From Identification to Conversion: The Top AI Sales Tools Every Sales Team Should Know
This is an updated article offering a fresh perspective on AI sales tools in today's competitive market.
If you’re tired of sifting through countless articles promising to reveal the “best sales tools,” we’re here to give you the real deal. You won’t have to wonder whether they’re truly the “best” – this is about AI sales tools that genuinely work to optimize the sales process.
AI sales tools are part of the reality of business today, used to uplift sales processes, drive conversions, and improve profitability. Many have entered the market, but not all have proven their worth.
But what about the ones that have? These worthy tools have caused quite the stir – making cold calls warmer, sales pitches sharper, and closing deals smoother.
If you want to harness the power of AI, you need to identify the top tools and know how to use them effectively. Accompanied by brilliant solutions like Lift AI, you can crank up those sales numbers quickly.
Why Every Sales Team Needs AI Tools
So, why should sales teams embrace AI tools? Let’s look closer at the data.
97% of sales leaders and those in sales operations (from a sample of over 7,700 sales professionals) say AI gives reps more time to sell. According to the same Salesforce report, high-performing reps are 1.9x more likely to use AI.
There’s no question about it – AI tools can easily and swiftly handle repetitive tasks, which is how you free up time for what matters, and that’s selling.
Automated processes typically collect data, and predictive analytics swoops in to use the data collected to predict future behavior. Analyzing historical data, AI works as a strategist to make sense of it and make predictions about future customer behavior, market changes, or sales probabilities.
Now let’s add another link to the chain and address lead scoring and prioritization. In the sales world, time is irreplaceable. But AI makes sure that not a moment is wasted.
Through processing large amounts of data, AI tools can distinguish hot prospects from lukewarm ones and present a scored and prioritized leads list. By sifting through purchasing habits and engagement levels, sales teams can harness AI to focus their efforts more intentionally and strategically.
Once you can zero-in on these leads, you can stop generic outreach strategies and craft personalized experiences using AI. Each bout of communication is tailored to the user, acknowledging and addressing their unique needs.
Data and a genuine understanding of the customer journey reinforce this hyper-personalization. It can speak the user’s language, referencing their likes, preferences, and past interactions to create meaning in every inch of the customer journey.
Categories of AI Sales Tools
AI Website Visitor Identification Tools
Having a fuller understanding of who’s visiting your site can provide you with critical insights that can drive more conversions. Let’s explore three standout tools in this domain.
Leadfeeder is a B2B lead generation AI sales software that works to identify anonymous website visitors and how they’re behaving on your site.
It can identify the company they work for, even if they’re working remotely. As you’re able to segment leads with the highest potential, you can capture those leads before they slip away. You can also see what your prospects are interested in and use that information to build better sales pitches.
Factors takes things up a notch by dialing in on behavior and intent. Its machine learning algorithms both identify and predict visitor behavior to give you double the intel. That means you can shape a highly personalized engagement approach to lead generation. Whether it’s path analysis, comparing win rates, or root cause analysis, the array of tools will help sales and marketing teams measure their efforts effectively.
Another top AI-powered ID tool is Clearbit. While it has all the core capabilities required for visitor identification, its prowess lies in enrichment data. This tool provides enriched, full-scope profiles of your visitors through their de-anonymization platform “Reveal.” Clearbit also has a database with over 250 data sources and millions of data points to up the ante.
At the summit of AI visitor identification is Lift AI. Lift AI doesn’t have to unveil a user’s personal data – it can boost your website visitor identification by providing real-time buyer intent scores of each website visitor based on their behavior alone.
Once visitors land on your site and meet a certain score threshold, you can trigger engagement tools to convert those visitors while they’re on the site. It’s all about prioritizing interactions with high-intent visitors for better conversion rates.
AI Lead Scoring Tools
When it comes to refining the efficiency of your sales process, there’s another type of tool that empowers your team to work smarter and not harder. AI lead scoring tools are like fine-mesh strainers, providing an exact, data-driven, probability-backed score for each lead. Here’s a look into some top AI prospecting tools in this area:
Lead Magic does exactly what its name suggests – it dives into your pool of leads and scores each of them based on their sales-readiness and potential to convert. It has algorithms that track behaviors, crunch numbers, analyze interactions, and pump out accurate lead scores.
