AI can be a powerful tool for sales. It can solve common sales workflow problems like inefficient sales processes and large amounts of data management when used correctly.
Without AI, these challenges can normally lead to missed opportunities.
The thing is, stating these things is easy, but how do you actually apply AI to your sales workflow? In a way that it’s not used as a spam cannon, corner cutter or to the detriment of the quality of your outreach.
We’ve put this article together to answer just that.
Discover the top AI sales strategies - scroll 👇 to get started.
What is a sales workflow?
Before we get into AI, let’s recap on what a sales workflow actually is.
A sales workflow is a series of repeatable steps that salespeople take to outreach, nurture and close deals. The processes are usually unique to the company but follow tasks and activities to push people through the customer journey.
Why add AI to the sales workflow mix?
When implemented correctly, AI can significantly improve every stage of your sales process.
Here are four reasons why B2B salespeople should use it:
It automates repetitive tasks
AI can help automate repetitive tasks, such as searching for potential leads, creating emails, or answering customer feedback.
When sales representatives have less repetitive tasks, they can focus on higher-value sales activities and accomplish more.
It improves outbound prospecting
With AI tools like Cognism’s AI Search, sales professionals can:
- Find accurate prospect information quickly.
- Identify a new customer base.
- Craft the ideal target list in seconds.
Essentially, this leads to improved prospecting. You can forget about low-potential leads and focus your efforts on those more likely to deliver a higher customer lifetime value (CLV).
Plus, better results since reps have time to focus more on revenue-generating activities. 😉
It increases productivity
Whether it’s searching for prospects, summarising meetings, or analysing customer data, AI can do it quickly. A lot more quickly than sales managers or reps!
AI can cut through the noise of millions of data points and provide the right information.
It reduces ramp-up time
AI sales tools shorten the learning curve for new reps.
With AI, individual sales reps can access the right data from the start, enabling them to contribute early on.
8 ways to use AI to speed up your sales workflow
We’ve outlined eight ways to use AI in your sales workflows. 👇
1. Find new leads
Creating a targeted list of high-quality leads typically takes a lot of time.
It can mean:
- Using Google to find companies matching your ideal customer profile or buyer personas.
- Searching for the right B2B buyers by browsing LinkedIn.
- Using email finder tools to find their email addresses.
- Organising the data into a useful list.
While this can be an effective sales process, it is highly manual and time-consuming.
The good news is that AI is effective at finding potential customers’ contact information.
This is where Cognism’s AI Search tool can help. By typing in the end result you want, the tool gives you a list of qualified leads.
For example, you could type in “Show me companies who received funding in the past 12 months in the retail industry” to get an accurate list of direct contacts.
Other prompt ideas for Cognism’s AI Search could be:
- Search for sales directors in Barcelona at companies with over $10 million in annual sales revenue.
- Find companies in London using Salesforce that recently received Series B funding.
- Find sales leaders in New York at companies with over 500 employees.
- Show HR managers in Tokyo at companies using Salesforce.
- Person’s name or surname.
Cognism’s AI Search creates more time for closing deals and helps to keep your sales funnel full of new leads.
After finding the right resources, you can easily import the data into your CRM.
The dream of every B2B sales team, right?
2. Get more accurate contact information
According to ZoomInfo, B2B salespeople waste over 27.3% of their time chasing bad data.
Poor data quality is a real challenge that quickly results in wasted time, missed opportunities, and low conversion rates.
Again, Cognism AI Search helps to address this issue. Our database uses machine learning to ensure that the data you access is up-to-date and relevant. It can also predict changes to fields within a CRM’s user and business profiles, ensuring accurate data.
Having relevant data lets you focus on high-quality B2B buyers and close deals more efficiently.
That’s a successful sales workflow!
3. Surface new market opportunities
Finding contact information for potential buyers normally requires manual effort.
It could mean:
- Logging into your sales intelligence tool.
- Filtering through parameters such as location, job title, and company size.
- Searching for B2B buyers in a new industry.
Sounds time-consuming, right? Luckily, AI can help to speed up this process.
With Cognism AI Search, you can quickly type in an entirely new market and find accurate prospect information.
For example, if you work in the IT sector, you could use AI Search to generate a list of contacts within healthcare organisations. Or in any other industry!
Doing this lets you reach out to new markets and connect with decision-makers more quickly. And what does that mean?
An accelerated sales cycle!
4. Understand the customer’s personality
The commonly used methods of understanding prospects may include:
- Scrolling through social media posts.
- Browsing the company profile.
- Analysing the top competitors.
- Examining industry trends.
- Reading press releases.
The above approaches can work, but they only give a surface-level understanding of prospects. Plus, they’re highly manual.
