Your sales team serves as the last and most crucial link in a complex chain - the sales funnel. Even the slickest operation will fall apart if your sales staff are unable to convert at the end, potentially wasting all investments made up to that point.
Effective training and support have always been a critical element in building a high-performance sales force, helping to shore up individual and collective weaknesses and create robust strategies to best convert your product or service. However, implementing a training regime is not a simple endeavor and requires both existing expertise and the necessary resources to achieve.
Generative AI is a future-facing approach to employee development. This innovation has specific applications within the sales sector and is already being employed by companies globally to strengthen their sales team and provide world-leading training and coaching. But how can generative AI do all this so effectively? We’ll show you.
Generative AI at its core functions as a creative tool that can create content based on human prompts and input. While this may have originated as a text-based exercise, AI can now craft images, text, videos, and even presentations or questionnaires designed to the specifications of the input data.
This is a revolutionary shake-up to the industry and stands to become one of the best prospecting tools for sales, able to use sales data to design unique training courses that matter to your team specifically. Whether a specific product has a lower conversion rate or an individual is shown to be particularly effective at converting through email comms, these insights can lead to wider coaching that bolsters your entire sales force as a result.
Now, it’s true that fantastic results can be achieved through manual training and coaching programs, but generative AI sales training offers a range of benefits that any business would want.
Data-driven insights will help your business make stronger decisions for your sales team, and AI is the most effective method of ingesting and interpreting large datasets. When monitoring the performance of your employees, you’ll be able to not only identify areas of weakness but create learning pathways that help them to excel in their roles.
Furthermore, your sales team can support marketing efforts using the data gleaned from their activity, and vice versa. These kinds of cross-department boons are made possible using the vast data-gathering and manipulation capabilities of AI platforms.
AI is a powerful tool for monitoring your business operations. Already utilized across many heavily-regulated industries, such as the use of AI in the insurance industry to protect from fraudulent customer behavior, we can apply the same approach in sales.
Furthermore, employing a digital contract can provide an additional layer of security, ensuring that all transactions are not only tracked but also securely and legally bound, reducing the likelihood of disputes and enhancing transaction transparency.
An integrated AI solution can identify low-value sales opportunities to avoid spending extensive resources chasing the lead, can catch any sales errors with products to avoid misinformation, and help train staff in dealing with difficult situations to safeguard your business in the future.
Furthermore, as phishing attempts become more sophisticated, employing generative AI to recognize and respond to these threats can be a vital part of training sales staff, ensuring they are well-prepared to protect themselves and the company from digital fraud.
Generative AI is capable of providing key data and insights to support successful sales strategies. From designing training around a particular product or technique to creating ideal customer profiles from sales data as a supporting resource, your employees will have more tools at their disposal when attempting to convert.
Moreover, the integration of fulfillment services, enhanced by generative AI, can streamline the entire order processing system, ensuring that sales commitments are promptly met, which in turn boosts customer satisfaction and loyalty.
As powerful as these tools can be, it isn’t a simple switch you can flick and be off to the races with. If used incorrectly, the output of your effort will be poor quality, leading to low-impact coaching opportunities and a waste of resources. By following the five steps outlined below, you can avoid generative AI risks and get industry-leading training materials to take your sales force to the next level.
The first and most fundamental part of using generative AI in your sales workflow is as a supporting role in an individual's work and learning journey. It’s well-established that individuals learn and progress in different ways and at different rates, and this personal journey can be a difficult one to effectively guide as an employer.
AI support can help give your employees an always-available source of information and guidance during their day-to-day work. AI can monitor and provide assistance during live sales calls, offer insights that could help secure a conversion, and learn the habits of a team member as part of operations. Over time this will lead to more robust guidance, helping your team to learn and grow at a pace that suits them.
Combine this with a project management platform that can integrate your generative AI of choice and you’ll have a documented journey of all employees, helping both operatives and managers understand the business in greater depth.
Generative AI is adept at creating endless volumes of unique scenarios for your team to review, discuss, and resolve, as part of their development. Whether your team has found consistent challenges in selling a specific product line or they’re finding specific channels of communication, it is now possible to build training modules specifically for their needs.
By analyzing sales data and performance, AI can build fresh training materials, such as interactive exercises, real-world scenario examples, and other insights that will help shore up a salesperson’s skills and help make them a stronger team member.
This is already being used as cloud contact center solutions for training needs, where generative AI can use actual calls and supporting data to help further train employees on providing quality customer service without the risks of live environment contacts. Not only is the training material derived from actual conversations had by a team, but employees can learn in a safe and supportive environment.
No two sales pitches will be quite like the other, with the success or failure being dependent on numerous immutable factors. Typically, these types of individual events would be considered as such, and the data stored to little benefit. Over time, however, patterns will emerge from a collection of otherwise unique events, and important insights will be available to be captured.
Generative AI— using robust deep learning algorithms and rulesets— can effectively parse large sets of data, including conversations, conversion metrics, and more. Further analysis can link to the sources of the lead and their effectiveness, providing important links to other departments, and can even build buyer personas from analyzed data to inform future efforts.
The focus of your AI model will be dependent on what matters most to your business, but these powerful conclusions and realizations will help arm your sales team with knowledge backed by robust data analytics.
The amount of time, expertise, and resources required to create a single training module is already vast, but creating one for each employee’s needs? Almost incalculable. Add on the expense of securing industry experts to devise and craft the content and it simply isn’t feasible for many.
AI is capable of creating all these forms of content at speed and scale, completely autonomously, using existing information and historical data as an input. We recommend having some professional oversight - both to check the output of content is up-to-par and to check it achieves the desired objective - and to create an internal collection of evergreen content that can be used by employees and management for training purposes.
Once training models and resources have been tested in small clusters and individual cases, it is remarkably easy to incorporate these into wider training materials. Small customizations can be made to remove the individual element (should any be present) and to make it a piece of content that anyone in the business can access, and this will quickly scale into a long-term resource that all new employees can use to kickstart their training.
For example, individual calls and customer sales engagements could be stored in a repository for future use at call center solutions for fresh employee training. Any instances that highlight particularly challenging or frequent problems that arise during sales calls can be used as training materials to get new recruits up to speed quickly.
Generative AI is part of a wider artificial intelligence charge in global business, completely changing the way businesses operate. If you’ve yet to invest in AI-based training for your sales team, your employees could be at a distinct disadvantage against competitors who will likely already be employing such strategies.
A trained and equipped sales team can be the driving force for huge growth in any business, underscoring the need to invest in their capabilities and personal development. Generative AI is the future of coaching, now is the time to get involved.