Artifical Intelligence or AI has found a spot everywhere in your day from water cooler conversations to your LinkedIn feed. It's time it becomes a part of your daily workflows too.

Everyone and their aunt Betty has an AI tool to recommend. While we can't vouch for aunty Betty's recommendations, what we know is that AI is here to stay around and get into your workflows. 88% of chief sales officers (CSOs) have already invested in or are considering investing in AI analytics tools and technologies, says Gartner.

So, it's about time you know how other sales teams and reps are using AI in their workflows to enhance productivity, improve productivity, and more importantly hitting that sweet quota.

Sales, meet Artifical Intelligence

Sales teams are leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning to improve the performance of their sales reps. AI is helping reps save time, automate repetitive tasks, and actually spend time selling.

The Convergence of Sales and AI

Artificial intelligence eliminates time-consuming manual tasks, such as logging sales activities, and aids in faster decision-making, such as calculating lead scores or making sales forecasts. By automating manual and time consuming sales tasks, AI saves sales reps time for more creative and strategic aspects of sales workflows where they can shine and bring that quota home.

There are many use cases for AI in sales, which can yield various benefits. AI boosts sales efficiency by analyzing customer data and automating repetitive tasks. It improves the accuracy of identifying the best leads and opportunities. A cool use case of AI is how the insights it captures from customer data allow sales teams to personalize sales messages to customers easily.

This article focuses on seven different ways AI is being used by sales reps and sales managers to improve sales efficiency, drive results, and hit their quotas.

7 Creative Ways Sales Reps Are Using AI

1. Personalized Email Campaigns with Predictive Analysis

Generative AI can analyze customer behavior and craft email content tailored to the client based on industry, needs, pain points, and the client’s previous interactions with your brand. It uses natural language processing (NLP) to generate new content. By optimizing email subject lines, messages, and send times, AI can support your email campaigns in a big way.

ChatGPT, for example, creates sales emails, answers prospect queries, provides product recommendations, and more. HubSpot agency partner Imagine Business Development uses Seventh Sense AI to optimize and personalize email delivery times for all contacts on their database. So, if a recipient is more likely to open an email at 10 a.m., they would receive it at that time.

2. Intelligent Chatbots for Immediate Customer Engagement

While today’s chatbots cannot handle all customer queries, they can instantly answer FAQs and provide product recommendations.  They can help improve the quality of leads by differentiating them based on criteria such as need, budget, and timeline. By assisting with lead qualification, chatbots speed up the sales process and free up time for sales reps for more high-value tasks. Chatbots are unique in that they’re available 24/7 and provide consistent responses.

3. AI-Powered Social Listening for Lead Generation

You already know you can use sentiment analysis to your advantage in shaping sales plans. Tools that use AI to monitor social media mentions and sentiments simplify your job. They monitor social media networks like LinkedIn, blogs, forums, news sites, and podcasts to identify leads.

Zoho Social CRM monitors brand mentions and keeps all your social conversations on a single dashboard. You can engage people mentioning your brand directly from the dashboard and leverage Facebook Lead Ads integration to capture and monitor leads in real-time.

Toplyne, for example, automatically processes all your user behavior data to identify which lead will likely become a potential customer. Not only do you save time on building a high-intent pipeline, but you’re also better able to focus your sales might on the best opportunities, closing deals quickly.

4. Virtual Sales Assistants for Scheduling and Follow-ups

Follow-ups are critical to sales, but checking in on existing customers is just as crucial for building deeper relations that boost cross-selling and upselling results and grow lifetime value. AI can help automate appointment scheduling and follow-up emails to customer needs and preferences. It is yet another mundane task that reps can cut from their days to focus on selling and hitting their quotas.

5. Conversation Analytics to Refine Sales Pitches

Sales managers can draw insights from conversation analytics to make informed decisions to improve their sales process and the effectiveness of prospect interactions. AI can assess the efficacy of sales conversations, evaluate sales reps’ performance, and predict prospect behavior. They generate summaries of sales calls, which sales leaders can review to improve their sales performance metrics.

6. Predictive Forecasting for Sales Outcomes

Artificial intelligence can accommodate a massive amount of datasets. This is great news for sales forecasting as it means you can use hundreds to thousands of data points and metrics to make sales forecasts that are vastly more accurate.

Using measures such as churn rates, customer experience ratings, and indicators such as historical sales data, AI algorithms can provide sales leaders with pricing and profitability guidance and sales professionals the data-driven insights that help them achieve their ambitious sales goals.  

7. Behavioral Lead Scoring

Spend hours gathering data about your customers’ firmographics, email engagement, buying preferences, and other things that can help you woo them successfully. AI-powered tools can make it far less tiresome, analyzing for you and scoring your leads to a high degree of accuracy.

Toplyne, for example, automatically processes all your user behavior data to identify which lead will likely become a potential customer. Not only do you save time on building a high-intent pipeline, but you’re also better able to focus your sales might on the best opportunities, closing deals quickly.

Here’s how companies like Canva and Vercel generate sales pipeline from their self-serve funnel using Toplyne's predictive AI:

• Step 1/7: Create monetization playbooks to surface conversion and expansion opportunities (leads most likely to convert to paying customers, and teams most likely to grow into larger teams)

• Step 2/7: Choose the right leads to target – users (individual users) or accounts (a group of users with an organization).

• Step 3/7: Select the frequency at which you would want leads synced in your GTM apps.

• Step 4/7: Define how many leads you want by either the number of leads or your expected win rate, depending on your sales capacity and GTM strategy.

• Step 5/7: Build custom segments - Build custom segments based on And/Or logic at the deepest level of sub-properties within your product analytics.

• Step 6/7: Validate your GTM strategy - Hold back some users as a control group to test your GTM strategy.

• Step 7/7: Sync your product qualified pipeline into your GTM destinations - CRMs, sales & marketing execution tools, and customer engagement platforms.

Conclusion

Salesforce’s State of Sales (Fourth Edition) report notes artificial intelligence as one of the top five sales tools that have become more valuable since 2019. From predictive analytics, automatic data entry, and lead scoring to social listening, chatbots, outreach, and conversational analytics, AI sales tools can save time, improve efficiency, drive customer interactions, and catalyze better sales performance.

You can leverage AI-powered tools to cut repetitive tasks in outbound sales and support your inbound sales activities. The tools offer templates and allow the creation of workflows to automate the required tasks in a simple, linear way. Leverage AI in your workflows to maximize your productivity, save time, and hit that sweet quota.