A RT I F I C I A L I N TELLIG E N C E I N SAL ES:

4 AI Hacks to Make Sales

Teams More Efficient
In the business world, AI is becoming
the go-to sales tool.
In this eBook, discover four AI assisted sales
Over the last two years, there’s been a 76 percent increase in AI
adoption across sales organizations. ¹
hacks and get your reps hitting their number.

The reason for its rise? AI increases teams’ productivity by predicting Clone ideal accounts
and automating actions that require manual effort.

In other words, the research that takes reps hours, AI can do in Automate personalized outreach
seconds.

For sales teams, AI opens up a world of new possibilities, including Simplify account-health management
automating outreach, identifying best-fit buyers, and keeping CRMs
flush with fresh data.
Stream the freshest data
Read on to learn the four AI hacks sales teams need to improve
their performance.

¹ Salesforce. (2020, May 1). State of Sales. Salesforce.

https://www.salesforce.com/content/dam/web/en_us/www/documents/research/Salesforce-
State-of-Sales-4th-Ed.pdf

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 When sales teams win a deal, what’s
HACK #1
the logical next move?
Clone Ideal
Reps go after similar accounts. Prospecting on
these look-alike accounts helps you:
Accounts.
⚪ Eliminate “tire-kickers” from your lists
⚪ Understand the problem your prospects need to fix
⚪ Jump on cold calls armed with insights and
confidence
However, replicating that ideal customer and
tracking down best-fit prospects brings that logical
next move to a grinding halt. Reps must sift through
LinkedIn profiles for contact information and Google
prospects’ firmographics, including their tech
stacks, go-to-market strategies, company revenue,
and buying potential.
Here’s how AI helps reps identify ideal accounts.
Within a B2B data intelligence platform, AI generates
a description of your ideal buyer by analyzing
closed-won (and closed-lost) opportunities.
Using an evaluation of hundreds of data points
associated with these opportunities, artificial
intelligence sorts comparable accounts and contact
information for the sales team to pursue.
Many companies also use AI to develop an ideal
customer profile (ICP). An ICP combines various
data types (demographic, firmographic, and
technographic) to generate account lists that reps
will have the best chance of closing.
AI then scores accounts based on the ICP and alerts
reps to hot opportunities.
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 How important is personalized outreach? Put it this
HACK #2 way: “One size fits all” selling is not a good fit for
modern B2B buyers.
Automate
Only 32 percent of buyers say sales reps exceed their
expectations, and more than 68 percent see little to
no difference between vendors. ²
Personalized But personalizing your outreach is not easy.
Outreach.
Sales reps handle dozens of accounts at once. So, how
do you reach out to a prospect with the right message
at the right time? That’s where buying signals come in.
Get hot-off-the-press market news
Let’s say a company acquires funding. That’s a red-hot
signal for reps to get their foot in the door ahead of
the competition.
Did a target company change leadership, creating a
need for your product? With that alert, your rep can
jump on a call and plant their value proposition as the
C-suite reshuffles.
Track buyer intent
Intent data captures potential buyers’ online actions
that indicate their interest in your company and
product type.
² CSO Insights (2018), Study: Half of B2B Buyers Make Up Their Minds Before Talking to Sales Reps. PR Web.
https://www.prweb.com/releases/2018/06/prweb15537641.htm
Prospects’ intent signals include:
⚪ Downloading a whitepaper
⚪ Visiting your website (or similar companies’
websites)
⚪ Attending a webinar
⚪ Signing up for a newsletter
⚪ Browsing product reviews
⚪ Reading news about new technologies
For example, AI detects and alerts reps when a target
company visits particular technology review sites.
How does that work? Prospects’ IP addresses are
matched with relevant phone numbers and email
addresses, as well as existing contextual data. The
real-time notification signals that the company is
not only interested in products like yours, but they’re
interested right now.
“Intent data are simply behavior-based buying signals:
actions that imply a company is likely interested in
what you have to say or sell,” says DeAnn Poe, vice
president of marketing at ZoomInfo. “It allows teams
to insert themselves into the buying cycle sooner
to help guide the buying committee through the
decision-making process.”
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 Maintaining account health is critical for creating Know when to re-engage
HACK #3 the best possible experience for prospects, leads
Sales teams can set up automated playbooks
and existing customers. However, it’s not easy for
that alert reps when it’s time to re-engage an

Simplify
reps to know which accounts are healthy and which
account. This automation eliminates remembering
need attention.
who to reach out to and when, as well as locating

Account-Health
the right contact information and pre-approved
Prioritize the right accounts
messaging templates.
AI gathers data points across customer-facing

Management.
communications in reps’ email inboxes—eliminating Sales people can also analyze their re-engagement
manual data entry or analysis. tactics and adjust what works and what doesn’t.

That means sales reps get an instant, detailed Track account ownership
picture of account communications, such as:
If there is a territory or account reassignment,
⚪ Emails sent generating a broad view of account health with
the help of AI makes handoffs between reps and
⚪ Responses received
managers seamless.
⚪ Meetings completed

⚪ Phone calls made

This data contributes to an overall health

score (or urgency score), helping reps better
prioritize accounts.

“AI categorizes communication, looks up contacts,

and logs meetings and phone calls to aggregate
a health or urgency score, which reps can use to
reach out to the right people at the right times,”
says Hussam AlMukhtar, senior director of strategic
marketing at ZoomInfo.

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 How important is clean data? checking their profile on LinkedIn), you figure out
HACK #4 that the person has joined a new company. Now,
It’s critical!
how much time did that take?

Stream the
“Thirty to fifty percent of CRM and ERP data is
inaccurate,” says Henry Schuck, founder, and CEO Artificial Intelligence in Sales Is a
of ZoomInfo.
No-Brainer.

Freshest Data. If reps are working with dirty data, they’re

wasting time.
AI keeps account and contact data up-to-date so
reps can manage accounts without running into
issues such as calling a contact who is no longer at
the company or missing an opportunity because
your competitor got in first.
When it comes to reps’ performance—from the
new SDR’s cold call results to the AE’s closed-
won deals—artificial intelligence can mean the
difference between crushing quarterly quotas and
coming up short.
In other words, AI-powered business intelligence tools
remove manual inputs that keep reps from selling.

AI also takes action based on triggers you’ve
set. If a contact joins another company and has
a new email address, an email goes out to spark
engagement—or adds them to an existing email
sequence for contacts with new jobs.
Fast forward to the sales floor where, armed with
AI, reps own every call and get demos on the
calendar. If you ask them how they like AI assisted
sales, they’ll probably say, “I can’t imagine doing my
job without the help of artificial intelligence.”

This approach not only saves time for the rep, but it
ensures that outreach is sent to active contacts.

Consider the alternative scenario: You send an

email to an inactive email address. It bounces. After
some backtracking (doing an online search or

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Give your sales team the
business intelligence tools
they need to hit their number.

Learn More