6 AI Hacks for Inside Sales Reps [+Easy Steps]

As a small business owner myself, harnessing AI for inside salespeople has been rattling around in my mind since the launch of ChatGPT. It’s been pretty exciting to see the creativity that people all over the world are bringing to AI to improve their processes, create new services, and make being in business more fun and profitable.

So here we are — a little over a year after OpenAI changed the landscape of what can be sped up or fully automated for anyone using the internet.

I’ve been in contact with sales experts about how AI has helped them. They’ve shared tips and AI hacks for inside sales reps, as well as tips for coping with — and bouncing back from — bad sales months.

Table of Contents

• How AI Can Help Inside Sales Reps
• The General Advice for AI Applications in Sales
• 6 AI Hacks for Inside Sales Reps

How AI Can Help Inside Sales Reps

As an introvert, artist, and woman of letters, please believe me when I confide that sales didn’t come to me naturally. Over the years I have greeted tech advances with open arms because I need all the help I can get. Luckily, process automation has been building upon itself for decades, cutting out the need for various types of expertise to make meaningful moves.

Salespeople don’t need to be tech gurus to scour the internet for info on a prospect before they make a call. What’s new and exciting for everyone is that we can just ask AI to do that for us. Sometimes we don’t even have to ask — it’s already part of an automation sequence.

My dream of becoming an editor slapped me pretty handily in November of 2022. We are all becoming editors now — honing and building on AI foundations that were, once upon a time, extremely time-consuming to create by hand. It’s amazingly useful to get instant reports that used to take weeks of gathering, study, and interpretation to build only a year ago.

The General Advice for AI Applications in Sales

The general advice, although sound, is repetitive:

• Build an automated chatbot to save time and money by creating self-service access for customers. Let your [smaller thus less expensive] customer service team focus on the bigger and more complicated problems.
• Use automation to personalize your communications automatically with data from your CRM. Personalization really does increase sales, but that’s not a boon if you lose the time and money to have people do it by hand.
• Let AI build and schedule the social posts for you, just make any necessary tweaks once the main slogging is done for you.
• Try out predictive analytics — if I had a dollar for every time I’ve seen the words, “It’s a sales crystal ball,” I’d be relaxing in a hammock for the rest of my days.

All of this is good advice worth repeating because, frankly, it’s working. After initially flattening the learning curves, sales teams are getting more done in less time. We’re nurturing our customers and courting new ones more consistently — which is a great look for the brand — and generally building business faster.

It’s just that most of us are already doing those things, or at least know that we could be when we can get to it. If you haven’t jumped into the AI fray yet, that’s okay. It’s a great time to start using AI applications for sales and structures because there’s a competitive edge for those who are integrating AI and automation into their organization. It’s still new, and we’re all staying nimble in order to pivot as needed.

But progress never stops. How are sales experts using the power of AI in ways that others might not be yet? Want to see me try stuff and goof it up? I know I would.

AI Hacks for Inside Sales Reps

I collected some ideas from experienced sales pros who are making great use of AI. Sometimes they’ll be using proprietary software to accomplish these ideas, but we’re going to see what we can do with ChapGPT to move closer to these ideas with just a prompt or two.

Tip #1: AI-Driven Lead Scoring

Benzo Lee, Founder of Autoboxup, contributed the following AI tip:

“Our sales reps utilize an AI algorithm that assigns a “Fit Score” to leads, based on multiple data points like past purchases, social media interactions, and email responsiveness. These aren't just numerical scores; they are color-coded and come with actionable recommendations. For example, a red score indicates a low-potential lead, advising the sales rep to either drop it or put it into a long-term nurture bucket.”

Let’s explore AI-driven lead scoring with AI.

All of that sounds awesome. Let’s say I want to use my business data to score my customers and that I have a team member who makes the donuts with Python and can handle custom CSS for the site. We’d need an algorithm to score the customers, and then we need a way to present the results. Check out my prompts and what it gives us:

Gang, this thing just kicked out an algorithm robust enough to manage a slew of variables to assign scores to your customers however you want to score them. That’s more than I thought it would do, honestly. I’m not able to test the algorithm, nor do I have enough expertise to look at it and say how viable it is, how accurate it will be, or how much massaging it will need to work well. But it just saved my Python gal a ton of time toward the goal.

Next, the custom CSS for displaying the output:

Again, more than I expected. Not only does it write the code for you, but it also it integrates color coding without being prompted and lets you know that you can go in and change the style and colors to coordinate with your overall site branding. That’s great — because I wouldn’t have known that.

Tip #2: Real-Time Consumer Behavior Analysis

Sophia Tang, Founder of Nako Cosmetics, told me about how her company’s AI noticed a pattern in the data that needed to be addressed ASAP:

“During our Spring sale, AI analytics detected a pattern: our newly launched lip tint range had a cart abandonment rate of 60%. Probing deeper, feedback indicated a desire for complementary products. We swiftly introduced a bundle offer, pairing the lip tints with our top-selling eyeliner. This intervention reduced cart abandonment by 45% and increased sales by $300,000 within a week.”

Let’s explore real-time behavior analysis with AI.

Dang, Ms. Tang — way to work the problem and come out swinging! How long would it have taken without AI analytics, I wonder, to pour through the gobs of customer data? How long would it take to then get a sense of the pattern, figure out what it means, decide what to do, actually do it, and then pour through gobs more data to realize the results? My guess — by the next Spring sale a year later.

