Sales tools have been given a major overhaul in recent years with the continued development of artificial intelligence (AI). For any sales team, there will likely be at least one area of their working life or sales tools that has AI fully integrated into it, if not more than one.
It’s not just about making work easier either, using AI is about making sales teams more efficient and cost-effective. A report stated that businesses could save around $89.07 billion per year using AI. This would be achieved by outsourcing data entry and administrative tasks to AI, something that takes up to 70% of salespeople’s time.
Deciding where and when to incorporate sales tools infused with AI can feel tricky. On the one hand, you want to maximize efficiency and make the most of the new technology. Equally there is a “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. And while there is the opportunity to increase efficiency and productivity, there can also be a learning curve with new systems, and there are teething issues.
It’s worth putting some time and effort into how your sales tools can be leveled up using smart new AI features.
Table of Contents
What Are Sales Tools ?
Tools are, by the very definition of the word, things that help people perform a task. And if the task is “sales” these are tools that help sales teams (and those who support them) generate more sales.
Some very basic sales tools could be a telephone, or even a piece of paper, but the really valuable tools are much more technology-based. For instance, leveraging AI in sales processes has shown to increase the efficiency of sales reps by at least 27%, demonstrating how essential these advanced tools are in the fast-paced sales environments of today.
15 Types of Sales Tools You Must Know:
- Prospecting Tools: Technologies designed to find and manage potential clients, including AI-powered lead scoring systems and social media monitoring tools.
- Data Enrichment Tools: Increase the chances of your prospecting by using data enrichment to get as many touch points and details as possible for your outreach.
- Data Cleansing Tools: Ensure that all your prospecting data is clean and up-to-date with data cleansing tools that check emails and other factors.
- Email Outreach Tools: Software that facilitates better communication with clients, such as email outreach, chatbots, and video conferencing tools.
- LinkedIn Outreach Tools: Using specialized business social media such as LinkedIn can be enhanced with tools. This turns the social network into an easy to action outreach resource.
- CRM Systems: Platforms that help manage customer interactions and data throughout the customer lifecycle, improving relationships and customer retention, and driving sales growth.
- Sales Engagement & Enablement Platforms: Systems that equip sales teams with content management, sales training, and coaching tools to improve sales execution.
- Video Conferencing Tools & Platforms: Enabling even easier communication in the modern world. These tools make it simple to jump on a face-to-face call with prospective clients and make booking them easier.
- AI Meeting Assistants: These tools can help with taking notes, looping in other departments and keeping detailed records of exactly what your potential customer wants.
- Document Creation & Automation Tools: These are tools that help to move the sales quicker to the close. As well as making standardized contracts easier to get out to customers, they can also track and give details of who has opened the files and much more granular detail.
- E-signature Tools: Tools that allow contracts and other documents to be signed electronically, speeding up the sales process and reducing paperwork.
- Payment Processing Tools: Being able to easily receive payments from anywhere in the world is really important to ensure the smooth flow of a prospect into a customer. It can also minimize time spent by reps chasing payment before work can begin.
- Customer Success Tools: Making the transition from post-purchase easy. These types of tools allow for easier upselling and customer management.
- Sales Training Tools: Once you have the sale and the happy customer you can replicate the actions that led to success. AI-driven Sales training tools can be smart, reactive and tailored to your reps strengths and weaknesses.
- Strategic Planning & Forecasting Tools: Applications that provide data analysis and visualization to help sales teams make informed decisions based on performance metrics and sales forecasts.
These tools not only assist in the active selling phase but also support sales planning, strategy, and analysis, leading to a more effective and systematic approach to sales management.
Starting with Prospects: Sales Tools For Identifying and Enriching Profiles
The first part of any sales process is to know what it is you’re selling.
Then it’s to find your target market or audience. This can come in the form of lead lists generated by your marketing department, attending a networking event in your relevant field, or even cold emailing.
Before you even get started you should have a list of criteria that a potential prospect should qualify for. In the past this would have been a mixture of using information available, and asking questions.
Nowadays with the internet and the vast amounts of data we now have available to us, much of this pre-qualification can be done before you even email the potential customer.
