Businesses are moving away from traditional sales enablement and adopting AI to eliminate common sales challenges and enhance the efficacy of their processes.

But what exactly is AI-powered sales enablement?

In this article, you’ll find answers to all your AI enablement questions and learn how artificial intelligence can help you boost sales efficiency and drive business growth.

Let’s get started.

What Is AI Sales Enablement 

AI sales enablement is leveraging artificial intelligence to enhance the efficacy of your sales strategies and processes to drive better business results. 

Integrating artificial intelligence into your sales enablement process allows you to not only automate mundane tasks but also adopt a personalized approach to your go-to-market strategy.

And that’s not all! 

AI enables you to monitor your sales performance in real-time based on important metrics like ACV value, win rates, customer satisfaction, and more. 

You can then adjust your sales enablement programs based on your findings to boost your sales and drive efficiency. 

This data-driven approach also enables organizations to identify the challenges their sales professionals face and provide personalized guidance to enhance their sales productivity.

Let’s look at the common sales enablement challenges you can solve with AI.

6 Sales Enablement Challenges and How AI Can Solve Them

Let’s look at the common drawbacks of traditional sales enablement:

Challenge 1: Incomplete Sales Data/Records

Given the number of daily meetings a sales representative attends, it’s no surprise that their notes are often incomplete. Perhaps an even bigger factor is the struggle to get all the necessary information into their CRM to establish it as a single source of truth for themselves and the rest of their sales organization. 

More often than not, sales professionals collate data across multiple tools (e.g., separate spreadsheets and note-taking apps) for more convenience. This practice makes data consolidation and visibility into your CRM even more cumbersome.

Naturally, incomplete sales data leads to a bunch of problems. 

Any other internal stakeholders involved in the deal will not have sufficient data to understand its progress and status. This can lead to lost opportunities and inaccurate forecasts, among other things.

Additionally, when the account is transferred to the customer success team, the latter would not have the visibility required to deliver on the client's expectations.

Solution 

AI enablement solutions leverage natural language processing (NLP) to record and transcribe (voice-to-text) a sales call in real time. 

The AI solution also transfers the call information to the CRM to maintain accurate sales data for future reference. Given that these transcribed sales notes are searchable, you can easily get hold of what you’re looking for in the future.

The upside?

Not worrying about maintaining sales notes helps the sales representative focus on their conversation with the client and improve engagement.

Challenge 2: Manually Searching Sales Content

Searching for the right sales content manually at the right time is like finding a needle in a haystack. 

Often, sales reps struggle to zero in on relevant information during sales calls and other live client interactions or a sales manager struggles to find appropriate information when preparing forecasts for other sales leaders in the organization.

This is especially common with organizations that have poor CRM hygiene — where there are tons of inaccurate records and data that are spread across multiple entries. 

This may lead to adverse scenarios, including prolonged ramp times for new hires, a delayed sales cycle, missed opportunities, etc.

Solution

AI helps provide sales reps with the right information at the right time. For instance, your AI solution can run in the background of your Zoom call and recommend relevant content for a sales rep to leverage. This is made possible by AI guided selling.

Essentially, your sales AI solution implements AI guided selling to deliver relevant, real-time assistance to sales reps as they sell. 

AI offers content suggestions based on multiple factors, including buyer persona, market segment, client’s competitors, your sales playbook, etc. The tool virtualizes and integrates your sales playbook into all client meetings. 

With readily available sales content (such as case studies and battle cards), sales reps can focus completely on the interaction with the prospect. An AI sales enablement platform helps achieve more efficient sales content management.

This leads to higher client engagement, better discovery, fewer follow-ups, and a shorter sales cycle.

Challenge 3: Inadequate Sales Forecasting and Pipeline Management

Ineffective pipeline management and forecasting in sales can lead to unnecessary pipeline delays, inconsistencies in the sales process, and inefficient resource allocation.

Solution

AI revolutionizes the process of pipeline management and forecasting by employing the power of complex algorithms to harness historical sales data. 

With the power of AI, you can analyze large amounts of data to gather a strategic insight into the future of your sales pipeline to eliminate guesswork related to forecasting.

