Tools won’t make bad sellers great sellers. They may increase productivity, but it’s still important for your teams to understand the fundamentals of great selling so they can use AI tools to be more efficient. Technology is only as valuable as its inputs. If your sales team doesn’t have a strong, repeatable process for executing a value-based sales motion, AI is likely to do more harm than good.
Reps should maintain a curious mindset; research can set the context for their conversations and demonstrate initiative, but it’s no replacement for a customer-led sales process that uncovers true internal pains and desired outcomes.
Consider how an understanding of your typical customer organization can guide the use of AI tools: rather than just requesting all background information on a company, reps can pose specific questions about the executive-level decision-makers that typically hold weight in your deals. Remember that with AI tools, more specific directives can often yield richer results. Your team needs to understand who they are targeting as buyers and why before they can point AI in the right direction.
AI tools are still evolving. If you're a sales leader, you're probably already hyper-aware of the potential risk that AI could present if misused. Privacy and ethics concerns, data accuracy, and overreliance on technology can all hurt your sales momentum. To ensure AI tools are applied constructively, leaders must give their organization a clear roadmap for how the technology fits into their overall sales strategy.
Encourage reps to strike a balance between efficiency tools and personal relationship-building. Cultivate a culture around accountability and outcomes; AI is a tool for research and preparation, but not a replacement for elite sales execution. The human element of sales is, and will remain, the heart of our success. Most of us are inundated with sales messages daily; only the messages best aligned with buyer needs will truly connect. AI has the potential to empower sales reps to focus more on the human element and less on the tasks in between, but this makes the enablement of great selling by leaders all the more crucial.
As a sales leader, you can provide a blueprint to ensure your team's AI utilization enhances your sales process. It starts with giving a clear idea of what excellence looks like in various elements of your sales process, and how AI can support your existing strategy. Provide a great context for the use of AI tools by building out a framework so that everyone in your organization understands the use case for your product - the business problems your solution solves, the people who are typically invested in solving those problems, and the ROI your solution has provided in the past.