But how do you accomplish real-time behavior analysis? How was it able to help Nako Cosmetics be so agile? Let’s say you don’t know the first thing about analytics, but you’re the one who sees that your company should have it. Want to draw up a convincing pitch? Let’s see how AI can help you pitch a home run:

Image Source

I’m a writer and can see this definitely needs work to sound natural, convincing, and written from the POV of a member of the company’s own sales team. Again, though, it provides a huge leap in time savings in both research and writing structure for the one who sees the value of incorporating real-time behavior analytics into their sales strategies.

Tip #3: AI to Simplify Professional Jargon

Our next AI tip comes from John Gardner, Co-Founder and CEO of Kickoff Virtual Training:

“If your sales rely on translating complex concepts for laypeople, ChatGPT is great for finding new ways to explain complex information to potential clients.

For example, while I know the complexities of cardiovascular exercise and how our programs can benefit a client‘s heart health, using AI to simplify the explanation can make us more approachable. If your own simplifications aren’t getting through, turning to AI can help you come up with an alternative explanation in seconds.”

Let’s explore simplifying professional jargon with AI.

One of the many hats I’ve worn over the years is as a medical transcriptionist, and John is giving us some real talk. I know how unintelligible medical jargon can be — and I have a degree in words. To let the AI shine for us, I sought out a research article from the National Institute of Health’s PubMed Central Database so I could plug in a section to be simplified. Let’s see how it does:

That is definitely a lot easier to understand, especially when the medical words they have to keep are defined for the reader.

Tip #4: Searching Social Media for Hints on Communication Style

Whitt Dyer, Sales Development Representative at Regie.ai has his SDR team use their Regie.ai Chrome extension to help them not just grab some details but also indicate the best way to speak with them.

“AI helps execute on highly personalized and tailored sales outreach in less time. The SDR team uses the Regie.ai Chrome extension to look up a prospect’s social profile and select three pieces of personalized information on them to draft a personalized note from in seconds. It also provides insight into their personality and communication preferences, to help with call preparation.”

Let’s explore gaining hints on prospect communication style with AI.

Where has this been? We needed this in the 1900s. People who want me to buy their products need an AI solution like this one because I’m not buying anything if you call. If we’re Zooming, please get to the point. This daily reserve of patience for long-winded stories was sucked dry before 6 am by my kid.

They were kind enough to send a quick video of how their AI Chrome extension works. You’ll have to bask in that glow because ChatGPT — hilariously — has nothing:

I like to imagine that this is the AI’s way of saying, “I’m not creepin’ for you, you creeper.”

Tip #5: Customer Churn Prevention

We all know the way to prevent customer churn: provide great products and/or services and excellent customer service to help with any issues that arise. Yet, people have lives and needs that change, and you may not have the solution they need this time.

Somewhere between the extremes of your customers being brand evangelists vs. wholly uninterested, there’s a realm that can be addressed via David Godlewski’s, CEO of SaaS company Intelliverse, AI tip. He said this of his company’s AI:

“Our AI looks at how our customers use our services, listens to their feedback, and even checks their history with us. When it senses someone might be thinking about leaving, we spring into action. We offer them personalized deals, extra support, or product updates to keep them genuinely happy. This proactive approach has been fantastic at keeping our customers around.”

Let’s explore customer churn prevention with AI

Okay, so until your organization finds the right AI that will make this all happen for you, what can the easily available AI do to help you see patterns in your data? We used an example of one red flag for customer churn: non-payment.

So even though a full suite of AI customer monitoring still takes serious time and work to build, the AI is able to tell you what to do and give you seed code to start building something that ChatGPT doesn’t yet build itself. It’s only a matter of time until open source programs on the internet are so well coded, organized, and easy to integrate that customer monitoring systems will be easy to create and customize with this AI.

Tip #6: AI to Handle Dynamic Pricing Strategies

Marc Bishop is the Director of Business Growth at WYTLABS. He’s been at it for over 20 years and thinks of AI tools as possible secret weapons to success.

“AI [...] also handles automated follow-ups, dynamic pricing strategies, and optimized email campaigns, making your life as a salesperson so much easier. AI is like having a personal assistant that never sleeps. Embrace it, and it will significantly boost your sales efforts, just like it did for me.”

Let’s explore dynamic pricing strategies with AI

Let’s see how far the AI can get us toward a demand-based dynamic pricing strategy before we pretend to go shopping for a ready-made solution. I’ll run it by my imaginary Python gal again before deciding if it’d be better to try it in-house or buy it.

It looks like doing a thorough job of dynamic pricing is still pretty far out of reach for ChatGPT. There are times when you can take what it says and prompt it to create a smaller piece of the puzzle that it talks about — for example, an algorithm to gather real-time data, as mentioned in the last full line. Even just one type of dynamic pricing (demand-based) is a really complex task, so I’d better start shopping. Luckily:

Now this is interesting. I wonder if anybody is working on optimizing for ChatGPT or its peers as opposed to Google and its peers?

There’s nothing robotic about sales — it’s about people. Automation takes us further and faster, but we are still the critical component. Reaching out to build human connections and help each other solve problems is what we do every day, and AI for inside salespeople is definitely helping us do that work.