5 Ways Using AI in Sales Can Help Boost Productivity

Artificial intelligence, or AI, is a tool that is being harnessed for many uses these days. In the sales department, you might be surprised at just how many ways AI can help you improve your productivity and streamline your sales process like never before. If you’re going to outpace the competition, you have to be smarter and faster. And in case you haven’t noticed, the competition is already jumping on the AI ship and sailing off into the artificial sunset. 

So, what can you do with AI to help your sales team boost their productivity? Here are five actionable strategies every business should consider. 

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#1 – Cultivate, curate, and disseminate data 

You can employ AI to assist you in all aspects of data analysis and validation, ensuring you get accurate data and insights about your customers and prospects. Without AI tools, it may be hard to prove the quality of data you gather or the leads you purchase, making it more difficult to find qualified leads and make sales. 

When your sales team spends all their time sifting through reports and data, they’re missing out on valuable time they could spend with the customer, which is where they should be. By putting AI to work on the data front, your sales reps can spend their time on more productive tasks. 

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#2 – Use predictive analytics to identify ideal customer profiles (ICPs) 

You can take advantage of predictive analytics to find your ideal customer(s) based on their interactions, social media engagement, and other digital activities. This powerful tool utilizes machine learning algorithms to analyze data from clicks, social media shares, and other engagements and interactions. 

When you have insights into these customer profiles, you can segment them into customer groups and determine when and how to reach out to them in the prospecting stages. You can even forecast what products or services might suit them at various stages in their customer lifetime, making sales a total game-changer with that personalized outreach. 

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#3 – Eliminate repetitive tasks that can be automated 

AI is making automating routine tasks like appointment scheduling, lead intake & qualification, and email marketing outreach increasingly easy. With an enhanced AI chatbot, you can handle all incoming queries and customer needs without having your sales reps involved. This saves them tons of time that they used to spend answering questions and playing the role of customer service rep and sales expert at once. 

What can you automate? Just about anything you want these days. What should you automate? Consider automation and AI for anything that:

• Is repetitive and takes up more time than necessary
• Doesn’t require human interaction
• Can provide customers with more self-service solutions
• Can free up time for your sales reps 
• Can streamline workflows and enhance productivity throughout the organization 

It might take a little strategizing, but this will also result in your sales reps’ productivity soaring. 

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#4 – Automating and optimizing sales enablement 

Sales enablement ensures that your sales team has the right tools and resources to perform at their best. Several types of tools exist, including those based on AI. RocketDocs, for example, is a tool that allows users to build content libraries with AI’s power so that less work is involved. 

You can use AI to improve training for sales reps and even take advantage of AI tools to generate your requests for proposals (RFPs), which are responsible for about 35% of companies’ revenue each year. 

You can utilize AI tools in several ways to give your sales team the resources and training they need to maximize their closing skills and land more lifetime customers. Once you start exploring the options, you’ll find something for almost every need. 

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#5 – Improve sales engagement 

Sales engagement refers to the interactions between buyers and sellers in the customer journey. This begins at the initial outreach and goes through customer onboarding to continued business. AI can provide a lot of support here to help streamline the process and make things more effective. 

For starters, AI is great at collecting data on customer pain points and needs. With this insight, you can create tailored outreach messages and even run A/B tests to see which messages perform best. You can utilize a “rules engine” to update a pre-determined sequence once specific criteria have been met. 

When you have better sales engagement, your sales team won’t be spending so much time on outreach and trying to communicate with leads. That means they’ll have more time to move forward with other deals and prospects. 

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AI is still being under-utilized

Despite its advances and benefits, only about 37% of all sales organizations use AI. When you consider that as many as 30% of all your sales tasks can be automated to some degree, you might wonder why more people aren’t getting on board. Usually, it’s a simple lack of knowledge and opportunity. 

People assume AI is expensive, complicated, or “not for them” for one reason or another. They think it’s confusing or not quite ready for public use, or perhaps they haven’t had the time to get on board because they’ve been busy with other things. 

Whatever the case may be, AI can no longer be ignored. The list above is just the start of how artificial intelligence and automation can improve your sales productivity and customer experience. 

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Partner with Smith.ai for sales support and more

At Smith.ai, we know maximizing productivity means maximizing your solutions. We can help your business with our AI voice assistant, by answering calls 24/7, qualifying leads, taking messages, and performing lead intake.

Plus, our team can assist with your outreach campaigns, and we even have solutions for live chat for those who need it. To learn more, schedule a consultation or reach out to hello@smith.ai. 

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