It was a regular Tuesday afternoon in the 2000s when I first got my hands on an iPhone. As I played around with its touchscreen, I realized that this wasn’t just another piece of technology. I had the future right in my palm.
Over the past couple of decades, groundbreaking innovations have revolutionized the way we interact with electronic devices, each other, and the world. Now, we find ourselves on the verge of yet another transformation. Artificial intelligence (AI), particularly generative AI and natural language understanding (NLU), will usher in unprecedented advancements and possibilities.
You might have already asked ChatGPT to explain a concept, created realistic scenes in Midjourney, or even designed a personal avatar using the Lensa app. While these applications of AI are entertaining, they are merely scratching the surface of how generative AI will impact both our work and our lives.
How AI Enhances Sales Processes
The potential of AI for marketing, sales enablement, and sales teams is immense. In the face of hybrid work models, economic uncertainty, reduced budgets, and demands for increased efficiency, leaders are prioritizing sales productivity. Gone are the days of pursuing growth at any cost. Instead, we now strive for efficient growth. Considering that sales expenses often constitute the largest item on a company’s profit and loss statement, improving sales productivity is crucial.
This is where generative AI comes into play, automating, co-creating, and delivering intelligence. Currently, sales professionals face one of the toughest selling environments in a decade. However, in the coming year, generative AI is set to unlock new levels of efficiency, knowledge, and agility for customer-facing teams worldwide. AI empowers marketing and sales leaders to identify successful selling behaviors and replicate them across the entire team, eliminating the guesswork. And the best part? It requires only half the time and resources, streamlining workflows in the strategic enablement process, including equipping, training, coaching, and analyzing revenue teams.
Right now, generative AI is already demonstrating pivotal potential in three key areas:
Automation – Saving Time for Strategic Work
AI can now complete tasks that once took hours in a matter of seconds. For example, it can analyze a salesperson’s performance on a call and highlight areas where they struggled, such as pricing. It can then automatically assign a pricing course and reinforce the lesson later. This not only saves time for the salesperson, but also their manager and anyone else involved. It enables skill building and team performance optimization on a large scale. Furthermore, AI eliminates manual work by automatically discovering, organizing, managing, and archiving content. By automating these processes, AI gives us the gift of time that can be better spent on complex, creative, and collaborative endeavors that actually make a difference.
Co-Creation – Never Face a Blank Page Again
Imagine opening a new sales pitch template and finding a tailored draft copy already waiting for you to refine and send. Generative AI acts as your personal content creator. With the right instructions, it quickly generates persona-tailored presentations, product marketing assets, and more. It can be applied to every aspect of the enablement process, including content, guidance, training, coaching, and analytics. For instance, you can upload a document and instruct the AI to build a course, a rubric, and answers based on the content. The output is almost magical.
Instant Insights – Intelligence at Your Fingertips
Thanks to AI, humans can now have conversations with computers. By leveraging AI, you can gather better and faster insights than you could on your own. You’ve probably experienced how quickly ChatGPT can provide information on any subject and package it in a consumable form. However, it relies on information from the internet, which isn’t always the most accurate source. But if we apply large language models to verified information, like your corpus of enablement content, generative AI can serve up equally deep, easy-to-consume, and accurate insights. This gives revenue teams real-time access to the information they need. These insights even extend to coaching sellers. For example, a manager can query AI to analyze customer call recordings within a specific timeframe to assess how effectively the team is cross-selling a new product. They can then provide targeted coaching based on the AI’s findings.
As you review these use cases, you may have noticed a common thread – the human element. AI can amplify and expedite work across your go-to-market strategy, but it can never replace people. In fact, we need people more than ever to take the drafts, insights, and extra time provided by AI and use them to drive strategic change with stronger decision-making and better strategies. The combination of AI and human empathy, discernment, skills, and creative thinking will enable us to achieve more than either technology or people alone.
How AI-Driven Sales Enablement Platforms Empower Your Sales Team
At Zenith City News, we have always been committed to productivity. We continuously deliver advanced sales enablement software and methodologies that equip our customers’ sales reps to close deals and drive revenue in any environment. Now, with the rise of generative AI, that commitment is about to ignite like a wildfire.
We have been at the forefront of AI algorithms for sales enablement over the past decade, introducing unparalleled semantic search, platform recommendations, and predictive content across integrations like CRM systems. All of these innovations are powered by our patented machine-learning technology. However, what truly sets us apart is our Science team’s tireless efforts over the last three years. They have laid the groundwork for us to leverage large language models and natural language understanding, providing exceptional value to our customers. Now, we stand at a pivotal moment where our preparation will pay off.
With our Spring ’23 Release, we are unveiling all-new innovations and functionalities that harness the power of generative AI to drive unprecedented levels of sales productivity. Stay tuned to Zenith City News for the Highspot Discover event on June 1st. Join us to discover what we have been secretly building behind the scenes and what the future holds. Of course, this is just the beginning. As AI continues to evolve, the possibilities for sales enablement will only grow, potentially surpassing even the impact of the touchscreen.
Learn more about the future of sales enablement with AI at Zenith City News.