By leveraging AI, you can find it easier to consolidate your sales data into a single source of truth — your CRM tool - instead of relying on multiple sources to find the information you need. This eliminates potential data gaps (that might lead to skewed projections) and leads to more accurate forecasting.

It helps your sales team gather comprehensive visibility into your sales pipeline and devise proactive strategies to optimize it for better results.

By harnessing the power of AI, you can quickly identify and eliminate bottlenecks to further fine-tune your processes.

Challenge 4: Inefficient Manual Lead-Qualification and Nurturing

Traditionally, sales teams depended on rudimentary rule-based systems and manual lead-qualification processes. 

These processes were time-intensive and often led to unwarranted inconsistencies and inefficiencies in the sales process.

Solution

AI powered sales enablement eliminates the dependency on manual lead qualification and nurturing by automating the processes and improving decision-making. 

By leveraging conversation intelligence, you can quickly and accurately analyze many datasets. 

This helps enhance your lead scoring, lead qualification, and lead nurturing processes based on various factors. 

Some common lead qualification frameworks that B2B sales teams often use to vet a potential customer include:

1. BANT (Budget, Authority, Need and Timeline)
2. MEDDIC (Metrics, Economic Buyer, Decision Criteria, Decision Process, Identify Pain and Champion)
3. MEDDPICC (Metrics, Economic Buyer, Decision Criteria, Decision Process, Paper Process, Identify Pain, Champion and Competition)
4. FAINT (Funding, Authority, Interest, Need and Timing)
5. ANUM (Authority, Need, Urgency and Money)

Once the numbers are crunched, your AI platform will classify the leads as cold, warm, or hot based on their interactions with your business. You can use this data to build a robust marketing and sales strategy that works. 

Challenge 5: Too Much Time Spent on Performing Routine Tasks

Time is invaluable for team efficiency and sales productivity. Unfortunately, all too often, sales reps spend a major chunk of their workday performing repetitive tasks. 

Solution

AI can be a lifesaver in streamlining your sales processes and saving time. Everyday sales reps spend a lot of time performing mundane — yet vital — administrative tasks such as planning, managing pipelines, documentation, research, etc.

AI-powered sales automation helps offload most of these tasks from the sales team’s responsibilities. Doing this frees up time for the sales reps to focus on more strategic, revenue-generating activities. 

AI sales automation boosts the productivity and efficiency of the sales and marketing team and enables the reps to do more with less.

Challenge 6: Coaching and Training Large Sales Teams

One of the most common sales enablement challenges faced by teams is sales coaching when it comes to large sales teams. 

From designing the programs to creating content, delivering sales training sessions, and more, organizations constantly struggle with time and resources to do it all. 

A lack of personalized attention to every sales rep leads to inefficiencies and missed sales opportunities.

Solution 

Artificial intelligence helps deliver personalized sales enablement solutions for faster and more efficient sales training, coaching, and onboarding of large teams. 

AI sales enablement involves identifying the unique challenges every individual sales rep tries to solve and providing personalized assistance to help them close a deal.

Conversational AI helps monitor and analyze your sales rep interactions with the clients on calls and provides real-time feedback. It helps provide insights about customer behavior, intent, and tone while interacting with a sales rep.

The platform provides objective feedback on several parameters, such as tone of voice, clarity, pacing, etc., and suggests effective techniques to improve the efficacy of sales interactions.

AI sales tools can also incorporate virtual sales coaches that provide on-demand rehearsals and role plays for sales reps to practice their pitches and fine-tune their strategy before meeting a real prospect.

Now, let’s find out what you need to keep in mind while integrating AI into your sales enablement processes.

How Do I Integrate AI into My Sales Enablement Processes? 

Here’s a step-by-step guide that will help you understand how you can make an informed decision about integrating AI into your sales enablement process:

1. Evaluate Your Business Goals

As a sales leader, you can start by assessing what you need your sales and marketing team to accomplish. Identify the sales enablement processes that can benefit the most from conversational AI and automation. 

For instance, if your sales organization relies heavily on calls, you can consider a tool like Scratchpad that offers an AI sales assistant to record and analyze sales conversations.

