The Power of AI in Sales & 5 Ways You Can Use It

It is a powerful analytical tool and an indispensable resource for our team today,” Kevin M. Second, AI aids in personalizing and automating customer interactions. Artificial intelligence allows you to optimize this process by organizing and applying this data effectively. The AI landscape is evolving very quickly, and winners today may not be viable tomorrow. Small start-ups are great innovators but may not be able to scale as needed or produce sales-focused use cases that meet your needs.

You can use AI to track key performance indicators (KPIs) and sales metrics. The AI tools will provide you with reports and dashboards on your overall performance. In this post, we’ve put together the 10 best AI sales tools in the market right now. You’ll want a select number of tools that match your specific needs and objectives.

While the business case for artificial intelligence is compelling, the rate of change in AI technology is astonishingly fast—and not without risk. When commercial leaders were asked about the greatest barriers limiting their organization’s adoption of AI technologies, internal and external risk were at the top of the list. It’s clear that embracing AI is not just an option but a necessity for staying competitive. With 72% of executives recognizing AI as the future’s most significant business advantage, the time to act is now. Imagine a future where every decision is informed, every customer need anticipated, and every sales effort optimized.

AI for Sales: How Artificial Intelligence Is Revolutionizing Sales Processes

You can integrate Snov.io with other CRMs with AI sales features for automated lead enrichment and real-time data updates. That will help you reduce manual tasks and improve the overall sales process. 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. 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.

According to a study by Harvard Business Review, companies using AI in sales were able to increase their leads by more than 50%, reduce call time by 60-70%, and realize cost reductions of 40-60%. The challenge of adopting technology, such as CRM or marketing and sales dashboards, has always been a common issue among my company’s clients. 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. Looking to improve your data management and integrate automation and AI into your sales process?

The need for human oversight and accountability is clear, and may require the creation of new roles and capabilities to fully capitalize on opportunities ahead. Our research indicates that players that invest in AI are seeing a revenue uplift of 3 to 15 percent and a sales ROI uplift of 10 to 20 percent.

With the right approach to using AI tools for sales, teams stay ahead of the competition, achieve their goals more quickly, and spend more time on the most impactful tasks. AI, specifically NLP, can analyze customer interactions via chat, email, phone, and other channels and provide insights into how the prospect felt during the interaction. Generative AI models enable new capabilities and can be used more readily by a wider array of people.

Help sales reps with leads

Don’t expect results in a short time—be realistic about targets while reps are getting to grips with the AI technology. If you want to use artificial intelligence in sales, you can get started with a few simple steps. The most important thing, no matter what type of artificial intelligence sales tool you’re considering, is to know what you want to achieve. Coaches and supervisors have to ensure their sales reps are following whatever sales methodology they use consistently, whether that’s BANT, SPIN, or SPICED.

From predicting sales outcomes to automating time-consuming tasks to taking notes, Zoho’s Zia is a versatile AI assistant that helps sales reps manage CRM intelligently. The platform is an all-in-one workspace, offering sales teams an intuitive environment for transitioning between team calls, prospect conversations, meetings, and messaging. Additionally, Drift helps deliver a personalized experience by giving your team information about what interests your potential customers and what content they consume. You can also initiate conversations with prospects via chatbots and more.

He led technology strategy and procurement of a telco while reporting to the CEO. He has also led commercial growth of deep tech company Hypatos that reached a 7 digit annual recurring revenue and a 9 digit valuation from 0 within 2 years. Cem’s work in Hypatos was covered by leading technology publications like TechCrunch and Business Insider. He Chat PG graduated from Bogazici University as a computer engineer and holds an MBA from Columbia Business School. Once priority customers are decided, sales reps serve them better with sales content personalized to their needs and preferences. Leads’ engagement rate increases with personalized content, businesses convert visitors and retain customers.

If you’re looking to level up your sales team’s performance, turn to artificial intelligence. Although only 37% of all sales organizations currently use AI in sales processes, more than half of high-performing sales organizations leverage AI. Gen AI can combine and analyze large amounts of data—such as demographic information, existing customer data, and market trends—to identify additional audience segments. Its algorithms then enable businesses to create personalized outreach content, easily and at scale.

