When you consider that sales representatives spend just 28% of their week selling, you’ll see how AI can give your team an unparalleled opportunity to increase revenue. According to McKinsey, top sales performers are automating intensely to open up 20% more capacity in their sales teams.

AI for sales representatives goes way further than just ChatGPT. Integrating AI in your CRM won’t just save you time: it also gives sales representatives the support, information, and even coaching they need to have excellent conversations that convert leads.

So how does AI within CRM help a sales representative? Read on to learn six ways that can give your team a competitive edge.

Gone are the days when you’d have to balance creating rapport with a lead while furiously scribbling to remember exactly what you promised and the follow-up actions you need. AI can generate detailed transcripts with tags and summaries just seconds after your call, allowing sales representatives to put down their pens and focus on the client.

The best thing too is that, by integrating AI in your CRM, you make these call transcripts and summaries available to all of your sales team. This means, when a lead phones up, you instantly have access to recent communications across multiple channels in one place, also including SMS, WhatsApp and email.

In a busy sales environment, of course, you may not have time to read every call transcript. That’s why AI in your CRM can go a step further, scoring sales calls based on what matters most to you.

You can set your chosen criteria for what makes a great call. For a sales representative, these might include:

• Product knowledge

• Accuracy about pricing, timelines and features

• Follow-ups and clearly defining next steps

• Vibe and how the call reflects your brand

• Rapport and matching communication style to the client

• Questions asked to understand a client’s needs

• The overall vibe of the call and how it represents your brand

Sense, our AI-driven platform, integrates with your CRM to give you a final score and actionable results for each and every call. Learn more about Sense here and schedule a demo.

Remember that, most of the time, a sales representative isn’t actually selling. Here’s where using AI to streamline call management workflows can save you a lot of valuable time.

AI can sit right inside your CRM. Say your lead’s been on holiday and you need to follow up - AI can give you a quick timeline summary of what happened so you can get back to the conversation.

Likewise, when you do call the client, AI can surface call summaries and highlight more follow-up tasks, even generating editable emails for you to send in your brand or individual tone of voice. Yes, AI saves time, and it also means you won’t duplicate effort or miss details that could close a sale.

Lastly, if you’ve ever had a sales call where a technical question left you stuck, AI in your CRM also means you can ask on-the-fly questions.

Better than ChatGPT, the response won’t only be powered by AI’s vast knowledge of the world. It’ll also integrate information from your company, for example, documents, websites and training guides.

In an article all about how AI can help sales representatives, you might be surprised that we’ll share one way that AI can’t help so much. That’s in having human-to-human conversations that build relationships.

What AI can do, however, is help your sales representatives have better conversations. Think of it as having an extra coach for all your agents. After a sales call completes, AI can give feedback to help a rep improve their performance.

AI can pull together:

• What’s working well

• What’s getting results

• Suggested development areas

• Any consistent gaps

• The key themes you covered in the call

In our Sense platform, we wanted to make feedback an opportunity for growth, not dread, so our AI will also reveal an agent’s ‘secret sauce’. This highlights their behaviours and the individual talents that really connect with customers and drive sales.

As a manager or trainer, you’ll also get an overview of performance in your sales team, allowing you to set smart and personal goals aligned to your business metrics, as well as targeted training and coaching to support your reps.

For business owners and managers of sales teams, you’ll understand how important data is for assessing what’s working, what to improve and progress against your sales goals.

As we’ve covered, AI can provide automated and intelligent scoring for your calls. This becomes even more useful when you’re reviewing your sales team’s performance.

Rather than spending hours listening back to call recordings, you’ll instead have access to a wealth of data reporting, including:

• Progress against metrics

• Call search by keywords or phrases

• Tags for diving into topics

• Call scoring across your agents

• Filler words and talk time reporting

• Performance tracking over time

• Heatmaps revealing correlations in factors affecting performance

If compliance is a key factor within your industry, AI can help you reduce risk across your sales calls. For example, after every sales call, AI platforms like Sense can give you a score out of 100 against built-in safeguards.

Alongside training, AI can assess calls to make sure they meet your organisation’s compliance needs, such as protecting personal data and detecting missed opportunities or requirements. You can even set up alerts to be notified of low-scoring calls, complaints, or anything else that needs your attention.

We hope this article has left you curious to explore the ways in which AI within your CRM can help your sales representatives free up the time and resources they need for better conversations and, importantly, to close more leads.

If you’re wondering what’s next, Sense is a fully configurable, AI-driven platform that can integrate seamlessly within your CRM, whether you use Pipedrive, Salesforce, HubSpot or Inspiretec.

Schedule a demo to find out how Sense can support your sales team.