AI Sales Enablement—How To Leverage It in Your Workflows

As technology advances, traditional sales enablement—relying on manual work, generic content, and insufficient personalization—is becoming more outdated and inadequate to cater to customers’ needs. 

This is why many teams turn to AI—it helps them save time and ensure they can reach and exceed quotas. If you’re unsure what AI sales enablement entails and how to leverage it in your processes, you’re at the right place. Our team has used AI to half the number of emails we send and double the positive responses. We wanted to help others do the same, so we’ve created this guide to:

• Define AI sales enablement
• Show how to use AI in sales enablement
• Discuss a tool that supports sales enablement

What Is Sales Enablement and How Can AI Help?

Sales enablement involves supporting your sales team with everything they need to close more deals, including:

By bringing AI into your sales enablement processes, you can enhance every one of these areas to take your team’s efficiency to a new level and work smarter to ensure success. AI sales enablement allows you to:

• Automate workflows to save time
• Prioritize personalization
• Make data-driven decisions
• Monitor performance in real-time

💡 Bonus read: Check out our article on AI in marketing and sales to understand in what other ways you can leverage the technology to achieve goals. 

How To Leverage AI in Sales Enablement

Here are seven concrete ways to use AI for sales enablement:

1. Effortless content creation
2. Staff training, onboarding, and education
3. Simplified lead scoring
4. Personalized customer experience creation
5. Automating repetitive tasks
6. Easy sales forecasting
7. Data-based decision making

Content Creation

Content development and management are big parts of sales enablement. A comprehensive content library can:

• Streamline internal and external communication
• Ensure SDRs have detailed product information
• Encourage personalization
• Improve efficiency
• Ensure uniformity across the board

Although necessary, writing case studies, sales scripts, email templates, and other types of content is incredibly time-consuming. Plus, sales enablement content requires regular updates to accommodate the latest market changes.

Using prompts, you can instruct AI tools to create personalized and relevant content for different purposes. With AI, you can write entire resource hubs where SDRs will be able to find everything they need to perform their job. You can also update the content whenever necessary in only a few clicks. ✅

By relying on AI to create content, you’ll have more room to focus on other high-value tasks and activities that help you reach goals.

💡 Bonus read: One tool that can help you create content is ChatGPT. Read our articles on how to use ChatGPT to write an email, ChatGPT prompts for sales emails, ChatGPT for sales, and ChatGPT prompts for sales to see how to leverage it. 

Staff Training, Onboarding, and Education

Quick and efficient training and onboarding help new team members understand their roles and your company’s processes. It also ensures they know how to use different resources in their work and properly approach leads.

AI sales enablement tools can help you simplify onboarding and training by:

• Creating relevant materials
• Customizing training courses
• Custom building AI-powered prospects to allow new team members to practice

Besides helping you with initial training, AI sales enablement platforms allow you to create data-based education materials to support the ongoing development of your sales team. Such tools can analyze each salesperson’s performance data and use it as the basis for tailoring personalized learning experiences to help your team overcome challenges and improve their numbers. 

Lead Scoring

Prioritizing accounts based on specific criteria helps you focus on those with high potential, save time, and enhance the likelihood of conversions, and this is exactly what lead qualification is about. This process involves assigning points based on whether and to what degree an account fills out the conditions you set. 🥇

AI has a valuable role in lead scoring. It can:

• Analyze vast amounts of complex data to uncover trends and criteria for accurate lead scoring
• Build comprehensive ideal customer profiles to compare leads against and determine their value
• Predict the behavior and properties of different leads based on past data, which can help you anticipate their next move
• Ensure consistency across the board and keep your lead scoring processes objective

Creating Personalized Customer Experiences

Customers seek a personalized approach that will make them feel appreciated. For many, generic outreach isn’t compelling enough and can be a deal-breaker.

Adding AI to your sales enablement processes can help you collect detailed lead information and fill in potential data gaps to ensure SDRs have a comprehensive lead database they can tap into for outreach purposes.

With a high-quality sales tool and precise prompts, you can retrieve specific lead information, get answers to questions, and search every corner of the internet to gather data that supports personalization. 👌

Automating Repetitive Tasks

Sales enablement can include a number of repetitive tasks, such as:

• Data entry
• Email follow-ups
• Team performance tracking

AI sales enablement tools can handle these and many other repetitive activities to take some weight off your shoulders and streamline sales. 💪

For example, you can integrate a quality sales tool with your CRM to automate lead data management and centralize information. Or, you can connect your sales tool to a data analytics tool to track your team’s performance and easily spot areas of improvement.

Sales Forecasting

Sales enablement isn’t focused solely on the present—it also looks into the future to ensure proper resource optimization and prevent unpleasant surprises. For this purpose, advanced AI-powered tools can analyze past sales data to make projections for the future and:

• Set realistic goals
• Spot new opportunities
• Manage risks more effectively
• Better understand your customers

Data-Based Decision Making

AI can analyze large volumes of data to spot trends and patterns and identify potential issues before they escalate. For example, sales tools can monitor:

• Sales interactions
• Campaign performance
• Customer behavior
• Customer feedback

All this info helps you and your team make informed decisions impacting different processes, remove the guesswork from sales, and minimize risks. 

