Why Generative AI and Sales Are the Ultimate Deal-Making Duo

Sales organizations have often lagged other areas of business in digital transformation. The reason for this? Generally speaking, it was thanks to resistance to change, a lack of a clear strategy, and a failure to understand customer expectations and needs.

AI is poised to change all that, from the top down – from sales technology leaders like Salesforce to independent reps getting their hands on the technology. AI is changing everything and accelerating sales several decades into the future.

Indeed, sales works as an ideal training ground for artificial intelligence, offering vast amounts of data for AI to train on, learn from, and build insights on top of. The kind of data that sellers work with daily – phone calls, email threads, video interactions with customers – is exactly the kind of unstructured data AI can take, learn from, and work with.

Before AI, sifting through this immense data took hours of sellers’ time. The big advantage here is the possibility of removing those hours of manually sifting through data and giving that time back to the seller to do what sellers do best.

That being selling things. Building relationships. Becoming trusted advisors to their strategic customers.

Clearly, there’s a huge use case for AI in sales. And yet, what about that resistance to change – especially from sellers who fear replacement from AI? This reality stems beyond just sellers. In a study performed by Pew Research it was found that more than half of all workers fear being replaced by AI.

For sellers to embrace AI and all the good things that come with it, they need to be helped to see how AI is simply here to accelerate their productivity, not as an existential threat in a field where the human element is vital to success.

What can AI do that sellers can’t?

Despite many worries about a dystopian, robot-ruled future, AI isn’t meant to replace human intelligence. As Steven Pinker, Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, puts it, viewing human intelligence as something to be replaced is the wrong way of framing the impact of AI.

The right way of framing AI is to see it for what it’s good at – a specific kind of intelligence hyper powerful at a particular kind of computation. For this reason, AI can certainly augment areas of intelligence and perform those tasks better than even humans.

While generative AI is fantastic, it’s important for sales leaders to remember what its limitations are when implementing it for their sales teams to use. While many companies may be busily touting its effectiveness (and the benefits it can offer are immense), its shortcomings remain notable.

For example, we’ve long had computers much more capable of crunching complex mathematical equations, or at playing chess, than humans. Now, we have computers that can research and summarize that research much, much faster, as well.

AI can analyze vast amounts of data quicker than we can

Tools like ChatGPT have been trained on significant amounts of data to be able to write about any topic as if it were a knowledgeable professor. However, it works in ways vastly different than the human mind. In the words of Steven Pinker:

“We’re dealing with an alien intelligence that’s capable of astonishing feats, but not in the manner of the human mind. We don’t need to be exposed to half a trillion words of text (which, at three words a second, eight hours a day, would take 15,000 years) to speak or solve problems. Nonetheless, it is impressive what you can get out of very, very, very high-order statistical patterns in mammoth data sets.”

Seeing the big picture is exactly where AI falls short. As excited as we should be about AI’s potential to boost productivity and remove mundane processes, we can’t rely on AI to see the big picture inherently.

While human minds may differ from artificial ones, that doesn’t mean there can’t be interplay between the two. We can use AI to sift through this data and rely on human minds to think strategically and creatively about how to use this information.

What can sellers do that AI can’t?

Well, quite a bit. Even before the release of super advanced chatbots – and despite the rapid digital transformation the world has seen– sellers were indispensable in the buying decision when complex, high stakes sales were on the table. When it comes to these types of sales, it’s relationships that win deals and drive revenue, time and time again. Understanding who the key players are within an account, and what uniquely motivates them, and building relationships to help them achieve their goals is where sellers far outshine AI.

Strategize to analyze customer pain points and motivations

While chatbots like ChatGPT or Google Gemini may deliver customized, well-thought-out answers to complex queries, the models themselves processing this data don’t know or understand the information they are producing.

Language models are analyzing data and patterns and coming up with the best guess as to what should be said next. It does this so well that it gives the impression of understanding the subject and what it is discussing.

Human sellers, however, understand what is happening. They understand the context around the account, the people within it, the problems and the very interpersonal and human motivations therein.

They can gather all of this information in an insight map that charts goals, pressures, and initiatives and use AI to formulate these insights into actionable steps to lead them on a course to victory in the account.

Find novel solutions to problems buyers didn’t even know they had

Generative AI can only analyze what is there and extrapolate text or music or images from what it’s trained on. True genius, however, is not hitting the target that no one else can hit – it’s hitting the target no one else can see. The same goes for greatness in sales. It’s finding those hidden motivations and offering unique solutions.

In this advancement in technology, however, lies an advantage to those sellers capable of wielding its power. As we’ll look into later in this eBook, specific tools within sales specifically have the potential to unlock this power greater than ever. For now, suffice to say that Prometheus has brought us fire. Now it’s our turn to put it to work.