Sales teams experience the frustration of missed leads. A sales rep obtains a lead, becomes occupied with other tasks, never contacts the lead, and ultimately loses revenue due to timing issues. New sales automation solutions utilizing AI sales assistants will eliminate this issue. 

Why Manual Follow-Up Is Killing Your Pipeline

The Salesforce website states that 70% of sales reps spend their time on non-revenue-generating activities such as administrative tasks, logging calls, updating the CRM, and chasing unqualified leads, thus reducing time spent selling. Buyers today expect immediate responses from their sales representatives; consequently, the introduction of an AI assistant for sales has completely changed how we look at the sales process. Using the right sales automation tools, your reps will be able to reach all leads all of the time without increasing their payroll. 

What an AI Sales Agent Actually Does  

An AI sales assistant does not simply provide a series of pre-scripted email responses via a chatbot but rather provides conversational agents. Conversational agents provide humanized, real-time sales conversations, present objection handling and determination of lead qualification in one continuous application process, automatically updating the designated CRM application with each contact, thus allowing for the real-time routing of qualified leads to a human sales rep. 

Follow-Up Automation: Manual vs. AI Sales Agent   

The Follow-Up Gap Is Where Revenue Gets Lost  

AI outbound sales solutions typically focus on finding new leads. However, a lot of recoverable revenues are inside of leads that have gone cold. These include the prospects that expressed some level of interest in your product/service but had not converted. By using an AI sales call agent, it is possible to cover thousands of dormant accounts in one week, something you can’t do on a great scale with your human team. 

Pete & Gabi’s AI sales agent, Olivia AI, was built specifically for CRM, finds inactive contacts, performs personalized approaches, manages objections, and gives full conversation context back to your sales team.  

What to Look for in the Best AI Sales Agent    

When assessing the best AI sales assistants and automation platforms, here are the must-have capabilities: 

• Conversation in a natural voice without robotic scripts. 

• Ability to handle objections in real-time using the prospect’s input. 

• Native integrations with top CRM systems, such as Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive, and Zoho. 

• Availability and ability to follow up with prospects when your Reps are not at work 24/7. 

• Ability to offer multilingual support for sales teams that operate in multiple regions. 

• Ability to get up and running in days (not months) with top AI sales automation platforms. 

AI Sales Follow-Up: B2B Use Cases That Drive Results  

Many advantages come with using an AI sales agent for B2B businesses. B2B sales cycles last much longer than before; buyers are looking for ways to buy faster than before, and if you miss an opportunity to contact a customer, it can be expensive! Using AI sales assistants does allow B2B businesses to: 

• Reactivate an account that has been inactive for 90 days, 120 days, or even more than 200 days.  

• Qualify the demo request they receive prior to meeting with the representative.  

• Follow-up after trade shows or webinars, during a time when B2B businesses typically do not pursue opportunities due to the large number of attendees.  

• Help with upselling/cross-selling activities, without overworking the employees of the company.  

• Ensure that sales representatives spend their time selling, not prospecting. 

Ready to Stop Losing Leads to Slow Follow-Up?  

If your team is spending too much time on calls that could be automated or leaving potential customers to become cold without reaching out to them at all, don’t hire more sales representatives; think about how you can use smarter technologies to solve these problems. An example of smart technology that will help with this problem is Olivia AI. It is a AI sales agent created by Pete & Gabi to use artificial intelligence as a sales agent specifically designed to facilitate follow-ups at scale. 

Through the use of your CRM system Olivia AI acts as a 24/7 representative communicating with qualified leads using natural language; managing objections intelligently (providing full context for the conversation to all human agents), & giving your human agents everything they need in order to close more deals when the lead hands off to them. 

FAQs  

1. Which follow-up tasks can an AI sales agent fully handle without any human involvement?  

An AI salesperson will take care of all initial follow up tasks such as making outreach calls, qualifying leads, answering questions about limitations/conditions, and creating or updating records in your company’s customer relationship management database. Human involvement occurs only if there is no longer a good chance of obtaining an order from a prospect. That’s where Olivia AI by Pete & Gabi comes into play. Once the lead has been qualified and determined to have an interest, Olivia AI will transfer the call to your representative while providing complete context on the previous interaction. 

2. How does an AI sales rep handle a prospect who is frustrated or wants to speak to a human immediately?  

An effective conversational AI uses real-time sentiment analysis to detect when a conversation is getting off track or when a prospect is feeling frustrated and ready to quit communicating with your company. The AI agent will respond to this by promptly transferring the conversation to a live representative with the lead’s complete history so that the representative can quickly assist with the prospect issue. 

3. What happens to lead the AI qualifies, but the sales team does not follow up quickly enough?   

An excellent sales automation system manages this whole process automatically by transferring a qualified lead to a sales rep. If the rep fails to engage with that lead within a predetermined timeframe, the sales automation system uses AI to initiate a re-engagement workflow; for example, the AI could create a new call, create a task to follow up, or set a flag within the company’s CRM system. This way, when an AI warms up a lead, no lead can go cold due to the AI’s inability to physically connect with the lead. 

4. How does an AI sales assistant manage a complex product with nuanced qualification criteria?   

For an AI sales assistant system to be able to successfully assist salespeople with their sales process, it must be built around your specific qualification criteria, typical objections, and product-specific detail even before it calls a lead. An AI sales assistant system is designed to resolve the conversation prior to an enterprise-level relationship being established, therefore it is not designed to replace an expert on your product nor to close an enterprise-type sale. 

5. Which CRM and sales tools does an AI sales agent typically integrate with, and how long does setup take?  

Top AI sales agent mobile apps will have native integrations with Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive, and Zoho with automatic updates sent to the CRM immediately after each phone call, eliminating the need for manual entry and reducing the opportunity for errors to occur in the CRM. Olivia AI by Pete & Gabi can be live and operational within five business days of you setting it up; there are no long-term contracts and no time-consuming or complicated technical development steps required.