Sales teams are using AI everywhere to hit their quotas.
Imagine AI as your virtual assistant that can help you automate routine, tedious tasks—such as note-taking, summarization, and drafting sales emails. But that’s not all.
Artificial intelligence can process vast amounts of data—from customer interactions, social media posts, emails, and CRM data—to uncover valuable hidden insights that can help you optimize sales strategies and close deals faster.
In this blog post, we dig deep into the benefits of using AI in sales, potential risks, use cases, and the best AI sales tools in 2024. Better yet, we polled our in-house team and they told us how they use AI in the daily sales processes. Let's get started.
Benefits of using AI in sales
Artificial intelligence has wide-ranging capabilities to maximize performance and boost efficiency. Let’s look at how it can help your sales team:
• Maximizing reps’ productivity: By automating note-taking and manual call logging, 75% of salespeople believe they can focus on critical parts of their job—i.e., selling and building relationships with customers.
• Seamless CRM sync: AI eliminates manual data entry and automatically maps notes to the CRM fields, saving reps countless hours in copying/pasting and updating data.
• Personalized training: Managers can track reps’ sales activities and measure their performance against a set benchmark. By leveraging AI, they can understand where reps are falling short and provide feedback to improve performance.
• Shorter sales cycles: AI captures customer interactions to uncover trends, predictions, and insights to help sales teams optimize their strategies and close deals faster.
Potential risks of using AI in sales
Artificial intelligence in sales has undoubtedly accelerated processes, maximized productivity, and brought a new dimension to the customer experience, but it still has its drawbacks. From a sales standpoint, here are the inherent challenges that I see with using AI in sales:
1. Becoming too reliant
AI has its use cases in productivity, but on the flip side, it can make the sales team complacent and inefficient. For example: Sales teams can start relying on AI insights and recommendations rather than putting in the work to understand customer needs and create strategies that align with them. 39% of reps express this concern over becoming over-reliant on AI, citing it can be addictive.
2. Lack of personalized content
Though AI has accelerated content creation, it still lacks the personal, unique touch to drive customer engagement. 50% of customers say they can easily detect AI-generated content, while 52% report they were less engaged while reading it.
To ensure AI generates highly specific and personalized content, you need to continuously train your AI models. Feed the algorithm as much data as you can—audience profiles, intended tone of voice, and relevant prompts, so it can pick up nuances and generate better results over time.
3. Risk of inaccurate data
AI leverages machine learning algorithms and natural language processing (NLP) to gather and analyze data on market trends and customer behaviors, pinpoint areas of development, and build revenue forecasts. Because it’s reliant solely on data, sometimes it runs the risk of being inaccurate.
For example: AI can misinterpret buyer signals, which can lead to reps chasing wrong leads and wasting time. It can also provide a wrong call summary or action items that can disrupt your sales cadence. Sales teams need to validate AI-generated insights against their know-how to ensure they’re speaking with the right prospects and working towards closing qualified deals.
5 ways your team can use AI in sales
There are numerous ways your sales team can use AI to simplify workflows and drive greater ROI. We have listed five broad use cases to help you get started:
1. Prioritize high-intent leads
Reps spend too much time pursuing each lead, even those with little to no chance of conversion. Meanwhile, the high-value deals sitting in the pipeline turn cold and migrate to competition.
AI empowers you to qualify and score leads instantly. It analyzes vast amounts of data, including demographics, engagement levels, company-specific data, and social media interactions, and quickly identifies high-intent leads with a likelihood of closing.
This is how AI evaluates and qualifies leads at scale:
• Determine your ICP: AI uncovers historical customer data and analyzes profile attributes to generate an ideal customer profile (ICP).
• Build a custom lead scoring model: Based on the profile elements, such as job titles, demographics, website activity, etc., AI generates a custom lead scoring model.
• Score new leads: Whenever a new lead enters the system, AI runs it through the lead scoring model to assess the lead-to-ICP fit percentage score, which instantly enables reps to prioritize leads with a higher chance of converting.