Prospecting
The goal of prospecting is to identify potential leads or clients. Sales teams can use various sales tools and strategies to generate lists of leads based on particular criteria. This could be something such as industry, company size, job title, etc. This is the very first stage for building a sales pipeline. The larger the prospecting pool the more potential your sales teams have at closing a deal.
Effective prospecting not only fills the pipeline with potential leads but also sets the stage for the next critical steps in the sales process. By continuously tweaking your prospecting techniques and sales tools, sales teams can significantly enhance their efficiency and effectiveness, driving sales growth and achieving strategic business objectives. Some tools can actually identify which companies have been looking at your website, or a particular landing page. This allows you to zone in on those who may already be interested or engaged with your brand.
Popular Prospecting Tools
- RocketReach: Offering up-to-date contact details for over 450 million professionals worldwide, RocketReach is
- Apollo.io: Apollo tips itself as a sales acceleration platform, combining lead generation, engagement, and analytics.
- LinkedIn: LinkedIn has over 1 billion users across 200 countries, and offers a place where people offer up their role and title easily, while also actively signaling they are open to networking.
- LeadIQ : LeadIQ pushes itself as the prospecting tool that can integrate directly into a CRM system.
- Cognism: Offering event triggers and sales sequences Cognism is somewhere between a prospecting, data enrichment and communication tool.
- ClearBit: ClearBit, recently acquired by Hubspot took the data it got from its’ era of being a data enrichment tool to turn itself into a prospecting tool, letting users uncover potential leads according to predefined criteria. It also allows companies to identify who has been onto their website, meaning that a proactive sales team can reach out directly to that company at the right time, based on that data.
- Zoominfo: This is a huge B2B database of business profiles that allows sales teams to zone in and identify the right companies, department and decision makers to target.
Data Enrichment
Data enrichment tools allow you to add to your lists of potential prospects by finding out things such as industry, company size, job role, and some even offer levels of funding and turnover. It can also be a great way to help identify individuals and find touchpoints such as LinkedIn profiles, or email addresses. Unlike a general prospecting tool, although some of those mentioned above do offer data enrichment, it’s about taking raw leads and building extra detail into them.
The AI element of these sales tools allows for things like intelligent lead scoring, and updating each record with the latest news from across the web related to that company.
As AI-driven sales tools get even smarter, we could start to see predictive analytics. Using AI has proven to increase lead generation by up to 50%. This significant improvement underscores the importance of AI in identifying and engaging with potential clients more effectively.
This would mean that rather than having a list that has hundreds of leads based on the companies and interactions of those particular companies, it may suggest that some would have a more effective touchpoint. Or companies that they are unlikely to purchase in Q2 – but Q3 they will almost always spend.
Popular Data Enrichment Tools
- Hunter.io: Hunter.io is an entry level enrichment tool. Hunter is all about finding the right email address for potential prospect.
- Lusha: Lusha is probably one of the most known Clearbit competitors and the best Hunter alternative if you want to go beyond email finding. It’s one step ahead of what Hunter offers as it provides instant access to accurate B2B contact and company information, empowering sales and marketing professionals to connect with their ideal prospects faster and more effectively.
- Seamless.ai: Known for its ability to scrape data across the web, providing comprehensive information on potential leads.
- Clearbit: Already mentioned as a prospecting tool, ClearBit origins are of data enrichment. It’s the most complete platform of this list.
Data Cleansing
Data cleansing, also known as data cleaning, is the process of detecting and correcting (or removing) inaccurate records from a prospecting list. While this may seem like an unnecessary step, it’s important to maintain the integrity of your email domain.
If your team are regularly sending out cold emails then cleaning lists should be done as standard. This not only ensures that the right people are getting the emails, but also your inbox isn’t receiving a mass of bounces. As well as making sure that your emails don’t get blocked it also improves overall campaign effectiveness.
Popular Data Cleansing Tools
- Snov.io: Snov allows you to find emails, clean and verify them, in one place.
- NeverBounce: Specializing in email validation, NeverBounce enhances your email deliverability by cleaning your lists to significantly reduce bounce rates,
- ZeroBounce: ZeroBounce offers advanced email verification and cleaning services, along with valuable insights like additional data enrichment.
