11 Ways Generative AI in Sales Can Assist Your Team 

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is a hot topic of conversation these days. You will have a hard time finding someone who’s never heard of ChatGPT and the amazing things it can do. But is there anything behind the hype? Can AI be a handy sales automation tool, or is it just a plaything?

74% of sales reps have the answer. They’re already using AI in sales: for content creation, prospect outreach, and research. 41% of the industry has changed their sales strategies for 2023 because of AI.

What a dramatic turn away from the conventional wisdom that a machine will never match (let alone beat!) a human in such an interaction-based and empathy-demanding job as sales.

Artificial intelligence in sales is being implemented to automate processes, improve analytics, and enhance sales strategies, enabling companies to interact more effectively with customers and achieve better results in today’s competitive environment.

How did this shift even become possible?

What is generative AI?

Generative AI is an automated tool that can generate text, art, videos, or tables from simple verbal prompts. 

The sales automation tools of the recent past would only work with structured data, which has been prepared and organized for them. But generative AI can organize unstructured information, similarly to what a human would do.

Generative AI in today’s sales

Salespeople use AI to automate a broad range of tasks, from updating CRM systems and generating reports to outreach and lead classification. By outsourcing these menial tasks, they get more time to do what actually brings money: build relationships and close deals.

Shifting the paradigm for outbound sales

In recent years, many marketing gurus have claimed that “outbound is dead.” You should abandon it if you want your company to maintain a good reputation, they said. Today’s customers find many outbound tactics annoying and intrusive.

And they aren’t exactly wrong—old-school outbound reach, with cold calls bombarding people at the worst moment, is truly outdated. But the advent of AI has brought a smarter, more strategic approach to outbound sales that’s worth mastering.

AI tools are changing outbound by:

• Finding the right people to approach—By scanning social media profiles, news, websites, and tech stacks on a massive scale, AI can identify the best matches for your buyer persona.
• Personalizing messages at scale—AI can tailor an outreach email to every prospect, referencing their recent work and other important details to make your pitch resonate.
• Predicting your prospect’s next steps—With its superior analytical skills, AI can predict your leads’ progression through the pipeline with surprising accuracy and simulate conversations or calls to train your sales team.
• Continuously improving—AI learns from each interaction, both successes and failures, refining its approach until it hits the mark more and more often.

Does it mean that AI beats humans in all aspects of outbound sales? Not quite. While AI has some impressive strengths, it still comes with a number of limitations.

Generative AI strengths and limitations

Generative AI in sales is giving humans a run for their money in several areas of sales:

• Content creation—AI tools can instantly churn out promo materials such as outreach emails, follow-up responses, product descriptions, and even presentations.
• Large-scale personalization—Manually producing hyper-personalized messages for each of the hundreds of leads would take a lot of time and effort, but AI can get it done in minutes.
• Lead scoring and qualification—AI models can quickly sift through a large database of leads, identifying the most promising ones.

So, should you hand over all your sales work to AI? Not so fast—today’s AI models still struggle with:

• Understanding the wider context—Without proper tuning, AI tools might produce content that misses the subtle nuances of the lead’s background and past interactions, making your outreach feel annoying or irrelevant.
• Thinking out of the box—AI models are built to stick to safe, familiar patterns, which means they can hardly come up with unconventional solutions.
• Critically evaluating the data—If AI is fed flawed data, it won’t detect and report it. Errors and inconsistencies can lead to poor analysis and predictions.
• Multi-level analysis—AI models lack the tacit knowledge of what factors are more and less important in human interactions.
• Solving complex problems—When presented with such a problem, an AI model will come up with a suggestion quickly, but it will probably lack depth and practicability.

Fine-tuning and training the AI model can partly remedy these issues, improving accuracy and performance. However, even a well-trained model can’t completely replace a salesperson just yet.

Will AI replace salespeople?

With all the tasks AI is nailing, you might wonder—is it coming for sales reps’ jobs? Can it fully replace your sales team anytime soon? 

Most industry experts say no. Artificial intelligence in sales still has a long way to go before it can handle a complex conversation or sustain a relationship.

In fact, your sales team is more likely to welcome AI than fear it. According to Salesforce, 78% of salespeople are eager to see more generative AI in their companies. They view it as a useful tool for automating routine tasks, which augments their work rather than takes it over. In particular, AI can handle much of the lead scoring, content creation, follow-ups, and email responses, freeing the team’s time for more value-adding activities.

AI can be most useful in the outbound reach. While it’s not ready to step in as an account executive (AE), it can work with them as a sales development representative (SDR). AI can handle multiple accounts and campaigns, lending help to your AEs who already have enough on their plates without outbound tasks.

The benefits of using artificial intelligence for sales are numerous. They far outweigh the hassle of mastering a new tool.

Benefits of generative AI

Generative AI can become your loyal assistant, taking care of the least favorite parts of the job. For example, it can do the following tasks. 

1. Screen your prospects 

Would you like to chat only with the right people? Every sales rep would prefer to spend their time only on potential customers rather than waste it on unqualified leads.

An AI-based sales prospecting tool can make that happen by analyzing all of your prospect’s details: from demographics to what they tweet about. After that, it will sift out everyone who probably won’t fit.

