The Future of AI for Sales And How to Prepare for It

All sales operations require some amount of basic communication, and basic communication has increasingly fallen to machines. Sales jobs that only require basic functional knowledge of the product, basic problem-solving skills, or basic written or verbal communication will likely be artificial intelligence in sales replaced by AI in the next decade or so. If you’re a sales manager, forecasting is an essential part of your job. Professionals in a wide array of industries now use this impressive technology to organize complex data points, write text, generate visual artwork, and much more.

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. 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.

What can AI do for sales?

AI in marketing is all about recognizing patterns and gaining more engagement by appealing to trends in real-time. Selling is a cycle that involves passing potential customers from marketing to sales. And the handoff between the two is a gray area that looks different in every business. These tools—unlike people—are available 24/7 to keep leads and customers engaged.

They should also invest in training sales teams to adapt to more data-driven, AI-enabled procedures. Creating a holistic perspective of the client necessitates the dismantling of silos between customer-facing divisions and developing data-driven sales processes. AI-enabled platform suppliers can supply the infrastructure and advisory experience to help organizations align and modify their behavior. Although most sales reps follow best practices and periodically run sales forecasts, recent data has found that the majority of sales reps inaccurately forecast their pipeline. However, leveraging artificial intelligence allows you to significantly reduce the probability of inaccuracies in your sales team.

Activity Data Syncing and Contact Creation

You can use these insights to continually improve your sales processes and techniques. 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. They use advanced computer science techniques and superior computational firepower to extract insights from data. These insights can then be used to make predictions, recommendations, and decisions. This type of AI, “machine learning,” powers the most impressive capabilities in sales. Machine learning is a type of AI that identifies patterns based on large sets of data.

For example, you can use intelligent chatbots to answer questions on your website in real-time. By capitalizing on AI software that can analyze detailed data points in milliseconds and use the information gleaned to draw conclusions. We asked it to give us specific examples from the conversation where the salesperson did poorly in “asking open-ended questions”, and a few sample ways in which the salesperson could have done better. However, proper training and support are necessary to fully leverage the tool’s capabilities. Yes, it’s new technology, and yes, it might seem intimidating at first. But with the right training, your team will soon see that AI isn’t the complex beast it’s often made out to be.

It would take too much time and even then some intricate insights might escape the human mind. You see, things like speech-to-text-transcription and dialogue visualization can power truly helpful dynamic scripts. Thus, enabling contact center agents to resolve complicated issues faster and close more deals. Primarily by automatically adjusting what should be said depending on the flow of the conversation or providing real-time suggestions to guide the dialogue. Thus, relieving sales agents from tedious, manual work and letting them focus on high-value tasks.

AI can’t handle complex problem-solving and human relations, so it has to be combined with a personal touch. AI in the workplace can do everything from predicting which prospects are most likely to close, to sales forecasting, to recommending the next best action to take—which removes a lot of guesswork. It can also help you coach reps at scale (I’ll get into the specific of this one in just a bit), optimize pricing, and everything in between.