Effective sales execution: The enormous AI advantage
March 5, 2025 
Enterprise Account Executive at Gong
Sales Operations
Enterprise Account Executive at Gong
Brian LaManna is an Enterprise Account Executive at Gong and a 6x President’s Club winner. Since joining Gong, Brian worked his way from Commercial AE to Mid-Market AE, and now to Enterprise AE after achieving 147% of quota in 2024. That same year, he founded Closed Won to help SDRs and AEs with repeatable systems and frameworks to support their success. He also shares tactical sales advice on LinkedIn, helping thousands of sellers sharpen their prospecting, discovery, and execution.
When companies don’t hit their revenue goals, sales teams often take the blame.
Sales teams are key players in executing sales and delivering revenue growth. But getting qualified leads through the pipeline is a group effort.
Cross-departmental collaboration, strategic alignment, personalized coaching, and intelligent processes and tools all play central roles in executing sales and setting reps up for success.
This article breaks down sales execution and explores how an AI-driven sales approach can help your reps hit their targets and drive more revenue.
What is sales execution?
Sales execution refers to the combination of strategies, methodologies, and processes used to guide buyers through the sales funnel. It’s the result of the strategic initiatives, resources, and tools your organization deploys in pursuit of its revenue goals.
How would you define sales in one word? Execution. Execution — no hesitation with execution. I think sales is just all about making it happen.
Marjorie Janiewicz, Former Chief Revenue Officer, HackerOne
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After you develop a great product or service, refine your brand messaging, and implement a sales strategy, sales execution brings it all to life.
The value of AI in sales execution
Technology can be the one factor that can absolutely boost your sales team’s success to gain a competitive advantage of up to a million dollars a year.
Pere Codina, Former CEO, Kompyte
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Industry leaders are already leveraging AI and data-powered tools in their sales execution strategies. Recent insights from McKinsey revealed:
- An impressive 65 percent of respondents surveyed in The state of AI in early 2024 said their organizations regularly use AI in at least one business function.
- AI’s potential value is highest in sales and marketing and IT — where most organizations are already using AI-based tools.
- AI adoption in marketing and sales has more than doubled since 2023.
- Data-driven teams that embrace personalization and AI are 1.7 times more likely to grow market share than those that don’t.
Let’s explore some of these AI-driven opportunities in more detail to understand how they enhance sales execution.
Data-driven sales planning and forecasting
Revenue forecasting has become increasingly difficult due to a lack of reliable and complete data. Many leaders need to leverage more than just their CRM data to forecast accurately, as CRM data is often incomplete and biased.
Udi Ledergor, Chief Evangelist, Gong
After three consecutive quarters using Gong Forecast, Upwork’s Director of Revenue Operations, Drew Korab, said, “Our accuracy has only grown, to the point that we’re now at 95 percent. That’s invaluable for a company that’s moving into new sales territory in an uncertain economy.”
Sales leaders and RevOps managers must be able to leverage data and analytics to enrich the sales planning process. By sifting through troves of customer interaction data to identify similar patterns and common themes, today’s intelligent sales solutions can identify emerging trends, pinpoint high-value opportunities, and improve forecast accuracy.
Forecasting is something every sales team has to do, but most teams miss the mark. At PointClickCare, we transitioned from a ‘best-guess’ model to a data-fueled forecasting approach, putting us within 3 percent of accuracy.
John Lorenc, Ph. D., Former VP of Sales Operations, PointClickCare
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Effective seller training and onboarding
B2B sales are growing increasingly complex and often involve multiple decision-makers, each with their own priorities and pain points. Sales reps must be able to answer questions, overcome objections, add context, and give buyers confidence that they are making the right choice.
Sales execution strategies require well-trained reps with deep product knowledge and customer understanding to be effective. Everyone on your team must also understand the sales cycle stages, how potential customers move through the sales pipeline, and their own role in the process.
To overcome objections and ask the right questions, SDRs need to know who your ideal buyers are (and aren’t), their biggest pain points, and how your offering solves them. Effective onboarding and training programs equip sales reps with:
- Scripts for emails, calls, and demos
- Responses to common buyer objections
- Objection handling tactics
- Sales techniques
- Competitive talk tracks
- Buyer persona details
- Target market insights
- Market strategies
- Sales goals and objectives
- Performance metrics
Intelligent revenue solutions can democratize data and support knowledge sharing as part of your organization’s training and development efforts.
