Using generative AI as a sales tool can be as simple as an employee using an AI assistant to write emails. However, it’s often embedded more deeply into an organization’s fabric. For example, many sales departments integrate gen AI tools into customer relationship management (CRM) software to facilitate more seamless workflows and increase conversion rates.
Sales departments typically traffic in vast amounts of data collected from multiple channels, including phone calls, social media, meeting notes, pricing data, video recordings, customer preferences over time, historical customer interaction data and internal datasets. This makes the field ripe for a gen AI transformation, as the technology excels at analyzing unstructured data. As gen AI models “learn” and improve over time, early adopters stand to gain a significant competitive edge over their peers. This is particularly true in business-to-business (B2B) settings, where sales cycles are typically longer, and the cost of goods and services tends to be higher. According to the management consultancy McKinsey, data-driven B2B businesses deploying generative AI are 1.7 times more likely to increase market share than those who don’t.1
According to a recent survey from Salesforce, sales reps spend less than 30% of their time actually selling goods and services.2 As organizations continue to embed generative AI technology more deeply into their sales operations, the role of the salesperson changes significantly. Using automation and generative AI, sales leaders will likely focus more intensely on human interactions and client relationships while offloading less creative tasks to AI.