How to Implement Generative AI in Your Sales Team?

Sales teams handle a wide range of tasks, including prospecting hundreds of leads, trying to close hard-knuckle sales, and following up on existing customers to ensure they continue buying. What’s worse is, each of these tasks require content—be it call scripts, email pieces, or reports. It’s a lot of work, even for a team of ten. And that’s why generative AI programs are vital. These tools serve as your personal assistant and streamline your sales processes with a one-click integration.

However, using generative AI without creating an effective roadmap is also bad news, as it can lead to work friction or conflict and reduced productivity.

In this article, we will explore generative AI and help you design an implementation roadmap for your sales team to help you avoid that.

What Is Generative AI And Why Your Team Needs One

Generative AI is a subset of artificial intelligence that helps you create new content in different formats, including texts, images, videos, and even songs.

Of course, they don’t do that out of thin air. These innovative tech assistants leverage previously provided data and dozens of algorithms to handle generative queries.

Take Smartoutreach’s sales engagement generative assistant as an example. Sales teams can use its built-in functions to craft highly personalized and lead-converting emails or social media posts that move the needle.

Besides helping the sales team to free up their task desk, generative AIs also contribute in the following ways:

Time efficiency: 94% of workers say they waste most of their time performing repetitive tasks. For a sales team, these tasks can be anywhere from compiling convincing deal-closing scripts and or crafting email sequences to engage existing leads.

Generative AI swoops in to handle these tasks, helping free up time for your team and allowing them to focus on the core of their role.
Increased productivity: Automation tools with built-in generative features improve sales productivity by 14.5%. While that might look small, 14.5% is a lot of boost for your ROI in the long run.

More productivity also means more chances of expansion, more leads, and an uphill movement for your revenue.

Reduced Lead Acquisition cost: Roman Zrazhevsky, Founder & CEO of MIRA Safety, says, “Quality content is a key ingredient to keeping leads engaged and redirecting their attention from other poaching competitors. So, you should already know what’s going to happen when you become inconsistent with it—more dropouts from your sales funnel and increased lead acquisition cost for the marketing team.”

To avoid this, Generative AI eliminates your content queues, helps you automate content production, and ensures you retain the leads you already have.

6 Steps To Create a Generative AI Roadmap for Your Sales Team

According to Sergey Taver, Marketing Manager of Precision Watches, “An efficient roadmap defines how and where your sales team can effectively implement generative AI, such as using AI resume tools for streamlining the recruitment process, for maximum results like increased returns on investment (ROI), higher sales conversion rates, and overall company performance. Working without one leads to an ad-hoc workflow and possible inefficiency in contrast to what you would expect.”

So, let’s explore a few steps to create one.

Assess Current Sales Processes And Identify Opportunities

A normal sales process usually includes a few touch points, from prospecting and solution presentation to handling objections, negotiating, closing sales, and following up. Each step requires a large amount of content in the form of call scripts or emails.

Your goal here is to find out which of these points require a generative AI solution.

For instance, follow-up requires quite a number of personalized emails. And your sales team will likely find it difficult to keep up, especially if there’s an influx of customers.

You can supercharge sales teams with AI email assistants using generative AI for personalized email automation and actionable insights.

To assess your current sale processes for opportunities, you can:

Ask your sales team. They are at the eye of everything and understand best what areas need the touch of AI.
Analyze sales reports, review your team’s performance metrics, and evaluate the CRM data. Performance metrics like lead conversion rate, sales cycle length, win rate, customer retention, and revenue generation are particularly important.
Send surveys to existing customers and ask which areas felt off during their purchasing journey.
Map out the current sales process and find areas of friction with overlapping and repetitive tasks.

All these data reveal the status of your current sales processes, which touchpoints are lacking, and which stage of your sales funnel could use some help from generative AI.

This, in turn, helps you direct your resources properly and automate only areas where generative AI brings more value.

Find A Fitting Generative AI Solution

The next step is to search for the appropriate AI solution or generative AI development company that best aligns with your company’s overall goals. In this case, you don’t have to focus only on generative AI tools alone—you need something much more comprehensive, with a library of other sales-boosting tools specific to your sales needs.

It’s also important to note that generative AIs can be trained with private or public data. A perfect example is chatGPT, which has been trained on a lorry of data from public databases and with human trainers to produce copies, respond to queries like a human, or work with DALL-e to generate life-like images.

Regarding data sources, Bert Hofhuis, Founder of Every Investor, says, “Generative AIs trained with public data, especially those from the internet and social media, can hash out millions of content in minutes but are often non-specific or non-personalized. So, they do not fit in as a proper solution for individual teams.”

