Between 2012 and 2019, the percentage of salespeople meeting their annual quotas fell from 63% to 57%. That means, ‘results-driven’ and ‘time-pressed’ are two descriptors that now defines modern-day sales. Unfortunately, administrative tasks and meetings increasingly take up sales reps’ time, putting active selling on the backburner. This exacts significant costs on businesses, leading to reduced sales and higher turnover, which impact overall revenue.
Where Does Generative AI Come in?
The rise of ChatGPT has put generative artificial intelligence (AI) and AI more broadly into the spotlight. AI analyzes and works with existing data to mimic human intelligence, whereas generative AI, a branch of AI, can ‘learn’ from data patterns without human direction. It processes huge amounts of data to generate new, original content, including audio, images, text, videos, and code.
Artificial intelligence’s value, specifically generative AI, has poised the advanced technology for rapid growth. Forrester predicts AI-powered platforms will grow to $37 billion by 2025.
Why should this matter to sales leaders? AI use in sales is expected to increase across 2023, according to 91% of marketing and sales leaders. With the support of generative AI, sales teams can improve efficiencies, facilitate better sales planning and predictions, and increase job satisfaction.
Used effectively, generative AI enables sales teams to do more of what they are meant to do – sell. Complementing sales teams with new ideas and suggested best actions.
Those that don’t work to integrate AI into their business operations will be at a significant competitive disadvantage moving into the future, suffering from reduced efficiencies and missed opportunities.
The Costs of an Overworked Sales Team
Sales teams are overworked, preventing them from maximizing their time and identifying lucrative opportunities.
How else is this impacting your sales teams…and your bottom line?…
- Decreased Sales: Overworked teams will likely miss sales opportunities because they don’t have the time to focus on building awareness, prioritizing the right leads, and delivering the personalized customer experience (CX) required to close sales.
- Increased Burnout and Turnover: Salespeople that are overworked or have unrealistic quotas are prone to burnout, which makes them more likely to leave a company. This issue is further compounded by the next generation of incoming workers, who expect a greater work-life balance and demand the technological support needed to help them perform effectively. This costs companies substantial time and resources invested into onboarding new employees, which can also negatively impact performance and motivation.
- Lack of Time Management: When sales teams are overburdened, time management is impacted as teams struggle to meet deadlines and progress actions at pace. This can result in missed opportunities and costly delays.
How Can Generative AI Benefit Sales Leaders?
Generative AI has the potential to support sales teams across the sales funnel – from prospecting to closing. Sales begins with understanding who your ideal customer is. What are their pain points? What problems does your offering solve? However, answering these questions adequately requires sifting through an extraordinary amount of information. Humans simply don’t have the capacity to get into the details of every possible lead or opportunity.
This is where generative AI comes in, acting as each salesperson’s personal assistant. It can analyze incomprehensibly large amounts of information from various sources, for example, social media interactions, website activities, and customer databases. Insights and predictive analytics produced by generative AI can help inform which sales channels will be the most lucrative, increasing revenue potential.
A generative AI model could also be trained to analyze customer behavior data to identify patterns to determine the likelihood of interest in a particular product or service. It can help process information about a prospect’s needs, industry, budgets, timelines, behavior, demographics, etc., to identify the best-qualified leads. This helps address the 54% of sales leads generated by marketing teams that are deemed poorly qualified or underqualified by sales. Sales teams can then focus on those leads with the highest chance of converting, ensuring time and resources are used as effectively as possible.
The customer service side of sales has never been more pivotal to outcomes, with expectations for digitalization and personalization pushing most businesses to adjust their customer experience (CX) strategies and reprioritize customer care. In fact, 32% of customers around the world would stop doing business with a brand they ‘loved’ after a single bad experience, and that number jumps to just under 50% after numerous bad experiences. This has led to JP Morgan Chase, Starbucks, and Nike making personalized CX a strategic priority, using artificial intelligence (AI) to deepen engagement and enhance customer offerings.
4 Ways You Can Use Generative AI to Improve Your Selling Experience
1. Deliver Personalized Experiences
Generative AI can help deliver the personalization needed to elevate customer service, and nurture leads to build the depth of relationship required to close deals. This includes creating personalized and original content that will resonate with each lead or segment quickly, such as emails, product descriptions, marketing materials, etc. Customer patterns and preferences are incorporated into all messaging as well as the mode of delivery. This targeted approach boosts engagement and conversion rates. Conversation transcripts can be analyzed to identify opportunities the sales team may not have thought of or had time to consider.
