There’s only so much time in the workday, and sales teams can’t be wasting theirs chasing down bad leads and prospects. Doing so can be a monumental drain on sales department resources and employee productivity. In fact, according to some estimates, bad prospect data could cost an organization roughly 550 man-hours and $32,000 per sales representative.

The key to enhancing your sales and marketing departments’ performance and getting better, more qualified leads in your sales funnel is to get smarter with lead generation and nurturing. With the help of artificial intelligence tools, your business can weed out bad prospects and focus your efforts solely on winning over the most promising leads.

AI: The Future of Sales & Marketing

Artificial intelligence is one of the most cutting-edge areas of technology today, and software developers continue to find amazing new applications for this innovative tech. AI-powered software has slowly but surely spread into just about every industry and field, so it’s no wonder that sales and marketing teams have found a lot of success with artificial intelligence tools.

One of the more compelling applications for AI technology is using this software to improve decision-making processes to bring about more positive outcomes. Writing for the Harvard Business Review, business consultant and author Victor Antonio Gonzalez highlighted some of the most impactful ways that artificial intelligence tools can help sales teams. He cited use cases including forecasting, upselling, cross-selling and, of course, lead scoring.

As Gonzalez explained, AI takes the guesswork out of lead scoring, enabling sales representatives to focus their energy on the most promising and potentially lucrative prospects. “With AI, the algorithm can compile historical information about a client, along with social media postings and the salesperson’s customer interaction history (e.g., emails sent, voicemails left, text messages sent, etc.) and rank the opportunities or leads in the pipeline according to their chances of closing successfully,” he wrote.

Using artificial intelligence tools, sales teams would no longer have to rely on their instincts and personal read on a situation to decide which leads to prioritize – AI software can quantitatively determine that for them.

Infer Software Brings Sales & Marketing Into the Digital Age

AI-based marketing and sales software may sound like some kind of futuristic, Sci-Fi flight of fancy, but these kinds of solutions are available in the here and now. Ignite’s Infer Predictive Scoring platform offers all of these advanced capabilities to drive sales and marketing success.

This powerful software platform can score vast quantities of inbound leads in real time, giving sales and marketing departments clear direction on which prospects they should be giving the most attention. Infer leverages cutting-edge predictive behavioral scoring technology to mine a wide range of activity data and present the most accurate and fullest view possible for each prospect.

Sales departments can also use Infer to segment their prospect lists into different groups and distribute those leads evenly across their entire team so every representative has enough time to nurture prospects through the sales funnel.

The Infer platform can also seamlessly integrate with some of the most widely used applications in sales and marketing today, including HubSpot, Salesforce and Marin Software. That compatibility allows sales and marketing teams to tap into the deepest well of data possible for their lead prospecting and nurturing campaigns.

It’s time to bring marketing and sales software into the digital era, and artificial intelligence tools like Infer provide all of the advanced features needed to make lead prospecting more accurate and targeted than ever before.