Is B2B Sales AI Ready to Take Off?

Artificial intelligence has been transforming businesses for years, but the transformation accelerated in December 2022 when ChatGPT opened the doors to a user-friendly generative AI. Since then, companies have incorporated AI into everything from internal communications to client-facing messages to productivity tools.

Properly managed, AI tools have a home in marketing, finance, production, and even B2B sales. But, you might be thinking, you don’t want B2B sales AI to replace your vital connections with your business accounts, so what role can it have beyond admin work?

To start, let’s peel back the layers of how your sales and revenue departments work to uncover any aspect of manual work, analysis, or technical skills where AI can either manage the task alone or be a handy assistant (co-pilot) to your team.

A few initial possibilities  of what AI can do include:

• Building detailed client profiles and account strategy plans
• Personalized outreach at scale
• Training your sales reps through interactive role-playing simulations—and providing instantaneous, detailed feedback
• Tracking all of your opportunities for new sales, renewals, cross-sells, and upsells so nothing falls through the cracksGiving your directors and managers the information they need through training profiles, forecast models, and detailed reports, all created by artificial intelligence and ready to read
• But the technology is evolving fast, so let’s consider a more complete vision next.

What Can B2B Sales AI Platforms Do?

Robust AI tools are still in the early days of their evolution. Since the widespread adoption of ChatGPT at the beginning of 2023, business tools have expanded to offer a wide array of AI-powered support functions, analytics options, user-friendly productivity options, and more. See where AI in B2B sales can helpfully slot into any of the workflows of your revenue team.

Marketing

One of the most significant use cases for artificial intelligence in today’s B2B landscape is marketing. Simply, people can’t manage account-based marketing and increasingly personalized approaches alone. That’s why businesses are adding AI-enabled ad creation tools, marketing campaign platforms, and robust marketing analytics integrations into their tech stack. As enterprise-level companies refine their messaging to speak directly to key decision-makers in a target organization at the right time and with the proper outreach, everyone else must adopt the same practices or be left behind.

Some of the specific tasks AI can optimize include:

• Automating lead scoring processes
• Timing interactions to reduce sales cycles
• Understanding the context of interactions to determine prospects’ purpose, goals, and concerns and better translate intent indicators.
• Untangling B2B sales relationships, primarily when multiple stakeholders are involved, so that salespeople can address the right messages to the right actors.

Account Management Background Work

Salespeople must provide more comprehensive, customer-centric services, taking on the role of part account manager and part salesperson. This is one of the most effective approaches to overcoming mistrust. While this is true for sales environments overall, the lengthy procurement process and the long-term relationships demanded in B2B sales make it even more critical. 

However, managing all the touchpoints, interactions, client org chart details, and SWOT analyses that AMs traditionally do can overwhelm a busy salesperson with manual processes. AI-based AM tools can work silently in the background and alert salespeople about the best time to start a conversation, when something needs their attention, and their priorities for the day, week, or quarter.

Monitoring

No business can ignore the importance of data in today’s sales environment, and organizational leaders who operate in the dark are doomed to fail. Sales managers need constant insight into their teams’ progress on big deals, accounts that may get lost, and transactions that will bleed over into the next quarter. To make strategic calls, VPs and sales directors need a more holistic, guided overview. 

Again, manually managing all of this monitoring and analytics is quickly becoming impossible because of the data companies can collect and the data they must compose. B2B sales AI and machine learning-based tools can look at the raw data and present essential trends and insights leaders at all levels of an organization need to act effectively. 

Related: Is AI for Sales Calls Training the Next Breakthrough?

Quarterly and Annual Goal Predictions

Everyone within a sales organization has a quarterly goal they need to meet. Entry-level salespeople and business development representatives have sales call quotas. Regional sales managers have revenue goals for new business and business retention. C-suite executives must keep the organization on target to cover spending, reassure stakeholders, and plan growth initiatives for the year ahead.

While traditional tools and even smart spreadsheets from five years ago can show fundamental trends and allow leaders to estimate their likelihood of meeting goals, B2B AI can give far more accurate predictions. After all, trend lines based on performance in the first half of a quarter won’t fully translate to the second half, especially if it’s Q4 with lots of travel and delays. A savvy salesperson might make the adjustments in their head because they have experience. Still, only AI can consider human factors, past years’ performance, competitor performance, and hundreds or thousands of other factors to present accurate predictions.

For companies that need to realize a return on their tech stack investments as concretely as possible, this is one of the most significant and immediate benefits of AI in B2B sales. According to an analysis of McKinsey data written by Forbes Technology Council member Selva Pandian, “According to the research and insights, which McKinsey defines as data-driven decision making, adds a 2 to 5% boost in sales. Agility, which includes scaling sales and reprioritizing accounts, can lead to a 5 to 10% boost.” Simply following the data to rearrange your sales priorities without changing your sales processes and training initiatives can reap steep rewards.

