AI as a New Way to Improve Sales Performance

Generative AI is often discussed almost as a revolutionary technology. Here Liubov Reynolds, Managing Director, Sales Expand Ltd, discusses how artificial intelligence (AI) can improve sales performance.

It’s the second week of June. London is buzzing. This is an important week on busy London Tech Scene – London Tech Week, a chance for many businesses to demonstrate new technologies and AI is a dominant theme. ChatGPT has brought Generative AI capabilities to the mass adoption and created a revolution in how we can search information and how we create new content. So, what is there for Sales and Marketing professionals?

AI principles

But first, here are the most important principles to understand about AI:

• Current generation of AI and ML (Machine Learning Systems) is based on common patterns finding using enhanced Neural Networks, Visual and Language models. It is NOT based on logic and rules.
• AI systems are trained by applying these models on specified data sets, learning (identifying) new patterns by analysing massive amount of similar data on specific subject. Effectively, this simulates process of how babies learn or how people unconsciously figuring out the world around them without applying predefined rules.
• The amount of analysed data and quality of loaded data sets (correct, clean data) are crucial factors in providing correct output. Due to these challenges, current AI systems may “hallucinate” and provide wrong answers.
• AI models are constantly adapting. The more data loaded, the more AI is trained, the better probability in a correct outcome and the best AI systems can proved expected results in 80%+ but never in 100% cases, because they are not based on rules and there are always data outside of common patterns.
• Generative AI systems such as ChatCPT create a content in a specific style (identified pattens) defined by “prompts”.
• As a result, AI are best suited to provide quick analysis of common patterns within the processes, performance and behaviour, so that they can be quickly spotted and corrected where applicable.

Adapting AI to Sales

Here are some common areas where AI principles can be adapted in Sales to:

1. Spot a typical behaviour of Sales reps, both poor performance and the pattens/typical approaches of best performers, what they do and how they win the deals, so that it can be adapted for sales content generation and training sales team to better performance.
2. Analyse quality of pipeline to improve probability to win and the focus on key accounts.
3. Generate customer-specific content and customer-specific offering by spotting pattens in customer behaviour and interests.
4. Improve quality of leads by providing customer-specific information and path on how to buy with limited Sales involvement, so called “Buyer Enablement” trend / Digital deal rooms.
5. Replace repetitive prospective sales tasks with highly-customisable prospecting content generated for individual buyers, moving from customer-specific journey to customer-specific content

Applying AI to Sales

So, what are how the organisation can ensure for successful application of AI in Sales process. They would need to:

1. Integrate AI into existing Sales systems technical stack.
2. Review approaches on how and what data collected at what point of time. This is important for applying correct AI training modes.
3. Cleanse data, removing duplications and “dirty data”, wrong information and setting up the process for optimised data collection to avoid “hallucination” of AI system with unexpected outputs.
4. Prepare the team in adapting AI principles by starting small and identifying areas where AI can be applied to test the new principles and systems, typically repetitive task with low outcome, poor performance and unidentified clear reasons.
5. Research and select ready-made AI-first products or create your own AI tool.

What’s vital is to engage with a consultant that can analyse the best way of adapting new AI tools to your selling environment, helping your organisation to improve its sales performance. In this article, I’m just scratching the surface, there is more to learn from working with customers across multiple industries, allowing the adoption of the best sales performance techniques to enable sales to constantly grow.

By Liubov Reynolds, Managing Director, Sales Expand Ltd