The phenomenon of ChatGPT has taken the internet by storm. The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) is changing the way businesses operate – most likely, forever. AI is being used in various industries, and sales is definitely not an exception. Despite this, it is not always clear how to get started with using AI in your day-to-day activities.
There’s no doubt that AI can help sales reps automate administrative tasks, analyze customer data, and provide valuable insights that can help close more deals. But what else? In this blog post, I’ll discuss how sales reps can leverage AI to improve their sales process and provide actionable suggestions on how to start using it yourself as a B2B sales rep.
AI in Sales: Where do I start
The following section will list some important areas where AI and automation tools can have a great impact, with some concrete tools you can check out:
- Automation of repetitive tasks: AI-powered tools can automate administrative tasks such as data entry, scheduling, and follow-up emails, allowing sales reps to focus on high-value tasks such as building relationships with prospects and closing deals.
- Make.com (previously Integromat): Although not technically an AI tool, Make.com offers simple, yet powerful, tools for automating repetitive tasks.
- Zaplify.com: Zaplify is a simple, team-based tool for automating the dull and repetitive tasks of prospecting and outreach.
- Data analysis: AI can analyze customer data to identify patterns and insights that can help sales reps tailor their approach to each prospect and increase their chances of closing deals.
- CrystalKnows.com: A simple chrome extension for analyzing personality types and giving recommendations on sales approach based on Linkedin profiles.
- ChatGPT: We can’t talk about AI without mentioning ChatGPT. The uses of ChatGPT are endless, but some suggestions are generating copy for outreach, generating drafts for blog posts, converting tables to useful information, cleaning up unformatted data, etc..
- Improved customer experience: AI-powered chatbots can provide instant responses to customer inquiries, improving the customer experience and increasing the chances of converting prospects into customers.
- Intercom: AI-powered chats for handling support for a website. Intercom provides, on top of a regular live-chat with your support staff, AI-powered chatbot for simpler questions, AI-generated template responses and a host of onboarding tools.
Start small!
I think one of the most important aspects of getting started with AI in your work processes is starting small. Despite the giant potential of advanced AI tools such as ChatGPT, I would say that the largest impacts that can be made in small administrative tasks that are easily automated. We have a concrete example of this at Zaplify. Back in the early days of the company, our founder and only salesperson Oscar Collins was spending multiple hours per week on generating proposals for each client, keeping track of and managing expiring contracts and many more simple administrative tasks. One day, Oscar’s co-founder Kevin Östlin took notice of this and helped him set up simple flows on Make.com to automate these tasks. In one afternoon, they were able to save Oscar about a day of work per week.
This example illustrates that it is not important to find the most advanced or hyped tool, but rather the area of highest impact and coming up with the simplest solution to automate it. Also, I think an important insight from this story is to not hesitate to contact your favorite tech-savvy colleague for help! They rarely shy away from an opportunity to flex their tech-muscles.
Conclusion
As the world of sales continues to evolve, it’s important for B2B sales reps to stay ahead of the curve by leveraging AI-powered tools and technologies. By automating administrative tasks, analyzing customer data, and using chatbots to improve the customer experience, sales reps can increase their productivity, save time, and close more deals. With my experience in sales automation and AI, I encourage you to embrace some form of automation tool and incorporate it into your sales process to stay competitive and provide the best possible service to your customers. At Zaplify, we’re continuously applying AI methods where we see value for our customers and internal processes. Please feel free to reach out if you want to geek out and speak all-things-AI!
Best,
Mahir.
