ESTEREL, QUE. – At the ChannelNEXT East Conference, sales training expert Shane Gibson uncovered some of the top artificial intelligence tools for sales professionals during his keynote address.
Gibson, an internationally recognized sales trainer at Vancouver’s SalesAcademy.ca and the No. 5 Social Sales Person in the World, according to Forbes, told the crowd of solution provider executives at the ChannelNEXT East event that the VP of sales of tomorrow has to be a sales coach along with a CTO to be successful. Also, the VP of sales for tomorrow must spend less time on administrative tasks and more time building his team up.
Artificial intelligence tools specific for sales will become more prevalent in the near future than it is today.
Gibson used the ChannelNEXT East Conference to unveil the top AI tools to look at this year. They are:
- InsideSales.com, a sales acceleration platform built on AI for getting the most out of your sales team. What Gibson likes about InsideSales.com is that the AI embeds the inbound sales right into a CRM tool.
- Conversica uses conversational AI in a business context for generating leads. Conversica’s flagship solution is called AI Sales Assistant and it automatically contacts, engages with, qualifies and follows up with leads in a multi-channel, two-way endeavor. What Gibson likes about Conversica is that it can semi-automate the inbound lead engagement process and elevates non-profile prospects to the sales team, while leaving out the bottom ones. This way qualified prospects are given to human sales people.
- Gong.io is a natural language processing and machine learning tool for sales professionals. What Gibson likes about Gong.io is it can connect sales patterns to closing rates. The tool listens to conversations and transcribes them. From there it analyses it for sales people. One thing Gong.io found was that the less a sales person talks the better he or she closes a deal. Gong.io suggests sales people should talk between 30 to 45 per cent during the sales process. Another data-point Gong.io found was that those sales people who start with the price do poorly compared to those who reveal the price at the end of the sales process.
- CrystalKnows is a proprietary personality detection technology that was developed at the Harvard Innovation Lab. What Gibson likes about CrystalKnows is its ability to do AI-based evaluations of LinkedIn profiles or from a written letter. It uses Watson cognitive analytics on a Chrome platform to gain personality insights from profiles or written correspondence such as blogs or emails. “I used IBM’s Waston text analysis tool to analyze pre and post-election speeches by President Trump. It produced two very different personality profiles. With a little research what was revealed was that the President’s personality hadn’t changed – his speech writers had,” Gibson said.
All these AI tools plug into Salesforce and HubSpot.
“AI does not replace humans, but it can make them more efficient,” he added.
