This week we're summarizing recent news coverage about AI's impact on sales, featuring four articles that caught our attention for a variety of reasons - and not all of those reasons are good!
We're doing a bit of catch-up in this inaugural recap, so these articles are from the last few months which is a long time in AI (more on that below). So what is AI's key benefit to sales? Right now the consensus is lead & account scoring, email writing, content generation, forecasting, and automation.
Read on to see how this aligns with your own POV.
This article predicts that AI technology will be quickly adopted by salespeople, a group that is notorious for resisting adoption. We agree that AI has the potential to buck this trend because of its ability to serve individual sales professionals on their terms. Unlike tools that monitor salespeople, AI empowers them to sell more effectively.
https://hbr.org/2023/03/how-generative-ai-will-change-sales
We included this one mainly so we could push back hard on the term “AI generated salespeople”. We believe in AI to enhance the productivity and performance of salespeople, not to replace them. We favor terms like "assistant", “co-pilot” and “agent” instead. Also, we have a sneaking suspicion this was written by chatGPT (without attribution).
This blog lists examples of Hubspot’s AI-powered tools and offers tips on how to incorporate AI into a sales strategy. The examples are biased towards Hubspot - as you would expect - but the concepts apply no matter what CRM you use. And in fact we believe the benefits of AI will be greatest with CRM-agnostic tools like rule5.