Boosting Sales Performance with AI: A CRO’s Guide to Leveraging AI Across the Sales Pipeline

The role of Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) has never been more critical. As industries grapple with economic uncertainty, it falls on sales leaders to drive sustainable revenue growth. At the same time, buyers have more information and choices than ever before. To succeed in this environment, CROs must find ways to increase sales productivity, improve lead conversion, and accelerate deal velocity.

Salesforce surveyed over 2,000 sales and service professionals as part of its Generative AI Snapshot Research Series, finding that more than 50% of sales and service teams don’t know how to get the most value out of generative AI. The research suggests that sales and service teams lack the training and trust in the technology to successfully use it at work. (Source: Salesforce – June 28, 2023)

Fortunately, recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) present new opportunities to drive sales growth. By leveraging AI across the sales pipeline, CROs can unlock game-changing insights, automate tedious tasks, and create highly personalized buying experiences. This enables sales teams to focus their time on building relationships and closing complex, strategic deals.

Attract More Leads with AI-Powered Marketing

One of the fastest ways to spur sales growth is to increase lead generation. With buyers now starting 57% of their journeys digitally, sales success depends heavily on digital marketing and demand generation.

AI is revolutionizing these front-end sales processes in several ways:

• Predictive lead scoring – By analyzing data signals, AI identifies and routes high-quality leads. This improves conversion rates.
• Dynamic ad targeting – AI platforms target ads to likely converters and optimize in real-time.
• Chatbots – Intelligent chatbots qualify leads 24/7 by capturing key details. Warm leads can then be routed to reps.
• Content recommendations – Platforms use AI to recommend and rank relevant content to promising prospects.

The bottom line is that AI dramatically improves the precision of your demand generation programs. Instead of a spray and pray approach, you can use data to laser focus your efforts.

Prioritize Outbound Prospecting with Predictive Analytics

When inbound marketing falls short, outbound prospecting is critical for hitting revenue goals. Predictive analytics tools powered by AI identify your best potential customers and inform prospecting strategies tailored to specific targets.

Outbound teams can leverage these AI capabilities to:

• Discover missed opportunities – AI reveals net-new targets that match your ICP but have not yet engaged.
• Optimize prospect lists – AI prioritizes outbound targets based on propensity to buy. Focusing on the best leads first improves productivity.
• Personalize outreach – AI generates insights to tailor messaging to what resonates with each prospect. Personalized messaging boosts connection rates up to 50%.

Essentially, AI acts as a prospecting accelerator – helping teams work smarter by enabling informed conversations to move buyers down the funnel.

Accelerate Lead Conversion with AI Assistants

Once leads enter the sales funnel, converting them quickly is critical for hitting growth targets. However, restricted sales capacity remains a major bottleneck.

AI sales assistants present a solution by automating mundane tasks to increase productivity. Key capabilities include:

• Data capture – Assistants gather common prospect information through conversational interactions, saving manual data entry.
• Meeting scheduling – AI handles scheduling, invites, and confirmations to eliminate this admin work.
• Document sharing – Sales materials and proposals can be efficiently delivered by AI tools integrated with systems.
• Lead nurturing – Based on identified needs, AI continues personalized interactions to warm leads.
• Product advising – Conversational AI guides prospects through options to progress the journey and prepare for consultations.

By handling repetitive tasks at scale, AI frees reps for high impact selling activities. This improves productivity and accelerates conversions.

Increase Deal Size with Data-Driven Pricing Optimization

Beyond closing more deals, sales leaders need strategies for growing deal size. Pricing optimization offers a major lever through AI capabilities like:

• Buyer willingness modeling – AI assesses data to estimate price thresholds customers will accept.
• Competitive analysis – AI monitors competitors’ pricing and positioning for market intelligence.
• A/B testing – AI tests different price points and bundles to identify optimal pricing.
• Dynamic pricing – AI customizes pricing for each customer based on their profile and behaviors.

With this intelligence, sales teams can have informed pricing discussions that capture full value and increase deal size.

Improve Sales Forecasting with Predictive Analytics

Accurately forecasting revenue is critically important yet difficult for CROs. However, predictive analytics tools powered by AI can forecast sales with up to 30% greater accuracy. Key techniques include:

• Buyer propensity modeling – AI assesses leads to estimate their close likelihood, providing funnel visibility.
• Macroeconomic modeling – By incorporating signals like industry projections, AI projects their sales impact.
• Automated scenario planning – AI stress tests forecasts through market change scenarios.
• Continuous learning – As more deal data comes in, models update to get smarter over time.

With their ability to synthesize multiple data points, AI forecasting tools offer CROs reliable visibility into revenue trajectories for better planning, and according to a recent Gartner article, AI will help enterprises create new products more quickly as industries like pharma, healthcare and manufacturing (CPG, food and beverages, chemicals and materials science) become AI-first, developing new drugs, less-toxic household cleaners, novel flavors and fragrances, new alloys, and faster and better medical diagnoses. (Source: Gartner)

Conclusion

While still in early phases, AI adoption across the sales pipeline has demonstrated enormous potential to enhance performance and drive growth. As capabilities continue advancing, CROs have an opportunity to build a strategic advantage by being early adopters.

Already, leading sales organizations are incorporating AI to grow accounts, win against competitors, scale revenue, enter new markets, and focus reps on consultative selling. But to capitalize on AI, CROs need to embrace change and invest in technology. Those who lead this transformation will be rewarded with sales teams that anticipate market changes, exceed customer expectations, and drive maximum impact.