- Hunter.io: Apart from being a data enrichment tool, Hunter also validates email addresses being a good alternative to the above.
Making the Initial Contact: Sales Tools For Efficient Outreach and Communication
After identifying your ideal prospects, armed with insights into their roles and industries, the next critical step is the first outreach. This initial contact is one of the most important parts of the entire sales process. It’s the first impression that sets the tone for the entire interaction, and that first impression can be incredibly difficult to change once set.
Making that first contact can be on a number of different touchpoints, and can be implemented using any number of sales tools. While for many the first way to contact used to be picking up the phone, nowadays there are plenty of others to consider.
Email Outreach Sales Tools
Email is probably the most efficient way to to get in touch with a new prospect. When utilized effectively across sales, as well as with marketing and customer success as well, it can offer a gentle, asynchronous way of reaching out.
If you opt for the email outreach approach, make sure that you are tailoring your messaging to recipient’s interests. Just a little bit of personalization can go a long way.
Popular Email Outreach Tools
- MailChimp: While mostly considered a newsletter and marketing tool, MailChimp supports sales efforts through advanced automation and segmentation features, allowing sales teams to send personalized emails at scale.
- Constant Contact: Similar to MailChimp, Constant Contact offers robust customization and segmentation capabilities, making it a versatile tool for sales-related email campaigns.
- Instantly: A specialized cold email software designed to optimize outreach efforts. Instantly allows sales teams to automate their cold email campaigns, track responses, and analyze the effectiveness of different messaging strategies. Its focus on cold emailing makes it an essential tool for sales professionals looking to initiate contact with new leads efficiently. It uses AI to test drive different copy, templates, and sending times to maximize open rates and conversions.
- lemlist – lemlist is a bit more unusual than other cold email outreach tools. It allows you to add images, video and more personalization that other email platforms that will typically encourage plain text emails.
- QuickMail – Super simple and easy to use, QuickMail is great for pure cold email. Along with testing capabilities, and clear graphs and data, it’s great for running a high volume of campaigns.
If you are concerned about the direct to inbox approach, and want to go for a more personalized outreach then using LinkedIn is a great way to get started. We mentioned LinkedIn as a prospecting tool, but it’s also one of the best ways to communicate directly with your potential customers.
If your team want to use LinkedIn, it’s likely that they will need to upgrade to LinkedIn Sales Navigator to increase their ability to outreach to multiple prospects.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a sales tool that offers:
- Detailed search capabilities to identify potential leads.
- The ability to filter prospects based on company size, functionality and more (this is often where many of the prospecting tools acquire their information from in the first instance).
- The ability to send personalized InMail messages, fostering direct and impactful communications.
- Insights into lead activities, enabling sales teams to tailor their outreach strategies effectively
Popular LinkedIn Outreach Tools
- LinkedIn Sales Navigator: LinkedIn wants people to use their native functionality. Here you can create lead lists, segment depending on different targets, and make sure that you are reaching out to the right people. It’s built for sales (and recruitment), and is easy to use.
- SalesFlow: SalesFlow does everything that LinkedIn Sales Navigator does but automates it. Simply build your list, creating your outreach message sequence and then set it to go.
- Zopto: Like SalesFlow, Zopto is another tool that allows you to send out sequences of messages, connections and inMails on the LinkedIn platform. You can also enrich your list with email addresses, and if the information is available, email them directly using LinkedIn to create your prospect list.
CRM Systems
Seamless integration with Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems is critical for tracking communications, managing leads, and deriving insights from outreach activities.
The best CRM systems are indispensable in sales for managing leads, tracking communications, and deriving actionable insights. Advanced platforms like HubSpot, Salesforce, Zoho, Pipedrive, Close, and even Notion leverage AI to enhance these capabilities, making sales outreach more efficient and personalized.
Additionally, the integration of virtual sales assistants into these platforms has become a game-changer for many sales teams. By automating repetitive tasks, providing real-time customer data, and enabling 24/7 customer service, these AI-powered assistants further streamline the sales process, ensuring sales professionals can focus on building relationships and closing deals.