2. Get insights into the Voice of Customer (VoC)
87% of prospects complain that sales reps don’t understand their needs. Leveraging AI for sales calls can provide a pinpointed direction to reps to understand customers’ objections, concerns, and questions.
AI-powered sales tools analyze customer interactions at scale and extract insights into buyer pain points, needs, and sentiments. This enables you to understand what customers think about your product, what features they like the most, and how you fare against the competition. You can then take this feedback to the product and marketing team to improve product features, tweak communication, and refine sales strategies.
3. Automate low-value data entry tasks
Sales reps look forward to selling to prospects, making those precious connections, and upskilling themselves. But more often, they’re bogged down by tedious admin tasks—taking notes, summarizing highlights, and updating CRM.
Conversational AI tools record sales calls and automatically generate AI-powered notes and summaries. They list action items, summarize key points, and recommend the next steps of action, enabling the sales team to focus on critical, high-value tasks.
Here are some other admin tasks you can automate using AI:
• CRM data entry: AI pulls data from third-party apps and syncs it to CRM. All your customer records are automatically organized in related fields, ensuring no one has to copy/paste data manually.
• Generate personalized emails: AI analyzes buyer interactions and generates hyper-personalized emails. Based on the customer’s response, it can also draft a follow-up email and suggest action items for the next call.
• Optimize customer engagement: AI-powered tools such as chatbots and virtual assistants use machine learning algorithms and sentiment analysis to generate automated responses and provide 24/7 customer support.
4. Create accurate sales forecasts
Sales leaders find it tricky to create accurate sales forecasts even TODAY. Look at this statistic from the 2024 Sales Forecasting Benchmark Report: 4 in 5 sales leaders missed their quarterly sales forecast in the past year, while 50% of them missed it more than once.
AI forecasting tools bring clarity and predictability to operations and empower you to create accurate sales forecasts in real-time. It can pinpoint the deals that will likely close or won’t close and suggest measures to improve your deal health score.
• Spot deal risks early on
AI runs a pulse check across all your deals and triggers alerts to prioritize deals at risk. It can automatically score deals based on the likelihood of closing. Using this information, you can commit monthly forecasts and enable reps to hit their targets consistently.
• Monitor the health of your pipeline
With AI, you can instantly get a snapshot of the overall pipeline health, track daily/weekly movement, and gauge how much of your pipeline has grown or shrunk in a defined period. You can further get drilled-down insights into accounts, such as the engagement levels across deals, activities, communication, etc., to uncover deal risks and new opportunities.
5. Enable targeted coaching
Managers often lack time to review sales calls and provide individual feedback to reps. AI can step in to analyze sales calls and gain actionable insights into reps’ performance and voice of the customer (VoC).
Conversation intelligence tools leverage AI to provide insights on reps’ talk time, talk-to-listen ratio, longest monologues, filler words used, and customer interaction ratio, which enables sales leaders to monitor the quality and engagement of the call. Looking at this data, sales leaders can understand where reps are doing well and where they’re struggling and create targeted feedback programs to help them improve their performance.
AI takes the first round of review and auto-scores each call based on the defined parameters. You can either define the rules yourself or use AI-generated scorecards (which use SPIN and MEDDIC methodologies) to score calls. This saves a bunch of time for managers, as they can quickly pick calls with the lowest scores or negative sentiments rather than listening to every call and providing feedback to each rep individually.
How our team at Avoma uses AI in sales
While covering broad applications of AI in sales, we also wanted you to hear from our sales team on how they use AI to streamline workflows and boost their productivity.
Disclaimer: Our sales team uses Avoma to optimize their processes. If you’re not interested in Avoma’s AI capabilities, you can skip this section. However, if you’d like to know how our AEs and SDRs simplify sales processes with Avoma, keep on reading:
1. Detailed note-taking & transcription
Everett McMahan, a Mid-Market Account Executive at Avoma, relies on AI-generated notes to get a quick snapshot of previous calls. He says, “Avoma saves me 10 minutes per sales call since I don’t have to take notes by myself. It automatically breaks down the conversation into custom topics, such as pain points, key takeaways, and next steps, which allows me to review hours of calls in a few minutes.”
