Generative AI has the potential to revolutionize every facet of sales enablement, from training to customer outreach. Rather than spending time on repetitive manual tasks and relying on intuition to close deals, your salespeople can instead dedicate themselves to bringing in prospects. More importantly, generative AI can empower everyone in your organization with a deeper understanding of buyer personas, market trends, and more. 

And that’s not even getting into the other applications of the technology, such as customer education. We’ll discuss why your organization should incorporate GenAI into its sales enablement toolkit.

What is Generative AI?

As the name suggests, generative AI (GenAI for short) is a form of artificial intelligence that’s capable of generating content based on training data. This content could be anything from text and images to audio and video. Some GenAI tools are built on multimodal models, allowing them to parse and generate multiple different types of media. 

Applications of Generative AI for Sales Enablement

There are several significant use cases of GenAI in sales enablement. 

Automating repetitive or routine tasks and processes through GenAI allows your team to focus on activities that drive business value. Potential targets for sales enablement automation targets include email outreach, proposal responses, lead scoring, data entry, and opportunity tracking. 

GenAI can also help your business gain deep insights into customers through advanced analytics. Generative AI solutions such as ChatGPT excel at pattern recognition, making them uniquely suited for business analytics. You can also use GenAI for data orchestration and categorization. 

You can even take things a step further and apply prescriptive analytics, using both real-time and historical data alongside a specialized GenAI tool to create accurate projections and predictions, which you can then use to make more informed sales decisions. 

Lead management represents another common use case for GenAI. By using artificial intelligence to guide your prospecting and qualification efforts, your business can more efficiently identify its most promising leads. This, in turn, allows your salespeople to focus their efforts where they will make the most difference. 

Content creation is a major emerging use case for generative AI, as well — though it’s best done with caution. While GenAI tools can create basic copy and images without much difficulty, anything more sophisticated is going to require ample human oversight. Remember that AI does not actually create anything on its own, but rather iterates based on training data. 

GenAI can be used to apply personalization to existing content and create content at scale based on pre-made frameworks; it is far more effective at these tasks than at generating content entirely from scratch. 

As mentioned earlier, artificial intelligence can also be used to improve training through personalized materials and learning paths. Other potential use cases include proactive outreach, automated customer support, and AI assistants for salespeople. 

Best Practices for Using Generative AI in Sales Enablement

Where generative AI is concerned, The same general best practices apply to sales enablement as to other fields. These include, but are not limited to: 

• Manage your data. Especially if you intend to train your own model, make sure your organization has well-established data governance practices and excellent data hygiene. This includes policies around data privacy, storage, and sanitization. 

• Prepare your people. Generative AI is powerful, but you won’t be able to use it to its fullest potential unless your employees fully understand what it is and how it works. Prior to deploying GenAI, make sure your sales enablement team undergoes the necessary technical training.

Prepare your infrastructure. Make sure you have access to infrastructure that can actually support GenAI. This could be specialized computer chips, AI PCs, or simply a cloud platform provided to you by a vendor.