Popular CRM Systems
- HubSpot Sales Hub: HubSpot incorporates AI for sentiment analysis and email tracking, notifying reps instantly when an email is opened. Its AI-driven features also optimize meeting scheduling and live chat engagements, enabling tailored follow-ups that significantly increase conversion chances.
- Salesforce: Salesforce Einstein AI revolutionizes sales processes with predictive lead scoring, automated data entry, and personalized recommendations for next steps with prospects. Its sentiment analysis capabilities ensure communications are always strategically aligned with the prospect’s mood and readiness to buy.
- Zoho CRM: Zoho’s Zia AI offers sales teams an intelligent assistant capable of voice commands, sales trend analysis, and lead scoring. Zia can predict deal closures and identify anomalies in sales trends, allowing for proactive adjustments. Zia’s conversational AI enhances customer interaction with timely and relevant responses.
- Notion: Notion is an incredibly adaptable and flexible workspace, which makes it ideal for any sales teams who want a specific and customizable CRM. While it does not natively incorporate AI in the same way as other CRM platforms mentioned, its capacity to integrate with external AI tools and services through APIs makes it ideal for a more forward-thinking and tech-savvy sales team. Being able to action this functionality means that you can configure automated data analysis, lead tracking, and personalized outreach strategies that align with the dynamic needs of sales management.
- Pipedrive: Pipedrive is often cited as being great for having a visually strong way of showing data. This CRM’s AI spots the deals that are most likely to close using past successes.
- Close.com: Close focuses on sales automation and productivity, integrating AI to streamline lead scoring and prioritization. Its AI algorithms analyze communication patterns to suggest the best times for follow-up calls or emails, maximizing the effectiveness of sales efforts.
Sales Engagement Platforms
While a CRM such as Salesforce or Hubspot offers some sales management, they are also about storage and record keeping. However a sales engagement platform is a lot more focused on the actual sales process, than data storage.
Sales engagement platforms incorporate other elements that are normally attributed to marketing. Things such as social listening email sequencing, automation, and content personalization. They move beyond the traditional CRM’s focus on data storage to actively drive sales. With sales tools such as social listening, platforms can helo sales teams catch brand mentions and potential leads on social media, allowing for timely interactions.
They also offer more in-depth analytics for insights into which strategies work best, guiding teams on the most effective ways to communicate and move prospects through the sales funnel. They also integrate with CRMs to help streamline the sales workflow, keeping teams focused on selling rather than on administrative tasks.
- SalesLoft: This sales tool includes a range of features such as email automation, dialer functionalities for using the telephone and also a number of social selling tools. Features like this when incorporated into a single tool can be a cost-effective, and efficient, way to maximize sales tools for your team. With its automation capabilities it can also prevent a lot of time-sucking admin, allowing sales teams and management to outsource routine tasks. This forward-looking approach is reflected in the strategic plans of businesses, with 61% of companies aiming to incorporate AI into their sales forecasting.
Outreach: This platform is a leader in sales engagement, helping teams automate and prioritize their interactions with potential and existing customers. Outreach provides tools for email sequencing, call routing, and performance analytics to optimize sales processes and increase efficiency.
Dock is a client-facing workspace that helps revenue teams close deals, onboard customers, and manage renewals. With Dock, companies organize everything shared at each stage of the customer journey—from sales content to order forms to project plans. Along the way, leadership gets valuable analytics to calculate the sales forecast, coach front-line managers, fix broken implementations, and understand what content actually resonates.
Yesware: Yesware is an all-in-one for sales professionals that integrates directly into email inboxes. It offers email tracking, templates, meeting scheduling, and follow-up reminders.
Groove: Groove is a sales engagement platform tailored for Google Workspace and Salesforce users, offering a suite of tools including email and calendar integration, aut-dialer capabilities, and actionable analytics. It’s designed to automate routine tasks and provide insights into sales activities.
Mixmax: Mixmax is an email communication platform that enhances email productivity for sales teams with features like email tracking, scheduling, templates, and sequences. It also offers unique features such as one-click meeting scheduling and polls within emails, making it a versatile tool for engaging prospects
Reply.io: Reply.io focuses on automating personal communication at scale. It supports multichannel sequences that include emails, social media outreach, and calls. The platform offers tools for sales acceleration, team collaboration, and detailed analytics to drive engagement and conversions.