Pratt, an Account Executive at Avoma, finds AI-powered transcription pretty useful. He says, “Sometimes, you need to remember how prospects framed a specific problem, the phrases and terminologies they used, so you can approach them using the same language. Avoma provides me with accurate transcripts to extract these insights and accordingly prepare for subsequent calls”.
2. Automatic CRM sync
Avoma eliminates manual data entry and automatically syncs call details to the CRM.
“I use Avoma’s dashboard to update my pipeline and quota forecast,” says McMahan. "The 2-way sync makes it incredibly easy to review my deals. To do this in CRM alone and map each deal to a field would take me forever. Avoma saves me dozens of clicks per deal, especially when I need to update data for a pipeline review with my manager."
3. AI-powered scorecards & coaching
Avoma allows you to set up AI scorecards for various purposes, such as demo calls, follow-up calls, etc., to ensure each rep is scored objectively. AI takes the first pass and auto-scores each call, so reps can instantly understand how they performed on the call, and managers can devise targeted coaching strategies to help them improve their performance.
Khushboo Bhatia, a new account executive at Avoma, uses AI scorecards to regularly take stock of her performance. She says, “Since I am ramping up and learning about the product features, I review my score after each call to see how I performed. I also look at the top-performing calls to pick up sales strategies and further improve my performance.”
4. Deal & revenue intelligence
Avoma empowers you to track and manage deals across the pipeline in real-time, spot deal risks and behavioral patterns, and optimize your sales strategies. With Avoma’s deal risk score and deal health score, you can get a snapshot of the pipeline health and identify deals to be prioritized or accelerated.
“Avoma gives me a reality check of sorts” says McMahan. “It tells me which deals are not going well while I could be thinking otherwise. It analyzes my calls and emails and provides deal risk alerts, and is also a great platform to review my entire communication with prospects rather than switching between CRM, emails, and call recordings."
Overall, by using Avoma, our AEs save a significant amount of time, automating clerical tasks, extracting insights from calls and transcripts, and ultimately improving their sales strategies to close more deals.
The best AI sales tools of 2024
Now that you've examined the use cases of AI in sales, let’s look at the best AI sales tools you can consider to simplify your workflows and boost performance.
1. Avoma
Avoma is a revenue acceleration platform that enables you to schedule meetings via a single platform, extract actionable insights from calls and transcripts, build accurate forecasts, and leverage AI to fast-track coaching and development. From managing sales pipeline to closing deals, Avoma supercharges all aspects of sales operations to unlock a new level of efficiency and productivity.
Key features of Avoma:
- Meeting scheduler & lead routing: Avoma’s scheduler allows you to set up multiple meeting pages based on time zones, availability, and other preferences, as well as route leads to the appropriate agents. You can also create templates for various purposes, such as booking demos, interviews, etc., and use them for recurring meetings rather than creating a page from scratch.
- AI-powered notes & transcripts: Avoma captures in-depth notes, organized by categories, such as buyer pain points, business goals, pricing, etc., so you can get quick context. You can also access the meeting transcript in the corresponding tab. All notes & transcripts are automatically synced to CRM, so reps don’t have to manually update the information.
- Pipeline management and forecasting: Avoma tracks and manages the entire pipeline, triggers alerts for deal risks, spots market trends early, and allows you to create accurate monthly forecasts.
- Targeted coaching: Avoma’s AI automatically scores calls based on pre-defined factors, giving you 100% coverage for call coaching. Sales leaders can get a complete breakdown of the topic, including reps’ talk time, talk-to-listen ratio, monologues, etc.
Pricing:
- Free plan available
- Starter Plan: $19/user/month
- Plus Plan: $49/user/month
- Business Plan: $79/user/month
What users say about Avoma:
2. Gong
Gong captures customer interactions to identify trends, prospect needs, and competitor activity. Armed with these insights, sales leaders can optimize their strategies, detect risks early on, and pinpoint coaching opportunities to improve team performance.