The tool has the ability to track the journey of every lead, which means consistent monitoring and score adjusting as behaviors change or more interactions occur. That gives you a huge leg up in the selling landscape, as you can be confident knowing you’ve always got the most relevant lead score.
Secondly, we have Einstein Lead Scoring by Salesforce. The product calculates a score that directly reflects purchase readiness by considering things like customer interactions, purchase history, and activities in the sales funnel.
Its standout feature? Its self-learning mechanism. Over time, Einstein Lead Scoring uses data patterns to become smarter and deliver more precise lead scores.
For ultimate ease-of-use, Pecan is a top choice thanks to its automated machine-learning platform. With all the complex data science processes automated, predictive analytics has become more accessible than ever. Users can fast-track the analytical process, enjoy time saved, and direct sales efforts towards high-potential leads.
While these tools are certainly compelling, Lift AI is the only platform that uses AI and a proprietary scoring model to identify buyer intent with over 85% accuracy, even if those visitors are 100% anonymous. Each visitor immediately gets assigned a score through predictive lead scoring that represents how likely they are to make a purchase – in real time. With this newfound information, you can prioritize leads that are more likely to convert.
AI Email Outreach Tools
Effective email outreach is another potent tool in your arsenal. Let’s evaluate three effective AI tools that are redefining the process.
Outreach.io is a leading sales engagement platform that employs AI to personalize emails, automate follow-ups, and track engagement.
Its sequence feature can automatically adjust emails and follow-ups based on triggers and recipient behavior, making communication much more contextual.
While outreach prioritizes the pipeline, Crystal Knows emphasizes the human element of email outreach. AI analyzes a recipient’s personality based on their digital footprint so that email content resonates with them. With an uplift in engagement and responses, your email outreach strategy becomes targeted and tailored.
If you’re looking for a tool to help you craft impactful email content, Persado claims to be able to “outperform your best copy 96% of the time.”
Its sophisticated AI engine combines advanced AI, a proprietary marketing communications knowledge base, deep learning models, and a decision engine to offer up the exact language that motivates your target to engage and act. Using this high-performing language, your email will be more relevant and successful.
You know those intent scores we mentioned that Lift AI is able to assign instantaneously? They aren’t just for immediate engagement – they can also be leveraged in email campaigns. When integrated with your customer relationship management (CRM) or marketing automation system, Lift AI can help you tailor emails based on the reader’s potential to convert.
High-scoring leads might receive more aggressive sales pitches, while you can nurture those with lower potential using informative content. After all, it’s about turning outreach into outcomes.
AI Sales Analytics Tools
With so much data at your disposal, you’ll need AI to help you transform it into actionable insights. Here are three AI sales analytics tools that can get you on the path to informed decision-making.
Gong’s AI tool captures all aspects of interactions you have with customers, including sales call recordings, speech patterns, and more, to gauge customer sentiment. With that information, the tool delivers insights so you can inform your strategy, improve productivity, and close deals based on hard data.
While Gong focuses its attention on improving the quality of sales conversations, Clari focuses on accurate forecasting of sales and gauging deal risks. This sales analytics tool offers a real-time view of your sales funnel that links with your CRM system. Through spotlighting sales opportunities and using data to predict outcomes, you can expect better sales execution.
Lastly, we have InsightSquared. Its functionality goes beyond standard sales analytics to provide visually dynamic sales reports. This way, you’ll have a superior understanding of key sales metrics, pipeline trends, and conversion rates. Having this analysis at your fingertips means you can also track your team’s performance against set targets.
But by integrating Lift AI, you can use buyer intent analysis to gain deeper insights into sales data and employ real-time engagement.
The technology is designed to examine a range of digital body language indicators from anonymous visitors, assigning them a conversion score in real time. Once you understand these buyer intent patterns, you can tailor your outreach and sales strategies to boost conversion probabilities.
AI Sales Automation Tools
Within sales automation, AI works much more behind the scenes, so your sales teams can perform at their best in the foreground. Let’s look at three AI sales automation tools that every team should have.
You might have heard of HubSpot before, but did you know they offer what’s called Sales Hub? HubSpot Sales Hub is a full suite of free sales CRM tools for salespeople to connect with leads and close more deals.
