People discuss AI for B2B sales with the kind of breathless awe you'd expect from teenagers talking about the Eras tour.
Even Gartner, usually a cautious and sober commentator on new tech, becomes positively hand-wavy when it comes to sales AI, calling it “transformative”, predicting it will “revolutionize” B2B sales, and promising that it will be handling 60% of B2B seller work by 2028.
But most of what’s written about sales AI focuses on its future potential. It will revolutionize, transform, and totally revamp how B2B sales teams work.
Just…not right now.
Is anyone actually using AI to generate more revenue — now? Are there B2B sales teams seeing genuine, tangible results from AI today?
Actually, yes. Like Ms. Swift herself, sales AI really does live up to the hype. In this article, we’ll show you exactly how today’s top-performing B2B sales teams are currently using AI to save time, engage more prospects, and sell more effectively.
7 ways that real B2B sales teams are using AI to sell better
The majority of B2B sales professionals are using AI during their daily workflows: 65%, according to our survey.
And once sales teams have fully implemented a sales-focused AI, they quickly recognize it as a game-changer. A study by Sales Mastery found that 63% of sales teams who use AI regularly believe that “sales organizations without AI will be at a significant competitive disadvantage in the next three years.”
Specifically, today’s sales AI solutions are helping B2B sales teams in two main areas:
- Sales efficiency — Cutting down on tedious manual work so they have more time to focus on meaningful sales activities
- Sales effectiveness — Helping them sell better, whether by finding information more easily, improving their pitches, or recommending targeted sales actions
Here are seven examples of AI delivering genuine, no-BS results for B2B sales teams:
1. Saving time on sales admin tasks
The IDC reports that the average sales rep spends over a quarter of their working week on admin.
AI can make a major difference there: in our recent survey of 100 B2B professionals in revenue-focused roles, the vast majority reported that AI was highly effective in reducing the time spent on tedious administrative tasks.
This lines up with Sales Mastery’s findings that more than 30% of sales professionals using AI have seen increases in selling time.
Specifically, you can use AI to save admin time by:
- Drafting sales emails you can then personalize and add the human touch (no more wasting time staring at a blank screen)
- Automating your client and internal meeting summaries and note-logging — so you have all the information you need without having to write it all yourself
- Logging data from calls, emails, and interactions in your CRM automatically
- Scoring leads based on the likelihood to convert, so you can focus on the best prospects
- Scheduling meetings and sending automatic reminders
- Adding customer data into contracts, proposals and other sales documents automatically
📖 Want more tips on reducing admin time with AI? Check out our guide, How to use enablement AI to speed up admin tasks
2. Surfacing content more quickly
The IDC also found that sales professionals are spending an average of 2.3 hours a week searching for marketing collateral and 5.8 hours a week searching for customer-related information.
By using AI to instantly surface the resources they need, when they need them, B2B sales reps can save 7 hours a week.
And this isn’t just about saving time looking things up — it’s also about being able to handle unexpected questions from prospects on the fly. With AI-generated summaries, you can find the answers you need instantly.
Bigtincan’s SearchAI gives reps instant access to content summaries and relevant assets
💡 A word of caution here: By now, we’ve all heard the horror stories of AI search tools hallucinating wrong answers. Glue pizza, anyone?
To make sure you’re always finding the latest, most relevant information to share with customers, use an internal search AI tool that’s integrated with your internal knowledge management system. That way, it will only return relevant, approved, and compliant answers.
3. Personalizing content in minutes, not hours
It takes sales reps an average of up to five days to prepare a personalized presentation or document for each prospect.
With enablement AI, it can take five minutes.
For instance, you can use Genie Assistant from Bigtincan to:
- Customize a digital sales room template with all the relevant content your prospect needs to make a purchase decision — for instance, by surfacing case studies from similar businesses.
- Automatically add relevant customer branding, such as their name and logo, to your presentation
- Create a first draft of a call script, email, or sales presentation, which you can then edit quickly to make it your own
Genie Assistant can help you create, repurpose, and personalize sales content in minutes
4. Freeing up sales managers so they have more time for coaching
A study published in the Harvard Business Review found that managers who used AI to analyze their team’s performance spent an additional 20% of their time on valuable sales coaching.
Again, this is all about time-saving. Before introducing AI, managers were using up significant time reviewing sales call recordings to spot where reps were struggling — meaning that they could only spend 9-10% of their time actually helping reps overcome those struggles.
But, by introducing an AI tool that analyzed sales calls for them, they no longer had to spend hours working out where they were most needed — and the percentage of time spent coaching jumped up to about 30%.
Get continuous insights into your team’s call performance with MeetingsAI
💡 If you’d like to experience what it feels like to have enough time to coach your team, you might want to check out MeetingsAI
From there, you can either step in as a coach or easily find and share the ideal course to guide them. Visit our website to set up a demo.
