Generative AI For Sales + 7 Productivity Tools

How to apply Generative AI for sales?

In this article, you'll learn:

• What are the actual benefits of AI in sales

• How AI can or cannot harm your data security

• The top AI tools you MUST be familiar with (I use them every day)

Let's dive in.

AI or Generative Artificial Intelligence, isn't a newcomer in the world of technology. AI itself has been around since 1960s, but it was the unique capabilities of generative intelligence that changed the game.

Generative AI can generate new data similar to the data it was trained on. Imagine a tool that creates content, design, or even music - that's Gen AI for you.

When I first heard of ChatGPT and all the AI-related buzz, I was really skeptical. I used to study machine learning before that and played around with old generative ai models, so I didn't expect any sort of breakthrough.

A few weeks later every person in my work community started talking about ChatGPT, so I tried it myself. I was stunned. The more I used it, the more I was captivated by its enormous potential. And it didn't take me a long time to figure out the use cases to improve sales perfomance.

Benefits of Generative AI for Sales

I am not going to discuss the obvious things you can achieve using ChatGPT. We all know (if you've never tried it yet, sign up here; it's free) how good it can be in improving your grammar and verbiage and helping with all the new things you want to learn.

I'm going to talk about the generative AI tools and market trends that will (and already are) coming out of this technology.

It's hard to make any specific predictions yet, as this is all a new field, so I will break down the general benefits it can offer to your sales organization first, giving you a competitive edge. And then talk about the AI tools and applications I personally use.

• Administrative Boost: Salespeople now spend way more time on administrative tasks compared to a few years ago. I think Generative AI will optimize 80% of repetitive tasks, including writing emails, sales data entry, and CRM auto-updates. And personalization will be the most important aspect of these interactions.
  
  With heaps of customer data available, AI tools can generate personalized emails, content, and even predict the best channels to reach potential customers. This can really improve your sales performance by saving time and effort, allowing salespeople to focus on building relationships and closing deals..
  
  Miscrosoft are actively trying to implement this in their new Sales Co-pilot. It's still at a very early stage but we can clearly see the company is going.

  
  

• Real-Time Recommendations: Picture this - you're a sales leader and your SDR is on a sales call, and in real-time, they get sales tips and guidance specific to the customer on the line. This isn't some futuristic dream but a logical application of Generative AI.
  
  If it's something that has all the knowledge from the web and you give it the context of the current customer interaction, it will likely do a better job of analyzing the situation than the top-paid sales consultant in the world.
  
  Of course, it depends on the amount of data you'll be able to feed it, as great salespeople can read emotions and pick up on lots of non-verbal cues. But I think it's just a matter of time.
  Such tools like  Einstein GPT recently launched by Salesforce can guide the sales reps on follow-ups, predictions, and next steps, making the sales process more dynamic and informed.

  

• Enhanced Analytics: AI-driven analytics is probably going to be the most powerful sales technology out there. With advanced algorithms, sales teams can get not just data-driven insights but actual stories behind them.
  
  The #1 problem I found many sales managers have is the complexity of their analytics software. Companies without data analytical teams have always struggled to provide non-technical, business departments with all the relevant data needed. This task, even with the vast majority of software in the market, was tricky and had many downsides.
  
  AI can completely change this. As a communication layer between business people and the data, it can serve you as a complete data analyst but at a fraction of the cost. This leads to better strategy planning and resource allocation based on actionable insights provided by the technology.

  
  

• Customized Training: Yes, now training materials will be tailored specifically for sales professionals challenges. At least that's how I foresee it. With Generative AI, sales leaders will be able to achieve that by curating simulations, role-play scenarios, and more to improve the sales processes and techniques of individual teams.
  
  This in return will stimulate more engagement from your team, as this is going to be a) personal, b) relevant, and c) interesting. You still can and, in my opinion, should structure them all based on your unique approach and expertise.
  
  But when it comes to the actual training process and engaging your sales force, giving AI the context of their current journey and the strategy you want them to adopt will be invaluable.

Risks of Generative AI for Sales

Like every other tool, Generative AI comes with its risks. Here are some that I would pay attention to:

1. Sometimes it's not accurate. It happens that the model delivers inaccurate information or what's in technical circles called hallucination.
   
   However, with human oversight and fine-tuning, these challenges can be mitigated. Just keep that in mind and never rely 100% on what you're getting from it.
   
   That's why it's also a good idea to have someone in your company with a good understanding of the way LLMs work and their drawbacks. Trust but verify.

   
   

2. Stay away from completely new AI solutions. There are a lot of startups right now claiming to replace your CRM, analytics, or outreach software with AI.
   
   While in some cases, it might be worth evaluating, the majority of such tools will give you more headaches than real value. Think of Generative AI as an enhancement to the existing stack you have. Innovative companies will all adopt it, so you won't be left behind if you don't use a startup claiming to replace your HubSpot with AI.

   
   

3. Data privacy and security concerns. Although OpenAI (the parent company of ChatGPT) only stores the information you send to it temporarily in case of abusive or offensive content, the tools themselves might have access to your data, and it's important to understand where and how they keep it.
   
   Because of the way LLM apps work and the more of your data they have, the better their efficiency. It's natural that every product will seek to access as much relevant information from you as possible to provide you with the best results.
   
   And while the intent itself is good, be mindful of who you're sharing your data with and how secure it's going to be.

