The impact of generative AI is evident in all types of software, but one area we’re continually hearing about is sales technology. Salesloft, a revenue intelligence platform, and Outreach, a sales execution platform (technically in the same category), recently announced some updates with AI at the foundation.
Identifying important deal insights
Salesloft’s spring launch brought in a few new features that leverage generative AI. With Conversation Key Moments, AI analyzes call transcripts and recordings and identifies potential deal risks and opportunities. Now, salespeople could do this themselves, but it would take a bit of work if there were multiple calls that involved more than one person on the buying team. Catching common objections, hearing what competitors are doing, and understanding how each person on the buying team affects the decision is essential for sales teams to understand because it affects how they respond going forward.
According to Ellie Fields, Chief Product Officer at Salesloft:
Each interaction over the course of weeks or months is a chance to understand the buyer, address their objections and win a deal. But it’s too hard for people to keep all that information top of mind. That’s where Salesloft’s rich data platform and AI come in. We distill key moments from every conversation, then use that insight to save sellers time and make them smarter; for example, providing prep in the minutes before a meeting.
Outreach recently launched Smart Account Plans, a new account view layout that gives sellers a single place to view all aspects of an account. Account views are not new, but when you bring AI into the mix, they can surface a lot more critical insights and information around account activity and the buying committee.
This account view also includes a generative AI chat experience where salespeople can ask specific questions about the account, such as “What are the potential risks,” or “What were the biggest objections or concerns raised so far?”. Along with AI-generated responses, the chat provides deep links to conversations or emails that provide more context. David Ruggiero, President of GTM at Outreach, said:
Successful account-based sales strategies rely on shared information, constant alignment, detailed planning, and structured workflows. By adopting a strategic approach, companies can improve their prospecting efforts, lower customer acquisition costs, and maximize the value of their existing customers through thoughtful account management, which will drive ongoing business growth.
Prepping for meetings is another way AI can help sales teams. For Salesloft, this comes in the form of a “cheat sheet” that brings together past conversation data, meeting summaries and key points, and other important buyer information. This is similar to what GTM Buddy does; the difference is where you can get this summary. GTM Buddy provides it in a sidebar inside your email software while you go to Salesloft for the same information. Does that matter? It depends on where the seller works. If a selling team spends all their time in the Salesloft platform, you would want this cheat sheet there.
Working with the entire buying team
We know buying decisions happen within a committee in B2B sales. But sales teams don’t always know who is on that team. Salesloft allows you to capture new buying team members by analyzing names in emails and meetings. It will create a new record for each new person and log all their activity, and it will connect that record to related opportunities through integration with Salesloft Deals.
Outreach has a new Prospect Relationship Map that visualizes the entire buying team and shows which stakeholders have the buying power in an account. Outreach said that when more than one contact is engaged in a deal, it’s 37% more likely to close. That makes sense because even if only one or two people in a buying group have the final decision-making authority, plenty of others can influence the decision. Sales teams need to engage the entire buying committee in some way.
Outreach’s ability to provide “cross-department threading”—bringing more than one department into the sales process—is also interesting. It enables sales teams to create relationships with multiple people and buying departments.
According to Outreach data, deals with one department have a win rate of 28%, but when working with three or more departments, that win rate grows to 44%. Outreach claims that cross-threading can increase the win rate by 56%.
Helping salespeople improve
There’s another new feature in Salesloft’s spring launch – AI-assisted Scorecards. These scorecards are designed to help managers assess their reps’ performance. The AI pre-populates the scorecard by analyzing meeting and interaction transactions, saving managers from going through and listening to every meeting and reviewing every action of each rep they are responsible for.
The AI will surface action items in the manager’s workflow to ensure that reps get targeted and timely feedback. Reps can also request a scorecard themselves (the request goes to their manager), proactively assessing and improving their performance.
My take
The sales process has changed so much in the last few years that sales teams need their tools to evolve with those changes.
Leveraging AI to analyze sales calls and emails does help salespeople more quickly understand what they need to do when working with an account. And these salespeople are often responsible for hundreds of accounts (or more). Also, considering how many members of the buying team there are and knowing that each relationship is different, having AI bring all that information together and surface key points is critical.
But there’s more. If the bulk of the purchase journey is done without direct sales involvement, there should be a way to bring all the pre-sales activity into the sales process and have AI analyze that, giving sales teams even more information on the account and members of the buying team. Both of the platforms discussed here do provide that integration with marketing systems to give sales the information, but it’s unclear if that marketing activity is part of either new feature. It’s that holistic view of the buying team (and members of the buying team) that ultimately will help sales success.