AI not only provides smarter training to salespeople but also ensures they get the support they need. Source: Pexels

AI not only provides smarter training to salespeople but also ensures they get the support they need. Source: Pexels

Can AI help train your salespeople faster and more intelligently?

SALESPEOPLE bring in the clients and revenues — that’s the reality.

Organizations that thrive tend to have really effective salespeople, and constantly work on providing them with training, tools, and support to ensure they can keep their edge in the competitive marketplace.

According to a new Gartner forecast, businesses that want the best for their salespeople must introduce artificial intelligence (AI) to provide smarter, more intelligent training to their salespeople.

Gartner’s analysts believe that introducing AI to sales training and coaching can provide a more individualized learning experience that can scale across the organization.

“In order to have a more performant sales organization, training and coaching content must be delivered based on individual learning style,” Gartner Senior Research Director Melissa Hilbert said.

“Learning styles such as visual, auditory and kinesthetic affect how sales reps receive training and coaching information, creating an imbalance in performance if not accounted for at scale.”

The analyst firm believes that creating a high-performance sales team is difficult with traditional training and coaching.

Moreover, the reality is that new-age sales teams expect a better employee experience and seek out smarter digital tools and solutions to help them reach their goals and beat their targets.

Since AI-based learning tools help identify knowledge and skill gaps and provide personalized training based on individual needs, it’s more effective and helps maximize the salesperson’s time and the organization’s investment.

“AI is already embedded in many of the personal lives of sellers and sales leaders, and it is beginning to emerge in the workplace through training and coaching tools.”

The analyst firm explained that AI in training solutions uses “branching”, a method to guide an individual’s learning through a module based on responses, as well as adaptive learning, which direct’s the learner to appropriate training or coaching based on their interaction with the system.

At the end of the day, the reality is that AI not only provides more individualized learning to salespeople but also helps train them in the shortest possible time, on the things that matter the most.

When it comes to training salespeople from scratch or providing training to bridge knowledge gaps when an experienced salesperson joins from another organization, AI can be even more useful, shortening the time they’re away from the sales floor.

“If you can decrease the time it takes to get a new seller productive, you have become more efficient, reduced your training costs and now have the possibility for more sales outcomes.

“This is what sales training and coaching technology is targeted to do,” concluded Hilbert.

Organizations are already exploring AI use cases and investing heavily in harnessing the technology to help different teams better understand data, optimize their workflow, do more with their time.

Introducing AI in sales training might seem like just another use case — but it has the potential to directly increase revenues for the entire organization — which is incredibly critical in today’s marketplace which is seeing more and more competition every day, irrespective of sector or industry.