5. Improving sales effectiveness with AI-led sales coaching
So far, most of these results have been in terms of efficiency via time saved. But enablement AI can also help you become a more effective B2B seller.
For instance, when using VoiceVibes, the sales coaching AI from Bigtincan, reps improved their oral delivery by an average of 20%. More than 80% of users reported that they noticed the improvement the very next time they delivered a presentation.
Wondering how? Basically, AI can analyze your team’s voice, presentation style, and messaging, and then package it up into objective, measurable feedback for your team to work on.
For instance, did you know that people are over 13 times more likely to say they want to buy from a person when they rated their voice as extremely confident vs not at all confident? But guessing whether your team sounds extremely confident isn’t that easy — and it will certainly take you a lot of time listening to calls to figure it out.
With AI, you can accurately predict how buyers will perceive your sellers’ voices, and help your team inject that note of assurance that can make all the difference to their close rate.
📖 Further reading: 5 ways AI can scale personalized training & coaching for your sales teams
6. Practicing your pitch
As anyone in B2B sales these days can tell you, it’s harder to sell than it’s ever been. Sales cycles are longer, there are more stakeholders involved, and your sales reps have less time in front of the buyer than ever before. B2B buyers spend just 17% of the total purchase process talking to sales these days, according to Gartner — and that’s split across all vendors.
With limited facetime, you need to make every second count. That means your reps need to have, well, put in the reps. They need to have practiced their pitches inside and out, updating them to reflect new messaging, preparing for every objection.
And you definitely don’t want them to be doing that during the demo. As Barry Trailer from Sales Mastery put it in our webinar, that’s what’s called “playing with live ammo.”
But who has time to walk reps through their pitches, over and over again?
AI, that’s who. For instance, when Zoom needed to bring its sales team up to speed on messaging about its new platform, they used AI to hone their skills, leading to “a noticeable improvement in skills and message mastery across all sales reps.”
And, as Sales Mastery’s research shows, all that practice pays off — more than 40% of sellers using AI for sales roleplaying report increased win rates.
Tools like RolePlayAI can help sales reps:
- Improve their ability to handle objections
- Practice dealing with different personalities
- Test their skills and readiness
- Develop better active listening skills
Want to see it in action? Here’s a two-minute demo of how you can use RolePlayAI to boost sales effectiveness:
The importance of sales practice for sales effectiveness (and what AI has to do with it) | Bigtincan
…But sometimes it is just hype
Of course, it’s not all good news. AI is a powerful tool in B2B sales enablement, but there are some areas where it’s just not there yet.
For instance, in our survey, B2B revenue professionals told us they avoid AI altogether (or handle it with care) in some specific areas:
1. Entering sensitive information into open-sourced generative AI tools
If you’re using an open-sourced AI platform like OpenAi’s ChatGPT, there’s a real risk of data exposure if the platform is compromised or misused. For instance, in 2023, over 225,000 sets of credentials (usernames and passwords) used to access ChatGPT were stolen and subsequently put up for sale on illegal online markets.
Additionally, any input could potentially be stored and used to improve the LLM, which should raise concerns about unintended data retention or access by unauthorized parties.
The good news is that tools like Bigtincan give you all the power of AI, without the security risks: our SecureGLP™ is the industry’s leading secure platform for managing AI in an increasingly complex world of data security.
2. Hitting “send” or “share” without proofing your AI-generated content
Yes, AI can save your sales team a huge amount of time on drafting emails, writing sales scripts, and creating customized proposals — but it’s not a done deal. You still need to fact-check, edit, and personalize your content.
As Sandra Cantor, our Director of Product Marketing, explains, AI can help you “get to a first draft,” but it’s certainly not a “final product.” You’ll still need to proofread, fact-check and add the personal touch to get your content customer-ready.
Which brings us to the most important no-no…
3. Using AI for any task or customer interaction that should be human, authentic, and personalized
Yes, we Bigtincanners are big into enablement AI. But we believe that AI is there to help humans, not replace them. With enablement AI, sales teams free up their time to do what only humans can do — build genuine relationships with prospects and customers.
Bigtincan’s AI tools help B2B sales team get real-world results
If you’re ready to get transformative results from sales AI right now, our suite of AI tools is the real deal. Think of it as your very own personal sales assistant. GenieAI can help you:
- Find the answers you need whenever you need them, with our natural-language search AI — without the risk of hallucinations
- Create sales emails, scripts and videos more quickly, with our generative AI content creator
- Give your sellers the practice they need in a safe environment, with our RolePlayAI
- Use MeetingsAI to summarize meetings, log notes, and get suggested next actions
- Keep your confidential data safe with SecureGLP™
Want to see it in action? Request a demo today and find out what AI-powered selling could do for your team.
