How Does Generative AI Impact Salespeople?
Sales is a complex and constantly changing profession that relies heavily on nuanced human interaction and judgment. Generative AI can actually be a great personal assistant for salespeople, allowing them to focus on complex tasks that humans are better suited for while the AI automates a tremendous amount of work and sometimes even does a better job.
As generative AI is developing at a remarkable speed, some big players in CRM have started making their moves. Microsoft's Viva Sales and Salesforce's Einstein GPT are two examples of how companies are using AI to enhance sales capabilities. This highlights the importance of using data and analytics to drive sales performance and the potential of AI to provide valuable insights and recommendations to sales teams. We expect other CRM players will follow suit as well.
Opportunities of integrating generative AI in sales
The benefits of using generative AI to improve the sales process are tremendous because generative AI can work with the unstructured data created during the sales process. This includes data such as customer emails, social media interactions, video recordings, and call transcripts. AI can analyze a buyer's purchase history, preferences, and behavior to suggest products or services that they are likely to be interested in. This can help salespeople personalize their approach and improve their chances of closing a deal.
Generative AI can help salespeople in the following 3 areas of their day-to-day job:
Creating sales collateral: In the past, making sales materials was time-consuming because it required a lot of research, writing, and design work. With AI-powered tools, sales teams can generate high-quality content in a fraction of the time it would take to create it manually. This can be especially helpful when making things like email campaigns, posts on social media, presentation decks, and product descriptions that need to be changed often and in large quantities.
Reduce mundane administrative tasks: These tasks include sales data entry, note taking, scheduling appointments, and drafting outreach and follow-up emails. This not only saves time but also allows salespeople to focus on more complex tasks that require nuanced human interaction, such as building relationships and closing deals.
Generate sales reports and analytics: In our previous blog post, we discussed the importance of knowing your sales numbers, but many sales teams don’t spend time on it until it’s reporting time. By looking at data like sales numbers, customer feedback, and market trends, AI can give sales teams insights and suggestions that can help them improve their approach and find places to make changes.
Challenges and risks of integrating generative AI in sales:
One of the biggest challenges of using generative AI in sales is making sure that the AI can tailor its recommendations based on the specifics of each deal. This requires a lot of investment in collecting and analyzing company or deal data, as well as monitoring and improving the AI algorithm all the time. First, such data may not be available in large quantities, in the right format, or with the right relevance. Second, even if they exist, it is hard for smaller organizations to truly benefit from them because it can take a lot of money to gather data and create algorithms.
There are also some risks associated with using generative AI in sales. One of the big risks is the potential for bias. If the algorithms aren't trained well, they could accidentally reinforce biases or stereotypes, which may lead to reputational risks for an organization. Another risk of using generative AI in sales is the potential for privacy violations. AI algorithms rely on large amounts of data to function, and if this data is not properly protected, confidential information or trade secrets could be vulnerable to misuse.
Overall, as AI technology continues to evolve, we can expect to see even greater benefits for sales teams in the years ahead. It will be interesting to see if generative AI can be used for more than just doing tasks, like recommending complex sales decisions.
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