A 2021 study by Gartner found that 88% of CSOs have already invested in, or are considering investing in AI tools and technologies for their sales teams. If your team isn’t already using AI tools, they risk being left behind. Your competitors are already using AI to optimize their processes, work more efficiently, and equip their reps with more information ahead of any sales interaction.
Sales teams use AI tools in different ways, like:
- Improving lead prioritization based on sales interactions
- Analyzing data from customer conversations
- Personalizing rep training and coaching recommendations based on live sales interactions
AI tools will help your salespeople and front-line managers find the important and actionable insights within the avalanche of data that modern sales generate.
1. Clari improves revenue forecast accuracy
Inaccurate revenue forecasts can cause major problems for your business. If you overestimate revenue growth, leadership teams may over-invest in the team, product, or facilities and then lack the revenue to sustain that investment.
Clari uses AI to analyze your existing deal data and create revenue predictions to help your sales organization make more accurate forecasts. First, it automatically gathers and analyzes data from your organization — from outreach emails to meeting invites. Then it uses AI to analyze and synthesize that data into real-time pipeline updates and insights. This gives sales leaders the data and insights you need to forecast revenue more accurately than if you were to review your pipeline data manually.
An AI-powered forecasting tool like Clari offers multiple benefits to sales organizations — and the rest of the business:
- Eliminating time wasted on manual data entry by automating the data collection process
- More accurate revenue forecasting for your sales team, broken down by rep, region, or product
- More easily share forecasts with leadership and other stakeholders, so they have the context they need for strategic decision-making
More accurate revenue forecasting helps sales teams close more deals, as they can prioritize leads your tools have identified as the most likely to close.
2. Rollio improves data quality
Incomplete data in your CRM makes it impossible for sales leaders to monitor the progress of leads through the sales funnel or know when their reps are facing challenges and need support. Tools like Rollio make it easier for teams to update records in the CRM after every customer interaction to improve the quantity and quality of your CRM data.
Rollio connects with Salesforce and uses AI to enable sales reps to interact with their CRM like they’re speaking to a person. For example, agents can ask Rollio to update a prospect record in Salesforce using conversational language, for example, “Update my opportunity with Mindtickle. Add a pricing conversation as a next step, and push the close date back one month.” Rollio’s AI will interpret their instructions and update the record accordingly. This speeds up data entry, so your customer records are more up-to-date and contain more information about sales interactions compared with updating records manually.
An AI-driven tool like Rollio benefits sales reps and managers by:
- Reducing time spent on data entry, so reps can spend their time on higher-impact sales interactions instead
- Improving the quality and quantity of data in your CRM, so reps and managers have access to all the relevant data for prioritizing leads and follow-up sales activities
- Giving sales leaders an easy way to get updates about their team’s activities
More complete data in your CRM helps sales professionals close more deals, as they have the full context available for their next interaction with a prospect. For example, reps can personalize follow-up messages based on their conversation, and managers can more easily support agents when CRM data suggests a deal is moving toward closed/lost.
3. Conversica increases team productivity — but not headcount
Forrester found that sales reps spend only 23% of their time on core sales activities. Tools like Conversica enable sales organizations to increase their team productivity (in terms of touchpoints and follow-ups) without hiring more reps and increasing their headcount.
Conversica provides sales teams with an AI assistant to automatically follow up with leads via chatbot, email, or SMS. It helps increase the number of touchpoints leads have with your company by automating low-value acknowledgment messages while enabling your reps to focus on higher-value sales interactions. In addition, Conversica uses conversational AI to speed up response times and scale up your team’s productivity without needing additional team members to do so.
For sales teams, this means:
- They can automate lead follow-up, so prospects hear back from you sooner
- Leads are kept warm and engaged between interactions with real members of your team
- Sales cycles may accelerate due to an increased number of touchpoints in the process
- Reps have more time to personalize their interactions with customers, as low-value acknowledgment-style interactions are handled automatically
AI tools like Conversica, which provide sales teams with a virtual assistant, help them close more deals by spending more time personalizing their messages and less time on routine prospect interactions.