2. Addressing Customer Concerns
When it comes to addressing customer concerns, generative AI can support the best way to address these and suggest relevant case studies, testimonials, and/or other supporting information to address concerns.
3. Optimize Competitive Pricing Concerns
Price optimization is another area that has been historically difficult for sales teams to get right. Many operate solely on instinct, completely unbacked by intelligence. But, with generative AI, that can change.
Generative AI can play an instrumental role in ensuring prices are designed to drive sales and revenue. It can perform data analysis to identify customer patterns that affect the price point for a product or service. It can conduct competitor research looking at others’ market share, pricing strategy, and product positioning to suggest how to price to facilitate competitiveness. Predictive analytics based on previous sales data, market trends, and other factors can be used to forecast the effect of different pricing strategies on sales and revenues. Analysis of data from various sources can be used to adjust prices in real-time based on market conditions and customer behaviors.
4. Lengthening the Customer Life Cycles
Across the funnel, generative AI is poised to help sales teams optimize their processes to drive productivity – identifying inefficiencies and bottlenecks and suggesting ways to address them – and subsequently sales and revenue.
Beyond the initial sale, generative AI can help with ongoing relationships with customers. This includes assessing customer data to determine when and how to communicate with existing customers and which customers to approach regarding upsell opportunities. This is important since it tends to be easier to sell to existing customers than to bring in new ones. When it comes to closing, generative AI can identify the best negotiation strategies and approaches to improve the likelihood of a conversion.
The Importance of Adopting Advanced Tech like Generative AI
Competitiveness and long-term viability are at risk for sales teams that do not start to incorporate advanced technologies, like generative AI, into their day-to-day operations. Without it, workloads increase, messaging may be inconsistent across channels and campaigns, the capacity to personalize is drastically reduced, opportunities are missed, and more. These outcomes result in reduced sales and greater difficulty retaining employees.
Increasingly, the next generation of workers expects the support of the latest technologies. Organizations that don’t have them often struggle to retain workers, an issue that will only worsen with the next generation of workers and increased digitalization across sectors.
Work-life balance is an important issue for younger workers, with many of us familiar with trends like ‘the Great Resignation’ and ‘quiet quitting.’ Technologies like generative AI have the potential to not only drive better results by improving customer engagement and interactions but they can improve the quality of life for your employees, which improves their job satisfaction and motivation, making them more likely to commit to an organization for the long haul.
With the support of generative AI, sales reps and leaders also have more time to focus on higher value and creatively demanding tasks. They are given time back, and processes are streamlined and redesigned to optimize outcomes.
In a world of exponential technological advances, it’s time to prioritize selling smarter. SugarCRM can help you work smarter, not harder, to achieve your CX and selling goals. Our systems can assist you in generating accurate predictions to make better decisions with the help of AI-powered predictability. Help your company by leaning on an intelligent platform to benefit from dependable next-step advice and better visibility through external data.
Interested in learning more about how AI can assist your sales organization in eliminating the busy work and opening the doors to new possibilities? Speak with a Sugar representative today!
FAQs
What can ChatGPT do for sales? ›
ChatGPT is an AI-powered chatbot that can simulate human-like conversations. In sales, ChatGPT can be used to engage with potential customers and answer their questions. It can also help sales reps by automating tasks such as lead generation, lead scoring, and follow-up emails.
Does ChatGPT give the same answers to everyone? ›Does ChatGPT give everyone the same answer? ChatGPT can generate essays, write code, and more from user queries. Most of the time, when different people ask ChatGPT the same question, they will get the same answer. There may be a few word variations, but they will be almost identical.
What is ChatGPT in simple terms? ›ChatGPT is a natural language processing tool driven by AI technology that allows you to have human-like conversations and much more with the chatbot. The language model can answer questions and assist you with tasks, such as composing emails, essays, and code.
How do I use ChatGPT for sales calls? ›- 8 ways to use ChatGPT for enterprise sales.
- #1: Research your target industries and personas.
- #2: Build sales team members' personal brands on social media.
- #3: Generate cold outreach messaging.
- #4: Come up with lead-qualifying questions.
- #5: Do quick competitive research.
- #6: Role play with a prospect.
