A guide to AI sales tools and choosing one that’s right for your team

Ready to turn your customer interactions into insights you can use to win deals? 

Sales AI tools are already a must-have on the leading sales teams. They’re using AI to analyze calls, spot hidden deal risks, and get the information they need to win more deals, faster. It’s time your team started using AI to unlock smarter strategies, boost revenue, and free up valuable time that could be spent selling, rather than on manual and administrative tasks.

In this article, we’ll discuss everything you need to know about choosing an AI sales tool. That includes reviewing the types of tools that exist, their benefits and drawbacks, and how to integrate one into your team. 

What types of AI sales tools exist? 

Your sales team can use AI for a variety of tasks. Here’s a run-down of the main types of sales-related, AI-backed tools currently on the market: 

Revenue forecasting tools

Revenue forecasting tools have been around for a while, and most of them use historical data to provide basic forecasts. Now, with the addition of AI to forecasting, you have more advanced tools to choose from. Today, they use real-time data and scenario modeling to create more accurate predictions about your pipeline, with some providing actionable insights about individual deals. The best forecasting tools are data-driven, and offer up detailed information that goes beyond predictions to point out at-risk deals and opportunities to take corrective action.

Generative AI tools

With generative AI, you can create personalized content, such as emails and targeted social media posts. Reps can save hours of time each week while also providing their buyers with more effective outreach. A Gong survey found that sellers spend 5.9 hours each week drafting personalized content, and 6.2 hours creating content from scratch. Not surprisingly, 78% of sales reps want to use generative AI to personalize their sales engagement and shorten their writing time.

Conversation intelligence tools

Conversation intelligence tools transcribe and analyze call recordings to give you valuable insights into customers’ needs and challenges, as well as reps’ performances on calls. Managers can use it to target their coaching and reps can use it for self-coaching that boosts their sales performance.

Lead-scoring tools

AI lead-scoring tools can help your sales team make better decisions about which leads to prioritize. These tools analyze customer data to predict the likelihood of conversion. Use these tools to get better results from your sales efforts. 

Coaching tools

Sales managers can now use AI to highlight any topics of conversation they want to track, alongside the usual keyword trackers. This makes it easier to spot skills gaps and — in the right platform — enable personalized feedback at scale. With the right AI-backed tool, it’s also easier to spot and share best practices across a sales team, no matter its size.

Risk-spotting tools

AI can identify both risks and opportunities inside accounts by analyzing customer interactions, engagement levels, and buying signals. This “foresight” helps reps avoid losing deals that are in flight, and also helps customer success teams reduce customer churn.

What should you consider when selecting an AI sales tool? 

There’s a wealth of AI-backed sales tools available right now, which is great, but it can also feel overwhelming if you’re trying to find the perfect match. Remember, the best tool for your sales team depends on your workflows, your challenges, your anticipated growth, and more. Here are the key points to consider:

Alignment with your needs

Start by pinpointing your primary pain points. Do you struggle, for example, with poor lead qualification, email personalization, call analysis, or closing deals? Ensure the AI tool you’re considering addresses your most pressing challenges.

The AI model

AI tools are only as good as the data they’re trained on. What data was your tool’s AI model trained on? It’s important information in terms of understanding whether that tool will address your specific needs. When you choose an AI sales tool that was trained on industry-specific rather than general-purpose data, you’ll get more relevant capabilities and actionable insights.

Features and user-friendliness

Focus on a tool with essential features your team will use, and consider the time and training you’ll need for its successful adoption. A user-friendly interface and a simply visual presentation of insights will make the tool easier to learn and integrate into your workflows.

Integrations

Consider how the AI tool will fit into your current tech stack. Does it integrate seamlessly with your CRM, email platforms, and other essential tools? Consider potential future needs, too. If you need custom setups, check if an API is available.

Platforms over point solutions

Choosing a unified platform over multiple point solutions prevents potential problems and provides clear benefits for your sales team:

It avoids juggling multiple integrations and toggling between tools.
It provides a more streamlined workflow and unified data.
It’s often less expensive in the long term. 
It allows for better team collaboration in a shared, centralized platform.
There’s less training involved in adopting one platform.

Scalability and adaptability

Think long-term, not short-term. Can the tool grow and change alongside your business? Make sure it can handle your evolving product lines and sales strategies. Also look for flexible pricing models that match your potential growth. Consider the customization options, and finally, investigate the vendor’s track record. Do they have a history of innovation and adapting to market changes?

