While the sales process is driven by people, there's a ton of administrative work happening behind the scenes. McKinsey suggests that ⅕ of sales teams' tasks can be automated. Plus, during the prospecting phase, your sales team produces a lot of unstructured data - emails, call transcripts, social media interactions, CRM notes - which becomes the playing ground for GenAI. 

It can analyze various interactions to find patterns in customer interactions, common queries and lead behaviors. This is just one example. 

Gen AI seamlessly integrates into sales operations, empowering sales reps to automate administrative tasks and concentrate more on driving conversions. And the results speak for themselves; players who are already invested in Gen AI are seeing a sales ROI increase of upto 10-20%. 

You can be a part of this group. Let’s see how you can use GenAI in your sales workflow. 

5 Reasons Why You Need Gen AI in Sales 

The sales industry is constantly evolving, and so are customers. They’re becoming self-powered with publicly available information on market trends, product comparisons and case studies. You must stay one step ahead with Gen AI to learn from data and adapt quickly to changing circumstances. 

Here are 4 reasons why you need Gen AI in sales: 

1. Traditional sales processes are broken 

Traditionally, you’d spend days - if not weeks - convincing a stranger to buy your product or service. 

But now, prospects make 60-70% of their buying decisions before even contacting sales. It’s obvious that times have changed, and sales need to evolve, using advanced technologies such as Gen AI to find the exact problems customers face, segment them and provide personalized solutions. 

2. To use vast amounts of unstructured data

Sales generate a lot of data, and since it’s a human-to-human process, the data is more likely to be unstructured - emails, voicemails, presentations, comments etc. The sheer volume of this data makes it hard to clean, organize and derive meaningful insights from it manually. 

But with Gen AI, you can process and analyze large datasets to uncover valuable patterns, trends, and correlations that help you uncover opportunities and optimize sales strategies.

3. To personalize customer engagement

Your sales team’s success relies on their ability to understand customer needs and preferences and tailor your offerings accordingly. Using Gen AI and NLP, your sales teams can craft highly targeted marketing messages, recommend relevant products or services, and provide proactive support to create a personalized customer experience.

4. To automate sales processes

Sales processes often involve repetitive tasks such as lead scoring, prospecting, and follow-up communications. These tasks are time-consuming and prone to human error. Using Gen AI, you can automate these tasks and free up sales professionals so they can focus on higher-value activities such as relationship-building and strategic planning. 

6 use cases for Gen AI in sales

90% of commercial leaders feel that Gen AI has a lot of use cases. Let’s read some of those:

1. Identifying ICP Accounts - to find leads 

There are a number of ways you can find your ICP. However, the BANT criteria is one of the best as it helps you identify buying intent based on budget, authority, need and timeline:

• B - Budget - Understand whether the prospect has the required budget to purchase your product or service
• A - Authority - Determine whether the person you’re in touch with is the final purchase decision-maker
• N - Need - Understand whether the business has an actual need to buy your product or service
• T - Timeline - Understand the implementation time period

GenAI can scan various parameters to find ideal customer profiles that fit these criteria. 

For example, it can scan a prospect's social media to find out if they’re one of the decision-makers in a company, or it can find revenue reports from a company to see if they can afford your product or service.

HappySales does the same for you. It gathers insights from LinkedIn, website, annual reports and CRM to reduce your research time from hours to 30 seconds. It identifies top-notch customer profiles with hot intent to buy. You just can’t miss out on this opportunity.

2. Lead Generation - to fill the sales pipeline

Gen AI can automate the process of sourcing and qualifying leads for you. It analyzes publicly available data, social media profiles, and online behavior; Gen AI can identify and prioritize potential leads based on predefined criteria. 

For instance, Gen AI algorithms can scan social media platforms, industry databases, and online forums to identify individuals or businesses expressing interest or need for products or services offered by the sales team, providing a steady stream of qualified leads for sales outreach.

3. Deep Research on Prospects - to qualify leads

Gen AI can conduct deep research to find accurate and updated information about your prospects and create relevant talking points for your sales team. It gathers information about competitors, funding rounds, and the company’s tech stack. 

For example, Gen AI-powered research tools can analyze news articles and social media posts to shortlist companies that recently got funded. This way, you get a list of companies with the budget to buy your product or service so that you can reach out to them.  

4. Sentiment Analysis - to identify opportunities:

Gen AI can perform sentiment analysis on various texts, such as customer feedback, social media mentions, and online reviews. Sales pros can uncover how customers perceive their brands and analyze customer sentiment. 

Gen AI sentiment analysis tools can monitor online review platforms to identify positive mentions on your product or sentiment shifts on your competitors' products. For instance, if customers are criticizing a competitor’s feature on the internet, Gen AI will pick dissatisfaction signals. Then, you can share more content on how your product can better help your customers. 

5. Customer Segmentation - for personalized email campaigns

Gen AI can segment customers into distinct groups based on demographics, purchasing history, and preferences to enable targeted marketing campaigns. It analyzes historical sales data and customer interactions to find patterns within different customer segments. 

For example, Gen AI clustering algorithms can group customers based on similar purchase behaviors or product preferences. Then, your sales team can create tailored messaging, offers, and promotions to share with each segment to create a more personalized experience. 

