11x is a startup building autonomous digital workers — its first product, Alice, is an AI sales development representative that has generated tens of millions in revenue opportunities for its customers, according to the company.
So, who better to discuss the role of AI in sales than Guillaume Roux-Romestaing, who is part of its go-to-market team?
In our Startup Life newsletter, Guillaume shared his top tips on how to use AI to support your sales function.
Think about automation first
At the early stages of a company, you want tools to take away all the repetitive tasks or those you’re doing manually — sourcing leads, reaching out to prospects and follow-ups, for example. Make use of aids like Zapier to connect up all the different tools you’re using and automate basic tasks.
You can also use tools like LinkedIn Sales Navigator for sourcing leads or Apollo and RocketReach for finding large quantities of data about potential customers. Basically, make your processes more efficient before you throw AI into the mix.
Give your AI context
You need to spend time teaching your AI about:
- your company and products
- your brand and your tone
- your customer and their pain points.
We ensure Alice reads everything there is online about a customer — websites, socials, blog posts, news about them — so her output is personalised.
Leverage AI
Here are some examples of how it can help in your sales cycle:
- Finding prospects. Instead of finding 10 prospects a week, your team can now find hundreds.
- Getting meetings in the calendar. Let the AI do the back-and-forth so you can use the time to prepare for the meeting and close the deal.
- Personalisation at scale. AIs like Alice can write hundreds of emails simultaneously and they’ll be personalised enough to not feel like spam.
- Follow-ups. You want to remain top of mind without being annoying. You can even programme your AI to send a fun gif to get a prospect’s attention.
Don’t let it replace creativity
If your sales strategy involves crafting a 30-minute personalised outreach message to one person, which you know has a high conversion rate, then don’t use AI to replace that human creativity. If your team spends anywhere between 30 seconds and 10 minutes drafting an email and you do that repetitively, then AI will be better.
It is quicker and can learn more about a prospect than you can in the same period as well as synthesising that into a personal outreach note — as I said before, it is good at scale.
Test your output
Always A/B test the copy you’re sending out to prospects. Get your AI to create multiple versions of your copy. Test and measure your messaging constantly.
Even when you find it is successful, keep testing it and keep trying new iterations as your market will evolve as your product evolves. Your AI won’t know this. This is your job.
Don’t expect an AI to close a sale
LLMs that are available aren’t sophisticated enough yet to satisfy the human need to chat with another human. Even if it does become sophisticated enough to replicate our tone of voice, there’s a chance humans will push back on being sold to by robots. Therefore, it’s still unclear whether that part will ever be taken over by AI.
We use Alice and we still need a sales team — they’re just 10x more efficient.
Leverage your team
AI means you can operate in a lean and efficient fashion — you’re not wasting human resources on silly tasks like finding an email address! But to make it useful, you need to grow with it and ensure your team of sales development representatives and account executives focus their attention on higher-value work.
Focus on qualified leads and provide personal and human service. Your human talent can be, essentially, brand experience.
On the subject of… using AI for sales
1. Generative AI is changing the sales game. But it can only come into its own when AI models are fine-tuned on company-specific data.
2. A fifth of current sales-team functions could be automated, according to McKinsey.
