The benefits of putting your CRM system on autopilot

In the past two years, selling has transformed from a mostly analog experience (coffees and in-person meetings) to an almost completely digital one, with the majority of selling happening online.

The 2021 Forrester Analytics Business Technographics® Priorities And Journey Survey confirmed that 62% of B2B marketing decision-makers agreed buyers are now less interested in spending time with sellers. Unfortunately, for many B2B organizations, these new sales preferences have created a significant technology gap.

As a result, technology providers have evolved rapidly to help companies meet the growing demands of their customers and capitalize on the newfound data being created by more digital customer interactions. But doing so effectively at scale requires a truly customer-focused approach that leverages the latest artificial intelligence (AI) and automation technology to support sellers in this new, more digital-first selling environment.

The advantages of AI and automation

B2B selling, particularly at the enterprise level, is more competitive and challenging than ever before. But, when used effectively, AI can help teams automate some of the heavy lifting to consolidate and analyze data—even data locked away in silos like email and calendar systems—and surface opportunities so sellers can focus more on selling.

Here are just three advantages of using these tools to put your CRM on autopilot:

1. Access to accurate, real-time CRM data across the organization

To make the most of each campaign and ultimately see better ROI from your CRM, teams need to be able to accurately capture engaged contacts and measure marketing attribution. But auto-populating CRM data is notoriously difficult. Complex account hierarchies, stale data, and ongoing configuration requirements are just a few of the common issues that can break CRM sync processes.

An AI-powered matching engine like People.ai’s SmartMatch™ partnered with an enterprise system like Oracle Sales can help you bypass those problems and automate the process of capturing business activity data, filtering out private or sensitive information like PII and PHI, and linking the data to the appropriate account or opportunity. No more relying on sellers to manually enter, consolidate, and clean up that data, which both invites errors into your system and takes time away from selling.

2. A true 360-degree customer view

By establishing an automated process for capturing, maintaining, and analyzing data, you can begin to learn even more about your customers and use that information to provide the personalized experience buyers have come to expect. Such comprehensive visibility throughout the customer journey allows for unparalleled customer focus and personalization, particularly within large, complex accounts with multiple business units.

With a unified data set in place and a complete view of the customer, you can capture all contacts and context needed for a smooth onboarding experience and ensure a more seamless handoff from pre-sales to post-sales. Additionally, any team members who enter the account in the future can quickly and easily get up to speed. You can even use automation to prescribe actionable insights to flag and de-risk deals in the renewal pipeline based on best practices and top organizational initiatives.

3. A one-stop shop for users anytime, anywhere

Data portability is vital to overall system integration effectiveness and a seamless user experience. Gone are the days of bouncing from app to app to get things done. Data should be served up in context to arm users with valuable insights no matter where they spend time working.

The advantages of automated integration between software applications are far-ranging. Accelerated growth, increased user-driven innovation, and dramatically improved visibility across the organization are just a few of the reasons why it’s essential to integrate your business software applications.

People.ai offers highly portable data that meets you where you work. For example, customer analytics and data can be piped directly into systems like Oracle Eloqua Marketing Automation, augmenting your existing systems with rich, comprehensive, real-time field activity data to power models where they’re used most.

The benefits of an Oracle + People.ai partnership

People.ai fuels Oracle Sales with mission-critical business activity data and optimizes ROI for enterprises while enabling a myriad of persona-specific uses. The Oracle and People.ai partnership:

• Enables sales reps to save time, ramp up faster, and ultimately close more deals.
• Empowers sales leadership with insight into account and deal health, enhanced coaching opportunities, and added forecast accuracy.
• Gives marketers greater visibility into engagement throughout the customer’s journey with opportunities to increase contact creation, improve attribution and influence realization, and maintain healthier, more accurate CRM data.

Additional resources

For more strategies and tactics to help you unify your data and leverage AI and automation, watch the full replay of Oracle’s Virtual Summit: How Organizations Help Sellers Get Back to Selling.

In Forrester’s recently released New Tech Report: Revenue Operations & Intelligence (RO&I), People.ai was ranked as a late stage vendor. To learn more about this distinction and how People.ai can help you unlock the value of unifying revenue data to align your teams around account engagement and opportunity execution, read our blog post.