It can also generate email subject lines, body content, and call-to-action messages tailored to each recipient's interests, preferences, and purchase history, increasing email engagement and conversion rates for outbound campaigns.

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6. Sales Analytics - to track performance

Gen AI can identify trends and patterns in sales performance metrics such as revenue, conversion rates, and customer acquisition costs to track your sales performance. 

For example, Gen AI analytics dashboards track key performance indicators (KPIs) over time and highlight areas of improvement. They can also provide actionable recommendations to optimize sales performance and drive business growth.

3 Limitations of Using GenAI in Sales

Although GenAI is constantly evolving, there are some limitations that you should keep in mind: 

1. AI’s limited understanding of context

Gen AI sometimes misses the mark when it comes to understanding a situation's full context or subtle nuances, sometimes even generating fictional information. 

Take sentiment analysis, for instance. GenAI tools might not always understand the tone or intent behind customer feedback. 

So, sales relying blindly on these insights can make strategic errors. For example, you may send an upsell email to a customer just because AI suggested that their tone indicates satisfaction with the product, while in fact, they were not satisfied. 

Always double-check the insights to prevent this to ensure they don’t mess up your strategy.

2. AI’s outputs depend on the data quality that you feed it

If GenAI models are trained with subpar or biased data, it can seriously hamper the quality of insights. It means you could end up with totally off-base or even misleading results. To make the most of GenAI, make sure your data is top-notch. 

You can set up data quality checks, implement robust data governance frameworks, and stay on top of data maintenance tasks to ensure that Gen AI systems are firing on all cylinders and delivering reliable output.

3. Quality and accuracy issues  

Sometimes, output from Gen AI models can lack relevance or accuracy. This can lead to poor AI suggestions on personalized sales content, inaccurate research on prospects, and unpersuasive messages.

No doubt, these limitations are prevalent, but some tools are rising above them to assist your sales team in their day-to-day jobs. 

5 Top AI Sales Tools

Here are 5 AI tools you can consider for your sales workflow: 

1. HappySales

HappySales is one of the leading GenAI Sales tools in the market. It uses prospects' information to write hyper-personalized emails that convert. It uncovers insights from various sources like websites, LinkedIn, annual reports, and CRM to identify top prospects for your service or product.  

With HappySales, you can reduce your prospect research time from several hours to 30 seconds. From finding a prospect to help you initiate conversations, Happysales does it all. 

Key Features:

• Collects customer data from websites, annual reports, Linkedin and CRM
• Creates personalized messaging, using customers data that has better chance of engagement 
• Has a free forever plan to try and get accustomed to the product 

Pricing:

• Basic: Free
• Essentials: $25/user/month
• Premium: $35/user/month

2. Oneshot.ai

Like HappySales, Oneshot also works on the philosophy of simplifying prospect research and outbounding with intent. Oneshot AI lets you identify signals from prospects that suggest they’re willing to buy. 

Once you ascertain the most persuasive trigger, you can send a personalized outreach message to your prospect that has more chances to convert. Oneshort’s machine learning models help you continuously optimize your outreach campaigns for the best results. 

Key Features 

• Automatically identify hidden signals from prospects that suggest their interest to buy
• Generate hyper-relevant outreach in seconds
• Lets you run your entire prospecting strategy from single platform

Pricing 

• Premium: $995/month
• Enterprise: Custom pricing 

3. Autobound

Auotbound lets you discover your best prospects and write thousands of emails at once. With Autobound, you can create person-specific value propositions so all your emails are relevant to your target audience. It comes as a Chrome extension, so you can use it while prospecting on multiple websites. 

Key Features: 

• Write 1000 emails at once.
• Extracts 5000 contacts for $18/month including cell phone numbers and emails. 
• Greet website visitors with hyper-personalized messaging 

Pricing:

• Basic: Free
• Pro: $39
• Enterprise: Custom pricing

4. Unhaze

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Unhaze is also a Gen AI tool in sales that creates personalized messaging for your campaigns. It integrates with your CRM to analyze sales data to find the most relevant buying signals. The goal is to find the right opportunity to send an outreach message so it has the best chance of converting.

Key Features

• Score companies based on business model, size, geo, industry, key roles, technologies used to find the best qualified prospects.
• Reps and marketers can find best features and playbooks in a single place so reps and marketers have a holistic view of all accounts.
• Respond to triggers such as key hires, promotions and demo requests with personalized messages

Pricing

• Starter: $500/month
• Growth: $1000/month
• Enterprise: Custom pricing

5. Hyperbound

Hyperbound is an AI sales tool that lets you practice sales conversations with AI buyers. It emulates realistic scenarios so your sales personnel become more confident with their strategies. It comes with scorecards that measure your sales reps' performance so you can track your reps’ performance in real-time. With these features, you can coach your reps so they’re confident before they join the frontline

Key Features 

• Scoreboards and assignments to measure sales reps’ performance
• Hyperrealistic customer conversations to train reps
• Provides areas for improvement to help sales reps become more confident 

Pricing

• Basic: Free
• Custom pricing after a few calls

Don’t sit on Gen AI.

Businesses that have invested in GenAI already see its benefits, and you can be a part of the group. If you don’t know where to start, check out HappySales, to kickstart your GenAI journey.