How do Sales Representatives Feel about AI?
“Will Artificial Intelligence replace salespeople?”
A year ago, someone posted this on Reddit, and what started as a casual conversation quickly became a debate. While some argued that “it doesn’t matter and jobs have been automated before”, some users raised genuine concern. They explained that sales reps should find ways to leverage AI rather than lying to themselves.
And that is what has encouraged us to write this blog post.
While many sales reps are insecure about their current job roles and spend sleepless nights thinking about how AI can replace them, that is not the right mindset.
Derrick Hathaway, Sales Director at VEM Medical, says, “As a sales director, I’ve seen that most sales representatives have a love-hate relationship with AI. Some may accept technology as an asset that makes them more productive and effective selling. In contrast, others may view a technology-dependent sales process as threatening to the human interaction central to selling.”
The truth is that AI will not replace skilled sales reps, but this fear of AI and not using it to its full potential will replace a sales rep. The idea is to coexist and collaborate with AI to sustain it for a long time.
We interviewed sales leaders from different B2B industries to create this blog post, explaining why sales reps should consider AI their friend and ways to collaborate with AI for exceptional results.
📒FYI: If you want to read the Reddit thread, click here.
How has B2B Sales Changed Over the Years?
The world post-COVID-19 pandemic looks very different. B2B selling has also changed remarkably. Since B2B buyers and sellers were forced to move online, many new trends and practices had to be introduced to support these new setups.
This McKinsey report highlights how B2B sales have changed over the last four years:
- 70-80% of B2B decision-makers prefer remote human interactions. Activities like identification of new suppliers, ordering, and re-ordering have shifted largely to the digital set-up. Currently, 36% of ordering and 35% of reordering in the B2B context are done digitally
- More and more B2B buyers are willing to purchase online through digital self-service platforms. Around 32% are willing to spend between $50K to $500K through end-to-end digital self-service and remote human interactions
- In the new era of sales, both selling and prospecting are performed through remote interactions. The two most extensive breakouts are video and live chats. In-person interaction with sales reps has reduced by 52% since COVID-19, whereas interaction through online chat has increased by 23%
And when discussing the changes in sales, we would also like to bring forward the cultural aspect. According to HBR, your sales team requires a mindset shift to keep up with this digital revolution in sales. The two keywords that perfectly match this evolving digital sales landscape are transparency and authenticity. The sales reps who would sustain are the ones who are efficient enough to derive insights from AI systems.
Sales success is now much more than just incentives. The elements of successful sales today include performance management, coaching, sales enablement, and training, all of which focus on learning more about customers and their needs.
It is high time sales reps leave their comfort bubble and learn to co-exist with a consistently changing system. Conversational AI is the beginning of a vast digital change B2B sales leaders anticipate.
Which Sales Tasks or Responsibilities are Most Likely to be Automated by AI?
Before enterprise AI search platforms came into the picture, sales reps spent a lot of their time on tasks such as performing hours of research to identify one high-intent prospect, cold-calling hundreds of prospects every day and updating the status of their responses in a long spreadsheet, sending numerous cold emails manually, and so on!
According to HubSpot’s State of AI in Sales report, 74% of sales reps agree that AI helps them spend more time on those sales activities that they enjoy the most.
If you are wondering which of the sales tasks and responsibilities can be automated using AI, here’s a list:
AI takes away all the assumptions from your sales processes
There are two things that sales reps have always struggled with: identifying whom to reach out to and how to prepare for a sales call. While both are critical aspects of any organization’s B2B sales process, there used to be a lot of assumptions involved.
Thanks to AI, there is no room for guesswork anymore.
Identifying the right prospects
"AI is cutting through the noise, allowing sales reps to focus more on doing the job rather than the research." Vibs Abhishek, CEO Alltius.
AI search tools like LinkedIn Sales Navigator free up hours by helping sales reps identify high-intent prospects within a few clicks. As you fill out advanced search filters like Leads mentioned in the news, Leads with recent LinkedIn activity, Posted content keywords, Seniority level, etc. LinkedIn’s AI algorithm creates a long list of high-intent prospects more likely to be interested in your products than random people.