Sales Training

Where AI in B2B sales shines the most is in B2B sales training. Any sales training manager knows that the training process is rough, with repetitive training sequences, countless minor variations in prospect responses, and lots of time spent getting a sales rep from being a source of spending to a source of revenue. After all, salespeople in training aren’t making money, and experienced salespeople training them, answering questions, or saving a deal from slipping away are earning less for the company.

Take a closer look at how B2B sales AI can revolutionize B2B sales training in these critical aspects:

Interactive Sales Role Play

Interactive sales training is one of the most valuable learning techniques. Salespeople can model common scenarios, practice messaging, and develop techniques for handling confused, frustrated, and ambivalent prospects. Role-play scenarios allow every sales rep to focus on individual skills without worrying about practicing on customers.

However, there are some drawbacks to conventional sales role-play training. The first is that most salespeople don’t like it—they don’t enjoy performing in front of an audience, they don’t like being put on the spot and evaluated by a trainer, and they may feel like they aren’t getting any value from it if the scenarios are too artificial. Because of the one-on-one nature of role-play exercises, providing consistent sessions and feedback may not be an option for your busy training or management team.

The AI training software can handle the task with a sales AI simulator. Robust AI sales coaching platforms can:

• Generate an endless array of realistic scenarios that center around everyday interactions your salespeople have while simultaneously zeroing in on specific skills or concepts
• Role play in the ‘prospect’ or ‘client’ role so your sales reps can practice without a live audience
• Assess your representatives in exercises like mock sales calls, cold calling, upselling scenarios, and more
• Generate responses to each part of the exchange that makes sense and further the realism—and objective—of the scenario
• Provide real-time coaching or feedback to deepen learning
• Allow sales reps to practice again and again

Process Prompts

AI can read increasingly granular clues to provide deep insight and tell B2B salespeople the most tactical move in any interaction. It does this by:

• Analyzing voice sentiment in audio, video, and text-based messages so salespeople can make the appropriate response
• Knowing what phrases and negotiation points have had the most success in similar interactions across similar prospects
• Differentiating between genuine buyer intent signals and time-wasting signals

With an AI tool integrated into their CRM or as an open tab on their workstation, salespeople can operate more efficiently, with fewer missteps, delays, or lost deals. This also ramps up training, as new and new-to-you salespeople quickly learn your company’s unique selling processes and typical client base. Even novice salespeople can confidently and promptly graduate from training sequences to cold leads to hot leads.

Personalized Learning Tracks for Every Salesperson

Every salesperson has different learning needs, which can be difficult for any sales manager or training team to keep up with. As your organization grows, you might have entry-level inside sales reps, legacy field sales reps who have been with the company for years, and new hires who are experienced sellers but new to your industry. Each of them needs training, but the training they need differs wildly between basic skills, industry talking points, and brand-new messaging for a newly released product line. On top of that, each employee will have different natural talents and preferred learning styles.

Enter AI, which can develop individualized learning tracks for every employee. This process starts with a series of assessments that can objectively determine each participant’s current skill levels and knowledge base. Based on those insights, training AI can identify which modules make the most sense and generate scenarios that target gaps or deficiencies as efficiently as possible. Your trainees can then jump into the training without waiting for a trainer to be available or holding off until a seminar or class. The modules, training exercises, and next steps are always available for when they have downtime.

The sales manager or trainer can then review everyone’s progress at a glance, input new objectives, and evaluate how individuals are developing new skills.

Automatic Feedback and Standardized Scores

Successful sales processes must be in a constant state of refinement. Even the most powerful tactics and workflows must adapt to changing buyer behaviors through frequent, incremental changes. AI takes growth-driven design principles — making and testing small changes without jeopardizing the core processes — and makes them even more powerful. It can read signals from a small, virtually unnoticeable buyer and a salesperson’s behavior and offer feedback to close gaps and improve interactions. This means salespeople constantly strengthen their performances, whether ramping up as new sales professionals or an expert who aligns their techniques to match modern B2B buyers.

Not only is this flow of information continuous, but it’s also objective and data-backed. Toxic workplaces, high turnover, and plain old human subjectivity are hazards in any training situation or performance review. But when AI constantly analyzes workflows and performance, trainers and trainees (and managers and salespeople) know where they’ve made progress and can still grow. Even better, that information is available for quarterly reviews or at the end of every week, even once interaction has ended and the employee is ready to reflect.

Related: Beyond the Battle Card: Training Your Reps to Go Up Against a New Competitor

What Will AI in B2B Sales Do for Your Company?

B2B sales AI is transforming how companies get business done. Maintaining a human connection with your B2B clients is essential, and AI tools are the solution to inefficiencies and lost opportunities that can interfere with those connections. Quantified provides B2B sales organizations with cutting-edge sales training AI solutions so your people can build human connections. Give your sales team access to realistic, objective-driven sales training exercises that shake off all the disadvantages of in-person training, and see how much your sales team can grow when they always have an AI-powered sales coach in their pocket. Reach out today to see how AI can revolutionize your training processes and results.