How to Use Artificial Intelligence to Enable Sales Teams

Marketers and salespeople have very different jobs, but they're working towards the same goal:

Increase revenue.

To do that, you need to think like a salesperson—and empower salespeople with next-generation technologies like AI in sales.

How?

Sales enablement expert Pam Didner (@PamDidner) has the answer. 

These insights come from How Marketers Can Utilize AI to Enable Sales, an AI Academy for Marketers course presented by Didner.

Think Like a Salesperson

As a marketer, we use buyer personas to understand our customer and their needs. With better understanding come better marketing results.

We can do the same thing with salespeople. To think like a salesperson, we can actually treat them like we would our most valued customers—and create a persona to better understand them.

To do that, Didner suggests some key steps:

1. Pick a heroic photo. Whether it is a Marvel character or your favorite movie protagonist, you want to view your salespeople as the superheroes of your company.
2. Identify what they are good at. Write a description that states what your sales team is good at doing, so you better understand their strengths in the organization.
3. Identify their goals. Highlight what is driving them to take the actions they are taking, and what matters most to them.
4. Use this persona to determine how you should support them. Once you have a clearer picture of what drives your salespeople, it becomes easier to determine what actions marketing needs to take to support them.

Meet With Your Salespeople

In-person meetings with your workers is a good way to build professional relationships and understand needs.

When you meet with your salespeople, there are five questions to ask to better understand what they need.

1. Ask how they handle rejections. The answer to this question will help you better understand how individual salespeople operate during sales calls.
2. Ask if they continue to nurture or ditch the accounts that reject them. Listening to their answers will give you good insight on their thoughts and make them feel heard.
3. Ask what the biggest deal they closed in the past five years was and how they did it. This question also makes salespeople feel heard—and gets them excited to work with you. Besides, what salesperson doesn’t want to show off their biggest close?
4. Ask what content they find most useful. This will help you narrow down and deliver the most helpful materials to your sales team.
5. Ask how you can help. You may receive a laundry list of things to do, but you don’t have to do all of them. Pick which items on the list help fulfill their needs the most based on their sales persona.

Evaluate AI Options 

You can also enable your sales team by helping them adopt AI. However, to do that you need to understand their workflow.

1. Identify what can be automated. Anything that is data-driven and/or repetitive is likely a solid candidate for automation.
2. Identify existing tools being used. What technologies do salespeople already use? These tools and platforms may already use AI.
3. Identify the gaps in the workflow. What tasks should be getting done but aren't? Which tasks end up falling through the cracks on any given day? The items that aren't getting done can often be great candidates for outsourcing to AI.

After getting to know your sales team and evaluating your AI options, you'll want to deliver content to them that is necessary to do their job by:

1. Identifying five to 15 content assets that have performed best with customers, then make sure sales knows it exists and how to use it.
2. Creating a content management library. This will put all the content you need in one place where all parties, including sales, can access it.
3. Implement AI into your content management library. Adding certain features will improve the type of content delivered to your team. Some AI tools can make recommendations about  what content is best for salespeople based on a particular sales situation. Other forms of AI can make predictions about what content prospects will like next, based on the content they've already consumed.

Want To Learn More About What AI Can Do For You?

These insights came from How Marketers Can Utilize AI to Enable Sales, an AI Academy for Marketers course presented by Pam Didner (@PamDidner), a marketing consultant, writer, and speaker for various organizations.

AI Academy for Marketers is our members-only online education platform and community. The Academy features dozens of on-demand courses and certifications taught by leading AI and marketing experts.