The revolutionary rise of CRMs is a pretty interesting one.
From simply being a contact management system meant to record prospect data in the ‘80s to being a full-fledged customer relationship management tool for sales, marketing, and customer success teams in the late ‘90s, CRMs have evolved to accommodate the needs of businesses in every industry.
Today, CRMs are not just web-based tools meant to be integrated with your disparate business applications to give you data. It is a formidable technology that allows administrative tasks to be automated, increases collaboration among teams spread across the world, and enables companies to create better sales processes.
Pioneers of the technology, like Salesforce, hit the scene in the year 2000 with its cloud-based CRM software that quickly became the #1 CRM in the world. And to fortify its product, Salesforce incorporated Artificial Intelligence (AI) into its CRM to ensure that customer-facing teams are empowered to provide a more personalised service.
While Generative AI helped sales teams bridge the gap in the sales lifecycle and improve their sales efficiency, many were left wondering if AI really made all that difference.
In this blog, we’ll explore whether Generative AI truly outperforms traditional CRM-based selling and analyse their respective strengths and weaknesses.
Benefits of Traditional CRM-Based Selling
Today, companies look up to mature CRM solutions that can encompass a wide range of functions across sales, marketing, customer relations, and even accounting to help them sell better and grow their bottom line. Some of the benefits sales teams can expect after investing in a CRM solution include:
1. Improved Customer Data Management
Traditionally, CRMs provide sellers with a single source of truth for all customer interactions. This data includes the prospects’ or leads’ contact details, product preferences, and transactional history, making the CRM a centralised repository for sales teams to access and manage customer information.
Since CRMs are capable of automating the process of data entry and creating customer records, it relieves the sales teams from entering data manually every time—thus reducing the risk of errors and ensuring that all customer data is accurate and up-to-date.
2. Enhanced Customer Segmentation
A traditional CRM enables sales and marketing teams to set up targeted marketing campaigns and segment customers based on various criteria (such as their industry, purchase history, buyer’s persona and behaviour). This level of personalisation not only leads to more effective marketing campaigns but also improves lead qualification. By understanding customer profiles better, sales teams can focus on high-potential leads and improve conversion rates.
3. Streamlined Sales Processes
A traditional CRM can help automate repetitive tasks for the sales, marketing, and customer success teams—such as creating and sending follow-up emails, responding to meeting requests, and updating lead status across integrated applications, thereby freeing up time for sales reps to focus on selling.
An automated CRM tool can also help sales teams visualise and manage their sales pipeline, track the progress of deals, and forecast revenue more accurately.
4. Increased Sales Productivity
A traditional CRM provides sales teams with a comprehensive view of customer interactions (including emails, calls, meetings, and support tickets) and offers better insights into customer needs and preferences. This enables them to proactively address issues and offer more personalised products or services.
Additionally, a CRM helps sales teams prioritise their tasks by highlighting high-value activities and urgent follow-ups. With the help of cloud-based CRMs (such as Salesforce), sales representatives can access customer information and update records on the go, improving efficiency.
In short, traditional CRM systems provide sales teams with a centralised repository to access customer information, track sales pipelines, and facilitate communication.
Limitations of Traditional CRM-Based Selling
Although a CRM is definitely an indispensable tool for improving sales and marketing efforts, the system is not without its disadvantages. Let’s look at some of the limitations of a traditional CRM.
1. Data Overload
With the vast amount of prospect and customer information collected by a traditional CRM, sellers often drown in a sea of data, making it difficult to manage the CRM. Sales teams may struggle to monitor data entry as well as analyse and extract actionable insights in time. Moreover, poor data quality—such as duplicate entries, outdated information, or incomplete records—can further complicate decision-making and reduce the effectiveness of the CRM.
2. A Complex Learning Curve
A traditional CRM is a complex software, often coming with a multitude of features, customisation options, and integrations. This level of complexity can be overwhelming for sales teams, as most of them may not be technically inclined. The learning curve can be steep; and in spite of spending significant time and effort to train the sales, marketing, and customer success teams, there may still be dependency on IT.
Moreover, if the CRM software is neither cloud-based nor user-friendly, it can lead to poor adoption rates by the end users, reducing its effectiveness in aiding sales.
3. Inaccurate Data Entry
As indispensable as a traditional CRM might be, its effectiveness relies heavily on the accuracy and completeness of the data being entered by the users. Inconsistency or negligence in entering data can lead to the CRM producing inaccurate reports and forecasts, affecting sales strategies and leading to poor decision-making.
