Although still in its early stages, artificial intelligence is already embedded in countless aspects of daily life—from personalised product suggestions on Amazon to mobile check deposits and using voice assistants like Siri to send messages.
AI is also making waves in the business world, particularly for revenue-focused teams. Sales professionals are leveraging AI to enhance productivity and close more deals, prompting chief revenue officers (CROs) to ramp up their investments in this technology. According to Gartner, 35% of CROs are expected to establish a centralised "GenAI Operations" team within their go-to-market (GTM) organisation by the end of next year.
The most forward-thinking companies are also integrating AI into sales enablement strategies, equipping their teams with tools and insights to consistently seal the deal. But what does AI-driven sales enablement entail?
This article dives into how AI can elevate your sales enablement initiatives, improve the performance of your sales teams, and highlights some of the leading AI-powered tools companies rely on to achieve these outcomes.
Understanding Artificial Intelligence in Sales Enablement
Let’s start with the basics: what exactly does artificial intelligence (AI) mean in the context of sales enablement?
To put it simply, AI refers to technology that allows machines and computers to mimic human intelligence and decision-making processes. As IBM explains, it enables machines to simulate human problem-solving and thought processes, essentially allowing them to think and act like humans.
AI encompasses various disciplines, including:
- Machine Learning
- Neural Networks
- Cognitive Computing
- Computer Vision
- Natural Language Processing (NLP)
Among these, Natural Language Processing has gained significant attention, largely due to the rise of tools like ChatGPT, making it one of the most widely discussed aspects of AI today.
Can AI and Sales Enablement Collaborate Effectively?
Absolutely! Modern AI-powered sales enablement platforms seamlessly integrate AI into sales and revenue team strategies.
By leveraging machine learning and predictive analytics, AI enhances various aspects of sales enablement, including forecasting, content management, onboarding, coaching, and more. Its ability to process and analyse complex datasets far surpasses human capabilities, providing deeper insights into customer behaviour, sales performance, market trends, and competitive landscapes.
The core of sales enablement lies in equipping sales teams with the tools and resources they need to excel. Today’s AI-driven sales solutions amplify these efforts, empowering enablement teams to provide even better support for sales professionals.
5 Pain Points Sellers and Enablers Hate (and How AI Solves Them)
With AI-driven solutions, the hurdles that once held sales teams back become stepping stones for success. Empower your team to overcome obstacles and achieve more with tailored AI capabilities.
1. Enablement Teams are Small
Enablement teams often operate with limited resources. Even the most well-equipped teams can leave sellers feeling unsupported, as there's always room for additional valuable materials and more impactful training sessions to simplify their work.
In many organisations, enablement is often a one-person role, and the shift towards revenue enablement is expanding the function’s responsibilities. Leaders increasingly expect enablement professionals to support multiple teams and business functions—often without additional resources.
This is where AI proves invaluable. Cost-effective and scalable, AI empowers even the smallest enablement teams to create a significant impact across the organisation. By leveraging AI, teams can ensure sellers have access to the right materials and support needed to thrive.
2. Increasing Time Spent Selling
Effective enablement ensures that reps have the resources they need to maximise their time on sales calls. Even small boosts in productivity can significantly impact the company’s bottom line.
Think of AI as a game-changer for enablement. It allows you to offload time-consuming, low-value tasks, enabling you to focus on initiatives that drive real results for your sales organisation. Reps can also benefit from the same efficiency.
AI can handle routine administrative tasks that would otherwise consume valuable time for your sales team—like logging call details in a CRM or locating relevant enablement materials.
The result?
Reps can dedicate more time to selling, driving revenue growth, and achieving their targets with greater ease.
3. Boosting Confidence in Decision-Making
Creating an effective long-term revenue enablement strategy requires more than intuition—it demands reliable data. Without data-driven insights, building a strategy that drives meaningful change becomes a challenge.
AI provides the data you need, eliminating the time and effort required for manual data collection. With AI-generated insights, you can approach decision-making with greater confidence and clarity.
This data not only strengthens your strategy but also:
- Enhances your ability to gain buy-in from key stakeholders.
- Enables quicker adjustments when something isn’t working as expected.
AI doesn’t just increase productivity; it ensures your efforts are focused on the most impactful initiatives, empowering you to drive results with the support of your team and organisation.
