10 Creative Examples of How to Use AI in Sales

You can connect and train AI on your proprietary data or train a GPT on your own voice and style. You’ll likely need to invest in training for your current staff, hire a consultant, or create a new position to drive forward your AI initiatives. Write a report with all possible areas of implementation, potential outcomes, and what resources you would need to make it happen. Without a human editor, AI can produce content with factual inaccuracies, bias, or a divergent tone from your brand. Using AI requires human oversight so these types of mistakes don’t happen.

Now, the accuracy of those predictions depends on the system being used and the quality of the data. But the fact is that, with the right inputs in the past and present, AI is capable of showing you who is most likely to buy in the future. At their core, though, all of these technologies help machines perform specific cognitive tasks as well as or better than humans. Organizations that address the challenges head-on will be better positioned to succeed with AI. For instance, 82% of survey respondents overall report their organization doesn’t have a clearly communicated policy around the use of AI. Yet, those reporting the greatest impact are significantly more likely to say their organization has such a policy (31%) compared with those reporting less impact (17%).

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. From their previous research, the company selected a chatbot tool that promises real-time customer query handling, lead capturing, and integration with their CRM. A finance company was eager to enhance its customer service and lead generation through an AI-driven chatbot.

There are so many areas of sales where having an AI assistant speeds things up. There are predictive or power dialers that help sales reps make way more outbound calls at scale, and then there are automations that will pull in activity or call data without reps having to lift a finger. Gartner predicts that 70% of customer experiences will involve some machine learning in the next three years. Integrating chatbots with email automation adds another layer of interaction, enabling automated responses, lead qualification, and real-time engagement based on customer inquiries and behavior. These sales AI tools analyze interactions and typically label sentiment as positive, negative, or neutral. Using these insights, you can evaluate which sales techniques perform best and how customers feel about various products and services.

Routine responsibilities consume a shocking amount of a sales representative’s work hours. In fact, 72% of their week is eaten up by non-selling duties like data entry and deal management. This prevents professionals from focusing on the core activities of relationship-building and closing deals. Overall, AI in sales empowers teams to be more productive and achieve better results. Let’s delve into specific challenges niche specialists face and how the technology offers solutions for a more efficient selling process. Personalization is becoming less of a nice-to-have aspect of the sales process and more of an expectation—especially for products and services that require a significant investment.

It tracks competitor activity in real-time across millions of online data sources, giving you a clear picture of a competing company’s online footprint. Crayon uses AI to then automatically surface these insights daily in your inbox, summarize news stories about competitors, and score the importance of competitive intelligence items. 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. Using its powers of data analysis at scale, AI can find patterns in lead data that allow it to identify new leads that are in-market, based on the criteria that matters to your business. But getting at all of this information isn’t easy to do on a manual, case-by-case basis.

The ability for AI technology to improve on its own over time is called machine learning. Another example of an AI-powered conversation intelligence tool is Chorus. This platform leverages artificial intelligence to recognize the context within a conversation, identify key moments within sales calls, and even note competitor mentions. A big barrier to sales productivity is simply figuring out what to do and prioritize next. Your sales team has a lot on their plate and work many different deals at the same time. If they fail to prioritize and perform the right actions in the right order, they miss opportunities to close more revenue.

How is AI Already Used in Sales?

If any of these use cases resonate with your sales team, it’s time to start looking for the right AI solution. According to most sales reps, digital transformation has accelerated over the last 3 years. Specifically, sales technology needs have changed significantly within this period. Artificial intelligence has therefore emerged as necessary to successfully adapt to the changing sales landscape. Sales role-play and coaching drives better sales rep performance, but few sales leaders have the time to properly train and coach across a large team. Learn how marketers and sales leaders can use conversational marketing and AI chatbots to enhance buyer experiences and accelerate sales.

AI-backed CRMs provide rich insights into customer behavior, enabling businesses to tailor their interactions and offerings with a new level of precision. Over-reliance on AI can risk increased impersonal interactions, negatively impacting customer experience. Sales teams must be empowered to understand when genuine human engagement is required to nurture a lead. AI offers the ability to predict trends, foresee challenges, and adapt to market changes with ease.