In case you’re working with CRM tools, an AI sales assistant platform like Alltius, helps sales reps identify the best prospects from a long list of “leads”. Sales representatives can just ask Alltius’ assistant “Which leads have the highest probability of conversion?” and it can list leads in decreasing order of affinity to converted customers on the go. Try it out.
Preparing for a sales call
“Preparing for customer meetings is much easier. In particular, a high-level overview can be obtained much more quickly thanks to AI.”. - John, Account Executive, Tech Sales Temple
With tools like ChatGPT, sales reps can generate questions and objections that might be raised during the call. Once they have an idea, it will be easier to prepare for the call. In fact, ChatGPT also writes mock sales scripts that can be edited and personalized using Grammarly, as John mentioned.
But in order to gain granular insights, sales representatives can use specialized platforms like Alltius to prepare for their sales call by knowing more about the customer, knowing how our product can help them and knowing what are the major competitors out there.
Alltius also simplifies the entire sales call preparation process by creating customer focused pitches for sales rep in advance based on customer profile. Such personalized pitches can increase conversion rates by 3X as they’re focused on pain points and benefits rather than being generic.
Here’s an example of pitch generated for an insurance sales agent trying to pitch a plan to the customer.
Additionally, tools like Otter.ai record calls and automatically note down minutes of a meeting, so sales reps use these insights to prepare for the next call.
Automating manual tasks that sales reps don’t enjoy doing
Enterprise AI platforms can also automate routine activities like:
Data entry and countless hours spent updating spreadsheets to create reports, contact databases, shortlisting high-intent prospects, updating cold email response status, etc.
Emailing : Automating cold emailing, starting with drafting an email, creating engaging subject lines, sending bulk emails within seconds, and creating detailed reports from these email campaigns.
Alltius helps sales reps compose customer focused after call emails with placeholders, which reduces time to draft email to literally seconds. Try it out.
Automation : Auto-scheduling meetings, routing leads to preferred destinations, syncing calendars to update your online calendar, sending reminders before a meeting
How do Sales Reps Feel about AI? What Insecurities Do They Have?
Sales professionals have two opinions when asked about their insecurities related to AI. According to HubSpot’s report, 42% of sales professionals are concerned about AI replacing their jobs, while 42% are not worried.
Michael Monette, founder and operator of Office Furniture Plus, sheds some light on this. He explains how CRM systems have helped sales reps improve their sales approach. He says, “In our company, we're all about using the best tools to keep our performance impressive. We've equipped ourselves with CRM systems that have predictive analytics, chatbots to handle customer support, and advanced software to forecast sales. These tools aren't just helpful; they've seriously stepped up our game, enabling us to target potential clients more accurately and improve the quality of our leads. More importantly, they've helped us connect with our customers in a much better way, driving up our sales and revenue.”
He explains that despite all these benefits, some sales reps need to be more comfortable with this technology. In his own words, “Despite these benefits, some members of our sales team are still uneasy about bringing AI into the mix. I've heard worries about job security, concerns about losing a personal touch in sales, and even questions about biases in AI algorithms.”
This shows a critical knowledge gap present in the organization. While sales reps should reap the benefits of CRM systems and similar AI-backed technologies, they spend valuable time criticizing these technologies.
Some of the most common insecurities related to AI include:
- Fear of losing their job
- Fear of losing their value in the company
- Fear of making a lasting impression on the leadership team
But like a true leader, Michael says, “I take these concerns seriously. That's why I focus on providing continuous training and keeping the lines of communication wide open. I make it clear that AI is here to improve our skills—not replace them. This helps people understand the valuable support AI brings to our roles, making sure we move forward together as a stronger team.”
While you cannot completely eliminate these AI fears, as a leader, you must address these concerns as a team.
