Thinking about making a career in sales?

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Fabulous! You’re on the right track on making new connections, bringing revenue for a company and to top it all off making good money!

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Let’s pick tech industry and see how things are changing everyday. Sales roles are becoming more sophisticated in the tech industry because of the way the sales process is run and deals are managed in companies. Sales, marketing, product and customer success teams work together to generate qualified leads through various marketing events, convert those leads into customers and then manage their day-to-day queries or issues post sale. Collectively these operations are called Revenue Operations!

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That’s why in the tech companies, primarily in software as a service (SaaS) businesses, revenue operations teams work alongside sales, marketing, product and customer success teams to make sure that the right tech stack is in place that can offer the best RoI while providing productivity boost as well as forecasting capabilities.

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As we are talking about the tech industry, of course, there is a significant impact of AI powered platforms that are helping sales people achieve their highest potential at work without having to spend hours doing redundant tasks.

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Let’s explore how sales teams are leveraging AI to enhance their capabilities and generate more revenue.

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1) Sales automation: Sales organizations are typically 10-20% of the overall headcount of a company but budgets assigned to sales organizations are way higher than 20%. AI is playing an instrumental role in helping sales teams to automate a lot of redundant work such as automatically taking call notes, updating CRMs and providing call sentiment & engagement score.

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2) Competitive insights: During sales calls, customers discuss competitors, product features, key challenges and much more. This critical piece of information – once aggregated – provides a goldmine of knowledge that can define a company’s strategy in the long term. AI powered platforms that can automatically capture such moments are very important to sales leaders to learn about what’s going on in the customer’s mind and where sales reps need coaching.

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3) Forecasting capabilities: A lot of sales leaders assess the impact of their sales reps’ performance, deal progress and competitive mentions to understand if their deal pipeline is healthy enough to achieve revenue targets. Companies are able to capture deal progress and revenue forecasts after accounting for potential risks through automated platforms, thereby increasing conversion rates and revenue growth.

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By leveraging AI intelligence, sales teams can understand customer perspective, competitive landscape and future trends. This enables leadership teams to make important decisions that directly impact a company’s top line and bottom line.

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If you are looking for a career in sales or revenue operations, the first step is to understand the day-to-day operations and how the latest tech is helping salespeople generate additional revenue. The importance of AI in sales and marketing processes is gaining so much traction that large venture capital funds and corporates are investing heavily in this space and disrupting the age-old way of running frontline operations.

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Keywords: Sales, AI, intelligence, sales process, leadership, efficiency, deal pipeline

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This article was originally published in NYU Wasserman Blog Series.