AI in sales: 6 use cases to close more deals

Artificial intelligence (AI) is taking the sales sector by storm. And while many teams, including mine, are eager to harness new AI-powered solutions, we don’t always know where or how to begin, so we stick with the status quo.

I didn’t want to fall into that trap and get left behind.

As a sales professional, I started by arming myself with information on how to use AI-powered insights from every deal in my pipeline. I was able to create more accurate sales forecasts, engage in more effective coaching, streamline workflows, uncover emerging trends, and prioritize high-value deals.

Sound like a lot? It is, and it’s what today’s leading sales teams do to succeed on a daily basis.

In this article, I’ll dive deep into how I have used AI to supercharge my sales processes, focus on high-value opportunities, and ultimately drive up my company’s bottom line.

Every bit of data from your customer interactions is a goldmine of insights waiting to be unearthed. AI turns this information into actionable insights you can use to devise strategies that bolster your sales team’s effectiveness in ways that impact your quarterly and annual numbers.

AI can process unimaginable amounts of sales data, customer information, emails, social media chatter, etc. Machine learning algorithms analyze this data to identify trends and clarify customer behaviors, so you can build sales strategies that overcome your most pressing challenges. 

How does it work?

At a basic level, AI handles administrative and manual tasks, which frees up valuable time that sales professionals can spend doing what they do best‌ — ‌building relationships with customers and selling. At a deeper level, offers profound insights into what works to close deals and what doesn’t, so you can tailor and streamline your sales process accordingly.

What does this mean for your sales team? Using AI means you stay a step ahead of the competition. 

With support from AI tools, your team can prevent lost deals and better focus their efforts, since they can more easily identify and prioritize ideal buyers and high-value deals. You’ll also see an uptick in customer satisfaction as buyers enjoy a smoother and more streamlined purchasing journey. 

Let’s dive into how AI-powered solutions like Gong’s Revenue Intelligence platform can transform your sales outcomes by offering deeper insights, focused coaching opportunities, and more efficient sales strategies — because knowing when to use AI matters.

AI is transforming the sales landscape, streamlining every step from pinpointing leads to closing deals faster.

Here are some of the most valuable ways you can use AI in your sales organization:

While there are plenty of conventional sales forecasting tools, most of them provide rudimentary and inaccurate forecasts based purely on historical sales data and a few customer insights. AI sales forecasting is like having a telescope so powerful it can see how your customers will act in the future.

That’s how AI takes the guesswork out of sales forecasting. Solutions like Gong collect and analyze vast datasets from multiple sources to highlight patterns, trends, and potential pitfalls the human eye would miss.

Unlike conventional tools, AI brings a never-before-seen level of accuracy to your sales forecast in real time.

AI sales tools continuously track and process incoming data to offer real-time insights that keep your predictions accurate and relevant. This allows you to adapt your sales strategies as deals (and markets) evolve, and capitalize on trends as they happen.

Not only does this give you a better understanding of how your pipeline will perform, it also helps you plan better, allocate resources more effectively, and manage your inventory with confidence. 

Just look at the analytics company, Piano: After years of poor forecasting due to unreliable, fragmented data and disjointed systems, Piano now has 90% forecasting accuracy, thanks to Gong. 

This is because Gong Forecast — a solution built on the Gong platform — uses 300+ unique buying signals to predict deal outcomes, so your forecasts are at least 20% more accurate than forecasts that rely on CRM algorithms alone. 

Think of it this way: After a long day of back-to-back customer calls, sales reps and managers can either spend hours listening to conversations to try and pick out the key points, or they can get right to the heart of the matter by reading an efficient call summary that highlights key points.

AI-backed conversation intelligence tools like Gong record, analyze, and summarize the key information, next steps, and actions required after every sales conversation, saving countless hours and ensuring you never miss an insight.

It’s like having a virtual assistant that never tires. AI captures your customers’ questions, concerns, and decisions, and gives your sales team a clear picture of what to do next via daily to-do lists for each rep. Just imagine what your sales reps could achieve if they could focus more on selling during calls, and less on note-taking. 

