Sell Smarter with Generative AI
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Describe how gen AI creates personalized messaging.
- Explain how summarization assists meeting prep and debriefing.
- Describe how gen AI creates variations of product descriptions and pricing.
Add Generative AI to the Sales Team
So many customer interactions involve sales. From acting on leads to closing a deal, there are lots of opportunities for gen AI to assist sales professionals with their work. And sales teams also communicate internally, which gives gen AI daily utility.
The sales story usually starts with reaching out to leads. While this task can be daunting if you have a ton of leads, but only so much time, it’s the perfect chance for gen AI to contribute. All it needs is a little context from you: the customer’s industry, which product they’re interested in, or where the lead originated. Combine that information with product descriptions and gen AI can create drafts that highlight the personalized, relevant benefits of working together. Tailor each message to the right channels, too. For example, reaching out through social media takes an informal tone and shorter messages, while emails are more verbose.
First impressions are critical. So make use of another gen AI superpower: generating multiple versions of the same message. That way, a sales rep can pick the one they like best before hitting send. Make note of which they chose and feed that back to the LLM for reinforcement learning!
[AI-generated image using DreamStudio at stability.ai with the prompt, “A person in business casual looking at a wall covered in papers that have writing on them. Drawn in the style of 2d vector art.”]
With any luck, that initial contact will be the first of many times you communicate with the customer. And each time, gen AI makes the job easier by monitoring the conversation to generate follow-up emails based on important details you’ve already discussed. Sentiment analysis ensures the suggested responses have the appropriate tone for the situation. So whether you’re introducing a sales rep for the first time or scheduling a meeting, let gen AI do the drafting.
Once a deal is underway, sales teams must prepare for in-person meetings. Perhaps they need to familiarize themselves with the opportunity details. Gen AI can help by summarizing the state of each deal. It can also identify key factors that are important to the customer, context about market conditions, and considerations noted by other team members. Gen AI can even provide it in a bulleted list for easy scanning before a meeting.
Gen AI can help prepare materials for the meeting, too. That same context that guided the summary can be used for customer-facing content in the form of presentations. For example, ask the gen AI to draft three short sentences extolling the benefits of working with your organization, and you’ve got something to put on a slide.
Finally, if you are able to record the meeting, gen AI can transcribe it using voice-to-text, then summarize it in a concise after-action report. Log key takeaways, next steps, and even notes about sentiment to share with stakeholders moments after you end the meeting. With gen AI, free your sales team from time-consuming tasks to focus on building relationships and closing deals.
Enhance Commerce Experiences
Some customers come to you searching for just the right item. For these customers, commerce operations must deliver web pages, product details, and pricing that attracts a wide variety of viewers. But if beauty is in the eye of the beholder, no single experience will suit everyone. Thankfully, gen AI can help commerce orgs too.
Starting with the products themselves, a good description connects with the customer. If your product doesn’t yet have a description, gen AI can make one from a list of keywords, a short description of the audience, and the desired tone of voice. Copywriters can expand this first pass at a description, or it might be good enough for use. If you already have product descriptions, gen AI can easily create remixes to target different market segments. At every step, incorporate your SEO strategy and A/B testing to create variations.
But even great product descriptions need to be seen by prospective customers. That’s where your website comes in—gen AI helps yet again. Imagine if you could describe your ideal website for gen AI to construct in real-time. It’s possible! Underlying web page code is yet another language that LLMs can be trained on. Simply put, it’s actually translating human words into computer words. This development flexibility makes it easy to try different approaches and optimize layouts and navigation to increase engagement. Gen AI can also help with the artistic aspects by adding generated artwork to headers and as background images. Did you want rolling hills of an Italian countryside? Or maybe a mosaic depicting space flight? It’s all within reach.
Pricing is another task for gen AI. Lots of factors play into the price of a product, from customer segments to demand to market conditions. Let gen AI analyze these factors to dynamically price products, then adjust those prices in real time depending on customer behavior.
For example, offer the right discount after a product sits in a shopping cart for a length of time. Gen AI can even respond to competitor pricing if it comes up during a chatbot session. Each customer has an idea of the right price for them, and if it’s reasonable, gen AI can meet them at that point.
As the sales roll in from your ecommerce site, gen AI can also assist with some backend duties. First is fraud detection. With enough training data, gen AI can first learn what is normal purchasing behavior and then compare those patterns to new transactions. It can also learn known fraud techniques and high-risk locations in order to identify suspicious activity. While gen AI looks at site patterns, it can also help with demand forecasting to optimize inventory. Customers will be thrilled to get what they need, when they need it, at a price they like.