For example, in CX, hyper-personalized content and offerings can be based on individual customer behavior, persona, and purchase history. Growth can be accelerated by leveraging AI to jumpstart top-line performance, giving sales teams the right analytics and customer insights to capture demand. AI coupled with company-specific data and context has enabled consumer insights at the most granular level, allowing B2C lever personalization through targeted marketing and sales offerings. Winning B2B companies go beyond account-based marketing and disproportionately use hyper-personalization in their outreach. AI is one of the latest technologies that’s making a big impact on the world of sales.

There’s no point grabbing at cool-sounding AI solutions if they’re not suited to your business needs! And with more and more AI tools on the market, it’s worth looking carefully to choose the best ones for you. Live sentiment analysis shows how calls are going at-a-glance, and managers can choose to listen in and join if necessary. Built-in speech coaching lets reps know if they’re speaking too fast, or not listening to the customer.

From lead generation to segmentation, lead scoring and analytics, AI empowers your team, giving them insight that helps them to close deals, upsell, cross-sell, and more. AI in sales uses artificial intelligence to automate sales tasks, simplifying and optimizing sales processes. As a rule, artificial intelligence in sales boils down to utilizing AI-powered software tools. People.ai also offers a feature called PeopleGlass, which simplifies CRM management.

Our CRM makes it easy to keep your data organized and accurate and gather insights from your data with insightful reporting. With Nutshell, you can also easily automate elements of your sales process, collaborate with your team, use AI to gather insights into your customer relationships, and more. AI tools, especially generative AI, may sometimes provide answers, predictions, or insights that are inaccurate, inconsistent, or just don’t fit with the sales strategy you want to pursue.

AI For Sales: Complete Guide To Using AI In Sales

If the AI detects any negative sentiment, it can send real-time alerts, allowing swift responses that prevent potential damage to your brand reputation. In this post, I’ve tried to highlight everything you need to know about AI, its role in business, sales in particular, and how it can help you grow your sales effectiveness with no risks. Since then, millions of people worldwide have got their hands on this revolutionary technology. Otherwise, they’ll avoid these tools in the first place, resulting in missed opportunities for efficiency and growth. It’s powered by OpenAI’s GPT model and built on Apollo’s database of 60 million companies and 260 million contacts. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. “Within my organization, Clari is being used to forecast sales and get an idea of what opportunities are coming up and how quickly they could be closed.

Furthermore, AI considers a wide range of variables such as seasonality, economic indicators, and the impact of marketing campaigns to provide a holistic view of the sales landscape. 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.

While 78% of business leaders recognize AI’s benefits over risks, incorporating it into sales is complex. Challenges range from technical integration hurdles to privacy regulations, highlighting that while adopting AI presents a significant opportunity, it requires careful planning and execution. AI in sales has quickly transitioned from an emerging trend or future possibility to a sales strategy necessary to stay ahead of the competition. With more than half of businesses ramping up generative AI investments since public adoption surged in early 2023, AI is becoming a core element of sales operations. Your customers do not just take out their credit cards to buy things. Sales leaders need to make calls, meet them in person, answer their concerns and continue to guide their customers after sales to ensure that you build a healthy relationship with them.

strategies for creating a strong sales AI strategy

This might be costly and overall complicated for small businesses or startups. 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. Imagine your sales team using ChatGPT to create sales collateral, Gong for extracting insights from calls, and HubSpot for lead scoring. Gong is a revenue intelligence platform that turns customer interactions into strategic insights, helping customer teams gain insights into market advancements. Of sales reps, 34% are using AI to get their hands on data-driven insights like sales forecasting, lead scoring, and pipeline analysis.

Dialpad automatically generates full conversation transcription, tracks action items, and identifies keywords. New data and insights from 600+ sales pros across B2B and B2C teams on how they’re using AI. “HubSpot https://chat.openai.com/ Sales Hub helped me build a strong pipeline and is now helping our business a lot as we’re able to turn those leads into customers. I highly recommend HubSpot Sales Hub for businesses out there,” Gladys B.

AI’s natural language processing (NLP) algorithms can transcribe and analyze sales calls, providing summaries that highlight customer needs and opportunities. Exceed.ai’s sales assistant helps sales reps automate lead engagement, qualification, and meeting scheduling. You can then focus on other important activities like actually closing deals. Sales enablement is the process of providing your salespeople/sales teams with the right resources and tools to empower them to close more deals.

