Generative AI for Sales: How AI Has Reshaped Sales in 2024

Dec 13, 2023

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Generative AI caused massive tidal waves in the business world. Take a deep dive into how AI reshaped sales in 2023

12m 15s reading time

Since 2021, the value of the global AI market has doubled from $95.6 billion to $207.9 billion, with a staggering predicted twenty-fold growth by 2030.

Generative AI has been the new tech spearheading much of this trend, with corporate giants Google and NVIDIA, for example, announcing new AI infrastructure to build and deploy massive models for generative AI. The growth of artificial intelligence is reflected in sales, too — the AI sales assistant software market is expected to triple in size from $31.5 billion to $92.8 billion by 2032.

But beyond mere numbers, what’s really happening? And what are the real benefits of generative AI for sales?

Leading role of generative AI in sales transformation

Despite all the current hype, AI — or what we think of as traditional AI — is nothing new in sales. Most sales teams have been using it for a while to analyze data instantly and get relevant predictions. Chatbots, too, usually have AI support that helps them go beyond a simple pre-programmed decision tree.

Generative AI, which everyone is so excited about, takes things further. As the name suggests, sales tools are no longer just predicting and forecasting. They’re generating completely new data based on their learning model. This, along with the lack of barrier to entry for tech like ChatGPT, has opened the door to a new era for sales in four main areas:

Personalization: Gen AI chatbots for sales and support are no longer limited to standard responses. AI can learn from every interaction and recognize context to provide relevant human-like responses. Some AIs are so capable that they can hold natural conversations with website visitors and gently guide them toward making a purchase.
Content creation: Gen AI can create content such as nurturing emails, blog articles, and social media posts in minutes.
Needs prediction: With the right statistical insights, generative AI can help agents respond better to leads and sales calls. You can also craft a special sales persona to help train your AI on who your audience is and how you’d like to communicate.
Data insights: Whereas traditional AI generates reports and insights, generative AI allows reps, sales managers, and decision-makers to interact with their data in a conversational manner.

In short, generative AI for sales and marketing is a game-changer that helps you engage in creative interactions with potential customers. It doesn’t just follow a set path. It can adapt and improvise in real-time conversations, and it can even help solve complex problems by providing innovative solutions tailored to your customer needs.

This huge potential explains why sales and marketing have the highest rate of everyday gen AI use compared to other key functions. Sales and marketing tools like AiSDR allow teams to delegate low-level tasks so they can focus on high-level work.

Four ways generative AI is transforming sales today

Generative AI has become a catalyst for transforming sales processes, and failing to innovate could end up costing you opportunities for low-cost, high-reward revenue growth.

Here’s a closer look at four ways that AI has affected the work of today’s sales teams for the better.

Improved personalization

What was a best practice just a few years ago is now the golden rule: If you want to sell more effectively, you’ll need to personalize your customer sales experience. Salesforce research suggests that more than half of customers now expect sales offers to always be personalized.

Manual personalization — collecting data, distinguishing what’s most important, and inserting it into a nurturing strategy — takes days of a sales development representative’s (SDR’s) work. This is where gen AI steps in.

Generative AI sales tools work with data from social media or specialized databases like ZoomInfo to provide insights such as a customer’s pain points. AI then tailors the content it generates to address the pain points within minutes.

Different tools can handle each step depending on their features, or you can use an all-in-one tool like AiSDR to cover all of them. AiSDR can qualify leads, tailor content based on company size, industry, and role, and even develop a personalized nurturing sequence.

In short, the emergence of affordable AI tools has made it easy to streamline processes and ensure quality results while cutting employee workload.

Efficient content creation

Any generative or conversational AI tool for sales has to work fast. For example, even the free version of Chat GPT for sales lets you instantly generate ideas for months of social media content, write product descriptions, or compile a case study for your website. You only need to feed it the necessary details and write a good-quality prompt.

Shopify Magic is another example as it offers AI-based features across Shopify’s products and workflows for automatic text generation. As a result, Shopify vendors can easily generate or translate text with the AI feature for product descriptions, Shopify emails, pages, and even blog posts.

