Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning for sales: What all you need to know

Artificial intelligence (AI) is helping companies boost lead volume, improve close rate, and supercharge overall sales performance.

That's because this technology can automate and augment much of the sales process. As a result, salespeople are free to focus on what matters: closing the sale.

Forward-thinking companies are catching on to that fact. According to a Salesforce State of Sales report, sales leaders expect their AI adoption to grow faster than any other technology.

Salesforce also found that high-performing teams are 4.9X more likely to be using AI than underperforming ones.

Yet AI is not replacing salespeople. The vast majority of companies using AI or planning to also plan to increase staff.

That's because AI is creating practical value for sales teams by giving them superpowers, with several real-world use cases and tools being used today.

But there's so much hype around AI that salespeople often miss this fact. We don't blame them. They've got numbers to hit, and too much commentary out there about AI is aspirational, not practical.

In this article, we'll stick to the practical.

What Is AI for Sales?

Artificial intelligence is an umbrella term that covers several different technologies, like machine learning, computer vision, natural language processing, deep learning, and more.

At their core, though, all of these technologies help machines perform specific cognitive tasks as well as or better than humans.

For instance, AI-powered computer vision systems in self-driving cars are able to identify obstacles just like people do, allowing the machine to take the wheel.

Your favorite voice assistant, like Alexa or Siri, understands your words just like another person, then responds in kind all using AI.

Amazon and Netflix use AI recommendation engines to offer up products and movies you might like, making assumptions about your preferences just like a fellow product or movie enthusiast might.

While there are a ton of complexities to different types of AI, all you really need to know right now is that "artificial intelligence" describes many different types of smart technologies. And many of these technologies can impact your sales career and performance in profound ways.

That's because AI isn't just automation, though it may include elements of intelligent automation. AI tools take things a few steps further.

These technologies analyze large datasets. They don't just crunch numbers, though. They use advanced computer science techniques and superior computational firepower to extract insights from data.

These insights can then be used to make predictions, recommendations, and decisions.

This type of AI, "machine learning," powers the most impressive capabilities in sales.

Machine learning is a type of AI that identifies patterns based on large sets of data. The machine uses these patterns to make predictions. Then, it uses more and more data to improve those predictions over time.

The result?

Technology powered by machine learning gets better over time, often without human involvement.

This is very different from traditional software.

A typical non-AI system, like your accounting software, relies on human inputs to work. The system is hard-coded with rules by people. Then, it follows those rules exactly to help you do your taxes. The system only improves if human programmers improve it.

But machine learning tools can improve on their own. This improvement comes from a machine assessing its own performance and new data.

For instance, a marketing AI tool exists that writes email subject lines for you. Humans train the tool's machine learning using samples of a company's marketing copy. But then the tool drafts its own email subject lines.

Split-testing occurs, then the machine learns on its own what to improve based on the results. Over time, the machine gets better and better with little human involvement. This unlocks possibly unlimited performance potential.

Now, imagine this power applied to any piece of marketing or sales technology that uses data. AI can actually make everything, from ads to analytics to content, more intelligent.

This means sophisticated AI can analyze customer and prospect data, predict which prospects are most likely to close, recommend the most important sales actions to take, forecast results, optimize pricing, and much, much more.

Thanks to this power to augment and improve sales performance, McKinsey analysts writing in Harvard Business Review estimate that AI can create $1.4 to $2.6 trillion of value in marketing and sales.