Why AI is a game-changer for your sales order entry

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In the fast-paced world of sales, efficiency and accuracy are paramount. Yet, many sales teams still grapple with the burdensome task of manually processing sales orders. This not only consumes valuable time but also leaves room for errors. Of course, almost everyone has already heard about how Artificial Intelligence (AI) will disrupt most industries. In this article, we will deep-dive into the potential of AI for boosting productivity in sales order entry and how AI can elevate your sales operations to new heights.

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The Status Quo: Manual Sales Order Processing

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Currently, the majority of sales order intakes are handled manually, often through email. This involves a massive influx of emails, attachments, and documents in various formats. Sales teams must painstakingly sift through each email, extract relevant information, and input it into their Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems. This manual process is not only time-consuming but also prone to errors, leading to high workloads in your team, potential delays, and customer dissatisfaction.

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Understanding AI: The Backbone Technology of Large Language Models (LLMs)

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Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a broad field encompassing various technologies that enable machines to mimic human intelligence. At the heart of this new technology, especially in the realm of sales order intakes, is a specific type of AI known as Large Language Models (LLMs).

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What Are Large Language Models (LLMs)?

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LLMs are advanced AI systems designed to understand, generate, and manipulate human language. They are trained on vast amounts of text data, enabling them to recognize context, grasp nuances, and generate coherent and contextually relevant responses. The sophistication of LLMs lies in their ability to process and understand natural language, making them incredibly powerful tools for automating tasks that involve text and communication.

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How Do LLMs Work?

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LLMs operate using a deep learning architecture called transformers. This architecture allows them to process and generate language with an unprecedented level of accuracy and coherence. Here’s a simplified breakdown of how they work:

1. Training: LLMs are trained on diverse datasets comprising billions of words from books, articles, websites, and other text sources. During training, the model learns to predict the next word in a sentence, gradually understanding grammar, context, and even nuances like tone and style.
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2. Fine-Tuning: After initial training, LLMs can be fine-tuned for specific tasks or industries by feeding them domain-specific data. For sales order intakes, this could mean enriching the model with data from sales orders, invoices, and customer communications.
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3. Inference: Once trained, LLMs can generate text, answer questions, summarize documents, extract information, and much more. They can understand and respond to queries in natural language, making them highly versatile assistants for almost all of your sales order intake tasks.

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Automating Tedious and Error-Prone Tasks with LLMs

If applied skillfully and correctly, AI, and LLMs in particular, allow us to automate many of the tedious and error-prone tasks in daily sales operations, freeing up sales teams to focus on more strategic and high-value activities.

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AI as a Virtual Assistant in Your Inbox

Let’s imagine the following scenario, which can be readily implemented with the technologies available nowadays: A state-of-the-art LLM has access to your sales order inbox. Here’s how AI can streamline the sales order intake process and significantly boost efficiency:

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• Opening and Reading Documents: AI can automatically open and read incoming documents, identifying and classifying them based on predefined criteria. No matter what file formats your clients send you: Word, PDF, Excel, CSV, XML or any other format. Even images taken by phone.
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• Data Extraction: AI can extract data in a structured form, such as product information, price, quantity, customer data, and commercial terms, from various document formats. This ensures that all necessary information is captured accurately and swiftly.
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• Data Matching: AI can match the extracted order data against your existing system records (e.g. in your ERP), checking for discrepancies or missing information.
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• Generating Quotes and Orders: AI can automatically generate quotes or new sales orders based on the extracted data, ensuring consistency and reducing the turnaround time.
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• Drafting Personalized Responses: AI can draft personalized email responses to customers, whether it’s sending quotes, confirming orders, or requesting additional information, thus maintaining a smooth communication flow. By analyzing previous interactions and customer preferences, you can even instruct the AI to answer in the particular language and communication style that resonates most with your customer.
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• Proactive Follow-Ups: AI can monitor the status of sales orders and automatically send follow-up emails to customers. This ensures timely communication, keeping customers informed about their order status, delivery updates, and any issues that may arise.
  
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Achieving Efficiency Gains with AI

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By integrating AI directly into your sales order inbox, you can transform it into a productivity powerhouse. Here’s a closer look at the benefits:

• Time Savings: Automating the repetitive tasks of reading, extracting, and entering data means your team spends less time on administrative work and more on high-value activities.
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• Increased Accuracy: Even the best and most motivated employees get tired at some point and make mistakes. AI reduces the risk of human error, ensuring that data is entered correctly and consistently into your ERP or CRM system. By cross-referencing multiple data points and verifying information, the AI helps maintain the integrity of your sales data, reducing the risk of discrepancies.
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• Faster Turnaround: With AI handling the initial processing of sales orders, you can respond to customer inquiries and complete transactions more quickly. Money will be faster in your bank account.
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• Improved Customer Satisfaction: Quicker response times and fewer errors lead to happier customers and stronger relationships.
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• Leverage data analytics:  LLMs can analyze historical sales data to predict future trends identify patterns in customer behavior, helping sales teams anticipate demand and adjust their strategies accordingly.
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How turian Can Help Automate Your Sales Order Processing

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At turian, we specialize in leveraging AI to streamline and automate sales order processes. Our AI-driven solutions can turn your sales order inbox into a productivity powerhouse, enabling your team to achieve unprecedented efficiency and accuracy.

With our adaptive LLM technology, you will have a human-level AI Assistant sitting right in your inbox to take care of labor-intense tasks. You can customize your AI Assistant to fit your company-specific workflows, for instance by adding custom validations such as checking stock availability, earliest delivery dates, or applying customer-specific discounts.

You don’t feel comfortable entrusting your AI Assistant to automate critical processes? No worries, our human-in-the-loop approach ensures full control of critical decisions.

See our technology in action and learn how it can transform your sales operations by booking a demo.

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We believe that AI is indeed a game-changer for sales order intakes - and our customers agree! Integrating LLMs into the sales order inbox offers a comprehensive suite of benefits that go beyond mere automation of data entry. From enhanced customer interaction and advanced analytics to improved data management and operational efficiency, LLMs can revolutionize the way sales teams handle order intakes, leading to significant productivity gains and better customer experiences.