Artificial Intelligence is changing everything, from accountancy to zoology. Used well, it can be a remarkable tool, automating processes, saving time and creating new opportunities. Used poorly, it can mess up everything.

For sales teams, adding a dash of AI to can free people up to focus on what you really hired them to do: sell things. It can automate tasks, provide insight into what techniques work (and which don’t), and help you make your sales pipeline and conversions more effective. Here are ten tips to help your sales with AI.

Generate Prospects

The best cold call is a warm call, where your sales team knows the customer’s needs and how they can help them. AI can help here: tools like Gong.io and Zoominfo can use AI to find prospects automatically. These aren’t just names and numbers generated from Google searches; they are qualified prospects filtered by the criteria you set, ranked, and rated by the AI systems.

Personalize Engagement

These services can also create prospect briefings, giving your sales team the information they need to drive sales. Tools like copy.ai can even create pitches based on an AI analysis of the prospect. Copy.ai offers a free demo of their service: just give it a link to the prospect’s LinkedIn page and what you are selling, and it will create a draft pitch.

Brainstorm Pitches and Scripts

Some inspiration can go a long way when creating sales pitches, and AI can help. AI sites like ChatGPT can create pitches on demand: just come up with a suitable prompt that describes what you are selling and let it riff. Don’t forget to tell it why your product or service is excellent and what your USPs are.

Create email pitches in Google Docs and Word

Both Google Docs and Microsoft Word now include AI features for creating pitches, emails, and other sales materials. Google Docs uses Google uses its own Gemini AI, while Word uses Microsoft CoPilot. Both can do more than just create raw materials, though: both allow you to refine the content you create, tweaking it so it works better for you. Because I live near Boston, which is overflowing with classics scholars, I asked Gemini to tweak my dog-sitting service pitch into iambic pentameter.

Automate and Schedule Email Pitches

Automatic email services are nothing new, but they are getting smarter. By analyzing the millions of emails they send, some can tell you how likely your emails are to be received and read, the best time to send an email and automatically respond to customers.

Practice Sales Techniques

Training your sales team can be complicated: you want them to practice, but not on your customers. AI has a solution: an AI can role-play as a customer so your team can practice their lines and refine their scripts. Services like Quantified.ai and Hyperbound can create virtual customers in pre-defined scenarios, from cold calling to after-sales support. The best part? These virtual customers won’t get upset and go elsewhere if they mess it up.

Automate Follow-ups and Scheduling

Once you have contacted a customer, you need to stick with your promises to follow up. Calendar tools like Calendy can automate the process of making appointments, while the Otter.ai Meeting Assistant can record a sales call, create a transcript, and use AI to boil that down into action items: send the customer information, then call them in a week to discuss.  This can automatically schedule the call, setting up your sales team for maximum efficiency.

Master Analytics and Forecasting

How effective is your sales team? That’s about more than just raw sales numbers: it’s about finding where the process works and where it doesn’t. AI analytics can help with this, from diagnostic AI tools ones that deliver real-time deal summaries.

Practice For A Sales Job Interview

If you are looking for a sales job, you can use AI to practice for the interview. Create a prompt like the one below, replacing the names as required, then feed it into ChatGPT:

“I would like to be interviewed for the role of Director of Ad Sales at TK, where I would be responsible for TK, TK and TK. Structure the interview as a question-and-answer session. Only provide feedback after you have asked five questions.”

Because ChatGPT has been trained on millions of documents, including resumes and job ads, it knows a surprising amount about what recruiters are looking for in an interview.

Get Resume and Interview Feedback

Employers are increasingly using AI for recruitment, but it doesn’t just work one way: if you are looking for a job, you can use AI to help you get hired. Services like ResumeWorded and LinkedIn itself will analyze your resume or LinkedIn page and advise you on how to tweak it for maximum impact. Companies like RecruitmentAI use AI avatars to do the first round of interviews, but you can turn that around and use it for practice: just sign up for a trial, create a job using the description of the one you are going for and try it out.