be successful need to be strong in both.

In this digital age new technologies like Information technology, Automation, Internet of Things, Cloud Computing, Artificial intelligence are changing the ways the companies and business work. This is usually termed as “Industry 4.0” or 4th industrial revolution. Artificial Intelligence is one among the drivers of 4th industrial revolution.

What is Artificial Intelligence (AI)?

Artificial Intelligence has different definitions given by many bodies but all of them more or less mean same. The word Artificial intelligence as given in oxford dic-tionary13 means 'development of computer systems capable of performing tasks which normally requires humans'. Though the definition mentions tasks usually performed by human the advances in the recent times has enabled these very systems to outperform humans in many areas like image recognition and pattern recognition.

Artificial intelligence is a wide area of science which deals with the algorithms which are capable of demon-strating intelligence similar to humans. Popular field ‘Machine Learning’ is a sub field of AI which deals with different ways of enabling machines to learn itself rather than manual programming through the provided data. Machine learning algorithms are based on statistical techniques which basically try to recognize the pat-terns in the data and make predictions. Feature learning or Representation learning is technique in which the system learn the basic representations which are need-ed for feature detection which in turn is used for classification or prediction, this differs from other methods of machine learning where features are explicitly defined. Again in this field we have many models which work in different ways like auto-encoders, Artificial Neural Networks, Deep Learning model etc.

In recent times the rapid advances in the AI has ena-bled a wide applicability and boosting the growth of many areas. According to the AI Index in 2019 year, 58% of the large companies have adopted AI in at least one business unit. This adoptability in turn is leading to the growth in investments in the field of AI and ML. 'AI index' reports that there has been growth of more than 300 % in the peer reviewed papers between 1998 and 2018.

Though these advances are boosting economy in many areas many fear that this kills many jobs but there are people who say that this is just for a time being after that there will be creation of new jobs. In the past also there has been fear that automation would kill many jobs but it was in short term and in long term it created many compli-mentary jobs

AI in Sales Activities

Artifical Intelligence is being used in many functions of the Sales department, starting from the sales forecasting to the after sales activities. Below we will discuss how AI is being used in these functions one by one and also how it is impacting.

Sales Forecast

Predicting the sales volume in any business is very critical it enables the businesses to plan and priori-tize production, distribution, and inventory activities. With the help of AI many businesses have implemented a real time forecasting models which take historical da-ta and the customer information as input. In the paper by Kagate et al. different kinds of ML algorithms and models have been studied and compared. Currently ML models are being used in many areas like fashion Retail, Mining Spare parts, E-commerce, Automobile sales. Although there used to be chal-lenges in implementing these alogorithms in cases like new product lunch, non-contractual setting, large num-ber of assortments etc in sales forecast, these days there are many advanced models where they have overcome these and achieved good accuracy like food sales and B2B sales.

Lead Generation and Scoring

For a business, finding new sales leads and markets is a time and money consuming affair and of-ten it doesn’t give satisfactory results. AI is helping in this regard saving lot of time, money in many companies and above all it also gives high accuracy. AI models take different attributes of the customers and historical data to make a calculat-ed prediction so that sales people can pursue those. Lead scoring is also a simliar function where AI algo-rithms perform ranking on the available leads so that it helps sales personnel in making a decision. A paper by Shyam and Sharma describes how AI is being used in Lead generation and lead scoring.

Sales Content Generation

Interacting with customers is a very important and challenging function on which the sales conversion rates depends. A company may have to communicate with thousands of customers in a day and also taking care that this communication is effective. AI can help in handling these interactions by communicating through NLP techniques and can delegate these to real sales man when they are actually ready to be handled. AI is also being used to generate the content based upon the customer and his historical conversations so that it looks natural and effective this serves as a good solution when there is usually change in per-son who is dealing. All this is basically developed due to the advances in the Natural language processing (NLP) and text synthesis which makes it so natural that it’s difficult to differentiate it from human language.

Automate Sales Activities and Data Analytics

In the different activities performed by the sales personnel there will be some repetitive and simple Sales activities like accessing emails, documents man-agement, intimation messages, Meeting Setup etc. These activities can be automated using technologies like RPA which will remove unnecessary burden on staff and also to reduce the human intervention. AI these days is aiding this technology to make this automation process intelligent where it seamlessly captures the data from various sources and performs data analytics and natu-ral language analysis on it to extract insights which can be used to better the conversations and processes in future conversations. AI also helps in re-ducing risks and increasing accuracy and efficiency of the tasks.

