After a long day of meeting with clients, Haley Gault, a Salesforce seller, received a last-minute ping from a customer saying they wanted to meet with her face-to-face within the hour.
Gault started to sweat: The customer’s business, electric vehicle charging stations, was not a topic she knew well. To get up to speed, she pulled up Salesforce’s Agentforce AI tool in Slack, typed in “EV contractors,” and received a dossier of previous sales, call recordings, and industry trends.
“I don’t have a vertical, so I’m no industry expert in regards to electric vehicle contracting,” Gault said. “That’s a way for me to really quickly get up to speed on who this customer is. What were the previous conversations with Salesforce? Who are the key stakeholders?”
Gault isn’t alone in harnessing AI tools for her sales role. When McKinsey asked about 1,500 companies about how they used generative AI, sales and marketing were the most common responses.
Dan Gottlieb, Gartner’s vice president analyst for sales, told Business Insider that sales professionals are an industrious group of self-starters who are actively searching for new AI use cases. They use artificial intelligence to compile research, develop leads, and even hone their pitching skills, Gottlieb said.
But the increasing implementation of AI in sales raises the question: Could this integration diminish the power of human connection? Corporate selling is, after all, a fundamentally human process that relies on relationship building, typically via phone calls and client dinners.
At Salesforce, its 25,000 sellers use AI tools to improve their human approach to sales, not erase it, Connor Marsden, the company’s North America president of industrial, consumer, and energy, told BI.
How AI can bolster seller goals
The Columbia Business School professor Michael Brown said he’d noticed some sales professionals worrying about whether AI is dehumanizing the selling process.
“I don’t know any buyer who wants to be sold to by a copilot,” Brown told BI.
He added that there would always be client-buyers who want to have in-person conversations with sellers about pricing, discounts, and legal agreements. At the same time, Brown said he had a positive outlook on AI’s expansion to sales processes, so long as it continues to enhance worker performance.
To do that, sellers should think about applying AI to their daily unstructured tasks, like client research, brainstorming how to approach a particular situation, and making sense of large amounts of information quickly, Gottlieb said.
Gault, for example, has shared parts of her favorite sales-related book with Salesforce’s autonomous AI agent, Sales Coach. After Gault input passages from “Never Split the Difference” by the former FBI hostage negotiator Christopher Voss into her agent, it offered her advice based on Voss’ techniques, like to acknowledge customers’ emotions when they express frustrations.
With Sales Coach, Gault said she could role-play and get a critique of her performance to prepare for client meetings.
Gault, who works remotely from Pittsburgh, said these AI-powered tools help her prepare for customer interactions because she often lacks in-person colleagues to role-play with and receive feedback from.
The evolution of AI use at Salesforce
AI isn’t new in Salesforce’s operations, but its utility continues to change, Kris Billmaier, the executive vice president and general manager of Sales Cloud and growth products at Salesforce, told BI.
He said the company had invested in predictive and assistive AI tools, as well as autonomous AI agents.
For autonomous AI, Billmaier used the example of updating client statuses in Sales Cloud, Salesforce’s platform for tracking sellers’ statuses for each of their clients, from generating leads to closing deals. He said Salesforce’s predictive AI used to make status-update recommendations based on its analysis of a sales lead’s communications. To complete the process of approving and recording the status change, sellers had to review the AI’s recommendation, then manually click “accept.”
But as sellers became more acquainted with the AI’s suggestions, Salesforce began to use autonomous agents for that process. Now sellers can set up an agent to approve their status changes without human intervention.
AI adoption requires employee awareness and accessibility
Bringing AI to a workplace so dependent on human connection is no easy feat. Marsden said it’s a “new motion” many sellers aren’t used to.
He said a solution is to ensure that AI-powered features are “living and breathing” in the tools that sellers use every day.
When, for example, a customer tells Gault that they’re using HubSpot, a competing marketing software, she looks to the right-hand corner of her screen. There, her Sales Coach autonomous AI agent is already populating ways other sellers have tackled objections from HubSpot users.
Salesforce sellers can also find Slack’s AI chatbot among their options for colleagues to message.
“There’s a baked-in incentive for them to be really good at using AI so they can come across authentically in front of their customers,” Marsden said.
“The human side is having the conversation, doing the discovery, and inquiring about what the customer’s needs are,” he said. “And then AI is there to complement, to help you make sure you captured all the needed feedback.”