Support and learning resources

Find out what level of onboarding and ongoing technical support the vendor provides. Check for readily available training materials and make sure there are “easy learning” options. Investigate the vendor’s overall reputation and how responsive they are when customers need help.

Data security and privacy

Choose vendors with strong data security measures in place, especially when it comes to sensitive customer data. Make sure the tool you choose helps you comply with relevant regulations (like GDPR). Check that they have clear policies on data ownership and how customer information might be used.

Return on investment 

Calculate how quickly you might see a positive return on your investment through things like a boost to revenue, time saved, and process efficiencies. Don’t focus only on immediate results — consider the long-term benefits, too. Ask if the vendor has case studies from businesses whose situations, challenges, and pains are similar to yours.

Company culture and ethical considerations

Assess whether your team is open to change. Are they comfortable with adopting AI technology or would they need additional training and support?
Look for a vendor with a clear commitment to ethical AI practices.
Ensure the tool doesn’t introduce bias or favor certain groups of customers over others.
Choose a tool that prioritizes customer data protection and privacy.
Make sure the tool has safeguards against using your collected information in harmful ways.
Create clear guidelines for how your team will use AI-backed insights.
Use human oversight to ensure that whatever AI you choose, it aligns with your organization’s ethical principles.

Sales team involvement

Don’t underestimate the value of your sales team’s input when choosing an AI tool. Involve them from the start of your search. Ask them which features would make their jobs easier — you might be surprised by their insights and requests! Bringing your team into the decision-making process gives you a much better chance at successful adoption. 

What are the benefits and drawbacks of using AI-backed sales tools?

Benefits

Increase seller effectiveness

AI sales tools can increase your sales team’s effectiveness by providing insights and automation that wouldn’t be possible with manual processes alone. Our research showed that AI-assisted sales strategies can increase your win rates by 50%. These impressive gains are due to AI’s ability to analyze massive amounts of sales data to identify patterns in buyer behaviors and pinpoint ideal prospects. Some AI can even suggest the best next steps in a deal, personalize interactions, and sharpen your messaging, to create more success in converting leads and closing deals.

Improve productivity and save time

An AI sales tool can improve your team’s productivity, saving countless hours by automating mundane tasks and streamlining workflows. For example, AI-powered lead scoring helps you prioritize the best prospects, allowing you to focus your energy where it will have the most impact. A majority (60%) of commercial leaders said that AI significantly impacted their ability to identify quality leads. With its ability to automate lead scoring and qualification, AI can also help you manage a larger pool of leads.

Scheduling tools can seamlessly integrate with your team’s calendars and automate meeting prep, which saves you time. Generative AI tools can quickly draft emails, follow-up sequences, or product summaries. By taking on all the mundane but necessary parts of the process, AI frees up time for relationship-building and selling activities.

Reduce errors

With AI in the driver’s seat, you and your team will handle data less often, minimizing errors and calculation mistakes, and generating more reliable forecasts and reports. You’ll never have to redo calculations or fix mistakes.

Improve decision-making

AI sales tools analyze vast amounts of data to uncover hidden patterns, trends, and correlations hiding in your customer interactions. AI models use this data to predict customer behaviors, recommend next steps, and highlight potential risks before they become major problems in your deals. This takes the guesswork out of the sales process, allowing your team to make better, data-driven decisions about individual deals and accounts. With more accurate forecasts at hand, your leadership team can also make better decisions about the overall business.

Personalize customer experiences

AI sales and engagement tools allow your team to tailor their interactions using customer data. For example, they can personalize email subject lines, make product suggestions based on past purchases and current challenges, or generate emails that address a prospect’s specific pain points. This creates a highly relevant experience for the customer, which leads to more satisfaction and loyalty.

Coach sales teams

AI identifies strengths and areas for improvement by analyzing call recordings, email interactions, and win/loss data. It also offers benchmarking against other sales team members, which reps can use for self-coaching. Managers use this information to focus their coaching efforts — they know who needs help and with what sales skill. It gives coaches an unprecedented ability to craft personalized feedback, guidance, and tailored training programs for each team member.

Improve job satisfaction and retention

By working smarter with AI, sales reps can close more deals and achieve better results. When reps see this reflected in their metrics, it boosts job satisfaction and motivation, which discourages them from seeking work elsewhere. That’s a massive financial win for sales orgs, as onboarding can be costly in terms of hiring, training, and ramp times (i.e., the time it takes to get a new hire up to quota).

Improvement over time

On top of all the benefits outlined above, AI sales tools improve continuously over time. The more data they have, the more they learn — and the more accurate and relevant data you get, quarter over quarter. 