Consequently, AI has become an indispensable tool for sales teams to accelerate their business growth. Now, lead scoring can essentially help sales reps from getting blindsided by “promising” leads that disappear. Even better, lead scoring can save new reps from spending hours chasing a deal that so clearly will never close in the eyes of more experienced SDRs. AI improves sales by freeing up salespeople to do what they’re best at – sales outreach.

As AI tools become more widely available and AI technology continues progressing, artificial intelligence significantly impacts many fields, including sales. AI personalizes the sales journey, ensuring every interaction resonates with the customer, facilitating stronger relationships, boosting engagement, and increasing conversion rates. By analyzing past behavior and preferences, AI recommends relevant content, tailors email outreach, and suggests the most appropriate communication channel to boost sales.

Additionally, advancements in predictive capabilities and deeper insights into customer data will enable proactive sales strategies and personalized offerings. AI algorithms can assess the likelihood of a lead converting into a customer based on various factors, such as behavior, demographics, and engagement. This helps sales teams prioritize leads and tailor their approach accordingly. With this newfound efficiency, sales teams can operate at a faster pace with greater accuracy and consistency across tasks.

By automating the more mundane aspects of the job, AI allows salespeople to focus on higher-level tasks such as relationship building and strategic planning. This shift may even be seen as positive among sales professionals, who would appreciate the increased efficiency and the ability to focus on more impactful aspects of their work. AI streamlines sales operations by automating routine tasks, allowing sales teams to focus more on strategic activities. Additionally, generative AI is learning and evolving daily, to the point where it’s getting harder to distinguish whether you’re interacting with a person or AI.

Just about every inside sales organization uses Zoom to connect with and sell to prospects. Fire up the free app, then click a button, and Fathom will use AI to summarize specific portions of your Zoom call for you. When the call ends, you’ll have immediate access to the full recording and transcription, too. And because Fathom integrates with Salesforce, HubSpot, and Close, the summaries and notes the app takes for you will automatically appear in your company’s CRM.

What is AI Sales Automation? Mechanisms and Applications

Instead of leads falling through the cracks, as they often do, every lead is contacted, nurtured, and qualified. Once the lead is warm or needs human attention, the machine hands the lead off to a human rep. AI can also predict when leads are ready to buy based on historical data and behavioral signals. That means you can actually begin to effectively prioritize and work the leads that are closest to purchase, significantly increasing your close rate. Using its powers of prediction, AI can make increasingly accurate estimates of how likely it is that leads in your database close. By analyzing vast amounts of historical and market data, AI can highlight which types of leads stand a better chance of closing and when.

AI-based data cleaning identifies and corrects inconsistencies, ensuring accurate prospects profiles. These enriched, precise details empower salespersons to target and engage the most promising leads effectively. Read Close’s free CRM buying guide to learn everything you need to know about this mission-critical sales tool. With the right AI technology, you’ll be able to streamline a variety of sales enablement tasks for your company.

Solutions

But there are a TON of AI tools for sales out there that do a TON of different things. Learn the basics of B2B content marketing, including essential formats and the five key steps to success. Three popular ways to use AI in sales training, including materials creation, role-playing, and personalized coaching. This page is provided for information purposes only and subject to change.

This will enhance the customer experience, increasing both engagement and loyalty, and is expected to become a standard practice in industries ranging from e-commerce to B2B sectors. AI is used in sales enablement to automate content delivery and training. AI in sales can be used to help manage and predict customer behavior, identify cross-selling and upselling opportunities, automate repetitive tasks, and Chat GPT improve forecasting accuracy. Ultimately, the goal of AI in sales is to boost efficiency and effectiveness while reducing costs. Instead, it acts as an assistant and can perform or automate certain tedious tasks, speed up sales processes, and help professionals find sales opportunities more easily. Prospecting for leads can be an enormous time drain, which is why AI prospecting is such an attractive idea.

The integration of AI into the sales process is not without challenges, but it constitutes a significant opportunity for sales organizations. By tapping into historical interaction data, purchasing patterns, and preferences, AI can help to create a more individualized and engaging customer experience. That tailored approach not only elevates customer satisfaction but also fosters long-term loyalty. AI tools can analyze vast amounts of data and make smart decisions, draw patterns, and make quite accurate predictions.

