How to Use AI for Sales Qualification

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One time, when I worked for IBM, I asked a prospect from a well-known engineering software company if they had determined a budget for their digital transformation initiative. He replied, "Oh, you are doing BANT qualification? I'll make it easy for you. My budget is X, I am the project lead, I just described our needs, and our timeframe is four to six months."

I never had a lead qualify themselves this well throughout my sales career, and I am not holding my breath that it will ever happen again.

Sales qualification, of course, falls squarely onto the sales rep in most situations. There are sales methodology books and training courses for learning how to qualify leads, and seasoned sales reps often develop good instincts for separating prospects from suspects and outright time-wasters. But now there's another player on the field that can help: AI.

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The Benefits of Using AI for Sales Qualification

Using AI for sales qualification can help sellers identify the leads with the highest propensity to convert to a deal before they even engage with a prospect.

I work with many AI-enhanced sales qualification tools which help sales professionals to:

• Automate manual tasks to better increase productivity and customer face time.
• Delegate outreach messages like emails and social media posts.
• Assign lead prioritization and report generation to virtual sales assistants.
• Enrich customers and prospects with recent news items and other insights.
• Improve competitive intelligence.
• Assess each rep's sales qualification skills with virtual coaches.

If you want to learn more, allow me to guide you on an exploration of AI tools that increase sales qualification efficiency and effectiveness. Many of these tools offer great value in their own right as well.

Automate manual tasks and spend more time selling.

For decades, salespeople across all industries struggled to effectively manage administrative tasks like documenting their sales activities and writing customer correspondence like proposals, contracts, and personalized messages.

HubSpot's 2024 State of Sales Report surveyed over 14,000 sales professionals and discovered that reps spend an average of at least one hour per day on administrative tasks and only one-third of the day actively selling. Administrative time is a lot like quicksand - it silently and slowly devours time and attention as the business day flies by.

The same report found that using AI to accomplish administrative tasks saves salespeople an average of two hours a day. I love the idea of freeing up two hours for customer meetings, relationship building, moving opportunities through the pipeline, and closing more deals.

How AI Can Help

• Sales process automation reduces administrative duties and frees salespeople up for productive customer meetings and calls.
• Automated forecasting takes a lot of the guesswork and anxiety out of sales forecasting. Basing projections on historical data and predictive insights increases forecast accuracy. Forecasting was never my favorite activity, as public sector procurement can be unpredictable. I love the idea of taking the legwork out of sales forecasting by automating it while improving accuracy based on historical data and predictive insights.
• Recording sales calls and converting them into transcripts streamlines information sharing. Recorded calls and transcripts are valuable for collaborative sales pursuits, and they can help reps focus more on the conversation. They don't have to worry about recording every detail.

Pro tip: Who said you can't create more hours in a day? Leverage AI tools to enable your sales team to increase customer face time and eliminate performance-related excuses about activities like CRM updates, forecast preparation, and social media posts taking away from selling time.

Generate, analyze, and interpret reports.

Even for seasoned sales managers, generating and interpreting reports on KPIs like ranking sales rep revenue attainment and utilization can be a real chore. According to HubSpot research, 38% of HubSpot users use AI tools for data analysis and reporting, compared to only 17% of other sales teams that don't use HubSpot.

Today's sales managers are often tied up and spread thin with interdepartmental meetings, or coaching team members, and generating manual reports. Empowering sales reps to generate and review analysis of their productivity and call quality helps them to be more independent and have more control over their success.

How AI Can Help

• Synthesizing information from deal journey analytics, conversational intelligence, and lead funnel reports provides sales leaders with vital information about how their team is performing against plan and on individual sales calls.
• Sales call feedback from a virtual coach is bias-free, meaning it may resonate with sales reps more and help them focus on specific sales skill development.

Pro tip: Providing managers with real-time visibility to the sales pipeline enables them to take corrective action before critical milestones like the end of the quarter or the fiscal year. They might choose to leverage this transparency to create sales incentive programs around lead identification or moving leads down the funnel to opportunities and closed revenue.

