More Demos, Less Hussle: How Generative AI Helps Sales Teams

Even with a superb product, companies will go nowhere without an efficient and effective sales department. In a highly competitive market, customers can always turn to more persuasive competitors.

In this context, automation and AI-based tools are a must for your sales team. For example, when Virgin Pulse used AI for sales, they saw an impressive fourfold increase in top-of-funnel conversions. AI enhanced their communication with prospects by analyzing their sales reps’ 

The use of tech is no longer an option, it’s a necessity. For sales teams, sticking to manual processes means losing revenue as time kills deals. 

How to use innovative tech to nurture your leads on a timely basis, book more demos, and get more deals closed? Generative AI is the perfect tool for this.

What is generative AI?

Generative AI is a type of artificial intelligence that focuses on creating new ideas, scripts, recommendations, images, or other content, based on the information it learned from existing data and the rules laid down in its algorithm. The first example that comes to mind is ChatGPT, and although salespeople can use it, it’s not specialized for sales. 

But these alternatives – Viva Sales by Microsoft and Einstein GPT by Salesforce – are. The apps have many features that can benefit sales departments, like creating contextual email replies or taking meeting summaries 

And not only that. Generative AI is here to stay as it drastically optimizes sales agents’ processes, 

• taking over mundane tasks like lead scoring and segmenting
• analyzing agents’ communication and taking notes that can be used for educational materials
• personalizing prospects’ interactions by analyzing past customer experience with the company and providing relevant recommendations to sales representatives
• forecasting sales dynamics
• analyzing its own performance

With less time across the sales funnels and more targeted communication, sales departments will book more demos and close more deals. For this to come true, implement best practices for generative AI, which we will discuss next.

Best practices for using generative AI in sales

Buying AI software doesn’t automatically make you successful. You need to learn how to unleash the full potential of AI for sales to encourage your prospects to book more demos and eventually buy your product. Let’s see how to do that.

Use AI for chatbots 

Think about Siri or Alexa, but in a chat form, and imagine how they would converse with your leads while the sales team takes care of other tasks. Of course, they can’t do the entire job; eventually, the sales team must pursue the conversation with the prospect and convince them to book a demo or purchase.

What generative AI can do is keep a prospect engaged, answer common questions, and clarify details until a human agent is free to engage. Keeping the conversation ongoing is critical for eventually booking a demo, and generative AI will help you do it with less effort. 

Tackle objections before prospects voice them

You don’t need to read people’s minds to tackle objections in your sales pitch; you only need to use artificial intelligence for sales.

What do we mean? First, AI analyzes all your prospects’ previous objections, finds the most common ones, and generates wording with a convincing argument to counter them.

Second, when you use sales prospecting software designed for a particular company, it analyzes all available information to detect and counter possible objections.

For example, suppose you want to persuade a medium-sized company to book a demo of your automation software, and your AI tool analyzes the available data and reveals the most common objection is price. In this case, it might create an email that includes data to show that the automation tool can save more money than it costs in the long run.

Make personalization look and feel organic

When a sales rep writes dozens of prospecting emails daily, words can sound hackneyed. But generative AI can help: as long as you feed it data, it can find different angles to write a personalized email in a few seconds. It can naturally design comms to appear and feel superior compared to manually crafted ones, eliminating the hassle of customization. You can achieve the best results by implementing the practice we describe next.

Integrate AI-based sales tools with your business intel platforms

Just like a real person, generative AI needs data to produce good results. Use AI tools that integrate with your business intel platforms, like Zoominfo. This way, you can gather insights about potential leads – like their name, company, job title, and more – within seconds. 

This helps you get a better view of your leads, their background, and their interest, which leads to a deeper understanding of buyers’ personas and their needs. As AI gathers more information about the person it engages with, it can delve into finer details during conversations, providing better experiences for your prospects.

As a result, you improve interaction with your prospects, attain better response rates, and book more demos. 

Build and test your hypotheses

With generative AI integrated into your systems, checking and validating your assumptions is faster and cheaper. All you need to do is follow AI’s recommendations for targeting the right audience, with the right message and at the right time, to check your hypothesis on a smaller scale and implement it more widely if successful. 

For example, if you think adding GIFs in prospecting emails is a good idea, an AI sales assistant can recommend how to insert them naturally and the optimal size for a focused trial run. 

Even if the experiment fails, you save time, money, and, possibly, your reputation.

Make AI analyze its own performance

Generative AI is impressive, but you should always check that it works at its full capacity by measuring its performance. 

What’s the best way to do this? By asking AI.

AI can analyze its own performance to show you where it could improve, suggest new ways to use it, and make graphs so you can review its performance more easily.

For instance, you can check with AI which emails have the most opens and clicks. Based on this information, you can decide to improve the subject lines or the first lines of a message. 

Look for deep insights

AI-based sales tools can analyze people’s behavior to find the “whys” behind “whys.” If you need to know why your customers buy your product (they want to make their business processes more efficient), AI can discern their deeper motivation (for instance, they seek efficiency to scale their business).

AI can help you get past the first “why” and identify deeper motivations. This way, your sales team can appeal directly to the emotional mind that drives a prospect’s purchases.

Conclusion

AI sales tools can be invaluable if you use them to their full potential. They can help find and understand the prospects, qualify leads, draft an email in seconds, and provide insight into sales-related activities for data-driven decisions. All you need to do is integrate a sales AI solution with other business systems, use best practices like those we described above, and leverage its capabilities. AiSDR can help you do this. 

AiSDR is a sales automation tool that performs sales representatives’ tasks – from finding and qualifying prospects to guiding prospects down the sales funnel with emails – at a fraction of SDR’s salary. Integrating with ZoomInfo, Hubspot, and other business systems, AiSDR pulls all the necessary info to produce stellar results that drive demo bookings and sales. Book a demo to get a free trial of AiSDR and check it out for yourself.

FAQ

What is a sales prospecting tool?

A sales prospecting tool is software that automates and streamlines cumbersome lead qualification and prospecting tasks for your sales team.

Does AI have any role to play in sales?

Yes, AI plays a crucial role in sales by producing data-driven insights on a sales department’s performance, enhancing customer interactions, and automating mundane tasks, all in the service of driving revenue.

How can AI increase my profit?

AI can increase profit in several ways:

• by replacing SDRs in your sales team
• by automating processes to optimize business operations
• by personalizing customer experiences
• by identifying market trends and opportunities
• by improving data analysis to facilitate decision-making

Some of these benefits reduce spending, while others drive revenue, which drives profit higher.

What are the three ways of finding sales prospects?

Three ways of finding sales prospects are:

• networking and referrals
• online lead generation via social media, content creation, or advertising
• cold outreach through calling, email campaigns, and personalized messages

How is AI used in sales?

AI is used in sales in various ways, including:

• scoring and qualifying leads
• forecasting sales
• personalizing sales engagement
• automating sales processes 
• performing sales analytics that yields insights
• enabling chatbots and virtual assistants

Can AI take over sales?

The current capabilities of AI allow it to augment the capabilities of sales representatives, but it can’t fully replace people.