Just like the Internet and smartphones transformed sales, artificial intelligence (AI) is poised to change everything. Whether or not you’ve historically been an early adopter, leaders have little choice but to embrace this next wave of disruption. The reality is simple: those that leverage new AI capabilities will remain competitive in an increasingly volatile sales landscape, while those that don’t may be left behind.
Businesses everywhere are already harnessing recent generative AI innovations to enhance their enablement programs as they seek to equip, train, and coach their sales teams to navigate modern challenges. Enablement can mean the difference between win or lose – and in today’s challenging economic environment, AI presents an incredible opportunity to increase your salespeople’s productivity and performance.
So how do you elevate your enablement program with AI? Let’s explore the opportunities available today, and how to be ready to capitalize on what’s to come tomorrow.
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How to Think About AI
Before getting into the details, we first need to understand the role of AI right now, and how it will change your day to day. Artificial intelligence has been around for years in various forms, while more recently, a new wave of AI innovation has taken shape in the form of generative AI, which uses large language models to generate text, images, and other media. Now, advances in AI are accelerating and hold transformational potential for enablement, where our primary job is to prepare our sales teams to sell. AI is your powerful assistant in accomplishing this objective, faster and better than you ever could on your own. And during a time of reduced budgets and companies asking their teams to achieve more with fewer resources, maximizing productivity is paramount.
Think about it like this: AI won’t replace you, but it will replace the tedious time you spent on mundane tasks. AI can tackle the little things that add up to require big-time investments, freeing you to focus on more strategic, higher-impact activities – scaling your capacity and your impact.
Do Or Die: Implementing AI Innovation
 New technology is wildly exciting, but it can also be overwhelming. A great place to start is to stay up to date on the latest AI capabilities your current enablement tools are releasing. Right now, generative AI is resulting in advancements in three key areas related to enablement:
- Automation: How many hours did you spend this week organizing, managing, and archiving content? Probably more than you need to. From content management to onboarding processes, AI can now automate manual work.
- Co-Creation: Thanks to large language models and natural language understanding, it’s now possible to use AI features that generate content summaries and descriptions with the click of a button – saving you time spent crafting the perfect guidance to deliver alongside your content.
- Intelligence: AI can deliver information, insights, and assets at our fingertips. We all know the frustration that follows when we learn buyers aren’t using our sales content, plays, and training – for no reason other than they couldn’t find it. Now sellers can query your company’s entire corpus of enablement content to find what they need. This is just the beginning of how AI can be used to provide instant answers.
AI in Action: Upskilling Your Salespeople
Let’s examine a specific example of how AI can make all the difference in your enablement efforts. You know that companies that prioritize upskilling and training see 14% higher rep quota attainment and 5% higher win rates, and best of all: good training receives a 353% ROI. But the problem is your enablement team’s resources and budget were recently reduced – how can you achieve more with less, ensuring you keep your salespeople’s skills stay sharp? AI is the answer.
AI-powered analytics show you the gaps in your team’s understanding that are hurting their performance. Using AI as your personal content creator, you upload a document with content designed to fill those gaps, and tell the AI to build a course, a rubric, and answers based on that content. This saves countless hours that you instead invest in a collaborative meeting with your sales managers, ensuring they are bought into the training and will prioritize it with the reps.
The use of AI in this training scenario is powerful, but you can go even further to where AI can make arguably its biggest impact – coaching. To ensure the training sticks, you create an AI coach that engages the reps in 1:1 conversational quizzes on the new training, grades their responses, and provides guidance for improvement. Finally, the same AI coach can lead role play, mimicking a buyer based on prior call analysis to engage the sellers in applying the new training in a practice scenario so they’re ready to deliver when they’re in front of a real buyer.
The end result: a comprehensive training and coaching experience that keeps your reps current on everything they need to know, say, show, and do in unique selling scenarios – and it took you and your team half the time.
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Prepare Today to Win Tomorrow
AI is a blue ocean of possibility for enablement. But, like with many things, you will get out what you put in. Now is the time to lay the foundation for an enablement engine powered by AI – an engine that will equip, train, and coach your teams to win in a world that continues to change.