ChatGPT has a high number of potential uses for business, especially when we talk about marketing and sales. Yep, we can include lead generation and outbound marketing. This “free employee” offers numerous opportunities for businesses to improve their marketing and sales efforts.
Can you sell ChatGPT content? ›Can I use output from ChatGPT for commercial uses? Subject to the Content Policy and Terms, you own the output you create with ChatGPT, including the right to reprint, sell, and merchandise – regardless of whether output was generated through a free or paid plan.
Does ChatGPT Plus give better answers? ›OpenAI's ChatGPT Plus is a convincing AI chatbot that can offer excellent features and benefits compared to the basic free version of ChatGPT. Features like higher accuracy, no downtime, faster response, and more make it suitable for research papers, data analysis, customer support, and more at $20/month.
Can ChatGPT be detected? ›Can Universities detect Chat GPT? It is now completely possible for universities to detect ChatGPT and many other AI content generators. If work is submitted through a university's learning management system, such as Turnitin, AI and plagiarism detection should happen.
What is ChatGPT and how does it work? ›ChatGPT is an app built by OpenAI. Using the GPT language models, it can answer your questions, write copy, draft emails, hold a conversation, explain code in different programming languages, translate natural language to code, and more—or at least try to—all based on the natural language prompts you feed it.
What is ChatGPT trained on? ›According to OpenAI, Chat GPT was trained using “Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback” (RLHF).
How do you ask a question on ChatGPT? ›
Ask Basic Questions
Just like you use Google to get answers to your questions, you can request the same information from ChatGPT. Just submit a query and the chatbot will serve up a response; no need to click multiple links.
- Better: "Who else is participating with you in making this decision?"
- Better: "May I ask you a few questions to find out if we can be of service?"
- Better: "If you experience any issues with our service, our customer support team is ready to help.
- On your next call speak louder than you think you should. Even if it feels weird. ...
- Don't speak too professionally. People that “belong” don't talk professionally. ...
- Lastly, Don't ramble. Say what you need to then shut up.
- Record and review your call. ...
- Start with a friendly greeting — but not too friendly. ...
- Make sure nothing has changed since the last communication. ...
- Set call agenda and expectations. ...
- Reiterate pain points. ...
- Talk about product value, not features. ...
- Reference your unique differentiator.
Strategies for how to generate sales leads include asking for referrals, conducting customer care calls, and nurturing leads. Being a trusted source of information on the internet and social media, as well as through online networking, are also lead generation strategies.
How many leads should turn into sales? ›How many leads turn into sales? This is highly dependent on your strategy, number of leads, and sales funnel. Some studies say 10-15% of leads can turn into sales, but the best way to get an accurate number for this is to use the formula to calculate your LCR over time.
How many leads does it take to make a sale? ›According to experts, the optimal amount of leads a B2C business should generate per day is 150.
How do you leverage ChatGPT to make money? ›- Affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is one way to earn using ChatGPT. ...
- Blogging. Starting a blog is the greatest approach to monetizing ChatGPT. ...
- Content editing. ...
- Conduct research. ...
- Virtual instructor. ...
- Build software. ...
- Writing lyrics for music. ...
- Create a recipe blog for food.
ChatGPT Plus was announced at the end of January 2023 and is priced at $20 per month. At the time of writing it is available as part of a pilot plan only though, so only a select amount of users currently have access.
Is selling low content books profitable? ›Publishing and selling low content books is a great way to open a lucrative passive income stream. It's a fantastic side hustle for digital nomads or solopreneurs who don't have the time (or perhaps inclination) to write and self publish a 50k word book or ebook.
How accurate are ChatGPT answers? ›
Is ChatGPT a credible source? No, ChatGPT is not a credible source of factual information and can't be cited for this purpose in academic writing. While it tries to provide accurate answers, it often gets things wrong because its responses are based on patterns, not facts and data.
Who owns ChatGPT? ›ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot developed by OpenAI and released in November 2022. It is built on top of OpenAI's GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 foundational large language models (LLMs) and has been fine-tuned (an approach to transfer learning) using both supervised and reinforcement learning techniques.
Is it worth upgrading to ChatGPT? ›Upgrading to ChatGPT Plus can save you more time and improve efficiency. But if you only occasionally use ChatGPT or only use it for fun, the free ChatGPT is more than sufficient to meet your needs.
