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AI is disrupting sales roles, creating new efficiencies, and augmenting lead generation, productivity, and customer engagement. To realise AI’s potential in the sales process, it’s critical that sales teams learn how to effectively work alongside AI and maximise the time saved through automation. AI is now also a powerful tool for training and developing sales teams.
Hubspot estimates that sales professionals save two hours and 15 minutes daily using AI to automate manual tasks. Moreover, 78% of sales professionals agree AI helps them to spend more time on the most critical aspects of their roles.
In 2024, personalisation will be one of the most essential factors in successful sales campaigns and revenue growth. AI can provide sales teams with the time, efficiency, and insights to excel at personalisation and build genuine customer rapport.
The benefits of AI for sales are immense. AI chatbots can identify and qualify leads, engage customers, and gather vital data for personalisation strategies. AI-powered platforms can highlight leads, create targeted pipelines, and provide powerful insights. AI tools can automate daily admin tasks, write emails and scripts, and produce sales collateral. The list is almost endless, but what must begin as we enter the age of AI is the process of developing human employees to work with AI and get the most out of these impressive new tools.
The first step for an effective human-AI sales team is to reassure employees their jobs aren’t going to be taken by AI but instead will become far more interesting. Although AI will indeed automate repetitive, mundane, and administrative tasks, it’s also true that human employees will take on more creative and problem-solving responsibilities. For sales teams, it’s taking the time to understand products and customers better, personalise, closely match features and benefits with customer pain points and objectives, and more effectively overcome objections.
The likelihood is that tools and CRMs already used by sales teams have integrated AI into current functions and developed new ones. It’s critical to review and understand the functionality of old and new tools, assess workflows and processes, and ensure AI-powered functionality is understood and fully utilised.
One way to ensure that sales teams get the most out of AI tools and insights in the sales process is to set KPIs for both AI and sales teams and monitor the results together. A collaborative monitoring approach will identify if AI’s advantages are leveraged effectively and help sales teams understand how AI can be used.
AI is not perfect; it’s being adopted rapidly but with its risks in mind. Trained human oversight can minimise risks of inaccuracies, falsifications, model limitations, and ethical considerations. In most cases, it’s essential to supervise and improve AI output. Sales teams require training to understand the risks of using AI and to oversee output to ensure it’s accurate, appropriate, unbiased, and up to expectations.
If AI can save salespeople over two hours per day, those two hours should be put to the best use to maximise the return on AI investment and adoption for the organisation. According to Hubspot, 74% of salespeople agree that AI can help them spend more time on the parts of the job they enjoy most. So, training sales teams, even established ones, should consist of AI training and development to optimise the time saved.
The substantial impact of AI on sales roles, including time savings and efficiencies, means it’s time to work with sales teams to evaluate and refresh KPIs. New KPIs can account for all important personalisation, target rapport building, and again maximise results from those all-important time savings. KPIs can also reflect the qualified leads AI can deliver and its ability to categorise pipeline stages accurately. It may be more appropriate to start targeting quality over quantity. AI can also create smarter KPIs.
Segmentation and tiering are recommended strategies for sales success in 2024. AI-delivered insights allow faster, improved segmentation and tiering by value or the highest probability of converting. These customer segments can be effectively allocated to sales team members, improving performance and motivation.
AI tools can amplify sales forecasting, which doesn’t have to be the realm of sales leaders. Teaching all employees to use data-driven insights to identify prospects that can most quickly become revenue streams can be part of the upskilling and development of sales teams.
AI tools can also augment sales training by delivering digital training, onboarding new employees, monitoring progress, and even partaking in performance management.
Generative or conversational AI is perfect for role-playing sales scenarios. AI chatbots can be customised to behave like a reluctant customer and programmed to deliver common objections, allowing sales teams to practice their skills without feeling nervous about working directly with a manager. AI-enabled sales training software can also provide feedback on sales techniques.
Publicly available AI models can help to create sales scripts that team members or leaders can further refine. These models can also expand on product advantages and use cases and educate sales teams on their target industry. Custom AI chatbots deployed internally can be trained solely on company and product material, features, benefits, and case studies, serving as a repository of valuable information for sales teams. The speed of these bots also means they can be used as a tool during live sales activity, for example, when a salesperson needs a fast technical answer for a prospect.
AI's analytical capabilities can provide real-time information on performance to sales leaders, allowing them to immediately address deficiencies with greater insight as to the cause. AI sales coaching tools can “listen” live to sales agents or analyse recordings to provide feedback and identify the techniques top performers use.
AI has arrived with a multitude of benefits for sales teams that can only be realised when sales teams feel confident working side-by-side with AI and know how to leverage the advantages this technology can deliver. Likewise, sales leaders can deploy AI to motivate, manage, and train sales teams dynamically and effectively.
Next, Discover The ROI of AI: Tangible Benefits Within a Year.
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