How Top Sales Professionals Are Using Artificial Intelligence to Sell Faster

Here, I spoke with top sales experts to find out where they see the biggest opportunities with artificial intelligence in sales.  

Let's dive in.

How Sales Professionals Are Using Artificial Intelligence

1. Writing prospecting messages.

Thanks to AI, the days of generic emails and LinkedIn messages are over.

Now, salespeople can leverage AI tools to write the perfect prospecting message — one that is personalized, compelling, and highly relevant. In fact, 31% of sales professionals already use AI for this purpose.

For Dan Tyre, Sales Director at HubSpot, AI operates as a research assistant, helping him collect key information about prospects before reaching out. 

"I use ChatSpot four times an hour to access information that helps in the sales process. For example, before I email a prospect, I use it to find company news and what technology they use," he told me.

2. Perfecting the sales call.

"The ability to advance reps' prep before a discovery call is, to me, one of the best uses of AI in the discovery process," said Jake Dunlap, host of the Jake Dunlap Show. "ChatGPT is fantastic for helping reps prep before the actual call, and some tools can coach reps during or post-call by analyzing the conversation."

Consider a tool like SecondNature. Using this tool, sales reps speak to an AI avatar, Jenny, who fills the role of a prospect — lobbing objections, asking questions, and sharing information about her company.

It then tracks how much information the sales rep was able to uncover, how well they responded to questions, and areas for improvement.

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Unlike traditional training, AI offers a more interactive and personalized approach. It's not replacing the sales manager – or their expertise, experience, and credibility. But it can surface insights to make their training more effective. For instance, managers can review each rep's performance, identify broader areas of improvement, and leverage these insights in future trainings.

3. Identifying the right prospects.

For Tyre, AI is an invaluable tool for targeting the most promising prospects. He told me, "To find prospects that are a good fit, I use ChatSpot to identify leads based on their industry, location, and size."

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Before AI, scoring leads was mostly a manual process with some basic number crunching. Nowadays, AI is opening the door to more advanced and accurate lead scoring due to its ability to process thousands of data points to find patterns and opportunities the human eye might miss.

For sales reps, this means more time to focus on the most promising prospects, ultimately leading to more closed deals.

4. Bridging the gap between marketing and sales.

"Marketing-sales misalignment is a huge problem that could benefit from AI's ability to analyze and categorize data,"Ryan Gunn, Director of Demand Gen & Marketing Ops at Aptitude 8, told me.

"Imagine you're working a deal and need a piece of content to nudge the prospect along. AI could look at the data in your deal record and recommend relevant content that your marketing team has already created."

When marketing and sales teams are unified, they can maximize AI to target promising leads and effectively guide them through the sales funnel.

5. Automating menial tasks.

If you're in sales, you know that non-selling activities are a huge time sink. You might be stuck entering data into your CRM, scheduling (and then re-scheduling) meetings, or writing sales collateral.

While these tasks are important, they often pull salespeople away from what they do best — selling. That's where AI comes in.

A staggering 79% of salespeople using AI say it allows them to spend more time selling. These tools can help with the following:

• Data entry: to help you add contacts, create reports, and retrieve information.
• Email automation: to help you draft personalized emails, create subject lines, and send emails at optimized times.
• Calendar management: to help you schedule meetings, send reminders, and sync your calendar with other team members.
• Sales forecasting: to help you analyze historical performance, customer behavior, market trends, and external factors and create accurate forecasts.

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By leveraging AI, salespeople can streamline their workflow and eliminate menial, time-consuming tasks. This means more time to spend where it truly counts – building meaningful relationships with customers and creating great experiences for them.