The Ultimate Guide to Selling AI: 7 Strategies for Success

Selling AI is gaining momentum in 2024. According to the McKinsey Global Survey, the adoption of AI has jumped to 72 percent compared with 2023. 

Expanding adoption comes with more concerns and doubts. Your ability to address these pain points is key to excelling in the competitive market for non-generative and generative AI solutions.

It’s hardly surprising that AI’s impact on sales is also increasing. The most popular sentiment is that sales AI helps teams save time so that they can dedicate their work hours to building rapport with leads and prospects.

In this article, we’ll explore how AI enhances sales efficiency and share expert tips on thriving in the AI market.

Here’s what we’ll cover:

• The Current State of AI in Sales
• Understand Your AI Product
• Identify and Target the Right Prospects
• Overcome Common Objections to AI
• Effective Demonstration Techniques for AI Products
• Build Trust and Credibility
• Pricing and Packaging Strategies for AI Products
• Post-Sale Support and Customer Success
• Future Trends in AI Sales

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The Current State of AI in Sales

Let’s take a closer look at the top AI sales tools. 

Sales Engagement

Non-generative and generative AI enhances sales engagement by automating repetitive tasks and helping streamline personalized interactions. 

AI email tools can schedule emails, follow-up emails, and reminders. Non-generative AI can also analyze engagement patterns to optimize the timing of outreach.

For example, AI can determine the best times to send emails by analyzing whether there’s any correlation between the times when emails are sent out and their open rates.

Prospect Insights

AI lead generation empowers sales teams with deep insights into their prospects. By analyzing vast amounts of data from various sources, AI can predict which prospects are most likely to convert, thus aiding with lead scoring.

It can also help identify the prospects’ pain points and tailor sales pitches accordingly. AI can also monitor social media to help sales reps stay informed about their prospects’ interests and behaviors. 

All in all, with the help of AI, sales pipeline management has never been easier.

Conversational Intelligence and Sales Coaching

AI enhances conversational intelligence by analyzing sales calls and meetings in real-time. It can provide sales reps with instant feedback on their performance, highlighting areas for improvement such as tone, pacing, and keyword usage. 

AI-powered coaching tools can also identify successful techniques used by top performers, helping to standardize best practices across the sales team. 

Revenue Operations and Intelligence

AI can analyze historical revenue data to forecast future sales.

AI tools can also track key performance indicators (sales KPIs) and generate real-time reports, enabling sales leaders to make data-driven decisions. 

Quote and Contract Management

AI simplifies quote and contract management by automating the creation, approval, and tracking of sales documents. AI can also generate accurate quotes and streamline the contract approval process.

1. Understand Your AI Product

It should go without saying that when selling AI, sales reps must become intimately familiar with the solution’s key features and value propositions in order to be successful. 

This means going beyond just knowing its features—you need to grasp how the technology works, the specific problems it solves, and the tangible benefits it offers to your customers.

Also, a strong knowledge base allows you to tailor your pitch to various industries and use cases, demonstrating how your AI solution can seamlessly integrate into the business’s existing processes.

For example, when selling solutions powered by white-label AI software, sales reps should zero in on how AI reduces the risks of human errors and boosts efficiency by automating manual tasks. 

If a sales team aspires to sell AI integration services or AI consulting services, it could be useful to highlight how one of the significant challenges with adopting AI is ensuring accuracy. A sales rep pitching integration and consulting services could highlight how AI experts can train team members on responsible uses of AI. 

2. Identify and Target the Right Prospects

In B2B sales, an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP sales) usually consists of the following components:  When building an ICP for AI solutions or services, it’s worth considering the following data. 

Research shows that businesses in marketing and sales, product and service development, and IT adopt AI at the highest level. 

Also, the most common pain point for customers looking for AI solutions or services is low employee productivity due to an overwhelming number of manual tasks.

By using data-driven insights to pinpoint organizations that would benefit most from your AI solutions, you’re able to tailor your messaging accordingly to resonate with their specific pain points.

Looking to find ICPs? Use Yesware’s Prospector tool to drill down your ideal prospects with advanced search filters with access to 100+ million business profiles.

3. Overcome Common Objections to AI

One of the frequent objections that teams encounter when selling AI is the concern that AI tools will lead to job displacement. Yet, if we look at the research, forecasts warn us that only up to 30% of jobs could be automatable by the mid-2030s. 

Furthermore, rather than reducing employment opportunities, AI tools can facilitate upskilling, where employees can have more time for creative and communication-related tasks that require the human touch.

Another common AI selling challenge is prospects’ fears surrounding data security. Sales teams that sell AI to customers in the IT industry could highlight that in 2020, companies that fully deployed security automation saw $3.58 million in savings in average breach costs, according to IBM.

