Do You Know Where Your Buyers Are? AI Does

In the last few years, procurement has become a young person’s game. According to the latest Forrester research, millennials and Gen Z represent 64% of business buyers—a demographic shift that is altering how purchase decisions are made, and forcing companies to change how and when they reach these buyers. 

Reared on easy access to information and frictionless e-commerce, this cohort prefers a self-guided buyer journey, and generally has a much smaller appetite for traditional sales channels. According to a 2022 report by TrustRadius, B2B buyers are using vendor-provided information to inform their purchases less than ever before, and they are particularly adverse to interacting with vendor sales reps; reliance on sales reps dropped 18% since 2021, marking the first time that they weren’t listed in the top five sources employed by buyers.

Not only are these buyers resistant to traditional marketing, they also prefer to take the entire buying journey on their own, often relying on channels that are outside a vendor’s purview. TrustRadius found that 29% of millennial and 41% of Gen Z buyers use third-party review sites as their first port of call when researching a vendor.

What this means for businesses is that up until the point of purchase, many of these prospects are invisible to sales and marketing teams, making it more difficult to engage with them than ever before. 

So, how can businesses reach prospects they can’t see? The answer is in the data. 

Connecting the dots between datasets

With many prospects hidden from view, more companies are turning to new analytical tools to help them identify potential customers and anticipate their next moves. Traditionally, mining insights from the data available in CRMs has been a manual and labor-intensive process. Today, AI can hand-deliver these insights, spotting connections between different groups of data and eliminating silos that can cost companies up to 30% of annual revenue, according to IDC Market Research. 

Zia, an AI-powered data analytical assistant built into Zoho CRM, is one such tool to streamline analytics. With the help of AI, Zia can collate data from multiple sources, both internal and external, even pulling public data into its analytics platform. This capability makes it possible for sales and marketing teams to gain insights into marketplaces that might have previously been hidden from view. 

Through data mining and machine learning, Zia automatically extracts and analyzes data and presents it as actionable insights. With Zia, sales and marketing teams can improve customer segmentation, identify new sales opportunities and provide more personalized experiences for customers. 

AI also powers Zia with predictive capabilities that help organizations create realistic sales targets. Zia can predict the win probability for all ongoing deals and make conversion predictions for individual accounts. It can also alert teams in real time when it detects deviations in sales activity, such as a drop in new leads or a spike in chatbot activity. 

Businesses without this type of holistic view of their sales landscape rely on considerable guesswork, and only find out about crucial anomalies well after the fact. With Zia, they can spot unusual behavior as it happens, and get ahead of it. Learning historical trends, Zia can also help teams strategize their offerings by making informed predictions about customer preferences. 

Insights that travel at the speed of data

Younger business buyers are also more demanding than their older counterparts. Difficult to please, 90% of millennial and Gen Z buyers report being dissatisfied with their vendors, according to Forrester, and a report by McKinsey finds that 74% of such buyers will actively look elsewhere if their vendor doesn’t respond to them immediately.  

Generative AI makes it easier for sales reps to be always available—even when they’re not near their phones or computers. Earlier this year, Zoho integrated ChatGPT—the AI-driven natural language processing tool developed by OpenAI—across its product suite via several application extensions. 

The technology enables Zia to write emails from scratch and automatically send them out, so no query is left unanswered. ChatGPT also gives Zia the power to analyze a customer’s mood by analyzing the tone in their communications, better enabling sales teams to craft the most appropriate response. 

With ChatGPT, Zia also makes it easier for organizations to manage their social channels. Marketing teams can enter a prompt, and Zia does the rest, crafting posts and recommending hashtags and images. 

Zoho’s integration of ChatGPT is just the latest innovation from a company that has long prided itself on being innovation-first. Zoho spends twice as much on R&D as it does on sales and marketing, with particular focus on areas like AI, machine learning and IoT. These investments in tech are also investments in its customers—and its customers’ customers. Even the ones that are hard to see. 

Discover how Zoho’s ChatGPT-powered CRM helps sales teams generate and convert more leads with a free 30-day trial.