Ensure these goals address pain points identified in the sales process audit and align with broader business objectives. AI is being leveraged to streamline and optimize sales engagement processes. Another significant barrier is the resistance to change within organizations, particularly from sales teams that may feel threatened by AI automation.

They believed that enhancing the accuracy of their product recommendations could lead to higher conversion rates and, consequently, increased sales. The goal is to document repetitive and time-consuming tasks that could be optimized or automated with AI. AI algorithms can improve sales forecasting and predict revenue streams with greater accuracy than people.

As marketing assets have become more personalized through the years, customers are beginning to value privacy more and more. This saves your marketing team time and money, allowing them to work more efficiently and increase profits. Another great use of AI in digital marketing is to forecast customer behavior and sales. 6Sense is one example of a tool that leverages AI to sift through intent data.

Enhanced customer insights

On the sales side, AI is all about speeding up the sales cycle and sales tracking and making room for more productive interactions. Contrary to what some people think, Artificial Intelligence isn’t replacing human salespeople anytime soon. Many sales processes still require a human element to seal the deal—and that human element will perform much better when it’s freed from the repetitive administrative tasks that AI can take on.

New data and insights from 600+ sales pros across B2B and B2C teams on how they’re using AI. Artificial intelligence, specifically, provides several opportunities for streamlining and optimization. However, crafting and submitting effective responses can be extremely time-consuming, considering that these proposals require a lot of data.

At this point, you might be wondering, “Okay, but how does this look in practice? ” Let’s review some real-life examples of how big media companies have used AI in their digital marketing. Copyright laws are written around human authorship, so it’s unclear if you actually own AI-generated content in the same way. If your marketing team downloads and uses AI software, you’ll need to be sure you comply with privacy laws, such as GDPR. As you can see, the main goal of using AI in digital marketing is to increase performance and ROI for your campaigns.

Companies are using AI more and more to access advanced data enrichment and analysis to understand their market better and refine their sales strategies. Companies like IBM and Walmart are utilizing AI to enhance how to use ai in sales their sales forecasting capabilities. By leveraging machine learning models, these companies analyze historical sales data, seasonal trends, and consumer behavior to predict future sales with high accuracy.

How is artificial intelligence changing sales?

“HubSpot 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. Aside from RFP solutions, AI can also be leveraged to improve sales enablement through sales intelligence solutions, sales outreach platforms, and even CRMs. A recent Salesforce study found that AI is one of the top sales tools considered significantly more valuable in 2022 compared to 2019.

AI suggests additional products or services based on customer history and preferences. AI analyzes email campaign data to determine optimal timing and content for higher engagement. Interestingly, even many of those achieving the greatest impact from AI on their sales performance say they’re overwhelmed by the AI options and use cases (45%). Perhaps because the more you go down the AI rabbit hole, the more possibilities you uncover. But the human element — understanding, empathy, and ethical judgment — remains irreplaceable. Customers can experience products or services in a virtual space, aiding their purchase decisions.

While AI can’t replace the human touch that is essential in sales, it can help salespeople with many aspects of their roles. AI has the potential to transform sales through precise customer targeting and automated efficiency improvements. With Forrester forecasting a $37 billion market for AI-driven platforms by 2025, artificial intelligence can empower sales professionals with state-of-the-art tools, improving their effectiveness and success.

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. It reduces the time spent on manual data entry for sales professionals, allowing them to concentrate on navigating the sales funnel and closing deals efficiently.

Generative AI tools can analyze sales interactions, such as email, live chat and video conferencing conversations, in real time and coach sales reps along the way. They can collect and feed large amounts of past sales interaction data into the tool to help it recognize company terminology and elements of successful and unsuccessful sales interactions. The rest of the time is spent on things like data entry and deal management activities. AI for sales can eliminate tedious, non-selling tasks and help boost team efficiency. When this happens, your sales reps will be able to focus more on closing deals and driving revenue.

