AI in Sales Enablement: 7 AI use cases beyond ChatGPT

If you’ve been reading up on artificial intelligence (AI) in sales, you might’ve noticed that most of the attention seems to be focused on generating content, AI-powered SDRs, ChatGPT prompts, and automating routine tasks like data entry and call logging.

But the truth is there’s a huge variety of tasks throughout the sales process that AI can help with—beyond doing outreach at a massive scale.

AI in sales enablement is an especially compelling area because there’s such a big opportunity to improve on legacy workflows like onboarding, analytics, and content delivery that are plagued with inefficiency and repetition.

Take sales enablement content, for example. 

Everyone knows the same few names (like Highspot and Showpad), and for the most part, these platforms all work in pretty similar ways: content gets uploaded, sales teams search for what they need, and sometimes they’re able to find it.

But what if AI could turn your sales enablement tools into more than just glorified repositories of content? 

In this blog, we’ll look at how sales organizations can use AI to improve enablement workflows—in a wide range of ways. 

It’s not just about productivity

Okay, productivity is a big part of what AI offers. But there’s a lot more that sales orgs get out of using AI for enablement besides just “reps don’t have to manually type up notes from every call.”

More actionable insights

AI is especially useful for analyzing data much more quickly than a human can. 

From a development and training perspective, this is a big advance for any sales organization planning to scale up. Managers can only review and grade so many sales calls manually. 

Now, instead of listening to recordings from beginning to end, they can use AI to analyze these conversations and detect if reps followed their sales methodology or playbook consistently. 

There are already some AI-powered contact center solutions that can do this—if you have a large sales team, this could easily cut down QA time from hours to just minutes and give managers more time to focus on coaching instead of combing through hours of recordings. 

More conversational intelligence

While most people think of numbers when they hear “data.” But in sales, the conversational data from all those discovery and demo calls that your sales team is having every day contain a treasure trove of insights. 

By leveraging natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning algorithms, some AI tools can extract important insights from your sales recordings and transcripts. 

• What pain points are prospects bringing up? 
• Which features are they most interested in? 
• What are the most common objections that your reps have to deal with? 

These are just a few examples of the kinds of information AI can pull from sales calls to help both managers and reps improve their coaching and sales strategies.

Faster sales velocity

Ultimately, the benefit of AI is simple: speed. Some tools automate parts of the sales process (such as follow-ups), while others provide real-time coaching that helps reps move prospects through the sales funnel more efficiently and close deals faster.

The 7 highest-potential use cases for AI in sales enablement

Now, let’s look at some potential applications of AI in sales enablement in more detail.

1. Content management

Content management is constantly one of the biggest pain points for sales enablement teams. 

Historically, content gets uploaded to a CMS (content management system), and sales reps can search or browse for the one-pager, battlecard, proposal template, or whatever content they need. 

If they’re lucky, it won’t take more than a few minutes to find the most up-to-date version, with current product descriptions and pricing.

In other words, they’re left to fend for themselves. 

Modern CMS solutions have made it much easier for Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success teams to organize, share, and track both rep- and client-facing content.

For example, Dock’s content management system lets revenue teams organize content into Boards and Tags to more easily find content by theme, format, or use case.

In the future, AI will be able to extend these benefits even further:

• Content discoverability: For example, AI can improve content discoverability when sellers are doing research in their CMS by suggesting relevant materials based on the sales rep's needs and the stage of the deal they’re working on. (If you use Netflix or Amazon Prime, then you’re probably already familiar with this type of AI-enhanced content discovery in your recommendations.)
• Content sorting: AI-powered content management systems will soon be able to automatically sort assets by format, customer segment, subject matter, etc. 
• Personalized content sharing: Say a sales rep is on a call with a prospect who works at a dental practice and wants to share some healthcare-focused marketing materials. AI could automatically search all connected knowledge sources and instantly pull those pieces of content for the rep to share.
• Analysis of impact: On a related note, AI can also track and analyze how sales content is used by prospects and provide insights into which pieces are most effective at advancing deals, which can inform go-to-market strategy and help them create more high-impact materials in the future.

2. Sales asset creation

But what if you don’t have enough resources or staff to constantly churn out personalized sales enablement assets at scale? 

AI can help here too, by automating the creation of sales assets like proposals and one-pagers that are tailored to each prospect's specific needs and preferences.

For example, you could drop in an AI-generated call summary from Fathom, pop that into ChatGPT and ask it to personalize existing sales messaging based on the call transcript, and then drop that new copy into your sales proposal.

Tools like Outreach have already rolled out generative AI-powered features that write first drafts of sales emails and suggest edits to increase engagement and conversion rates. 

3. Real-time coaching and enforcing adherence to playbooks

According to HBR, leading sales and revenue operations teams attribute 60% or more of their total pipeline in any quarter to actively designed and deployed sales plays.

