INDUSTRY VIEW

Artificial Intelligence is reshaping B2B sales by reducing administrative workloads, accelerating complex processes and giving sales teams more time to build stronger customer relationships. Fares Asadi, Director, CRM Solution Consulting – EMEA South at ServiceNow, tells us how AI-native CRM platforms can transform the sales process by automating quoting, improving accuracy and personalisation and enabling Middle East enterprises to deliver faster, more consistent customer experiences.

And since, in the digital era, we cannot discuss the sales field without mentioning customer relationship management( CRM) systems, we should take time to consider how AI is evolving the CRM arena. A 2024 global report from LinkedIn and Ipsos claimed that by“[ offloading ] administrative tasks”, AI could“ double every salesperson’ s average selling time from 10 to 20 + hours per week”.

Any job role that finds 75 % of its daily time swallowed by nonproductivity tasks is a prime candidate for review. But when that review reveals that the non-productivity tasks are in many ways created by legacy CRM platforms, it is time to review CRM itself to find out what is going wrong. CRM is supposed to be a productivity engine for sales executives, but after a cursory examination, we can see that much of the

Fares Asadi, Director, CRM Solution Consulting – EMEA South at ServiceNow, performance bottleneck lies in the quoting process. Quoting workflows in digital CRM should be quick and accurate but current tools place many hurdles between the seller and the quote – obstacles that require the salesperson to consult with colleagues and comb through many different spreadsheets before manually preparing the quote.

Manual data entry seems out of place in the AI-driven present, as does screen-hopping and touring multiple systems. In a business

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