Improving Sales Efficiency: Harnessing the Power of AI for Individual Sales Reps

AI Automation for Sales reps Part 1/3

The dynamic nature of today's business environment requires salespeople to continually adapt, selling and booking meetings is harder accross the board with economic conditions altering business objectives and putting a cautious lense on sending. Reps are required to be constantly exploring innovative approaches to boost efficiency and enhance efficacy.

One pivotal tool driving this evolution in the SaaS industry is Artificial Intelligence (AI). The integration of AI in sales (and many other industries) is being adoped at a staggering rate, reshaping the sales landscape through automation. 

We at BowTiedDingo believe the individual sales rep can tap into this power to improve their own efficiency and efficacy, but that most reps are doing it wrong and in turn hurting their performance.

Today, we're looking at how AI + Proper training and regular evaluation can improve your quarterly/monthly performance in less time so that you can focus on building your WiFi Money.

We plan on doing more posts on AI and sales automation think of this as a part 1 basic primer, we’re going to explain how to outsource most of your work to AI (We’ve got a number of N8N templates that you might like).

Where it goes wrong + How to do it right

Before diving into usecases we think Generative AI is good for, lets talk about what we mean by most reps are doing it wrong, and why we think training is the solution to it.

The main issue is public generative AI models are for the most part NOT TRAINED TO WRITE SALES COPY. The way they write by default will not book you meetings or close deals.

That is simply it. So all of the reps and sales enablement managers, and marketing teams who go out and just drop what they want into chatGPT and use the results are just hurting themselves.

In an ideal world we would have LLMs (Large Language Models) trained on top sales data, and those are being built (The BowTiedDingo team are one of those who are builting it), but for now, we want to focus on how to use what is available Chat GPT and Our own SaaS Sales Script AI - currently powered by GPT 4 (This is powered by GPT, but uses fine tuning and prompt engineering to improve results - https://www.salesscriptai.net )

Training should be around how to account for the deficiencies in the language model and what use cases have the best results currently.

You should also be running manually written cadences/sequences A/B tested with AI an continually reviewing if the AI content is performing on par. If it is not, you need to make adjustment to your input.

Automated Writing

We're starting here because it's what everyone is already doing, but with adverse effects.

That being said it can be trained or well prompted to do this well.

If you can give an AI model like GPT4 a number of GOOD examples and prompt it with the correct information, AI writing can become one of the most significant benefits of AI. Automation.

These AI generated writings, programmed to learn the customer's language, resonate with their needs, preferences, and pain points. By enabling Sales reps to communicate more effectively, automated writing tools help to eliminate the mundane task of proposal writing and allow reps to concentrate on their core sales activities. 

How do you do this? You built a prompt that teaches your AI a specific framework you want it to follow, then give it specific details it should use (The content) and follow it by a minimum of 2 very good examples. 

If you want a simple and quick ROI from this post, use lavendar’s cold email frameworks: https://blog.lavender.ai/sales-email-frameworks/ then follow above prompt framework. You’ll get good emails immediately.

AI in Customer Research - A Deeper Understanding for Better Strategies 

AI can save a lot of time in understanding your customers. By quickly analyzing webpages, articles, documents, etc. and cross referencing job titles, requirements, standard pain points etc. AI can prepare insights into what is likely troubling your prospects before you even pick up the phone.

These insights help the sales rep tailor their approach. By delivering personalized experiences and solutions, sales reps can keep conversations in their winning zone, and increase customer satisfaction and loyalty, resulting in higher sales conversion rates and better customer retention. 

Another thing that companies often don't arm sellers is accurate, up to date persona cards of who your ideal customer is at this point in time. Ai can help generate based off of most successful or recent customers and their details, who you should be approaching and how you should do it.

We do recommend reading some of what Roee from Winning By Design posts on linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/roeehartuv/ He has some good templates you can use.

In conclusion, AI has reshaped the sales landscape, especially within the competitive arena of SaaS. By leveraging automated writing, enriching customer research, and streamlining processes through automation, AI can significantly improve efficiency and efficacy for sales reps. As AI technologies continue to evolve and mature, their impact on individual sales reps' practices and the broader SaaS community is likely to expand, heralding a future where data-driven insights and automated processes are woven seamlessly into the fabric of sales operations.