You're a seasoned sales pro. You've been selling big deals for years and invariably find a way to make quota. You're a maverick because you know that at the end of the day, you and you alone are responsible for your success.

You know your product and your market. You understand the customer's world and can artfully align your solution with their challenges to create a compelling case to buy.

But it's really tough right now to engage with enough good prospects to hit your numbers.

Your target buyers are inundated with vendor calls, emails, and voicemails. They don't respond to your outreach. The latest spam algorithms are so tight that 'spray & pray' template emails are worthless. Even competent SDRs struggle to engage with prospects who have been conditioned not to answer calls from unknown callers.

How can you get more at bats?

AI for Sales Intelligence

New sales intelligence software products are flooding the market as vendors jump on the AI bandwagon. Keeping track of the sales AI product landscape that has evolved so rapidly over the last three years is enough to make your head spin. Many of these products augment existing sales processes and workflows, and most are designed for enterprise sales teams.

Let's focus on how AI can increase your sales productivity where you're struggling the most--engaging with new prospects.

You, like many top performers, are likely already using AI for sales (or buyer) intelligence -- to research individual prospects and their organizations. Simple prompts in ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or your favorite LLM can yield helpful insights about the prospect's company, its industry, size, financials, products, services, and recent news. Similarly, it's easy to gather information from social media and other public sources about the individual's professional role, responsibilities, background, and even their personality traits.

LLMs will also yield data on industry trends, challenges, and macro-level opportunities that you can reference in your outreach, as well as insights to your prospect's competitors and differentiation. Including this kind of information will demonstrate that you have done your homework.

As explained in the popular and highly-rated Challenger Sale methodology, consultative sellers gain trust and respect from their buyers by offering valuable business insights, not just product pitches. Coming up with an intelligent and relevant point of view (PoV) in your sales outreach will differentiate you from your competition, but this requires a lot of research and thought. As the Challenger Sale authors point out, few salespeople are able to pull this off. However, clever use of AI prompts can help you craft compelling, often novel, and highly customized PoVs that reveal how your product or service may address the prospect's business goals (even latent goals) and challenges.

AI-based Sales Outreach

Template-based emails don't work anymore; 'heavy' personalization is required to have any chance of engagement with cold prospects. Here again, AI can help. Using AI-gathered sales intelligence on your prospects, hyper-personalization is possible.

LLMs excel in generating elegant, grammatically-correct prose. Using AI, it is quite easy to generate personalized sales outreach messaging for email, InMail, and even voicemail that you can edit to match your style. AI can come up with ice breakers and authentic conversation starters using topics like shared interests, common connections, or recent events. As with everything AI, the quality of the messaging depends on the input: the context you provide.

Increasing Sales Productivity

So, back to the earlier question, how do you get more at bats using AI in Sales?

Even though today's powerful and rapidly-improving LLMs are a powerful tool for sales professionals, they are only as good as the inputs you provide. We have all received AI-generated email and voicemail solicitations that are at best, poorly-crafted, and at worst, pure nonsense.

So, AI is not a silver bullet. However, for sales top performers who understand the power of presenting an informed PoV that positions their product or service as a differentiated solution to a prospect's business challenge, AI can provide a signifcant boost in productivity. Here's how:

• Industry research shows that B2B sales people find prospecting to be the most challenging aspect of their job, and spend anywhere from 10 to 20% of their time doing it. AI can reduce this time and effort dramatically -- by 80% or more.
• This time includes writing emails to prospects. Most B2B salespeople spend upwards of 20% of their time writing emails. If half of these emails are to new prospects, then the use of AI can return at least three hours per week for other tasks… like researching more prospects and sending more prospect emails! This will increase your at bats.
• The AI-generated, hyper-personalized outreach messaging with a relevant PoV made possible by AI-driven deep prospect research, separates your communications from your competition. It drives up prospect engagement and positions you as an elite salesperson with the potential to become a trusted advisor to your buyers.
• When you do connect with a new prospect, the research insights you have at your finger tips maximize the chances of the meeting being mutually valuable.
• Finally, the above capabilities are now available in a turnkey solution. Importantly, it is designed and priced for salespeople like you--mavericks who want to take control of their own success and not rely solely on corporate support.

Summary

AI offers several ways to increase sales productivity. Everything described here can be done using popular LLMs and with sufficient practice writing prompts. More thorough prospect research informs your cold outreach so you can create hyper-personalized communications that increase prospect engagement. And when you do connect, the research prepares you for your initial calls with prospects so that they are as productive as possible, resulting in more conversions.

For those salespeople, small business owners, professionals, and fundraisers who would rather use a tool than become skilled in developing LLM prompts to achieve the above productivity benefits, one is now available.

What’s more, it learns your preferences and style over time so that the outputs continually improve, resulting in ever more targeted, sophisticated outreach, and higher conversion rates.

It is clear that AI is changing the way salespeople work. It is also clear that AI offers real opportunities for all salespeople to ease the burden of prospecting and drive more sales.

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