Generative AI for Sales: Guide and Use Cases

Generative Artificial Intelligence analyzes vast amounts of data, such as customer demographics, previous interactions, behavior, purchase history, etc., to personalize interactions, content, and sales offers to individual clients’ needs and preferences at scale. It supports sales agents throughout the sales cycle, helping them personalize all customer interactions to increase the likelihood of closing a deal.

In early 2024, over 65% of 600 companies surveyed by McKinsey reported regularly using generative AI, almost 50% more than just 10 months prior. Additionally, ¾ of all respondents believe that generative AI will significantly or disruptively change their industry in the next couple of years.

In this article, we will explore what generative AI for sales is and how businesses can use it to personalize their relationships at scale and close more deals.

Generative AI for Sales - Use Cases

According to McKinsey, generative AI for sales has an impact in three main areas - increasing productivity, enhancing customer experience, and driving sales growth. Generative AI can be used to hyper-personalize content to individual customers, increase the number of closed deals with customer insights, and enhance employees' productivity by automating repetitive tasks.

In this section, we will explore in detail the gen AI use cases for sales that help sales teams achieve higher productivity, close more deals, and improve customer experience:

Personalized communication at scale

Traditionally, to draft an engaging message tailored to the unique needs and preferences of prospects, sales representatives had to research information manually, going through the company’s website, social media profiles, and other mentions that could be found online. That was a laborious and time-consuming task, which limited how many prospects sales agents could contact.

With the rise of generative AI, sales reps can significantly streamline and speed up this process. Gen AI can quickly collect and analyze all the available data, such as prospect’s interests, preferences, behavior, previous interactions, etc., and prepare a draft of personalized messages and emails in natural language that imitates humans. All that is left for sales agents to do is review the proposed message, edit it if necessary, and send it to the prospect.

Generative AI handles data analysis and message preparation, allowing sales agents to contact a greater number of prospects and focus on building relationships with them. Generative AI can also assist sales agents in writing follow-up emails, outlining RFP responses, and replying with additional information and useful content.

By using Gen AI to personalize communication, sales representatives can streamline their interactions with customers and write relevant and timely messages.

Automated content generation

Generative AI for sales can assist sales reps in creating sales content from scratch in multiple languages and customizing it to fit unique requirements. This ensures that sales teams can quickly generate relevant materials to engage with potential customers throughout the sales cycle. By using generative AI, businesses can maintain consistency in the brand’s voice across all communication channels.

Here’s a list of sales materials gen AI can create:

• sales scripts
• offers and proposals
• sales presentations
• brochures
• knowledge articles
• sales playbooks
• product demos

For example, Gen AI can write case studies related to specific industries, highlighting the information requested by prospects in minutes, and later customize it for another client.

Sales chatbots

Generative AI-empowered chatbots are changing how customers interact with businesses, offering a 24/7 opportunity to get in touch with an organization in multiple languages. Instead of waiting for the sales agent’s reply, customers can receive an instant response from an intelligent chatbot that can understand questions in natural language, and generate a human-like answer regarding product details, price, demos, the possibility of scheduling a meeting, etc.

Chatbots can also integrate with CRM systems to automatically capture and log in customer details in real-time, helping sales agents follow up more effectively.

Meeting preparation

Sales agents can use generative AI tools to better prepare for sales meetings and calls. Gen AI can analyze data about prospects, including their needs, preferences, behavior, and past interactions to create tailored meeting plans and sales proposals. It can also prepare and customize sales presentations, demos, and additional materials, and suggest talking points to ensure a successful meeting.

Virtual sales assistant

Generative AI can act as a sales assistant, automating repetitive tasks and providing real-time guidance for sales professionals throughout the sales process. It can analyze their cases, compile them with historical sales data on similar successfully closed deals, and provide recommendations on the best course of action to increase the chances of signing a deal. It can also analyze the prospect’s behavior, previous interactions, and messages to suggest the best way to respond.

Product recommendations

Sales professionals can use generative AI to generate personalized product and service recommendations that will help them increase the deal value. By analyzing purchase history and browsing behavior, customer preferences, and market trends, generative AI tools can produce tailored upselling and cross-selling recommendations. Sales agents can use these recommendations to tailor their offerings to specific customer needs and offer the right product at the right time.

Negotiation assistance

Generative AI for sales can help sales representatives prepare for negotiations with data-driven insights regarding pricing strategy, deal terms, and possible objections. Sales teams can use these insights to prepare successful negotiating strategies and answers to issues that prospects may bring up. With gen AI as part of the negotiating team, sales reps have higher chances of closing a deal.

Gen AI tools can also prepare personalized documents and contracts to include client’s requirements and speed up the deal-closing process.

Sentiment analysis

Humans don’t have a problem with understanding other humans' emotions. Sales agents can quickly identify if a customer or a prospect is angry, happy, frustrated, or neutral. Whether during a meeting, a call, or a thorough text, they can easily understand the tone of customers and tailor their responses accordingly. So why would they need generative AI’s capability to analyze customer sentiment?

Generative AI tools can be useful in a slightly different way, instead of analyzing individual customer’s emotions, they can collect data from client’s feedback, reviews, social media comments, etc., and prepare a summary of potential opportunities and issues. Based on these insights, Gen AI can suggest possible solutions to improve customer engagement and satisfaction.

