Start AI in sales with the records

Sellers spend most of their week on the work around a sale. In the latest survey of 4,050 sales professionals in 22 countries, they spent 40% of their time selling. Ask them what AI should take on first, and they name the clerk's work: the records.

We read 31 published studies and surveys on what sales people want from AI in the system where they keep customers and deals. Five practices follow.

1. Start with the records#

Among 1,000 sales and marketing professionals who use a CRM, the single most requested AI capability was automated data entry. Start there: the notes after a call, the tasks that came out of it, the next date, the stage. A record that keeps itself gives sellers time back on day one, and everything AI does later reads from it.

2. Let it draft, and keep the send#

Few sellers would let an agent act on its own. 16% of 220 B2B sales professionals would let it take a sales action without reviewing it first, and three wider surveys put the share between 10% and 24%. So let AI write the first reply, the follow-up and the quote, and leave the send with the seller until the drafts stop needing edits.

3. Hand over reading and writing before numbers#

Sellers use AI most for customer research (43%) and least for forecasting and pipeline analysis (28%). Trust thins as the work gets closer to a decision. Leaders also trust AI more than their teams do: 21% of sales leaders would skip the review, against 12% of sellers. Set the line with the people who live with the result, and keep a person on the numbers a forecast or a discount rests on.

4. Widen it as it earns trust#

Trust grows with use. With one coding agent, about 20% of new users' sessions ran without asking for approval, against over 40% for experienced users, and the experienced users stopped the agent more often. More room and closer watching go together: widen the line a step at a time, and keep a record of what was done.

5. Measure where it meets customers#

The gains measured so far are in conversations with customers. A chatbot answering shoppers before they bought raised one online retailer's sales by 16.3%, and an assistant raised support agents' issues resolved per hour by 15%. Nobody has published a controlled study of B2B sellers working in a CRM, so count your own: replies sent the same day, follow-ups not missed, hours back in the week.

Small? Get the customers in one place first#

24.7% of small EU enterprises use CRM software, against 65.4% of large ones, and 17% use AI, against 55%. AI can only keep records that exist. For a small team, the first step is customers and deals in one place.

How SalexHub does it#

Tell the Agent what was agreed on a call, and it writes each task on the customer's record, with who does it and by when. It drafts the first reply to a new request from the deal, and you send it from your own address. How far it goes on its own is yours to set, for the whole organization, a role or one person, and each change it makes is written on the record. Customers, deals and activities come in from a spreadsheet or your old CRM, with look-alikes flagged before anything is written.