Closing deals isn’t easy. There’s a lot involved in the process. Sales reps’ responsibilities include tasks ranging from qualifying leads through cold calls and emails to meeting stringent sales targets. Some of these tasks demand their attention and energy, while others can be delegated (to AI).
According to a Gartner survey, approximately 90% of sellers are experiencing burnout in their work. To take some pressure off these overworked sales reps, let’s explore some ways in which generative AI could help alleviate their workloads.
Analyze sales data
While data is abundant, not everyone has mastered data literacy. According to a data literacy report by DataCamp, “only around 5% of organizations classify themselves as fully data literate.” It’s not fair to expect every employee of a company to be data literate, especially sales reps. They were not hired to analyze data but to sell products. However, having access to previous years’ sales data and reports can help significantly with qualifying leads, predicting customer behavior, and optimizing pricing.
To illustrate, let’s meet Emily, a sales rep from a fictional tech company called Bell. Emily is tasked with qualifying leads by making calls and sending emails. She receives a set of leads from different countries and, before proceeding, consults AI to provide her with sales data from those countries for the past six months.
The generative AI program reveals an increased demand for a security solution in country A over the past few months. Curious about this trend, Emily discovers that the government of country A recently enacted a privacy law, leading to a surge in requests for this security product.
Emily now understands the sales pattern and purchasing behavior of leads from country A. With the existing demand in that market, she decides to prioritize qualifying leads from country A, because she knows they have a better chance of conversion. Sales reps can leverage such data-derived insights to save time and boost productivity.
Draft content for sales materials
Another crucial aspect of a sales rep’s job involves creating compelling, persuasive, engaging content for emails and proposals. However, sales reps often lack the necessary writing skills to compose these documents. Moreover, these tasks can be time-consuming, and when drafting documents for dozens or even hundreds of clients, there is a higher chance of errors and inconsistencies in tone.
Generative AI can be a valuable resource for such content-intensive tasks, allowing sales reps to focus on the more rewarding aspects of their jobs, such as building customer relationships and securing orders that will ultimately drive increased revenue and growth for the company.
Let’s return to our fictional company, Bell. One of Emily’s clients requests a proposal for a ticketing tool to manage their workflows. Emily faces a choice: She can either draft a proposal from scratch, fact-check it, proofread it, and send it to the client, or she can seek assistance from generative AI. With AI’s help, she can generate content with minimal errors and grammatical mistakes in a matter of minutes, if not seconds. Emily chooses the latter approach, sends in a well-drafted proposal, and successfully secures the deal with the client.
Now, let’s discuss implementation. Once you decide to integrate generative AI into your sales process, consider the following steps as an initial approach to implementation.
Train your AI: Train your AI using existing documents from your company. This will help the AI program adapt to your company’s tone and style.
Integrate it with your existing process: Make your AI more accessible for your sales reps by integrating it into the current workflows.
Supervise its work: Before sending AI-generated content, review it to ensure it aligns with the customer’s requirements and your company’s vision and goals.
Secure customer data: Ensure that the AI system handling personal data complies with global data privacy regulations.
In summary, generative AI is not a threat but rather an additional source of support in the sales process. It simplifies time-consuming, research-intensive tasks for sales reps, enabling them to focus more on building customer relationships and meeting sales targets.