AI for Sales: What You Need to Know

This technology helps in understanding customer needs more deeply, refining sales pitches, and ultimately improving overall sales performance. Start by automating the tracking and updating of deals in your CRM system. AI-enhanced chatbots and virtual assistants can become your sales team’s new best friends, providing real-time updates and customer interactions. Based on historical data and market trends, these tools are invaluable in negotiations. And this greatly improves your chances of closing successful deals.

For instance, AI-powered CRM systems leverage predictive analytics to forecast sales trends, ensuring sales teams stay ahead. Furthermore, AI in sales enablement automates time-consuming data entry and other repetitive tasks, allowing salespeople to dedicate more time to closing deals. AI is one of the latest technologies that’s making a big impact on the world of sales. In fact, according to a recent survey, 50% of senior-level sales and marketing professionals are already using AI, and another 29% plan to start using it in the future.

As AI continues to evolve, it’s becoming increasingly important for companies to have an AI alignment across all departments. In this article, I’ll explore the latest trends and benefits of AI in marketing and sales and provide recommendations on how businesses can find the right balance for using AI. As the co-founder of Why Not Labs, an indie mobile game studio, she also shares insights on mobile game marketing, particularly in the hybrid casual and hyper casual genres.

According to the McKinsey study, sales teams currently employing AI reduce call durations by as much as 60% to 70%. Some companies have slashed expenditures in half by using AI technology to automate lower-level sales duties. Sports technology platform Playbook was growing quickly and struggling to onboard and train new sales reps at scale. Playbook started using Wingman by Clari to record calls and provide instant feedback for both the sales rep and leadership. AI can help sales teams easily tailor content to prospects based on what stage they are at in the buyer’s journey. Simple prompts allow the AI to generate content that aligns with the specific concerns of prospects at each stage.

Sales AI: Why artificial intelligence is the future of sales

The topic of artificial intelligence (AI) is everywhere these days and it will forever change how businesses operate. Selling in today’s dynamic landscape is difficult — it requires a wealth of knowledge, skills, agility, and perseverance. But by leveraging AI-guided selling, sellers can build more strategic relationships, effectively engage with buyers, and speed up the entire buying process. AI for sales identifies patterns that help a sales rep determine leads that will most likely bring profits. These leads are easy to convert into deals reducing the time you would need to close a deal. Mobile devices work as great training devices because your sales reps all likely have some combination of phones, laptops, and tablets with them all the time.

This dashboard visually represented the KPIs, allowing easy monitoring and quick insights. The sales team attended hands-on workshops to use the tool in a controlled environment. The company partnered with the AI tool’s vendor to design a training program. The vendor provided insights into the tool’s capabilities, best practices, and common challenges users might face. Based on their extensive research, the company shortlisted three AI-driven voice analytics tools that best align with their needs and budget and received positive feedback from current users. By analyzing historical data and industry benchmarks, the company estimated that an AI-driven inventory management system could reduce food wastage costs by 15%.

HubSpot reports that inside sales reps spend an estimated 33% of their time actively selling – a minuscule amount compared to the time spent on tasks that could be AI-enabled. Here are five ways that companies are using AI in sales to help them sell more efficiently. While ChatGPT has stolen recent headlines, companies have been quietly using artificial intelligence (AI) to streamline operations, boost productivity, and cut costs for almost a decade. Chatbots have become a mainstay of online customer service while machine learning drives the personalization of many of our daily digital experiences. The challenge of adopting technology, such as CRM or marketing and sales dashboards, has always been a common issue among my company’s clients. In my experience, however, companies can see a significant increase in technology usage and growth by incorporating technology adoption and AI training into the employee interview and onboarding process.

In times of uncertainty, understanding your customer’s intent is gold. AI’s ability to analyze search queries, social media behavior, and other online interactions can spotlight those most likely to engage with your product or service. It meticulously analyzes each customer’s unique needs and preferences. And these proposals are more likely to resonate with your customers. By using the power of AI, you ensure that each proposal is targeted and effective.

Company A uses conversation AI to monitor sales calls between customers and sales reps, programming the system to recognize Company B’s name and information. It boasts a comprehensive toolkit encompassing traditional CRM functionalities and the latest AI capabilities, empowering sales teams to work smarter and accelerate deal closures. Trusted by over 60,000 businesses, this platform equips sales teams with tools designed to enhance their selling prowess.

