How Account Executives Can Maximize Sales Impact Using AI

Kicking off the day with a coffee and powering through until the last deal closes, Account Executives (AEs) have their hands full from dawn to dusk.

Imagine if there was a secret to powering through those tasks at 10x the speed. Think about having a tool that turns every tick of the clock into productive gold.

Enter the revolutionary realm of AI for sales.

Today, AI doesn’t just automate. It summarizes content, drafts emails, analyzes data, and so much more.

Dive into this article, and you’ll walk alongside an AE through their daily hustle. We’re peeling back the curtain to show you how this new technology isn’t merely a fast pass to complete tasks. It’s a turbo boost, enhancing every aspect of the art and strategy of selling.

Cold emails

Every sales rep knows the drill: you’re trying to strike the perfect balance between professional and personal, all while standing out in a crowded inbox–but it’s pretty tough even for seasoned veterans.

Enter Lavender.ai, the AI assistant that’s reshaping the cold email landscape. This clever tool brings the savvy of AI right to your email drafts, ensuring that each message is primed to pique interest and prompt replies.

Lavender.ai acts like a co-pilot for your outbound efforts. It scrutinizes your email drafts, offering real-time suggestions to sharpen your language, enhance clarity, and nail the tone. Think of it as having an expert editor over your shoulder, one that knows the ins and outs of sales psychology and what makes people tick (and click).

The result? A cold email that feels anything but cold. An email that opens the door to deeper conversations and, ultimately, to deals that close.

Meeting prep

Preparing for meetings can be a grind. You have to spend hours sifting through social media, blogs, interviews, and the latest news. And if you’re picking up where a previous conversation left off, you’ll need to dive into your CRM for notes, not to mention comb through past emails.

But that’s where AI steps in and changes the game.

Let’s say you’ve got a meeting with someone new. That’s when you turn to ChatGPT. Feed it info from your prospect—like LinkedIn posts or blog entries—then ask it to boil it all down to the key points.

Get ChatGPT ready by priming it:

“You’re a sales rep for [COMPANY NAME]. You are preparing for a first meeting with a [JOB TITLE] from [COMPANY NAME]. Given your upcoming meeting, you'd like to better understand the individual you’ll be speaking with. I will provide their LinkedIn profile, any personal blogs or publications they've authored, and any other relevant links that might offer insights into their professional background and personal interests.”

Then make the request:

"Based on the following content from [NAME], please provide insights into their interests, preferences, recent activities, and potential pain points or needs that I can address in our upcoming sales meeting." [Insert content here]

With this prompt, ChatGPT will identify any pain points, goals, interests, and concerns in the content they publish.

You’ve still got to find the content, but AI takes on the heavy lifting. And if you’re looking to find out how your prospect ticks, you’ve got tools like Crystal Knows or Humantic AI. These tools take the same info and run it through different psychological analyses. So, you know how to tailor your pitch to make an impact on a deeper level.

But why stop at the person? You can put AI to work on understanding their company, too. Grab press releases, social media updates, and external reviews from Capterra or G2. Feed them to ChatGPT with similar prompts to get the lowdown on the company’s recent ups and downs, shifts in their industry, and areas where you could collaborate.

Run an effective meeting

After your morning coffee kicks in, it’s time to jump into the heart of your day: the sales meetings.

Believe it or not, AI can help you in real time during your call.

Sometimes it’s hard to tell how a prospect is feeling with their words alone. That’s where AI sentiment analysis tools come into play. Tools like JustCall join in on your call and can listen in on the tone and energy of the conversation. They give you a heads-up if the person on the other end sounds hesitant or super interested. With this kind of insight, you can shift your approach as needed, keeping you one step ahead throughout the meeting.

Follow-up

After your meeting ends, there are a hundred things to do: send emails, update the CRM, and plan what to do next. But AI can take over some of these tasks.

Take the transcription of your call and put it into ChatGPT with this prompt:

“Here’s what happened in my latest chat with [Account Name]. Can you help me write a follow-up email that goes over the main points we discussed and lists what we need to do next?”

And then there’s the CRM, which can be a drag to update. But with WINN.AI, it’s easy. After your meetings, it puts all the important information into the CRM for you. This means your CRM always contains the latest info about your deals, but you don’t have to waste time on busy work.

