How to Build a Virtual Sales Team: Key Roles to Fill
Explore how to build a virtual sales team powered by AI
Building a virtual sales team powered or supported by AI sales tools can be a smart move for companies looking to scale without inflating costs and headcount. With AI sales software, you and your team can tackle prospecting, qualification, scoring, and email outreach more efficiently and with less hassle.
In fact, the right mix of human specialists and AI support can boost productivity and reach more customers while reducing the risks of team churn and burnout.
But before you completely remake your sales team with AI support, you’ll need to know where and how AI can help human salespeople.
Benefits of using an AI to support a virtual sales team
AI isn’t about to completely replace humans. There’s no need to fire your whole sales team and replace it with AI sales tools.
With the right configuration, AI can double or triple your sales team’s current performance, allowing you to avoid growing headcount just to scale.
Here are some of the benefits of having AI provide support for your sales.
24/7 availability
AI doesn’t take a nap to recharge — it works around the clock to help you meet goals. It can book meetings, launch campaigns, and follow up with leads at any time of the day. If your business works with customers in different time zones, an AI SDR is ideal.
Scalability
AI sales tools can quickly handle large volumes of data and multiple tasks. For example, you can find leads and send email campaigns to thousands of prospects in just a few minutes. It’s also easy to instruct AI sales tools to write emails based on high-performing frameworks:
- Awareness – Credibility – Conviction – Action (ACCA)
- Attention – Interest – Desire – Action (AIDA)
- Justin Michael Method (JMM)
- Show Me You Know Me (SMYKM)
Cost-effectiveness
The average cost of an in-house SDR is $4,500 per month, while AiSDR costs just $750 per month. Just based on the raw numbers, this makes it 83% less expensive than hiring a full-time SDR, and that doesn’t even account for the cost of hiring, benefits, and taxes.
Then there are other savings in the form of consolidating software subscriptions. Many AI solutions provide build-in lead databases or integrations with providers like ZoomInfo. This lets you cancel your original subscription and receive the benefits of both tools without two price tags.
Efficiency
An AI solution can carry out many routine tasks like lead generation, follow-ups, and data entry more efficiently than human SDRs, and it can do so without errors. For example, human SDRs can forget to follow up with prospects, or they might send similar messages to all leads without personalizing them. AI, in contrast, will always personalize messages, analyze email metrics, and learn to improve with every task it performs.
Key sales team roles that AI can make more efficient
A team is only as strong as its weakest link. That’s why the performance of each member of your sales team defines the sales strategy’s success.
Here’s a look at the main sales team roles and how AI can help human reps reach their potential or cover for the role if you don’t have one yet.
Sales manager
Sales managers supervise and evaluate the performance of sales representatives. These managers play a key role in creating sales strategies and generating revenue for your business. Their main responsibilities are to:
- Hire, train, lead, and supervise sales teams
- Create sales strategies and coordinate all sales activities
- Build and manage sales pipelines
- Analyze sales data, create reports, and make forecasts
While AI can’t fully replace sales managers, it can make their work much easier and let them focus on more strategic tasks.
Sales manager tasks to delegate to AI
Here are a few of the tasks that a sales manager can delegate to AI.
Sales rep training
Sales managers are often overloaded with tasks, and they struggle to make enough time to train their reps. That’s where AI can help. AI agents can roleplay sales calls with your reps using different sales scenarios and give personalized feedback. This can help sales managers who aren’t even present on a call review how reps communicate with prospects and offer tips on how to improve communication.
Customer analysis
You can’t have a sales strategy if you don’t know your customer. AI can help sales managers refine customer personas and create personalized sales offers.
For example, with AiSDR, if you enter as much information as possible about your company and what you sell, AiSDR will use that data to help you create a sales persona that will run your outreach and personalize emails based on the data you’ve collected about each lead.
Sales forecasting
AI can process datasets from ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) systems, sales tools, and public records and describe their variables. This ensures more accurate forecasts for every variable that impacts your revenue.
Implementation tips
Here are some tips that will help improve your sales manager’s performance.
Figure out which tasks to delegate to AI and which the sales manager will perform.
As the sales manager role is strategic and requires a lot of expertise, you can’t fully delegate all of their responsibilities to AI. The questions below will help you decide which tasks AI can do and which should be handled by the sales manager.
- Motivation: Is the reward for completing the task much higher than the time investment? Is the sales manager motivated to complete the task?
- Proximity with the customer: Does this task require interaction with a hot lead?
- Difficulty: Does this task require expertise, social skills, or creativity?
- Risk: Does this task greatly impact the business, and is there a risk involved in performing the task?
If you answer yes to these questions, these tasks require human input.
Configure and test the AI agent’s data collection and reporting abilities.
No matter how advanced an AI tool is, you can’t fully rely on it without human monitoring.
To improve the performance of AI, you need to regularly test and train it on new data, such as transaction and interaction history for predictive analytics, past emails for automated outreach campaigns, or examples of good proposals for gen AI models.
Account executive
An account executive is a manager who not only finds new prospects but also maintains relationships with existing clients, keeps them happy, and figures out how to increase revenue.
Their responsibilities typically include:
- Building strong relationships with key accounts
- Growing existing accounts and reaching out to them with new opportunities
- Improving communication with customers, analyzing customer behavior, and retaining existing customers
- Identifying potential customers
- Maintaining customer satisfaction and loyalty
Account executive tasks to delegate to AI
Here are some responsibilities that account executives could hand off to AI.