What Is Artificial Intelligence in Sales?

Email tracking with AI offers unique insights into email interactions, engagement metrics, open rates, and responses. This allows salespeople to send timely and effective campaigns, as well as follow-ups. AI offers the ability to predict trends, foresee challenges, and adapt to market changes with ease. By doing so, you can refine your strategies and priorities based on data-led forecasting, ensuring you bring more predictability to your sales forecast.

This article suggests five ways that sales departments can leverage the power of AI in sales to become a top-performer with the same (or less) effort than today. Business owners should familiarize themselves with relevant laws, conduct privacy impact assessments, ensure AI solutions are transparent and collaborate with AI ethics and privacy experts. At my consulting firm, for example, we begin by conducting an audit of a company’s current utilization of AI when assisting companies in aligning their marketing and sales efforts. Once we’ve determined a best practice, we then find and bring in experts to ensure optimal performance in both departments. Once the AI tools are in place, companies should establish a process for continuously training and refining the AI models to ensure their effectiveness over time.

With AI handling many of the routine and data-driven tasks, the role of sales professionals will evolve. With the continuous refinement of AI algorithms, sales processes will become increasingly predictive. The integration of AI often raises concerns about job displacement within sales teams. While automation can enhance efficiency, it’s essential to maintain human touchpoints in the sales process. Over the month, the chatbot interacted with visitors, answering queries and capturing lead information.

You can use Clay’s persona flow and formulas to say something different but this requires an exact keyword match. You can use this if sometimes the titles change slightly and you want to match up the selling propositions. For all of this data look at their LinkedIn profile and think methodically before answering.

Use AI technologies for lead generation in both inbound and outbound strategies. For example, AI chatbots can interact with website visitors, collecting lead data in real-time. AI can also track user behaviors on websites and digital platforms, discerning their preferences and intentions. This data helps you further deliver personalized ads and relevant lead-gen content.

You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. One of the most useful things about AI is its ability to speed up repetitive processes like data entry, which gives sales reps more time for human-focused tasks—and closing deals. AI boosts sales prospecting and lead generation across various channels by improving targeting, personalization, decision-making, and more. Using artificial intelligence in sales and marketing can help teams quickly generate quality leads. AI for sales prospecting is all about finding the patterns in customer behavior, and then shining a light on the prospects with the most potential.

AI automation also accelerates sales processes, shortens sales cycles, and improves overall sales performance. For example, artificial intelligence can help you create playbooks for any sales methodology your sales team is supposed to follow. Additionally, AI can autonomously monitor how your sales reps align with the playbook guidelines and address questions listed within.

By following these best practices and ensuring that AI is implemented in a way that meets a company’s particular needs, AI has opened up numerous venues for optimization and operational improvement. The key is finding the right balance between AI and humans to serve your customers and streamline your employee’s workflow. Gartner states that by 2026, 65% of B2B sales organizations will shift from relying on intuition to making data-based decisions. They will do this by employing technology that integrates workflow, data, and analytics.

When faced with winning or losing a commission check, they’re going to push forward and work directly with their accounts, not spend time entering data into a CRM system. Let’s get into the nitty-gritty of how you can stay on top of the game by using AI for sales to improve your efficiency, speed, and communication. If unsure, professionals can navigate this opacity by testing early and testing often to ensure the AI is making proper decisions. One thing that causes people to distrust AI is not understanding how it works, or how it arrives at its answers. There’s a degree of unease that comes with the rapid rise of machine-learning. In order to harness all the capabilities of AI, humans will have to place a basic measure of trust in it to do the reliable, public-facing work that people expect.

Additionally, it ensures that your sales team does not annoy the leads by recommending products they have no interest in. This is one of the best examples of AI in sales that can streamline your sales processes and automate workflows. Sales forecasting is the process of anticipating sales revenue that a business may generate over a specific period.

Although AI technology has the potential to change the way we market, it cannot work without human engagement. Artificial intelligence requires a planned procedure to function at its best. Thanks to AI, sales managers can now use dashboards to see which salespeople are likely to meet their quotas and which outstanding deals have a good chance of being closed.

