AI for sales

12 July 2024

Authors

Keith O'Brien

Writer, IBM Consulting

Amanda Downie

Editorial Content Strategist, IBM

What is AI for sales?

AI for sales is the process in which organizations use artificial intelligence (AI) to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their sales operation.

AI is an increasingly powerful tool for organizations to use across all departments, including marketing and HR. It helps sales teams better identify leads, keep prospects warm and close sales, while moving people through the sales funnel quicker. AI-driven sales teams are likely to outperform those who do not use these AI sales technologies.

Creating AI-powered sales teams speeds up decision-making, driving more value to the organization. Sales leaders are among the most vocal advocates for the use of AI. It is especially helpful in B2B sales scenarios where sales cycles are a bit longer and costs of goods or services are often higher. Organizations are helping their sales enablement by encouraging AI use throughout the sales process.

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Types of AI in sales

There are several key AI technologies that enhance sales strategy.

Conversational AI

These are technologies that converse with users. They use machine learning and natural language processing to mimic human interactions and speak with customers by using multiple languages. Conversational AI can help sales organizations provide more recommendations to users, potentially identifying cross-sell opportunities.

Computer vision

This is another AI technology that uses machine learning and neural networks. Computer vision instructs computers and systems to identify insights from digital images, videos and other visual inputs.

Predictive analytics

This approach takes historical first-party data and industry data to better understand what is likely to happen in the future. AI superpowers organizations’ ability to conduct predictive analytics and forecasting, making more accurate decisions about where sales growth will come from and what resources are needed to meet future sales goals.

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Generative AI in sales

Generative AI is a huge tool for sales professionals. It can power several key use cases that salespeople use to augment their jobs or organizations deploy to interact directly with customers. Generative AI can serve as a real-time copilot for sales representatives looking to improve how quickly they can close deals. Salespeople can ask generative AI for answers to tricky questions from prospects.

Many sales teams are beginning to use generative AI to help with content associated with lead generation outreach. AI content creation can take the content of a white paper and draft a sample blog post, social media post and email. A salesperson can then review to ensure that everything is accurate. It can also create many variations of source material, providing opportunities to try out different pieces of content for different audiences.

Creating content faster with more personalized messages gives both sales and marketing teams more opportunities to reach important prospects with content that will resonate with them.

AI in sales tools

There are several AI sales tools that can provide value, many of which are part of sales technology integrations.

Customer relationship management (CRM)

AI can supercharge how CRM tools store information and make it available for sales professionals. It can parse customer data to improve the taxonomy and organization of content. AI can improve CRM data by appending industries and titles to individuals in the database by scanning information on the web. It can help sales organizations in other ways. if an organization publishes a piece of content about the insurance industry, AI can identify all relevant parties in the organization’s database and create a list to whom representatives can send the content.

Sales automation

AI-driven automation can eliminate many time-consuming and repetitive tasks and accelerate workflows. Sales AI tools often use algorithms to automate sales operations, like adding information from customer calls and emails to a CRM database. AI can also streamline several key follow-ups to prospects after a sales call. It can send relevant materials, draft and send a follow-up message and remind sales representatives when they need to call the prospect back.

Chatbots and virtual agents

These tools help sales representatives better manage their time by answering simple questions from customers. Organizations use virtual agent technology, which combines natural language processing, intelligent search and robotic process automation (RPA), to power chatbots. Chatbots engage with users to answer questions and provide suggestions. It can also help those sales representatives have more productive conversations with prospects by collecting important data from chat transcripts. While chatbots have been around for some time, the addition of AI makes them smarter and more efficient.

AI in sales use cases

There are several use cases that explain why organizations are using AI in their sales activities to improve sales performance like sales conversion rates and other key metrics.

  • Sales engagement: It can help sales managers and sales assistants better manage their daily activities. It can help organizations quickly move customers through the sales funnel and more readily provide answers to their pressing questions. AI can pull together and synthesize a customers’ entire purchase history so the sales representative can better assist that customer.
  • Sales forecasting: An organization can use machine learning to analyze their sales data to see when sales are more likely to occur, improving their sales forecasting abilities. For example, AI can help identify expected growth in Latin America because of emerging signals in the data.
  • Call summary automation: AI can parse entire transcripts and provide key takeaways, next steps or tasks from sales calls by using conversation intelligence. Sales professionals can focus on engaging with the prospects instead of typing notes, knowing that the AI technology captures important information from the meeting. It can also scan and parse responses to sales emails, creating a list of tasks that the sales representative needs to accomplish to close the deal.
  • Lead scoring: No two customers are exactly alike. AI can ingest many data points about customer behaviors to understand how likely any individual is to make a purchase. Capturing and analyzing data manually is a huge undertaking for many organizations. Using AI to sift through the data and assign a score to each prospect helps free up sales representatives to devote more time to high-profile customers and prospects. It will also likely be more accurate than if a sales representative attempts to assign their own score.
  • Data collection and analysis: Organizations can use tools such as machine learning and other AI tools to manage their data better. It can eliminate the need for manual data entry, freeing up sales representatives to focus more on improving customer interactions. It can also help organizations understand their datasets better and drive greater insights. For example, it can access sales intelligence created by AI to know whether a prospect or existing customer is an upsell candidate.

AI in sales benefits

There are a range of benefits for using AI in sales.

  • Increased sales optimizations: Organizations that use AI improve efficiency in several key areas, and sales is no different. Sales reps who use AI are armed with more knowledge and resources so they can perform tasks quicker.
  • Quicker time-to-sale: Those sales professionals can use AI to provide prospects with more tailored content and answer those individuals’ questions quicker, helping them move those prospects quicker through the sales funnel.
  • Stronger customer experience: Customers are increasingly comfortable with interacting with AI if it provides value. Organizations are increasingly using customer-facing AI to answer consumer questions and provide access to important content.
  • Happier employees: Using AI helps employees find more value in their jobs by removing unnecessary manual tasks and freeing them up to make more meaningful connections with fellow employees and prospects.
  • Accelerated time-to-market: Organizations can use AI to parse customer conversations to identify unmet needs or ideas for new products. Actionable insights can provide justification for expanding to new markets or retooling an existing product.

AI in sales best practices

While every organization is different, there are some key guardrails that every organization should follow.

Establish governance and safety policies

Organizations must use AI responsibly to protect important customer data and to avoid potential misuse. Building AI into their systems requires organizations to include the legal and IT teams to create the right system to use AI the right way.

Identify technology gaps

Organizations have several options for how they use AI and what specific tools they use. They can choose to partner with third parties or try to build their own systems. The IT team should get involved at the beginning of the process and drive strategic decisions on which technologies the organization will use and where.

Reskill and upskill the sales team

Sales professionals need to learn how to use the tools to their benefit. Therefore, organizations should invest in training to educate the workforce on how to use AI to augment their jobs and grow their pipelines.

Set a clear strategy

Using AI requires executives to make several important decisions, allocate their human resources appropriately and identify where to make investments. The entire organization needs to align around how to adopt and master AI.

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