Plus, you’ll have a library of searchable call logs and summaries that provide a single source of truth to everyone involved in a deal. This way, nobody involved in the sale loses out, even if they miss a meeting.

As Sparrow’s CRO, Paul Park, puts it, “We used to waste a lot of time and energy note-taking and confirming information during and after meetings and calls. Now, it’s as easy as opening a call recording by typing in keywords to find what we need.”

When you assess calls with the help of AI-backed sales tools, you get a more complete picture of your customers’ needs and concerns. 

Conversation intelligence tools don’t just listen, they analyze sales calls to identify customer sentiment and intent and unveil actionable insights on how to improve sales performance. AI can do that for individual calls, and it can also pull insights from across your pipeline and your entire backlog of recorded calls to spot sales strategies that work.

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Not only does this make it easier for sales reps to understand how to close a deal, but this type of real-time feedback unearths insights around sales coaching opportunities. It pinpoints exactly how and where sales reps struggle, as well as how the entire team might refine their sales pitches based on actual customer engagement. 

Hear.com, for example, leveraged AI-driven conversation intelligence to enhance its training programs and gain better visibility into how its sales agents can deliver positive buying experiences. As a result, the hearing aid company increased its close rate by a whopping 45%.

Personalized communication is key. According to 75% of marketers in a recent Hubspot survey, personalization drives sales and repeat business. But ask any rep and you’ll hear that it’s incredibly time-consuming to consistently produce high-quality, high-value, personalized content.

Generative AI simplifies and accelerates this process. It leverages a customer’s history to predict and draft the kind of email messaging they’re likely to respond to, and it’s capable of doing so at scale. 

Some AI sales tools can automatically create hyper-personalized emails that cater to the segment’s — or an individual customer’s — preferences and needs. You can also use these tools to generate follow-up emails that summarize next steps based on the most recent call. AI can also optimize email send times based on engagement data.

Not only does this save sales reps lots of time, it’s also highly effective. Allison Horn, managing director of Accenture’s talent and organization consulting services, estimates that her AI users save as much as 40% of their working hours through AI-backed augmentation and automation.

Sales leaders and managers are always looking for new opportunities to grow their business. 

AI takes the guesswork out of this endeavor by scanning vast amounts of data to uncover opportunities as they emerge. By spotting patterns and trends in customer behaviors, purchasing data, social media interactions, and more, AI can identify potential markets and leads that are ripe for prospecting.

This shortcut into market visibility broadens your market reach and sharpens your competitive edge. It helps you concentrate your efforts ‌where they’ll yield the highest returns. 

That’s what happened to the employee experience platform, Culture Amp.

As Simon Kirk, their VP of Revenue Enablement, explains, “Gong enables us to have a real-time update of what’s happening so that we can help coach our sales and customer success teams around how they’re approaching the market.”

The art of pipeline prioritization lies in predicting buyer intent. When you know which customers are most likely to buy, you can concentrate on accelerating their journey through the sales cycle.

AI supercharges lead scoring by predicting a prospect’s likelihood of buying with incredible accuracy. It factors in behavioral, engagement, transactional, company-specific, and demographic data, and uses machine learning algorithms to find trends in buying patterns that show you who’s most likely to purchase. This way, sales teams can focus their energy on leads that are more likely to say yes, so the sales cycle is faster and smoother.

Gong’s AI-driven platform transforms the way sales teams operate. From highly accurate forecasting to personalized email responses, Gong’s insights equip sales teams with deep learning capabilities that supercharge their sales processes.

Here’s some of what you’ll be able to do with Gong: 

Gong Forecast is exceptionally accurate. It analyzes more than 300 unique buying signals to understand exactly where a deal stands at any given time. Gong’s integrated platform consolidates customer interaction data from multiple sources in one place for unprecedented predictive accuracy. Managers who use Forecast can also see which deals are at risk and learn more about what’s causing the derailment. Then they’re able to coach the rep to get the deal back on track.

