Using AI for Sales

Top sales people know that in order to have personalized communication with your prospects, it is critical to know their current context. But how do you get that context if you're dealing with a complex, enterprise sale? You need to assess every email, call transcript, and other data point to know the context in order to provide intelligent feedback to your prospect. AI makes that easy by summarizing all the information about your deals from across all of your go to market teams and tools. You get insight into which personae are most engaged with you, what messages matter to them, what are their biggest risks, and more. That can allow you to effectively tune your sales messaging to suit the true needs of your prospects.

We at SetSail are passionate about the application of AI to make sellers both more efficient and effective. In fact, we wrote a longer resource on it here. But to summarize, there are two main ways that we think it will help sellers. First, through efficiency. Second, through effectiveness. From an efficiency perspective, AI sales tools will help automate actions that used to require significant manual effort. Whether that is logging sales activities in the CRM, analyzing call transcripts for insights, generating new reports to support your pipeline call, or other tasks, AI and in particular SetSail's AI, can automate that. From an effectiveness perspective, AI can make sellers more effective by uncovering what sales activities are most connected to winning deals and then recommending next steps for the sellers to take. But critically, these aren't generic recommendations like "you should multithread". These are specific recommendations built on analysis of your specific sales process and across all of your sales activities.

SetSail AI captures rich insights into every deal, account, and interaction with prospects. That insight is analyzed and compared against the behaviors of top sellers and closed won sales pursuits. As a result, SetSail identifies the signals, metrics, and milestones that matter. Sales leaders can monitor how well their sales reps are tracking toward these "real" leading indicators. If a deal is not progressing as expected, or a seller isn't doing the right kinds of activities, leaders can spot the problem early and correct it. Plus, because SetSail AI pushes insights to sellers as needed that allows sellers to get recommendations on next best steps so that they can move deals forward more efficiently. And sales leaders can get the alerts they need to stay on top of even large teams of sales professionals.

AI-driven chatbots can help go to market teams by helping to engage, qualify, and convert website visitors. They can intelligently answer questions and direct visitors toward resources -- including sales meetings -- that can help to advance a prospect. Rather than relying on sellers to answer every question, AI can be particularly adept not only standard questions but even more complex ones. Once questions are answered, AI chat bots can redirect leads to sales people for follow-up and advancement as a deal.

Natural language processing has generated a wealth of intelligence for sellers. It does so by generating transcripts of calls and video conferences and sharing those with the sales team. When you have these transcripts, AI can then mine the discussion to learn a prospect's challenges and key pains. The various scripts can be aggregated and assessed from a MEDDICC perspective too. That intelligence allows sales teams to spot deals at risk and recommend next best steps to close more deals.

A great way to stay on top of the latest developments in AI's application for the sales profession is by following our blog and our LinkedIn profile. SetSail is at the cutting edge of AI sales tools, and we are constantly publishing not only our insights and latest product developments, but also case studies that look at how other companies are using AI to boost their sales effectiveness. And also through data that we generate from our deep analysis that is anonymized across millions of sales interactions.

AI sales tools can provide sellers with a significant enhancement to their overall productivity. How? By increasing their overall efficiency. Consider a day in the life of a seller. They might start their day looking to plan their strategies for their pipeline deals. AI can identify which deals are at risk, which have momentum, and more. That allows the seller to prioritize which deals to focus on. Next, they might be walking into a prospect call. The deal is complex, so the seller is struggling to remember the next steps. Without AI-driven meeting prep, they get summaries of all of their past emails and calls. There's no need to work through dozens of call transcripts. Instead, the information is digested for them. Then, they might get a question from their sales leader about the current status of a deal. Rather than a complex MEDDICC analysis, they can use AI to comb through all of their communications to predict the likelihood of closing and make recommendations on what steps to take next.

Forecasting deals can be a tremendous challenge. Generic tools aren't especially helpful at predicting which deals will close and which won't because they tend to rely on standard information that isn't tuned to the reality of your business. SetSail instead looks at the actual activities that sellers have undertaken. It assesses communications and with whom they took place by personae. The result is a deeper understanding about what actions truly influence whether a deal will close or not. Your forecasts are more accurate -- and you can focus resources on risky deals.

CRMs are only as good as the quality of the data in them. But when sales teams rely on sellers to input information about their conversations with prospects, you end up with incomplete, inaccurate, and inconsistent data. That means that your sales reporting and the strategic decisions you make will rest on bad information. AI helps by capturing, organizing, and syncing data from across your go to market stack to your Salesforce CRM. It provides additional context by identifying key elements of a deal, like is the deal multi-threaded, what are the persona of the buying team, and more. Detailed information like this gets added to your CRM. The result is that sales leaders can get far more accurate insight from their CRM, allowing them to make better strategic and tactical sales decisions for their team.

As your sales team interacts with prospects, it generates a wealth of information and insight through data from emails, calendars, call transcripts, and more. This sales data includes information like 'which persona engages with which messages', 'when is a good time to call them', and 'how urgent is their need'. Because SetSail AI is gathering this information across many data points, it can provide much deeper analysis about your prospects and which are most likely to be worth following up with. That can allow you to prioritize your leads and get the right team members working on them. Plus, with SetSail's meeting preparation tools, you can get the context for your next follow-up through instant summaries of the current state of play for any prospect. No more looking through emails and call transcripts. That makes the handoff between a Sales Development and Account Executive team much more efficient.

A critical first step before you select which content or tool to use with a prospect, it's vital to know your current situation with that prospect. How can you do that? SetSail's AI platform analyzes your deals and all related communications via email, calendar, calls, and more. It can provide rich intelligence about the challenges and needs of your prospect, including providing a MEDDICC analysis of your deal. That kind of context enables your sellers to assess and choose which tools will be most effective to use with your prospects.

In order to create well targeted sales segments you need to understand the challenges and needs of your buyer persona. An incredible mine of information about your buyers' needs comes from the interactions your team has with prospects across email, calls, calendars, and more. SetSail AI captures and analyzes data from across your go to market stack and various teams. It then mines this data for insights into your buyer and associated deals. Armed with this intelligence, your sales operations team can quickly discover which deals are most likely to close, what are the major milestones, signals, and metrics associated with winning deals and more. That allows your team to evaluate your ideal customer and build intelligent lists of target accounts.

AI can help sellers eliminate mundane and repetitive tasks. Consider a day in the life of a seller. They might start their day looking to plan their strategies for their pipeline deals. AI can identify which deals are at risk, which have momentum, and more. That allows the seller to prioritize which deals to focus on. Next, they might be walking into a prospect call. The deal is complex, so the seller is struggling to remember the next steps. Without AI-driven meeting prep, they get summaries of all of their past emails and calls. There's no need to work through dozens of call transcripts. Instead, the information is digested for them. Then, they might get a question from their sales leader about the current status of a deal. Rather than a complex MEDDICC analysis, they can use AI to comb through all of their communications to predict the likelihood of closing and make recommendations on what steps to take next.