Current Sales are obsolete - Here is how you innovate with AI

Is sales outdated?

The fact is that Gen Z doesn´t like being sold to. At least, not in the old way.

As a result, sales and marketing are getting linked. The goal here is to make the prospect feel in control of their own decisions from the beginning. As a result, the potential customer is informed and requests to talk to you based on the information provided before.

Imagine the prospect messaging you first. They know all the features and benefits of your product. They are not only warm, they are convinced.

It feels better to sell to someone who already thinks you have the solution to their problem.

It saves time when you don´t have to explain every feature and benefit of your products in the sales meeting.

The Trust is created before the meeting, with personalization, automated communication, and AI chatbots. This is how AI is merging marketing and sales into one.

3 steps to the “new sales”

There are two biggest levers you can pull to change how the sales process works:

Marketing: You insert parts of the sales process into marketing, such as removing roadblocks, answering questions, and nurturing leads.

AI and Automation: Informs, answers, and constantly reminds the customer of the benefits of your solution.

1. Get to know your buyer (Have a clear buyer persona)

You need to know who you are selling to. It´s important to go deep:

• What do they do in their free time?

• What are their hobbies?

• Where do they go to get information?

If you know this, people WILL feel understood in your communication. On the sales call, they will already associate a positive emotion with you.

You have two options on how to find out these “deeper insights”. Get data, or guess.

One is expensive and time-consuming, the other one is not precise.

However, with AI, you can make the “guessing” more accurate, here is how:

• Get help from a Robot (chatGPT)

  1. Go to chat.openai.com and use either a regular version of chatGPT or custom GPT for buyer personas.

  2. Input information about your business. State your ideal customer. State your previous customer and any insights you might already have.

  3. Ask chatGPT to develop a buyer persona for you. You might need to ask a few more times to get some new and interesting insights to test.

  4. You should have a list of interesting insights. Not all of them are true. This step acts as a guide to finding out the real struggles and hidden truths behind the curtain.

• Social Listening

  • The first easy step is to go to social platforms where your target customer is. Whether it is LinkedIn, X, or Instagram. Find your customers, follow them, and look for valuable insights.

    • What questions are they asking?

    • What discussions are they leading?

    • What is their language?

  • PRO TIP: Use tools such as brand24.com or Sprout Social to monitor keywords related to your industry. Then, export data in XLSX. This data can be used in chatgGPT or tools such as Gigasheet.com to find the most common issues or language used. Just upload it and ask relevant questions.

• Get Data (AI-powered surveys)

  • You can generate questions for your survey and make it more automated with tools such as Blocksurvey.io

  • You can also do a video survey and analyze the data gathered through software like Notably.ai

2. Remove Roadblocks - So they can decide on their own

People want information. And they want it fast.

They are used to doing their research. During this process, there will naturally come up with a lot of questions.

If you answer these, you can convince many people at once.

The old way of this would be to just put a few questions you get asked often on your website under the section “FAQ”.

To fully remove roadblocks and act as a salesman, you need more.

The whole website should be written in a way that answers question by question.

Just in the time a question arises, the website will answer it.

There will be questions that are too special to get answered by website. This is the time my favorite tool comes into play: AI-powered chatbots for your website.

What is this?

• A gatekeeper answering the most common questions

• A lead generation specialist gathering leads

• A sales specialist trying to convince the visitor to buy

It never sleeps, eats, or takes a break.

You just go to a website like chatnode.ai. Input your internal documents, your website, and other data. Before making it public, give it specific instructions on how to act and test it few times.

This is a great way to make the visitor feel appreciated and supported at any time.

If the chatbot isn´t able to solve the issue, you already have their contact info and can contact them the next day.

3. Personalize the Experience (And Save Time!)

Everyone wants to feel special. Especially when they are being sold to.

In the past, it was either very time-consuming or impossible to do this while selling one to many.

It´s a walk in the park nowadays.

First, gather their information. When getting their contact info, make sure to at least get their first name.

If you could ask them a few questions, it´s great.

For example, before subscribing to the Newsletter, you could ask them what content they like, what products, features, etc…

With this information, you can go and create personalized sales materials.

I have two exciting tactics for you:

• Writing the First line with AI

  • If you want the prospect to feel special, it´s important to show that you have researched them. You can do this by including a personalized first line in the E-mail.

  • Go to copilot.ai and ask it: Hey, I want to write a personalized email for (Person) from (Company). Can you write me a first line personalized based on his (Social Platform) last post?

• Video personalization

  • It´s easy to get your email lost in the inbox full of hundreds of others. You can use Video personalization tools to generate a video with you or an avatar to make the prospect feel special.

Tools of the Week:

Some tools that might be useful when automating and innovating sales processes with AI.

• Warmer.ai - A great tool that automates writing the first lines I mentioned before. Takes your prospect´s profile and writes an opening line based on that.

• Synthesia.io - Probably the most advanced AI Video generation platform right now. With this software, you can create personalized AI Videos of you talking directly to your prospects.

• Chatspot.ai - Regular Chatbot tool but improved by Hubspot integration. You can directly pull data from CRM and use it for seamless communication with prospects.

• Seamless.ai - CRM on steroids. It can learn about your ideal customer and find the next one thanks to AI technology.

• Airgram.io - Powerful tool for automating note-taking. It summarizes your meeting for you and can even derive action points from the notes.

The Future

The technology is changing every day. No one knows what is coming. But one thing is for sure: The sales process of most companies will have to change. Every other industry has become automated and sales will be no exception.

The process could look like this:

You come to a website that already knows about your preferences, the chatbot talks in your language and tries to inform you about all the features.

After leaving information with the chatbot, you get assigned a robot-seller that calls you and helps you make a quick purchase, it will be able to provide you with any answer, or special offer or redirect you to a human seller.

Scary? Maybe yes, but soon this will be a reality. Your company can do only one thing, prepare to not stay behind.

Wrapping up

Whether you like it or not, sales are changing and so should your process around this.

Start monitoring the tools, opportunities, and your competitors.

This way, you will be able to react quickly when you see the technology taking over this industry.

If you want to take action now, you can start implementing the tools, training your team on their usage of them, and also creating processes around AI-powered sales.

Hope you got some value from this, see you next week!