Armed with this insight, a sales leader can easily keep an eye on tens (or even hundreds) of active calls and quickly see which ones have negative sentiment. If they do spot any, they can click to open up the real-time transcripts, scan it quickly to get more context, and decide whether or not they need to jump in to save the deal. AI, and automation in general, reduces the amount of repetitive, non-selling tasks your team needs to do manually. This enables your team to focus on work that makes the best use of their skills and has the biggest impact, increasing productivity and job satisfaction. Some sales AI tools offer the ability to determine ideal pricing for a given customer. It does this using information gathered from past purchases and applies these to an algorithm to calculate and recommend the best pricing.

Using these insights, you can evaluate which sales techniques perform best and how customers feel about various products and services. Chatbots provide instant responses to leads and customers, helping to qualify leads and move them through the sales process. These tools can answer customer questions, gather lead and customer data, and recommend products.

No matter which sales AI tools you use, remember that automation is the product of a human brain. And now, human soft skills can’t be overrun by artificial intelligence, machine learning, NLP (natural language processing), etc. I know, now, you might have a feeling your team needs as many AI sales tools as possible to cover all needs.

AI can even help reps with post-call reporting, which is one of those essential-but-tedious tasks. My team loves the fact that Dialpad automates call notes and highlights key action items for them, meaning they don’t have to manually type everything. Human sales leaders are pretty good at predicting sales numbers and setting goals, but AI can help them do this with greater accuracy.

This signifies a shift in how products and services are discovered, evaluated, and chosen, emphasizing the necessity for sales reps to use AI to meet client needs. Most folks (not only in sales, but also in customer support and other areas) really don’t like them, and it’s understandable. In most cases, chatbots are a roundabout way of “dealing with” customers—but with no guarantee of actually successfully resolving their issues. Maybe in the future when chatbot technology improves, this will change, but for now, we’ll leave chatbots out of it.

Add the element of human touch.

We work with ambitious leaders who want to define the future, not hide from it. A comprehensive approach, not siloed proofs of concept, will allow a bank to serve customers better and improve its economics. Not only do sales produce a lot of data, but this data comes from multiple sources. Sales outreach, in particular, can span multiple channels making it difficult to track.

• For example, Hubspot offers a predictive scoring tool that uses AI to identify high-quality leads based on pre-defined criteria.
• AI tools can quickly analyze large data sets and uncover patterns to strengthen outreach and target sales tactics based on the audience you’re reaching out to.
• Using AI, sales managers can now use dashboards to visually see which salespeople are likely to hit their quotas along with which outstanding deals stand a good chance of being closed.

Advanced analytics, gathered automatically for optimal efficiency, show you the big picture before making a sales forecast. Gartner predicts that 70% of customer experiences will involve some machine learning in the next three years. While AI can be extremely helpful for your sales team, it’s not a cure-all. There are certain challenges and limitations to keep in mind, including the following. Deep learning is a subset of AI that uses artificial neural networks modeled after the human brain.

The technology will augment insurance agents’ capabilities and help customers self-serve for simpler transactions. Moreover, the prospect of greater efficiencies can cause employees to worry about their jobs and actively resist adoption. Relieving their anxieties and encouraging adoption of the technology will be critical to reaping value, but this requires thoughtful, empathetic management. Companies that find the greatest success with generative AI will be those that master not only the technical capabilities but also the behavioral changes inherent to this shift in how people work. B2B companies using generative AI are already seeing the initial benefits of customization, speed, and efficiency.

In sales, AI has the potential to assist with lead qualification, product demonstrations and customer engagement. The use of AI-generated salespeople can help companies save time and resources while still providing a high level of customer service. However, there are still some consumers who prefer the personal touch of a real human, which is why it’s important for businesses to strike a balance between AI and human interaction. AI enables you to quickly analyze and pull insights from large data sets about your leads, customers, sales process, and more. You can use these insights to continually improve your sales processes and techniques. These sales AI tools analyze interactions and typically label sentiment as positive, negative, or neutral.