Is it worth paying for ChatGPT 4? ›If you require advanced AI capabilities, faster response times, and priority access, the subscription might be a worthwhile investment. However, if you're a casual user or don't need the cutting-edge features of ChatGPT-4, the free ChatGPT-3.5 version might be more than sufficient for your needs.
Does ChatGPT Plus have a limit? ›If you're using ChatGPT as your very own AI writing assistant, you may be wondering: Does ChatGPT have a word limit? Well, there doesn't seem to be a set limit on how much text you can send this chatbot. So, it appears that there is no such thing as a strict limit.
Can professors tell if you use ChatGPT? ›It also won't be as effective as it seems, as professors can often detect ChatGPT essays using various methods. Plagiarism detection tools such as Turnitin and Copyscape can spot if your essay is generated by ChatGPT without any editing or citation.
Will I get caught using ChatGPT? ›Unfortunately, yes. ChatGPT uses language technology models that are easily detectable by anti-plagiarism software like originality.ai, contentscale.ai, or gptzero.me. That being said, there are ways to use AI technology to assist you with your work without getting caught.
Can I copy and paste from ChatGPT? ›Pasting from ChatGPT · Chat GPT Users. #Blog Posts When copy-pasting from ChatGPT, I would recommend using the "Paste Text Only"/"Paste without Formatting" shortcut: Ctrl + Shift + V (Windows) or Command ⌘ + Shift ⇧ + V (Mac) to not have to remove the background color each time.
Where does ChatGPT get its information from? ›ChatGPT is an AI language model that was trained on a large body of text from a variety of sources (e.g., Wikipedia, books, news articles, scientific journals).
What are the benefits of ChatGPT Plus? ›ChatGPT Plus is a new optional subscription that grants you access to a more advanced and capable language model called GPT-4. It also lets you access the chatbot during periods of high demand. The subscription will set you back $20 plus tax each month. Keep reading to know more.
What is the difference between ChatGPT and ChatGPT Plus? ›
ChatGPT Plus appears to offer the same core features as the free version of ChatGPT, but with the added benefit of reduced wait times, as the service is less likely to be down or at capacity. However, there are no guarantees of new or improved features beyond the upcoming ChatGPT API.
How many people are using ChatGPT? ›How Many ChatGPT Users Are There? According to the latest available data, ChatGPT currently has over 100 million users. And the website currently generates 1 billion visitors per month. This user and traffic growth was achieved in a record-breaking two-month period (from December 2022 to February 2023).
What are the features of ChatGPT? ›...
| Features of GPT-4 | |
|---|---|
| Improved accuracy in natural language processing | Improved speed and efficiency |
| Improved accuracy in information retrieval and search capabilities | Ability to understand and interpret complex scientific and technical language |
Use Bing. Microsoft's search engine now has its own version of ChatGPT that you can use without verifying your phone number. You will need to have a Microsoft account, but unlike signing up through OpenAI, you can get a Microsoft account using a VoIP phone number (like the free ones available through Google Voice).
How do you ask questions to get answers? ›- Be a good listener. ...
- Don't be afraid of your questions. ...
- Do your research. ...
- Go where the conversation takes you. ...
- Use silence to your advantage. ...
- Ask probing questions. ...
- Keep your questions short. ...
- Get your sequence right.
Instruct GPT works by providing it with a prompt or a set of instructions, along with the task-specific dataset, and then fine-tuning the model on that dataset. Once the model is fine-tuned, it can be used to perform the specific task for which it was trained.
What do you say at the end of a sales call? ›- "Unless you have any more questions or concerns, I think we're ready to get started." ...
- "Let's discuss pricing." ...
- "Tell me what you're thinking." ...
- "We can take as long as you'd like, but I know [you've got another meeting at X time, this call is scheduled to wrap up in Y minutes].
There's a fine line between diligence and rudeness, and too many sales people cross it. By erring on the side of professionalism—which is, of course, critical in B2B sales—a rep will be less likely to alienate potential customers, and more likely to make the sales they need. Just don't call more than three times.
What is a ghost call in sales? ›Ghost calling is when a salesperson submits a report or some kind of data showing them to have visited specific customer(s) when they haven't seen the customer(s). It is falsification of all or part of a report to cover up for the lack of visiting.
What is the best tone of voice for sales? ›In general, having a neutral pitch, with your voice not sounding too high or low, is a good strategy when it comes to tonality in sales. Use moments of high pitch to express excitement and friendliness. Try moments of low pitch to convey a sense of authority and expertise.