This is why chatGPT, as a standalone solution, is inefficient for a sales team looking to unify sales communication, roll out sassy emails to leads, follow up with customers, and maintain a particular brand tone.

“On the other hand, those trained with private data are not as versatile as chatGPT, but they are a perfect solution for target teams,” he continues.

Use Smartreach.io as a case study. This elevator sales engagement platform leverages data from sales teams, specialized sales organizations, previous sales exposure, and years of experience. That makes it easy to produce the results needed for sales departments since it feeds and lives on everything sales, , including tools like AI Image Editing, which can help create tailored visuals for presentations and marketing materials, compared to a generalistic AI like GPT.

Ian Sells, CEO of Million Dollar Sellers, also shares a helpful view and says, “Besides the comprehensiveness and source of training data, you should also consider security when choosing your go-to-market generative AI tools. You definitely don’t want a platform that’s an easy hack for cyber-ninjas, and neither do you want a platform that secretly sells your sales data to competitors. Check previous customer reviews and ensure they have a robust user base to verify security claims.”

Pilot Test Selected AI Tools And Evaluate Results

Create an A/B testing format for two or three tools on your list and measure results over a short period, maybe months, a quarter, or half a year. Then select the one with the best results and scalability.”

Of course, the number of tools you decide to test-run with a few backdoor operations depends on your capital. For smaller sales teams with a limited budget, just two is enough.

“At the same time, look beyond the marketed strengths of your selected tools and dig out their possible weaknesses, regardless of how insignificant. Compare with your expected expectations and evaluate future risks. If the risks cannot be resolved or minimized, it’s best you look for another tool, even if the former produces awesome results in the short run,” says Andrew Pierce, CEO at LLC Attorney.

Keep in mind that your goal is to assess each tool’s performance, usability, and successful integration with key workflows. And your performance metrics are a good judge of these factors.

Develop A Concise Implementation Plan

Once you have your tool, design an implementation plan entailing the resources needed, the time of implementation, the areas affected, and the responsibilities of those involved during deployment. This is necessary to avoid friction within your team.

Tim White, founder of Milepro, cautions against flipping everything on your team from manual to AI at once. “Sudden integration is not the flex most people think it is. Of course, it’ll help you roll up things fast, but you’re leaving almost no room for your team to catch up and get used to being assisted. And that will lead to significantly disruptive and unwanted results.”

Alternatively, gradually introduce the new AI tool into the flow. Start with one sales process monthly or weekly, then gradually expand into other stages that require generative AI automation.

A team should also be responsible for monitoring these integrations and quickly detecting frictions. This will help minimize functional workplace casualty and make the implementation process as smooth as possible.

Equip And Train Your Sales Team

As with any other tool, generative AI programs have a learning curve. Some are brief, whereas others are ridiculously long or difficult.

Provide on-the-job training to help your team acclimate faster. For one, it is more effective than PDFs and tool guides because of the practical experience. Your team sees how it works and implements whatever they just learned right away.

Other training resources, such as pre-recorded videos, are also helpful, but mostly for out-of-office purposes.

In most cases, the urge to go manual swoops in again, especially during the first few days of AI integration. That’s perfectly normal. You should encourage and show your sales representatives the benefits of a generative AI tool, introduce incentives for usage, and gradually blur the line till generative AI becomes a part of the team.

Monitor Performance And Optimize Integration

Your performance metrics are particularly good indicators of a successful integration. The normal expectation is to see lead conversion rate, sales cycle length, win rate, customer retention, and revenue generation go up within a few months.

So, if they remain stagnant or move too slowly, there’s something wrong with the integration process, or you have the wrong tool.

Digging deeper, Sturgeon Christie, CEO of Second Skin Audio, believes integration is not a one-time process, and most teams won’t hit the jackpot once.

He says, “You have to continuously monitor your sales performance, look for possible areas of improvement, detect human-tool friction, find out potential areas for duplication, and determine if there are touch points still lacking. As the team or organization leader, you must fix these deficiencies and ensure your sales reps seamlessly bond with their new AI assistant.”

Wrapping Up

Generative AI is here to stay, and sales teams must integrate this innovative tech to scale their performance or overall ROI. However, random implementation will not improve your metrics, so creating a roadmap is crucial.

To start, assess your current sales process and identify opportunities for integration. Then, search for a few comprehensive generative tools that align with your business goals and provide the features you need. Smartreach.io is your GTM choice when it comes to this.

Afterward, pilot-test your primary tools until you find the best one for your business. Lastly, develop an implementation map highlighting the resources you need and where to start from, equip and train your team, and optimize performance with subsequent monitoring.