Communication Bots and Recommendation Engines

Most of the applications discussed above will be in the backend and end user won’t necessarily notice them. The latest trend of chat bots and physicals bots which directly interact with the users and provide sug-gestions, answers queries and help in promoting the products are becoming more popular. Some of the ex-amples are: Almost all the ecommerce sites has chat bots these days, Content platforms and ecommerce are implementing AI recommendation engines in their sites for more click rates. These models provide recommendation based on different attributes like history, location, De-mographic details, etc. In this way it is helping in in-creasing the click conversion rates and revenue income.

AI in Marketing

Compared to Sales, Marketing department is leveraging more the power of AI. Starting from market segmenta-tion and targeting to the marketing results anlaysis AI is being used in many activities and functions.

Market Segmentation and Targeting

Marketing professional used to depend on traditional methods like RFM and Spray and Pray methods to segment the market. But these methods take lot of effort and time and yet they don’t give expected results. After the advances in AI the marketers started to use AI algorithms to segment the market based on dif-ferent attributes sourced from different channels like internet, mobile, money spending, social and demo-graphic attributes etc. These methods gives a varied in-sights allowing the marketers to target the customers with more personalized information increasing the chances of creating new customers. The paper by Florez discusses on the machine learning models and Balakrishnan discusses on neural networks to perform market segmentation. The papers of Casabayo and Jih-Jeng's discusses some of the case studies of AI algorithms in market segmentation.

Marketing Communication Optimization

Many companies perform their market-ing communication through different channels like web sites, Email, Social networking sites, Content platforms etc, and it is important to optimize these actvities both in expenditure and returns. In order to increase the ROI in these activities we can take help of AI to make them effective and efficient. Some of the use case or scenarios where it is being used are marketing content creation where neuroscience and AI are being used to analyse how the audience percieve, this is called neuromarketing. To avoid the scenarios where the con-tent is in quite opposite to context we can use NLP and other context analysis techniques based on AI to make the marketing communication aware of the context. And it can also be used to deliver recommendations based on the context like movie preferences, Hotel recommendation etc. It is usual that com-panies use different channels for marketing so AI can be used to optimize the expenditure on these channels so that a coherent and optimized strategy can be created.

Price Optimization

Deciding the price for a product con-sidering many factors so as to maximize the profits is one of the most difficult task. AI helps in this respect where it can dynamically suggest price for the product in real time based on the customer, market conditions, Competition etc. Many companies are implementing the price optimization by neural networks and reinforcement learning models like in ecommerce sites, electricty price decisions and Retail marketers respectively. Price decision more importance in real estate market as it comprises of many parameters and includes huge margins, paper by Rafiei et al., proposes a method to solve this scenario.

Customer Churn:

Creating a new customer is more costly than maintaining an old customer. So it is wise to take necessary steps maintain the existing customers. AI is very helpful in this regard , AI algorithms like Regres-sion, Decision Trees, Neural networks and support vec-tor machines can be used to predict the customer churn, these models when given with the necessary data can find out whether a particular customer is planning to abandon the company. This way company can take steps to avoid that and maintain customer attrition lev-el. In the paper by Hauang et al., AI algorithms are applied to predict the customer churn in Telecommunications market. Paper by Coussement & Van Den discusses on how neural SVM's can be used to predict the customer churn in newspaper and paper by Wnag et al., discusses how ensemble model can be used to reduce the attrition level in ads business.

Social Media and PR Monitoring and Analysis

In this fast connected digital world a small negative statement about the company or busi-ness can be very detritious to its image and will impact in many ways. So it is company's job to maintain its image on the social platforms and avoid any such situations. AI can monitor these platforms dedicatedly and with its Natural language processing techniques it can find out any such negative statements or opinions and can take necessary steps or can inform the personnel to respond and avoid the con-sequences. Apart from that AI can also leverage the enormous live data of the company on social platforms and perform data analytics to give necessarily insights which can help the marketers to understand the cus-tomer’s pulse.

Conclusion

Due to its amazing capabilities and applicability Artifical Intelligence is finding its way in almost all the activities of the Sales and Marketing. The increasing adoption of AI in different activities shows that any sales and marketing professional should get acquainted with the AI technology. Although it seems AI can do any task it still need someone to feed the data and fine-tune the models so we can safely say that AI is not a replacement to the Sales and marketing professional rather it is a tool in their hands to make their tasks more easy and effective.

Although this paper tried to be comprehensive on the uses and impact of AI in Sales and marketing still there are many areas where its impact is visible. We hope this paper would serve as a summarized content who want to know how AI is impacting and revolutionizing the Sales and marketing field. 

References

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