Have you been yearning to improve your sales team’s productivity and close deals faster using AI sales assistant softwares? Even though you want to add a new software to your sales stack, you're unsure if the tool will deliver significant results. 

We hear you. 

In this article, we'll guide you through 4 different AI sales assistant softwares you can include in your sales stack based on your needs. 

What is AI sales assistant software?

AI sales assistant software uses artificial intelligence to automate routine sales tasks such as sorting through leads, automating conversations and prospect outreach, and more. 

The two common categories of an AI sales assistant software include:

• Conversational sales: AI assists the sales reps during customer interactions, analyzes the conversations and provides insights like customer pain points, objections, etc.
• Sales bots: They are AI chatbots that qualify sales leads by asking specific questions and even schedule demos.

Why companies are looking for an AI sales assistant software

1. Automate manual and time-taking tasks

81% of sales pros say that AI can help them spend less on manual and time-consuming tasks. Generating subject lines, crafting email sequences, scheduling meetings, and recording and transcribing meetings—such tasks can eat up so much of the reps’ time. With AI sales assistant software, you can automate these tasks.

2. Faster and accurate data analysis

With AI sales assistant software integrated into sales calls, reps can analyze customer interactions and identify the customer’s pain points, outcomes, and next steps. This helps companies understand their sales interactions better and improve the CX. 

3. Easy to scale your sales team

Scaling is hard for mid and enterprise-level teams, especially because sales leaders and managers have lots of responsibilities in hand but not enough time to spend on repetitive tasks.

With AI assistant software, they can automate parts of their sales process and increase their team’s efficiency. 

For example, if a sales manager has to provide feedback to reps on the sales calls they conducted, instead of reviewing each call one by one, sales managers can use an AI sales assistant software and automate the entire feedback loop. With this method, AI will review the sales calls and provide feedback on—the reps' weaknesses and areas of improvement. The sales manager can then review AI-generated feedback and coach the reps accordingly.

4. More relevant training and coaching

Imagine a sales manager using an AI sales coaching tool that enables AI roleplaying and provides feedback on every practice pitch. It can save so much time the sales managers must have been spending coaching the rep on each call. 

Plus, sales managers can gain performance insights about each rep—helping them create personalized coaching programs for the reps. 

4 Best AI sales assistant software in 2024

1. Happysales

Happysales is an AI-powered sales platform that lets sales teams of all sizes leverage AI capabilities to conduct prospect research, generate icebreakers and email responses, and coach reps. 

The standout feature of Happysales is its highly accurate and automated prospecting capabilities and AI Coach functionality. 

The automated prospecting functionality enables sales reps to speed up their prospecting with auto-generated icebreakers, and personalized emails and messages for prospect engagement.

Plus, sales reps can engage multiple accounts at once—with different emails for each prospect (doesn't make the prospect feel like the rep has copy-pasted the messages). With personality insights, and 100+ intelligence triggers, reps can create unique emails for each prospect while personalizing and sending the emails in bulk.

The AI coach functionality lets sales managers and leaders coach their sales reps using AI sales coaching techniques and AI-based roleplays. With AI-roleplays, AI provides the rep with the prospect's information—from prospect details to their personality. The AI Coach will then feed the prospect's information and generate an AI prospect avatar so the rep can execute the roleplay. The AI will then provide feedback based on this practice call that the sales manager can review and coach their rep better. 

Because Happysales offers AI-roleplays, which not many other platforms offer, it's the right tool to leverage upon if you want to scale rep coaching. 

Key features

• AI agent: Build intelligent lists that match your ICPs, personalize emails and messages, and suggest email responses based on your company's knowledge base. 
• AI collaborator: Identify prospect’s pain points, automatically generate icebreakers and get tailored messaging recommendations. 
• AI coach: Enable AI roleplays, and identify and provide insights on areas of improvement.
• Bulk prospecting: Engage multiple accounts at the same time with personality insights and 100+ intelligence triggers.

