As mentioned above, these have gone awry in some instances, but today's chatbots are specifically designed for customer communications. There's no chance you'll unleash Tay on your prospects. These bots can answer common questions and help prospects find the resources and contacts they're seeking quickly. Email automation: There are many ways to use AI with email. For example, some solutions enable you to send out customized newsletters, optimized by the AI based on what previously engaged the reader enough to click through.

It is Sales & Marketing Alignment month on SalesPOP! So continuing our series on artificial intelligence, let's now take a look at AI and how it fits in with Sales & Marketing Alignment. As we know by evaluating the current state of Sales & Marketing Alignment, it is still a major challenge to get these two groups working in unity. Yet in today it's vital that they do–if only because in today's digital marketplace it's getting more and more difficult to tell where exactly Marketing ends and Sales begins. Although there are clear opinions on the subject, we have never totally solved the question of lead generation being specifically a Marketing or a Sales activity.

No one with any experience in enterprise IT would suggest that technology itself can boost the bottom line. Emerging AI sales technology, however, can provide a shortcut to success by delivering more leads and making more reliable predictions than sales reps can on their own. Today's sales teams rely on numerous tools to fill out the entire sales value chain, with large organizations reporting the use of 60 or more sales technologies, said Tad Travis, Gartner research director, in an October 2018 panel webinar in which analysts discussed emerging trends in sales technology. Sales force automation (SFA) handles the basics of sales execution programs, like managing accounts, deals, forecasts, sales activity recording and lead management. Then, there are components that integrate with those, such as configure, price, quote tools, master data management, marketing automation and partner relationship management tools.