AI Sales Agent: the Next Big Thing in Sales

If you’ve landed on this page, you’re most probably trying to understand what exactly AI sales agents are and how these tools can help you automate and optimize your sales processes. We get it: with all this AI hype going around and hundreds of AI-powered solutions out there for sales teams promising to automate nearly everything, you might be overwhelmed by the choices and the terminology. No worries – we’re here to make things clearer for you.

Below, we’ll break down the different types of AI sales agents and their common use cases and share examples of specific tools that you can use to boost your sales team’s efficiency. By the end of this blog, you’ll have a better understanding of what these solutions are capable of and whether you need one for your business.

What is an AI Sales Agent?

So, how do AI sales agents work, and what exactly do we mean by AI sales agents in the first place? While the exact terminology and capabilities of these tools may differ across providers, in a broad sense, AI sales agents are software solutions that leverage Artificial Intelligence to automate, improve, and streamline different sales processes and tasks. They can operate as voice bots, conversational chatbots, digital assistants, or embedded features within CRM systems.

Using Natural Language Processing (NLP), generative AI, Machine Learning (ML), and an array of other cutting-edge technologies, AI sales agents can perform tasks traditionally done by salespeople with little or no human input. These may include handling calls, capturing and qualifying leads, scheduling meetings, providing personalized product recommendations, responding to emails, coaching sales reps, and more.

Better yet, AI sales agents can constantly analyze data from past experiences and the feedback they receive to become even more efficient over time and improve the way they handle tasks. 

Types of AI Sales Agents and Common Use Cases

Having analyzed dozens of solutions on the market, we’ve categorized AI sales agents into the following types:

AI Voice Bots/ Calling Bots

AI sales agents that can interact with prospects and customers through voice are becoming incredibly popular. These are mostly known as AI voice bots, AI voice agents, or AI calling bots. In fact, these terms are often thrown around interchangeably. A typical AI voice agent solution can be used in both sales and customer service environments. 

Backed by Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), NLP, Natural Language Generation (NLU), speech synthesis, and other technologies, AI voice bots can handle inbound and outbound calls independently while interacting with prospects through natural dialogue, just like your human sales reps would.

Let’s take a closer look at some of the most common use cases:

• Automated sales calls: A virtual AI agent for sales calls can reach out to your prospects proactively and handle dozens or even hundreds of outbound calls simultaneously, promoting your products or services, helping you build brand awareness, and answering questions from potential customers.
• Lead generation and qualification: On top of that, AI voice bots can automate your lead qualification process. They can ask your prospects a series of pre-qualification questions, gather information about their needs and interests, and even score them based on their likelihood to convert.
• Appointment scheduling: What’s even better, when integrated with calendar software systems, AI voice bots can help you automate the entire process of scheduling appointments, meetings, or demo calls with your sales reps – all without human involvement, saving your team a bunch of time.
• Automated follow-up calls: Lots of leads may be lost due to delayed follow-ups, and that happens way too often. Fortunately, AI voice agents can help you automate follow-up calls, nurture leads that aren’t yet ready to buy, keep your prospects engaged, and move them through your sales funnel faster.

Conversational and Generative AI Chatbots

AI-powered chatbots are another type of AI sales agents. These are excellent sales tools that can engage with your website visitors proactively, capture and qualify leads, recommend relevant products, and offer assistance during the checkout process, helping you increase sales. According to the Intercom’s report, 41% of businesses that use chatbots for sales purposes have seen an increase in revenue by around 67%. 

And unlike early-days rule-based chatbots that were only able to respond to simple questions (and would annoy users for the most part), AI-powered chatbots can engage with prospects in a truly conversational, human-like way. 

Here are the most common use cases for AI-powered sales chatbots:

• Proactive engagement: Firstly, AI chatbots can proactively engage with your website visitors, welcome prospects with customized messages, and offer timely help without them having to ask for it. These proactive chat invitations can be triggered by specific events like the time spent on a page or previous interactions with the website.
• Checkout assistance: Similarly, AI chatbots can offer timely assistance during the checkout process, engaging users who are one step away from completing their purchase. AI bots can provide information about shipping times, help resolve payment issues, or even offer discounts to encourage users to finalize their purchase before leaving your website.
• Personalized product recommendations: In addition to offering timely support and assistance, AI-powered chatbots can provide personalized product recommendations to your site visitors based on current shopping cart items or browsing history. And that can help you increase the average order value and conversions.
• Lead capture and qualification: Just like AI voice bots, AI chatbots can also help you with lead capture and automated qualification by asking pre-qualification questions and filtering out unqualified leads. AI chatbots can also instantly transfer high-potential leads to your sales reps, ensuring no opportunity slips through the cracks.

AI Assistants/ Copilots

Finally, there are plenty of AI-powered sales agents that operate as virtual assistants/ copilots, helping sales reps with a bunch of sales tasks like scoring and qualifying leads, automating inbound lead nurturing, crafting personalized emails, summarizing relevant data about prospects for better call preparation, providing real-time on-call guidance, streamlining agent coaching and onboarding, and so much more. The features and capabilities of these AI sales assistants may greatly vary across providers.

