Want To Close More Deals? AI Can Help You
A new partnership between Salesloft and IBM demonstrates how AI can complement the sales process.
By Rebecca Barker
Salesloft is trying to make salespeople's jobs easier with the help of AI.
The sales engagement platform is incorporating IBM's watsonx artificial intelligence into its interface to enhance seller capabilities, the Atlanta-based Inc. 5000 company shared in a press release. IBM's technology offers a "prompt lab" that can summarize meetings or reports, generate insights and takeaways from content like product reviews, and create a customer assistant through a chatbot template.
The alliance between the two companies unlocks new selling potential for Salesloft's more than 5,000 clients, which include Google, Shopify, and Cisco. IBM--a Salesloft customer itself--will also use the company's enhanced interface within its global sales organization, which consists of up to 40,000 users dispersed throughout 30 countries.
Salesloft CEO David Obrand says the company hopes the technological adoption will help to streamline salespeople's workflows--reducing busy work so they can focus on selling. "There are around 2,080 hours in a year for work ... but every study that we have seen on the market says that sellers spend less than a third of that time with their prospects and customers," he says.
The goal, Obrand adds, is for generative AI to "augment," not replace jobs. For instance, Salesloft's existing AI, called Rhythm, might work in conjunction with watsonx to create three possible emails that a seller can send to a client. The seller can adjust or combine aspects of the messages and choose the most suitable option, but the AI's initial assistance can save them both time and mental energy.
The technology can also be used to predict customer behavior and identify potential risks, building off Rhythm's existing capabilities. Much of Rhythm's offerings streamline workflow through features like "Conversations Summary," which reviews and determines valuable takeaways from recorded calls, and "Salesloft Deals," which predicts buyer behavior and forecasts the steps needed to finalize a sale. Users could input this data into watsonx's prompt lab to ask specific questions with tailored outputs.
Obrand says that companies using Rhythm have experienced a 20 percent reduction in the time it takes to get deals done, a 25 percent increase in the deals that they secure, and a nearly 40 percent decrease in the activities required to close a deal--because AI does it for them. Rhythm's success validates the idea that AI can be used to support, rather than replace, sellers. The intent of the collaboration with IBM is to further enhance these opportunities.
Generative AI, of course, does have some risks. Hallucinations, misinformation, and deepfakes all pose an imminent threat to users and nonusers alike. However, Obrand says Salesloft has spent the past seven months--the two companies began exploring a partnership in June 2023--experimenting with watsonx "to become deeply, deeply learned on [IBM's] models and how to best apply them such that they don't give you know either hallucinations or phantom answers or anything like that."
He acknowledges that establishing trust between sellers and their customers is paramount to ensuring business success and longevity, and believes watsonx will facilitate that relationship dynamic, as IBM reports the platform answers questions with 95 percent accuracy.