Sales AI tools utilize intelligence in sales to identify and qualify potential leads efficiently, enabling sales representatives to focus on high-value prospects. AI is revolutionizing the sales industry by providing valuable insights, automating tasks, and improving efficiency. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. By harnessing the power of artificial intelligence (AI), sales professionals can make smarter decisions, predict customer behavior, and personalize their approach to each prospect. It’s no wonder that more and more companies are investing in AI technologies to drive revenue and increase their bottom line. One way companies are benefiting from AI for sales is by utilizing AI-powered tools to automate tasks like contact and activity capture and mapping to Salesforce.

Focus the training on practical applications of the AI tools in daily sales activities to help your team understand and leverage their full capabilities. Schedule regular training sessions and provide resources for self-learning to ensure ongoing skill development. In a technical sense, AI in sales is the application of machine learning algorithms and AI-based analytical techniques to enhance several aspects of the sales process. In terms of revenue generation, AI can “hyper-charge” the sales process – so it’s no surprise that AI is quickly become an essentially sales tool. AI lead generation instantly sifts through key data points about potential leads, including industry, job titles, demographics, networks, and market trends. Then, it shows you the leads who are most likely to buy, increasing your chances of conversion.

Personalize The Customer Journey

By understanding potential customers on a deeper level, AI enhances sales operations, fostering stronger relationships and increasing revenue opportunities. It also includes ChatSpot for automating manual sales tasks (data entry, note-taking, and scheduling), which integrates with HubSpot CRM data to streamline processes. Harnessing advanced data analysis and applications improves sales efficiency. According to Deloitte, the primary goal for most top-level AI users is increased efficiency, wherein 33% of AI users reported significant streamlining of organizational processes. McKinsey reports that sales professionals leveraging AI have seen a remarkable 50% surge in both leads and appointments, boosting the profitability of their business over time. AI in sales is the use of advanced algorithms and analytical tools to automate and improve sales operations.

Artificial intelligence, or AI, has snuck its way into everyday usage across many industries. This means most people don’t even know when they’re using artificial intelligence, including sales development representatives (SDRs), or sales reps. Chatbots, created https://chat.openai.com/ with natural language processing (NLP), can answer common questions, nurture leads, schedule demo calls, and more. AI uses machine learning and large-language models (LLM) to analyze big data and turn it into actionable insights, automated actions, and content.

When combined with a planned strategy, artificial intelligence promises enhanced efficiency, effectiveness, and sales success. When applied well, AI for sales can be an invaluable tool to help your sales company keep track of performance, optimize sales cycles and train sales teams in essential sales skills. In this article, we discuss how AI fits into the world of sales and explore use cases, challenges, benefits, and the types of tools that help optimize complex sales processes. AI can be exceptionally useful in uncovering insights you can bring to your prospects in the form of a value-based offer. You can very quickly research your prospects’ industries, uncover common pain points, and gather CRM data. If you’re using tools like Einstein in SFDC, you can conduct company research.

From the benefits of hyperpersonalization to the remarkable advances in generative AI, the future of AI in sales may even have a sci-fi aspect to it. That’s the beauty of artificial intelligence—computers don’t get headaches, no matter how tedious the work is. Artificial Intelligence—AI—is computerized technology designed to perform cognitive tasks as well as (or even better than) their human counterparts. Basically, AI technology is designed to make tasks easier by delegating some of the thinking to computers.

• To assess AI’s contribution to results, establish clear key performance indicators (KPIs) such as conversion rates, lead quality, or sales cycle.
• Then, when it’s all said and done, analyze data from your text campaigns to learn how to improve your sales performance.
• All good companies understand that adapting to change is the most significant defining factor of success.
• For sales teams specifically, the platform pulls data from multiple sources to help salespeople build real-time, accurate pipelines and set sales goals.

Apart from these, many more sales processes can be automated with AI, allowing your sales team to focus on actual selling. AI can quickly pull, summarize, and organize relevant data, so it makes sense to integrate the technology into your knowledge hub. Keeping the CRM updated is so time consuming it either cuts into the time sales reps could spend prospecting, or reps skip it altogether.

Finally, predictive forecasting can also create value for sales teams internally. For instance, sales managers can use the same data analysis to forecast their team’s performance in advance. This way, they can take proactive steps to enhance their sales attribution based on factual figures. AI tools can analyze records of customers who have churned and not churned to find patterns. Once a machine learning model is created, it can warn your salespeople about current customers who are at risk of churning.

