In an ideal world, you’d want your BDRs to focus all their time on sourcing deals. In reality, they only spend 22% to 37% of their time doing so. How come?
The rest of your team’s hours get filled with activities that don’t generate revenue directly. That includes preparing for meetings, creating decks, researching customers, and doing other paperwork. Managing and making sure your CRM software is up to date can alone take up to 18% of any given rep’s day. That leaves little window for making progress on deals, but even that time is often spent on engaging cold leads.
As if this is not enough, the more BDRs you hire, the more paperwork and admin tasks there are for them to check off. That’s why the growing AI sales assistant technology industry is focused on delegating or automating the most time-consuming and repetitive tasks that every BDR does on a daily basis. As the AI sales assistant technology develops further, it’ll become much easier to get inefficiencies out of your sales process.
However, your focus should be on increasing the time your BDRs spend with the right visitors, not just increasing their sales time in general.
Enhancing BDR Performance with AI Sales Assistants
For years, artificial intelligence has been trying to find its way into practical corporate applications. While using it to close deals might still be a few years away, AI is more than capable of handling mechanical and repetitive tasks that tend to take up a lot of time but produce little value.
Today, sales assistants powered by AI are able to help your BDRs in three broad categories:
- Time management
- Automating routine tasks
- Engaging and qualifying leads
The Critical Role of AI Sales Assistants
Addressing the Time Management Challenge for BDRs
AI tools are fantastic time savers. From scheduling meetings to transcribing calls, to summarizing research, they free up a lot of time that BDRs would spend on manual processing. As a result, by using AI, your reps can focus on matters — selling.
Automating Routine Tasks
Using AI tools doesn’t just save time — it keeps morale high by taking over tedious tasks that sap the energy out of your sales team. For example, AI sales software can do data entry and updates in your web-based sales CRM instantly or provide timely analytics reports across all acquisition channels.
Enhancing Lead Engagement and Qualification
Thanks to natural language processing, your AI assistant today can be helpful in the early stages of your conversion funnel, such as lead engagement and qualification.
Using chat, for example, AI tools can pick up valuable insights from web visitors, run them through a lead scoring algorithm, and pass them on to sales reps who are actually closing deals.
Top AI Sales Assistant Tools: An Overview
Dooly: Automate Sales Tasks in Salesforce
An essential tool for actionable insights, Dooly takes the grunt work out of Salesforce, saving every BDR up to five hours a week. Described briefly, Dooly is an intuitive app that combines all the most important Salesforce fields in a single interface and seamlessly syncs all the updates from sales reps. Its AI technology learns from sales calls, suggests additional information to include, and even autofills fields based on up-to-date sales data.
Conversica: Customer Interactions on Autopilot
Another popular AI sales assistant is Conversica, which is a conversational tool that helps both sales and marketing teams engage leads at any point of the conversion funnel, from awareness to interest, consideration, and purchase.
Conversica seamlessly integrates into your existing sales stack (e.g. Salesforce, Hubspot, Microsoft Dynamics 365) and leverages your sales information to proactively approach and explain key benefits to potential customers that BDRs might not necessarily focus on.
Drift: From Lead Generation to Revenue
Seemingly ubiquitous today, Drift is a revenue acceleration platform. It includes live chat for sales powered by AI to generate more pipeline for your team.
Drift’s chatbot understands natural speech, replies within a given context, schedules demos, and escalates to a live representative in real time. Thanks to its software integrations, Drift can even personalize messages and provide comprehensive conversational analytics, highlighting key metrics.
Making AI Sales Assistants Work for Your Team
Integration with Existing Sales Processes
Sales enablement tools like Drift and Conversica are used on all top sales-oriented websites today. They integrate seamlessly with existing sales processes out of the box due to their support for popular CRMs and data platforms.
This is key — any sales intelligence tool you choose has to work with your current sales stack and should be implemented without involving your IT department or requiring weeks of training for your sales team.
Realizing the Full Potential of AI Assistants
AI assistants can help sales leaders make data-driven decisions and automate routine sales activities, saving every BDR hours every week. But most tools are missing one critical feature — they only work for website visitors or leads you know about.
For example, if a web visitor is anonymous to you, there would be no way even for a sales assistant powered by AI to know how likely they are to convert. Because of that, the assistant or chatbot would enroll that visitor in a standard “cold” strategy (or none at all). We know that chatbots can’t convert traffic like a live agent can, and they can introduce friction in the user experience. Because of this, you’re not engaging your anonymous visitors effectively. Why does that matter? These anonymous visitors can constitute over 90% of your daily traffic, which is a huge revenue opportunity that’s being missed.
The Future of Sales: AI-Driven Strategies
One good way to understand the value of an anonymous visitor (or to know when to engage them) is by scoring their buyer intent in real-time using Lift AI.
Unlike other AI tools, Lift AI focuses solely on website visitor “behavior”, and uses a proprietary model that relies on more than 15 years of sales data across various industries, incorporating one billion customer data points and 14 million live sales engagements. The result is a real-time buyer intent solution for website visitors - whether they’re known or completely anonymous.
Lift AI scores every single visitor in real time based on hundreds or micro behaviors, even if they haven’t been recorded in your CRM or any other sales tools. Once a visitor receives a score, they will either be directed to any chatbot of your choice (Drift, Salesforce, etc.) or connected directly with your BDRs, depending on their buying intent.
The results that Lift AI is able to achieve with the help of other AI sales tools speak for themselves. Most customers increase their chat conversions anywhere from two to 10 times within the first 90 days, due to Lift AI helping them find leads with the highest buyer intent.
Some examples include Chronos, which got 85% more leads from its pipeline. Truckstop increased its sales conversions by 300% (9.72% vs. 3.28%). Drift itself had its conversions go up 9 times with Lift AI.
The power of Lift AI as a sales assistant is by delivering your sales teams red-hot, ready-to-buy website leads based on their behavior—all in real-time. When combined with other AI assistant tools such as chatbots and sales outreach sequencing, Lift AI makes each of them more effective and efficient.
Conclusion: The Competitive Edge of AI Sales Assistants
Ambitious sales teams today can do much more if they leverage AI tools that would help them forecast sales, polish sales pitches, process large volumes of data, follow up with leads, and close more deals.
Dooly, Conversica, and Drift are all great examples of how sales managers can elevate their teams and make them more effective in just a few days.
By adding Lift AI on top of those tools, you can drastically widen and shorten your sales funnel by including anonymous visitors and processing them with the help of machine learning. Sign up for a free proof of concept today offered to companies with over 20,000 monthly visitors and see how it can change your sales strategy.
FAQ for AI Sales Assistants
What Is AI Sales Assistant Software?
AI assistant software can be any tool powered by AI that helps sales reps do their job more effectively. For example, AI tools can be used to qualify leads and automate CRM data updates.
What Can AI Do for Sales?
The most immediate benefit of AI is automating tedious tasks, from inputting data to managing calls to scheduling demos to summarizing call notes. More advanced AI tools, such as Lift AI, can help determine buyer intent of every single visitor to your website, even anonymous ones.
What Does an AI Sales Assistant Do?
AI assistants tend to specialize in different aspects of sales. Some provide chat interactions and logic, some automate tasks, some predict outcomes or forecast sales.
Will AI Replace Salespeople?
AI is unlikely to completely replace people. People like to buy from people they trust, which is an inherently human characteristic. However, AI tools can empower salespeople to do more by leveraging their time.