Setting Up the Meeting: The Role of AI Assistants
Once your team is in the door with a potential customer, it’s now the time to speak and try and encourage them to sign on the dotted line. This can be done on the phone, face-to-face, or by using video conferencing.
While still relatively new, online meetings are now a great way to get to know your potential customers, allow them to meet you “in-person”, but without the financial and time expense that would come with a traditional meeting.
Video Conferencing Platforms
Video conferencing platforms are one of the most popular ways for people to communicate nowadays. While video calling has been around for a while, it’s only in the last few years that it has become as commonplace as it is now. Video conferencing gives you the chance to speak with people across the globe as if they were in the same room as you.
While there are three main players when it comes to video conferencing, there are also smaller options and other third-party tools that can help to make video conferencing even more seamless.
Popular Video Conferencing Tools
- Zoom: The leading name in video conferencing. Zoom is synonymous with online meetings. It is known for its ease of use, reliability, and high-quality video. Zoom supports various meeting sizes, from one-on-one catch-ups to large webinars, and offers features like screen sharing, meeting recording, and virtual backgrounds to enhance the meeting experience.
- Google Meet: Integrated within the Google Workspace ecosystem, Google Meet offers secure video calls that are easy to join and manage. It’s known for its simplicity and integration with Google Calendar and Gmail, making scheduling and joining meetings straightforward for users of Google services.
- Microsoft Teams: Microsoft Teams is a comprehensive collaboration tool that includes chat, video meetings, file storage, and integration with Office 365 applications. It’s designed for seamless collaboration and communication within organizations. It’s often very popular with more corporate settings.
- Webex: A long-standing player in the video conferencing domain, Cisco’s Webex offers a secure, all-in-one platform for video meetings, team collaboration, and webinars.
- GoToMeeting: GoToMeeting is a user-friendly video conferencing tool that’s well-suited for small to medium-sized businesses. It offers features like HD video, screen sharing, and meeting recording, along with mobile apps to stay connected on the go. Its simplicity and reliability make it a solid choice for teams needing straightforward video conferencing capabilities. There is also a web-based app version for those who don’t want to download anything onto their computer.
- Calendly: While it doesn’t offer video conferencing itself, this calendar-based booking system makes it easy to organize video calls that suit everybody. Linked directly to a calendar, it allows people to book calls at times convenient to all. No clashes, it also automatically generates the meeting code of your choice. It makes synchronizing a video call easy.
AI Meeting Assistants
On top of these, we also now have a range of third-party options to further enhance your video meetings.
AI meeting assistants (a.k.a AI notetakers) revolutionize meeting management by automating scheduling, capturing key discussions, and providing analytical summaries, thus enhancing productivity and insight gathering.
Popular AI Meeting Assistants
- tl;dv: Recording, transcribing, translation. tl;dv is a powerful, AI-note taker that allows for seamless recording and storage of meetings. It easy to capture the essentials of a meeting and share highlights with team members who couldn’t attend. What’s more, with AI’s help, you can ask questions about one or more meetings, create recurring meeting reports and integrate with your entire sales suite.
- Grain: Grain focuses on capturing and sharing the most impactful moments from your video calls. It allows users to create shareable video clips from meetings to ensure key insights and moments are easily accessible and actionable.
- Chorus.ai:Chorus.ai records, transcribes, and analyzes sales calls to provide insights into customer interactions. It helps teams understand what works, refine sales techniques, and improve deal closure rates.
- Fireflies.ai: Fireflies can attend your meetings to record, transcribe, and search through conversations in your meetings. Fireflies.ai integrates with popular video conferencing tools to automate meeting documentation and make it searchable and shareable. Although with plenty of features, Fireflies free plan is not as generous as others like tl;dv, restricting you to audio recordings up to 300min/month.
- Gong.io: Incredibly sales-focused, Gong.io uses AI to analyze conversations for insights into sales performance, customer feedback, and market intelligence. It’s an expensive platform and really only worth it once you want to go deep into deal forecasting.