4. Improving Sales Effectiveness
Few things are more discouraging than putting in the effort every day and seeing little to no progress. It’s a recipe for burnout and disengagement, leading to the inevitable question: “Why bother?”
When your reps start feeling this way, it signals a serious issue—one that’s hard to reverse without significant intervention.
AI-powered sales enablement can help break this cycle. By automating repetitive tasks, enhancing decision-making, and boosting productivity, AI ensures your enablement efforts deliver faster and more impactful results.
The outcome? Your sales reps become more effective and efficient. They’ll close deals faster, hit their targets more consistently, and find the sales process less of a grind. As their confidence grows, so does their enjoyment of the work.
This creates a positive momentum. Reps who feel supported, successful, and equipped to win are more motivated to give their best. They’ll bring more energy and commitment, ultimately driving higher sales effectiveness and organisational success.
5. Missed Leads and Forgotten Follow-Ups
Following up with leads who aren’t fully qualified can feel like a lot of effort, especially when they’re still early in the funnel and unlikely to convert. However, ignoring them isn’t an option—lead nurturing is essential, even though it requires significant time and effort.
Fortunately, AI can handle much of this workload. It’s widely accepted that following up with an unresponsive prospect multiple times is necessary before moving on. Yet, the less engaged a prospect is, the lower their chances of conversion, even if they eventually re-engage.
To make the most of your team’s efforts, it’s crucial to prioritise high-probability leads. AI-powered solutions can automate personalised follow-ups, incorporating insights about the prospect’s journey, previous interactions, and what strategies have been effective.
What once required meticulous attention and time can now be automated, allowing sales reps to focus on adding value when a prospect is truly qualified. This ensures your team maximises their time, improves lead conversion rates, and drives greater revenue for the organisation.
How AI Is Improving Sales Enablement
It’s no secret that selling has become more challenging. With increased scrutiny on spending and rising expectations from B2B buyers for personalised experiences, sellers face significant pressure.
Integrating AI into your sales enablement strategy offers a powerful solution to these challenges, equipping sellers to close more deals effectively. Let’s explore how AI can enhance sales enablement and boost seller performance.
1. AI-Driven Content Recommendations
Sales professionals dedicate an average of 440 hours each year searching for the right content to share with potential buyers. Research from Salesforce highlights that sales reps spend less than 30% of their time on actual selling. In today’s fast-paced sales environment, reclaiming this lost time is critical to closing more deals.
While many sales enablement platforms provide centralised content hubs, advanced AI-powered tools take it further. These solutions eliminate the hassle of manually searching through repositories for case studies, testimonials, or sales materials.
By analysing the context of sales interactions through tools like Gong, Chorus, Gmail, or Salesloft, AI intelligently identifies the exact content a sales rep needs at any given moment. This ensures that relevant materials are readily available, allowing reps to focus on selling rather than searching.
For sales enablement teams, this approach revitalises content that might otherwise remain overlooked. No more missed opportunities or irrelevant materials—AI-powered recommendations surface the most impactful content precisely when it’s needed, enhancing both meeting preparation and follow-up efforts. Delivered directly within the tools sales reps use every day, these recommendations make sales processes more efficient and effective.
2. Smarter Lead Scoring and Prioritisation
Gartner research shows that while 34% of marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) progress to sales-accepted leads (SALs), the conversion rates beyond that point are less encouraging. Only 47% of SALs advance to sales-qualified leads (SQLs), and just over half of SQLs culminate in closed deals.
Lead scoring offers a powerful way to increase the chances of converting leads into buyers. By analysing factors such as intent data and demographic details, businesses can prioritise prospects more effectively. With AI’s ability to analyse complex datasets, it goes a step further by helping refine ideal customer profiles and customising sales strategies and content to align with each lead’s unique attributes.
3. Personalised Customer Engagement
A study by McKinsey reveals that 71% of consumers now expect personalised experiences, with 76% expressing frustration when their interactions lack this tailored approach. Yet, manually personalising every piece of sales content is an overwhelming task, even for the most skilled sales professionals.
To address this, sales enablement teams must equip representatives with the right tools, data, and content to drive results. AI-powered sales enablement solutions make it easier to collect and manage the data needed for effective personalisation.
