By Winnie Palmer, EMEA Head of Marketing at Seismic
ChatGPT sparked waves of interest in the business world, highlighting the transformative potential of AI. Since then, AI has steadily infiltrated sales and marketing functions, overcoming years of market scepticism and economic headwinds. When used effectively, it is a tool that can improve buyer engagement by drawing insights from content, streamlining the sales process, and helping sales leaders guide and strengthen their teams.
As a result, 80% of sales leaders expect an average of 23% revenue growth from AI utilisation over the coming five years. On top of that, nearly 70% believe companies that fail to incorporate AI into their GTM processes effectively will fall behind their competitors by 2026.
However, AI is a tool that shouldn’t be rushed. It’s all about working smarter, not harder, and an unchecked or rushed AI implementation can easily lead to an inefficient operation and jeopardise customer and prospect trust. So, how should businesses use AI to empower their sales operations?
Using robots to humanise sales
Building successful customer relationships means creating excellent connections, building trust, and delivering personalised interactions. But, contrary to popular belief, using AI in sales doesn’t necessarily conflict with human-to-human interactions; indeed, tools such as AI-powered transcription, conversation takeaways, and sentiment analysis are designed to enhance them.
For example, AI doesn’t forget. That means it can make notes during meetings, summarise, and remind sellers about the important parts, regardless of how much time passes or how many clients and meetings the seller has. As a result, a seller using AI effectively will have a much easier time keeping track of important events such as a prospect’s promotion, new hires, and personal events. This lets them focus on the conversation instead of making notes, helping sellers deliver personalised experiences consistently at scale.
On top of supporting relationship-building, AI-powered tools can help sellers thrive in the digital jungle of content, particularly with email and social media.
Since digital communication is all about personalising efficiently, sales reps often need to send similar emails to many prospects or customers. Using AI, marketing and sales can create templated prompts to generate personalised recommendations based on deal factors and buyer profiles that they can review and approve before sending.
Similarly, creating high-quality, value-adding content on social media while maintaining compliance takes time and effort. As a result, posts often lack depth or analysis, and companies may be unable to ensure individual seller-level governance. There’s also the issue of content history and control, which is crucial in financial industries. With AI, sellers can generate post suggestions with personalised commentary in seconds that is on-brand and compliant.
Business is personal
Personalisation is the way forward, and prospects now expect personalised content at every touchpoint, from social media to email to digital sales rooms. According to McKinsey, personalisation can boost revenue by as much as 40%.
AI can improve personalisation by, for example, becoming a personal meeting assistant. It can provide benefits such as transcription, summaries, action items, reminders, recommendations, and so much more. It can also help personalise content resources by curating and distributing content based on contextual information and leveraging curated templates such as sales decks, how-to guides, and market insights.
This saves sellers and marketers significant time and effort and ensures that their content is always personal, on-brand, and compliant.
In addition, the traditional hours-long sales training broadcast may soon be replaced by AI-powered platforms as these can now provide on-the-job learning tailored to the individual needs of each salesperson.
For example, sellers can practice with AI and engage in peer-to-peer learning, and have the AI highlight individual dos and don’ts, providing a personalised checklist and/or suggested approach to skills development. It can also provide access to customer queries and answers on the spot, leveraging peer-to-peer knowledge sharing opportunity to improving learning even further.
This helps salespeople perfect what to say, show, and do at the right time, leading to shorter onboarding times for new hires and continuous upskilling for existing reps.
According to a recent study, the enablement industry recognises the abovementioned potential of AI. The numbers show it’s keen to continue applying AI to go-to-market (GTM) processes, particularly considering AI’s latest improvements.
This is a direct result of positive business outcomes from using AI, where over 90% claimed it had improved operational optimisation, enhanced buyer experience, and improved agility and efficiency.
Using AI requires consideration
Yet, while this report demonstrates the potential of AI and sales leaders’ interest, it also identifies a significant gap in their understanding of how AI works in GTM processes.
Despite the majority citing AI as a primary driver for their sales enablement investments, in this recent study, less than half said they were either somewhat or very familiar with AI’s specific application. Additionally, nearly 80% of those who adopted AI tools reported initial hurdles before they eventually saw positives, showing that the implementation can be a complex and time-consuming challenge.
In other words, there’s a clear need for support.
To implement and use AI in sales effectively, efficiently, in a compliant fashion, and responsibly, businesses need consider carefully their AI strategy, coupled with strong enablement programmes that add value to their teams and can be implemented seamlessly. This way businesses can truly enable their teams to perform more effectively in delivering the desired business outcomes.