- Fathom: Fathom offers real-time transcription and summarization without storing proprietary information. It’s a nice meeting assistant offering in-meeting highlights. However it’s quite limited on the AI front, offering little to none customization on which prompts you can query meetings with.
- Avoma: An all-in-one AI meeting assistant that provides transcription, key takeaway extraction, and actionable insights for better meeting outcomes.
- Hyperia: Hyperia is a video call recording platform featuring conversational intelligence, automatic transcription, note-taking, and calendar event recording.
Closing the Deal and Beyond: Document Handling, E-Signatures & Post-Sales Support
When it comes to closing the deal, sales tools can really help to speed up the process. There’s no more trying to print and fax signatures. Everything can now be signed, sealed and delivered using digital technology. From smart contract generation, to digital signatures, AI and technology really have made it frictionless to getting those brand new customers.
It’s not just about using AI driven sales tools for convenience either, it can completely transform the entire closing process. Smart AI systems can ensure that every necessary document is prepared, organized, and ready for action. This level of automation guarantees that sales teams can focus on the customer rather than on paperwork, enhancing the overall experience for both parties
Document Creation & Automation
In the closing stages of a sale, the ability to swiftly generate, customize, and distribute essential documents is invaluable. Document creation and automation tools facilitate this by enabling sales teams to produce contracts, proposals, and other necessary paperwork with speed and precision.
Utilizing templates and automated workflows, these tools ensure that all documents are consistent, accurate, and tailored to each client’s needs. This not only enhances the professionalism of the sales process but also allows sales teams to focus more on client relationships and less on administrative tasks. Automation in document handling leads to a streamlined closing process, reducing the time from negotiation to agreement, and significantly improving the customer experience.
Popular Document Creation & Automation Tools
- PandaDoc: Automates the creation of proposals, contracts, and quotes with customizable templates, facilitating faster document turnaround times.
- Zoho Writer: Part of the Zoho suite, this tool offers a powerful platform for document creation, with collaboration and automation features ideal for sales documents.
- OneFlow: This all-in-one document software allows creation of contracts, and templates. It integrates direclty with many CRM systems, and offers eSignatures.
eSignatures
eSignature technology marks a real advance in finalizing sales transactions. By allowing documents to be signed electronically, eSignature tools eliminate the challenges associated with physical signatures, such as printing, scanning, and mailing.
These eSignature tools not only provide a secure and legally binding means to sign documents from anywhere at any time but also offer tracking features that alert sales teams the moment a document is signed. This immediate visibility into document status enhances the agility of sales operations, enabling quicker responses and follow-ups.
It’s also great for persistency. If your new client hasn’t signed the contract the system can send out automatic reminders. This allows many sales reps can disassociate themselves from the process, which can add another layer of rapport to relationships. They are no longer the “chaser,” but are there to support the new client.
Popular Esignature Tools
- DocuSign: A leader in the eSignature space, DocuSign simplifies the process of signing documents online. It makes it secure and legally binding with ease.
- Dropbox Sign: Offers an easy-to-use interface for signing documents digitally, integrating seamlessly with various cloud storage services for easy access and management.
Payment Processing
Securing a deal is only part of the sales journey; efficient and reliable payment collection is what completes it. Businesses expect flexible, secure, and straightforward payment solutions that can allow for a variety of payment methods and currencies.
Payment processing tools make this much easier by working directly with sales and accounting tools. This means that transactions are processed accurately and securely, with minimal manual intervention. Accounts can also automatically reconcile invoices with data pulled through. This in turn can be linked to the CRM and help to automat follow-ups and renewal notices in plenty of time. Additionally, integrating an AML case management workflow can enhance transaction security and ensure compliance with anti-money laundering regulations. This workflow monitors transactions to prevent fraudulent activities, ensuring that all financial processes adhere to regulatory standards.
Payment Collection & Processing Tools
- Stripe: A comprehensive payment processing platform known for its flexibility, supporting a wide range of payment methods and currencies.
- PayPal for Business: Offers robust payment solutions tailored for businesses of all sizes, ensuring secure and efficient transactions with global reach.
