5 Ways to Leverage AI to Supercharge Sales Performance
It’s no secret that artificial intelligence has gone mainstream. Today, navigating to a news website, social media site, or industry publication is nearly impossible without seeing at least a handful of headlines or conversations about AI’s tremendous growth and impact.
But AI isn’t just some buzzword or a passing trend. AI has become a must-have technology for any revenue organization looking to remain competitive and grow revenue in a crowded marketplace.
By now, most revenue leaders know they should leverage AI to boost sales performance. But many still aren’t quite sure how to incorporate AI into their sales processes.
In this post, we’ll explore five practical, impactful AI strategies that can help you enhance seller efficiency and drive revenue growth for your go-to-market teams.
AI is a must-have for revenue leaders
The harsh reality is that many revenue organizations aren’t meeting their numbers. If that’s the case at your organization, you’re not alone.
GTM performance often misses the mark – by a lot. Research tells us only 42% of sales reps regularly meet quota.
Furthermore, GTM teams struggle to keep up with the pace of change. Customer churn costs U.S. providers $168B each year, and 70% of businesses fail to pivot to new market shifts.
As a revenue leader, your work is cut out for you.
But AI can help change the game.
By strategically leveraging AI, you can improve performance across the entire GTM team and drive revenue growth. Let’s look at five practical but impactful AI strategies that’ll supercharge your sales results.
Strategy #1: Build rep skills with modern training and enablement
Every seller needs training and enablement to have what it takes to engage buyers and close deals. But each rep has different experiences, strengths, and weaknesses. A one-size-fits-all approach to training and enablement doesn’t work.
Enablement and training must be personalized for each individual. However, most organizations struggle to apply a truly adaptive approach to enablement.
AI makes it easier to deliver personalized training and enablement at scale – even when budgets and people hours are tight. Here are a few ways you can tap into AI to make enablement creation fast and simple:
- Program creation: AI can create program structures for common enablement use cases. Then, you just have to drop your content into the flow.
- Knowledge assessment: AI can take training content and quickly create an assessment to gauge mastery. Mindtickle Copilot has reduced the time to create assessments from 21 to 1.9 minutes.
Time to create an assessment
As AI quickly evolves, so will the ability to create even more complex and tailored enablement quickly and at scale.
Strategy #2: Improve team performance with data-driven coaching
Effective sales coaching can improve win rates by as much as 29%. However, traditional sales coaching practices are time-intensive, and sales managers don’t have time to spare.
Role-plays have been a longstanding sales tactic for preparing reps for conversations. However, managers are busy and don’t have time to go over each pitch before a rep jumps on a call.
AI makes role-plays scalable across large enterprises.
Organizations can quickly create AI role-play scenarios based on a few prompts. Reps can practice with an AI buyer in a hyper-realistic scenario miming a real-life sales interaction. With role-plays, sellers can practice as much as needed to be confident with messaging and nail the delivery without waiting for their manager’s feedback.
Also, sales reps don’t have to wait around for manager feedback. AI provides a score for each role-play – as well as immediate feedback on things like:
- Pace of speech
- Sentiment
- Use of filler words
Sellers can use this feedback to improve their pitch before money is on the line.
AI-driven coaching works. Cisco, a Mindtickle customer, recently held a pitch contest for its 3,500 sellers, which yielded 6,050 submissions. By using Mindtickle Copilot to review the role-plays, Cisco saved 38 weeks of manager time. The company also saw a 25% increase in the value of booked deals and a 31% rise in the average deal size.
Strategy #3: Accelerate deal cycles with intelligent digital sales rooms
Deals are getting increasingly complex, and buying committees are getting larger. It can be a lot for a seller to manage – especially when every buying committee member has unique needs.
Digital Sales Rooms (or DSRs, for short) are portals where buyers and sellers can engage and collaborate to accelerate deals. DSRs give buyers a place to research, share content with team members, and get answers to their questions. On the other hand, sellers use DSRs to share the right content and understand how the entire buying group engages with it.
Though DSRs are a relatively new technology, they’re proving to be an effective way to collaborate with buyers and move deals forward. Customers that incorporate DSRs into their sales motion typically see increases in win rates, sometimes as high as 2x, showing the importance of upleveling how you engage with modern buyers.
Increasingly, buyers prefer to do their buying tasks via self-service tools. DSRs give them a place to do their buying tasks and allow sellers to influence and track this self-service process. Serve them the branded and third-party content they need to advance their evaluation, and they’ll progress quicker through the buying journey. You’ll know where they are in their process and how you can support their next steps.
Advancements in AI will make Digital Sales Rooms even more useful for buyers and sellers. Modern sales orgs will soon use AI to auto-create and curate rooms based on CRM data, content engagement data, and other buying signals. Using a combination of AI, input from your marketing SMEs, and insights from your sellers, you can orchestrate compelling buyer experiences that drive deals forward.
Strategy #4: Deliver the right content for every moment
Most organizations have no shortage of sales content to use with buyers. In fact, we might say that most organizations have too much. Sellers often struggle to find the content they need and know how to use it when they find it. With AI, sellers don’t have to spend hours looking for content or creating their assets. Instead, recommended assets are served alongside helpful context, which they can use to move deals forward.
With AI being able to scrub a ton of content all at once, sellers can stop searching for keywords on a certain document and rather ask AI common questions to help them in their deals, like, “How do I compete with Competitor ABC?” and get a succinct response that they can use in the moment.
Furthermore, AI is making it possible to (finally) understand the true impact of content in deals. It’s not enough to know the content was used in a deal that closed or was lost. You need to understand whether it has the intended impact within each deal.
For example, AI is unlocking the ability to combine attribution and engagement data into an understanding of the estimated impact of engagement with content on the likelihood of a deal closing. This will tell you so much more than the shallow content ROI metrics currently offered in most platforms.
Strategy #5: Gain insights on every call to accelerate deals
Each interaction with a buyer is full of rich insights – whether a seller realizes it or not. With AI, sales teams can unlock these insights without sifting through call transcripts. Then, they can leverage this intel to improve performance and sales outcomes.
AI helps analyze each call. This allows for:
- Fast follow-ups: Reps get real-time call summaries and action items, which enables them to follow up faster.
- Higher productivity: Your CRM is auto-enriched with call recordings and summaries.
- Instant insights: AI highlights key moments and can answer deal or rep-related questions instantly.
- Voice of your market: AI can summarize competitive mentions, challenges of your customers, and how your message is resonating with buyers across conversations
AI-powered call insights boost performance. You can use insights to measure rep performance, understand your buyers, and enhance deal outcomes.
AI is transforming the world of sales
AI has only recently gone mainstream. But already, it’s transforming the world of sales.
Your competitors are already using AI. If you’re not, you risk getting left behind.
Now’s the time to strategically leverage artificial intelligence to ramp reps faster, get more expansion opportunities, and win bigger deals.
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