10 ways you can use AI and close deals faster

Written by Swagat Irsale, Growth Advocate. 

I am Swagat Irsale and I am a Growth Advocate who consults with start ups and scale ups in growing revenue and scaling products. 

Before going into AI, lets think; if you are a seller, here is what you expect - 

• Qualified leads to work on. These leads should have been vetted to make sure they have budget, authority, need and other parameters. 

• System to demo the product, handle objections and give end to end product information to the entire multi-departmental customer teams. 

• Assistance in legal, procurement, InfoSec, etc. 

All of these pointers are related to b2b sellers; however some of them apply to b2c, departmental, insurance, etc. sellers. 

If you are a seller, how are you measured? 

The beauty of sales is that it is very much measurable; very similar to sports. How many matches won vs how many matches lost; it is that simple. We can analyse how, why, what and other aspects of it; but measure is perfect. 

In b2b here is how I have seen it measured - 

• Annual quota agreed on vs quota met, President’s Club ... 🏆

• Time to close a deal - this can be in days or weeks. Every company has an average number of  weeks to close a deal. 

• Are customers happy? Many times even after the product is sold, the customer says I wish to speak with the Sales team. This shows their trust in sales and they feel the sales team listens to them. 

I am sure you will agree that these are the most widely used parameters to measure sales and seller performance. 

As a seller there are many activities which span across qualification, demos, objections, pricing, contracting, negotiation, legal and much more. In b2c products some different steps may be there, but you get the point. 

Here are 10 ways you can use AI and close deals faster.

Not endorsing any tool, platform; only use cases to close deals faster. 

1 - AI can improve outbound messages - 

Even if there is a separate system for outbound, every seller sends messages to prospects which they feel may buy. AI can help sellers craft these messages. We can add in the prompt that we wish to send personalized messages and ask GPTs to craft a message which will have a high probability of getting a response from the prospect  ... 🙋. 

2 - AI can do prospecting and researching leads, contacts better - 

AI can help sellers in getting real time or close to real time insights about leads which have shown interest in the products. Doing this bi-weekly helps. This can give insights about company strategy, buying intent, organisation priority and much more. 

A seller then can modify the sales collateral accordingly. 

3 - Set up automation of tasks and create reminders - 

Sellers need to do many tasks which are small but critical. Examples of these are scheduling calls, updating CRM, creating action items based on meetings and so on. AI tools can help automating these tasks, follow ups, create reminders based on a combination of email, slack and meeting notes and so on ... 🥇 

With these the seller can make sure that no prospect/ customer remains untouched and feels left behind. 

4 - AI can make sales enablement faster and sooner - 

AI can help sellers summarise calls and create, assign action items to specific team members. AI can also summarise meetings for objection, competitive insights and more. AI tools can help sellers in creating personalized sales presentations, documents and so on. 

Imagine AI can help you as a seller draft a message which explains your product in a non-technical way so the prospect understands. I believe this is key as many of the customers will be non-technical and may not understand technicalities of the products. 

5 - AI can help in lead scoring - 

A challenge with sellers is where to put their focus, which deal has a high probability of closing and so on. Because Sales is a maze where you are always racing against time and AI can score leads as an example and help you prioritise leads.  

6 - AI can do voice training - 

If most of your sales as a seller is on zoom and google meet; it is very important to train your voice. Is your voice sounding firm, authoritative, too soft and so on. Teams on the other side of the call create an impression of the person based on the voice. AI can help sellers train their voice to make sure that the voice is appropriate and deep in tone, etc … 🤣 

7 - AI can do competitive analysis - 

I believe this is self explanatory. I have seen tools if they have been connected with multiple tools, know who the competitors are, which tools the customer is already using and so on. 

Competitive analysis is very helpful in pricing the product as well. 

8 - AI can help in creating multi-lingual demos - 

If you are selling in Europe or parts of Asia, there are specific languages which are a must. Sellers can convert existing collaterals, materials and demos from one language to the other and help the prospects understand the product better. Similar for reading emails in another language … 👍 

Many times, the only blockers in closing sales may be the language barrier. AI can close the gap and help sellers close the deals faster. 

9 - Ai can help in contract, negotiation and technical navigation - 

Most of the sellers have to work cross-functionally to close deals. This means working with Finance, procurement, legal, technical and other teams. AI can help sellers draft better contracts, work on red lines in an effective way and so on. 

This definitely makes a seller productive and helps them close deals faster … 👏 

10 - AI is best for coaching and mentoring - 

Many sellers may not agree but coaching and mentoring is one of the silver bullets in sales and sales outcome. How to demo well, how to speak, in what tone, how to navigate the deal, who is the decision maker, how to read budgets, headwinds - tailwinds, how to work with multi- disciplinary customer teams and so on. 

AI tools can help here. Role play is one of the best examples. Just feed your slides, a previous demo video, a document about your product features and fire a prompt. 

You get the point.

So these are the 10 ways you can use AI and close deals faster. 

You may feel this kind of system takes time, costs money, etc. but trust me it is worth the cost and benefits outway its cost.

I help startups grow revenue and scale products - day in day out; everyday. If I can do it; sure you can too.