A glimpse at the future of AI-powered sales

Nearly a quarter of our way through the 21st century, one might assume that technology would be helping people get their work done.

Yet in sales organizations, it appears the opposite is true: Nearly half of sellers today say they’re overwhelmed by on-the-job tech, according to Gartner research.

That’s not just an annoyance—it’s a productivity killer. Gartner also reports that overwhelmed sellers are 43% less likely to meet quota than colleagues who aren’t suffering from tech overload.

Artificial intelligence has long promised to be a savior for sales and business teams by reducing overload (and busywork), not exacerbating it. Goldman Sachs estimates that AI could automate up to 31% of sales tasks, and nearly 8 in 10 salespeople believe AI can help them spend more time on actual selling, according to a 2023 HubSpot report.

Despite the potential benefits, sales teams have not been early adopters of AI for intrinsic reasons: Sales remains a very people-driven process, and in B2B marketplaces, sales cycles are long and heavily relationship-based.

Modern AI tools have the power to assist sellers with those relationships, but they are not designed to replace the critical human touch. Here’s a look at four distinct AI use cases that can give sales teams a big lift in the coming years.

1. Offloading administrative scut work

The traditional sales funnel is a complex sequence: prospecting, lead qualification, company research, pitching, objection handling, closing, and nurturing. Without automated assistance, sellers must do a lot of manual work: scouring LinkedIn for leads, scheduling qualifying conversations, writing pitches. The busywork can be endless.

Adam Purvis, an account manager at customer support provider Coconut Software, turned to generative AI recently after feeling bogged down by admin chores that took up most of his day, such as coming up with subject lines. Now, he pulls a ChatGPT query from his list of pre-generated prompts and finds a workable subject line idea in seconds. “I can do all that with a click rather than sitting there trying to brainstorm myself,” says Purvis. “That's the sort of stuff that accelerates my workflow.”

Generative AI can serve as a handy assistant in other ways for sales teams, according to Harvard Business Review, such as mining analytics data for actionable insights,  personalizing content, and speeding up sales planning.

2. Better, faster forecasting

Prospecting, lead generation, and qualification rely heavily on personal communication. Sellers are usually sifting through prospects’ behaviors, attempting to glean useful takeaways, or closely analyzing their emails, phone calls, and other interactions to send the most effective follow-up to keep potential customers interested.

Instead of parsing all of this manually, sales reps can use it to inform generative AI models that produce better recommendations—in seconds—on which next steps can deliver a successful sale.

For example, Clari, a multipurpose revenue operations platform, has been a valuable tool for helping Purvis improve his sales forecasts. He uses the program to sort prospects by analyzing variables such as length of deal and stakeholder engagement. The pipeline management tool, meanwhile, has been helpful in organizing his team, unifying revenue metrics and sales trends.

Olivia Lin, partnerships manager at brick machinery company Tabrick, has also found AI to be especially effective at this stage. “AI-driven CRM software helps me analyze customer data, allowing for more personalized interactions and efficient lead management,” says Lin. With AI tools, she adds, “we saw a 30% increase in the number of high-quality leads, enabling us to focus our efforts on the most promising prospects.”

3. Super-personalized communications

Sellers are also using AI writing tools powered by natural language processing (NLP) to develop personalized content for outreach and nurturing. ChatGPT is one popular option; Jasper is another generative AI-based platform that creates a variety of content types tailored to marketers and sellers.

Read also: Generative AI: A new catalyst in customer support

Beyond content creation, sales teams are also experimenting with AI-powered chatbots to offer immediate, personalized support to leads and customers in the nurturing stage. These tools offer 24/7 support, allowing prospective customers to feel engaged throughout the entire process, all while giving salespeople more time to focus on other tasks. Even if they’re not interacting directly with a sales representative at that moment, they’re able to get an immediate answer.

4. Real-time sales coaching

AI tools can help sales teams receive real-time feedback on their outreach efforts. Without coaching software, sales reps might only receive feedback when their managers have time. That typically amounts to about an hour per week, according to HubSpot research.

AI tools can handle much higher volumes of coaching feedback by mining customer interactions and sellers’ responses in real time and instantly generating recommendations on how follow-up interactions could be improved.

Compared to forecasting and content generation, such AI-powered coaching tools are still fairly nascent. But emerging tools such as MeetRecord, Gong, and Siro are already helping sales teams receive valuable, concrete feedback.

The path to faster adoption (and value)

AI will factor heavily into the future of how sales organizations function. But the path forward isn’t clear just yet.

While large sales-software vendors already layer AI into their platforms, they don’t yet offer comprehensive capabilities. Today, 40% of executives say their sellers use at least four to five applications to perform their jobs, according to a Salesloft survey.

“Consolidation of tools is essential,” says Purvis. “An effective AI-powered solution will have generative AI, conversation intelligence, and AI sales forecasting.”

Another hurdle is perception. Sales teams are not immune to the widespread fear that follows AI; after all, automation has already phased out hundreds of thousands of jobs. But with less time spent on tedious managerial tasks, sales teams can gain time back to focus on selling.

The true potential for AI rests in making these interactions more effective. Since only 37% of sales organizations are currently using AI, a Salesforce report notes, this could be the difference that gives seasoned sellers an edge against the competition.

Purvis says, “People who say that there's no place for sales AI are totally missing the big picture of where this is going to go five to 10 years from now.”

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