AI Can Help Sales Teams Drive Bigger, Better Outcomes: Here’s How

AI-Guided Selling

Over the past few years, we’ve become accustomed to the world of digital-first sales. Much of the buyer journey now occurs before a prospect’s first conversation with a sales rep, which means sellers need to come to the table well-informed and ready to nurture meaningful relationships, no matter where a potential client is located in the funnel.

AI-guided selling can untangle many of the complexities of digital-first sales. From prospecting to writing emails and call scripts to building better proposals and winning presentations, AI is leaving sales teams more prepared to tackle their daily responsibilities. By combining human intelligence and AI to create impactful buyer engagements, this approach can help ensure sellers are better equipped to meet prospects where they’re at and guide them through their unique buyer journey.

Every single buyer engagement generates valuable data. By analyzing information—like when and how a particular piece of content was shared, how a prospect interacted with it and whether a certain sales play led to a closed deal—AI grants sellers the insights they need to optimize their strategies at scale. This technology doesn’t just tell sellers what actions to take; it tells them why so they can identify similar indicators for replicable success.

And those insights trickle up throughout the revenue organization. Here’s how:

• A sales rep sees a recommended next best step.

• Their boss, a sales manager, scales those learnings across multiple sales reps.

• A revenue executive looks at a dashboard to see what’s working and what isn’t across their entire organization.

By aggregating and contextualizing this data, sales teams can access a more comprehensive view of their activities to understand what works and what doesn’t.

The Benefits Of Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Sales leaders take note: AI has the potential to improve the roles—and lives—of your teams to an impressive degree. Here are just a few of the advantages it presents:

Greater Efficiencies

One of AI’s most oft-cited benefits is its ability to unlock greater efficiencies for individual sellers and their teams at large. As tools become more sophisticated and advanced as time goes on, they’ll enable organizations to boost productivity and overall performance.

Seismic’s recent survey revealed that respondents who have implemented AI-powered tools into their enablement processes were able to achieve greater GTM efficiency (94%), operational optimization (92%) and improved agility and speed-to-market (91%).

Better Relationship-Building

With AI complementing the work sellers do by automating manual tasks, reps can focus on the human side of their job—namely, making strong connections with buyers and providing best-in-class experiences. Since implementing AI into their enablement processes, survey respondents achieved results like enhanced buyer experiences (93%), increased customer satisfaction (88%) and increased brand engagement (86%).

Nurturing relationships in a digital-first environment is not an easy task. Today’s buyers crave highly personalized content experiences paired with unmatched seller expertise. AI can arm reps with the knowledge they need to meet these expectations.

Increased Revenue

According to McKinsey, 63% of organizations that have adopted artificial intelligence have already reported an uptick in revenue. During a persistent period of economic uncertainty, AI’s financial implications should not be overlooked. Business leaders must leverage every tool at their disposal to guarantee reliable revenue growth.

Shortened sales cycles and faster ramp-up times, when paired with the ability to highlight patterns and behaviors that lead to more effective strategies, is a powerful recipe for success. All of these enhancements can work together to support better cost savings and revenue generation.

Don’t Fall Behind

AI tool spending is anticipated to climb to $79 billion by 2030. Despite mounting anxieties surrounding the use of AI in the workplace, it’s clear that this technology isn’t going anywhere: 82% of respondents to Seismic’s survey who are currently using AI said they’re impressed with the results they’re seeing and plan to implement more AI-powered solutions in the next year.

As such, organizations that wish to remain competitive must learn to use AI to their advantage or risk falling behind; 73% of respondents believe businesses that fail to effectively incorporate AI into their GTM strategy will be surpassed by competitors within the next three years.

Your organization may not be ready to dive head-first into adopting AI tools. To take your first step with this technology, consider implementing it for one department of the organization. A pilot program for one business unit or department can provide a glimpse of the value of AI, making it easier to convince leaders to deploy it across more teams.

GTM is constantly evolving, and AI is rapidly speeding up its transformation. Don’t hesitate or feel trepidatious—if you aren’t using AI to help your business, you might be missing out on time- and cost-saving capabilities. The improvements AI stands to make to organizations’ sales motions are immense, and early adopters can be poised to stay ahead of the curve as tools and strategies become more sophisticated over time.

Everyone from school children to corporate COOs and CROs is using generative AI in their weekly work. Sales teams should be no different.

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This article was written by Forbes and originally published here.