- Xero: This accounting software also offers in-software payments, allowing for easy invoicing and invoice reconciliation. It can also integrate directly with many bank accounts making it easy for full transparency.
The Aftermath: Continuous Improvement and Strategic Planning with AI
After successfully closing the deal, the journey doesn’t end; it shifts towards ensuring lasting customer satisfaction, leveraging insights for smarter decision-making, boosting efficiency through automation, and crafting forward-thinking strategies. AI is pivotal in each of these domains, reshaping how sales teams, and customer success teams, operate post-sale.
Additionally, sales planning and coaching tools can use AI to create and build personalized strategies and increase sales competencies. By using technology it’s easier to identify skill gaps, and this in turn can suggest relevant training, and tracking progress.
Customer Success
Customer success often need to use sales tools as much as sales teams do. Keeping the newly signed up customers happy and ensuring that communication with them is swift and tracked is very important. A solid platform for follow-ups helps to continue that customer-client relationship. Also, more importantly, it offers chances to solve issues, while also upselling and cross-selling at key points as well.
Whether it’s an extensive knowledge base that can be ascessed using smart prompts, or a chatbot that sounds just like a real person, it’s such an important part of running a business.
Customer Success Tools
- Intercom: A customer engagement platform that utilizes AI-driven messaging to provide personalized customer support and proactive engagement, fostering lasting relationships and driving customer success.
- ZenDesk: ZenDesk is a customer service platform that offers AI-powered tools for ticket management, knowledge base creation, and customer interaction tracking, enabling businesses to deliver exceptional post-sales support and enhance customer satisfaction.
- Slack: Setting up a dedicated Slack channel for customer success is a smart way to interact with customers in realtime. With AI you can create a chatbot to help customers with frequently asked questions. It can also link up with CRMs to keep a record of all communications from the customer as well.
Sales Training & Coaching
One of the most powerful parts of AI’s development has been the ability to share knowledge and learn. Something that can be programmed with all the data and insights of every single success, every single bad call, and customer information. Armed with this, sales training can be personalized and tailored to the individual – more so than was ever possible than by a real-life human. It can give feedback on things such as tone, wording, pace, and more. Taking all the best elements of the best sales sequences and turning them into real, actionable insights, based on data.
Sales Training Tools
- ExecVision: Utilizes AI to analyze sales calls, providing actionable insights for coaching and training purposes. It helps identify areas for improvement and tracks progress over time.
- Gong.io: As a sales-focused tool, this provides real-time coaching while reps are on calls. It can also help to identify which reps need more help, and what is making the ones that are closing more successful achieve this.
Strategic Planning & Forecasting
- Tableau: With AI and machine learning, Tableau enables businesses to analyze data comprehensively, visualize insights, and generate data-driven forecasts, facilitating strategic decision-making and future-proofing strategies.P
- Weflow: Weflow is a strategic planning and forecasting tool that utilizes AI-driven analytics to provide insights into market trends and performance metrics. It enables businesses to visualize data, identify patterns, and make informed decisions, thereby supporting strategic planning initiatives effectively.
The AI Advantage: Future-proofing Sales Teams
The integration of AI throughout the sales cycle doesn’t just amplify current efficiencies and effectiveness; it positions sales teams to meet future challenges head-on. With figures that show that organizations using AI in their sales and marketing strategies are witnessing at least a 5% increase in revenue. This statistic underscores the profound impact AI can have on a company’s bottom line.
As AI technology evolves, it provides a competitive advantage, allowing sales organizations to swiftly adapt to market and customer behavior changes. This dynamic capability ensures sales teams are not just keeping pace but setting the pace, ready to embrace future innovations and methodologies.
However, the journey towards fully leveraging AI in sales is accompanied by a learning curve. Notably, 53% of sales professionals report uncertainty about how to extract the most value from AI in their work, pointing to a crucial need for targeted training and resources to bridge this knowledge gap.
By weaving AI into the fabric of all sales processes, organizations can not only streamline their operations but also cultivate a culture of innovation and continuous improvement. This forward-looking approach is essential for staying relevant in a rapidly changing business landscape, ensuring sales teams are always a step ahead.
