How to Use AI to Close More Sales

When a prospect first reaches out for more information, I’ve found that engagement is at its peak.

Even when talks progress all the way to a signed contract, they will never be as engaged as they were in that initial moment when a problem arose and curiosity about your solution struck.

Many times I’ve been frustrated trying to chase down a once-excited prospect whose priorities have already shifted to the next item on the list.

With so many different initiatives competing for your prospects’ limited attention, it’s essential to close deals quickly and efficiently while the problem they want to solve is fresh in their minds. Wondering how to achieve this lofty goal? AI can help.

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How I Used AI to Qualify Leads and Close More Deals

It’s essential to take advantage of initial interest to start a conversation, and one of our primary tools for doing that when I was at Lead Prosper was our website’s chat window.

Thanks to the integration between HubSpot and Slack, reps could respond to messages in real-time right within our organization’s main messaging app. Unfortunately, even with reps covering all three time zones here in the States, there were plenty of hours where the chat was unstaffed and prospects had to fill out an email contact form for more information — it was an undesirable plan B, until AI came along to fill in the gaps.

By using HubSpot’s AI chatbot builder, we enabled our prospects to get answers to their questions 24/7/365, regardless of sales rep availability.

This capability resulted in more closed deals, but it had plenty of additional benefits: Sales reps no longer had to 1) come in the next business day and put prospects in re-engagement sequences, 2) personalize those sequences, 3) hit the phones when emails went unanswered, and 4) often end up disqualifying the lead anyway when it wasn’t the right fit. Instead, qualified opps became demos on the calendar around the clock.

Why Use AI Sales Closing Techniques

With AI backing up our sales department, missed opportunities became a thing of the past — which is critical considering that sales is a numbers game. No matter how compelling your product or service, each closed deal could be preceded by a dozen or more that never result in new business.

To meet your quota (and stay sane), it’s important to leverage AI tools and techniques that can unlock the following benefits. Here are some of the benefits I think you’ll see:

Scale Your Team

Getting headcount approval can be an uphill battle, and while there’s no substitute for expanding a team of seasoned sales reps, a successful AI implementation might be the next best thing.

After our own chatbot implementation, we conducted a quick evaluation and found the total time saved amounted to an entire full-time equivalent (FTE) — I think this is a very positive result that would be even more profound in larger organizations or those with high-traffic web properties.

Improve Conversion Rates

One of the biggest benefits I saw from implementing AI (and a big part of the fantastic ROI it produced) was the way it helped us disqualify leads that weren’t a good fit.

Time is your most valuable resource, and it’s frustrating to spend it chasing down leads that will ultimately fail some basic qualifications. By leaning on AI for those initial temperature-gauging interactions, I could focus my attention on the valuable deals where my involvement made a big difference.

Move Deals Along

Even in ideal situations where the prospect fits neatly into our ideal customer profile (ICP) and has demonstrated clear purchasing intent, I’ve found it takes quite a few touches to get to a signed contract and closed sale. Some of the back-and-forth requires your direct involvement — such as contract terms or pricing negotiations — but items like simple clarifying questions and scheduling follow-ups can easily be offloaded to AI to reduce your workload.

There have never been more ways to implement AI tools and work smarter. Armed with the right solutions, you can increase efficacy, improve efficiency, and exceed your quota — and yes, enjoy those commission accelerators, too.

5 Ways to Use AI to Close More Sales

1. Create Content

Whether you’re responding to potential objections in a prospect’s email or drafting a blog post to help attract or nurture inbound leads, generative AI can help. ChatGPT is still probably the most well-known large language model (LLM), but there are now a slew of options that can help you communicate effectively and efficiently in almost any medium and at every stage of the sales funnel from cold email to close.

My recommendation for this: It’s clear I’m a fan of HubSpot — even more so now that it has an AI content assistant built into a host of tools, enabling you to generate landing page copy, ideate CTAs for testing, produce blog post titles and outlines, create captivating email subject lines, and much more.

2. Aim Accurately

Not all sales opportunities are created equal, and prospects with a greater potential payout are worth more of your time while others might only merit an abbreviated discovery. AI lead scoring tools can help you tell the difference up front, before you’ve committed too much of your most valuable resource: time.

My recommendation for this: Teams with access to the Enterprise versions of the HubSpot Sales Hubs and HubSpot Marketing Hub have access to AI-powered lead scoring. Since we’re still at the Professional Tier, I’ve looked into Leadspace for a solution that combines AI and big data to help you prioritize the most promising leads. The InsideSales platform also purports to provide insight on which leads are most likely to convert.

3. Engage Efficiently

Depending on how much control you’re willing to relinquish, there are a range of tools available that can actually engage with your prospects on your behalf. Thanks to my team’s success with our chatbot implementation for leads at the top of the funnel, I’m determined to lean on AI in subsequent stages as well.

My recommendation for this: Conversica is an AI-driven assistant trained on billions of actual interactions to carry on two-way conversations with prospects. Follow-ups are definitely one of the most time-intensive components of my own sales processes, which is why letting AI handle colder leads so I can focus on warmer ones sounds very intriguing.

4. Personalize Effectively

At Lead Prosper, our solution could be used by a wide variety of digital marketers ranging from lead generators to marketing agencies to service providers interested in purchasing leads. When you have an expansive, complex product or one with a wide variety of use cases, it makes sense that different prospects will be interested in different functionalities.

My recommendation for this: I’ve seen big benefits from upgrading to a more sophisticated CMS. Tools such as Seismic or PathFactory can help sales teams with content management, keeping assets organized and updated while also recommending the most effective assets for different types of buyers at different stages of the journey.

5. Know Your Prospect

Ever visited a new place and picked up a bit of an accent? It’s called mirroring, and we all do it subconsciously to some degree in order to fit in with the people around us. Great sales reps also know mirroring is an effective way to build rapport with prospects and establish trust, but what if there was a way to get deeper insights into your prospects’ personalities and motivations before ever meeting them?

My recommendation for this: I’m still putting in the legwork and conducting good old-fashioned research, but I’m curious about Crystal — an AI tool that analyzes publicly available data about your prospects to produce personality assessments illustrating the best ways to connect and communicate with them. Besides promising to accelerate relationship building and increase conversion rates, it also integrates with a variety of leading sales tools, including HubSpot.

Sealing the Deal

AI is no longer just a novelty, and the sales enablement market is flooded with tools that can transform your workflows and take your sales game to the next level.

Want some quick wins? I’ve found AI the most approachable in content creation and personalization. Once you’ve taken that initial leap, you’ll find — like I did — that AI can address weaknesses, increase capacity, and empower you and your sales team in a variety of surprising and impactful ways.