There are a few AI tools available that help to understand customer personality at a deeper level. One example is Crystal, which allows you to better understand the person you are speaking with.
(Source: Crystal)
Crystal has a Chrome Extension that shows a personality summary right from a LinkedIn profile. The personality profile lets you understand how the prospects prefer to communicate.
Using such tools can have the following benefits:
- Your confidence going into sales meetings increases.
- You can handle sales objections more effectively.
- You secure more closed deals from your meetings.
- Your sales efficiency improves.
As a result of these, your sales workflow speeds up.
Another tool for the same purpose is Humantic AI, which converts LinkedIn profiles into personality profiles. Its feature set is quite similar, but it also works within your CRM, emails, and calendar.
5. Write customer interactions
AI copywriting tools were some of the first AI tools B2B teams used. This is mainly because they started to get developed shortly after ChatGPT was launched.
Speaking of ChatGPT, it’s one of the AI copywriting tools sales teams use to create better copy more quickly.
You can use it to:
- Write the initial sales emails.
- Write scripts for cold calls.
- Create follow-up emails.
- Do more complex tasks, such as analysing different email copies to determine the most effective one.
💡 Learn more about using ChatGPT for sales.
Doing the above tasks without AI are often more time-consuming, and tools like ChatGPT can help you overcome the initial creative block.
In addition to ChatGPT, you can use other AI copywriting tools, such as Copy.ai. It can help write better sales content through persona research, competitor analysis, and market research reports.
Copy.ai also has templates for better email writing.
However, a word of caution before using any AI-generated content:
Make sure you review the text before reaching out to potential customers. You want to avoid using any generic and off-brand text, which AI tools can cause. In the worst case, this can hurt your sales pitches and lengthen the workflow.
To prevent this, add a personal touch to the text. ✅
6. Personalise outbound emails
Personalisation typically helps to get higher response rates when sending cold outreach emails. A Woodpecker analysis even claims that personalisation can double your response rate.
The challenge with personalisation? It takes a lot of time!
Different AI tools aim to solve this by automating personalisation at scale. One such tool is Reply.io, which uses AI to help create personalised email sequences.
(Source: Lemlist)
Reply.io’s tool, Jason AI, uses AI to search databases and tailor messages at each prospecting stage.
Lemlist is another tool that offers AI-powered cold email personalisation. Simply specify your campaign goal, and it will create a personalised email sequence for you.
To ensure accuracy, you should review the emails your AI tools create.
A top tip for more successful workflows:
Sales teams often use tools that speed up different parts of their sales workflow together. For example, a tool like Cognism is great for finding high-quality prospects, but you may use another tool like Outreach to send cold outreach messages.
7. Communicate using chatbots
Unlike people, B2B chatbots aren’t limited by work hours and holidays, and they’re much more capable than you may think.
According to IBM, chatbots can handle 80% of routine tasks and customer interactions.
Plus, chatbots can make more effective sales workflows.
In the simplest form, this means adding a chatbot to your website to answer customers’ most common questions. Tools such as Tidio can assist with this.
(Source: Tidio)
Tidio also has an AI-powered chatbot, but it isn’t specifically sales-focused.
If you want to take chatbots a step further, you can use tools like Drift Bionic Chatbots.
Drift Bionic Chatbots uses AI to provide accurate and brand-consistent responses to site visitors.
The tool works based on the data you have uploaded to Drift, qualifying leads and directing them to sales reps.
Using chatbot tools can significantly reduce the time it takes to respond to customer inquiries, resulting in faster closed sales.
8. Summarise sales meetings
AI tools are highly beneficial for meeting summarisation.
The sales workflow is sped up by automatically transcribing conversations, and no opportunity is lost. Transcript tools aren’t usually designed just for sales meetings but are excellent for them.
Many AI tools can help with summarising a sales demo, one of which is Fathom. It records and summarises the most important takeaways from meetings.
(Source: G2)
Fathom AI has different transcript templates; one is a sales template that aims to give you a better understanding of prospect needs.
Another commonly used tool is Loom, which offers AI capabilities for recording and sharing videos. After recording your video, it creates a summary and title, removes filler words and silence, and turns your video into a text document.
By automating these tasks, these tools significantly reduce the time it takes to finish post-meeting tasks.
Spend more time closing with Cognism
Finding high-quality leads doesn’t have to be a time-consuming and tedious process.
If this is the case for your sales team right now, Cognism’s AI Search tool can help.
Our goal is simple:
Improve your current sales process by quickly providing you with accurate contact information. Simply type in a prompt and AI Search will give you a list of qualified leads, saving you valuable time.
Sounds great, right? Then click 👇