7 Productivity Tools You Should Be Using Now

With all that being said, I've tested a lot of different tools and approaches on how AI can really help you sell better. A lot of those failed, but some turned out to be pretty successful. Here's what worked for me, and I think it will be helpful for you (I have absolutely no affiliation with the tools provided below):

1. ChatGPT For Email Writing

I know it may seem basic, but with the right prompt, it's the #1 tool that will save your sanity while crafting tens of emails, all of which should be top-notch. Depending on your style, I recommend keeping an "email improvement" prompt in your notes tool, so you don't have to create one every time.

The prompt that I use:

Using casual but professional verbiage, improve the following email to make the recipient inclined to <X>. Don't use university-level language, cheesy or overcomplicated words. Here's my email: "...your email goes here..."

You can also use a very similar one to craft a complete email for you if you don't want to give it any personal input. I personally don't like doing it, as it rarely gives me the results I want. In this case, just put the email you want to reply to and, using the prompt example above, ask it to generate a reply for you that you can then touch up.

2. Cold Email Personalization

This was another great discovery for me. This approach boosted the click-through rates and conversion of all the email campaigns I was sending out.

So next time you get a list of leads you're going to reach out to, put them all in Google Sheets. Depending on what lead sourcing tools you use (e.g., Apollo or Zoominfo), there should be an option to get a website summary of a person.

You can then go to SheetGPT, install it to your Google Sheet, and in a new column, you can create a highly personalized icebreaker for these leads using something like this (assuming the website summary you have is in D2):

=GPT("Generate a very short 1 sentence personalization line for the email. Don't use use hey or hello just the line. Use simple, casual and no cheesy words. Make a short compliment about his company. Start with I really like what... Here's what his company does: " & D2)

Now you can use these column values as custom variables in your email prospecting tool and ramp up the personalized outreach quite a bit 🙂

3. AI Lead Scoring

Using the same SheetGPT plugin, you can ask it to read the information about the leads available and then generate a score for each of them based on the requirements you should put in another cell. Which in return will speed up your lead generation process 10x.

This allows you to iterate for thousands of leads at once and then sort from the highest score to the lowest to start engaging with the most promising leads first.

I did it with a list of 3400 people and asked ChatGPT to set a score from 1/10 using decimals so my whole list can be sorted. It allowed me to cherry-pick really good leads out of the whole list I had.

Here's the promt I used:

=GPT("Here's the info about the lead: " & D3 & "And here's my ICP: " & $F$2 & "On a scale 1 - 10, always rounded to three decimals places, score this lead where 1 is no relevant and 10 is very relevant. Return only the score and nothing else)", "gpt-4")

4. Presentations Generation

Presentations are probably one of the most daunting tasks. There are a few slide deck generators out there, however, I've found Plus AI works much better at helping you 'co-write' slides rather than simply spitting out a mediocre finished product that likely won't be useful.

For instance, there are "sticky notes" to slides with suggestions on how to finish, edit, or improve each slide.

What I also really like about it is I can throw in a bunch of text, and it will organize it for me in a really nice-looking way. So I don't have to bother my designer or spend hours trying to make it pretty.

This powerful tool is completely free and available as a plugin for Google Slides and Docs.

5. Competitors Tracking

There are some other non-AI apps that do this, but I found the AI ones work better, probably because of their visual monitoring.

It's a lifesaver automation if you need to keep track of multiple websites. I use this personally for all of our competitors so I am always aware of what's happening on their side, which is something that would take up more time than exists in a single day if I wanted to keep on top of this manually.

Hexowatch AI is the one that I use, but I am sure there are some alternatives to it as well.

6. Email Box Organization

I've tried a lot here, from a complete new solution like Superhuman to different email clients and Chrome extensions. Because the amount of emails I am receiving and sending on a daily basis is insane. It really seems to be unmanageable and frustrating. So as soon as AI came out in public, the first thing I was expecting to see built was something to help me with this email hell.

And guess what? Someone finally did it at Sanebox.

It's not 100% perfect, and sometimes I find marketing emails in my "Important" group of emails, but most of the time, all of the non-important emails get sent right to a folder called SaneLater, and this is something you can ignore entirely or check once in a while.

It also doesn't read the contents of the emails but rather takes into consideration the header, metadata, and history with the sender. This was another neat bonus because I am really a privacy-conscious person.

7. Analytics Assistance

Yes, I am going to talk about the product we've built here. Intentionally, I didn't put it as #1, like a lot of other people do, but also couldn't leave it out completely because this is something I am using daily myself.

I was never strong in coding. Every time I had to deal with some sales or customer analytics, I either was spending hours playing around with Salesforce or struggling to write SQL to pull the insights off the database. So although I always found myself having access to heaps of data, I couldn't really do much about it, considering the limited bandwidth.

Now Gen AI can do it for you. We've built an infrastructure that connects your company's knowledge base, CRM, and database to GPT so you can talk to it about your data as if it was a data analyst you hired.

Like a real human it understands your messages so you can ask it questions about your sales team performance, product retention, or any other analytical question, and it will go and pull this information for you.

Join our waitlist, and we'll be excited to share the first version with you for free.

Summary

I hope you have a better picture now of all the benefits Gen AI can bring to the table, but keep in mind that the importance of human interaction in sales cannot be sidelined. High-ticket sales, in particular, depend heavily on building relationships and trust.

Generative AI for sales can provide sales professionals with great support and better decision making process. But it will always struggle to replace the human touch, and I don't see it happening in the closest future.