We can all agree: The benefits of AI are far-reaching. In fact, according to HubSpot, 78% of sales professionals say AI can help them spend more time on the most critical aspects of their role.
The tough part? Turning AI ambitions into action. How do you ensure your AI investment isn’t creating more work for your sales team? How can you train your team to know what parts of the job are worth automating vs. personalizing? These are critical questions with not-so-obvious answers.
Follow along as we break down how to identify opportunities for AI in your workflow — and what solutions might best help you implement it.
Identifying Your Potential Pain Points
Finding the best use cases for AI in your workflow will depend on your unique circumstances. However, if your team is experiencing any of the following common issues, AI can likely help resolve them.
Inefficient Use of Sales Time
Your sales team is spending too much time making sales material from scratch. While this content is an important part of your process, the time it takes for your team to create it generates little value compared to other duties.
Demos may also be a critical part of acquiring and qualifying leads, but the truth is they provide minimal return for your team’s time. Whether it be spending time on unqualified leads or presenting repetitive demos for multiple stakeholders in a buyer group, demos can be time-intensive, making them a prime candidate for AI automation.
Lack of Actionable Insights From Buyer Data
On its own, your buyer data isn’t providing value to your sales process. To gain any utility from your data, your team needs to spend hours sifting through metrics to identify actionable insights. Even then, they may miss valuable takeaways. This process burns away resources that can be better utilized elsewhere and can lead to frustration among your team.
Poor Task Prioritization
In some sales teams, sales reps are busy answering simple questions, rather than preparing for a sale. While responding to customer questions is important, constant communication over simple issues can significantly detract from your team’s availability to handle higher value sales tasks.
If your customer database is disorganized, your team may also be wasting time identifying which leads are qualified, who has been contacted, and where prospects are in the sales funnel and pipeline.
Once you’ve pinpointed your team’s workflow issues, you can determine which AI solutions will best streamline your processes and yield the highest return.
Pinpointing the Right AI Solutions
Making AI work for you is a two-step process. Once you’ve identified use cases, you must then find the right solutions to optimize your AI’s return on investment.
- Content creation software: Generative AI has come a long way in its ability to create valuable sales materials. Using solutions like ChatGPT or Consensus AI allows your team to dynamically customize and generate content without the time and hassle of creating content from scratch.
- Analytics: Incorporating AI into your business data drives value throughout your organization. AI-enabled analytics solutions like Demolytics organize, analyze, and extract valuable insights from your data to empower your team and guide your strategy.
- Buyer-facing chatbots: Let AI field your buyers’ questions by training it with your internal data. Properly trained AI chatbots can respond to frequently asked questions, reducing the hands-on time required from your reps.
- CRM: Adding AI to your customer relationship management (CRM) software can assist your team in scoring leads, organizing account data, and providing reporting. Popular CRM solutions like HubSpot and Salesforce are now adding AI to their platforms to increase their usefulness for sales teams.
- Product demonstrations: Demo automation transforms an otherwise time-intensive task into a buyer-empowering value driver. AI can customize demos, translate content, and gather buyer behavior metrics without your team ever having to get involved.
You may discover that multiple AI solutions are useful to you based on your team’s needs. In this case, you’ll want to prioritize solutions that can communicate with one another — or you’ll risk complicating your workflow rather than streamlining it.
The Importance of Integrations
AI solutions can benefit your sales team by increasing their bandwidth, but if your chosen AI solution can’t easily connect with your existing tech stack, you could end up creating more of a headache than an assistant.
That’s why choosing an AI solution with a range of integrations is essential to making AI work for you. When AI solutions like Consensus are properly integrated, they can connect with and distribute their power amongst your top tools — from your CRM to marketing to content management, and more.
The better connected your solutions, the less time your team has to spend manually inputting data. This time savings not only increases the value and flexibility of your digital solutions, but also creates more opportunities for your team to perform high-value sales work.
Automate Your Sales Process With Consensus
Finding the right solutions to optimize your sales efficiency with AI is essential to your team’s success. That’s why Consensus is designed with flexibility in mind, optimizing your demo process and working alongside other AI solutions to boost your overall efficiency.To learn more about how Consensus AI can help your team, talk to one of our experts. They can help pinpoint your unique value proposition and identify your best opportunities for AI automation.
