Speak to a sales rep about what the most frustrating aspect of their job is, and they’ll typically answer that it’s the amount of time they spend not making sales that frustrates them the most.
All too often, you’ll find talented sales reps spending a huge portion of their day — sometimes as much as a third of their time — on prep work, admin, and other tasks that are important, but which don’t have a direct impact on their success.
There have been tools that promised to save time before, but in the age of AI, it looks like we might have finally got what we needed. In this post, we’ll outline some of the key things that AI tools can do for a sales team, including verifying email addresses, creating personalized emails, and ranking leads.
Find The Target Audience
Having an extended target account list is vital for giving a sales team the contacts they need to reach out to. In the past, building that list would have taken a long time, and you’d also have to hope that the information included on the list was accurate.
AI tools make it easier than ever to put together a target account list. With tools like GTM AI, you can simply input your ideal customer — such as “FinTech companies with 500 employees showing search intent for ‘fraud detections’” — and get a ranked list with key information such as company name, emails, buying committee, and more. With this, your sales team can have confidence that they’ll be reaching out to contacts who are most likely to be interested in your product/service.
Fill In Missing Details
Sales representatives often run into the problem of having a company name, but little contact information. Finding this information is usually possible, but it can take a lot of time. Even once you have a name or details, you often have to verify that it’s the right information. All of that takes time away from the actual sales work.
Advanced AI tools can take small amounts of information and then automatically fill in the gaps. This not only surfaces the information that the sales team needs, but also helps to boost morale. There are few things that annoy sales reps more than spending hours trying to find the right contact information. AI tools remove that issue.
Verify Email Addresses
Sales representatives don’t want to think about email deliverability, but the fact is that it’s important. Having too many bounced emails can impact the sender’s reputation, which increases the risk that emails will be sent to the spam filter in the future.
With AI, sales reps no longer have to hope for the best. There are tools that can make sure an email address is real, and that emails sent to it are likely to be delivered.
Find Out Who’s Involved In The Buying Decision
If there’s one thing that can impact the morale of a sales rep, it’s discovering that they’ve been speaking to someone who, it eventually turns out, is not the decision-maker. Even if the sale is still possible, it’s a little disheartening that you’re not as far along in the process as you thought you were.
There are AI tools that can help sales teams to establish who’s who in the buying process. This information can include their names and roles, which can help sales reps to put together an effective roadmap towards success. As well as increasing the chances of success, it can also help reps to feel more confident, since they’ll be more likely to know at what stage of the process they are at.
Create Personalized Emails
Every good sales rep knows that personalized emails significantly outperform generic templates. The problem is that putting personalized emails takes time. While the rep will do it because they know it’s the only way, they’re not often happy about using their time in this way.
With AI, sales reps can quickly generate emails that include personalized information such as the company name, contact role, information about the business, plus how their tool/product can benefit them. The rep will still need to review and make edits to the email, but the process will take significantly less time than writing each email from scratch.
Find Similar Businesses Based On Your Customers
Existing customers can be a goldmine for finding future customers. After all, if they’ve bought from you, then there’s a high chance that similar companies will be interested in buying from you too.
There are AI tools that can take a look at your current customer list and then identify related businesses based on industry, business model, number of employees, and so on. This not only saves your employees from having to complete this work, but it’s usually a lot more accurate, too, since you can use AI to consider variables that would take an employee too long to uncover, if they could at all.
Rank Your Leads
Having a long list of leads is promising, but the fact is that not all leads are created equal. Some will be reasonably interested in buying from you, others will only be somewhat interested. Others will have 5% interest. Knowing where each name on the list falls is vital for helping your team work in order and to have the right expectations.
The best AI sales tools offer lead ranking features that assign a score of probability to each. They analyze how closely a lead matches your ICP and a host of other evaluation signals to determine the probability of interest. Once your team has that, they’ll know where they should be giving most of their attention.
Summarize Need-to-Know Info Before a Conversation
Buyers not only want sales reps to know things about the company when they join a phone call; they expect it. The best sales reps understand the importance of knowing context and would easily spend thirty minutes or more pulling information before a call. With AI tools, they can quickly generate a summary that instantly gives them the need-to-know info.
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