Artificial intelligence AI has been taking the world by storm in recent years, flooding LinkedIn with a dizzying number of hot takes and how-tos. If all the fuss has left you wondering about the future of artificial intelligence in sales and what it means for your business, read on.
In this article, we’ll cover how AI sales tools fit into the sales and marketing process, what tools you can leverage to optimize your strategy, and how you can successfully and implement AI into your sales process.
Understanding the Role of AI in Sales and Marketing
You already know AI is being leveraged across different industries, supporting professionals with everything from customer service inquiries to medical diagnoses. But how can AI help in sales and marketing?
Think of AI as your own personal assistant—someone (or something, rather) to assign work that consumes a large amount of your day but isn’t necessarily your primary skill set. For example, sales reps can use AI to write and send personalized outreach messages to prospects. But when combined, AI and sales can do much more than just execute on tasks.
AI works by pooling together sources of data to reference for its output. This means it can quickly identify trends to optimize your process—which you can also share with your marketing and customer success teams. For example, you could use AI to identify what your most common objections are, or what kind of messaging is converting best. It can use the same trend analysis to predict how likely a lead is to convert based on the lead’s response—helping you weed out potential customers from dead ends.
What does all of this mean for sales teams? According to the Harvard Business Review, 47% of sales work can be automated effectively with technology. Think about what your sales team could be doing if they gained 47% of their time back, it would be pretty significant, right?
How AI is Revolutionizing the Sales Industry
The sales industry has adopted AI—bringing about a paradigm shift that empowers businesses to operate more efficiently and profitably. In fact, 40% of sales and marketing teams report data science from AI and machine learning as critical to the success of their department.
One of the most significant ways in which AI is revolutionizing sales is by enabling hyper-personalization. By analyzing vast amounts of customer data, AI algorithms can identify individual preferences and tailor LinkedIn messages accordingly, leading to higher conversion rates and customer satisfaction.
Moreover, AI-driven predictive analytics allows sales teams to forecast future trends and outcomes with greater accuracy, enabling them to make more informed decisions. This not only enhances sales performance but also helps businesses like yours stay ahead of the competition in a rapidly-evolving market landscape.
But what does all of this look like in practice?
Picture a day in the life of an SDR:
- Researching prospects
- Typing out personalized messages
- Sifting through the responses
- Gauging interest to prioritize leads
- Booking meetings
- More research on leads
- Answering requests for proposals
- Hopping on sales calls
- (Hopefully) finally closing deals
Then the same SDR starts to use AI, and the technology:
- Takes over most of the customer research
- Personalizes messages better than the SDR can
- References data from past conversations to identify which leads are actually going to convert
- Gets meetings booked in the SDR’s calendar
The SDR is left to read summaries of research, answer messages from warm leads, and hop on calls to close deals. It's almost like giving your SDR their own AI sales rep. That is the future of AI—and it’s happening now using lead generation AI.
Benefits of Using B2B AI for Sales Teams
Perhaps the most obvious benefit of using AI is efficiency. It’s fast, and it frees up time for humans so they can do more. But the benefits go beyond doing more, faster. We’ve put together a more holistic roundup of the benefits of AI in sales to help give you (or your stakeholders) the full picture.
Improve customer relationships
AI for customer success enables deeper insights into customer behavior and preferences, allowing sales professionals to tailor their approach and messaging to resonate with specific target audiences. This not only improves the effectiveness of sales efforts but also enhances customer relationships and loyalty.
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Increase productivity and revenue
Marketing automation AI automates routine tasks such as data entry, lead scoring, and follow-up emails, freeing up valuable time for sales reps to focus on building relationships and closing deals. Your sales team doesn’t just become more productive—they can handle larger volumes of leads and opportunities, ultimately driving revenue growth.
In fact, the 2024 technology industry outlook report by Deloitte shows that 80% of surveyed sales professionals feel that using generative AI for sales makes their communication more efficient while contributing to more sales.
Reduce burnout
We don’t need to tell you that sales is a taxing profession. With looming quotas, frequent rejections, and a host of administrative work bogging down your day, it’s easy to burn out. But AI eases the burden of manual tasks while improving your actual outcomes. Unsurprisingly, reducing workload while improving outcomes helps improve your sales team’s mental wellbeing and decreases staff turnover.
Make data-driven decisions
Additionally, AI-driven analytics provide sales leaders with actionable insights into sales performance and market trends, enabling them to make strategic decisions and course corrections as needed. This data-driven approach to sales management helps businesses stay agile and responsive in an ever-changing business environment.