Enhance your competitive benchmarking.

Competitive intelligence can be challenging to source in ultra-competitive industries like SaaS and fintech service providers. Yet this data enhances the sales qualification process, enabling teams to make informed decisions about whether to pursue a lead where a competitor has a deeply rooted relationship, or the prospect has been drinking too much of your competitor's Kool-Aid. It can also help you sell more to your strengths without blatantly disparaging competitors. HubSpot's 2024 State of Sales report found that 63% of sales leaders believe AI makes it easier to compete in their industry.

Discovering that a prospect owns a competitive solution (or a customer is considering a move from your solution to a competitor) is a daunting obstacle. Yet you can overcome that obstacle if you know how your competitors' solution stacks up to a prospect's requirements relative to yours and whether there is a strong relationship between the two companies.

How AI Can Help

• Collecting competitive intelligence can enrich sales enablement battle cards and benchmark products and services relative to other opportunities in the marketplace. I've seen how Klue's AI-driven platform helps sales professionals stay ahead of market trends, understand competitor strategies, and identify new opportunities within their territory.

Pro tip: Throughout my sales career, my policies about competitive selling aligned with those of the sales managers I worked for. I didn't "sling mud" at competitors. Sell on the value my company and its products and services offer. Doing so is selling from a position of strength - not on price or assumptions. I learned that recommending features that might distinguish the product or service I was promoting without qualifying whether a prospect sees value in them can be dangerous.

How to Qualify Leads with AI

Here is a breakdown of how I would tailor my lead qualification process for the AI age.

1. Create your sales plan and approach.

Joining a new team or taking on a new territory or industry assignment requires a fair amount of planning and research. I would start by creating a sales plan and consulting with ChatSpot to identify some prospect companies and contacts for my lead funnel that match my ICP criteria.

2. Uncover and qualify leads.

Once I have a sales plan in place and approved, I would get started on my sales outreach and lead qualification as soon as possible.

Next, I would:

1. Import targeted leads into my CRM (I use HubSpot), segment the list by industry and business size, and enrich the lead data with information from ChatSpot and LinkedIn Sales Navigator. I would add any leads from sources like customers I've worked with in the past.

A lead qualification matrix is a great way to determine whether marketing qualified leads (MQLs) are sales-ready, if they need nurturing until they are ready to engage with sales, or if they ever will be sales-ready.

Pro tip: Handraisers (sales call requestors) are usually the easiest leads to connect with. Yet just because a prospect asks to be contacted doesn't mean they are a good ICP fit or ready to buy. I would still use the lead scoring tool to determine my outreach approach.

My Favorite Tools

• Klue Compete offers a compelling competitive analysis and Win/Loss solution that integrates with HubSpot.
• HubSpot's competitive analysis template is a great tool you can start using today as a competitive battle card of sorts.
• The LinkedIn Sales Navigator and HubSpot's Sales Hubare great resources for boosting your productivity and automating forecasting.

3. Engage with real-time sales lead insights.

AI-enhanced lead reporting can help sales leaders and their teams to:

• Stay ahead of market changes.
• Prioritize leads that are a good fit for your ICP.
• Classify prospects in your marketing and sales funnel by engagement frequency.
• Work more efficiently and effectively using selling tactics that generate wins and satisfy customers.

Pro tip: HubSpot's 2024 Sales Trends Report found that market factors like longer deal cycles, inflation and budget constraints forced sales teams to generate better results with fewer resources and smaller teams. In my experience, it's much more effective to rely on AI reporting to identify the highest quality leads rather than your gut instinct.

Don't Leave Leads and Revenue on the Table

Some businesses and salespeople resist the adoption of AI-powered sales tools. They choose to stick with their traditional sales qualification business practices instead of realizing the many benefits described above.

But the risk of losing market share and revenue to competitors that adopt AI sales tools grows constantly. At the same time, the AI tools that enhance sales qualification are evolving to meet sellers' needs. I think the value of these assets will only continue to grow in the future.

Topics:Artificial Intelligence

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