Also, when selling AI solutions to clients concerned with security, it can be beneficial to walk them through the robust security measures in place to protect data. This includes encryption, access controls, and compliance with data protection regulations such as GDPR and CCPA.

Prospects often question AI solutions’ return on investment (ROI) and cost-effectiveness. They may be concerned about the upfront costs and the time required to see tangible benefits.

Here are some stats from the research by McKinsey & Company that can help address the aforementioned concerns. 

When companies adopt generative AI tools, they experience more than 5% revenue increases in supply chain and inventory management. Companies see cost benefits in service operations when adopting analytical AI. 

4. Effective Demonstration Techniques for AI Products

A compelling product demo should captivate your prospects from the start and keep them engaged throughout. Rather than merely listing features, emphasize how your AI product solves your prospects’ unique pain points.  You can gather intelligence about your prospects’ pain points by conducting research using their website and public profiles on social media, such as LinkedIn. 

Another way to gauge your prospects’ pain points is to send your presentation slides in advance. Yesware’s attachment tracking tool collects information on who views your slides and for how long. This information is invaluable for determining what aspects of your AI product or service resonate most with your prospects. 

When presenting demos while selling AI, aspire to speak the language of your audience. Use industry-specific terms and examples to make the demo more relatable.

Personalization is also key to making your demo resonate with your audience. Incorporating leads data, such as personalized ROI projections, can boost the effectiveness of your presentation.

5. Build Trust and Credibility

According to World Economic Forum research, people are distrustful of technology that is developing too rapidly, leaving them unable to control its direction. Therefore, when selling AI, it is all the more important to secure your prospects’ trust.

Case studies and success stories are powerful tools to illustrate the real-world benefits of your AI products and solutions. 

Allowing prospects to experience your AI product firsthand through trials or pilot programs can also boost trust. A trial period demonstrates confidence in your product and reduces the perceived risk for the buyer, making them more likely to commit to a purchase. 

Tip: Leverage Yesware’s automated email campaigns to nurture leads by sharing relevant AI success stories and case studies and keeping your AI tools and services top-of-mind for potential buyers. Yesware will send your follow-ups automatically so nothing splits through the cracks. 

6. Pricing and Packaging Strategies for AI Products

When selling AI, it’s important to consider what part of the AI ecology your product belongs to. While we are all most familiar with AI models, which are AI-based tools that generate custom output depending on customer inputs, AI models are just the tip of the iceberg.

Developing an AI model involves a lot of work. Infrastructure, including custom chips and servers, is the foundation of any AI product. Also, it would be impossible to build AI models without training data and tools, such as programming languages. 

In order to determine the pricing of AI products, it is necessary to break the product down into units of consumption for which the client should pay. Depending on the AI product’s place in the AI ecology, the units of consumption may include the complexity of an AI model and the volume of storage available.

Your pricing and packaging shouldn’t exist in a void. It is highly recommended that you analyze pricing and packaging strategies for similar AI products on the market. 

7. Post-Sale Support and Customer Success

A smooth onboarding process and comprehensive training are vital to helping customers quickly implement your AI products or services. 

Furthermore, continued education and support are essential to maintaining customer satisfaction. You can offer resources, such as webinars and Q&A sessions, to assist customers as they navigate and grow with your AI product. 

It’s also important to regularly update your clients on new features and best practices to maximize their use of your AI products.

Future Trends in AI Sales

According to Humantic AI, the rapid development of AI and its adoption are poised to transform sales through computational psychometrics. This approach uses machine learning and data mining to extract data from prospects’ online presence and analyze it using scientific psychometric models such as The Big Five Model. 

Research shows that personality has an impact on customers’ purchase decisions, so identifying prospects’ personality types can help tailor selling AI strategies to their unique needs. 

To use an example from Humantic AI’s white paper, AI analysis can classify a prospect as someone with personality type I. I-type personalities are hard to sell to because they are mistrustful. With this knowledge, sales teams can ensure effective deal closures by focusing on a friendly approach and relationship-building strategies.

Tip: These psychology principles will help you persuade prospects and sell more AI solutions. 

Psychology Principles + 13 Power Words for Winning SalesData-backed psychological principles, nonverbal cues, and persuasive phrases to win more deals.

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Conclusion

AI technology is transforming sales strategies by making them more time-efficient and personalized. Selling AI requires extensive knowledge of the AI market, AI benefits and challenges, and the nitty-gritty of AI implementation.

With Yesware, you can boost your AI sales with the help of AI-powered workflows and analytics. Try it for free here.