Key AI Technologies for Your Sales Team
The term “artificial intelligence” refers to a long list of technologies that can accomplish tasks like pattern recognition or speech as if they were human. While you may be most familiar with large language learning models—namely, ChatGPT— there are a slew of AI for sales and marketing products on the market that operate with different types of AI.
Here are some ways your team can take advantage of AI solutions for sales so that your team can become more effective in their day-to-day.
Outreach and messaging
Top-of-funnel outreach is undoubtedly one of the most time-consuming aspects of traditional selling. Personalizing each message and adapting your responses to each prospect is taxing—yet only a fraction of these early-stage conversations convert. In steps conversational AI. Take Smart Reply AI by CoPilot AI for example. It can “read” your conversation and generate context-appropriate responses in a click. Enabling your team to send effective messages in seconds means they can manage a higher volume of prospects at once.
Skeptical? 86% of sales professionals report that using AI for messaging find it effective.
Competitor analysis
Staying on top of competitors is basic sales hygiene. In order to present your business as the best solution, you need to know how to position yourselves against competitors. And research…takes time. Unless you have a competitor analysis tool like Crayon.
Crayon monitors your competition and flags important updates about what they’re up to, like changes in their pricing models, changes in leadership, website updates, or press releases.
Crayon specifically can help you share key updates and create battlecards for your sales team in minutes, with insights on who your biggest competitors are and how you win against them.
With Crayon, your team stays effortlessly in-the-know on how to pitch your product against the competition so you can win more clients.
RFP document automation
Responding to an RFPs and RFIs can be a make-or-break moment for a sale—but it can also be a lot of work. That’s why Loopio created a fix that leverages AI technology to automatically insert winning answers and information into your documents.
Loopio scans requests from your prospects, automatically detects common inquiries and pulls in pre-approved answers from your content library so you can provide winning answers in the click of a button.
Lead and prospect evaluation
Replace your intuition with predictive intelligence. CoPilot AI has AI enabled sales solutions that use algorithms to analyze historical conversation data and predict how warm your leads really are.
While that might sound complicated, it’s very simple in practice. On your end, CoPilot AI will rank the likelihood of a prospect responding or how interested they are in booking a meeting, right from your dashboard. From there, your sales reps can allocate resources towards your best prospects so they can close more sales.
To further support conversion, CoPilot AI has features that can analyze your prospects and garner key insights about their preferred communication style and provides tips and templates for effectively communicating with each individual. With the predictions and analysis from CoPilot AI, your team can work quicker while sending the right messages to the best prospects, ultimately converting more clients.
Employee coaching
Need to train new sales reps, or coach existing ones to their full potential? There’s an AI for that too. Coaching solutions like Quantified stage fake interactions for your team to practice through, and provides insights on their strengths and areas for development. In a world where personalization and authenticity reign, sticking to scripts won’t cut it. Successful, organic sales calls come with practice, and sales coaching AI like Quantified ensure you won’t have to lose real clients while your team ramps up.
Implementing AI in Your Sales Strategy
So you want to leverage the power of AI, but you’re left wondering how to get started. Before you implement any products, you’ll need to start with a plan. Remember—AI isn’t about to replace humans. But if you don’t leverage it, competitors that do will pull ahead.You need to evaluate how AI can support your team, and make sure your people are set up for success.
Follow the four steps below to get the most out of your AI investment.
- Assess your needs
Identify pain points and inefficiencies in your current sales processes that could be addressed with AI solutions. In an ideal world, you’d have the budget to implement as many tools as needed to support your team. But the reality for most businesses is that you’ll need to identify which areas will have the best ROI for your team.
- Choose the right tools
Research and select tools that align with your objectives and budget, paying extra attention to tools with a suite of features that can address multiple needs.
Not only is it likely to be cheaper than purchasing individual solutions, but it will be easier to onboard your team, and the products should work seamlessly together.
CoPilot AI, for example, offers a comprehensive suite of features that allow B2B sales teams to automate the sales process on LinkedIn using messages and/or video, while providing insights to drive better conversion.
- Train Your Team
Provide training and support to ensure your sales team is equipped to leverage AI effectively. Even the best tool will fail if your team isn’t set up for success.During the research phase, you can inquire about what level of support your team can expect from any given product. Do you get live on-boarding? How available is live support, and what kind of self-service options are available for troubleshooting?
Some companies offer support that goes beyond the basic functions of your chosen tool, to really ensure your team is positioned to thrive. CoPilot AI, for example, has dedicated teams for both onboarding and continued support who will help you optimize your LinkedIn profiles so your sales reps get the maximum benefits from the sales AI.