2. Reach out to potential customers

Forget the one-size-fits-all automated messages. AI can craft them personally for each customer based on past conversations with them. 

That’s a great chance to present your product to every lead in a way that feels right for them. No human can possibly remember all the subtle details that the AI will note and use.

3. Warm up your leads

You no longer have to rely on guesswork to design responses and follow-ups. Just have the sales AI pick the conversation up from a certain point.

AI will answer all the questions the person might have about your product. What’s more, it will tweak messages in a way that resonates with this particular individual, building on their responses in real-time, until they’re ready to buy.

4. Take notes during sales calls 

Customers who don’t want to be recorded can be a pain in the neck. Have you ever taken notes by hand to accommodate their request and still get at least some information to work with? 

Again, an AI sales assistant can cut in to save the day. It will take notes, making sure no important detail slips through the cracks, and provide the information you need to fine-tune your offer.

5. Build reports 

Let’s be honest: no one takes much fun out of preparing all those reports. Why not have AI do it?

A sales artificial intelligence can pull data from wherever you have it: Excel spreadsheets, Salesforce, Pipedrive, another sophisticated tool, or any combination of these. Processing it in a fraction of a second, it will present key insights in an eye-pleasing and easy-to-navigate format. 

6. Create useful resources 

What about customer manuals and presentation slides? Can AI handle these?

Actually, it can. Just give it access to the data, and you’re free to do something that’s a bit more fun: chatting with another prospect or preparing for a call. 

7. Generate sales copy 

You’ve probably seen those awful AI-generated texts. You might’ve even sworn never to fall that low.

However, even the best of us hit writer’s block at times. Generative AI can help you get things moving. Use AI as a brainstorming partner to come up with new ideas. Producing a stellar offer or email will suddenly become much easier. 

8. Forecast revenues

Where numbers come into play, AI easily beats a human. Have it crunch your data and produce reliable forecasts with just a single click.

9. Train your staff 

There’s no other way to become a sales pro than to practice. But you will lose deals and customers while learning to do it perfectly well. 

AI can set up virtual simulation scenarios for you and your new team members to practice sales without actually selling. You will tackle objections and hone your persuasion skills in the same manner as you’d do with a real customer. 

10. Process large volumes of data 

An average human reads 183 words per minute, and AI will process the same amount in a fraction of a millisecond. However huge data set you dump on it, your AI helper will produce a summary with lightning speed.

Imagine getting AI to analyze all the objections you’ve ever got. The tool will break them into a few manageable categories so you can craft a perfect response to each.  

11. Connect with your leads and prospects when you’re away 

No one should wake in the middle of the night to jump on a call from another time zone. Let AI do the talking while you enjoy a well-deserved rest. 

A generative AI isn’t your regular dumb chatbot. It will answer whatever questions your prospects and leads may come up with in a meaningful, human-like way, keeping them around until you’re back in the office.

There is an important caveat: generic AIs are often ill-suited for the tasks listed above. To perform them effectively, you need a particular kind of AI—the one trained to assist you with sales.

What is AiSDR?

AiSDR is an AI tool designed with salespeople in mind. Our goal was to automate as much of sales reps’ routine work as possible so they could focus on revenue-generating activities.

These are some of the things AiSDR can do for you:

• Filter the leads that match your perfect customer profile
• Generate and send outreach emails
• Generate and send follow-up emails
• Respond to prospect questions, using them as prompts
• Book a meeting for qualified prospects

AiSDR can’t make sales calls yet, but we’re working on this. Our ambition is to create the future of sales—the only AI sales tool you will ever need.

Conclusion

Generative AI in sales can help your team close more deals. By outsourcing menial tasks to artificial intelligence, sales reps will have more time to do things that really matter.

For the best result, you need an AI tool specially trained to assist salespeople, such as AiSDR.

Book a demo for AiSDR to see how it works.

FAQ

What are the benefits of using generative AI? 

Generative AI in sales can offer personalized customer interactions, help accurately forecast trends, assist in training sales reps, and automate time-consuming tasks like report generation and note-taking. It also aids in data processing at superhuman speed, providing valuable insights to enhance sales strategies.

How can I use AI to make money?

You can use AI to automate tedious tasks and have more time for revenue-generating activities, which will boost your income.

How is artificial intelligence used in sales?

AI in sales is used to qualify leads, personalize customer outreach, predict sales trends, automate administrative tasks, and provide actionable insights from large volumes of data. It can also help in nurturing leads, training sales reps, and maintaining customer engagement.

What is the future of artificial intelligence in sales?

In the future, AI will probably offer a new level of personalized customer interaction, real-time forecasting, and smarter automation of tasks. However, most industry experts disagree that it will be able to completely replace a salesperson.

Can AI make sales calls?

Technically, it can, but you might not want it to. In this role, even a fine-tuned AI is still less efficient than a trained human.

How can AI be used in marketing and sales?

AI can revolutionize marketing and sales in several ways: it can personalize customer interactions based on their behavior, automate repetitive tasks like email campaigns or data entry, analyze massive amounts of data to reveal insights, help forecast sales trends, and even assist in creating engaging content or ad copies.