Double the power of ZOHO with 7Targets

AI Sales Assistant or Virtual SDR are helping to get the consistency and reliability in the Sales process. AI Sales Assistant market is growing and each product is taking its perspective to provide value for their customer. Below are some important expectations one has from the AI Sales Assistant.

• Ability to write different emails to each new contact
• Ability to read emails
• Based on the email response decide the category of the contact
• Create Subject lines dynamically
• Capability for one sales exec to have multiple Assistants for nurturing contacts across different offering
• Capability for one Assistant focused on one offering to be used by multiple sales execs simultaneously
• Remind the Sales executive if they have not responded back to a lead
• Hyper personalize email sending time

Below is an honest attempt to compare Zoho and 7Targets AI Sales Assistant on the above and few more attributes.

Ability to write different emails to each new contact

Using a “template-based approach” often results in one email getting sent to hundreds of contacts simultaneously at the same time with the same subject line. This is like an invitation to spam engines.

Emma, our AI Assistants, works differently. She changes different opening and closing sentences to make emails look like they are written by a human. Emma changes subject line combinations based on best practices using a machine learning model. Emma learns and remembers the email open time of 1000’s of prospects and adjusts the time of sending subsequent emails to the prospect accordingly. This combination of simulating a human is not present in Zoho, FreshMarketer, Hubspot, or Salesforce.

Watch 4 Important Automated Responses by AI Sales Assistants (and HOT lead classification).

Ability for senior execs to simply cc the assistant, as they do with a real assistant

Senior executives have no time to get into “one more tool” and add a lead. They simply want to cc their assistant so that the assistant goes ahead and follows up a conversation. Similarly, Emma can be cc’ed and she will followup with a prospect if he/she does not respond.

This cannot be done with Zoho or similar tools.

Email address cleanup

Mundane work like cleaning up email addresses is also automatically done by the assistant before she starts sending emails. AFAIK, most tools blindly send emails to whoever you need to and then penalize you for a large bounce rate. And that leaves the job of cleaning up emails back on your business development team, who - instead of doing business development, now have to focus on administrative work like email address cleanups.

Auto-scheduling follow ups

If a prospect is out of office for the rest of the week, should an email followup engine still continue to send emails? If a prospect asks to contact after 2 months after the covid situation is over, is it necessary for a human to intervene, manually set a reminder for himself to contact the prospect after 2 months, and then, after 2 months, remember to actually contact the prospect again after 2 months? This is what most tools ask you to do. They force business development guys to put data into CRMs, set reminders themselves, and ask them to be disciplined and process-oriented.

Many juniors or inside sales team members may not be highly process-oriented. Everyone forgets. When I see the email to contact a prospect after 2 months, I may see it on my mobile while having coffee. Now if I have to remember to get back to my CRM and update the task list once I go back to my desk, most people simply drop the lead.

Emma does not drop any lead. She will auto-reschedule follow ups. A biz-dev person need not get into the picture till a prospect is asking for information that the assistant cannot answer.

Strong sales person Vs Democratization of messaging

Most teams have a strong salesperson, a few average sales guys, and then a few non-performers who cannot get new meetings. Our Assistants are focused sales/lead nurturing virtual assistants that can be leveraged by your entire team. This democratizes the playing field as far as the initial outreach is concerned. It still allows each salesperson to try his own custom messages. If a custom message works better than an existing message, others can easily adopt that message right away. Instead of waiting for a monthly sales win/loss meeting, sharing why someone won a deal, sales can adopt messaging much faster.

Seeing this clearly across team members is not possible in traditional tools like Zoho. Seeing the response ratio of each sub-segment for each geo is quite a task in most tools. 7Targets approach is to start with the basic task of ensuring emails are opened and then helping to see response rates. And everything revolves around these 2 metrics. And this helps other sales team members to quickly get to “what’s working”, based on data, without waiting for a monthly meeting.

One sales exec has multiple Assistants

7Targets implemented this as a request from some of the existing customers. This gives sales an ability to create geography specific and Industry/Vertical specific Assistants, giving higher coverage within each territory for each salesperson. The concept of an assistant working for a salesperson is not present in Zoho.

Remind the Salespeople too

7Targets customers requested for a feature where the Assistant should followup with the Salespeople in case they forgot to respond back to a lead who responded. Other tools like Zoho, Freshmarketer, Hubspot, Salesforce has no such concept of identifying that a “Lead is at Risk” and reminding the sales. Other tools depend on humans to come to the Reminder section and add a task to remind themselves about different situations.

Running Sendgrid and other tools

Assistant has the skills to run other emailing tools like SendGrid. Our AI assistants use Amazon SES. AI Assistants’ value is in creating different email content with different success stories without creating “rigid templates”.

Nurturing table

The most important reason why a prospect turns from cold to warm lies in what stories have you told them about your customers. Success stories, testimonials, good videos are created by many marketing teams but are often forgotten by sales teams. Our Assistants are used by Inside Sales as well as Sales team members. And in each email, the assistant automatically attaches one story from the “Nurturing table”. Each segment has its own nurturing table. Hospital HR prospects will get success stories related to hospitals while the Edutech sector will hear about how you helped Byju’s setup a team in Mumbai! This ‘relevant’ material to relevant leads helps in making leads warm.

In Zoho or other tools, you cannot create so many combinations of templates where the body of the email is generic but success stories are dynamically attached.

More information

7Targets.ai/help has detailed videos to get started. Read more

WhatsApp group support

7Targets makes sure that customers get value from the solution. Works closely with the customers to help them use the Assistant well. Help review the custom messages if needed. The instant support and customer-focused backlog prioritization makes sure that customers get what they want.

Screening out prospects

The focus of the assistant is to screen out prospects where humans should not spend time. Finding out engaged and warm leads. Getting a list of leads who are engaged and Warm would help the Sales team prioritize whom to call. Thereby improving the calling metrics. Zoho, Hubspot are tools that provide you the framework and you have to figure out who is a warm lead, who is a hot lead. The AI Assistant helps do that for you. Read more

WhatsApp Notifications on hot leads, warm leads

WhatsApp notifications for the Hot and Warm lead gives the Salesperson an opportunity to call the lead instantly. There is good research from the best universities and experts in the area which says that if you are able to talk to someone within 5 mins of that person engaged with your content, the chances of further communication increases substantially.

Intelli import

All tools today force you to adopt a particular format and then upload data. Marketing and sales guys are not software engineers. Simple looking tasks can be difficult. Although this feature is in beta right now, 7Targets focus is to make end users’ life easy so that he simply drags and drops the XL with one lead per row, and the assistant automatically picks up names and email addresses. Read more

Conclusion

Honestly, AI Sales Assistant is a different concept. It’s there to help your humans, and not to compete with Zoho, Freshmarketer, and other tools. 7Targets complement and integrate with those tools.

The Assistant’s job ends after she gets a positive response from the prospect. All other states of negotiations, getting on meetings with prospects, sending proposals, etc. have to be managed in a CRM. 7Targets aids a CRM, it does not replace it.

Assistant simply focused on the first leg of the tasks, that of getting meetings everyday for sales. With that singular goal in mind, we work with all other CRMs and tools.

Feel free to sign-up and give it a try.