Generative AI is making sales more efficient – and more human

Generative AI is about more than just automating sales and marketing. As Steve Ranger explains, it’s about making it more personal, too.

At its best, sales is a mix of understanding customers, responding to their needs and delivering want – sometimes before they even realise it themselves.

At nearly every point through that sales process, generative AI is already having an impact. Sales teams are using AI tools for everything from finding new leads to streamlining their internal processes. It’s making it easier for them to respond to requests from clients, write proposals and engage with their customer needs.

Here, we speak to companies already taking advantage. If they’re doing something that you aren’t, you might be falling behind.

Related reading: How Disney, Netflix and Amazon use CX to make customers happy

The benefits of AI for sales and marketing

Consultancy firm McKinsey calculates that a fifth of sales team functions could be automated. Little wonder, then, that 90% of the commercial leaders it surveyed said they planned to use AI “often” in the next couple of years. It’s already proven to work. McKinsey’s research found that firms that invest in AI are seeing a revenue uplift of 3% to 15% — and a sales return on investment increase of 10% to 20%.

According to tech analyst Gartner, business-to-business sales teams using technologies with generative AI embedded will reduce the amount of time spent on prospecting and preparing for customer meetings by over 50% by 2026. The analyst predicts that teams using generative AI to generate proposal and bid responses will spend about 16 hours on a request for proposal (RFP) — down from 27 hours — without risking the win rate.

However, Gartner also warns that generative AI is at what it calls the “Peak of Inflated Expectations” for sales technologies. That means there might be lots of excitement around the concept — and a lot of disappointment over the next couple of years if companies don’t get it right.

There’s a special type of disappointment for businesses that think AI means replacing salespeople with robots. That’s heading in the wrong direction from the start.

What are sales teams doing with generative AI?

Some of the early uses of AI have been around for a while — the smart and sometimes not-so-smart chatbots that greet you from the corner of many websites. These are the first point of engagement and can help sales teams to understand the potential fit and value of a customer. With the introduction of generative AI, they are getting smarter and will be able to help qualify customers before handing over the conversation to a human colleague.

Beyond this, some usage echoes of business professional. Using ChatGPT to generate text for reports and pitches, for example. And, for those at the cutting edge, creating business images with Midjourney to slot into presentations.

But here we want to go into the weeds. What about generating leads, offloading admin tasks, and helping to build closer customer relationships? That’s where the true power of AI for sales kicks in.

Can AI really generate sales leads?

Beyond this, one of the most obvious ways generative AI is making an impact on sales and marketing is content creation. From customer emails to social media posts, AI bots can help marketing teams create good content quickly and can help personalise content to create a stronger engagement with potential clients.

Rather than firing off a vanilla email to a prospect, a salesperson can use AI to research the company and their particular needs to provide something much more targeted and much more useful to the recipient. That alone would be useful in keeping a brand front-of-mind for customers and to help to start encouraging them further down the sales funnel towards an eventual sale.

“One of the big benefits of AI in the sales process will be personalisation at scale,” says Professor Steven van Belleghem, an expert in customer experience.

“It will mean sales professionals will be able to reach out to more potential customers in a really personalised way — not just a mass email that pulls in their name, but personalised content and messaging based on all the data collected about their needs, usage, preferences etc. It is intelligence augmented — using technology to scale the human touch.”

Companies have become more adept at gathering information about their customers and keeping it in customer relationship management (CRM) systems. Building on that with data coming in from chatbots, augmented with personalised content, sales leaders can start to automate and enrich the early stages of engagement with customers in a way that would be impossibly time-consuming without it. Bringing this all together means that sales teams can also make their forecasting much more accurate — another key demand for sales bosses.

A common theme for many sales teams is using AI to free up their time for more and richer interactions with customers.

“Sales are so relationship-based at its core — the technology has always enabled human salespeople to do things better,” says Tamsyn Partington, Sales Manager at CloudSmiths.

The company’s sales team uses generative AI tools to respond to emails and to research topics. It’s also training a bot with its sales activities and documents to assist the team. “It helps the salespeople focus on what they really need to focus on,” she says.

How brands are using AI to support sales and marketing

Tom Henson is Managing Director of tech company Emerge Digital which started by using AI tools to write some content for events and presentations but is now testing the use of AI which he said is “re-humanising” the sales process.

For the average sales team, there is about an 80:20 split in terms of the time taken up by admin tasks compared to the time spent selling to clients. That admin can be anything from going through a recording of a meeting to find and transcribe the key points, to writing up proposals or quotes or updating information in the CRM system.

While all of those things are useful, Henson says, “it’s not meetings, it’s not speaking to people, meeting people, negotiating or getting a sale closed and over the line”.

Emerge Digital’s team has been using AI to automate those tasks and Henson said it is now shifted to a 60:40 admin-to-selling ratio.

“We are spending more time now in meetings with clients, which is really important, we are definitely spending less time on administration. What that means is the ability to potentially handle more leads, more opportunities, whilst also offering a better experience for people coming to us.”

Henson predicts that in the next year, the team will add another 20% gain in efficiency as AI is further incorporated into the tools they use.

How sales teams are responding to using AI

The response from the sales team has been positive, he says: salespeople don’t like doing the administrative stuff.

“Having more time to spend with clients they are starting to win more business so that means better rewards for the salespeople, so there’s not really anything they are losing out on at the moment,” he says. “It should only really enhance what they do. There are a lot of big companies out there that can compete solely on features or price. For SMEs, it’s often around having a really good relationship and the salesperson is a key part of building that relationship.”

But there are risks. If every company is using the same AI tools to turn out the same polished presentations, then where’s the advantage? Henson says this is where the real skill of the salespeople comes in. “Then it becomes more than ever about the human side of what they are doing, which is spending time with customers, listening to their needs and challenges and coming back and making sure that is really reflected.”