Apollo is a sales intelligence platform with a massive database of over 60 million companies and 260 million contacts. Sales teams use this platform to not only get their hands on information about their potential customers but also connect with them. Last but not least, sales teams can integrate ChatSpot, a conversational AI bot, with their HubSpot CRM to unlock a wide range of possibilities. You can automatically add contacts to the CRM, conduct extensive company research, and transcribe calls, among other things.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) continue to push the boundaries of what is possible in marketing and sales. Given the accelerating complexity and speed of doing business in a digital-first world, these technologies are becoming essential tools. AI powers sales coaching by providing insights into sales calls, pricing strategies, and improvement opportunities. It analyzes sales conversations to identify what’s working and what isn’t. This, in turn, allows sales leaders to personalize coaching strategies and easily foster a culture of continuous learning.

Of sales professionals using generative AI tools for writing messages to prospects, 86% have reported that it is very effective. With hundreds of AI sales tools in the market, picking the right ones for your tech stack can be confusing and daunting. The top use case for AI in sales is to help representatives understand customer needs, according to Salesforce’s State of Sales report. Your knowledge of a customer’s needs informs every decision you make in customer interactions — from your pitch to your sales content and overall outreach approach. Once trained, the model can be operationalized within commercial systems to streamline workflows while being continuously refined by agile processes. This is the result of shifts in consumer sentiment alongside rapid technological change.

AI is a game-changer for everything sales does, from lead generation to customer engagement and closing deals. Though AI applications are numerous, correct prioritization is key to success. Process mining can help sales teams to automatically monitor and manage their sales operations by extracting and analyzing process data from CRM, other relevant IT systems, and documents.

AI enhances lead scoring by evaluating and prioritizing prospects based on their conversation quality, behaviors, and historical data. This helps the sales team identify those likely to convert into customers. With sales reps busier than ever, AI is an invaluable ally for B2B sales teams. Let’s explore the different use cases of AI sales tools in improving your approach.

Artificial intelligence presents a compelling opportunity to improve this stat and level up your sales operation. New research into how marketers are using AI and key insights into the future of marketing. In this post, you’ll learn everything you need to know to get started with AI in sales — what it means, why you need to leverage it, and 5 powerful applications for your sales process. Thus gen AI represents an enormous step change in power, sophistication, and utility—and a fundamental shift in our relationship to artificial intelligence. To do this, gen AI uses deep-learning models called foundation models (FMs).

Hippo Video, an AI-powered platform, helps sales teams create videos at scale with added personalization. Additionally, sales reps can use AI lead scoring tools like HubSpot’s Predictive Lead Scoring to identify the highest quality leads in their pipelines. These tools take thousands of data points and custom scoring criteria set by sales teams as input.

Finally, AI-driven recommendations can help you upsell or cross-sell products or services to existing customers, keeping them loyal to your product and brand. AI in sales allows your team to work smarter and focus on activities that require human expertise, rather than repetitive tasks, which in the era of automation should be delegated to technology. There’s no doubt about how effective AI sales tools like ChatGPT, Gong, and HubSpot’s Content Assistant are. When provided with the right inputs, these tools can help you generate resonating sales pitches, proposals, and other content.

As a result, generative AI enables on the order of 10 times more use cases. Selecting high-priority use cases thus becomes more important yet more difficult, which means companies need a way to do this quickly yet strategically. But AI is more than a tool for managing data, it can also extract important insights from it. 73% of sales professionals agree that AI can help them pull insights from data they otherwise wouldn’t be able to find.

A recent Bain & Company survey of more than 550 enterprises worldwide shows that use cases in sales, marketing, and customer support are among those getting the most uptake (see Figure 1). Roughly 40% of respondents have adopted or are evaluating the technology. 61% of sales professionals also agree that AI can make prospecting more personalized. For instance, it can analyze information about your prospects — everything from demographics, past email exchanges, and buying behavior — and provide key information for outreach. In the business world, where artificial intelligence looks like a number one trend, it looks like a crime not to apply it to your sales process. In this guide, I tried to provide you with the basics of why you need AI, what you can do with AI tools, examples of these services based on different goals, and best practices.

So, if you‘re still undecided about AI, now is the time to explore its potential. Despite the enormous benefits your sales team can gain from implementing AI sales solutions, I can’t help but mention the risks waiting for you in the way of AI-boosted sales automation. What’s more, with AI technology, you can analyze accounts at risk of churning and develop the right engagement strategies to retain these customers.

