Generative AI in Sales: How It’s Changing the Game in 2024

Vlad Oleksiienko 18 Nov 2024

While AI was merely a growing trend over the last couple of years, in 2024, 72% of all businesses use it for one more or of their business operations, and truthfully speaking, we don’t see how that number won’t be 100% in the near future.

AI has integrated into all branches of business activity, including sales, marketing, customer service, hiring, software development, and team productivity.

As we move into 2025, generative AI is becoming increasingly popular and accessible for businesses of all sizes, empowering them to work at unprecedented levels of efficiency.

But what exactly generative AI is, how it works, and what some real-life use cases are are all questions we’ll cover in this article. Let’s get to it!

What is generative AI?

You know how ChatGPT interprets your prompt, analyzes tons of data, and finally produces a response at lightning speed? That’s a prime example of generative AI.

AI is a complex technology that can undertake numerous different functions, some of which require it to generate new types of content, and this is exactly what generative AI is.

So whenever AI software generates any type of content, solves various problems, and predicts outcomes—that’s generative AI doing its magic.

Unlike traditional AI, which relies on rigid rule-based programming, generative AI learns from vast datasets to produce outputs that perfectly mimic human creativity and intelligence. And just like most other forms of AI, it also learns ‘on the job’ to get even smarter over time.

Generative AI is slowly but steadily becoming an indispensable tool across multiple industries, from tech to healthcare and beyond, applicable in practically all departments.

In sales, generative AI enhances the entire workflow, from prospecting to closing deals, empowering sales professionals to make better and faster decisions, while assisting with the routine, time-consuming tasks in the process.

Benefits of generative AI in sales and marketing

We’ve already mentioned how transformative generative AI can be for sales teams, but don’t take our word for it, just take a look at all the value they can bring your business right away:

Hyper-personalization → humans are great at personalization, but when it comes to writing hundreds of tailored messages for your prospects, nobody does it better than AI. Generative AI tools analyze past interactions, buyer behavior and preferences, CRM data, and more to create highly effective outreach that boosts engagement rates.
Time efficiency → generative AI’s ability to handle complex tasks at lightning speed frees up a bunch of time for sales reps that they can allocate for the more high-value activities. For example, certain AI tools excel at drafting effective cold emails or enriching customer profiles with external data.
Enhanced lead scoring → by analyzing outbound and inbound leads’ behavioral data, certain AI models can accurately, and more importantly, objectively prioritize leads most likely to convert. Sales reps can use these tools to create unique lead-scoring systems tailored to their specific audience and product.
Cost reduction → the logic here is that by automating some of the more time-consuming sales processes like engaging with customers and analyzing data, businesses can reduce their operational costs. Besides, when it comes to scaling sales operations, generative AI tools like AI SDRs are much cheaper than hiring new SDRs.
Data-driven insights → all AI and data go hand in hand, the only difference is that generative AI takes it a step further by using that data to create completely new, logical connections and outputs. Sales and marketing teams can therefore make objective, data-driven decisions in their efforts to interest, engage, and convert buyers.
Adaptability across channels → generative AI goes far beyond emails when it comes to sales engagement, adapting messages across LinkedIn, social media, and other platforms, taking sales multichannel outreach to the next level.
Improved customer experience → outbound prospects get relevant and timely engagement, inbound leads get quick and personalized responses, and that’s how generative AI helps foster company trust, leading to increased loyalty and retention.

As you can see, generative AI in marketing and sales can be a true game-changer if implemented and integrated correctly. Let’s take a look at some common sales scenarios to get an idea of how it works in practice.

Generative AI use cases in sales

There are countless ways sales teams can leverage generative AI in their operations, especially with new types of AI sales software coming to life nowadays.

The idea is to determine the processes that your sales team either needs improved results or help in handling scaled quotas, integrate the software in existing tool stacks, and find ways to fuse the human workforce with these automations.

Let’s take a look at the most common and revenue-driven use cases of generative AI in modern sales.

Personalized outreach

The most common generative AI use case in sales is undoubtedly sales outreach.

For quite some time now, various sales tools had the ability to fully automate mass outreach to help sales reps save time, but the problem was how generic those messages were.

With generative AI, sales professionals can rest assured that all their communication will be highly personalized with relevant prospect and company data, and effective, following the best practices of sales outreach.

The way these tools work usually starts with users ‘feeding’ the generative AI with all the information about their company, product, target audience, and outreach goals to make it an expert sales member of your team. Here’s what that looks like in Reply.io:

But that’s just the very beginning.

Next, such AI software will leverage any existing historical data, customer behavior, LinkedIn profiles, and demographic insights to produce messages that highly resonate with each unique prospect, saving you tons of time in the process.

