When 2023 is over and we create our annual summaries of trends and topics, you can sum up this year in two words: Artificial Intelligence. Especially since we’ll probably be using AI to compile those summaries.
AI has dominated the headlines this year, and with good reason. It amazes us, intrigues us, and even frightens us when we think of the possibilities it possesses. The more we learn about AI, the more we want to know how we can make it work for us (at least before it tries to overtake us). But how could AI work for presales teams in B2B sales?
We asked five of our favorite thought leaders to weigh in on how they and their teams use AI to impact the sales cycle and enhance buying experiences. Check out this demo or read the highlights in the sections below!
Competitive Intelligence
Neal Niemiec, Director of Customer Success at GRAITEC GROUP, says that presales practitioners can use tools like ChatGPT to gather intelligence by looking at how competitors position themselves and use that information to overcome objections.
“As we bring our products to the marketplace, we can better understand what the competitors are doing, their message to market, and we can correctly have objection handling in place and further focus on where there might be weaknesses within the competitors.”
Call Prep
Patrick Pissang, CEO, Founder, and Lead SE Trainer at Sales Hero GmbH, shared that sales engineers should be using AI as part of their desk research to understand industry changes their customers are facing, three key objectives their customers want to achieve, and three ways they can help their customers improve their business.
“You are more prepared, you have more to show, the results become better, more proficient. Then you can go on and extend that to actually create a Value Chevron Deck… Do the manual things, and then have the AI complement that.”
Demo Prep and Execution
Natasja Bax, Founder, Trainer, and Coach at The DemoScene, says that sales engineers can revolutionize their demo process by upping their preparation game. Tools like ChatGPT can help SEs use research to curate a list of questions to support their discovery conversations.
“We all know that starting a demo with a summary of the customer’s situation is key to a great demo. ChatGPT can quickly convert your meeting notes into personalized summary slides.”
Gaining Industry Insights
Chris White, Founder and CEO of TechSalesAdvisors, suggested that presales leaders and practitioners use AI to go past gaining familiarity with new clients or prospects, and ask pointed questions that help SEs become industry experts almost instantly.
“You can ask ChatGPT to write a 100 word summary of a company, and then ask specific questions about challenges that industry faces. It equips you with some of the things your stakeholders will talk about and want to solve for.”
Optimizing Presales Teams
Todd Janzen, Global VP of Q-Branch at Salesforce, shared how his teams use AI to improve imagery for slides, create complex SQL queries, write and refine Javascript code to save developers time, and even answer RFPs.
“Our RFP vendor is coming up with some cool ChatGPT functionality to help us come up with net new answers, which is a huge time saver, and to also generate that executive summary when submitting that RFP back to a customer or prospect.”
The future of AI in presales is uncertain, but we’re excited to see how its various applications can improve the lives of sales engineers and their ability to make an impact on the buyer’s journey. Let’s talk about your favorite use case for AI in presales and how demo automation can enhance it!