Now that we have established the key benefits and limitations of traditional CRMs, let’s explore how AI has revolutionised the scene and whether it really trumps a non-AI-integrated CRM in selling smartly.
Benefits of Generative AI in Sales
Like it or not, you can’t deny that AI’s impact is real.
In fact, according to this Forbes report, AI is becoming increasingly critical in sales. The report states that companies using AI in sales have achieved up to a 50% increase in leads, reduced call time by as much as 70%, and reduced costs by up to 60%.
This is the reason why robust CRM solutions like Salesforce have strengthened their CRM platform by incorporating Generative AI.
By harnessing AI for sales, Salesforce CRM helps you become more predictive about your customers, anticipate newer opportunities, and exceed customer needs.
Let’s look at some of the ways in which Generative AI helps you sell better and close more deals.
1. Personalised Customer Engagement
Imagine being able to send a customer an email that feels like it was written just for them—addressing their unique needs and interests!
With an advanced CRM that has incorporated generative AI, this is not only possible but also easy to implement. In fact, one of the most powerful applications of Generative AI in sales is its ability to analyse vast amounts of customer or prospect data and generate tailored content and recommendations that resonate with individual preferences and behaviours.
Products such as Salesforce Einstein AI can help sales reps craft personalised messages, provide product recommendations, and generate follow-up emails, ensuring that every touchpoint with their customers is relevant and engaging.
2. Enhanced Lead Scoring and Prioritisation
Sales teams often struggle with identifying which leads to prioritise.
Generative AI-enhanced CRMs such as Salesforce Einstein can help take the guesswork out of lead scoring by analysing patterns and customer behaviours to determine which leads are most likely to convert. This allows sales reps to focus their efforts on high-potential prospects and make data-driven decisions about where to allocate their time and resources.
This not only boosts sales productivity but also increases the chances of closing deals.
3. Automated Sales Forecasting
Accurate and real-time sales forecasting is crucial for driving growth and making data-driven decisions.
CRMs that have been integrated with Generative AI can help sales managers analyse historical sales data and predict market trends to generate precise sales forecasts. This enables businesses to anticipate demand, allocate resources effectively, and set realistic sales targets.
With AI-powered sales forecasting, businesses can stay ahead of market fluctuations and make proactive adjustments to their sales strategies. Generative AI by Salesforce Einstein, for instance, can not only assist in building a smarter pipeline but also help you improve forecasting accuracy, get more reliable forecast predictions, and effectively track how sales teams are doing.
4. Improved Customer Support and Service
The most common version of AI most people are familiar with is undoubtedly the chatbots. With the integration of AI agents (such as Salesforce Einstein Copilot), Generative AI can help sales teams enhance customer service by providing real-time assistance and generating quick, accurate responses to prospect inquiries.
Additionally, Generative AI-integrated CRMs can help answer common questions, troubleshoot issues, provide product information, automate routine customer support tasks, and eventually help free up sales, marketing, and customer services teams to focus on more complex and high-value interactions.
5. Content Generation for Marketing and Sales Collateral
Creating high-quality content for marketing and sales campaigns can be time-consuming and resource-intensive.
CRMs integrated with Generative AI can help streamline this process by generating compelling content quickly and efficiently. From marketing emails and social media updates to product descriptions and sales presentations, AI can help businesses produce a wide range of content that aligns with their brand voice and messaging. This helps sales teams, in particular, focus more on selling than on fruitless administrative activities.
Limitations of Generative AI in Sales
Although the benefits of using advanced CRMs integrated with Generative AI are indisputable, there are often hidden disadvantages to using AI that may not be as easily apparent.
Here, we dive into these limitations.
1. Lack of the Human Touch
Any business looks up to its sales reps to nurture deep, lasting relationships with their customers. Building trust, understanding customer perspectives and challenges, and adapting to nuanced situations are expected.
Generative AI, while capable of processing vast amounts of information, lacks the emotional intelligence and empathy that human salespeople bring to the table. This is likely to be reflected in the content generated by AI, which can sound robotic or forced. Moreover, over-reliance on Generative AI can result in impersonal interactions, potentially alienating customers who value a more personalised approach.
2. Complex Integration Challenges
With most CRMs in the market, implementing Generative AI is not a plug-and-play solution. It often requires developer skills and calls for a significant investment in integrating the organisation’s existing systems, processes, and workflows.
