AI Tools to Supercharge Your Sales Strategy

By Dan Adams, President, The AIM Institute

As a strategic account manager, will you lose your job to artificial intelligence (AI)? That’s hard to imagine. But you might lose sales to a competitor applying the full potential of AI.

To make sure this doesn’t happen, you should be aware of the many ways AI can help you do your job faster and better. Since AI-for-sales applications are expanding like a cosmic big bang, the best we can do is to understand:

• What AI is good at in fundamental terms.
• A framework to organize the sales tasks AI can improve.
• Examples of AI sales tools available at this snapshot in time.

The greatest challenge isn’t finding ways to use AI. It’s sifting through the overwhelming possibilities and focusing your limited attention on the few that will most benefit you. Of course, this all depends on your needs. You might decide to employ AI when you:

• Need help composing more professional pitch decks and proposals.
• Seek to manage your calendar and email more efficiently.
• Want to accurately summarize virtual meetings in a timely manner.

What is AI good at?

AI is good at analyzing huge amounts of data rapidly and finding patterns or insights that we humans might miss. It may help to think of three AI superpowers:

1. Analyzing human’s past work: AI engines like ChatGPT have scraped the internet and can quickly access vast amounts of knowledge previously acquired by humans. This means you can use AI to quickly learn about a company, technology, industry trend, manufacturing process, or an application for your offering.
2. Analyzing your work: Instead of asking AI to analyze data on the internet, you can ask it to analyze work you have created. It can assess, summarize, and make recommendations to improve your outbound emails, virtual meetings, schedule, territory travel routes, call reports, blogs, and more.
3. Role-playing with you: Top strategic account managers have mastered dialogue skills like handling objections, asking questions, and closing. Previously the only coaching they received was synchronous, when a trainer practiced with them. With AI you can now role-play asynchronously, 24-7, without another human present.

AI lets you do your work faster, better, or both. For example, AI can help you conduct faster pre-call research on the company you’ll visit. Or role-playing with AI can help you ask better questions of customers.

It depends on your starting point. If you’re already conducting thorough pre-call research, AI helps you do it faster. If you’re skipping this work because you’re too busy, AI helps you do it better. Think of this as a continuum, with many AI tools helping you do your work both faster and better.

What sales tasks can AI improve?

Consider five broad sales areas where AI could help you:

Improve task productivity: There is much routine work that AI could help you do more efficiently. Most of these improvements are at the faster end of the faster-better continuum. They could free up your time to accomplish more work like sales calls.

Create sales content: If you’re highly skilled in creating presentations, videos, engaging emails, and blogs, AI will help you do this faster. If these aren’t in your skill set, AI can help you do these tasks better.

Generate and qualify leads: AI really shows its strengths in this category. From mountains of data, it can help you find prospects that meet your criteria, qualify them, and even craft personalized outbound messages to them.

Build personal selling skills: With asynchronous AI role-playing, you can master skills to improve your customer conversations. Your AI coach will not only simulate the responses of real customers, it will also give you feedback and advice on how to get better.

Prepare for sales calls: AI can help strategic account managers do this faster and better. Later, we’ll explore AI tools that deliver massive amounts of pre-visit intelligence. This AI-based research is also better than what was available — even to diligent researchers — before we had AI.

In the table below, you’ll see 30 AI tools organized by these five sales areas. Is this a thorough review revealing the best tools in each category? Nope. Does the list exclude new AI tools that were launched after this blog was written? Certainly.

These are simply examples to give you an idea of what’s possible. When you’re ready to investigate a sales area to improve, let AI help you. Go to ChatGPT (or a similar AI engine) and simply enter the prompt below, replacing the parenthetical section with what you want to improve:

I am a strategic account manager, and I want to (improve the quality of my outbound emails). Please recommend the five best AI tools that could help me.

30 AI Tools for B2B Sales Professionals
Sales Area	Sales Task	Examples of AI Tools
Improve Task Productivity	Complete the routine sales tasks you’re already doing — only faster, and often better.	https://otter.ai/	Records, transcribes & summarizes virtual meetings.
		https://www.salesforce.com/	Uses customer data to drive decisions & productivity.
		https://spotio.com/	Maps the most efficient sales territory routes.
		https://www.lavender.ai/	Provides suggestions for improving outbound emails.
		https://www.avoma.com/	Streamlines post-meeting workflows.
		https://instantly.ai/	Automates & personalizes outbound emails.
		https://www.storydoc.com/	Generates business proposals and pitch decks.
		https://www.momentum.io/	Automates tasks such as deal handoffs & approvals.
		https://www.piperai.com/	Automates data entry, follow-ups, & task reminders.
Create Sales Content	Create presentations, videos, emails, and blogs tailored to your audience.	https://chatgpt.com/	Provides research for blogs, presentations, & posts.
		https://www.jasper.ai/	Generates blogs, emails, & social media content.
		https://www.grammarly.com/	Checks spelling, grammar, punctuation, clarity, etc.
		https://www.hippovideo.io/	Delivers contextualized, personalized sales videos.
		https://www.cognism.com/	Helps sellers become fast, proficient copywriters.
Generate and Qualify Leads	Build high-value prospect lists and develop personalized messaging.	https://www.usergems.com/	Targets potential buyers by tracking job changes.
		https://www.clay.com/	Builds lists & automates outbound messages.
		https://www.actively.ai/	Identifies top prospects and writes messages.
		https://www.salesape.ai/	Uses AI agent to find and qualify leads.
Build Personal Selling Skills	Use AI training, role-playing, and feedback to improve selling skills.	https://www.quantified.ai/	Improves communication skills through AI coaching.
		https://secondnature.ai/	Simulates sales conversations with virtual coaches.
		https://www.wonderway.io/	Analyzes sales data & provides recommendations
		https://www.pitchmonster.io/	Allows practice & feedback on sales conversations.
Prepare for Sales Calls	Conduct research on target accounts and prepare for better sales conversations.	LinkedIn Sales Navigator	Used to identify & learn about individual contacts.
		https://www.zoominfo.com/	Provides data on individual buyers and companies.
		https://info.cognism.com/	Provides data on individual buyers and companies.
		https://www.dnb.com/	Used to identify and learn about companies.
		https://www.salesprep.com/	Creates pre-call reports and provides AI role-playing.