How To Add AI to Your Sales Enablement Workflows

Here’s how to combine AI and sales enablement:

Criteria for Choosing the Right AI Sales Tool

As the market’s overflowing with dozens of solutions that promise to streamline sales, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the choices. If you find it hard to evaluate your options, here are a few criteria to keep in mind:

• Various AI options—The right tool should offer different AI-powered features to streamline content creation, task automation, data collection, and other relevant processes
• Integrations—The tool should seamlessly integrate with different CRM systems, data providers, and sales engagement platforms to help you organize and centralize work
• Templates—Choose a tool that offers customizable AI templates that simplify your work and help you save time
• Feature versatility—Find a tool that does more than sales enablement to minimize context switching, streamline communication, and bring teams under a single roof
• User-friendliness—The right tool should be intuitive, so you and your team don’t have to spend a lot of time learning its ins and outs
• Budget—The right tool should offer excellent value for money. For utmost flexibility, it should have a free plan and multiple paid ones

One sales tool that has all of the above is Clay. Thanks to its multifunctionality, this sales automation platform covers sales enablement but is also an excellent tool for SDRs. 📌

Clay—A Valuable AI-Powered Sales Ally

Clay isn’t a sales enablement platform per se—it’s much more than that. This sales automation is designed to streamline creating and managing sales campaigns from start to finish but includes many options you can use for sales enablement purposes. 👌

In a way, Clay acts as a universal sales tool—its unmatched feature versatility sets it apart and makes it an excellent addition to any sales tech stack. Here are Clay’s options we want to highlight that cover sales enablement and beyond:

1. Claygent
2. Integrations
3. AI email drafter
4. AI templates

Claygent

Claygent is Clay’s AI-powered research assistant that can wear many hats. It operates just like ChatGPT—you enter prompts to get the desired results.

In terms of sales enablement, Claygent can help you:

• Create valuable content for your team
• Find relevant case studies
• Research company and people information
• Format data

In other words, Claygent automates many sales enablement tasks to ensure SDRs have everything they need to reach out to potential leads with personalized messaging.

Besides helping with sales enablement, Claygent is useful to SDRs in other ways as well. It can assist with:

• Deep lead targeting
• Summarizing information
• Customizing messaging
• Building campaigns specific to each prospect

Thanks to its various use cases, Claygent is an ideal assistant to every sales and marketing team that wants to work faster and maintain efficiency. ✅

Integrations

Clay is packed with valuable features, but you can extend its functionalities even further by integrating it with over 200 platforms. 

For example, you can connect Clay to popular CRMs like Salesforce or HubSpot to effortlessly sync and update records and score leads. Or, you can integrate Clay with Typeform to pull response data from forms through which you can collect your coworkers’ feedback on current processes.

Another integration you’ll like is with OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT. With it, you can generate any type of text to speed up content creation, save time, and minimize mistakes. 🤖

Clay’s most significant integrations revolve around data enrichment, which is another reason why the platform is so versatile. Sales teams can use over 75 data providers to retrieve different company and people information to build comprehensive databases that serve as the foundation for outreach.

You can access each data provider individually or use Clay’s waterfall enrichment to go through multiple providers, automate enrichment, and boost data coverage. If you opt for the latter, you still remain in control—you select the data point you need and the providers, and Clay takes care of the rest.

AI Templates

To further streamline the work of sales teams, Clay offers two types of AI templates:

1. Templates for generating target ICPs
2. Templates for AI email writing

Since they have a pre-set structure, you only need to input the right information to get results. Of course, if you’d like to change some template elements, you can—Clay highlights flexibility and customizability.

Clay AI Email Drafter

We’ve mentioned that Clay is more than a sales enablement tool, and offers versatile options that cover the entire sales process. A unique AI feature we’d like to point out focuses on outreach and will be a favorite to SDRs—AI email drafter.

This feature can create tailored emails for each lead and reference specific data gathered through enrichment. We’re not just talking about mentioning someone’s name or job title, as the drafter can:

• Cite research
• Mention a person’s podcast appearance
• Reference an event someone attended
• Mention someone’s recent social media post

Once emails are generated, it’s easy to send them to a preferred CRM tool or email sequencer. There’s also the option to save emails in a CSV file. 🗃️

Clay’s Flexible Pricing Plans

You don’t have to spend a dime to get started with Clay—the platform has a free forever plan perfect for getting to know different options for streamlining sales processes. If you like what you see, you can opt for one of the four paid options:

Every paid option and the free plan can accommodate unlimited users. This means sales and marketing teams can work together in Clay and leverage its options without worrying they’ll overgrow the platform. 🧘

Clay users agree—the platform is worth the investment thanks to its rich feature set. Here’s what one user says about it:

Become a Part of Clay’s Universe

All it takes to start enjoying Clay’s options is to set up your account, and here’s how to do it:

1. Go to the signup page
2. Enter your name, email address, and password
3. Explore the platform’s sales enablement and other functionalities

Clay offers extensive resources to help you get to know all its options and uses. If you’d like to learn about every feature through carefully designed lessons in video format, head to Clay University. There’s also a lively Slack community where you can see how other users leverage Clay and borrow some ideas for your workflows. 

To receive tips on setting up successful sales campaigns from the Clay team, sign up for the Sales Prospecting Newsletter. 💌

💡 Keep reading: If you’d like to know more about different roles of AI in sales, check out the following guides:

• Using AI for cold calling
• ChatGPT lead generation
• AI in B2B sales
• AI-guided selling
• AI SDR