How to Use AI in Sales to Increase Your Revenue in 2024

Artificial intelligence (AI) is being used more and more by salespeople across industries—particularly in helping them far exceed their quota goals. It’s allowing them to do this in two major ways:

First, it’s boosting salespeople’s productivity and efficiency by automating manual, repetitive tasks that take away from selling time.

Second, it’s giving salespeople access to AI-powered capabilities, like predictive forecasting and automatic lead scoring, to build a better, more effective path to sales.

Artificial intelligence in sales helps a salesperson sell faster, smarter, better, and, most importantly, more. With AI, sales teams are delivered valuable customer insights that allow them to build and create personalized sales strategies that have a higher chance of closing.

Here’s how the use of AI in sales is transforming the industry, why using AI in sales benefits both sales teams and your organization as a whole, and insight into some of the top AI sales tools on the market today.

What is AI in sales?

Simply put, AI simulates—or mimics—human intelligence in technology solutions or tools such as computers or mobile devices. These devices are programmed to think and learn just like we do. AI systems can perform tasks like problem-solving, decision-making, language understanding, and pattern recognition in a very similar manner to human beings.

When used by salespeople, AI technology has the ability to improve a sales rep’s efficiency, productivity, and overall decision-making. In lead generation, for instance, AI sales tools are able to score leads based on someone’s behavior or interactions with your products or services. Sales people can then to focus their selling efforts on the most promising customer prospects.

AI sales automation is another example. These tools have the ability to automate manual, repetitive, or time-consuming tasks like data entry or follow-up communications to improve efficiency. Chatbots and virtual assistants, for instance, can help sales reps handle customers’ initial inquiries and automatically schedule meetings with sales teams as needed.

The Benefits of Using AI in Sales

Now that you understand how AI impacts your sales teams, here’s a closer look at the benefits of using AI in sales.

More In-Depth Customer Insights

AI tools can uncover patterns and trends in your customer’s behaviors or preferences by analyzing your customer datasets. This analysis allows your sales team to better understand customers, anticipate their needs, and personalize its sales approach, ultimately resulting in more effective, targeted sales strategies.

More Productivity and Efficiency

AI can automate repetitive and time-consuming tasks. Completing those tasks with AI frees up sales reps to focus on more important strategic work—like building relationships and closing deals.

Better Performance

With AI tools, sales teams get easy access to real-time analytics and performance feedback. Analytics and feedback allow them to quickly identify where they need to improve to close more deals. Plus, predictive analytics tools can help to forecast sales trends and outcomes, allowing your team to adjust strategies or tactics to get better results.

Enhanced Lead Generation and Qualification

Sales automation allows sales reps to pinpoint high-potential leads and score them automatically based on a specific set of criteria. This scoring process helps reps to focus their efforts on the most promising prospects, increasing the chances of conversions and improving overall performance.

Personalized and Targeted Customer Engagement

Creating highly personalized interactions is one of the biggest advantages of bringing AI tools—particularly generative AI tools—to your sales processes. For example, sales reps can tailor products or service recommendations based on customer history and preferences during sales calls. This personalization leads to a more engaging, satisfying customer experience and increases the chance of repeat business.

How to Use AI in Sales: 5 Use Cases

The use of AI in sales is limitless. Because the technology is so versatile, it’s easy to plug the technology into any sales process and allow it to improve efficiency and productivity. Here’s some examples of AI in sales to showcase how businesses are using the technology in their own processes.

1.Automate Repetitive Workflows

Tasks like data entry and scheduling meetings take time away from interacting with customers. With AI-powered tools, your sales professionals can automate those tasks and significantly streamline their workflows. This reduces the amount of time spent on manual tasks and it allows your sales team to focus on more high-value activities—like growing your customer base.

2. Enrich, Analyze, and Utilize Customer Data

AI allows your sales team to gather and analyze huge amounts of customer data from across your business channels. Good data gives sales reps deeper insights into your customers’ behaviors, preferences, and needs. You can also enrich your CRM system with this data so you can create more personalized and effective sales strategies to improve customer engagement and satisfaction.

3. Forecast Sales Opportunities and Prioritize Leads

Many AI tools are used for sales forecasting, allowing teams to predict future sales opportunities through the use of predictive analytics. These tools specifically look into historical data and identify patterns. These insights also aid sales teams in lead scoring processes, allowing them to make decisions based on how likely customers are to convert or make a purchase. This allows sales reps or sales managers to focus efforts on the most promising customers. Predictive analytics improves the overall accuracy of your sales forecast and increases your lead management processes.

4. Analyze Customer Sentiment

AI tools gather and analyze data from all your customer interactions, including emails, social media posts, reviews, and more. All this data teaches your sales reps to understand customer sentiment and better understand how they feel about your products or services. With this insight, your sales team can address concerns more quickly and keep customers happy.

5. Track Your ROI and Optimize Your Sales Funnel

Detailed analytics sales activities and campaigns are another advantage to using sales automation tools. With these insights, your sales team can better track return on investment (ROI) and optimize the sales funnel. It also gives you insight on how to allocate resources more effectively and ensure efforts are focused on the most impactful or profitable areas.