Some of the most common (but definitely not all) use cases are:

• Inbound lead scoring and qualification: An AI agent for sales and marketing can automatically score and qualify inbound leads based on your specific criteria, predicting their likelihood to convert. That helps ensure your sales reps only focus on the most promising opportunities.
• Email outreach assistance: AI copilots can also help your sales reps craft highly personalized email campaigns based on the available customer data and even suggest the optimal send times for follow-ups. That saves your reps a great deal of time and helps improve your engagement rates.
• Prospect insights for better call preparation: Preparation is key when it comes to handling B2B sales calls. Obviously, the more you know about your prospects, the better you can tailor your sales pitch. An AI agent for sales can easily summarize information about each prospect, helping reps prepare for calls in just minutes.
• Real-time on-call guidance: No matter how well you think you’re prepared, things can easily go off track while you’re on a call with a prospect. With real-time on-call guidance, AI copilots help sales reps navigate each conversation with greater confidence by helping them source the relevant info on the spot and handle objections effectively.
• AI sales coaching and onboarding: Last but not least, AI agent assistants can support the coaching and onboarding of newly hired sales reps. AI copilots can deliver personalized coaching and enable reps to practice pitches with roleplays and receive actionable feedback. And that can reduce ramp time for new reps and build their confidence faster.

Benefits of Implementing AI-powered Sales Agents

Automation of repetitive tasks = less manual work for your reps

Did you know that according to Salesforce, sales reps spend 70% of their time on non-selling tasks? These include prioritizing leads, manually entering customer data and information, preparing and planning, handling admin tasks, researching prospects, and more. As we’ve mentioned above, AI sales agents can automate many of these tasks, enabling your sales team to focus more on selling and closing deals.

Better efficiency without overwhelming your team

Unlike your human reps, an AI agent never clocks out – it’s always on, and it works tirelessly 24/7. If you want to improve your team’s efficiency without overwhelming your reps and causing burnout – implementing an AI sales agent is a totally worthwhile investment. For example, imagine an AI calling bot that can call your prospects, qualify leads, and book appointments independently. That helps you ensure your reps only spend time interacting with the most promising opportunities while the bot takes the heavy lifting off their shoulders.

Fewer abandoned carts and more conversions

According to research from Baymard Institute, nearly 70% of online shopping carts are abandoned. Now that’s an alarming number. There might be numerous reasons why users abandon their shopping carts without completing a purchase. But when an AI sales agent steps in at just the right moment to address last-minute hesitations, that can help you reduce the abandonment rate. And in addition to checkout assistance, AI sales agents can help you increase conversions and the average order value by making smart, context-driven product recommendations while also improving customer satisfaction.

Streamlined lead generation and qualification 

Let’s take AI chatbots, for example. An AI-powered chatbot can operate around the clock, providing immediate answers to potential customers no matter the time or day they reach out, capturing and qualifying inbound leads, and preventing lost opportunities. Based on the stats published by LocaliQ, 36% of businesses use chatbots to improve their lead generation strategies, while more than half of businesses employing chatbots find that they are driving more high-quality leads.

Scalability and cost savings

Again, picture an AI voice agent that can handle multiple inbound calls simultaneously (while your human reps can only handle one call at a time) or make hundreds of outbound calls in just minutes. That means you can easily scale your operations without having to hire additional sales reps. And did we mention that many AI voice bots are multilingual and can handle calls in multiple languages? While that might not be an ideal solution for SMBs, for businesses with high call volumes and global operations – it’s a great way to reduce operational costs.

Examples of AI Sales Agents Across Different Use Cases 

If you’ve decided by now that implementing an AI sales agent is an investment worth making, below are some of the specific tools you might want to explore further:

Getting Started with VoiceSpin’s AI Contact Center Solutions for Sales Teams

AI sales agents aren’t meant to replace your human sales reps – but they can make your sales team a lot more productive and efficient through AI-powered automation. Whether you want to scale your outreach efforts, automate your lead qualification process, improve website conversions, engage and nurture leads more effectively, or enhance the day-to-day experience for your sales reps – there’s the right AI sales agent solution out there for your specific business needs. And here’s how exactly VoiceSpin’s AI contact center solutions can help your sales team:

✓ AI Voice Bot: Our AI voice agent can handle inbound and outbound calls while maintaining a truly natural dialogue and making your prospects feel like they are interacting with a real human. The bot can provide contextually relevant answers, instantly filter out unqualified leads, and help prospects book appointments – all without involving your reps. The best part is that it can learn from past interactions and become better over time through machine learning.

✓ AI Chatbot: VoiceSpin’s AI chatbot can interact with your website visitors 24/7, answer questions about your products or services, qualify your inbound leads based on specific criteria, and automatically schedule appointments or demo calls. The bot can also seamlessly transfer conversations to your human reps when needed while preserving the context of the conversation.

✓ AI Auto Dialer: Our AI sales dialer can automate the process of dialing numbers and help you increase the efficiency of your outbound calling campaigns by intelligently scoring leads and connecting them to the best-suited sales reps based on the probability of a successful conversion. Plus, the dialer skips busy signals, disconnected numbers, and leaves voicemails automatically, so your reps can use their time more productively and handle more conversations in less time. 

✓ AI Speech Analyzer: With VoiceSpin’s AI Speech Analyzer, you can monitor 100% of your inbound and outbound calls and evaluate the quality of customer interactions and your team’s performance based on your specific criteria through custom metrics. And with AI call summaries, your reps don’t have to spend hours listening to call recordings to review past interactions before following up.

Book a demo call now to learn more about these AI contact center solutions VoiceSpin has to offer for sales teams and how they can boost your team’s performance.