Pros

• AI roleplaying
• Automated email responses and icebreakers
• Cost-effective

Cons

• No transparent pricing on website
• No forecasting and deal management functionality

G2 rating: 5/5

Pricing: Starts at $25 per user per month

2. Outreach

Outreach is a sales engagement platform for medium and enterprise-level sales teams. It helps sales teams streamline their day-to-day sales activities, track sales opportunities, analyze sales calls, forecast sales pipeline, and coach sales reps—all under one roof. 

While Outreach.io has several features to cater to sales teams, the primary standout feature for sales teams is advanced sales engagement automation. It helps you:

• Create automated multi-channel sequences
• Personalize the outreach
• Automate workflows
• Provide detailed analytics and AI-powered recommendations

Since Outreach has a vast array of AI-powered sales engagement capabilities, it enables making more intelligent data-driven decisions. 

Key features

Since Outreach covers every aspect of sales—from sales engagement to forecasting and training, below we have outlined the standout features for each part of the sales process. 

Rep coaching

• Topic and keyword research: Filter the sales calls to understand when the key topics are being discussed such as budget, discovery, objections, and negotiation. 
• Kaia team trends: Compare rep performance to team benchmarks.
• Kaia playlist: Build and share examples of best sales calls to help onboard new reps faster.

Conversation intelligence 

• Content cards: Get access to sales enablement content at the right moment in virtual meetings so reps can easily answer questions about competitors, pricing, product features, and more. 
• Action item detection and follow-up: Detect when an action item was spoken, and sync them to meeting transcript—so that after the call, those action items can be added as follow-up tasks. 
• Topics and buyer sentiment: Get insights into trending topics from your buyers on calls—without having to attend each call. 
• Real-time call recording and transcription: Build accurate transcripts by helping Outreach’s AI assistant, Kaia, learn about the organization's unique vocabulary: product names, competitors, and other industry terms. 

Sales engagement 

• Advanced email sequences: Manage multiple stakeholders within the same sequence, combine responses across multiple emails in a single thread, and send automated follow-ups. 
• OOO detection: Identify when prospects are out of office and pause the email sequence until they return.
• AI insights: Understand what content, workflows, sequences, and rep behaviors are leading to meetings and sales opportunities.

Pros

• Better auto-sequencing functionality
• Responsive customer support
• Integrates with multiple platforms including Salesforce and LinkedIn
• Built-in outbound calling system
• AI email writer and sequence creator

Cons

• Expensive compared to other sales platforms
• Reporting feature needs to be improved
• Has a steep learning curve
• Doesn’t have transparent pricing

G2 rating: 4.3/5

Pricing: Starts at $100 per month for Standard plan 

3. Drift 

Drift is an AI-powered buyer engagement platform. It helps sales teams to qualify and engage the leads and streamlines the rep communication with prospects to close the deals quickly. 

With Drift, you can embed live chat into your website, identify highly engaged visitors, qualify them, and turn them into your customers. The best thing about Drift is that sales teams can save time as they don't have to constantly communicate and follow up with the prospect—the bot will do it for the rep. Once the prospect responds to the bot's questions and qualifies the lead, the lead can book a meeting with the sales rep. 

The entire process—from the bot asking questions to lead scheduling the call—is scalable. Because of its AI-powered conversational sales capabilities, Drift is the right tool for you.  

Key features

• Prospector: View the list of most engaged accounts to see which accounts have accessed your website, their most recent activity, engagement score, last touchpoint, and what the accounts are engaging with.
• Live chat: Create multiple Driift inboxes to manage different types of conversations, instantly respond to frequently asked customer questions using Saved Replies, and get feedback from buyers using Conversational Ratings. 
• GPT suggested replies: Automatically generate potential replies in live chat based on the customer's website content, marketing materials, and context of a specific conversation. 
• Drift video: Send personalized videos or GIFs to prospects via LinkedIn video, email, or chat.
• Drift meetings: Give qualified leads the option to book the meeting in Microsoft and Google Calendar within the bot—whenever they’re ready with
• AI engagement score: Show sales reps which accounts are highly engaged and most likely to buy based on their interactions. 