5 AI Sales Tools

Podium’s AI Employee

Podium’s AI Employee turns every lead from the web—including web, email, text, phone, and third-party sites—into meaningful conversations that drive sales. The AI Employee does this by using generative AI tools to create personalized—but still conversational—responses and send them as soon as a prospect reaches out to your business. This automated process ensures that no lead goes unanswered and lets your salespeople focus their efforts on the most promising leads. Podium also features tools for customer engagement, allowing sales reps to create personalized messages and follow-ups to nurture leads and strengthen customer relationships.

With Podium, your sales team saves a significant amount of time on administrative tasks and can put its focus back on closing deals. Plus, by improving your lead management strategies, you ensure your sales team is engaging with high-potential leads and boosting your conversion rates.

Crayon

Crayon is competitive intelligence software that’s powered by AI tools. It allows you to effectively monitor your competitor’s activities, including product updates, pricing changes, marketing strategies, and more. With Crayon, you get access to market intelligence insights into trends and customer sentiment to keep your sales team informed—and ahead of—your competitors.

The generative AI platform also includes content recommendations that are based on in-depth analysis of customer data. It suggests strategies for your sales team to use to improve its marketing efforts and sales tactics, which increases the chances of closing deals. Additionally, these tools assist your sales team in creating targeted content that resonates more effectively with your target audience.

Clari

Clari uses AI tools for sales to predict outcomes and provide sales teams access to highly accurate revenue forecasts. Coupled with its pipeline management capabilities, Clari ensures that sales teams can quickly identify risks and opportunities and maintain a healthy, balanced sales funnel. Clari can also track sales activities and engagement, giving sales managers or higher-ups valuable insight into sales team performance or improvement areas.

Clari can also improve forecasting accuracy, enabling your team to plan and allocate resources more effectively. You’ll also get clear visibility into your sales pipeline, so you can help your sales teams focus on high-impact opportunities and optimize its efforts. Using Clari to continuously monitor both pipeline and team performance gives you insight on areas needing improvement and enhances your overall sales strategies.

Gong

A revenue intelligence platform, Gong captures all your customer interactions and delivers those insights to your sales team directly. Gong enables your sales reps to make decisions based on data, rather than opinions. For example, Gong can analyze your sales calls and meetings to provide actionable insights into revenue opportunities or areas needing improvement.

Gong features deal intelligence through identifying key factors that influence deal success and highlights deals that are at risk. This intelligence helps your sales team to focus its efforts on customers who may be considering one of your competitors. Additionally, Gong includes personalized sales coaching recommendations based on its analysis of your sales conversations. This tool helps to enhance communication by helping your sales team understand its interactions with customers and what resonates with them the most.

InsideSales.com (now XANT)

XANT is an enterprise sales engagement platform that uses AI to prioritize leads based on their likelihood to convert. This platform ensures that your sales team is focused on the most promising sales opportunities. It also provides recommendations on how to optimize sales cadences and follow-up strategies to maximize engagement with your prospects. For example, the tool can suggest the best time and methods for contacting prospects.

The tools also allow you to track and analyze sales team performance to identify trends and areas for improvement. Plus, by prioritizing your leads with XANT, you can help your sales team improve its conversion rates and work more efficiently.

Will AI sales assistants replace salespeople?

One of the biggest concerns around AI sales tools and bots is that the technology will replace humans. An understandable concern, it’s important to understand that AI in sales will only enhance the capabilities of salespeople. Instead of replacing jobs, AI will help sales teams make better decisions and do more faster and more efficiently.

For example, AI sales bots can automatically receive and respond to common customer inquiries that don’t necessarily require human intervention. Should the bot be unable to provide an answer, a sales rep will be alerted. They’ll have access to the entire interaction with the bot, so they can resolve the issue quickly and boost overall customer satisfaction.

Another example is AI sales calls. AI-powered tools can direct customers to the appropriate sales representative based on their specific customer needs. If a customer is ready for a sales demo, AI tools can route them to the appropriate representative. Those who are ready to make a purchase or who have other questions can also be sent to the correct sales rep to take the call.

Ultimately, AI in sales complements the role of your sales teams by streamlining several key operations. AI tools empower your sales teams, helping them be more productive, more efficient, and more effective—all while building better, stronger customer relationships and increasing business growth.

Leverage Podium’s AI Sales Bot to Enhance Your Sales Process

The use of AI in sales will keep improving as the technology continues to evolve and get smarter. Using AI-powered tools in your tech stack allows you to supercharge the productivity and efficiency of your sales teams, allowing it to deliver a more personalized and effective customer experience.

And with Podium’s AI Employee, you can do so with ease. Our tool excels in automating customer interactions, qualifying leads efficiently, improving sales enablement processes, and helping you maintain consistent engagement with your customers. The AI Employee sends automated responses to customer inquiries while still sounding like you—ensuring that no inquiry goes unanswered and no prospect feels like they’re talking to a bot. Podium also automates manual processes like appointment scheduling and reminders so your sales team can focus on the important work or building relationships with all incoming prospects.

Using Podium, you can easily optimize your sales process, improve decision-making with data-driven insights, and strengthen relationships with your customers—all of which gives you a huge competitive advantage.

Ready to see what Podium can do for you? Watch a demo today.