It isn’t the most efficient way to process your data and is time-consuming on top of it all. For example, AI automation in sales has assisted in automating purchases through bots, resulting in a reduction of 15 to 20% of spending sourced through e-platforms. The sales leaders can then share their findings and best practices with the rest of the team. This knowledge also aids managers in selecting new team members who have similar talents to quota-achievers.

Basic AI Sales Prospecting prompts

For example, your SDRs can offer those who are at risk of churning a promotion on a product that has been linked to higher retention. Not only can the right upsells and cross-sells increase revenue, but they can also reduce customer churn when done effectively. As experts in sales technology (we hope), we’ve seen first-hand how Artificial Intelligence (AI) has revolutionized the sales industry. See whether the company has a generic support email and either no support tech on site OR they have support tech on site (which let’s us know that they need to have everything in one place). Look for new product launches (which always come with new support demands).

We’ll outline a working definition of AI in sales that includes just the bottom line, no fluff or technical jargon. Then we’ll look at some top AI use cases you can adopt if you’re a sales representative. And you’ll come away armed with some ideas on how the technology can help you better make quota.

This empowers sales teams to make informed decisions and respond promptly to changes in the landscape, which can minimize the risk of deals being lost. AI tools can analyze records of customers who have churned and not churned to find patterns. Once a how to use ai in sales machine learning model is created, it can warn your salespeople about current customers who are at risk of churning. Likewise, it can tell you factors that increase a customer’s likelihood of staying a customer, such as if they buy certain products.

With AI, you’re not just staying ahead in the game; you’re redefining it. Let’s explore now some advanced AI prospecting techniques for pipeline expansion. Yes, it’s new technology, and yes, it might seem intimidating at first.

With multiple product divisions and sales teams working independently, Flock Security relied on a manual process to forecast data. They exported data from Salesforce and manipulated spreadsheets each week to create the forecast they needed for stakeholders. Sales teams waste a lot of time on non-revenue-generating activities — about 40% of their time, according to Dooly.

The analyst became an active member of online AI forums and communities. These platforms allowed the analyst to engage in discussions, pose questions, and share the company’s experiences with AI implementation. The company assigned a team member the specific role of AI research analyst.

With algorithms that aggregate previous transaction information, interaction details, and social media posts to assess leads and the likelihood of closing, AI can take the gut out of those decisions. While salespeople can usually figure out which leads to pursue, knowing which leads to seeking first isn’t always straightforward. AI can assist salespeople in determining healthy connections and directing them to those that require care and those in good shape. Some firms employ AI to do this periodically, so it’s never too late to increase the lifetime value. Sales managers face the difficult task of predicting where their team’s overall sales will fall each quarter. According to Forbes, 74 percent of sizeable B2B companies use sales forecasting at least once a week.

While there are concerns about AI’s impact on job roles, real human interaction and connection are still a vital part of the sales role. Begin with small-scale trials to test the selected AI tools and their impact on your sales processes. Gather feedback from your sales team during this phase to asses if the cost is worth the results. The seemingly endless number of sales tools available on the market makes it difficult to choose the best from the lot. Below are some of the common and most useful categories of sales tools that empower sales teams to manage their processes better. AI can even make customer research easier by going through specific websites and social media channels to gather key industry trends for you.

Concentrate on one that requires the data you already have to reduce data collection. Then there’s additional analyzing, action ideas, real action, and results analysis. Deciding how much, if any, to give a customer is always a challenge. You want to close the transaction, but you also don’t want to leave money on the table.

AI tools today can track competitor activity online in real time and automatically surface the critical insights you need to know. That drastically reduces the amount of time spent getting a clear picture of what the competition is doing—so you can reallocate the hours in your day to actually beating them. AI can actually recommend next deal actions for each sales rep in real-time based on all the information related to that deal and the stage it’s in. In this way, AI acts like an always-available sales coach and manager, guiding reps towards the exact steps needed to achieve maximum sales productivity. But getting at all of this information isn’t easy to do on a manual, case-by-case basis.

