How to Accelerate Your Business’ Growth with AI in Marketing

In medical sales and marketing, it’s important to grab every possible advantage to stand out from the competition. The medical/pharmaceutical industry can be incredibly lucrative, but there is often an incredible amount of competition for specific verticals.

For example, IBISWorld reports that, as of 2021, there are 998 Medical Device Manufacturing businesses in the USA. If you were a medical device manufacturer, that would mean having to compete with hundreds of other businesses for every lead.

One way for companies in the pharmaceutical and medical sales industry to gain a competitive advantage is to use AI tools in their sales and marketing strategies.

What Is AI in Marketing?

AI is an acronym for artificial intelligence. It’s a term that covers a variety of software-based tools that simulate human intelligence in some way to perform various tasks. An AI often leverages machine learning algorithms to sort through massive amounts of data or to improve how it completes tasks.

What Is Machine Learning?

Machine learning is a branch of AI science that helps computer algorithms “learn” in order to improve outcomes for whatever task the AI is trying to accomplish. As MIT Technology Review notes, “Machine-learning algorithms use statistics to find patterns in massive amounts of data.”

This information can be used by an AI to accomplish tasks like projecting likely future states based on historical data. For example, based on the changes in sales statistics over time, an AI with a machine learning algorithm could project how many sales a company is likely to make over the course of a year.

How Can AI Be Used for Sales and Marketing?

There are a lot of ways to integrate artificial intelligence into your sales and marketing processes. Examples of sales AI and marketing AI applications include:

1. Parsing Large Data Sets to Identify Emergent Trends

One of the things that AI programs can do better than a regular person is analyzing massive data sets. Machine learning algorithms can pull huge statistical data tables and analyze thousands of sales interactions in mere seconds.

This enables the creation and use of predictive analytics. This is a field of AI that can be a surprisingly useful sales tool. For example, Digital Authority Partners identified a use case for predictive analytics wherein a retailer was “able to correctly predict the pregnancy of a teenager based off of her purchasing habits, before she had even discovered she was (unexpectedly) expecting.”

Using this information, the retailer could proactively sell maternity/early child care to the customer. A similar situation can be useful for medical sales.

For example, say that a company is gearing up to release a new medical product. They start to spend more on R&D, and they begin ordering new parts or materials that they haven’t ordered before. If an AI solution could analyze their purchasing patterns and identify the type of research or product being made, a company could anticipate the release of the final product.

Using this information, a company could offer necessary products or materials to the other company, boosting sales and potentially cutting off competitors. Or, with foreknowledge of the new product that will hit the market, the business could begin pushing complementary products. For example, a medical knee brace to go with new knee implants.

2. Tracking Marketing Statistics

Another use of sales AI software is to track your company’s marketing metrics—which marketing channels you’re using, how much you spend on each, which channels are generating leads, how often leads convert into real sales opportunities, etc.

While a manual review of marketing statistics can be invaluable for gaining insights into overall marketing performance—it can take an enormous amount of time to review every single data point from every single marketing channel and organize the information into a coherent report.

By leveraging AI and machine learning as a sales tool, you can drastically reduce the time needed to monitor and manage various marketing channels. Machine learning AI, specifically, can help to proactively identify trends in your marketing to help provide suggestions on how to optimize marketing spend for greater ROI.

For example, say that leads generated by your company’s LinkedIn advertising were converting on offers at a 30% higher rate than leads from traditional cold calling activity or email marketing. However, there is a difference in the nature of the offers presented on LinkedIn compared to the other marketing channels.

With a sales software solution that tracks marketing activity, it would be possible to test different offers on different channels and see which ones provide the greatest return on investment. From there, you could tweak your marketing to generate the best results.

3. Tracking Sales Rep Activities

What do your most successful medical sales reps do differently from the ones who struggle to meet monthly sales quotas? This is a question that any sales team leader will ask themselves at some point. However, a sales manager doesn’t have the free time to listen in on every interaction between reps and customers/prospects.

This is where sales tools that leverage AI and machine learning can help.

With a sales software that uses AI to analyze recorded interactions between sales team members and customers, the AI can correlate specific activities and behaviors with successful deals.

For example, if sales reps with higher successful close rates tend to spend 25% more time on each interaction with a lead than reps with lower close rates, that could indicate that time spent on a call contributes to successful sales. Alternatively, what if sales reps who reach out five times instead of three times closed 50% more deals? How about sales reps offering specific products and services to specific types of leads?

By cross-checking all of the factors involved in the sales process, it’s easier to identify trends that contribute to success. This information can then be used to optimize sales rep training for greater results.

Benefits of Using a CSO That Leverages AI for Data-Driven Decisions

How does using sales AI software help a company, specifically? There are a few key benefits to using AI tools as a part of your marketing and sales processes:

• Improving ROI for Marketing Spend. As noted by Forbes, “buyers are overwhelmed every day with advertisements. Most of them are irrelevant, so they simply close the ad or move on to their next task. When this happens, advertisers lose money.” Using AI to track a prospect’s online activity and apparent interests helps businesses serve better, more targeted ads—which helps increase the ROI from marketing spend by improving the results from ads.
• Improving Accountability for Sales Reps. Another benefit of sales software in general is the increase in accountability for sales and marketing activities. Simple sales AI tools can improve accountability even further by automatically assembling reports on sales activities and performance metrics that are easier for sales managers to digest.
• Minimizing Delays between Conversion Activity and Outreach Efforts. In sales and marketing, the time-to-response after a prospect raises their hand by filling out a form or asking a question online can be crucial for winning new business. The first company to respond to a query often has a huge advantage over others. AI-powered chatbots can be a great way to provide a response in mere seconds (as opposed to waiting minutes, hours, or days for a sales rep to notice the activity and provide a manual response). Some articles have even made the bold claim that 85% of consumer interactions will be handled without human agents in the near future.

These are just a handful of the potential benefits of sales technology and tools that leverage AI. But, what does this have to do with contract sales organizations (CSOs)?

When you’re looking for new medical sales talent, it’s important to find people who are not only skilled at closing deals, but in working with the most recent sales tools. Additionally, it’s important for sales reps to be comfortable with having their activity tracked using sales software and AI-based tools.

At Axxelus, we conduct ongoing sales training to keep sales reps up to date on the latest sales best practices. We also work to ensure that every medical sales rep we pair with your organization is the right fit culturally—including being comfortable working with specific sales tools to track their activity and results.

Do you need to expand your sales team quickly? Reach out to Axxelus today!