Every new tool—AI or otherwise—is going to come with a learning curve, and you want to make sure there’s enough support in place for your team to adapt quickly.
- Set realistic expectations
Your team will be able to increase MRR by leveraging the right AI in B2B sales—but it’s not going to happen overnight. Set goals that are realistic and scalable over time as your team adapts to the new technology.
Keep in mind that some of your team members will master AI quicker than others. It’s important to build in feedback systems (async or in short meetings, depending on what works best for your team) to share what’s working and provide support to those who need it.
Best Practices for Using AI in Sales
To get the best results, you’ll want to follow best practices for using AI in sales.
Keep your tech stack small
The fewer products you use, the better. We touched on some benefits of going with one more robust product over multiple niche solutions, including cost and ease of onboarding. But too many tools can also cause issues with integrations, or require teams to waste time switching tabs and windows. Opting for a robust AI solution for sales teams is easier and more cost-efficient. We recommend looking for something that can support your prospecting efforts on LinkedIn Sales Navigator, all the way through to booking meetings and providing insights that help you close.
Train your tools
Not unlike a new human team member, your new AI may need some training early on for you to get the best use.Take generative AI, for example. These are the products that give you outputs like conversational messages or video. Tools that leverage generative ai in sales need to learn a bit about how your company talks, what it does, and who your target audience is, before it can generate the best results.The more “experience” your AI gets, the better and better it will perform, so be sure to invest time into training it and don’t be discouraged if your first tries don’t produce magical results.
Understand risk
When you use AI for sales, the solutions typically need to access sensitive data like prospect and client contact information, or your company’s performance insights.While this may seem scary at first, it’s not a new concept. Think about every tool you already use—even the most basic, like your email accounts, hold sensitive information you trust will stay safe.
AI is just another tool you need to do your due diligence on before signing up, just like any other technology in your stack. Find out what information you are giving permission for a solution to access, and what measures they have in place to protect against a breach.
Overcoming Challenges and Objections to AI
AI offers immense potential for transforming sales processes, but with change comes challenges. From resistance to fear, learn how you can overcome objections and embrace the future of sales.
Winning buy-in
The first challenge you’re likely to face is getting buy-in from stakeholders. Lucky for you—you’re in sales! Understanding concerns and overcoming objections should just be an average Tuesday.
Do your research on the AI products you want to leverage, gather evidence for how those solutions have helped solve problems businesses like yours are facing, and come up with an implementation plan. It can be helpful to develop a business case to support your case and get your team on board.
Overcoming resistance to change
Even though implementing AI in sales and marketing will ultimately make things easier for your team, change is always hard.
Every new tool you get is going to come with a learning curve that takes time and effort to overcome. You yourself may even be dreading the implementation phase.
As we mentioned before, you’ll need to set realistic expectations which includes a period of time where you might be set backwards. Consider this phase like launching a slingshot—in order to propel 100 meters forward, you’ll need to go a few inches back first.
Make sure you build an implementation plan that includes a point person to support onboarding, adequate training and access to support from the product team you’re buying from, and exciting goals to help with momentum. Getting through the learning curve is a lot easier when your team has a clear understanding of what they’re working towards.
Managing skepticism and fear
AI isn’t just a change—for many, it’s an unknown. At this point, anyone in an execution role has probably read a dozen headlines about how AI is going to render them obsolete—and rebuttals about how robots cannot work better than humans can.
When fears arise, listen and acknowledge them. Then reinforce that the goal is not to replace your team, but to strengthen it. Remind your team that AI is here to reduce how much time they spend on certain tasks, so they can close more deals and feel less stress.
When it comes to skepticism, the easiest route is to give a timeline and let people see it for themselves. The truth is, there are aspects of sales that strongly benefit from a human touch. Validate your team by highlighting how at the end of the day, they are the closers and a crucial part of your team. AI is just here for the easy stuff.
By addressing challenges proactively and fostering a culture of innovation and continuous learning, businesses can successfully navigate the transition to AI-powered sales.
Conclusion: Taking Your First Step
As we look to the future of sales and marketing, one thing is clear: AI will continue to play a central role in driving innovation and efficiency. By embracing technologies such as CoPilot AI and adopting best practices for implementation, sales teams can unlock new opportunities for growth and productivity—while improving their own wellbeing.
It may feel overwhelming at first—but you can adapt one tool at a time. Connect with the team at CoPilot AI today to see how you can optimize your sales process with a single AI platform.
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