The Top 5 AI Sales Tools for 2023 (According to Sales Leaders)

Seeing a new AI tool, idea, or prompt hitting your LinkedIn feed—daily? You’re not alone.

It’s like being in a bustling marketplace where vendors are vying for your attention—but they’re all presenting their latest AI solutions. While being on the other side of a sales pitch (for once) is exciting, you might also feel overwhelmed as you navigate the flood of information to determine which promises are worth exploring.

But amid the chaos, one thing is certain: AI-powered sales tools can potentially transform the sales process and the way teams work, to achieve better results (a.k.a more deals). 💰

That’s why we chatted with three sales leaders to see how they currently use generative AI to analyze customer data, train their sales representatives, and boost sales performance.

Read on to rev up your sales performance using AI tools. In this article, you’ll learn:

• The Top 5 AI Tools for Sales Teams
• How You’re Likely Using AI Already
• Cases for Leveraging AI, Right Now
• What Should You Expect Next?

The Top 5 AI Tools for Sales Teams in 2023

Rapid advances in AI technology have led to a surge of AI sales tools that claim to improve sales efforts significantly. To help you separate the wheat from the chaff, here are the top five AI tools that our sales leaders recommend:

1. Lavender 💜 For Writing Personalized Cold Emails

We’re all aware of the problems with the typical cold email: They’re long, filled with jargon, and tend to feel like canned messages (rather than authentically personalized). Lavender boasts a simple way to improve that. Their tool examines email data at mass and provides suggestions to improve your email content through their helpful scoring.

In action, Lavender performs like an email coach. It helps your sales representatives write better and faster emails, making recommendations to increase your chances of a reply. But more than that, you can use their new AI feature: a personalization assistant which uses the recipient’s email to provide information about your prospect. It goes so far as to provide insights into their bio, personality traits, work history, and more.

According to Morgan J. Ingram, you can also use Lavender in tandem with ChatGPT for a double-whammy of AI. For example, if you are sending an email to a Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), ask ChatGPT to critique the email as if they are the CMO and give feedback. “That way, you’re not testing the emails live. You’re not burning the forest by sending a cold email that will just make the recipient angry,” explains Morgan.

2. Descript 📹 For Impactful Video Product Demos

It’s easy to botch a product demo. You might be an expert at the product you’re pitching, but knowing your product doesn’t make a demo successful. And we’ve all been there: Those days when you hit downtime or error messages—just when you’re trying to tell your prospect how efficiently your software works.

Descript helps avoid this. It’s an AI-powered video editing, screen recording, and transcription tool. What does that mean for you? Its versatile video outreach software can turn speech into text and vice versa. It allows sales reps to easily share product demos and presentations with potential leads, significantly enhancing sales engagement.

If you’ve ever recorded a demo video and realized you missed something important, like having a call-to-action, you can use Descript’s AI feature, Overdub, to clone your voice. Just add in the sentence you want, and Overdub will speak for you, as you. This is also a great way of repurposing (and personalizing) demo videos for different prospects.

3. Tome 📝 For Persuasive Presentations

Next up: Tome, an AI sales tool that helps sales professionals create engaging and persuasive pitch decks. By using machine learning algorithms, it offers suggestions, diction improvements, and automatic structuring of your presentation, giving you an edge in your prospect presentations.

Tome has many incredible uses, but one of the most relevant for sales teams is its ability to help you describe your product in a clear, compelling way. All you do is fill in the answers, and it selects the most convincing phrases, honing in on the information your customers really need and want.

4. Second Nature 🎓 For Interactive Sales Training

Second Nature is a sales tool that utilizes AI technology for interactive sales training. Teams can use this tool to rehearse sales scenarios and receive instant, AI-driven feedback. “Remember when you went through training and had to do those super awkward role plays? Now, your reps can do them with Second Nature,” explains Stephanie.

Second Nature greatly enhances the team’s ability to handle real-world sales situations, improving lead conversion rates. The app also features built-in reports for reps and managers, covering both soft skills like presentation style and hard skills like specific product and playbook knowledge. This allows sales managers to focus on exactly where their reps need to improve with 1-on-1 attention.

5. Loopio 🤖 For Automating Your RFP Responses

Say the word “RFP,” and you can hear salespeople everywhere *shudder*. Security questionnaires, all those tedious, time-consuming tasks that you don’t want to spend your precious selling hours on… Loopio solves that.

Over the past four years, Loopio’s expert team of data scientists and machine learning (ML) engineers have built an array of innovative AI features that help teams produce quality RFP responses, swiftly. The technology they’ve built, alongside new GPT advancements, is ushering in a new era of efficiency for teams that respond to bids.

How Your Sales Reps Are (Likely) Using AI Already

According to Salesforce, sales reps spend just 28% of their week actually selling, with the majority of their time consumed by tasks like deal management and data entry. That’s not nearly enough time to meet their quotas. Sales reps should be focused on closing deals, not administration which eats into sales productivity.

The good news is that your sales reps are probably already using AI sales assistant tools, and they don’t even realize it. AI has been woven into everything they’re already using day-to-day. These tools help automate various sales activities, from initial outreach to deal closure. They help understand buying intent, draft personalized outreach, and provide valuable insights throughout the process.

Specifically in the sales domain, AI is revolutionizing operations by providing advanced functionalities. As Stephanie puts it, “I am seeing huge success in leveraging AI features in tools I already know and trust. I love it in Gong. I love it in Lessonly.”

For example, sales assistant tasks, like scheduling meetings and sending follow-up emails, are being automated, allowing sales teams to focus more on closing deals rather than repetitive and time-consuming tasks. Data analysis, a critical component of informed decision-making, is also increasingly driven by AI.

3 Compelling Reasons to Us AI Sales Tools, Right Now

Of course, the big, broad-stroke benefits of AI sales tools are that they’ll save you time and money. For the last decade or so, we’ve all been trying to automate the most time-consuming aspects of our jobs so that we can spend more time doing the things that only we can do. AI will supercharge that pace.

In particular, there are three compelling reasons why your team should start using AI, right now.

AI Sales Tools: It’s Just the Tip of the Iceberg

While we’re making great strides in integrating AI into sales strategies, the potential of AI technology still has much to offer.

As AI technology continues to evolve, the role of AI in sales will only grow in importance. By embracing AI sales tools today, sales and marketing teams can stay ahead of the competition and capitalize on the countless opportunities these tools offer. Don’t get left behind—start exploring the world of AI sales tools and unlock your team’s true potential.