The suite includes things like live chat, email templates and scheduling, and contract, deal, and task management. It’ll effectively manage your sales pipeline and you can navigate it all through a user-friendly dashboard.
HubSpot also recently released a powerful set of new AI tools designed to streamline business operations across multiple departments. As for sales, HubSpot’s AI can help you stay on top of prospect conversations through automatic summaries, transform CRM data into easy-to-digest reports, and craft personalized outreach, introductory, or follow-up emails.
Another CRM designed specifically for sales is Pipedrive. Its top features include its visual sales pipeline, lead segmentation tool, detailed reporting dashboards, and revenue forecasting calculator, among others. Together, these tools can suggest next steps, speeding up the decision-making process.
Zoho CRM brings the best out of your sales teams with another toolkit that excels at sales automation. Its main purpose is to automate all those pesky organizational tasks so sales reps can focus on closing deals.
Features include lead distribution automation and a sales process builder. But a big advantage is its AI assistant, Zia, which provides advanced predictions and alerts to manage leads and deals.
Arguably the most important part of the sales cycle, however, is early-stage engagement. Lift AI hones in on this by identifying anonymous visitors in real-time to empower your automation tools.
With these real-time intent scores, you can trigger interactions immediately. This fills your pipeline with leads that are primed and ready to convert.
How to Choose the Right AI Sales Tool for Your Business
After evaluating tools in the many areas of AI sales, it’s clear that making a choice is no small feat.
Before diving into the tools, consider what your business needs. Maybe you’re struggling with lead scoring and prioritization, or maybe your pain point is analyzing and interpreting your sales data. Be sure to identify your main challenges and goals so you can go for tools that address them.
Afterward, evaluate the function and features of the tools you have on your shortlist. Apart from fulfilling the needs you’ve identified, a good tool should also be able to grow and scale your business.
Look for features such as customizability, user-friendliness, and advanced capabilities or add-ons like predictive analytics.
Choose a tool that integrates with your existing systems to ease the transition and prevent disruptions to your sales operations. You might already have a CRM system, email marketing software, or something else that your team is used to using.
Instead of learning the ins and outs of a new tool, having an AI sales tool layered on top of an existing program will save you the hassle.
And, of course, check out user reviews and case studies to get a better overview of the tool in real-world scenarios. They could give you valuable information about how the tool performs, its effectiveness, and other things that won’t be listed on a specifications list.
Reviews will let you know how well the tool has worked for businesses similar to yours. Ultimately, it will help you make a final decision.
The Future of AI in Sales
In short, the future of AI in sales is bright. 78% of sales professionals say that AI can help them spend more time on the more important aspects of their role, while 74% say that it would help them spend time on parts they enjoy most.
Everyone seems to win when incorporating AI into the sales process, making salespeople happier and more productive.
A McKinsey survey found that respondents saw AI as having a “significant” or “very significant” impact on lead identification (60%), marketing optimization (55%), and personalized outreach (53%).
With the many benefits of AI automation on sales, it’s likely that more people in sales will begin to see the benefits of AI automation and use it to transform the way they work.
AI is predicted to transform raw, real-time data into actionable insights quicker and more accurately. Sales reps will have the right data at the right time, which means they can anticipate and cater to customer needs immediately.
As AI matures, predictive analytics will be able to forecast consumer behavior, identify sales opportunities, and pinpoint trends even more precisely and in a more personalized manner.
Conclusion
In the Harvard Business Review’s article How Generative AI Will Change Sales, we can see that the debate on whether AI will replace salespeople is shifting. The argument is that AI isn’t here to replace salespeople but to make them more productive.
With all the mundane tasks off their shoulders, people in sales can engage in more fulfilling and productive parts of their roles. As we move forward, businesses that embrace AI tools for sales will boast a competitive advantage.
So, don’t get left behind. Equip your team with intelligent sales tools that supplement their strengths, remove the burden, and amplify their productivity. Lift AI isn’t just another tool on the market but a true source of real-time lead scoring and sales intelligence.
If you’re interested in elevating your sales, find out how Lift AI can be the biggest revenue opportunity for your sales team.