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Drew Korab, Director of RevOps at Upwork, explains how Gong has improved its sales forecasts, saying, “Our forecast accuracy has grown to the point that we’re now at 95%. Gong lets us run a predictable revenue organization, reduce the number of tools in our tech stack, and save tons of time on forecasting.”

Gong provides total visibility into the deal topics and actions that drive wins. 

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Its conversation intelligence pinpoints soft and hard skills that individual sales reps struggle with, as well as team trends. This enables managers to engage in highly targeted and relevant coaching.

As Kieran Smith, Past Senior Manager of Revenue Enablement of Andeles said of Gong’s coaching-related capabilities, “We cut our ramp time for SDRs [sales development representatives] by 50%, which is notably good. We also reduced the time to ROI for AEs to 12 weeks and shortened our sales cycle by 33%.”

By leveraging AI to analyze 300+ buying signals, Gong Forecast helps sales teams highlight the most promising buyers and spotlight potential issues that might jeopardize their deals. This makes it much easier to prioritize high-intent, high-value accounts.

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Take DemandBase, for example, who used Gong to analyze their sales data and build “intent scoring.” Since then, the go-to-marketing platform has experienced a 25% increase in annual contract value.

Gong’s AI can generate personalized follow-ups that take into consideration the context of each customer’s past interactions. This customized information boosts buyer engagement, which in turn, accelerates the sales cycle. 

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Overall, this helps sales teams maintain consistent, personalized communication with potential clients without spending hours drafting follow-up emails.

Gong’s analytical capabilities empower sales teams to understand the impact of broader patterns in the market, and drill down into the specifics of each account to strategically adjust their approach.

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Gong can identify and understand customer needs, competitor-related concerns, and emerging market trends. You’ll be able to keep your sales strategies and messaging relevant while highlighting potential opportunities or threats in a rapidly changing market.

Kustomer’s SVP of Global Sales and Customer Service, Vikas Bhambri, said “I don’t know how we would have survived these uncertain times without Gong. Gong enabled us to identify our customers’ and prospects’ most pressing concerns and challenges.” 

Yes! AI is the ultimate sales assistant. When AI handles routine tasks like data entry and drafting emails, it frees up sales reps’ time to focus on more complex tasks that require a human touch. Aside from its automation capabilities, AI provides sharp, data-driven insights and accurate predictions that help your team prioritize their opportunities to get the most out of their efforts. 

AI isn’t here to take over jobs. Think of it as a support system, not as competition. AI complements sales teams by automating mundane tasks and providing deep, data-driven insights. But AI can’t navigate the human side of sales, like relationship building. Understanding, empathy, and negotiation all come down to human sales reps. While AI can help you understand where to focus your efforts, it’s your energy that seals the deal.

In multiple ways! AI saves you money by streamlining sales processes and workflows so they’re more efficient. It also sharpens your team’s focus so they’re more effective, concentrating on the most profitable deals, personalizing interactions, and converting faster. With AI-backed, actionable, real-time insights, salespeople interact more productively with prospects to move deals along and solve buyers’ challenges.

Starting is easier than you think. First, identify the repetitive tasks on your team that AI could automate, like lead scoring or creating call summaries. Then, consider where AI-generated insights could bring the most value to your sales processes. This information could help you improve workflow efficiency, identify more deal opportunities, and improve your coaching, all of which would result in more wins, faster. Think about where your team wastes the most time and how you could remove this friction using AI.

AI’s potential is only just unfolding. Its ability to aid in personalization, for example, will only continue to evolve. This will improve the effectiveness of your team’s customer interactions at scale by creating tailored experiences at every touchpoint without the need for sales reps to spend hours customizing their follow-up emails.

You’ll also see even more accurate predictive analytics, making lead scoring and sales forecasting more robust. This will help you plan and strategize flexibly, taking advantage of real-time trends and changes.

Pull your sales reps out of the manual-task quagmire they’re in so they can focus on high-value sales tasks. Let powerful AI insights drive your decision-making and use its automation capabilities to take the tedious work off everyone’s plate.

Hungry for more information on how AI can transform every element of your sales process? Check out these articles:

Ready to power up your sales team? See Gong in action now.