Additionally, if a business uses chatbots empowered by gen AI as a first point of contact before engaging the sales team, sentiment analysis becomes essential. Thanks to it, chatbots can understand human emotions better, answer their queries more accurately, and prepare a reliable overview of the first interaction with a potential client. They can assess the potential customers’ readiness to buy, and alert sales agents about the most promising opportunities, increasing the chance of closing more deals faster.

Sales report generation

Sales teams can swiftly generate multiple reports in minutes thanks to generative AI tools. Gen AI can collect, analyze data, and prepare reports with key data regarding sales performance and forecasts. It can include not only written text but also images, interactive diagrams, animations, and other materials to help stakeholders quickly understand essential information and make informed decisions.

Document summarization

Sales teams can use generative AI to summarize calls, meetings, and documents. For example, gen AI can transcribe and summarize a sales call, highlight key information, and prepare recommendations for the next call to increase the chances of closing a deal.

It can also summarize long documents to pull out the most important information that will have the biggest impact on the business. Thanks to this capability, generative AI can support agile decision-making processes, helping key stakeholders efficiently respond to new challenges and opportunities for business growth.

Generative AI can also summarize other types of materials, such as market trends reports, customer feedback, performance reports, etc., to help businesses make better decisions about their sales strategies.

Sales training materials

Generative AI for sales can prepare custom training materials tailored to individual sales agents' needs, based on their skills and current performance. It can quickly produce role-specific training content including guidebooks and videos with information about the products, services, sales process, and customer personas, for new sales professionals to help them get up to speed.

For the sales agents that have been with the company for some time, Gen AI can generate advanced training materials, such as scenario-based exercises, simulations, and new sales playbooks based on current market trends.

It can also prepare additional materials and tailor them to each sales agent to address specific challenges and skill gaps, such as upselling tactics, negotiating, effective closing, etc., based on analysis of sales performance. Thanks to this capability, sales leaders can ensure continuous learning and development, without having to go over performance reports and prepare learning modules by hand.

Benefits of Using Generative AI in Sales

Generative AI can simplify, enhance, and streamline sales work. It helps sales professionals personalize customer interactions at scale, increase productivity, and close more deals faster.

Here are the key benefits of generative AI for sales:

1. Increased productivity

Generative AI for sales can take over some of the repetitive and work-intensive tasks such as creating sales proposals, writing emails, sending follow-ups, preparing sales presentations, etc. With AI tools taking care of these tasks, sales reps can focus on actually selling and building customer relationships to increase the likelihood of closing a deal.

McKinsey estimates that generative AI tools could increase sales productivity by about 3-5% of current global sales expenditures.

2. Improved customer engagement

Generative AI tools help sales agents increase their customer engagement by providing personalized content tailored to each individual’s needs and preferences. By analyzing such data as past interactions, purchase history, and customer behavior, these tools can create content that speaks directly to the client’s goals and pain points. Gen AI can create customized content for each stage of the sales funnel, from outreach to deal closure, that deeply resonates with clients. This level of personalization ensures that interactions with sales agents feel more personal and relevant, increasing the likelihood of conversion.

3. Increased sales

With actionable insights provided by Gen AI, sales agents can increase the probability of closing a deal and improve their sales rates. Generative AI can provide valuable information about customers’ needs and preferences, suggest relevant products, recommend the next best step, provide negotiation tips, and generate additional content, helping sales agents effectively engage with customers and close more deals.

According to McKinsey’s research, businesses that invest in gen AI have seen a revenue increase between 3 to 15% and a sales ROI boost of 10 to 20%.

4. Reduced response time

Sales agents can use generative AI to write responses and find or generate helpful content, reducing the time they need to respond to customer messages and queries. By providing assistance in real time and suggesting the next best step, Gen AI can help sales professionals answer more accurately and efficiently, increasing customer satisfaction and sales agents' productivity.

4. Scalable outreach

The generative AI’s capability to analyze vast amounts of customer data and produce unique content in minutes is invaluable when it comes to carrying out effective outreach strategies. Sales teams can use Gen AI tools to scale their outreach efforts without sacrificing quality, enabling personalized communication at scale. With generative AI, sales professionals can contact more prospects than ever before, while keeping it relevant and personal.

5. Enhanced decision-making

With generative AI-empowered sales tools analyzing vast amounts of data and producing actionable reports, sales leaders can make better decisions based on real-time insights. Gen AI can support decisions regarding sales strategy, cross-selling and up-selling opportunities, and more. It’s also a great tool for busy sales managers who don’t have the time to go through lengthy reports. With Gen AI’s capability to summarize documents, highlight key information, and prepare recommendations, sales leaders can make decisions faster.

6. Reduced operational costs

Generative AI can help businesses cut operational costs by automating routine tasks and minimizing manual work. It can also help bring down the costs of content creation by assisting creators in generating unique, personalized content in multiple formats, without hiring additional staff.

7. Improved sales agents' performance

Generative AI tools help sales agents improve their selling skills with training materials based on their unique challenges that can be updated in real time. With unlimited success with playbooks, training videos, role-play scenarios, and other resources, sales professionals can constantly enhance their performance, stay updated on the newest market trends and best practices, and improve their sales outcomes.

Creatio.ai for Sales

Creatio offers powerful AI capabilities to increase the efficiency and productivity of sales teams. By combining generative, agentic, and predictive AI in a unified platform, Creatio.ai provides a comprehensive solution to automate routine tasks, provide deeper insights, personalize customer interactions, and enhance sales efforts.

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