Sure, you could use ChatGPT to generate personalized messages, as long as you input an effective sales prompt that is, but think about how much time that would take in the context of hundreds or thousands of prospects.

Besides emails, multichannel tools like Reply.io will also generate tailored messages for all other channels including LinkedIn messages, SMS, and WhatsApp messages.

And last but not least, it will bring it all together by creating tailored and conditional outreach sequences for each prospect, automating all touchpoints like follow-ups and LinkedIn connection requests:

As you can see, your automated emails could even open with a reference to a recent milestone, helping you build meaningful connections and increase the chances of a response.

Without any exaggeration, generative AI has completely transformed sales outreach by mixing the speed and automation of technology with the personalized and meaningful level of human communication.

And if that’s not enough, AI SDRs will take it a step further by also taking care of incoming responses in your sales communication—answering questions, handling objections, and booking meetings on your behalf. We’ll take a closer look at how Jason AI, one of the leading AI SDRs, does its magic in the next section of this article.

Never worry about replies again

Jason handles responses like a pro, ensuring every prospect gets the attention they deserve—without you lifting a finger.

Automate your follow-ups

Conversational intelligence (calls)

While calls are often part of multichannel sales automation platforms, there’s no room for generative AI to do its magic. After all, it can’t hop on a sales call instead of you!

However, being one of the most critical touchpoints in the B2B buyer journey, generative AI has found a unique way to assist with sales calls as well, with the help of conversational intelligence.

Conversational intelligence transcribes calls in real-time, analyzes the sales rep’s selling execution and the prospect’s sentiment, and finally highlights actionable insights during the call to help tip the scales in your favor.

So during a live call, when a prospect raises objections or asks certain complex questions, generative AI will provide expert-level prompts for the salesperson in real-time to help them handle the conversation.

Post-call, these AI tools will usually generate a detailed summary of the conversation, highlighting the strengths and weaknesses to help sales reps perform better with each next call, and automatically updating CRMs with key takeaways and any follow-up actions.

Chatbots

As previously mentioned, generative AI spans across both outbound and inbound sales, and the most common way it operates in the inbound direction is with the help of AI-powered chatbots.

Chatbots have been around for some time now, but they would always provide those generic, robotic answers that (more often than not) left people unsatisfied, which could potentially end the possibility of them doing business with said company.

Well, that’s just not the case any longer with generative, AI-powered Chatbots.

It’s no secret that nowadays a substantial number of prospects go through their buyer journeys on their own, without the need for any sales assistance, right till the very end when they’re weighing up their options.

AI chatbots are perfectly situated to be non-intrusive and non-salesly, yet nurture interested inbound leads should they need any sort of assistance. What are the custom pricing plans, how exactly does feature ‘X’ work, and does the product integrate with software ‘Y’ — AI chatbots will answer all those questions at lightning speed without any human intervention.

The way this works is by first integrating your company’s knowledge base with these AI chatbots, providing them with all the information they could possibly need to handle any queries. In turn, they will interpret questions, analyze the information you provided, and generate logical, and just as importantly—humanized and personalized responses to your inbound leads.

Here’s a quick overview of how our AI Chat by Reply.io works to get a better feel for such tools:

Our AI Chat will not only (pretty flawlessly) answer all questions for inbound leads, but also capture all website visitors, qualify them based on their website behavior and pre-determined criteria, and automatically ‘push’ them into the most relevant existing nurturing sequences, ensuring every sales opportunity gets acted upon.

Case study:

Fun fact, Klarna, one of the most popular financial apps in the world, reported saving a whopping $40 million annually by integrating AI Chatbots powered by generative AI into their operations.

They did this by automating the workload that would otherwise take 700 full-time customer-facing employees! Perhaps this example isn’t a direct ‘sales’ performance indicator, but it sure does give a glimpse at just how powerful these AI Chats can be when it comes to inbound lead generation.

From chat to call—seamlessly!

Engage visitors, answer questions, and book meetings right in the chat. No back-and-forth emails—just instant connections with hot leads.

Start chatting free

Lead generation (finding leads, qualifying, enriching data profiles)

An increasing number of businesses are turning to AI for lead generation, given its precision when it comes to targeting the right prospects, taking into account their demographics, technographics, online behavior, buyer intent signals, and so on.

Don’t get me wrong, human SDRs are more than equipped to execute this themselves but think about how much time it would take to skim all that data for each individual prospect.

Generative AI can drastically streamline this process, scanning the internet and various contact databases to build targeted prospect lists based on the unique criteria of your business, product, and ideal customers.

On top of that, they do an excellent job at qualifying prospects that sales reps add to CRMs or those who come in through inbound channels, helping sales teams prioritize those most likely to convert into customers, once again, further driving efficiency.

Once leads are identified and qualified, generative AI can enrich their customer profiles with additional data, including social media activity, company updates, and even product usage data for your trial users.