Integrating AI products or agents with your CRM system, training your sales, marketing, and customer success teams on AI usage, and ensuring seamless operations can be complex and time-consuming. Moreover, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) may find the cost and technical expertise required to implement AI prohibitive. Taking the help of a trusted technology partner who can manage the transition end-to-end would be required.
3. Over-Reliance on AI
Another possible disadvantage of using Generative AI in sales processes is that sales teams may become overly dependent on AI-generated insights.
And as companies become more reliant on AI for decision-making and sales processes, there is a risk that natural sales skills, particularly in areas like active follow-ups, negotiation, and cross-selling, may erode. This not only leads to a lack of initiative and creativity in handling sales opportunities but could also make businesses vulnerable if the AI-integrated CRM fails or delivers suboptimal results.
So, to answer the million-dollar question:
Is Generative AI in Sales Better than Traditional CRM Selling?
As explored in this article, CRMs integrated with Generative AI offer a more dynamic, efficient, and personalised approach to sales in comparison to traditional CRM systems. And unlike traditional CRM solutions that require manual updates and maintenance, Generative AI-enhanced CRMs continuously learn and improve, making them more scalable and adaptable, as well as the more competitive choice for modern businesses.
And for those of you wondering about the limitations of adopting AI, there is no need to choose only one or the other. All AI, is after all, not created equal. By taking a hybrid approach—where you pair a Customer Relationship Management software that has steadily stood the test of time with state-of-the-art AI technologies—you can enjoy the best of both worlds!
Salesforce Einstein AI – The Best of Both Worlds
Salesforce is arguably, the best-known and most sought-after Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software in the world today. From breaking down data silos to unifying your sales, services, marketing, customer relations, and IT under a single umbrella, Salesforce helps you focus on providing a unique, satisfying, and wholesome customer experience.
One of the major advantages Salesforce has over other CRMs in the market today is its Generative AI-integrated Sales Cloud module, known as Salesforce Einstein, which helps businesses improve sales productivity and see a tangible increase in bottom-line results. As the first-of-its-kind comprehensive AI for CRM, Salesforce Einstein AI can be used across the entire sales cycle—from following up with leads to facilitating more reliable sales forecasting—in faster and more seamless ways.
Salesforce Einstein’s Generative AI capabilities extend to automating the lead conversion and qualification processes in your CRM. Its customisable, conversational, Generative AI assistant, Einstein Copilot, has been natively embedded across Salesforce applications to help deliver a consistent user experience and dynamically automate any action to deliver better productivity. Moreover, with its robust Einstein Trust Layer, Salesforce ensures that all data interactions are protected, customer confidentiality is maintained, and data privacy regulations are complied with.
Salesforce Einstein has been seamlessly integrated into many Salesforce products that comprise the Customer 360 portfolio (such as Marketing Cloud, Sales Cloud, and the Service Cloud). This means that customisable, predictive, and generative AI can be used across your business to forecast sales, enhance team collaboration and productivity, improve customer experience, and ultimately increase profits.
Leverage Salesforce Einstein AI to Supercharge Your Sales Efficiency
Being among the precious few CRMs offering Generative AI capabilities, Salesforce Einstein AI has been designed to be deployed for any organisation, regardless of industry, region, or size. It can help sales teams build a smarter pipeline, improve forecasting accuracy, and accelerate their path to cash flow growth.
Moreover, with the additional advantage of the Einstein Trust Layer, you can now boldly trust Salesforce AI with your company secrets and your customer data while balancing the benefits of Generative AI.
If you would like to commence your journey with Generative AI powered by Salesforce, Corptec Technology Partners can show you the way.
Corptec can empower you to strategically adopt AI in your various business functions by ensuring you integrate Salesforce Einstein in your CRM. Our AI Coach can help you:
- Assess your AI readiness
- Explore the capabilities and value of AI for your specific business model
- Build an actionable roadmap to get you started with Salesforce Generative AI
Ace your sales goals with Salesforce Einstein’s Generative AI and Copilot services. Book your discovery session now!
As a trusted Salesforce consulting partner since 2018, Corptec Technology Partners has designed customer journeys for organisations across Australia by helping them maximise the potential of this leading CRM platform. We offer full-cycle implementation of Sales, Service, Marketing, and Financial Services Clouds, and support custom Salesforce integrations with any ERP or third-party applications.
To learn more, book a meeting with our Salesforce expert today!
