How to utilize AI in sales?

In late march ’25, McKinsey published their important report on the potential of implementing AI in your sales processes. For a company like We Do Follow-Up it was bittersweet experience. On the one hand, the insights provided in the article is spot on. On the other hand, it gives away our entire playbook for free.

In this article, we dissect the key lessons gathered, and explore how you can apply them in your everyday process. When implementing AI, and especially Generative AI, in your sales-flows, you need to be incredibly aware of what task you want the AI to solve for you, and its inherent limitations.

The McKinsey report organizes the sales-process into three phases: Awareness & Outreach, Engagement & Acquisition, and Success & Growth. In each of the phases, they identify relevant use-cases for AI, utilizing the power of the tool.

Awareness and Outreach

The first phase in the sales process is all about volume and efficiency. With Gen Ai, you get a resource that excels at parsing large amount of data instantaneously. The parsed data enables data-driven decision-making. Data-driven decisions can turbocharge your sales activities.

The Next best Opportunity

When parsing data, a Gen AI will take note of interesting trends and tendencies in your data-set. The more expansive the data set, the more complex the trends can be identified. The AI can identify and prioritize new leads, scraping the internet for relevant contact information.

By doing this, you can turbocharge your outreach process, by compiling large lists of relevant leads for you to engage with.

The next best action

When you have compiled a list of relevant leads, you want to engage with them in an optimized manner, to not waste your or anybody else’s time. That means hitting your leads at the right time, with the right content. Based on the trends uncovered, Gen AI can help you determine the next best action you need to take. It can help you author hard-hitting mails, leveraging best practices for nurturing and converting leads.

Based on the historic data available, the AI can extrapolate when to engage with the lead for optimal results.

Meeting support

When setting up a meeting with a lead, it is crucial to be well prepared. By leveraging Gen AI, your preparation can be streamlined in a way that ensures you always the most relevant information by your fingertips. This can rapidly speed up your prep-time, and help you condense the insights gathered in and after the meeting.

This is also a natural segue to the second phase of the sales process.

Engagement and acquisition

The second phase of the sales process is all about keeping the lead engaged and successfully make the conversion. By leveraging your historic data, the Gen AI can support you in asking the right questions at the right time, assist with negotiation support, and facilitate the research necessary to enhance the customer interactions.

Proposal responder

You know your business better than any client could ever have a chance to. What seems like a simple question to you, might be what makes or breaks a deal for the lead. Gen AI can be trained to automatically respond with the correct answer, if the lead is reaching out to you. This could be through mails or chatbots. By doing so, you free up the time you would use responding to these questions yourself, and the lead can feel in control of their own process.

Smart Pricing

Regardless of your industry, odds are that not two quotes look the same. Inflation, market developments, supply and demand always change, so why not take advantage of that. Set up correctly, Gen AI can dynamically update any quote you send, and base it on the relevant real-time data. Is your pipeline at capacity, you might want to increase your prices momentarily. Are production costs bloating within the foreseeable future, let the AI make sure this is taken into account when generating the quote, leveraging its predictive capabilities.

Of course, the AI can also assist you when negotiating, providing you with insights based on historic data and the leads responses. By examining the lead’s situation, the AI can suggest relevant concessions or enhancements to the deal, that might bring it over the line.

Smart research assistant

Sales is a constantly developing process, and to be successful requires you to stay on top the current best practices and up-to-date research. However, research is a time intensive activity, and time spent researching is time away from the sales process. Since it is a necessity, the challenge becomes to get the balance between research and sales correct.

As your own personal research assistant, not only can Gen AI generate lists of relevant materials and resources for you, but also provide you with elaborate excerpts of the texts. By extrapolating the relevant parts of a resource, it potentially provides you with all you need to know, and in turn improves the customer interaction, by applying the insights compiled to your specific use case.

This is also key to continuous success in your sales, and that leads us to the final phase of the sales process.

Success and Growth

A sales process that leads to a sale is good, a sales process that leads to a sale and can be replicated is amazing. The importance of continuously enhancing and evolving your sales process cannot be understated.

Just like how crucial it is to keep up to date on best practices, you need to be on top of your own process. What was good, what can be better, and what can never happen again. Gen AI can help you with that.

Smart coach

Since we are already using Gen AI as a research assistant, that provides us with all the newest insights in our field, we might just take that a step further. By utilizing Gen AI as a smart coach, it can compare our performances to the best practices, and offer suggestions on where to optimize. This insight could for example be extrapolated from recordings of your sales calls. By leveraging the massive amounts of data an AI can parse almost instantaneously, you can measure and optimize your own performance moving forward, and where the first sale might only have had a 5% chance of materializing, because you were blind firing, by evaluating your process and constantly optimizing, you could end up only generating leads that convert.

In conclusion

Gen AI is a valuable tool in any toolbox, and if you can harness the sheer amount data it can parse, it will turbocharge your entire sales process. By leveraging an AI’s potential in every aspect of a sales process, you can free up yourself or your sales people to do tasks that generates more value.