Just as an example, a dedicated lead generation AI platform might highlight one of your prospective companies that recently received funding as a high-priority target, recognizing that they are likely to invest in new solutions.

Sales proposals & presentations

This one’s pretty straightforward—sales professionals don’t only spend their time writing up personalized outreach messages but also various sales proposals and presentations, which is often quite a labor-intensive task, requiring extensive customization for each client.

With generative AI, sales professionals can significantly speed up this process without sacrificing the quality or level of personalization.

As a result, rather than creating sales proposals and presentations for a few key accounts, sales reps can begin creating highly tailored and customized sales materials for most or even all qualified prospects, without spending countless hours on them.

Truth be told, even the good-old ChatGPT can handle this task very effectively, as long as you input a smart and very detailed prompt for it to work with, outlining everything about your product, company, and the prospect company you’re creating your presentation for.

The time saved on proposal generation allows sales teams to focus on strategy and relationship-building, ensuring they deliver not just polished documents but also meaningful, value-driven discussions with their prospects.

Analytics & forecasting

There’s only one way to truly understand whether generative AI is working for your sales operations—analytics.

If you’re already using a leading sales automation platform like Reply.io, you almost certainly already have access to detailed, AI-driven analytics of your sales performance.

Generative AI goes beyond merely creating content and providing detailed analytics of sales performance—it can also generate accurate forecasts to help improve sales strategy and decision-making.

Using historical sales data, shifting market trends, and other external factors like economic indicators, generative AI software can predict revenue outcomes with remarkable accuracy.

A simple example could be a sales team that’s considering pursuing a particular new industry, so the AI tool will analyze all the necessary factors and conclude that this segment is experiencing a downturn, suggesting another industry to target with higher sales potential.

Sales training

Finally, generative AI is transforming the way sales professionals learn and develop their skills. We’ve already slightly touched on this when discussing conversational intelligence, where AI analyzes sales calls and generates actionable advice during the call, as well as performance reviews and areas of improvement after the call.

Certain AI sales training tools can also create real-world sales scenarios, offering reps a safe space to practice their pitches and handle objections without any risks, helping them develop their confidence and selling skills.

As an example, this AI software may present a virtual prospect who raises common concerns such as budget constraints or skepticism about ROI. The AI would then evaluate how the sales professional handles these real-world scenarios and provide objective feedback regarding their tone, content, and effectiveness.

These tools also identify specific areas for improvement, suggesting targeted sales materials to help improve those specific skills. Over time, these personalized coaching efforts will help ensure each and every sales team member becomes more effective and confident in their day-to-day work.

Generative AI in action

As promised, we’ll now explore how generative AI works in real-life sales scenarios with the example of Jason AI—one of the leading AI SDRs in the market.

In short, Jason AI is a fully-fledged SDR that joins your sales team along with the human SDRs, helping them work better and faster.

Jason mainly focuses on outbound sales outreach, one of the most common generative AI use cases in sales but it goes far beyond that by also helping sales teams identify targeted leads and book meetings.

After some minor training in the form of telling Jason AI all about your business, he will then start creating tailored, multichannel outreach sequences for all your leads while leveraging any relevant data he finds online.

Next, Jason AI will create hyper-personalized outreach messages for each prospect, catering to their unique pain points, business needs, and other data points. He can even start off your emails with catchy one-line openers to grab attention, should you choose so.

Last but not least, he will take care of incoming responses by handling common objections, answering queries, and even booking meetings on your behalf, just like magic!

Effectively, what this means is that Jason AI can reach out to hundreds or even thousands of prospects with unique, personalized outreach, nurture them through different follow-ups, responses, and touchpoints, and fill your calendar with meetings on autopilot, without you lifting a finger.

Sounds too good to be true? Check it out and see for yourself!

Meetings on autopilot? Yes, please!

Jason doesn’t just find leads—he books meetings while you focus on what you do best. Automate your outreach and let the deals roll in.

Find prospects now

The future of sales with generative AI

Moving into 2025, generative AI will become an integral part of sales operations. Technology that was once exclusive to enterprise-level businesses has now become more mainstream and accessible, so even the smallest of teams can enjoy these superpowers.

From personalized outreach and intelligent chatbots to advanced analytics and training, generative AI has covered every area of B2B sales, revolutionizing the speed and efficiency at which sales teams can operate.

Its ability to blend data-driven insights with creative, human-like communication makes it a real game-changer, and the best part is that this is just the beginning.

Looking ahead, generative AI will only continue to evolve, and who knows just how much more it will transform the way businesses engage with buyers and sell their products.

In any case, we encourage all sales professionals to embrace the fact that generative AI is the future of sales and definitely start implementing this technology in their operations to stay competitive and deliver exceptional customer experiences with every interaction.