The AIM Institute > Whitepapers > Sales Call Preparation with AI

Sales Call Preparation with AI

How can your salespeople beat their sales quotas more consistently? For most B2B sales professionals, it’s improving sales call preparation. This paper reveals the research supporting this and explains how artificial intelligence can improve two types of preparation: 1) pre-call customer insights, and 2) mastery of probing skills (which has been shown to boost selling success).

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Preview: Sales Call Preparation with AI

The research on B2B sales call preparation isn’t encouraging: 75% of B2B executive buyers say salespeople are not knowledgeable about their business… and do not understand the issues they face.  Unsurprisingly, only one in four salespeople get agreement from these buyers to meet again. To fix this, you must improve two types of sales call preparation:

  • Customer Insights: When a sales professional has gathered high-quality, pre-call information about the customer and their issues, they are welcomed into a deep conversation about how they might help that customer.
  • Probing Skills: When a salesperson has mastered probing skills to ask the right questions, they sell more. Why? Because they learn which products to pitch, which customer pain points to address, and they demonstrate they are interested in the customer.

Imagine you’re a salesperson preparing to call on an existing B2B customer. What will you spend most of your time talking about… your product or their world? Customers don’t care about your product. They simply “hire” your product to accomplish their “job to be done” (aka, their application or task). In a study of nearly 24,000 sales conversations, the top performers talked about their product features only half as much as other salespeople.

Instead of “features,” what “customer world” information should you gather ahead of your meeting? Your sales call preparation should include five items:

  • Business status
  • Company news
  • Market trends
  • Common problems
  • Process steps

For the first of the five items listed above (business status), you’ll need to rely on your existing CRM system. But the remaining four items can be delivered to you in less than 60 seconds today using AI. One such AI approach is the SalesPrepTM system at www.salesprep.com.

Being prepared with these insights is only half the battle. The second half is gaining the skills to ask the right questions. Sales professionals who do this sell more. But what are these “right” questions? One approach is called the “What-Why-Clarify” method.

But how could AI help you master this probing? The only way to master a new skill is with practice, practice, practice. Until now this required “synchronous” coaching. But now there’s an AI Guide—called “Claire” in the SalesPrep system—who provides this coaching “asynchronously” …

  • any time you want to practice on your own.
  • on any offering and customer job-to-be-done you’d like to practice on.
  • with the same—or possibly higher—level of advice you’d get from a human coach.

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