Why Sales Managers Should Hire an AI Assistant ASAP
By Rob Levy, Talla Sales Director
I sell software for a living. I hire and manage people to help me sell more software. And the next member of my sales team I’m going to add is an artificially intelligent sales assistant, because no other “hire” is going to do more to help me close deals.
As a sales manager, I have three key priorities:
- Hitting my sales number
- Creating happy customers
- Building consistent sales support throughout my organization
Every salesperson understands that your quota is your number-one priority, always.
Every smart salesperson — and every good salesperson working in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), where recurring revenue is everything — knows that happy customers are the only path to sustained success.
Consistent organizational support means everyone in your company — from marketing to product management to customer success to technical support to engineering and even human resources — is operating from the same playbook. We all work with the same brand guidelines, product specifications, success processes, and price sheets. If we’re not all singing from the same hymn book, sales will eventually pay the price — either through lost deals, or through customer churn.
An AI assistant connected to a modern knowledge base helps me achieve all three priorities.
An AI assistant helps me hit my sales number by letting me (and every sales representative on my team) focus on our number. Every second I spend on something other than talking to prospects is a drag on my sales efficiency. An AI agent can update my CRM system, pull together all the product and prospect data I need to build a quote, and tie in all the pre-call and post-call marketing automation I need to manage around a deal. That gives me more time with prospects, which means I close more deals and hit (or beat) my number.
AI software like Apple’s Siri or Google’s Assistant does exactly this kind of work on your smartphone, pulling together calendar, contact and location data to help you schedule appointments, buy airline tickets, or navigate rush-hour traffic without going through a bunch of tedious steps on your phone apps. AI can do the same for all the administrative overhead of your sales process.
That same AI agent also helps sales managers like me in particular, because letting A.I. do that admin work — which is usually unique to your company — means my new sales agents can ramp up faster, so I spend less time training and more time selling. It also means I can see which new reps can cut it sooner, because their onboarding curve gets much shorter.
All that extra time I can spend selling is also time I can spend taking care of my customers, so they stay happy. And the same time-saving that my AI agent offers me it can offer to my partners on the marketing, customer success, and customer support teams, so they can spend extra time keeping customers happy, too.
An AI agent that keep tracks of all that sales-related information — just like Siri or Google can keep track of all the apps and data on your phone — can make sure that every member of every team in your company is referencing the same product specs, positioning guides, price lists, and support best practices. If we all want to sing from the same hymnal, an AI assistant can help lead the choir.
This sales assistant isn’t vaporware; we’re building that AI sales assistant at Talla. If you’d like to learn how you can hire an AI agent for your sales team, contact me at Talla today.
Rob Levy is Talla’s Director of Sales. He has over a decade of experience selling technology solutions and leading sales teams at both major enterprises and software startups.