How do I stop being nervous on a sales call? ›
- Understand That Rejection Is Better Than Avoidance. In reality, what's the worst thing that can happen on a cold call? ...
- Move Past Mean People. ...
- Use Objections to Improve. ...
- Be Confident in Your Product. ...
- Trust Your System. ...
- Work in Your Strengths.
- Breathing & Meditation. Deep breathing is a common technique for managing stress, with benefits that range from alleviating anxiety to lowering blood pressure. ...
- Power Pose. ...
- Music.
Ask Interesting Questions
Ask questions that show you did your research on the company. Ask questions that position you as an expert and help build your credibility. For example: I see X, Y, and Z going on in your industry.
Ways to Open a Sales Call. Greet them warmly. Mention the research you've done about their company. Drop the name of a mutual connection.
How to use ChatGPT for business development? ›- Sign up for a GPT-3 API key: ...
- Choose a platform for your chatbot. ...
- Define the purpose and functionality of your chatbot. ...
- Create a script for your chatbot. ...
- Use the GPT-3 API to train your chatbot. ...
- Test and fine-tune your chatbot. ...
- Deploy your chatbot.
LinkedIn has, of course, been using artificial intelligence in one way or another for a long time, but now it wants to give its 134.5 million active monthly users and 900 million members the ChatGPT experience to help them put words into coherent sentences.
What do top sales performers do? ›“Top performers” were defined in the research as sales reps who consistently exceed sales expectations. Top-performing salespeople take a value-based selling approach that focuses on helping prospects understand the value gained from the product or service and through each interaction.
What does a sales rep do all day? ›A sales rep interacts directly with customers throughout all phases of the sales process. They're responsible for identifying a customer's needs, pitching relevant products or services, and ensuring they have a positive experience from start to finish.
How do I get the best out of ChatGPT? ›- Be specific on word count and put higher than you need. ...
- Don't be afraid to ask it to add more. ...
- Understand its limitations. ...
- It's better at creating outlines rather than full pieces of content. ...
- Make sure your request is clear and concise. ...
- You can ask it to reformulate its response.
Yes, in most cases it is safe to use Chat GPT. While using it, keep in mind that you do not know where the data you are entering into it will end up. This is the same for entering information into Google, Bing or other online services.
How to use ChatGPT for market research? ›
- Create your ChatGPT account.
- Familiarise yourself with ChatGPT capabilities and limitations.
- Explore types of ChatGPT prompts.
- Prepare ChatGPT for a market research project.
- Output information relevant to the market research project.
- Use prompts to ask follow us questions to gather more information.
ChatGPT and Character Limits
While it's a powerful tool, it does have a character limit of 2048 characters per response. This means that if you ask ChatGPT a question that requires a longer response, it may cut off mid-answer or provide an incomplete response.
The default length is fixed at 2048 tokens, while the maximum can be set at 4096 tokens.
Can ChatGPT summarize journal articles? ›With Chat GPT, you can quickly generate accurate summaries of lengthy articles, research papers, or reports. Following the steps outlined above, you can use Chat GPT or the ChatGPT extension to summarize text and save time and effort.
What is the highest paid sales? ›- Advertising sales representatives.
- Outside sales representative.
- Account executive.
- Pharmaceutical sales representative.
- Direct sales representative.
- Business development representative.
- Sales engineer.
- Sales professional.
The more you sell, the more you make in commissions. Sales representatives earn a salary, or draw, each month for a specified time regardless of sales. If they earn less in commission than they do in salary, they keep the commission and the difference between it and the draw amount.
What is the highest sales position? ›Chief sales officer (CSO)
They manage the company's VP of sales and oversee all sales activities of the company, making them the highest sales position in an organization.
Rapport building
Coming across as authentic and engaging will endear you to others and gain their trust. Building a strong rapport with customers is important, as you've got to convince them that you're the best person to sell them a product.
Sales is often a fast-paced, high-stress, unpredictable environment — and for many that choose to go into a sales profession, that's what they love about their work. They get the opportunity to meet new people, have thought-provoking conversations, and influence their compensation.
Why do sales reps lose deals? ›In many cases, sales calls fall flat because reps become overly reliant on products instead of buyer pain points and needs. That's the wrong focus: Product information is one of the most easily available resources for buyers. As a result, calls become a case of “tell me something I don't already know.”