Sales
David Levy
After talking to numerous sales, SDR, and enablement leaders, we’ve identified some major challenges with today’s sales enablement.
Sales enablement is often hard to find, hard to execute on live calls, and siloed between reps and departments.
Years ago, these problems would be inevitable. However, the time has come when AI can solve these pain points by enhancing the way reps sell.
AI adoption in sales has increased by 76% from 2018 to 2022. And for good reason: High-performing sales teams are 2.8X more likely to use AI than underperformers.
Video conferencing and AI have become the 2 most valuable sales tools since 2019. What conclusion can we draw here? Inside sales teams can now use AI throughout the entire sales process — including during live sales calls.
Not yet using AI for your sales enablement? Looking to achieve buy-in for AI from your sales organization? Here are 5 common pain points AI is solving to enable reps to sell more effectively.
In today's fast-paced business environment, sales productivity and sales output are critical to success.
During a sales call, sales reps may need to answer competitor questions, ask discovery questions to uncover pain, or tell a customer story from a similar company they helped to solve the same problem.
Having to search for sales content manually means reps are unable to find it when and where they need it most — during live interactions with prospects.
This leads to:
AI can make sales processes more efficient by surfacing the right content — at the right time — during sales calls.
Content can automatically appear on your rep’s Zoom call based on live conversation and can be contextually relevant based on factors such as:
This means sales leadership can virtualize their playbook, integrating it into every customer meeting, providing reps with the resources (battlecards, case studies, competitive intelligence, etc.) they need, when they need it most.
Here’s what that means for your organization:
This happens way too often –
A prospect asks about a competitor, a partnership, or shares a use case that’s important to them. The rep is frantically sending Slack messages to their colleagues on the side while trying to look through their CMS and Salesforce — all at the same time — to find the answers they need. Sounds like too much to manage? It is, and it happens daily.
This distraction can lead to numerous problems, such as:
Enabling reps with content should no longer mean only in Salesforce or a CMS, but live on customer meetings as well. This is the difference between providing “just-in-case” (which is a waste) content in a repository vs. “just-in-time” content on a customer meeting, which is how sellers want to consume information.
When reps are searching through a CMS, sending Slack messages to their colleagues, or looking through email during live calls trying to find an answer they need, a more sophisticated solution is required.
In a perfect world, your reps would have a personal assistant that could recommend the right piece of content at the right time. AI sales tools are that personal assistant.
Sales enablement AI can surface every type of content based on the conversation — live in a customer meeting. Everything from battlecards, customer wins, and discovery questions.
According to sales leaders surveyed in Salesforce’s State of Sales, “understanding customer needs” ranks #1 for AI’s impact on sales.
AI sales enablement software empowers sales teams to collect an increasing amount of critical data, while keeping reps more focused during the meeting.
Why?
In a meeting, instead of searching for the resources a seller needs, they can focus on uncovering pain points, handling objections, telling customer stories, recalling case studies, and positioning themselves against the competition.
After 7 meetings in a day and all of the email follow-up is completed, it’s not a mystery why seller notes don’t always make their way into Salesforce.
This can lead to a number of problems.
For one, it makes it difficult for sales managers to get a pulse on a deal.
And two, if the seller is bringing other internal stakeholders into their deal, it’ll be more time the rep will need to spend with pre-meeting prep, and organizing meetings-about-meetings with the deal team.
Lastly, when the account is handed off to Customer Success, those folks won’t have as much visibility into what and who were involved in the deal, which can lead to a less than ideal customer experience.
69% of high-performing sales teams use automation to log customer notes.
NLP transcribes voice-to-text in real-time, so reps can focus on the conversation and not worry about taking perfect notes.
The meeting notes are then automatically stored in the CRM, where they can be easily accessed by the rep or used for a debrief.
Because transcribed meeting notes are searchable, it's easy for sales reps to find what they're looking for.
Additionally, reps can bookmark key moments, so action items are never missed to move a deal forward.
Marketers are often challenged with a less than ideal feedback loop with what sales content is working and what is not.
Why?
Reps generally only convey feedback on where the gaps are.
This is a reactive approach to generating sales enablement content.
When salespeople and marketers work in silos, it’s difficult to determine what content is helpful and what could be improved.
As a result, neither team has a clear understanding of what’s working and what isn’t. And the whole organization suffers as a result.
AI turns customer conversations into actionable feedback by surfacing what content was used in a deal, whether it helped win the business, and why.
This closes the feedback loop between sales and marketing so that everyone is informed on what content is working and what isn’t.
And because marketers know which content is being surfaced during meetings and how those reps are performing over time, they can make more data-driven decisions on what content to create and when.
This helps marketers generate more SQLs by creating more relevant messaging for their ICP.
It can be difficult even for experienced reps to know where to take the sales process next — especially with large B2B deals. Making it worse, many companies’ sales playbooks have the steps outlined on what should be accomplished at each stage of the sales process, but the playbooks are sitting in a file somewhere and aren’t actively being adopted. This can lead to a rep mistakenly skipping parts of the sales process, making post-sale support more difficult.
63% of high performers use automation when determining the next actions to take on an account.
AI can help you virtualize your sales playbook, and provide real-time guidance on the next best steps to move a deal forward.
Relevant messaging will surface to help reps qualify, nurture, and win deals.
Then action items can be tracked and managed from the moment they’re mentioned on the call. This will align what happens on a call with the next steps prospects need to eventually buy and be onboarded.
Most AI sales enablement tools help sales teams before or after a meeting has taken place. This is valuable for several reasons, but it doesn't help with the most crucial part of the sales process: during sales calls.
Aircover is an Enablement AI platform that helps you virtualize your sales playbook, integrating it into every customer interaction. Using NLP (natural language processing), you can analyze the transcript of the meeting and surface key insights in real-time, live on a call.
On sales calls, Aircover empowers you to:
And best of all, streamlining the in-meeting sales process means new sales reps can get up to speed quickly and crush their quota while existing reps can focus on selling, not getting their meeting data into Salesforce.
Request access to Aircover today to turn your new reps into your best reps.
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