Pros

• Intuitive user interface
• Personalized customer journey and real-time conversations
• Excellent chatbot and live capabilities 
• Real-time alerts
• Integration with Salesforce and 50+ apps
• Excellent onboarding experience

Cons

• Expensive compared to other AI sales assistant tools
• Steep learning curve for users who're new to chatbots and conversational marketing 
• Prospector dashboard is glitchy at times 
• Initial setup is not easy

Ratings: 4.4/5

Pricing: Starts at $2500 per month; free plan available 

4. Reply.io

Reply.io is an AI-powered sales engagement platform that lets sales teams of all sizes automate multichannel outreach. 

With its automated multichannel functionality, you can automate email sequences for emails, phone, SMS, WhatsApp, and LinkedIn. With its powerful AI capabilities, it also helps you improve emails with smart AI suggestions, handles basic customer conversations, and books meetings for you. 

It also comes with a sales-trained AI chat video avatar. The video avatar works like a video chatbot and turns website visitors into hot leads—and guides them to take relevant action. Reply.io is a better choice compared to other AI sales assistant softwares because of its AI video chatbot. Most tools have a static chatbot but Reply.io’s chatbot is more interactive while providing you with multichannel outreach functionalities. 

Key features

• Multichannel sequences: Connect with your prospects on multiple channels—send emails and follow-ups, schedule calls, send SMS and WhatsApp messages, and create automated sequences in LinkedIn. 
• Jason AI: Define your ICPs, create email sequences, handle conversations with leads, and book meetings—all with the Reply io’s QI assistant.
• AI Chat: Leverage video avatars to capture website visitors and convert them to hot leads. 

Pros

• Automated multi-channel sequences
• Unified inbox for managing replies
• Easy email campaign setup
• Auto responses and meeting bookings with Jaison AI
• Responsive customer support 

Cons

• Overwhelming for new users as it has lots of features
• Chrome extension is buggy 

G2 rating: 4.6/5

Pricing: Starts at $49 per user per month for the Starter plan; free plan available 

Key features to look for in an AI sales assistant software

Wondering what are the functionalities your ideal AI sales assistant can offer? Here are 5 features you need to look at:

1. AI capabilities for personalization

AI sales assistants use AI capabilities to generate personalized emails, value propositions, call scripts, email icebreakers, and so on. This saves sales teams enough time, which they can use for prospecting and conducting sales calls. 

For example, if you want to send cold emails to prospective customers but have spent hours thinking about the right icebreaker to use in your emails, it can lead to enough wastage of time. Instead, using AI sales assistant software like Happysales helps you generate icebreakers automatically—within minutes. 

2. Lead prioritization and qualification

AI leverages lead prioritization and qualification through chatbots and quizzes. 

Here's how each of these work:

• Chatbot: Ask questions to visitors on your website using the chatbot and respond to them based on your information database. 
• Quiz: Build the quiz, and the tool gathers results and analyzes responses. It then curated the qualification information that the reps can use to qualify or unqualify the leads. 

Both the types of lead qualification and prioritization features are helpful—they qualify every visitor who lands on the website without the rep being involved in the first place. 

For example, when a visitor lands on your website, the chatbot can give the visitor different options to choose from like a chatbot demo, book a voice AI demo, etc. If the visitor selects the option to book for a demo, it signals that the visitor is a qualified lead. 

