No matter which way you slice it, your company’s success hinges on your sales team closing more deals. The faster and easier reps ink new business, the better your bottom line.
To optimize revenue flow, smart businesses invest in sales enablement strategies that equip reps with the knowledge and resources they need to convert the highest possible number of leads. But even with this support, sales teams have long faced limitations beyond their control.
For example, even the best new hires experience learning curves, the most skilled reps still have off days and humans can’t work round-the-clock without dire consequences. Plus, even if you’ve carefully assembled the most well-aligned sales, marketing and customer success teams on the planet, your RevOps performance will always be limited by the data that’s available and how quickly you can translate it into meaningful insights.
Fortunately, businesses finally have a way to blast through these limitations and achieve more scalable, sustainable growth than ever before. By leveraging the right AI in the right ways, you can supercharge sales enablement and help your revenue-generating teams reach their full potential. Here are five powerful ways to implement AI sales enablement:
Our human brains allow us to do many incredible things —like channel genuine empathy, act with compassion and build meaningful relationships. But we also have our limits. For example, we can’t analyze massive data sets and identify patterns or trends with the speed and accuracy of artificial intelligence.
While most organizations have been collecting heaps of customer and deal cycle data for several years, there was a limit to how much we could glean from this information. Even with advanced CRM reporting and early automation tools, converting data into useful action plans often seemed impossible.
But AI can assess colossal volumes of data in real-time and provide businesses with insight into which sales activities are most likely to move the needle, which efforts are a waste of time and which deals may be at risk. AI can also analyze historical trends and current performance data to help you make more accurate sales forecasts.
This way, instead of spending time crunching numbers and attempting to consider every potential scenario from every possible angle (and dealing with the constraints of our human brains’ data-processing skills), sales and marketing teams will have the intel they need to rapidly course-correct and optimize campaigns.
As any sales leader can attest, onboarding, training, coaching and upskilling sales teams can be an uphill battle. It’s time and resource-intensive and doesn’t always yield the progress you need. Team-wide training exercises can be too elementary for veteran sales pros, and you don’t always have the time to provide the in-depth one-on-one coaching underperforming reps need. Fortunately, several AI-powered tools can help fine-tune training while saving managers time.
Here are a few ways AI can support sales training and upskilling:
Pracctice makes perfect, especially when it comes to delivering a pitch. Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon for reps to stumble or mishandle objections in their first few passes —especially as they’re getting accustomed to discussing a new product or offer. But AI solutions like SecondNature provide reps with a safe place to work through mistakes, build their confidence and polish their delivery via virtual sales simulations. This way, they'll be well-prepared when they chat with a real prospect.
In most cases, reps don’t get feedback on their performance on a call until after it’s ended. And even when managers coach reps on communication shortcomings, there’s always a chance they might unconsciously fall back into old habits. But tools like Poised give speakers feedback in real-time, alerting them when they’re doing things like using too many filler words, speaking too quickly or interrupting another speaker so they can make improvements.
Not all sales reps share the same strengths and weaknesses, which is why one-size-fits-all training isn’t always effective. But, creating highly customized training plans for each team member isn’t always feasible. Fortunately, AI-powered solutions like Mindtickle analyze each rep’s customer interactions and identify specific areas of opportunity. And the HubSpot conversation intelligence solution allows managers to spot performance challenges and provide feedback without having to shadow several hours of calls.
Your RevOps performance is only as powerful as the data feeding it. Unfortunately, keeping your CRM data clean, organized and accurate has always been challenging. Manual data entry can be a time-suck —especially for busy sales reps already juggling too much. As a result, many businesses rely on a CRM filled with duplicate records and outdated customer information. And while importing third-party data can theoretically help you build more robust profiles, it can also create a bigger mess.
The good news is that AI is great at handling those tedious, mind-numbing data entry tasks most of us loathe. It can deduplicate and log contacts, helping you maintain cleaner and more accurate records. Tools like HubSpot’s ChatSpot can help reps create new contacts, add supplemental info to existing contact profiles and provide status updates through simple, conversational prompts. It can even help teams prospect. For example, simply ask the CRM bot to locate your ideal customers (i.e., "Find healthcare tech companies in New York with more than 500 employees”), and you’ll have a ready-made list for your next ABM campaign.
One of the biggest challenges for effective sales enablement is producing enough collateral —like email templates, pitch decks, product marketing content, case studies, testimonial reels, whitepapers and more. Like sales teams, marketing teams are struggling to do more with less and don’t always have the bandwidth to immediately crank out the content sales teams need.Fortunately, generative AI-powered tools can stand in the gap, helping sales reps rapidly create the content they need.
For example, AI solutions like RocketDocs can help sales teams quickly assemble proposals from content libraries, while ChatSpot can draft personalized emails using existing customer profiles. Additionally, the HubSpot Content Assistant can help marketing teams streamline and even speed up content creation by generating blog post ideas and crafting entire paragraphs to bust through writer’s block.By using AI to create sales collateral, sales teams can respond to prospects faster, and marketing teams can scale content production without burning out their creatives.
In addition to sales collateral, many marketing teams are responsible for creating internal content —like playbooks, scripts and educational materials. AI can help marketers craft those assets and provide the insights they need to ensure they’re effective. For example, AI can help you pinpoint which efforts yield the most engagement for various segments of your customer base and which pain points your team isn’t addressing. Solutions like Chorus can help sales leaders identify critical moments in sales calls that make or break a conversation and which competitors prospects mention most. And marketing leaders can use the HubSpot conversation intelligence tool to determine where sales reps need support, ensuring better cross-departmental alignment and more airtight RevOps strategies.
For decades, businesses have been searching for a way to boost operational efficiency and scale revenue without turning their employees into productivity droids. (After all, innovation doesn’t exactly thrive when everyone is burnt out, exhausted and micromanaged.) Now, there’s an answer.
Leveraging AI for sales enablement helps you offload dull, monotonous “busy work” and free up your sales and marketing pros to spend more of their time on the parts of their jobs they enjoy —like engaging directly with customers, building relationships and delving into more high-level strategic and creative pursuits.
AI can help you speed past your competition, but only if you become adept at using it now. By integrating AI-powered solutions into your workflow, you can align sales and marketing and boost the power of your sales enablement efforts, giving your sales team everything they need to blast through quarterly targets and make every year ahead your best yet.
