Sales teams need every advantage to stay competitive, and guided selling just makes sense. It helps prospects move smoothly through the sales funnel, getting what they need when needed. While traditional sales and marketing automation plays a part, where does AI fit in? 

In this article, we’ll explore AI guided selling use cases, tools, and how it can enhance your sales outcomes by optimizing automation and personalization.

What is AI Guided Selling?

AI guided selling combines technology with human intuition to improve buyer interactions. It uses artificial intelligence (AI) and data to suggest the best products or services based on what customers need and how they’ve behaved in the past.

For example, valuable customer data is generated whenever a buyer engages with your website or a sales representative, such as which content they interacted with or if a sales tactic advanced them further down the funnel. Aggregating this data from multiple systems provides a comprehensive view of buyer’s activities. This allows sales reps to offer more personalized guidance. 

Think of it as your very own personal sales assistant that never misses a beat.

How Does AI Guided Selling Work?

Behind the scenes, AI continuously learns and refines guidance using data so sales reps can anticipate buying intent. It then generates real-time recommendations for the sales team, such as product suggestions, pricing strategies, or when to initiate an upsell or cross-sell.

Business Benefits of Guided Selling

AI guided selling enables sales teams to focus on high-value activities rather than mundane, repetitive tasks that burn selling time. This accelerates the buying process and ensures customers feel understood and valued throughout the sales process. 

For example, the time it takes to qualify leads or follow up with cold prospects manually will be replaced with AI-driven intelligence. AI can automatically prioritize leads based on their likelihood to convert and send follow-up emails with appropriate content, allowing sales reps to focus on closing deals with higher-value clients. This automation speeds up the sales cycle and ensures the customer receives personalized communication at every touchpoint. Most importantly, they won’t fall through the cracks.

Guided Selling Technology & Tools

The backbone of guided selling lies in the tools and technology available to sales reps. These include CRM systems, AI-powered sales enablement, and data analytics platforms. These B2B sales tools simplify access to large data libraries that humans cannot process manually.  

When choosing guided selling tools, consider integration with your current tech stack, ease of use for sales teams, and scalability as your business grows. Assessing AI’s ability to look at all relevant data and work with your specific industry or customer base is also important. 

How To Use AI In Sales Enablement

Sales reps must be ready with the knowledge and content to capture the busiest buyer’s attention. AI plays a role in this by crafting tailored experiences and identifying training and coaching opportunities.

For instance, AI might detect that a prospect has viewed a demo multiple times but hasn’t scheduled a call. It could suggest that the sales rep follow up with a personalized message about the content or recommend highlighting case studies that match the prospect’s industry. This real-time, hands-on guidance allows sales reps to focus their efforts on the most impactful sales activities.

Here are a few examples of how to use AI in other ways for sales enablement:

• Personalized content: AI suggests relevant content based on customer behavior, like demos or case studies.
• Lead scoring: AI prioritizes leads by analyzing their likelihood of being converted.
• Follow-up prompts: AI alerts reps to follow up with prospects based on their engagement patterns.
• Coaching insights: AI identifies areas for improvement in sales performance.
• Best customer engagement times: AI predicts optimal times to reach out to potential customers.
• Product recommendations: AI suggests the right product that matches the prospect’s needs and industry.

Can AI Increase Sales Revenue and Growth?

There is a reason why Gartner predicts that 35% of CROs will resource a centralized “GenAI Operations” team for their go-to-market organization. It’s because AI can increase sales revenue and growth. With intelligence and recommendations, AI helps sales teams prioritize efforts where they matter most.

The result? Higher conversion rates, better customer experience, and sustained business growth over time.

Best Practices to Help You Excel in Guided Selling

To excel in guided selling, start with clean, accurate data. Ensure your team is trained in the tools and can interpret AI recommendations. Lastly, always keep ‘humans in the loop’ because human oversight will refine outcomes and reduce errors. 

AI can sometimes provide suggestions that need fine-tuning and human judgment. For example, if AI recommends offering a 20% discount to a lead based on past purchases, assess whether that’s truly necessary. Perhaps the lead has shown strong buying intent, and a smaller incentive, such as free shipping, might close the deal. To refine the recommendation, you could adjust the AI’s parameters or input more specific criteria, like prioritizing customer lifetime value or the urgency of the sale. This ensures the AI’s suggestion aligns with your overall sales strategy.

As Adnan Zijadic, Director Analyst at Gartner, explains, “Sellers bring emotional intelligence, meaningful conversations, and analysis of contextual relevance, and through an AI-guided playbook, can achieve an enhanced sales narrative.“

How Long Has AI Existed?

AI has roots dating back to the mid-20th century, with early milestones from Alan Turing. In 1950, Turing developed the concept of the Turing Test to determine if a machine could exhibit intelligent behavior indistinguishable from that of a human​. The official birth of AI is often credited to a 1956 Dartmouth workshop, where the field’s pioneers, including John McCarthy, explored how machines could simulate human intelligence​. Early AI focused on logic, problem-solving, and rule-based systems.

Today, AI has evolved significantly. Modern AI, particularly in guided selling, uses machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) to analyze massive datasets and provide real-time assistance. Future AI advancements may involve robots with even more sophisticated capabilities, such as advanced conversational agents or fully autonomous systems. 

The Biggest Obstacle is Learning to Trust AI

The greatest challenge with AI is trust, both in its accuracy and the belief that it won’t replace you. So, what can you do? Focus on your skills and make yourself invaluable beyond the basics. 

Expect AI to handle tasks like data entry, calculations, and processing large datasets. Your goal is to figure out how AI can assist you in your job while identifying areas where it falls short.

Use AI to offload repetitive tasks, then focus on what it can’t do. For example, as a sales engineer, you excel at building relationships, understanding complex technologies, solving unique problems, and managing customer needs. AI can’t replace all human qualities. Instead, hone how you manage client relationships, develop creative solutions based on customers’ needs, or navigate complex customers.

Combining AI to ease your burdens and sharpen the skills you can offer will make you indispensable.

Visit our AI resource center for more information about how to level up sales and presales with AI.