The era of the super-charismatic sales account executive who closes deals almost entirely through personality, hard work, and luck is fading away.

Fortunately, a new model is emerging in its place: flexible and agile sales professionals who understand how to use artificial intelligence (AI) to help them win through preparation, precision, and personalization.

AI-guided selling has the potential to redefine the sales profession by helping account executives become better informed and prepared for clients' unique challenges. These new tools specialize in offering actionable client insights, enabling more strategic account planning and automating repetitive tasks.

This new approach does not substitute for human input but offers a strong complement. Knowing your client better gives executives more time and information to build relationships, tailor their pitches, differentiate from competitors, and close deals more efficiently.

At the same time, it challenges fears that AI will replace human workers, demonstrating instead how technology can amplify and enhance human potential—even in sales.

SaleSage is well-situated to lead this transformation, delivering the tools and capabilities that account executives need to increase revenue and set new standards for success.

Smarter Sales Calls with AI-Guided Selling

Generating qualified sales leads takes a great deal of work. Turning those leads into customers—and measurable revenue—demands even more effort. AI-guided selling has the potential to lighten the load and transform the sales process by quickly producing actionable insights and intelligence, enabling teams to differentiate themselves with smartly tailored prospect-focused pitches.

This can take myriad forms across different organizations. The legacy sales process is often ad hoc and resource intensive, involving a (sometimes frantic) search for information about a prospect from contacts, news reports, databases, and other sources. The gathered information then informs a strategy for approaching the prospect.

AI-guided selling speeds up the gathering of that information. Trained on data from publicly available databases, news accounts, internal CRM systems, customer interactions, and other sources, the AI-guided sales tool helps spot trends and patterns. This information can help predict buying behavior and highlight industry dynamics. It also gives teams crucial context for a prospect’s position in their industry and the market overall.

With that information, sales personnel can build a roadmap for success, determining which clients to pursue and how exactly to get their attention and earn their business. AI-guided selling also gives sales executives a head start on the competition that still compiles intelligence in the traditional way. It serves as an enabler so executives can focus on preparing creative strategies to help solve client pain points.

Each organization will approach this type of selling a little differently, but the ways that it can help streamline and eliminate the guesswork in sales include:

• Developing a scoring methodology that can help executives set priority targets, focusing on those prospects with the best possible chance of becoming clients
• Identifying and then strategizing for cross-selling opportunities
• Analyzing post-sale feedback to recommend the best times and methods for following up after successful calls

Consider AI-guided selling as a powerful add-on to human salespeople’s creativity, personality, and doggedness. It helps streamline a sometimes painful process by reducing guesswork while emphasizing data-driven decisions. The result is higher close rates, measurable revenue growth, and greater productivity.

AI-Fueled Personalization for Improved Client Engagement

Even the best sales teams can run short on time. Sometimes, that results in approaching opportunities with proposals that feel generic and fail to address a client’s specific pain points.

AI-guided selling can help alleviate the pressure by helping account executives tailor work directly to their prospects’ needs. Generative AI helps nurture stronger client engagement by demonstrating a superior grasp of client challenges and potential solutions. You can show that you anticipate their needs before they even articulate them.

How does this happen? AI excels in analyzing a range of data sources, such as past sales, to provide insights that suggest potential future needs. This can help you and your team develop strategies for moving the account forward with insightful, data-driven solutions.

AI systems help improve relationship management across all accounts. For example, generative AI can custom-write personalized emails and suggest the best times to send them. It can also predict which offers are most likely to be successful and create customized bundles.

Engaging with clients on their terms has become an essential differentiator in an increasingly competitive marketplace. AI-guided selling can increase your ability to build successful long-term customer relationships.

Streamlining the Daily Grind with AI-Guided Selling

Every minute that a sales executive spends writing reports is one that they can’t use to close deals. In addition to sharpening the skills of the sales team, AI-guided selling helps free up time by taking on time-consuming (and tedious) administrative tasks.

Every sales organization is different, but once teams identify opportunities for streamlining, they may be surprised to find themselves with a long list. The areas that are most obvious for an AI selling tool to take on include:

• Data entry and customer relationship management maintenance, including verifying contact information, updating opportunities, de-duplicating lists, and capturing and organizing calls, emails, and meeting notes
• Meeting scheduling and follow-ups, including sending meeting reminders and generating and sending summary notes
• Quote and proposal generation, including making initial quotes based on standard pricing and generating standard forms of contracts
• Tools of the trade organization, including creating a library of sales materials like pricing sheets and product brochures and tracking their use and effectiveness
• General account management, such as follow-up emails, call tracking, and notes from visits

In most organizations, these tasks significantly add time burdens and remove sales personnel from opportunities to close deals and grow revenue. With the extra time, sales executives can focus more on developing the right pitches and proposals, building human relationships in person, and engaging in AI-driven learning activities to improve their knowledge and presentation skills.

Mastering AI-Guided Selling with SaleSage

Analysts have long predicted that automation would be the next big development in sales, and generative AI is now poised to make it happen. AI-guided selling can help elevate the performance of your sales team, enabling you to close more deals and grow revenue more efficiently.

Sales personnel can use AI-guided selling to take charge of the sales process, turning it from reactive to proactive by researching prospects, understanding their problems, and doing real-time data analysis and other research to anticipate and address customer needs. It also creates space for professional development and serves as an engine for strategic planning and tactical engagements by providing easy access to in-depth research.

Finally, AI-guided selling opens opportunities for role-playing scenarios to help sales personnel better learn to counter objections and break down barriers to yes.

Learn how to turn every objection into an opportunity with cutting-edge AI strategies. Take control of your sales conversations, overcome hurdles, and close more deals confidently. Unlock the power of AI today.