Salespeople Who Plug Into AI Become Faster, Smarter, and More Productive

With careful planning and execution, generative AI can be a powerful tool that will help you sell more.

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has started playing an instrumental role in reshaping sales strategies. Platforms like chatGPT and Google’s Bard create content, suggest responses to customers, and generate actionable insights from the vast amounts of data these tools have vacuumed up from the web.

For salespeople, this presents an opportunity to save time, move faster, and work smarter. Still, when you start working with AI it can be overwhelming. There is so much innovation, happening so quickly that it can be difficult to know where to even start.

Leverage the Three As

This is why your best bet is to start small by leveraging the Three As:

• Adopt an AI tool.
• Adapt it to your unique selling situation.
• Then work at it until you become Adept using it.

Don’t try to implement generative AI in every aspect of your sales process all at once. Start with one or two tasks that you think will benefit the most from automation.

As you adopt new AI tools be patient. You won’t see results overnight and in some cases, until you become adept with the tool, you’ll spend more time to accomplish the task than if you had just done it on your own without AI help.

Most important  – especially when you are using AI for messaging and writing – pay close attention to the feedback from your prospects and customers – good bad and ugly. Use this feedback to hone your approach, prompts, and your own edits so that your messages feel and sound authentically human.

The AI Mad Rush

Everyone is building AI tools everywhere. There is a mad rush in the tech community to be first. The problem is that most of these tools won’t be around in 24 months. They’ll be absorbed by other tools or just die because they couldn’t get enough customers.

Likewise, many of the tools that are free today, will cost you tomorrow. Therefore you want to be super selective with the AI tools you choose, to ensure that you are not wasting your time in a platform that will soon be out of business or obsolete.

Beware of AI Solutions Searching For Problems

In this mad rush, tech entrepreneurs and mainstream tech platforms are building AI into everything. A good many of these tools and widgets are useless – essentially gratuitous AI solutions looking for a problem.

I’ve got a bunch of gadgets in my kitchen drawers that I’ve purchased over the years. One, for example, cuts avocados. It looked cool on Instagram so I bought it. But, I only used it once. Yes, it worked but it wasn’t more efficient or effective than using a knife to cut the avocado open. So, it sits in the kitchen drawer. A solution still looking for a problem.

Just because there is an AI tool, widget, or function doesn’t mean that you should use it or that it is worth your time. Avoid getting caught up in the hype.

10 Ways Generative AI May Help You Sell More In the Future

As generative AI tools like ChatGPT become more integrated into the sales process, human intuition, creativity, and empathy will fuse with AI to help sales professionals gain a competitive edge.

Many of the innovations that will eventually plug into AI to sales motions are in their nascent stages. A holy grail for AI in sales is analysing disperate bits of information to build dynamic and targeted prospecting lists that tee up opportunities that are entering an open buying window. That, by the way, is my dream come true for AI. Imagine how fanatical you’d be with a prospecting list like that!

Here are some additional ways we may be leveraging generative AI in the future to sell more:

1. Personalized Content Creation: AI will be integrated into content management systems. This allows sales teams to instantly generate tailored presentations, reports, or videos designed around individual client profiles. This level of personalization can vastly improve engagement rates and demonstrate a keen understanding of a client’s unique requirements.
2. Revolutionizing Email Campaigns: Generative AI can draft compelling email content based on a lead’s engagement history. By analyzing past interactions, open rates, and responses, AI can suggest subject lines or content tweaks to maximize engagement. This results in higher open rates, better engagement, and ultimately, more conversions.
3. Data-Driven Insights: Generative AI sifts through enormous data sets to pinpoint key trends and insights. Salespeople can utilize these insights to better understand market trends, target potential high-value leads, and anticipate which services or products might attract specific customers.
4. Virtual Role-playing for Training: Platforms using generative AI can simulate customer interactions, enabling sales teams to refine their techniques in real-world scenarios. Through repetitive interactions with AI-generated customers, they can hone their pitches, responses, and closing techniques.
5. Creating Robust Customer Profiles: Generative AI merges data from various touchpoints to create in-depth customer personas. This offers salespeople a holistic view of potential leads, from their purchasing habits to their interaction history, facilitating a more targeted and effective approach.
6. Automated Follow-ups: Prompt follow-ups can be the difference between closing a deal and losing one. Using generative AI tools, sales teams can schedule and automate follow-up messages that align with previous conversations, ensuring timely and meaningful communication.
7. Advanced Sales Forecasting: Traditional sales forecasting, while valuable, can’t process the sheer volume of data available today. Generative AI, on the other hand, can churn through vast datasets, providing more accurate, data-driven sales predictions. This enables better resource allocation and strategy planning.
8. Intelligent Product Recommendations: For businesses with varied product portfolios, generative AI can be invaluable. By assessing a client’s profile, engagement history, and market trends, AI can identify the best product or service for a particular lead, improving the chances of conversion.
9. Dynamic Sales Scripts: Starting with a baseline script, generative AI tools like can refine and adjust pitches based on real-time feedback and success metrics. While the human touch remains irreplaceable, these dynamic scripts ensure that the sales approach remains consistently effective.
10. Real-time Strategy Adjustments: In the fast-paced world of sales, adaptability is key. Generative AI can analyze ongoing campaigns, customer feedback, and market shifts to recommend immediate strategy changes. This keeps sales strategies agile and relevant.

AI + Human: Sell More Together

There are voices in the business and sales predicting a dystopian future in which AI replaces salespeople. This attention seeking clickbait is pure BS.

The role of the salesperson is not diminishing. Instead, it’s evolving and becoming more important. With AI handling data analysis, content creation, and strategy suggestions, salespeople can focus on what they do best: building genuine authentic relationships and developing creative solutions for customer problems.

Embracing this merging of generative AI and the human touch will give you the competitive edge you’ve been seeking, allow you to lean into the things that make you uniquely human, remove the many of the repetitive boring tasks that steal your joy, and ultimately help you sell more.

Learn how to use AI and Sell More on Sales Gravy University. More than 1000 hours of professional development content for modern sales professionals and leaders: https://www.salesgravy.university