AI (Artificial Intelligence) in sales refers to the application of intelligent algorithms and technologies to automate and enhance various sales processes. It involves using AI tools and techniques to streamline tasks, gain insights, and improve the effectiveness of sales activities. As AI technology continues to advance, leveraging its benefits becomes increasingly crucial. With AI in sales, you can enhance efficiency through automation and gain a comprehensive view of your pipeline. While real-time AI alerts you to changes in your sales process and allows you to respond promptly, AI-guided selling supports continuous progress for your sales team. AI algorithms analyze sales data in real time, offering insights into customer behavior and market trends.

And now, human soft skills can’t be overrun by artificial intelligence, machine learning, NLP (natural language processing), etc. If AI algorithms are not transparent, which is often the case, it can lead to mistrust among customers and sales teams. You should understand and be ready to explain how decisions are made by AI models. Cold outreach is a crucial aspect of every business’s sales process. However, discovering the right information about every prospect and creating a strong introductory email is often a challenge for sales teams. Apart from these, many more sales processes can be automated with AI, allowing your sales team to focus on actual selling.

Adapting to new technology is never easy, but it can be transformative. Going back to your goal-setting, determine how you’ll measure success for your goals. Monitor KPIs and report back each month to see how AI has impacted your performance. Before you sign up for a free trial, first slow down and ask yourself what goals you want to accomplish with AI.

With insight from Appier, you will not need to hire data scientists to analyze the market for you. The benefit of using Exceed is that it will engage with the leads entering your pipeline by using a human touch in communication. The assistants in this tool will engage with the leads landing on your website. The tool has brilliant salesforce slack integration that will help you automate critical workflows. You will also benefit from the insights the tool delivers, making your work easier. It’s already being used at many businesses, and it’s slowly being adopted by sales.

• AI has the potential to enhance every stage of it, from prospect generation to closing deals.
• Sales work typically requires administrative work, routine interactions with clients, and management attention to tasks such as forecasting.
• When you know who’s most likely to buy from your company, you can focus your efforts on these folks and close more deals.
• Aside from knowing how you can use artificial intelligence for outreach campaigns.

We took person’s recent posts and their company description to automatically create post ideas that they could bring to LinkedIn. This strategy uses AI to generate useful marketing ideas for any company. The marketing ideas could include outbound campaign ideas, topics to post about on LinkedIn, shortform videos to create, etc., depending on what you want to sell. Many companies employ SDRs to manually write these lines, but you can fully automate this process with AI. This personalization helped one of Eric’s clients, a marketing agency, more than double their response rates from prospective clients (from 1.5% to 3.2%).

Through automation, it empowers organizations to efficiently capture, engage, qualify, and schedule meetings with potential leads on a grand scale. This transformative approach seamlessly integrates multiple communication channels, including Email, Chat, and SMS, ensuring no lead slips through the cracks. At the core of AI’s capabilities lies the capacity to analyze extensive datasets. It assists in sales forecasting and provides vital sales metrics for assessing performance, ensuring continuous optimization of sales strategies. Your company can harness the power of AI today with People.ai and start improving your sales team’s effectiveness. Take a deeper dive into how new AI technologies like generative AI can improve your sales team’s effectiveness in the list, Generative AI Use Cases for Sales Organizations.

According to HubSpot’s survey, 35% of sales professionals are using AI to eliminate admin work, making it the most popular use case for AI in sales. Sales teams are using AI-powered tools that can simulate sales conversations for training or can record real sales calls and find insights into areas for improvement. Like many disciplines, sales teams everywhere are trying to understand what role artificial intelligence will play in their industry.

However, crafting and submitting effective responses can be extremely time-consuming, considering that these proposals require a lot of data. Sales enablement in such an instance involves providing solutions to manage this process. Loopio’s “2021 RFP Response Trends” survey found that businesses send out an average of 150 RFP responses a year and these responses generate 35% of their revenue. Instead of automating you out of existence, most AI sales tools actually give you superpowers. But this process is still relatively static and requires a fair amount of work, evaluation, and maintenance to ensure leads are being scored properly.

Companies that can discover, share, and implement best-selling practices will be able to use them as a long-term competitive advantage. The sellers’ performance becomes the most critical determinant in determining win rates, to put it another way. To keep from being left behind in this new era of the sales industry, give it a chance.