Enhanced cross-departmental collaboration
Let’s say enablement gives you a great deck. Great. But they’re not telling you how to use it, where to use it, when to use it, which people to use it with, and why. Because they’ve never really done it.… Operations say you now have a reporting dashboard, but do they ever really peel back the layers to find out what data is important or how to interpret it? What do you do with that dashboard? How does that inspire you to understand your team’s performance? How does that inspire you to understand where you need to coach certain reps in terms of elevating their performance?
Vin Messina, VP of Sales Execution, Blackline
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Duplicated effort between departments, disjointed processes, and information silos all impede your sales team’s efforts and leave money on the table.
Intelligent revenue platforms let teams take a more coordinated, unified approach to close more deals and drive more revenue.
Take Gong’s AI Briefs, for instance. They allow sales leaders to easily structure, standardize, and streamline knowledge sharing. With pre-defined templates, account handoffs, and executive briefs, everyone can quickly get up to speed on account status, deal progress, or call context in any scenario.
Improved sales productivity and business efficiency
AI in sales can automate outreach, lead generation efforts, and other time-consuming administrative tasks so reps can spend more time selling.
In addition to automating manual processes and enhancing and streamlining workflows, intelligent revenue platforms can:
- Capture and transcribe calls
- Take notes
- Summarize discussion points and action items
- Identify what went well
- Identify potential gaps or roadblocks
- Update your CRM fields
- Suggest next steps
- Flag stalled deals
- Recommend personalized content
- Forecast more accurately
If you can automate all that crap, well, it opens up more time for sales reps to focus on the things that they’re paid to do and that they love doing, like meeting goals and closing deals. According to LinkedIn’s state of sales report, 73% of sales professionals are using this type of sales technology today to close more deals.
Pere Codina, Former CEO, Kompyte
Reveal Podcast: Uncovering the power of adaptability
Real-time pipeline insights and deal recommendations
Automating our lead routing, so leads will get sequenced to the right person and just no one has to do that. Automation really does that for sales processes. AI offers up cool insights that we’ve never known about from voice, which is really very helpful.
Rachel Zweck, Director of Sales Development, Flexera
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Data-driven tools can also tell you what’s in your sales pipeline, flag at-risk or slow-moving deals, estimate opportunity amounts by stage, and offer insights into your pipeline’s overall health.
Today’s AI sales tools can analyze customer preferences, purchase history, and buying propensity and provide real-time insights and deal recommendations. They can automatically notify reps of high-potential opportunities for recurring sales, upsells, and cross-sells. Then reps can focus their time and energy where it’s most likely to convert.
More personalized customer experiences
Many companies are automating customer communication entirely with a “spray and pray” approach. However, most customers say personalization attempts are failing.
This aligns with the findings in our recent State of Sales Engagement report, where:
- 91 percent of buyers said they didn’t think their experiences with sellers were personalized.
- Reps reported spending 12 hours a week on ineffective personalization.
Gong AI uses conversation intelligence to analyze customer interactions to suggest personalized messaging that will resonate with each buyer’s persona.
By being customer-centric and by zeroing in on your customer’s needs, determining solutions, and putting structures in place to deliver on them, you’ll be moving fast with sales execution in no time.
Vin Messina, VP of Sales Execution, Blackline
Reveal Podcast: Driving deals with value-based conversions
Strengthen your sales execution strategy with Gong AI
More than just recording, Forrester says, “Conversation intelligence (CI) tools will be the most important AI investment for sales organizations.” They will convert unstructured data (spoken, written, and video between buyers and sellers) into “deal and coaching insights that improve seller performance.”
The Forrester Wave™ report named Gong THE leader in conversation intelligence, calling it the most advanced and feature-rich solution on the market.
Gong AI can provide insights into how deals are going, which have potential (or aren’t worth the time), and offer coaching suggestions for your reps. You can use the best conversations for training and building the skills of individual reps.
It’s the sales execution solution your team has been waiting for.
Book a demo to see it for yourself.
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