Our CEO, Vibhanshu Abhishek recommends the following tips to deal with these AI insecurities for sales leaders:
- Reassuring your team that AI is here to help. Showing them the different ways AI can contribute to their success
- Initially, clear goals related to the usage of AI should be set. Define which tasks are ethically correct to do with AI and which tasks are a strict no-no. For example, automating prospecting workflow with AI is a great way to stay productive. However, sharing sensitive data with AI to get deeper insights is not the best practice, as it may lead to data breaches
- Encourage human touch in everything. Be it adding human personalization to an AI-generated email copy or the critical thinking capabilities of a human being when analyzing sales insights to make informed decisions
71% of sales reps have realized that AI will make their jobs more personalized. But that doesn’t mean all sales reps will be onboard with AI overnight.
Some reps will remain skeptical about AI, and that’s natural.
As John says, “Reps in particular who perform poorly are afraid of being replaced by artificial intelligence. I personally believe that artificial intelligence should be seen much more as a tool to boost performance and win more customers with even higher quality standards.”
Your job as a leader is to provide the required training and resources to help your sales team adapt to AI. Beyond that, it is their decision whether they want to embrace it.
The Key is to Co-exist: How can Sales Reps Succeed by Collaborating with AI?
The solution is to find a middle ground where both AI and sales reps can coexist. The idea is simple: AI automates manual activities that exhaust sales reps, and sales reps use this excess time to focus on the creative aspects of selling.
How? Let’s find out:
Personalized outreach with AI sales assistants
While personalized outreach emails have higher conversion potential than generic emails, the process is time-consuming. As a result, sales teams are unable to reach out at scale as they have to manually write hundreds of emails.
With AI sales assistants, this can be much simpler. Conversational AI tools like Alltius capture prospect data from CRM to craft emails that nudge customers’ pain points directly. Here’s a sneak peek 👇
Prepping for sales calls
AI sales assistants help sales reps prepare better for sales calls by closely understanding customer needs, suggesting insightful questions that could help them gain a deeper understanding of prospects’ requirements, developing personalized sales pitches within seconds, and so on.
Handling Sales Objections
Objection handling is also much more manageable with AI. Imagine a prospect asking a question, and the sales reps have to visit the company database and manually look through hundreds of materials to find the answer. When they see it, the prospect has already left the call.
AI sales assistant, like Alltius, on the other hand, go through these databases within seconds and provide exact responses to your queries by staying within the sales call. That means faster and more informative responses to prospect objections and more confident deals closing.
Streamlining your sales follow-up emails
Not sending follow-up emails in time means missing out on highly converting sales deals. But with so much on their plates, sales reps cannot keep track of when they sent the first email and when it is the right time to follow up. Even though they do remember, sending follow-up emails in bulk is a time-consuming activity that may take days or even weeks.
With a conversational AI platform like Alltius, drafting personalized emails and automating the entire follow-up email workflow is much simpler. This means sales reps can set the follow-up email system on autopilot and invest their time in more strategic tasks.
Jason Smit, the CEO of Contentellect, provides us with an interesting approach to using AI in sales. He explains an experiment his team is working on to identify expansion opportunities. “Our AI team is busy testing out an AI-powered methodology for both acquiring and retaining B2B clientele at scale. You can in theory, ingest disparate data streams spanning your customer activity logs, support transcripts, even their social chatter to find behavioral signals presaging potential churn risks before they metastasize. Armed with these predictive insights, our account managers can then proactively intervene. We preemptively would be able identify expansion opportunities by reverse-engineering predictive success profiles from currently thriving accounts. Those hallmarks then will sculpt ultra-personalized sales motions activating nascent prospects' urgency through scientific social proof.”
AI is responsible for creating more such game-changers!
Conclusion
We started this blog post with a question on Reddit about AI's potential to replace human sales reps. If you have the same question, we hope this article will help you find common ground between how to use AI and still not feel threatened by it.
If you are still unsure how AI can be your friend, we suggest you try out Alltius.
It helps you close deals faster with AI. Wondering how?
If you want to go into detail about how Alltius works, you can get a demo too.
Create AI assistants trained on your data now!
