Over the years, sales professionals have explored numerous new platforms that aim to make their jobs easier, increase productivity, and help their businesses maintain a competitive edge. The sales strategies are shifting to the digital marketplace, and many software and tools like CRM, sales automation, mobile sales apps, etc, are becoming mainstream. However, with AI emerging, the notion that thinking was dependent solely on humans has now changed. So, how will AI in sales bring changes?

AI has the potential to change the way sales teams operate and interact with customers. 

The use case of AI is not just limited to automating repetitive tasks; rather, it can enhance performance, guide, improve sales pitches and better optimise sales operations. In this blog, we will explore the potential of AI in sales, its benefits, and its application for developing a robust sales AI strategy. 

Let’s start by understanding what AI in Sales mean.

It can be defined as leveraging artificial intelligence to get insights from large customer data, identifying engagement patterns and implementing them to further optimise sales strategies based on each customer profile. 

Now, by using these insights, sales teams further enhance their outreach process, personalise sales experience, and predict future sales trends.

83% of sales teams using AI reported revenue growth in the past year, compared to 66% of teams without AI. (Source: Salesforce)

Key Applications of AI in Sales

The goal is to bring in efficiency, effectiveness and ultimately improve revenue. Hence, some of the key areas where AI can be implemented are–

1.Lead generation and scoring- AI’s capability to analyse a vast amount of data helps identify and prioritise high-potential leads. Based on demographics, behaviour and engagement history, it can assign a score to each lead, giving the team time to focus on efforts that are more likely to convert. AI is good at closely examining and learning from your business model and process, and implementing it to improve how it determines which leads are most worth pursuing and which ones will require more effort.

2. Sales automation- A lot of administrative tasks like scheduling meetings, data entry, follow-up emails and CRM system updates can be managed better with AI. It allows sales teams to have more time to focus on strategic activities and building relationships with clients. So, it can basically provide more selling time, less admin work and faster deal cycle.

Salespeople spend 71% of their time on non-selling tasks such as administrative tasks and manually entering data. (Source: Salesforce)

3. Personalisation- Since we have a lot of information on customer behaviour and preferences, AI can leverage it to create personalised communication based on individual customers. This can bring more relevance, engagement and value among the customers. Let’s understand this with an example: a prospect frequently visits your website, explores children’s and term plans. Then, they buy a child plan. Next time, when they log in, AI can recognise this pattern and suggest term plans that they explored. It can also customise the plan based on their past behaviour and preferences, increasing the likelihood of purchase.

4. Sales outreach- AI can also be a great enabler in helping engage and build relationships with potential customers. It can help make customer outreach more targeted, leveraging the vast amount of data. It can not only ease the process of finding the right prospect but also speed up the customer outreach process. It can schedule meetings, help send follow-up emails and improve sales pitches to engage prospects better. AI allows you to do this at scale.

5. Sales enablement- Onboarding and training sales teams has always been a challenge for organisations. It needs to be process-based, easily accessible, and updated frequently for better upskilling. AI can help ease it with guided selling, where it can equip them with the right knowledge, tools, and insights. It can help reduce time wasted on searching for the ‘right content’ by fetching the right content, case studies, documents and more. It can also handle FAQs to provide teams with sales-ready answers.

Benefits of AI in sales

A. Efficiency boost- Since most of the tasks, like meeting schedules, data entry, and follow-up emails, can be drafted effectively using AI. It allows sales reps to focus more on high-value tasks, like relationship nurturing and closing deals, which eventually results in increased efficiency.

B. Sales forecasting- Another great capability of AI is forecasting and predicting expected revenue, sales performance, risks and opportunities using historical sales data and market trends. It will help sales leaders to make data-driven decisions.

C. Improved customer retention- AI-driven customer insights can improve retention and reduce customer churn. It can predict customer behaviour, flag customers who are showing negative signs and retain them accordingly.

D. Improved customer engagement- Since a lot of customer experience and communication can be personalised based on the data using AI. It improves the satisfaction level among customers, leading to a stronger relationship and higher sales.

Future of AI in Sales

Undoubtedly, as the AI landscapes continue to advance, its integration in sales processes will become deeper, seamless and highly important. Sales teams that are empowered with AI-driven insights will be able to identify opportunities and challenges faster than ever before. It will help them stay at the top of their competition. 

Of course, it’s not about replacing human professionals, but transforming the landscape with intelligence and efficiency. Simultaneously, the human sales role will evolve to a more strategic and relationship-based one, with AI acting as an assistant, coach, content recommender and more to help with different decisions. As AI evolves, sales in the future will require a much deeper understanding of customers and market dynamics rather than functional planning, answering questions or follow-ups.

At SalesPanda, we are building an AI assistant that can help sales teams, agents, distributors and partners’ prospects better, pitch smarter, resolve queries and provide multilingual support in nearly 22 Indian languages. The initiative aims to bridge the language barrier and strengthen communication, engagement and customer relationships, using artificial intelligence. 

Imagine you have an insurance agent in Madurai who now has access to an AI assistant 24/7. This assistant can understand and communicate in Tamil, helping insurance agents find documents, generating a sales pitch, drafting an email or providing a solution to any product-related queries quickly to better cater to their customers’ needs! What do you think this will result in? It will help them convince their customers better, give them information in a language they understand and build a lasting relationship. 

This is one of the examples of how we are leveraging AI to help BFSI companies as we gradually expand our scope.