If done right, AI in sales can enable you to make more deals faster.

It can streamline your workflow, decrease time spent on manual work, and help you personalize your proposals and pitches, increasing the chances of closing the deal.

But without a centralized control room, the use of generative AI can go south if employees start using AI tools outside of the organization. In this blog post, we will look into what AI can do for sales teams, how it can be easily implemented, and how measures can be established to ensure correct usage. 

What is AI in sales?

AI in sales are tools and features that are artificially intelligent. They can ‘think’ for themselves, and thus help you do repetitive tasks. The tools are found on external sites such as ChatGPT and as tools that are baked into existing applications like Copilot in Microsoft’s Office 365.

AI in sales can be helpful before, during, and after a sale; the tools can help you prepare for a negotiation, give real-time feedback on your pitch, and finalize documents once the deal is done. Simply put, AI tools can help sales reps achieve a frictionless sales process.

Why AI is needed in sales

Since AI became commonly known with the launch of ChatGPT at the end of 2022, it has revolutionized industries across the board. As the first widely known tools were ChatGPT and Midjourney – text-based and image-based tools – GenAI is often seen as a tool used for generating written and visual content.

However, AI has turned out to be a valuable tool for many tasks, and there are good reasons why artificial intelligence is a technology that is impactful in the sales industry; salespeople have traditionally spent time on manual tasks such as researching prospects or writing personalized pitches. For sales reps who want to sell, these are time-consuming tasks. This is where AI comes into the picture.

With AI in sales, reps can focus on deals, not documents. This is backed up by research – a McKinsey study found that 30% of sales tasks can be easily automated. With AI, sales reps can spend less time on manual work and more time on perfecting pitches, strengthening client relationships, and ultimately closing deals.

How can teams use AI for sales enablement?

AI tools enable salespeople to focus their energy on what they’re best at: selling. This entails eliminating repetitive tasks, but also assisting the rep in the sales process to increase the likelihood of closing the deal. AI can be used in every step of a sales process – from lead generation to follow up.

How can I get started implementing AI in sales processes?

Some AI tools operate separately from your preferred work application – you’ll have to switch tabs to interact with the AI. If you want to keep your workflow streamlined and switch less tabs, look for AI tools that are built into your preferred place to work.

Companies like OpenAI have made their large language model (LLM) available for other companies to build their own AIs upon. Microsoft’s Copilot is an example of an AI assistant that is available within Office applications.

What you need to be aware of before implementing AI

By 2025, 35% of chief revenue officers will resource a centralized “GenAI Operations“ team as part of their go-to-market organization, according to research and consulting firm Gartner. This is an important stat. It shows that organizations are willing to allocate resources to AI due to its capabilities to vastly improve productivity of sales teams.

It also shows that managers are aware that AI should be centrally managed by a dedicated team. This is imperative to make sure employees are not just using third party AI tools outside of the organization, putting sensitive information and valuable data in the hands of other companies.

Generative AI operations teams will be tasked with establishing measures to make sure AI content is generated within a set of guidelines set by the company, authentication measures that decrease the risk of generating false information, and validation features to cross-check content before it’s sent out.

Many employees are currently using generative AI tools from outside the organization. This means potentially sensitive information is being shared with third parties without approval. Furthermore, tools like ChatGPT are known to ‘hallucinate’, meaning the content can be misleading or even outright false.

The Dynamic Duo: Benefits of combining AI and automation for sales

To use AI in sales safely, it needs to be combined with rule-based automation to ensure correctness, consistency and compliance with company and governmental standards. This is where Templafy’s document automation platform comes into the picture.

With generative AI tools baked into the document automation tool, sales reps can quickly generate personalized pitches and other custom content. Unlike tools used outside of the organization, management is in control of when employees can use AI and which prompts they can access, and use their own AI models and RAG to ensure accurate output and keep data safe.

Templafy mixes rule-based automation with managed AI to ensure that all content is consistent and compliant. This is achieved by making sure you work within a personalized, company-approved template with instant access to pre-approved prompts.

This seamless combination of tools dramatically decreases the time spent on the document and the risk of including false information, effectively increasing the time available for more important sales work.

How Templafy is bringing AI to sales teams

One of the companies that have implemented Templafy’s AI Assistant is Tietoevry. For Portfolio Owner Kaisa Nummela, the new AI sales enablement tool has had a major impact on the way they work.

“Templafy’s AI Assistant brings AI where users need it, with predefined prompts to make the use of it extremely easy. Users are able to benefit from the power of AI with minimum effort. Through embedding the AI into Microsoft Word and PowerPoint, we can elevate the way our employees are working with business documents”.

Templafy is used by more than 800 enterprises worldwide, including companies like Carlsberg, BDO, and ABB.

Get better at selling – start using Templafy’s AI for sales

Are you sold on the idea of making better sales? Then let’s get started! If you’re already a Templafy user, reach out to your Account Manager to learn how your new favorite AI tool works. If you’re new here, book a demo now and discover how enterprises are creating better company documents with Templafy.