Cascadia Global Ventures

Recently, most sales reports have progressed from passive, backward-looking documents to more interactive diagnostic tools with drill-down capabilities. With generative AI, reporting systems can become even more powerful and forward-looking. Managers can pose questions to get insights for helping salespeople improve and delivering more pointed and motivating coaching feedback. Sales planning tasks that took weeks can be performed in an hour as managers dialogue with the system to discover opportunities, formulate key account strategies, and determine how to allocate effort to geographies, customers, products, and activities.

Generative AI is transforming sales management by enhancing reporting systems and sales tools. This technology enables sales managers to interact with data in real-time, posing questions and receiving insights that aid in coaching, sales planning, and strategy formulation. Generative AI integration into sales systems streamlines processes and enriches interactions between sales teams and their tools.

Field sales organizations can leverage AI-powered companies like Anthropic, OpenAI (ChatGPT), Copilot, Perplexity, and Gemini in several ways to enhance their sales processes and productivity. The specific enhancements for sales would be the following:

Lead Generation and Prospecting – Use natural language processing capabilities to analyze large datasets and identify potential leads or sales opportunities.

Sales Content Creation – Leverage language models to generate sales presentations, product descriptions, case studies, and marketing materials.

Customer Interaction – Analyze customer communication data to identify pain points

Sales Training and Coaching – Generate role-playing scenarios and practice conversations, provide real-time feedback and suggestions to sales reps during customer calls by analyzing the conversation context.

Sales Analytics and Forecasting – Analyze historical sales data, market trends, and customer behavior, identifying cross-selling and upselling opportunities within the existing customer base.

While these AI companies offer powerful language capabilities, it is crucial for sales organizations to establish proper governance, ensure data privacy, and maintain human oversight. This is especially important for high-stakes customer interactions and decision-making processes.

Several cloud-based CRM and contact center companies offer flexibility for integrating artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities like large language models (LLMs), vector databases, and prompt engineering into their sales processes and customization. Examples are:

Salesforce provides a robust AI platform called Einstein that allows businesses to leverage AI across various Salesforce clouds, including Sales Cloud and Service Cloud.

Salesforce also offers integration with third-party AI platforms like OpenAI’s GPT models, enabling advanced language capabilities within Salesforce applications.

Microsoft’s AI capabilities are deeply integrated into the Dynamics 365 CRM and Customer Service applications. There is AI for Sales which provides AI-powered insights, lead scoring, opportunity scoring, and next appropriate action recommendations. Additionally, they have AI for Customer Service, and Azure AI Services.

Oracle CX Cloud has Sales Cloud and Service Cloud and offers AI capabilities through Oracle Digital Assistant and Oracle Adaptive Intelligent Apps. Zendesk also has AI capabilities primarily focused on customer service and support through Zendesk AI. This includes the: Answer Bot, Content Cues, and Intelligent Triage.

While these platforms offer varying levels of AI integration and customization, they support integrating with third-party AI services, vector databases, and language models through APIs and custom development. This allows high-technology sales organizations and businesses to leverage advanced AI capabilities like prompt engineering and fine-tuning LLMs for their specific use cases and requirements.

Zoom and Teams now offer several assistants for transcription to complement these AI-powered CRMs. There are also several add-on apps like Otter.ai that can even transcribe in real time, so you can quickly scroll back through the conversation.

Fireflies.ai is an AI meeting assistant that transcribes meetings, provides collaboration tools, generates insights, integrates with workflows, and helps teams be more productive and data-driven in meetings. It has a video conferencing bot and automatically joins and transcribes meetings across popular video conferencing platforms like Zoom, Google Meet, & Microsoft Teams. It has AI-Powered Search, Insights & Analytics. It integrates with over 50 apps like CRMs, dialers, productivity tools. There are AI summaries, meeting outlines, keywords, and action items to help review lengthy meetings.

Then to round out sales productivity and process tools there are AI-enhanced email programs like Superhuman and Shortwave that can analyze the content of your messages and keep track of different senders, allowing them to organize your inbox by message type and priority (so all your sales newsletters get grouped together, say, and don’t clutter up your main inbox). The programs can also draft replies to messages.

For dealing with a crucial work-related conversation with an email that is not sharp or hostile: If you tell the AI something like, “Kindly rewrite this email reply so that it is productive and amiable, rather than unfriendly,” I get a different perspective on how to compose my snappy comebacks. Your AI can help with technical support so that you never need to contact customer service or go to a specific company website or watch YouTube. If you do not understand a specific subject or do not enjoy monotonous work AI can help you with these areas as well.