How to Get Started with AI for Sales

If you're a salesperson, sales manager, or a marketing professional who works on sales enablement, AI can help you increase revenue and reduce costs. That means now is the time to get started with AI, no matter your skill or comfort level. To do so means you build a potentially insurmountable competitive advantage. To delay means you risk getting left behind.

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AI Will Be Your New Best Friend in Sales?

For anyone’s career, a mentor who is a coach and also a helpful friend is indispensable, both for learning and growing. When I first started out in sales, I wasted a lot of time on administrative work and chasing down the wrong deals. Through these experiences, I discovered what worked, what didn’t, and why I needed to do things differently.

 

And that really continues throughout all of our sales careers — we never stop learning. What I didn’t have then (and what would have made a huge difference) was a real helper to guide me through the challenges, give me good advice, and handle that administrative stuff so I could go out and sell more. There’s a changing reality for all sales teams: artificial intelligence (AI). Whether you’re new to sales or a seasoned veteran, let's take a look at several ways AI for sales can be that best friend, mentor, and helper to support you to learn more, sell more, and, most importantly, get paid more.

 

1. Build pipeline

2. Close more leads

3. Intelligently automate & augment tasks

4. Make AI Your Admin

5. Look at Past Deals to Make a New Deal

6. Find Out If It’s a Good Deal — Or Not

7. Toss the Sandbag

8. Prospect Leads That Don’t Go Stale

9. Open Up to a New Friend and Give AI for Sales a Chance

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For any scenario related to strategic planning or design and implementation of a BI project, our BI consulting services will provide you with their expertise. As an experienced partner, we want to help in your transition towards a data-driven decision-making, by empowering you with a culture of analytics. Since any transformation requires change, and change needs guidance, we will pilot you through it by lowering the risk and setting your project up for success.

 

Here is the complete list of the top 17 sales KPIs and metrics that every sales rep and manager should know:

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Sales Growth: Is your business growing steadily?

Sales Target: Are you on track regarding the sales targets?

Customer Acquisition Cost: How much does a new customer cost?

Average Revenue per Unit: What is your average revenue per user?

Customer Lifetime Value: How much do you expect to earn per customer?

Customer Churn Rate: How many customers do you lose?

Average Sales Cycle Length: How do you shorten your sales cycle?

Lead-to-Opportunity Ratio: How about your lead quality?

Opportunity-to-Win Ratio: How many qualified leads result in closing a deal?

Lead Conversion Ratio: Is your conversion ratio stable?

Number of Sales Opportunities: What is your potential purchase volume?

Sales Opportunity Score: Do you prioritize your sales opportunities?

Average Purchase Value: Is your average purchase value sustainable?

Revenue per Sales Rep: How much revenue do your sales rep bring?

Profit Margin per Sales Rep: Is your sales team profitable as expected?

Upsell & Cross-Sell Rates: How do you increase your revenue and ROI?

Incremental Sales by Campaign: Which campaign brings you the best results?

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There’s nothing worse than chasing down a deal only to have it end in, well, nothing. All of that time and investment are gone. AI can not only classify what a good deal or account looks like, but also predict which solutions and discounts to offer your customer based on previous successes. Sniffing out a good deal is definitely something reps can learn over time. But why wait when AI can get it done for you right now? Then you can just focus on the right things to go out and get the deals you can actually get done.

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Prospecting is a tough job. Knowing which lead to call makes you more productive and leads to more success. Figuring that out can be really time consuming — given all of the reports, analysis, and more. Just when you think you have it figured out, one trend or change in the market changes the game and you are back to hunting. Machine learning identifies patterns to determine which leads are most likely to be converted into a deal. It’s looking at many, many things, from the geography, size of a company, and titles, to engagement such as signing up for a trial or downloading a white paper. This is dynamic; AI is the helper to do this for you in real time, and it’s always up to date.

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All in all, one of the biggest challenges with AI is learning to trust it. In the early days of cloud computing, there was a certain level of skepticism: Is my data really safe? Can I really access my files all of the time? Now we don’t think twice about it. The same type of scenario is happening with AI. Often, reps still don’t fully trust an AI recommendation — even when the data backs it up. The whole point of AI is to help sales be more productive and profitable, but it can only happen if we open up to this new type of relationship and information.

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“A sales rep can only be as productive as the time spent selling.”

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