But even though many sales enablement teams may use methodologies and playbooks like MEDDIC, SPICED, and BANT, making sure that every rep sticks to the outlined steps is easier said than done.

AI can help ensure that sales reps follow prescribed sales methodologies and playbooks by providing real-time guidance. 

Some tools like Dialpad’s Ai Playbooks do this in the form of a live checklist—during a sales conversation. During the performance review or QA process, it also saves sales managers time by showing them whether a seller followed each step in their playbook without the manager having to listen to the entire call or read the whole transcript.

Similar to real-time AI agent assists, these AI features can analyze sales calls and other customer interactions to detect whether reps are following scripts and asking the right questions with minimal manager oversight. 

AI sentiment analysis tools like Gong provide an overview of all active conversations, allowing coaches to quickly spot if a conversation with a prospect is heading into negative sentiment territory. This helps them immediately see if they need to jump in to steer the conversation back onto the right track—without having to listen in on every call.

4. Competitor analysis

Getting salespeople up to speed on top competitors and positioning strategy is a key priority for enablement teams. But competitive audits are an intensive process, and at most companies, updates happen once a year—if you’re lucky. 

But the competitive landscape is constantly changing. Your competitors are constantly adding new features and adjusting their pricing, and then you’ve got new competitors that pop up from time to time.

AI can help automate this data collection process and save your sales enablement team from having to do such extensive manual research.

How? Well, your prospects are likely talking about (and comparing you against) your competitors when they talk to your sales team, which means there’s a goldmine of competitive insights in your everyday sales recordings and transcripts.

Competitive enablement products like Klue have introduced AI features to automatically summarize competitor reviews and flag potential differentiation opportunities.

Other AI solutions, like Dialpad’s contact center platform, can track and highlight mentions of keywords like competitors' names in sales calls. Product marketing and revenue leaders can then easily see if there are any spikes (or dips) in popularity or win rates against certain competitors, check out what prospects are saying—and help your sales team stay ahead of the competition. 

5. Buyer enablement

With sales teams getting less face-time with buying committees, digital sales rooms—shared online workspaces for sales teams and prospects—are becoming vital to buyer enablement because they help prospects’ many internal stakeholder groups stay aligned throughout the deal. 

Digital sales rooms are similar to a customizable interactive microsite, and one of their biggest benefits is that revenue teams can embed different types of content on the page including PDFs, videos, mutual action plans, and pricing proposals.

For example, Dock’s templates let you quickly drag and drop modules like pitch decks, pricing proposals, and more into a central hub to make it easy for prospects to access everything they need in one place. 

It can even pull in dynamic fields and information like deal size and status from CRMs like Salesforce: 

Not only does this improve buyer engagement, it also makes life easier for sales reps, who can share just one link with buyers instead of cluttering their inboxes with different attachments and email threads.

With AI’s current automation and generative powers (which seem to be growing by the week), it’s very likely that soon it’ll be able to automate different tasks within the building of a digital sales room, such as: 

• Suggesting next steps in a MAP based on past interactions, buyer behavior, and deal stages.
• Updating order forms. Creating order forms can be a time-consuming process—reps have to get internal approval on pricing, generate the document, and get them signed (the step that tends to slow down deals the most). AI can speed this up by taking pre-uploaded product libraries and legal documents, and generating sales order drafts based on that content.
• Auto-generating a business case for the rep based on past sales call recordings.

6. Lead segmentation

Lead scoring and segmentation is another area where AI can be helpful by predicting where buyers are in their journeys and focusing reps’ attention on the most relevant and high-potential lead segments.

Solutions like 6sense and Cognism leverage AI to group leads and create highly targeted segments based on factors such as customer behavior, demographics, past interactions, and purchase history.

This then empowers sales enablement teams to personalize strategies and messaging for their sellers according to the pain points and preferences of each segment, which increases the chances of conversion.

7. Sales forecasting and revenue intelligence

Because AI can analyze vast amounts of historical data and sales trends, it can significantly accelerate data-heavy tasks—like the ones you’d find in the sales forecasting process.

Some of the more popular revenue intelligence platforms, for example, have been marketing features like “AI-powered deal warnings and account insights” (Gong) that can “uncover patterns in your data, and assess gaps that could prevent you meeting or beating your number” (Clari).

What’s especially exciting about AI-powered forecasting tools is they’re able to continuously update their predictive analytics as they ingest more data, which results in more dynamic forecasts that adjust automatically to changes in the market or sales pipelines.

Empower your reps (and coaches) with AI-powered sales enablement

The potential use cases of AI in sales enablement are vast—and they’re continuously evolving. From informing sales strategies to getting reps the information they need, when they need it, AI can help sales organizations capitalize on endless opportunities to close more deals and improve performance across the entire sales journey.

If you’re interested in learning how to improve your sales enablement and rep onboarding process, reach out to our team to see how enablement teams are using Dock (and get a sneak peek at exciting AI features coming soon).