Drawbacks

There can be a few drawbacks to using AI sales tools, especially initially. Fortunately, there are ways to mitigate these drawbacks, as noted below: 

Initial cost

While AI sales tools require an upfront investment, their ROI potential is significant. McKinsey research found that investing in AI can lead to revenue growth of 3% to 15% and boost sales ROI by 10% to 20%. These impressive gains confirm that AI tools can offset their initial costs and drive long-term profitability.

Complexity of setup and implementation

Choose a vendor that provides good onboarding support and training resources. Doing so will have a powerful — and positive — impact on your setup and implementation experience.

Dependence on data quality

To get the most out of your AI sales tools, collect accurate data and regularly review it for any inconsistencies. Even though your AI sales tool will help you automate much of your data collection, you should still incorporate human oversight into your data review processes and have a good sense of what data underpins your work.

Potential for bias

Conduct regular bias audits of your AI sales tools to ensure they’re used responsibly and minimize the potential for unfairness. Again, you’ll need human expertise to put this into practice.

Need for human oversight

Treat AI as a support tool, not as a replacement for human sales expertise. From the frontlines to your leadership team, your revenue team members are still responsible for their performance, even if it’s bolstered by AI. 

Concern about jobs being lost to AI

While AI is great at streamlining routine tasks and providing data-driven insights, it simply can’t replace strong, human relationships … or handle complex negotiations. To get the most out of an AI sales tool, train your sales team to use AI as a data-driven assistant that frees them up to focus on building rapport and understanding their clients’ needs. Sales reps who are backed by AI are every bit as valuable as they once were — in fact, they’re probably worth more in terms of closed-won deals!

Data privacy and security

To keep your own data and your customers’ data safe, choose vendors with strong security features. Make sure you follow data privacy laws (e.g., GDPR), and have clear guidelines in place on your teams about how to use customer information.

Although all tools — including AI sales tools — have downsides, these are usually outweighed by their benefits. With careful planning, you can choose the right tool and overcome any initial challenges. Remember that as more sales orgs adopt AI-backed tools, you’ll likely need them just to keep up with the competition.

9 best practices for using sales AI tools 

You can set yourself up for success if you know the best practices for AI sales tools before you bring them on board. Here are nine proven tips to help you craft a successful launch:

Prioritize security and privacy
Clarify for your team how to use customer data ethically and responsibly. Address any privacy concerns they might have.
Make sure you’re compliant with regulations
Data privacy laws like GDPR are a must-follow, not an option. Figure out exactly how those laws affect your sales process. Give your team easy access to those rules and ensure that everyone understands what they need to do to stay compliant.
Make learning easy
Provide clear training sessions and easy-to-follow guides that are tailored to your sales team’s needs.
Appoint an AI advocate
Find a tech-savvy team member who’s interested in AI. Have them master the tool and become the go-to person for questions.
Set clear and realistic expectations 
Define what success looks like with your chosen AI tool (e.g., an increase in lead conversions, time saved on drafting outreach). Create shared goals and track metrics to celebrate wins and make adjustments.
Start with targeted wins 
Don’t try to do everything at once. Focus on a few pain points AI can solve well, so you see results and can build on that success.
Establish an AI feedback loop
Create a way for your team to easily provide feedback on how well the tool works — or doesn’t work.
Develop ethical AI practices
AI can be powerful in unexpected ways. Have regular discussions about its ethical use, potential biases, the responsible use of data, and staying on the right side of regulations.
Keep everyone in the loop 
Review how the tool performs, share success stories, and troubleshoot challenges.

What does the future hold for sales tools?

Kyle Asay says that with its rapid evolution and widespread uptake, “AI is quickly going to become less of an advantage and more of a must-have.” He describes it as a minimum standard for success in sales today.

Here’s what we can anticipate in the months and years to come:

Deep customer insights 

AI systems will be able to analyze customer data even more deeply to further understand buyers’ unique behaviors and needs. You’ll continue to respond with personalized interactions at scale.

Precise lead qualification

AI will get even better at pinpointing your best potential leads, which will save your team valuable time. With advanced AI tools, such as Gong Forecast, analyzing massive amounts of data, you can expect sales forecasts to become incredibly accurate.

Rapid content generation

Generative AI will streamline the creation of high-quality engagement, marketing materials, and sales scripts tailored to individual buyers. This acceleration in content output will be a game-changer. Gartner predicts that 60% of B2B sales will use generative AI sales technologies by 2028. This is an increase from less than 5% in 2023. Reflecting this trend, there’s been a 464% increase in emails using Gong’s generative AI since February 2023.

