Generative AI for Sales

Imagine a virtual assistant that can take the drudgery out of everyday tasks — things like data analysis, drafting emails, and competitive research. Instead of spending hours on boring tasks, you and your team could focus on building relationships that matter with your customers.

Just a few years ago, this idea was far-fetched. Today, it’s a reality. Artificial intelligence (AI) is an indispensable tool for sales pros and business professionals alike.

Read on to learn how to take advantage of generative AI for sales and get back to more human interaction.

What you’ll learn:

• What is generative AI for sales?
• Generative AI use cases for sales
• 10 Ways to integrate generative AI into your sales strategy

In the sales world, generative AI uses simple prompts to create copy (like prospecting emails) and make recommendations (like suggestions for quick-win deals) that are critical to efficient sales processes. It does this by analyzing your existing sales and customer data to help you draft emails, or determine which messages or resources would help advance a sales conversation. All of this should be integrated into your CRM, where sales and customer data live.

Generative AI models describe algorithms that can be used to create new content. They can also create audio, code, images, text, simulations, and video. Generative AI gets “smarter” by learning patterns every time a human being enters information. It also scrapes the internet — including newspaper archives, your competitor matrix, your value props, your case studies — for relevant information and data.

Nearly 4 of 5 sales leaders (78%) are concerned that their company is missing the boat on generative AI, according to Salesforce’s Trends in Data and Analytics for Sales report. One of the most impressive aspects of generative AI is that it creates new content almost instantly. It can create emails and sales pitches as well as give real-time guidance for next steps that are indistinguishable from — or even better than — content created by humans. And with an AI sales guide built directly into your CRM, it can help do all sorts of other useful things:

With generative AI, you can automate the chore of prospect and account research. Quickly generate concise summaries from your sales calls , better understand your competition, and eliminate manual data entry.

With conversational intelligence added to your CRM, generative AI transcribes and summarizes sales calls in seconds. It flags key moments in conversations to help you spot things such as objections, competitor mentions, attitudes on pricing, and more. Take an in-depth look at what your team is doing right during sales calls — and what they need to improve.

Generative AI can analyze the effectiveness of sales campaigns, providing personalized close plans tailored to your customer and sales process. It can also increase conversion rates by offering step-by-step guidance with milestones grounded in CRM data.

Personalized content such as product descriptions, marketing materials, and case studies can be written in a snap with generative AI. It also creates personalized sales proposals and presentations based on the specific needs and interests of each prospect. Generative AI even recommends specific products or services based on a customer’s past interactions and preferences.

Generative AI summarizes lead opportunity and other CRM records to identify the likelihood of closing a deal. Instantly qualify and pass hot leads to reps directly from your website.

Using the data from current business trends, generative AI creates forecasts. It also assesses potential gaps in your sales pipeline and offers a corrective course of action.

Closing can be a challenging part of the sales process: the Trends report says 79% of sales teams agree that personalization is difficult to execute at scale. Generative AI solves that, creating an action plan tailored for your customer and your sales process. It can also provide a bulleted summary of calls and identify customer sentiment, so you have better context for moving deals to close.

The Trends report found that 96% of sales pros agree data is essential to keep up with customer expectations. Generative AI analyzes customer data so reps can prioritize the most promising leads. It also creates accurate sales forecasts by analyzing historical sales data and identifying patterns and trends. With those deep insights into customer behavior, preferences, and purchasing patterns, sales reps can individualize their approach.

Generative AI can build customized sales skills training programs based on the individual needs of every individual on the sales team.  Got a new SDR, yes, Generative AI can build a specific training and reinforcement program for them.  Got a veteran rep who needs to do a 7-figure negotiation with a Fortune 10 company and their procurement department? No problem, Generative AI can create a simulation that even the most skilled reps can keep learning and practicing.

And that’s just the beginning. As the technology evolves, the number of available tools — and generative AI’s power to learn and imitate human skills — will only continue to improve.