Alert account executives to new opportunities
One of the main responsibilities of the account manager is to grow existing accounts, and AI can help by analyzing customers’ past behavior, industry trends, clients’ company updates, and CRM data. The AI agent can then alert managers when it’s time to engage existing customers with cross-selling opportunities.
Help connect with the right clients
AI can help account managers pinpoint high-value prospects based on various criteria. For example, AiSDR has a built-in lead database containing contact info for over 700 million leads. It also checks websites, job listings, and social media to see if prospects and companies intend to purchase or hire.
Implementation tips
Here are some tips to get the most out of AI for account management.
Train the AI to understand the specific needs of key accounts
For AI to anticipate the needs of key accounts, you need to train it with customer data, including customer purchase history, customer interactions with your company, sales calls and proposals, CRM records, and client industry trends.
Remember that AI is only as good as the data it’s trained on.
Integrate your AI SDR with your CRM for easy lead management and communication
Certain tools like AiSDR have a native 2-way HubSpot integration, so you can sync your active and static lists and follow up on any inbound requests. You can also set AiSDR to automatically nurture and fast-track prospects through the sales funnel.
Sales development representative
A sales development representative is a junior salesperson focusing on outreach, prospecting, and lead qualification.
SDRs don’t focus on closing deals but on connecting with as many leads as possible and qualifying them to determine whether they fit one of the company’s buyer personas.
Their main responsibilities are:
- Researching prospects
- Conducting outreach
- Making cold calls
- Email outreach
- Selling via social media
- Qualifying leads
SDR tasks to delegate to AI
Here are a couple of SDR tasks that can be passed off to AI.
Run personalized email outreach campaigns
Human SDRs need 20–30 minutes to create a personalized email. We spent over 349 days developing a sales AI that can create crisp, pointed messages in just five seconds. Every message is customized using LinkedIn data and the successful scripts of over fifty sales leaders.
Automate follow-ups based on context and manage cold emails
AiSDR will make sure every lead receives a follow-up over text or email until the campaign times out or the AI gets a response.
Analyze buyer intent
AiSDR’s lead discovery engine combines different types of low and high intent data, as well as search filters to find leads and automatically add them to outreach campaigns. For example, you can tell the AI to look for companies that just closed a successful funding round or posted new job vacancies.
You can also opt for a hybrid team comprised of both AI sales assistants and human SDRs. For instance, AI SDRs handle creating emails, cold email outreach, and follow-ups and human SDRs focus on cold calling, building relationships with clients, and generating new outreach strategies.
Implementation tips
Here are some ways you can enhance the performance of an AI SDR.
Establish criteria for lead qualification that the AI can learn from
SDRs use a variety of methods for lead qualification. This might be asking questions to determine if a lead fits a company’s buyer persona. If you feed answers to these questions to AI, it can use it to qualify leads and send your SDR only the ones who are most likely to buy.
Monitor and adjust the AI SDR’s approach based on results
Track performance metrics and adjust the AI SDR’s approach. For example, if you notice that email open rates are low, consider suggesting AI SDR add more personalization to outreach emails. Train the AI to know which messages succeed, which drive the best deals, and which to stop sending.
Connect the AI SDR to HubSpot so it can respond to inbound requests and referrals
AiSDR provides the market’s deepest HubSpot integration. Sync your active and static lists, enroll new leads into intent-based campaigns, and personalize messages using custom properties.
Business development representative
A business development representative (BDR) is the sales position responsible for generating new business opportunities for the organization. Their duties typically include:
- Seeking out potential leads
- Prospecting
- Qualifying prospects
- Client nurturing
- Market analysis
BDR tasks to delegate to AI
Here are a few of the ways AI can support BDRs in carrying out their tasks.
Find opportunities
AI can monitor internal and external customer data to inform BDRs about new opportunities and revenue streams. Or if you proceed with an AI BDR, it will carry out lead research based on your ideal customer profile.
Get accurate data to connect with prospects
AI platforms can provide a huge database of prospects with accurate and updated data to help you create a personalized pitch. It can include their company updates, details about industry trends, their current position, etc.
Automate high-volume tasks
From scheduling meetings and transcribing calls to summarizing research, AI can free up a lot of time BDRs would spend manually processing information. By using AI, your reps can focus on selling instead.
Implementation tips
Here’s how you can make the most of using AI for BDRs.
Configure the AI to search for lookalike audiences similar to your current audience
Feed the AI your buyer persona portraits and the database of your current customers so it can look for audiences similar to your current one.
Fine-tune the AI by providing your high-performing emails and follow-ups.
List the do’s and don’ts of your writing style, and provide good email examples. AiSDR will create emails that sound like your team created them.
Sales operation specialist
Sales operations specialists are responsible for analyzing and improving the efficiency of your company’s sales operations. They analyze data from different resources such as CRM, ERP, and customer feedback and come up with new ideas and strategies for improving the sales process.
Their main responsibilities are:
- Analyzing the sales pipeline and sales analytics
- Tracking the sales team’s progress
- Analyzing sales strategies and constantly improving them
- Managing and optimizing the performance of sales tools
Sales ops tasks to delegate to AI
The right AI-powered B2B sales tool can be assigned to these tasks.
Sales pipeline analysis
By analyzing data on conversions, lead interactions, and customer behavior, AI can identify areas for improvement.
Sales strategy refinement
AI can analyze historical sales data, existing pipeline opportunities, and sales rep activities to predict sales performance and help adjust the sales strategy accordingly.