Emotionally intelligent AI

Author and innovation consultant Soren Kaplan believes that AI will soon become emotionally aware. He predicts a world in which “salespeople pitching a new customer through a videoconference can see hidden real-time feedback about the emotional state of the prospect and adjust their pitch to be more persuasive.” 

This presents tremendous potential in terms of refining sales pitches in real time, but brings with it a host of ethical considerations around consent, privacy, and bias prevention. In this scenario, strong AI governance will be more important than ever.

Human expertise required

While AI will excel at data-driven tasks and automation, the human element of relationship building, nuanced negotiations, and strategic thinking is irreplaceable. The most successful sales teams will use a balance of people-based and AI-backed approaches.

Why Gong is the right AI sales tool for your company

“To say Gong crushed it would be an understatement. All the people using Gong were responsible for 30% more revenue, year-over-year.” —John Burke, Virgin Pulse’s Senior Leader for Solutions Consulting

Features

Gong’s user-friendly interface and the powerful features listed below make it easy to act on the platform’s customer insights:

Gong’s Deal Board and pipeline analytics help you proactively manage deals and identify potential roadblocks.
Its AI-driven sales forecasting improves your forecast accuracy so you can make better strategic decisions.
Competitor tracking (through Smart Trackers) helps you stay ahead of the game and understand your competitive landscape.
Conversation analytics provide you with insights into customer needs and pain points.
It’s easy to give personalized feedback at scale using Scorecards to assess reps’ calls.
Automatically generated Call Summaries include highlights, next steps, and action items from a call, making it easy to save time and stay up to date.
Incredibly accurate call recording and speech-to-text transcription lets you scan conversations quickly.
In Ask Anything, you can ask Gong’s AI for information about contacts, deals, or accounts (e.g., “What’s the main pain point for this buyer?” “Are they engaged enough in the buying process?”).

A proprietary AI model

Gong developed a proprietary AI model using billions of sales interactions, so it’s perfectly tailored to sales organizations. The platform understands the unique language and patterns of sales calls and emails, so it gives you deeper insights than tools like ChatGPT, which are trained on a public dataset that includes less relevant data.

Hundreds of integrations

Gong integrates with Salesforce, Zoom, and hundreds of others in the Gong Partner Network. These include tools for automation and workflows, data and BI, calendars, email, CRM, support and customer success, and digital interactions. This gives you more comprehensive ways to access Gong insights and make decisions using data from across your tech stack. It also includes an integration with Zapier, connecting thousands more apps. Gong doesn’t charge extra for integrations.

A unified platform

Gong’s unified platform gives your entire team a centralized place where they can access insights about customer interactions and work together more easily to sell collaboratively. It also makes coaching easier than ever and enables sellers and managers to drive sales performance. There’s no need to juggle multiple sales solutions when your whole team works in Gong.

Scalability and adaptability

Gong’s cloud-based infrastructure easily handles increasing users and data, and its flexible pricing lets you scale your subscription as your team grows.

Gong is highly adaptable to different workflows, offering customizable fields, deal stages, and dashboards, alongside an extensive integration library, and for more specialized needs, Gong lets developers build integrations. 

Support and resources

Gong offers unparalleled support and resources to help you get the most out of the platform. You have a comprehensive knowledge base in your dedicated Customer Success Manager, and a help center for self-guided solutions. There’s also live chat support for quick questions, and you can submit a support ticket for more detailed inquiries. 

The Gong community forum, called Gong Visioneers, is where users can connect, share best practices, and seek advice from each other. There’s also a newsletter, podcasts, and a library of webinars you can watch on demand. 

Data security and privacy

Gong offers a strong set of security measures:

Role-based access controls (RBAC)
Single Sign-On (SSO) integration
Data encryption at rest and in transit
Regular vulnerability scans and penetration testing
SOC 2 Type II compliance
GDPR compliance
Option for customer-managed encryption keys
Detailed audit logging
Data retention policies

AI sales tools bring your revenue game to the next level 

From real-time insights to automated processes, AI is revolutionizing selling. It unlocks data-driven strategies, saves valuable time, and allows your team to provide buyers and customers with highly personalized experiences. 

Gong stands out as a leader in AI-backed sales tools with its powerful features, user-friendly platform, and proprietary AI model. 

Ready to streamline your processes, empower your team, and boost your results? 

Discover what Gong can do for you. Book a demo today.