Create product descriptions in seconds and get your products in front of shoppers faster than ever. 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 to adopt new sales AI tools with the benefits those tools will provide. Deep learning is a subset of AI that uses artificial neural networks modeled after the human brain. These systems analyze unstructured data and learn to identify patterns and features in the data independently.

Sales reps typically interact with these tools from a chat window in their email systems’ interface. The tools can suggest responses to each email and let users input custom prompts, such as “write a cold sales email to John Smith about our new product.” The tool then generates a draft which users can edit. AI is revolutionizing the sales landscape, offering multifaceted benefits to sales leaders. Incorporating AI into a sales manager’s workflow does require thought, time, and attention – but there are significant gains to be made with a little bit of effort. The trick really is to get familiar with the technology to better understand how it can be best applied to your needs.

While capitalizing on emerging technologies to remain current and competitive. Traditionally, sales couldn’t be scaled unless you hired more salespeople or marketers, and… Regularly check if your AI tools match your goals – being flexible is key to getting the most out of each tool. To measure the impact of using AI in sales, you need to keep track of key sales metrics. Here are important things to consider when evaluating the effectiveness of AI-driven sales initiatives.

We fully expect that our guidance on using AI in sales prospecting will evolve as the tools evolve. However, by keeping the WAVE method for sales prospecting top-of-mind, you’ll have a framework that remains consistent even as the tools change. Prompts such as the examples above can give you lots of ideas for value-based offers.

Data enrichment is the process of pulling data into an organization’s database (typically a CRM) from third-party sources. The goal of this process is to create a more holistic, comprehensive, and accurate understanding of a prospect, lead, customer, or process. Artificial intelligence in sales can be leveraged in many different ways. However, here are five applications that can transform your sales process. For instance, one tool we list below actually follows up with leads without human intervention, going so far as to conduct two-way conversations with them.

All departments within an organization rely on sales forecasts — whether monthly, quarterly or annually — for resource allocation. Generative AI’s ability to analyze large amounts of unstructured data, such as sales interactions, can improve the accuracy of these forecasts. Technologies like this enable managers to coach in real time and prevent minor performance issues from getting out of hand. ChatGPT Plus ($20 monthly subscription) users have access to a great plugin available that can be used by sales managers and leaders to interpret and interrogate data – perfect for making data-driven decisions.

• AI is the ability of machines to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, and decision making.
• Our tool combines over 40 databases into one spreadsheet so that your team can see all the benefits of our sales automation technology with the data in front of them instead of manually researching accounts.
• Sixty-two percent of respondents find AI beneficial for crafting effective sales cadences.
• Many companies have taken all the frequently asked questions and instructions and put them into a database that can be searched by a chatbot using AI.
• This could include metrics such as increased lead conversion rates, reduced response time, improved accuracy in forecasting, or enhanced customer satisfaction.

Many can also send personalized initial and follow-up messages to get conversations started. There are various tools for automating and even personalizing outbound email campaigns. And while cold-calling may not be everyone’s cup of tea, there’s even AI-powered software that can suggest responses in real-time to help you get and keep potential leads interested.

AI can also help you use this data to pinpoint customers most likely to garner a desirable ROI. It’s important not to rely on generative AI entirely, though, as it can sometimes produce inaccurate information, and content generated solely by AI may not be ready for use with leads or customers. Basic chatbots provide certain pre-programmed responses, while more advanced ones use AI to understand user input, generate responses, and improve responses over time.

In essence, the future of AI-driven sales is bright and filled with opportunities and innovations. Transparency in how customer data is used, ensuring fairness in AI-driven decisions, and avoiding biases are all highly important. With AI’s capability to analyze vast amounts of personal data, there will be an increased emphasis on ethical selling.

Like in many other fields, befriending AI in sales isn’t just an option — it’s a necessity to stay competitive. If you’re not using AI, you’re giving your competitors (who are using it) a significant advantage. Make necessary adjustments and improvements before scaling up to minimize disruption to sales operations and ensure a smooth transition.