During my marketing career, there has been a lot of buzz about artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. Despite all the excitement, I didn’t fully grasp how sales engagement software could help me increase website conversions and route leads faster to the right sales representative. During a recent webinar, however, Rik McCrossan, Sr. Business Development Manager at Genesys, told a story about a firefighter making a life-saving call. It gave me a new perspective.

In Chicago, a team of firefighters responded to a kitchen fire. Despite their best efforts, the fire wouldn’t go out. At this moment, one of the firefighters realized something was wrong and ordered everyone out of the house. Moments later, the living room floor where they had been standing collapsed. In later interviews, the firefighter described his thought process for making that life-saving call. It was based on three things he noticed: water was not putting out the fire, the fire was burning hotter in the living room, and the fire was unusually quiet.

The firefighter recognized a pattern and took action. In marketing, it is also essential to recognize and engage on customer behavior patterns throughout the buyer’s journey. However, many marketing professionals miss these patterns, miss that critical point to engage, and let the floor cave in on their leads. That is all changing with sales engagement software powered by AI and machine learning.

Why Use AI and Machine Learning for Marketing

The power of AI, supported by machine learning capabilities, empowers an organization to capture and prioritize leads better, convert prospects faster, detect and reduce abandonment, and nurture prospects with greater efficiency. In doing so, decrease the cost of lead acquisition, grow sales, and increase customer lifetime value. Machine learning charts the patterns and behaviors of all your website visitors and gives you predictive outcomes of which customers are lost on your website, may leave your website or abandon their cart. This allows marketing and sales teams to engage at the right moment with the right offer on the right channel – chat, chatbots, live sales rep, email, mobile.

Leveraging deep learning and natural language processing is why your Amazon account is overflowing with the recommended products, and why Hannah Montana doesn’t come up on Pandora when you historically have listened to heavy metal.

Cross-selling, providing personalized content offers and discount offers on your website, are only a few of a myriad of ways that machine learning and automation can give you the ability to personalize customer experiences.

In addition to marketing functions, leveraging a sales engagement platform powered by AI can help with sales productivity by allocating your sales resources to the prospects most likely to buy. You have thousands of prospects engaging with your brand right now, leveraging a sales enablement solution can allocate these prospects to sales representatives in real time.

4 Ways to Increase Website Conversions with AI and Machine Learning

Leveraging a solution like Genesys Prospect Conversion, industry leaders can:

  1. Track Customer Behavior – Detailed journey mapping notifies sales representatives when customers are lost, on the verge of cart abandonment, or leaving your site.
  2. Predict the Best Prospect to Engage – Organizations leveraging this tool have been able to deliver industry leading conversion rates.
  3. Provide Personalized Engagement – Delivered across all channels, these leaders can engage customers on their preferred channels in real-time.
  4. Leverage Predictive Routing – Companies can deliver better outcomes by using the right human and automated sales resources for every journey moment.

The Future of AI in Marketing and Sales

Rik’s story demonstrates the importance of recognizing patterns to make the right decision at the right time. Marketing leaders across industries are integrating sales engagement software to gain insight into the people patterns across their websites, map these customer journeys across their website, and leverage these insights to engage visitors in real-time with the right content.

To learn more about sales engagement software for sales and marketing, watch our on-demand webinar, “Increase Website Conversions with AI and Machine Learning.”