Quick Take: A Day in the Life of a Salesperson - Before & After AI

In this Quick Take episode, we’re taking a few minutes to think about the day in the life of a salesperson before and after having AI tools at our fingertips.  

By the end of this short episode, you’ll have a solid bird’s-eye-view of how significantly AI has altered the daily routines and approaches of salespeople, making their strategies more efficient and effective.

LINKS:

Matt Sunshine

Sales Accelerator AI

Practice Coach AI

The Center for Sales Strategy

Transcript

Matt Sunshine: 0:05

Welcome to Improving Sales Performance, a podcast highlighting tips and insights aimed at helping sales organizations realize, and maybe even exceed, their goals. Here we chat with thought leaders, experts and gurus who have years of sales experience from a wide range of industries. I'm your host, matt Sunshine, ceo at the Center for Sales Strategy, a sales performance consulting company. In this Quick Take episode, we're taking a few minutes to think about the day in the life of a salesperson, before and after having AI tools at our fingertips. By the end of this short episode, you'll have a solid bird's eye view of how significantly AI has altered the daily routines and approaches of salespeople, making their strategies more efficient and effective. With that, let's dive in. So let's get started, and for today, let's just call out five areas. We'll start with prospecting. So before AI, you had manual research on potential leads, you had time-consuming cold calling and outbound emailing and you had very low response rates. People it was difficult to get people on the phone. It was difficult to get them to respond to your emails. Today, after AI, or with some of the AI solutions that are available, you have AI powered lead generation tools, you have automated personalized outreach, you have an increased response rates and you have more sales-qualified leads coming in. You had manual data entry. You know to update anything update an email, a conversation, anything. You had manual data entry. It was difficult to track deals in the pipelines. It was cumbersome and difficult, took a lot of time and the follow-up was inefficient at best. Well, you have AI powered CRM tools that are designed to help salespeople actually be smarter in their in their outreach and move move quite a bit faster. You have automated data entry and automated updates. You have intelligent insights and predictive analysis, and what that results in is improved customer engagement and retention. The before and after on CRM with AI is phenomenal.

Matt Sunshine: 2:51

Let's go to the third thing sales presentations or sales demos. So before AI, those were time consuming to create and to customize. They were difficult to tailor to specific needs. It took a lot of work, took a lot of time. It wasn't uncommon for this to take a day or even a couple of days to work on a deck and because of that they were less interactive and the proposals were less engaging. But after AI, ai powered presentation tools are just absolutely fantastic. You can automate the creation and you can personalize every presentation. They're interactive, they're more engaging and you can have real time data analysis and insights of what people are responding to. And so I think, when it comes to sales presentations and sales demos, ai has allowed salespeople to up their game to really up their game.

Matt Sunshine: 3:53

Let's talk about sales follow-ups. Before AI, it was manual email, manual phone call, manual reminders. After AI, like mentioned earlier, you have amazing CRM resources that automate follow-up tasks. You can have personalized email templates that you create and that you can personalize and update as needed, but it speeds up that process and you can have AI-driven insights to optimize your follow-up strategy. You can start to collect data on what sort of follow-up is working and what sort of follow-up is not working, and you can just get better at your analysis, better, faster at your analysis.

Matt Sunshine: 4:33

And then the last one to really call out is closing deals. Salespeople need to close deals, so before AI, you had the manual contract negotiation and paperwork that happened. It was difficult to track deal progress and because of that, sometimes you have longer sales cycles and what we're seeing with AI areas that AI is helping to improve. And I should just say AI does not solve all the problems of sales, but it does make sales people a lot more effective and a lot more efficient if they use the AI tools and resources correctly. But after AI with closing deals, you have AI-powered contract negotiation tools available to you, you have automated contract generation and signing tools available to you, and because of that, you have faster deal closure and it also leads to increased revenue.

Matt Sunshine: 5:33

So there's a lot of things that AI is doing and a lot of ways that AI can help salespeople to both be smarter in the way they approach their clients and their prospects, but also help them to be a little bit more effective and a little bit more efficient in how they move their clients and their prospects, but also help them to be a little bit more effective and a little bit more efficient in how they move their prospects and clients through a sales funnel, ultimately getting results for their clients and driving revenue performance for the businesses that they serve. This has been Improving Sales Performance. Thanks for listening. If you like what you heard, join us every week by clicking the subscribe button For more on the topics covered in the show, visit our website, thecenterforsalesstrategycom. There you can find helpful resources and content aimed at improving your sales performance.