AiSDR takes this one step further for B2B sales.

AiSDR can quickly generate large-scale email campaigns: All you need to do is state your purpose, tone, and other important details that AI can’t get from a lead’s or customer’s data. And just like that, you’ll have email drafts free of mistakes or typos. Just set up a campaign, launch it, and AiSDR will nurture leads and book meetings for you on autopilot, improving your SDR efficiency along the way.

Anticipating customer needs

Predicting customer needs and acting on them to nurture leads effectively are key to a good SDR’s job. However, these tasks aren’t always possible due to time restrictions and workload, given that every prediction requires interactions and research.

Gen AI has changed this issue by increasing the speed, quality, and convenience of predictions. AI tools for nurturing and sales can now analyze customer data and past interactions within seconds, highlight pain points and preferences, and offer solutions. This way, an SDR can work with objections even before they’re voiced and guide customers to purchase with less effort.

As an example, AiSDR knows the most common objections and previous solutions, so it can easily detect them in a new lead or customer. Based on data, it offers a prospecting email or personalized nurturing sequence to help the prospect overcome doubts and book a call with a sales agent.

Data-driven strategic insights

The main difference between generative AI-based and simple sales automation tools for data analysis is that generative AI sales tools give a conversational interface to your data.

With AI tools like Salesforce Einstein, you can request the main sales KPIs, and the tool will provide you with numbers, visuals, and recommendations. This means you don’t need to waste hours summing up the numbers and searching for the necessary categories in megabytes of data. But you can also ask questions, prompt the tool for comparisons, and get generated output based on just a subset of your data.

For example, generative AI tools can:

Analyze customers’ or prospects’ previous interactions with your company to improve experiences
Review employee performance and workflow data to pinpoint bottlenecks and ways to fix flaws
Suggest target audience needs and interests to help guide new business strategies and content creation
Analyze competitor websites and provide insights, positioning, and advantages

With this functionality, using AI tools for sales is like having a supercharged sales assistant on your team who can perform mundane tasks in minutes and answer questions in their area of responsibility.

The future of generative AI

Although generative AI in sales and marketing has already proven to be a game-changer, there are still many areas where AI can bolster companies:

Enhancing customer support: GPT-5 is expected to have improved reasoning and problem-solving while supporting conversations in a more natural way, almost indistinguishable from a real human. Such AI can be highly efficient as a customer support agent.
Engaging customers: As virtual AI assistants become more affordable, more people will use them as gatekeepers, filtering their feeds, emails, and calls. In response to that, AI sales systems will step up their game of getting through these AI gatekeepers and engaging human customers.
Predicting trends: Much of generative AI development is focused on improving its reliability and empowering its ability to process larger datasets. With these traits, future AI will be able to analyze market data, forecast trends, and help your company stay on top of the competition.

As generative AI use becomes more ubiquitous and these advancements turn into reality, generative AI will likely be adopted by more companies as customer support agents, sales reps, and predictive analysts, empowering your business development strategy.

Enhancing your business development strategy with generative AI

How can you use generative AI to enhance your business strategy? While powerful predictive AI is not yet around, you can take the following steps to build on current AI capabilities:

Understand your business goals: Start by identifying your business objectives for 2024. Ask yourself what your key priorities and targets are. This will provide a framework for integrating generative AI into your strategy.
Assess your current sales processes: Evaluate your existing sales processes and identify areas where generative AI can add value. Consider tasks that can be automated or enhanced by AI, such as lead generation, data analysis, or customer engagement.
Invest in the right technology: Research and invest in generative AI tools and platforms that align with your business needs. Look for solutions that offer personalization and AI sales automation.
Collect and analyze data: Generative AI relies on data to produce insights and make informed decisions. Ensure you have a robust data collection and analysis system in place to provide the necessary inputs for AI.
Train your sales team: It’s essential to train your sales team to work effectively with generative AI. Provide them with the necessary skills and knowledge to leverage AI tools, interpret AI-generated insights, and enhance customer interactions.