While researching tools, watch out for companies using the term AI when automation is really the more fitting term. Natural language processing (NLP) is a branch of AI that focuses on enabling AI systems to understand and generate human language. Machine learning is a subset of AI that enables computer systems to learn and improve on their own based on their experience rather than through direct instruction. Sales is a field that relies heavily on human interaction, but technology has always played a significant role in enhancing its efficiency and effectiveness.

For example, tracking the busiest times in a call center can help you with future staffing. Dialpad’s dashboard gives you a great overview of how things are going. But not only that, Dialpad’s Ai Scorecards can also review sales calls automatically for whether sellers did everything listed on the scorecard criteria. Basic chatbots provide certain pre-programmed responses, while more advanced ones use AI to understand user input, generate responses, and improve responses over time. Automation is using technology to perform tasks that humans would otherwise perform, reducing or eliminating the need for human labor to complete a task.

68% of sales professionals predict that by 2024, most of the software they use will have built-in AI capabilities. Here, we’ll look at key insights from our State of AI report to uncover how AI is empowering sales professionals to work smarter. What I mean is that you need to analyze your company processes and infer which AI functionality your team needs first of all. Think how you can sync it with what you already have and what should be your next goal. Implementing and maintaining AI sales functionality may cost money, and sometimes lots of money, if you aren’t able to carefully weigh the costs against the expected benefits. It’s the moment of understanding your company goals and setting priorities.

• Gong is a revenue intelligence platform that turns customer interactions into strategic insights, helping customer teams gain insights into market advancements.
• Currently, 52% of sales professionals say AI tools are very to somewhat important in their day-to-day role.
• FMs are pre-trained on massive datasets and the algorithms they support are adaptable to a wide variety of downstream tasks, including content generation.
• AI, or Artificial Intelligence, refers to the simulation of human intelligence processes by computer systems.
• Sales teams can use it to create collateral, craft messages, fix grammatical errors, and repurpose content, among other things.

If you want to see the difference AI makes to your business, focus on a project that will show you results in six to 12 months. As well as proving the worth of AI to the suits upstairs, it’ll also help motivate your team. Instead of trying to upsell or cross-sell to every client, AI can help you identify who’s most likely to be receptive by looking at previous interactions and profiles for insight. We discuss some of the applications of AI that are relevant to sales. There are many subsets of AI that use various approaches and have different applications. Sometimes, these terms are used interchangeably with AI, but specific differences exist.

Through our partnership with WebFX, we also offer access to advanced revenue marketing technology as well as implementation and consulting services for sales and marketing technology. While AI is becoming more widely available, it still comes with significant expenses. Sales teams need to balance cost and the time and effort required artificial intelligence sales to adopt new sales AI tools with the benefits those tools will provide. One challenge when implementing AI is balancing the use of AI with human interaction. If a sales team focuses too much on AI and neglects the human element in their process, they’ll be less effective, especially in areas like relationship building.

The solution involves updating current systems to be AI-compatible or adopting new platforms designed with AI integration in mind. AI sales technology tailors the customer experience based on past interactions. By using AI insights in sales, reps can better understand customer preferences and behaviors, helping them personalize their approach. This also helps them to anticipate needs and provide proactive solutions throughout the sales cycle. AI-powered sales tools analyze vast amounts of data to refine sales forecasts, helping your salesforce anticipate market trends and customer needs. These tools uncover intricate patterns and correlations in your data that might be overlooked through traditional methods.

This ensures sales reps can access the most impactful resources when they need them most. Using AI tools for sales also assists with segmenting leads and customers based on various characteristics to improve targeting and personalization. AI tools can quickly analyze large data sets and uncover patterns to strengthen outreach and target sales tactics based on the audience you’re reaching out to. Yet, when we look at how sales professionals use AI, it mainly operates as a productivity assistant.

That said, let’s go through our hand-picked list of AI sales tools to help you make the right pick. Rocketdocs is a platform that initially started as a sales proposal software but later evolved into a response management and sales enablement solution. An estimated 33% of an inside sales rep’s time is spent actively selling. Administrative to-dos and meetings can pull these professionals away from prospects.

This tool turns allows sales reps to update pipelines, take next steps, and add notes all from a single view. This means sales teams can spend less time managing screens and more time closing deals. One of its use cases is sales (sales enablement software), as it helps sales teams achieve their revenue targets more efficiently by providing AI-powered insights. Sales enablement platforms leverage AI to organize content and recommend materials in real time during sales calls.