Key features of Gong:
- Sales engagement: Gong Engage empowers you to capture prospect details, extract insights from calls and transcripts, automatically sync notes to CRM, and generate follow-up emails to streamline sales operations.
- Deal execution and forecasting: Gong’s AI assesses customer interactions to surface deal risks and alerts and helps sales teams prioritize accounts that need attention. Based on this real-time analysis, sales leaders can create accurate forecasts and enable reps to attain their quota faster.
- Personalized coaching: Gong provides data-driven recommendations for each rep based on the topics discussed, skill gaps, and adherence to sales processes, making it easier to provide targeted coaching at scale.
Pricing:
You can request a quote by signing up for a demo.
What users say about Gong:
3. Clari
Clari is an AI-powered sales platform that can capture deal activity across email, calendar, calls, and social media, inspect account engagement and opportunities, forecast revenue, and provide actionable insights into conversations.
Key features of Clari:
- Pipeline inspection: Clari makes it easier to understand the pipeline movement in detail—transaction details, segment coverage, and next steps to meet the current and projected forecasts.
- Predictive forecasting: Clari leverages AI to run a funnel forecast for various aspects such as accounts, net new business, churn, upsell, and cross-sell, and accurately predicts sales performance across functions.
- Conversation intelligence: Clari’s Copilot provides real-time battle cards and monologue alerts to navigate customer objections or concerns. Once the call is over, Clari delivers a post-call summary, next steps, and suggested actions directly into Slack or Microsoft Teams.
Pricing:
You can request a quote by signing up for a demo.
What users say about Clari:
4. Outreach
Outreach is a sales execution platform that helps you manage and track the entire sales cycle—from deal status to pipeline conversion on a single platform. The software leverages AI to extract valuable information in real-time for sales coaching, generate action items and follow-up emails, and analyze pipeline health to build revenue forecasts.
Key features of Outreach:
- AI-powered email sequences: Outreach stands out when it comes to its powerful email automation capabilities. You can build advanced email sequences to manage multiple stakeholders and consolidate responses across emails in a single thread.
- Sentiment analysis: Outreach’s Kaia, an AI-powered virtual assistant, scans calls and summaries to identify customer sentiments and uncover actionable insights on how to improve team performance.
- Pipeline management & deal intelligence: Outreach gives a bird eye’s view of the sales pipeline—from deal risk alerts, deal scores, pipeline gaps, and sales forecasting.
Pricing:
You can request a quote by signing up for a demo.
What users say about Outreach:
5. Drift (powered by Salesloft)
Drift is an AI-powered conversational chatbot that engages in real-time conversations with website visitors. When a prospect enters the chat, Drift automatically scores and qualifies them, enabling sales teams to prioritize their efforts with high-value leads.
Key features of Drift:
- Advanced email automation: Drift automatically sorts through your inbox, updates your CRM/MAP with customer information, and surfaces new leads. You can also run an A/B test to create different versions of emails and see which one is performing the best to optimize your playbook.
- Custom chatbots: Create custom chatbots for different kinds of buyers—SMB, Mid-market, or Enterprise. Ensure visitors who are browsing a pricing page versus a homepage get a different experience. Immediately qualify, engage, and book sales meetings, ensuring no leads slip through the cracks.
- ROI reporting: Track which conversations on topics are converting into quality leads and attribute success to pipeline and revenue. By analyzing these successful conversations, you can dissect relevant messages, prompts, or questions to use across different conversations and set up your CS or sales team for success.
Pricing:
You can request a quote by signing up for a demo.
What users say about Drift:
Automate your sales process using AI
Whether you need to eliminate manual tasks or pull up actionable, data-driven insights, AI has use cases for everyone on the sales team.
Avoma can automate your entire sales process—from scheduling meetings, automatically recording and transcribing conversations, extracting key insights, and finally, coaching your sales team at scale to improve their performance.
If you’re looking to get started, take out Avoma for a spin and see if it aligns with your business needs. Book a demo or get started with a free trial today.
