How AI Can Help Sales Teams Succeed: The Top 7
The rapid growth of artificial intelligence (AI) provides some interesting opportunities for sales organizations to improve their performance through better efficiency, reach, and personalization. We know from solution selling training that buyer behavior continues to shift and competition continues to intensify. Forward-thinking sales leaders are figuring out how AI can help sales teams to compete and thrive.
7 Ways AI Can Help Sales Teams Operate, Prioritize, and Win
Done right, the integration of AI can transform how sales teams:
- Automate Administrative Tasks to Maximize Selling Time
While sales leaders want their sales teams selling, Salesforce.com found that salespeople spend only about 65% of their time on activities like data entry, scheduling, and reporting. One of AI’s most immediate benefits is reducing the burden of administrative sales tasks. AI-driven tools can automate many non-revenue-generating activities such as logging CRM updates and generating follow-up emails.
Do your sales reps spend enough time building relationships and closing deals?
- Enhance Lead Scoring and Opportunity Prioritization
We know from business sales training that low performing sales teams chase unqualified leads. High performing sales teams focus on buyers where their unique value proposition resonates with ideal target clients. According to a study published in the Journal of Business Research (Zhang et al., 2022), AI-based lead scoring models significantly outperformed traditional rules-based methods in predicting conversion rates.
Are you consistently prioritizing the highest-potential leads?
- Deliver Real-Time Sales Coaching
We know from sales leadership simulation assessment data that sales coaching matters. AI-powered sales enablement tools can analyze sales calls in real time (e.g., talk-to-listen ratios, deal progression, and sentiment analysis) and provide in-the-moment sales coaching prompts. Over time, it can also help to detect sales coaching opportunities across a team (e.g., effective sales questioning, sales objection handling, sales negotiating, or pricing).
Are you consistently coaching your sales reps to higher performance?
- Predict Customer Needs and Personalizing Engagement
Buyer context matters. A recent McKinsey report noted that B2B sellers using AI personalization saw up to a 20% increase in customer conversion rates. By analyzing CRM activity, content consumption, and external signals (e.g., job changes, funding announcements, or new product rollouts), AI sales tools can recommend the right message, offer, or timing to engage potential prospects.
Is your sales conversion rate where it needs to be?
- Forecast with Greater Accuracy
Sales forecasting has long been more art than science, often influenced by optimism or gut instinct. AI changes that. By factoring in historical performance, pipeline trends, deal velocity, and engagement analytics, AI-powered forecasting engines deliver far more reliable predictions.
Are your sales forecasts accurate enough?
- Strengthen Customer Retention and Expansion
According to Gartner, sellers who gather buyer intelligence increase account growth by 5%. We know from major sales account planning training that customer retention and expansion matters. Predictive analytics can alert account managers to early warning signs of client churn or identify customer upsell and cross-sell opportunities based on usage data and buying patterns — helping to significantly increase customer lifetime value and satisfaction.
Are you retaining and growing your top accounts fast enough?
- Improve Sales System Adoption
Leading sales teams are increasingly embedding AI in the tools their teams already use (e.g., Salesforce, Slack, and Microsoft Teams). Done right, AI can reduce friction and enhance sales rep adoption. Sales teams don’t need to become data scientists; they simply need to trust and act on the insights AI surfaces.
Is your sales team taking enough advantage of your sales tools?
The Bottom Line
Gartner predicts that 95% of seller research workflows will begin with AI in the next 18 months. Done right, AI enables sales reps to be more strategic, more informed, and more customer centric with the clarity, speed, and scale needed to drive sales growth and efficiencies.
To learn more about how to help your sales team drive profitable revenue growth, download How to Optimize Your Sales Force in the Face of Increased Performance Pressure
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