In my experience, AI can give you a great head start on your work. It gets things started so you can spend more time on high-value activities instead of getting bogged down in drudgery.

For example, I create content for the blog on my website. Before generative AI, I would spend a lot of time just getting my ideas organized. Now, I can use the tool to create a first draft. That way, I have my initial thoughts down, and I can start doing the creative work of finessing the writing to be just right.

That’s just one way to put generative AI to work for your sales strategy. Here are ten more:

First things first: Make sure your generative AI is integrated with your CRM software. Salesforce Platform is built into Sales Cloud to give you a seamless experience based on trusted data.

Sellers spend hours a week (a day?) crafting emails that are personalized, targeted, and meaningful. Generative AI is poised to take this task on. How? AI writes personalized emails by studying customer information already stored in the CRM. That information includes the history of your customer interactions, the products that your prospect is interested in or has already bought, and even data from previous conversations.

The result is that a sales rep can write emails faster without sacrificing quality. First, the sales rep can give the AI tool a prompt: “Email Jeffrey Leu to invite him to our upcoming annual conference.” The AI tool can pull up the customer record and draft an email that shares the boilerplate information with a personalized nod to their previous interactions: “Hey, Jeff! We’ve previously discussed your interest in electric vehicles, so I wanted to invite you to come to our upcoming conference about innovations in the electric car industry.”

Establishing trust with a prospect during discovery will always be a deeply human process. But humans aren’t perfect — sometimes we miss body language and verbal cues that show a prospect is struggling or has concerns. With AI built directly into CRM, reps gain insights they would otherwise miss on sales calls.

With generative AI, you can use text-based prompts in presentation tools to create tailored decks and pitches in minutes. It can enhance presentations by providing dynamic, data-driven content adjustments and analyzing audience reactions and engagement metrics. Generative AI can also make on-the-fly suggestions to improve the presentation’s focus and generate visual aids and personalized talking points.

Sales reps can spend huge parts of their day generating, pulling, and analyzing data — and with so much to look at, it’s easy to miss big-win deal opportunities. Generative AI acts like a personal data analyst to uncover patterns and relationships in your CRM data almost instantaneously, pointing you toward high-value deals and those likely to close. Even better, it adapts to changing dynamics and customer information in real time, helping you modify your sales approach to make it more effective.

Generative AI has revolutionized sales lead scoring and prioritization. It analyzes vast amounts of data to identify high-potential prospects. Then the AI evaluates customer behavior, engagement levels, and historical data to assign accurate lead scores. This way, reps can focus on the prospects that are most likely to close.

Chatbots can help streamline initial customer interactions. These generative AI-driven tools can provide instant, accurate responses to inquiries, qualify leads, and gather essential customer information. And by pulling important details to pass on to human reps, these virtual assistants maximize sellers’ time so they can focus on more complex issues.

Teach and coach every rep the techniques of your top rep. Ramp up new hires fast by incorporating your specific value props and related information from your CRM alongside successful sales calls and circulating best-in-class techniques across the team. Create milestone-based programs that deliver outcomes. Effective sales coaching gives your team the support they need to do their jobs well.

Follow generative AI regulations to ensure the use of AI complies with data privacy regulations. Put guidelines into place to make sure the AI-generated content created for your team is used ethically.

Monitor the performance of your new generative AI tools and their impact on sales metrics, such as conversion rates and lead response times. Collect feedback from your sales team and customers to identify areas for improvement. Regularly update and retrain generative AI tools with new data to ensure they remain effective and accurate.

Generative AI for sales has lots of benefits. It can help you write knockout pitches and emails, make the discovery process pop, and analyze a slew of data in seconds. In other words, it’s a tool that can handle the busywork so you can sell more efficiently.

Automation and AI can deliver personalized experiences and revolutionize customer service. What they won’t do is replace the personal aspect of sales. Sales is inherently about relationships. That’s why generative AI is important for business but will continue to rely on the human touch.