These tools also automate the personalisation of sales content, reducing the time and effort required by sales reps to tailor each interaction. This allows reps to focus more on building relationships and closing deals while ensuring customers receive the individualised experiences they expect.
4. Intelligent Training and Onboarding
Research indicates that nearly half of sales professionals have left their roles due to inadequate onboarding and training. Poor onboarding sets a negative tone from the outset, and insufficient training can significantly impact employee retention across the organisation.
AI offers a solution by analysing data on sales performance, market trends, competition, and customer behaviour to refine coaching and onboarding strategies. Advanced AI-driven sales tools enable the creation of data-informed training programs and even offer roleplay scenarios with AI-generated prospects. These platforms serve as comprehensive hubs for all sales enablement training and coaching, ensuring your team is well-prepared and supported from day one.
5. Automated Administrative Tasks
Research by Salesforce shows that sales professionals dedicate only about 28% of their workweek to selling, with the remaining 72% spent on tasks such as administrative duties. Activities like generating reports or submitting invoices no longer need to be done manually, thanks to advancements in technology.
AI-powered sales tools take over these repetitive tasks, reducing workloads and streamlining sales processes. As sales professionals increasingly face challenges—69% report that selling is harder now than in the past—these tools allow them to focus on what truly matters: building meaningful connections with prospects and driving successful outcomes. This shift not only enhances productivity but also contributes to a more fulfilling and efficient workplace.
6. Real-Time Performance Analytics
Gartner research indicates that by 2025, 60% of B2B sales organisations will shift from intuition-driven approaches to data-driven selling. This shift is driven by the growing preference of B2B buyers for digital and self-service interactions. With the rise of multi-experience selling, companies must prioritise investments in real-time performance analytics to stay competitive.
AI-powered sales tools play a crucial role in collecting, organising, and sharing real-time analytics, making the data readily available to sales teams and other stakeholders. These insights influence every stage of the sales pipeline, providing a deeper understanding than human analysis alone. For example, AI can use natural language processing to evaluate conversations for elements like tone, helping sales representatives refine their communication skills or gauge the interest level of potential buyers. This enhances both the training process and the overall sales strategy.
7. Enhancing Sales Forecasting
Accurately predicting revenue is a critical goal for any sales organisation, but achieving precision in sales forecasts can be a significant challenge. Research from the Chief Revenue Officer + Sales Leader Outlook Report reveals that 34% of sales organisations identify inaccurate forecasting and limited predictability as major obstacles. Additionally, Gartner reports that only 45% of sales leaders express strong confidence in the reliability of their forecasts.
AI offers a transformative solution in this area. By analysing sales activities and deal progress, AI provides actionable insights into the likelihood of deals closing. This empowers sales representatives and managers with a clearer understanding of their pipeline, leading to more accurate and reliable forecasting ultimately enabling better planning and decision-making.
Empower Your Sales Team with ScaleStation
At ScaleStation, we combine AI expertise with a deep understanding of sales enablement to create strategies that deliver impactful results. From automating lead management to providing real-time insights, we enable your sales team to operate at peak performance. Our solutions are designed to save time, enhance accuracy, and help your reps close deals with confidence.
With tailored HubSpot integrations and personalised AI-driven approaches, ScaleStation ensures your sales process is seamless and efficient—partner with us to transform challenges into opportunities and empower your team to achieve sustained growth.
Start Your Journey to Smarter Sales Today!
Unlock the power of AI with ScaleStation. Schedule Your Consultation and see how we can redefine your sales enablement strategy!
Conclusion
AI is revolutionising the way sales enablement operates, offering solutions to challenges that once seemed impossible. From improving lead scoring and personalising customer interactions to streamlining administrative tasks and enhancing sales forecasting, AI empowers sales teams to work smarter, not harder.
By integrating AI into sales enablement strategies, organisations can unlock higher productivity, better decision-making, and improved seller performance. The result? Sales teams that are more effective, efficient, and equipped to meet the rising expectations of today’s B2B buyers.
Embracing AI isn’t just about keeping up with trends—it’s about building a future-proof sales enablement strategy that drives long-term success for the business. With AI, sales enablement can truly reach its full potential, creating a win-win scenario for both sellers and their organisations.