By following these steps, you can leverage the power of generative AI to optimize sales processes, drive growth, and achieve your business goals. However, to get the most out of the AI, you may need to combine it with other tools.

Additional tools to use alongside generative AI

A sales artificial intelligence does not operate in isolation. To do its best, it needs to be supported with other platforms and tools, such as:

Generative AI platforms: These platforms include pre-trained models, data management features, and customization options, making it easier for your sales team to use AI.
Data collection and management tools: Generative AI relies on large amounts of quality data. Using tools that can efficiently collect and organize data, you will have the necessary inputs to train and test your AI for sales.
Testing and evaluation tools: Evaluating the performance and accuracy of your AI is crucial. Specialized tools can help you measure outreach KPIs and identify areas for improvement.
Collaboration and project management tools: These tools can help streamline workflows and facilitate smooth coordination within your team working with sales AI.

The choice of tools will depend on your needs, goals, and technical expertise. Alternatively, you may opt for an AI platform that already has all the tools built-in.

AiSDR: AI for sales outreach on full autopilot

AiSDR AI was built as a solution to ease increasingly heavier workloads on over-burdened sales teams. Here are a few ways that AiSDR simplifies end-to-end outreach and books meetings on full autopilot:

All-in-one platform: AiSDR is an AI platform that includes a pre-trained AI for sales prospecting, lead discovery and qualification, content creation, and automated responses and follow-ups.
Seamless integration: AiSDR integrates seamlessly with common sales software like HubSpot, Zerobounce, and ZoomInfo.
Versatility and cost-efficiency: AiSDR can qualify and nurture leads, create and deliver personalized email campaigns and follow-ups, and drive engaged prospects to book a demo. It covers all email outreach tasks at 10% of the cost!
Developed for start-ups by a start-up: As a plug-and-play AI for sales, AiSDR handles more than just outreach. With just a few clicks, you can warm up a cold mailbox, find fresh leads, connect multiple mailboxes, and automatically add your HubSpot lead lists to specific campaigns.

Experience the top-performing generative AI in sales

Generative AI’s impact in the areas of personalization, content creation, needs anticipation, and sales insights is huge… but this is just the beginning.

There are plenty of signs that trends such as AI-based sales predictions or lead qualifications will grow, and their algorithms will improve as they learn from more data. Other trends like face expression recognition and emotion-based decision-making will only start to develop on a large scale.

New laws on data protection and AI applications may also drastically curb the use of generative AI for content and image creation in sales.

Whatever the future holds, most pointers indicate that now is the best time to jump on the train of AI-based sales and stay ahead of the pack.

And AiSDR is the perfect way to do it. It empowers your team with the capabilities needed to succeed in today’s fast-paced sales environment, from smart lead qualification to creating nurturing sequences.

Don’t miss out on your opportunity to harness the power of AI in sales.

Book a demo now to ensure your success in an AI-driven future.

FAQ

Can generative AI improve customer conversion?

Yes, absolutely. Generative AI can improve customer conversion by:

Personalizing content
Providing predictive insights
Prioritizing leads
Offering data-driven recommendations
Analyzing feedback

Applying AI for any of these purposes helps improve the prospect’s journey and increases their conversion into customers.

What are the challenges of integrating AI in sales?

Possible challenges of integrating AI in sales are:

Data privacy and security issues
High implementation costs and resource requirements
Resistance to change among sales teams
Ensuring AI aligns with brand and customer values

Still, your business can overcome all these challenges with thorough preparation and planning before implementing AI.

What is the future of AI in sales?

The future of AI in sales looks promising with AI-driven automation, predictive analytics, and personalization becoming standard practices. Additionally, chatbots and virtual sales assistants will play a more prominent role in guiding prospects through the sales process, and new trends like face expression recognition will emerge to help with decision-making.

How can AI personalize content?

AI personalizes content through data analysis and machine learning algorithms. It collects and analyzes data about user preferences, behaviors, and interactions to tailor content recommendations and messages.