Pipeline review

Checking on open deals used to mean going through each one by one to assess its progress and potential. It can be a tedious task and prone to bias and human error.

But for AEs today, AI tools like 6sense have changed the game. With 6sense, you get a quick view of all your deals that are still in the works. It helps sales reps figure out which accounts to put at the top of their list. It has smart dashboards that point out the deals that are most likely to close soon. So you can put your energy into the right places.

And then there’s forecasting, which used to mean creating spreadsheets and lots of them. Now, AEs have AI tools like InsightSquared to help them out. It looks at past deals, current activities, and even market trends to predict future sales. This means sales leaders get the numbers they need to plan ahead, but skip the number crunching.

Prospecting

The buzz of activity, the whirl of networking, and the diligence of follow-ups – the lead-up to any conference is a marathon. With all the tasks AEs already have on their plate, preparing for a conference often falls to the bottom of the list. That’s especially true when they have to a new city for the conference.

Thankfully, AI is here to make the run a little easier.

Conference prep means figuring out who’s going to be there. Gather your intel: who’s sponsoring, who’s attending, and who’s speaking. Lists of this year’s participants and highlights can offer invaluable hints about who you’ll be rubbing shoulders with.

To get a leg up, feed all this data to ChatGPT. Here’s how you can prompt it to get the key insights:

"I'm going to [Conference Name] about [Industry/Field]. Can you tell me about the people who are going, what they do, and what they might want to know or need help with?" That way, you'll understand the crowd better when you arrive.

Now, onto networking: it’s the heart of the conference experience.

When you’re ready to reach out, you should try an AI-powered email tool, like Snov.io. Snov.io is your AI-powered pen pal, drafting emails that hit just the right note. But first, Snov.io needs the scoop. Tell it about the conference, its schedule, and the person you’re eager to meet. Explain why you’re reaching out, list any recent achievements, and share the latest industry buzz.

Snov.io can take it from there. Plus it can even find and verify emails for you.

This way, you’ll be all set for some great conversations that could lead to some awesome opportunities.

Hand off accounts to SEs and CS

Landing a deal is just the start; the real test is in passing the torch to the customer success (CS) and solution engineers teams. CS and SE are responsible for making the AE’s promise a reality. But if they don’t know enough about the deal, it will be hard to deliver. Thankfully, AI can make the transition a lot smoother.

For AI to help, sales reps need to feed it every piece of customer communication—think emails, meeting notes, call transcripts, and sales decks.

Here are some AI prompts that can transform your handoff process:

• Comprehensive Summary Prompt: “Sum up the main points from these sales conversations. Highlight what we need to deliver and what the client is expecting from us.”

• Clarification Prompt: “What exactly did we sell in this deal? Make a list of all the services, products, and solutions and sort them out by priority and due date.”

• Setting Expectations Prompt: “Go through these chat records from our sales talks. What does the client expect after they buy, and how do they want us to help them out? Pin down what they’ve said both explicitly and implicitly.”

With these AI-generated insights, the CS and SE teams can craft an onboarding strategy that aligns seamlessly with sales.

Presenting proposals

Drafting a proposal is a task that eats into your hours, but with AI solutions like Superwin, it becomes a breeze.

Here’s how it works: you begin by defining what makes your offer stand out—the value model—and how you want to structure your proposals. Next up, you train the system with your most successful materials—those presentations and documents that have won you business before. Connect the dots by integrating your CRM and call recording tools, which will feed the AI tool with rich insights about your potential customers.

Once you’ve got all this set up, you’re ready to roll. Superwin will take over, churning out proposals that are both professional and customized. It’s like having a digital assistant who knows exactly how to pitch your product’s value in the most compelling way possible.

Final thoughts

As the day unwinds from that initial coffee-fueled kickoff to the final email’s click, AI is transforming the beat of an AE’s day-to-day life.

Gone are the days of writing cold emails, taking meeting notes, or updating the CRM. AI whips up emails in seconds, summarizes calls effortlessly, and eliminates hours of data entry.

In other words, it helps AEs streamline their busy work and focus on what really matters–selling.

Welcoming this technological comrade means more than just getting through your to-do list. It’s about forging a path to a thriving pipeline filled with closed-wins.