It’s not surprising that the most successful B2B sellers diligently protect their time. What is surprising is that the reality is two-thirds of a seller’s time is actually spent on non-selling activities, often of which are done manually.
Here is where sellers are all eyes on AI – and it’s for a good reason.
The AI evolution is already well underway, but it’s already showing us that it can solve some of the most basic, painful productivity challenges for sellers so they’re free to focus where it counts – more prospect facetime building credibility, more ICP research and communicating value, more pipeline generation, and more closed deals.
Meetings play a fundamental role in facilitating some of these things and ultimately sustained growth and revenue. They’re also an area ripe for AI’s disruption according to new research from Calendly. Our State of Scheduling Report found 1 in 4 workers spend 3 – 4 hours a week – or half a work day – scheduling meetings alone. Inefficient scheduling is squashing productivity, and it’s squashing deals.
Let’s explore how to layer AI into sales workflows across the meeting lifecycle to make your team more productive, help them to have higher-quality conversations with prospects and customers, and allow them to focus on revenue-generating outcomes.
How can you streamline, prepare to impress before the meeting?
AI can drive efficiency before the meeting even happens, eliminating friction right out the gate. Before your SDRs even book an intro call, AI-powered tools can give them insights into the behavior and preferences of current customers with similar profiles, making it easy for outbound sellers to personalize outreach at scale. The more relevant the messaging, the better chance you have of booking a first meeting.
When you’re thinking about that messaging, AI-powered copywriting tools like Writer.ai and Anyword can become secret weapons for SDRs. Instead of peeling through LinkedIn profiles, Twitter accounts, and obscure company facts to impress a prospect, feed copywriting tools that same data. In return, you’ll get an instantaneous, fully customized email template, simplifying the often monotonous, but critical workflow for effective outbound sales.
Once your sales team has done their due diligence and earned the right to an intro call, scheduling, and oftentimes rescheduling, the meeting is the next hurdle. More than 1 in 5 (21%) sales and marketing professionals surveyed use a minimum of three tools to schedule meetings, which only becomes more complex as more decision-makers are added throughout the buyer journey. Technology overload can be detrimental to the intent of maximizing productivity, especially when it impacts getting in front of the prospect soonest. Sales teams scheduled 8.5% more meetings year over year in September according to Calendly data; you can imagine the time wasted from scheduling those meetings with a tech stack working against you.
How do you create success in the meeting?
When you finally get the customer in a live conversation with their undivided attention, make the most of your time together.
AI can manage key administrative tasks during meetings, including recording calls, generating transcripts, and proposing action items. Consider adding a meeting assistant tool like the popular MeetGeek.ai. Did the customer mention a stakeholder who should be roped in? Did they imply they’d benefit from learning about a particular customer use case? MeetGeek.ai can join meetings independently, record them down to the minute and, using natural language processing, create shareable video highlights based on keywords, which you can circulate across your team post-meeting.
AI sales tools like Gong Engage not only provide meeting summaries, but it also suggests next steps and flags risk factors based on how the conversation went. With this kind of real-time feedback for AEs, you can liken AI to a sales coach sitting in on the meeting to make sure the interaction is most effective while your attention is centered on the customer.
How do you keep the deal cycle moving along between meetings?
Keeping momentum between conversations is crucial. Sales teams can use AI to speed up the deal cycle in between meetings, a critical period during the buyer journey: keep customers engaged and, if all goes well, ensure the final handoff to CX is smooth.
Automated follow-ups immediately following a meeting prompting customers to schedule the next one, as well as automated email cadences sharing ebooks, feature launch information, and similar collateral will save your sellers time and ensure these crucial follow-up steps don’t go forgotten by SDRs and AEs. Your prospects and customers will be impressed with the consistency and quality of communication.
AI can also help automate crucial cross-functional work between GTM teams. With parameters set by AI, your sales team can facilitate the smoothest handoff to your CX onboarding team when a deal is closed. Create an email cadence that is initiated immediately when a customer is marked “closed won” in Salesforce. That email includes a link to schedule time for a kickoff meeting with the AE and the assigned CSM.
AI-powered solutions can give sellers critical insights for that next conversation that could be the difference between a deal lost and a deal won. Nearly one-third (30%) of sales and marketing professionals say they’re most excited about AI‘s ability to optimize decision-making with data-driven insights. With Clari, sellers can analyze pipeline health based on whether or not the team is multi-threaded in a deal, the speed of prospect replies, or even how long an opportunity has sat in a specific stage of your sales cycle. Doing so gives sellers insight into forecasting and the accuracy of future revenue predictions.
Top-performing sales teams will act on AI
Ideally, every minute of a seller’s day would be dedicated to selling. To do this, sales leaders have to make smart decisions with where their teams focus.
That was probably one of the more surprising takeaways for me from Calendly’s report. Most revenue teams haven’t used AI productivity tools, yet: 57% in sales and marketing and 76% of workers in customer success roles haven’t tried them. But the intrigue is there and the opportunity to benefit from these solutions is clear. AI implemented thoughtfully across the meeting lifecycle can accelerate the deal cycle and give salespeople precious time back to dedicate to the most important aspect of their jobs: selling.
