For years, companies have searched for ways to transform the skillsets of their best salespeople into replicable strategies for others to follow. To a certain extent, this has worked. However, person-to-person sales are still more of an art than a precise science. High-performing salespeople still need certain innate skills for the job and an ability to discern what a potential buyer needs to hear and when they need to hear it. And while some of those skills can, with lengthy and costly training, be passed on to others, many other skills simply cannot be duplicated. Yet, the search to constantly improve continues.
Enter artificial intelligence (AI).
Owing to AI's ability to catalog and synthesize uncountable bits of information, some see it as the perfect tool to help create the perfect salesperson—a salesperson that instantly recalls volumes of product data, a salesperson that knows every lead's personal preferences, pain points, and needs, or a salesperson that always knows the perfect thing to say at the optimal time.
Demoleap, a Tel Aviv-based company in the sales enablement space, is making this a reality by using AI to solve common sales issues facing B2B sales teams. Let’s take a look at Demoleap’s approach.
Reducing Cognitive Load
Demoleap utilizes AI for a variety of purposes, but one of the most significant ways is by serving as a real-time knowledge repository to aid salespeople in real time. Access to deep and wide-ranging knowledge is, after all, one of the hallmarks of high-performance salespeople. However, very few people have a natural aptitude for recalling the minutiae of a product catalog on-demand during a live sales call. With Demoleap, they don't have to.
Demoleap Mastermind, the recently-released premium version of the Demoleap platform, uses an AI-powered knowledge engine that listens in on sales calls and provides relevant information for salespeople in real time. It's a way of leveling the cognitive playing field, relieving the salesperson from the burden of on-demand information recall. According to Demoleap’s CEO and co-founder Itay Sinuani, using a real-time guided selling platform can reduce the "cognitive limitations [which] are a barrier in the sales team's ability to close deals." In other words, by receiving help from a live AI assistant during calls - whether they’re early qualification calls, discovery, or even live demos and customer onboarding calls - salespeople can spend less of their energy recalling facts and more on focusing on the needs of the prospect.
Providing Real-Time Intent Analysis
Part of the so-called "knack" that high-performance salespeople have is a type of intuition that helps them discern how to guide a conversation with a prospect, keeping it on a path that will lead to a conversion. It's yet another trait that certain salespeople possess that's almost impossible to replicate or teach. Demoleap's AI attempts to bridge this gap, as well.
Demoleap analyzes customer intent cues as it transcribes sales calls in real-time. From there, according to Sinuani, Demoleap’s “continuously evolving algorithm prioritizes those cues based on intent indicators, which triggers the right content for the seller to follow the recommended playbook step." That means the AI handles the customer intuition aspect and points the salesperson towards the right approach to take at any given point in a sales call.
Automating Product Demonstrations
One of the biggest differences between a salesperson and a master salesperson is that the latter has the skills to be a showman. That means being able to present successfully, give fluent product demonstrations, and keep up with the prospect’s expectations. Demoleap's AI can fill this role with autopilot capabilities that can control the salesperson’s mouse, typing, and screen movements so that the salesperson can solely focus on speaking to the prospect. According to Sinuani, Demoleap “understands the seller's needs during every part of the demo meeting in real time and guides the user on what's next in the demo." It's yet one more way that AI can reduce the soft skills required of a high-performance salesperson.
After-Action Analytics
Demoleap further leverages AI to give sales leaders useful insights into which sales tactics work best and which don't. It can comb through the data gathered from call transcriptions and correlate it with KPIs like conversion rates. In doing so, it eliminates the high-level data analysis skills that decision-makers would otherwise require to turn call data into useful forward-looking sales strategies. It also helps to highlight any knowledge deficiencies that could be harming sales staff performance—without forcing anyone to sit through or read hours' worth of conversations to extract meaningful trends hidden within them.
AI Can Make Anyone a Master Salesperson
Based on the assistance Demoleap's AI can already provide to salespeople, it seems we're not far from a day when anyone can be a master salesperson. And this may be just the tip of the AI sales iceberg. We might even be close to a day where there's no real person behind the next sales call. It's an area of AI development that's certainly worth keeping an eye on, in any case.