4. Troops gives sales managers better pipeline visibility
If sales leaders don’t know how prospects are progressing through their sales funnel, it becomes difficult (or almost impossible) to accurately plan team resources or prioritize upcoming sales interactions. A revenue communication tool like Troops gives sales teams — both reps and managers — ongoing visibility into your team’s performance by surfacing and sharing relevant updates from your CRM.
Troops connects your CRM with messaging apps your team uses all the time through integrations with Slack and Microsoft Teams. It automatically delivers notifications in your messaging tools to provide your team with insights, updates, or reminders about deals in their pipeline. It also notifies you in real-time when anything happens that will have a significant impact on revenue — such as a deal that’s marked closed/won or closed/lost.
It offers several benefits for sales organizations:
- Sales leaders get a better overview of deal flow and rep performance
- Improved pipeline visibility means managers can improve the accuracy of their sales forecasting
- You can leverage team expertise to move deals forward, as all updates are visible to your whole team
AI tools that give your sales leaders better pipeline visibility help sales teams close more deals by making it easier for managers to support more complex customer interactions. Managers are more aware of ongoing sales conversations and the potential roadblocks and can support their team where needed.
5. Mindtickle uses AI to identify and drive winning sales team behaviour
Many sales organizations know the 80-20 rule all too well: the all-too-frequent situation where 80% of the revenue is driven by 20% of their reps. But when one of your top performers leaves, that can cause a major headache (and revenue shortfall) for sales departments. Instead of continuing to hope that their top reps don’t leave, forward-thinking companies turn to Mindtickle. Mindtickle’s sales readiness platform empowers sales reps to achieve a continuous state of sales excellence by using its tools and processes to increase reps’ knowledge and improve their performance. With Mindtickle, you can correlate competencies with revenue outcomes, helping you focus on the individualized knowledge, skills, and behaviors that help your reps win deals.
Mindtickle uses AI to analyze all sales interactions, from customer calls to emails, to assess reps’ performance at each stage in the sales process. Then it uses that data to provide AI-driven coaching and training recommendations that are personalized to each rep. These recommendations, exercises, and activities help to raise the performance level across your whole sales team so all agents can become top performers and achieve sales readiness.
An AI-powered sales readiness platform like Mindtickle offers sales leaders (and their teams) many benefits that have a positive impact on the rest of the organization:
- Managers automatically get better visibility into their reps’ performance, including specific areas for improvement so they can prioritize coaching where it will have the biggest impact.
- It creates a team culture of continuous improvement, as reps receive training and coaching recommendations on an ongoing basis, not just once a quarter in your sales kickoff.
- It raises the team performance standards, which leads to improved close rates, as reps are better able to manage complex or high-value sales interactions.
A platform like Mindtickle helps your sales team close more deals by ensuring all your reps are ready for their upcoming sales calls, equipped with the skills, knowledge, and best-practice behaviors to perform at their best.
AI sales tools will empower your team — not replace them
Many sales teams still have a lingering fear that AI sales tools will replace them and steal their jobs. Or they worry the AI will become a data dump, giving their teams piles of data with no context to help them draw actionable insights.
But AI technology actually empowers and enables your sales team — it helps them do their jobs better and gives them the data and insights they need to help them close more deals. There are lots of different ways AI can support sales teams, so if you’re ready to add artificial intelligence into your department’s toolkit, check out our Buyer’s Guide to Conversation Intelligence Solutions.
About Mindtickle
Mindtickle is the market-leading sales readiness platform, helping revenue leaders at world-class companies like Johnson & Johnson, Splunk, and Wipro, be ready to grow revenue by increasing knowledge, understanding ideal sales behaviors, and adapting to change. Dozens of Fortune 500 and Forbes Global 2000 companies use Mindtickle to define excellence, build knowledge, align content, analyze performance, and optimize behavior throughout their sales organizations. Mindtickle is recognized as a market leader by top industry analysts and is ranked by G2 as both the #1 enterprise software product and #5 sales software product.
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