3. Automation of manual sales tasks 

With AI sales assistant software, you can automate the most pressing sales activities and save time. Some of these sales activities include:

• Handling data entry
• Updating customer records
• Scheduling appointments
• Automatically dialing the calls
• Creating and sending proposals
• Following up with prospects
• Sending onboarding materials
• Scheduling onboarding calls
• Conducting prospect research

For example, with an AI assistant software like Happysales AI, you can conduct research on the prospect using their LinkedIn profile. You can identify their pain points, and generate icebreakers and different value propositions. This way, you'll not waste your time and speed up your research process. 

4. Conversation intelligence

With the conversation intelligence feature, you can analyze what is spoken on calls, track how often certain topics come up, and pick up on customer sentiment during the sales call. 

This is an empowering feature for sales teams as reps and account managers can get accurate call insights, which can be used to unlock growth opportunities and coach the reps better. 

For example, you can identify how many times has the prospective customer asked the rep for a refund on the sales call. 

5. Real-time insights

Real-time insights are instant, data-driven insights that let you track pipeline changes, adjust forecasts, and identify potential roadblocks to accomplish your sales goals. 

This helps sales teams identify early warning signals in the sales pipeline and anticipate future growth opportunities. 

For example, if your team is trending below the quota, you can use real-time insights to find out what’s going on and address the risks associated with it. 

How to choose the right AI sales assistant software for your business

The weight of your decision in purchasing the tool will impact your entire sales team. So, before taking the final buying decision, do this:

Assess your sales process needs

Do you want to automate your repetitive sales tasks such as scheduling LinkedIn outreach messages or crafting email sequences? Do you want to automate sales coaching for your team? Or, do you want to automate your processes like lead prioritization and prospecting? 

Identify the bottlenecks in your sales processes and accordingly look for AI sales assistant tools that solve the specific solution. 

Determine the budget and ROI

What’s the budget you’re looking to spend on the tool? Decide on the budget and what’s the ROI you want to generate out of it. 

For example, if using a $16 per month AI sales assistant software automates the rep coaching process for you, you’ll be able to save at least 2 hours every day that you might be spending while coaching your SDRs. 

Research, research, research

Compare the different AI sales assistant tools based on their features, AI capabilities, ease of use, integrations, and price.

• Go through the pricing page on the tool’s website to check the pricing and features offered under different pricing tiers. 
• Use software review sites like G2, Capterra, and SoftwareAdvice to read what users are saying about the specific tool (and even compare two or more tools together).
• Check out case studies to understand how the product helped their customers achieve relevant results
• Seek advice from peers in your industry and ask them about the tools they have opted for and why

See the selected tools in action  

Once you have selected the AI sales assistant tools based on your research, do either of these:

• Sign up for a free trial and try the tool
• Watch the product demo (if available on the website)

Side note: If the product tour is unavailable on the website—which is most likely to happen—book a demo with the sales team and get a live walkthrough of the product, understand the product features, pricing and support.  

Deploy and train your team

Once you have purchased the AI sales assistant software, deploy it and conduct training sessions. Make sure each sales rep in your team understands how to leverage the AI capabilities of the tool.

• Give them all the resources needed to learn about the tool—video tutorials, help docs, use cases, and case studies to help them understand the tool better
• Showcase examples of how the sales team can integrate the tool into their workflow. 

Wrapping up

When choosing the right AI sales assistant software—assess your sales process needs, determine your budget, and research thoroughly. 

Once you've set the basic foundation right, choose the software from the list we shared with you above. In case it doesn't meet your needs, do your research and find the tool that fits your budget, and integrates well with your CRM. 

FAQs

What is AI sales assistance?

AI sales assistance helps you streamline sales activities such as lead prioritization, sales engagement, personalized outreach, and rep coaching.

How can AI be used for sales?

AI for sales can be used to automatically generate email sequences, analyze sales calls, and prioritize and score leads. It also helps conduct prospect research by gathering information from multiple sources, and forecast sales and marketing trends. 

How much does an AI virtual assistant cost?

An AI virtual assistant can cost as low as $20 per user per month to around $500 per month (and even above) for enterprise-level teams.