2. Identify the Right AI Tool for Your Business

While shopping for an AI tool for your business, you must consider a number of important factors, such as ease of implementation, ease of use, pricing, features, ongoing subscription fees, if any, and so on.

3. Integrate AI Tool with Your Existing Systems

Be mindful of choosing an AI tool that seamlessly integrates with your existing platforms, such as a CRM system. AI enablement will be useless if it can’t be incorporated into your existing processes!

For example, an AI tool like Scratchpad can easily and quickly integrate with the most widely used CRM software, Salesforce.

4. Factor in Customization and Training

You must look for an AI tool that allows you to make comprehensive customizations to suit the evolving needs of your business. 

Additionally, the service provider must offer adequate training to help your sales team quickly learn how to use it. 

You must also consider the ongoing support the vendor will provide you.

5. Measure the Impact

Once you have implemented the AI tool, you need to evaluate its impact on your sales enablement processes regarding certain key performance indicators (KPIs). 

Gauge your sales AI tool based on metrics like lead response time, conversion rates, customer satisfaction, revenue generation, and more.

Constant analysis of the impact can help you modify your sales enablement processes to suit the changing needs of your business.

So what solution should you choose?

Consider an efficient and easy-to-use AI sales tool like Scratchpad to boost your sales strategy and close deals faster.

Scratchpad: The Only AI Sales Enablement Tool You Need

Scratchpad is a revolutionary AI-powered Chrome extension for Salesforce that helps transform your sales enablement processes, boost team collaboration, and drive better visibility.

This AI-powered workspace seamlessly integrates with your Salesforce CRM. It enables you to manage your pipelines efficiently, automate mundane workflows, analyze client conversations, and collaborate effectively on sales deals.

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Here’s a closer look at why Scratchpad is the best AI powered sales enablement tool for your business:

1. AI-Generated Call Transcripts and Summaries

Scratchpad’s AI Sales Assistant records and analyzes your sales calls so you never lose sight of important details. 

Get call transcripts, summaries, shareable video clips, and even auto-populated fields in Salesforce for things like MEDDIC or next steps based on conversations you have with a potential customer.

2. Custom AI Prompts Aligned with Your Sales Processes

It lets you configure AI prompts tailored to your sales methodologies, processes, and workflows. These prompts help train your AI Sales Assistant to listen for what matters in every prospect and customer interaction and automatically flag things accordingly.

Let’s answer some questions you may have about AI powered sales enablement.

FAQs about AI Sales Enablement

1. What are the core AI concepts used in sales enablement?

The core concepts that are used in sales enablement AI are:

• Machine Learning - Relies on algorithms that help computers learn from existing data (such as market trends and customer profiles) and perform specific tasks without direct instructions.
• Generative AI - Generative AI generates text based on deep learning to automate engagement, sales outreach, and client negotiations.
• Natural Language Processing - Comprehends and analyzes human language to generate actionable insights.
• Predictive Analytics - Automatically analyzes large data sets to gather insights useful for forecasting, pipeline optimization, etc.
• Conversation Intelligence - Analyzes client conversations to gather critical insights such as customer behavior, context, key moments, tone of voice, and keywords (pain points) for better future engagement.

2. Can AI replace salespeople?

AI helps salespeople by automating routine workflows, generating data-driven insights, and improving sales efficiency. 

However, it cannot replace the human touch that salespeople bring into customer interaction and strategic thinking. 

Although AI can augment the efforts put in by the sales team, organizations still need the expertise and intuition of salespeople to understand customer behavior and close deals.

Power Up Your Sales Enablement Processes With Scratchpad

There has been a remarkable shift from traditional to AI sales tools over the last few years. Businesses are steadily gravitating towards AI to achieve greater sales efficiency and ensure customer success.

So, how do you gain an edge over your competitors?

By deploying an AI sales enablement tool like Scratchpad!

This revolutionary tool offers a user-friendly, easy-to-navigate platform to help transform your sales processes. It helps transcribe and analyze sales conversations to gather actionable insights for your sales teams. The tool automatically updates your sales notes in Salesforce and lets you manage sales records more efficiently.

So, why wait?

Level up your sales enablement today. Get started for free in just a few minutes!