10 Best AI Tools for Sales in 2024 | Cirrus Insight

Having the best AI tools for your sales processes is no longer a luxury—it’s now a necessity in our fast-paced consumer marketplace.

As sales teams navigate increasingly complex buyer journeys and heightened competition, artificial intelligence (AI) offers game-changing solutions to streamline operations, make data-driven decisions, and drive revenue growth.

Keep reading to discover the benefits of integrating AI into your workflows, including an exploration of 10 AI-powered sales tools on the market.

Strategic Advantages of AI in Sales Management

Artificial intelligence is transforming how sales managers lead their teams, close deals, and hit revenue targets. Upgrading your current processes and strategies with AI can optimize every aspect of the sales cycle.

By choosing the best sales tools for your team, you can achieve the following outcomes: 

• Better resource allocation: Assign tasks and manage workloads more effectively by analyzing data with AI, keeping sales reps focused on high-priority tasks.

• Automation of busy work: Streamline repetitive tasks—such as meeting scheduling, data entry, and follow-ups—to free up time for actual selling activities.

• More informed decision-making: Employ AI to gain actionable insights from large datasets, allowing sales managers to make data-driven decisions in real time.

• Enhanced customer engagement: Personalize emails and sales collateral by using AI to autofill templates with CRM data, based on prospects’ behavior, preferences, and past interactions with sales.

• Predictive analytics: Forecast sales trends and spot potential risks on the horizon, giving you the intel needed to proactively adjust your strategies and improve win rates.

Grounding Your Expectations: Practical AI Solutions for Sales Teams

Before investing in AI tools for sales, make sure to align your expectations with the needs of your team. AI should enhance existing processes and address challenges faced by sales reps—not just introduce flashy new technologies.

When evaluating AI solutions, consider ones that offer the following benefits:

• Reduce time spent on busy work, including lead and prospect research, meeting scheduling, and CRM data entry
• Deliver better insights into customer behavior, allowing sales teams to anticipate client needs and tailor their pitches
• Automate lead generation and qualification, giving sales reps the breathing room to focus on high-priority deals and meetings
• Streamline pre-call preparation by automating research tasks and delivering skimable reports on key data and customer history

Lastly, ensure your new AI tools would be compatible with existing software and integrations—such as your CRM, email, and calendar applications—to avoid disrupting your sales ecosystem.

10 Best AI Tools for Sales

Interested in optimizing your sales workflows with AI? Here’s a breakdown of ten AI-powered tools that can optimize different stages of the sales funnel. 

Cirrus Insight Meeting AI

Cirrus Insight’s Meeting AI automates prospect and customer research, leveraging artificial intelligence to compile in-depth insights into companies and contacts. This tool prepares sales reps for their meetings, freeing up time for the high-value interactions that drive deals forward. 

Sales funnel stage: Prospect and customer research, pre-call preparation

Advantages:

• Saves time by eliminating hours of pre-meeting research ahead of scheduled calls
• Suggests the most relevant customer data to increase strategic action and forecasted revenue
• Ensures sales reps arrive to calls fully prepared, informed, and equipped to make meaningful connections and drive outcomes

Zoho CRM

Zoho CRM uses AI to deliver predictive sales insights and automate lead scoring, enabling client-facing teams to zero in on promising leads. Its AI assistant, Zia, analyzes CRM data to forecast revenue and track customer interactions.

Sales funnel stage: Lead generation, customer data management

Advantages:

• Predicts the likelihood of lead conversion, monitoring sales trends and suggesting the best times to contact prospects
• Assigns sales reps to leads based on their expertise and suggests which products to sell

HubSpot Sales Hub

Still in its beta stage, Breeze is HubSpot’s AI solution for enriching its CRM platform, including the Sales Hub. Its AI-powered functionality supports sales teams in building their pipelines and closing deals, thanks to better forecasting and insights into prospects.

Sales funnel stage: Sales forecasting, guided selling, sales reporting

Advantages:

• Offers predictive AI to deliver better sales analysis and recommendations, including forecasting
• Advises on the best next steps for nurturing leads and following up via an AI prospecting agent
• Generates reports more quickly using AI-powered descriptions on lead funnels, target account engagement, and other metrics

Clari (Sales Forecasting Tool)

Clari is an AI-driven platform that provides sales forecasting to assist reps in identifying risks and opportunities in their pipeline. By analyzing deal progress and delivering real-time insights, this solution supports sales managers in leading their teams.

Sales funnel stage: Pipeline analysis, deal forecasting

Advantages:

• Improves forecast accuracy with AI-powered insights
• Generates mid-meeting cue cards for reps to better respond to questions and point points
• Increases visibility into the sales pipeline, determining which deals are active or at risk

Aviso (Sales Forecasting Tool)

Aviso delivers AI-powered forecasting by leveraging machine learning to provide deal insights and performance metrics. This integrated AI platform helps indicate where teams stand in their sales targets and how to adjust strategies to achieve their goals.

Sales funnel stage: Sales forecasting, deal progression

Advantages:

• Harnesses AI to provide more accurate sales forecasts by analyzing sales data, market conditions, and deal status
• Analyzes the sales pipeline to spot at-risk deals and potential upsides
• Able to automate tasks and provide insights using Aviso’s AI assistant

Leadfeeder

Leadfeeder uses AI to uncover anonymous website visitors and turn them into qualified leads. By tracking visitor behavior, it helps build the sales pipeline by identifying potential customers who have shown interest in the company’s products or services.

Sales funnel stage: Lead generation, sales prospecting

Advantages:

• Spots high-value website visitors within the previously anonymous traffic to your site
• Tracks down the contact information of potential leads, including emails and social profiles
• Assigns these new leads to the best sales rep, based on industry, web activity, and other preset qualifiers, and syncs with your CRM

Drift (Conversational AI and Chatbots)

Salesloft’s Drift chatbots use conversational AI to engage website visitors. Without any human intervention, this tool can assess chat conversations with prospective customers to qualify leads for sales, book meetings, and deliver a better engagement experience.

Sales funnel stage: Lead qualification, customer engagement

Advantages:

• Analyzes conversation patterns and engagement levels to identify high-intent leads
• Delivers personalized interactions by using AI to gain insights about a visitor’s behavior, preferences, and previous interactions
• Provides instant, multilingual replies to customer questions, makes product suggestions, and runs demos in real-time

Outreach (Email Automation)

Outreach automates email sequences, follow-ups, and prospecting, allowing sales reps to engage more consistently with leads. The platform’s AI-driven insights help optimize messaging and timing for maximum engagement.

Sales funnel stage: Email outreach, customer engagement

Advantages:

• Analyzes client data and previous interactions to write tailored emails for prospects
• Generates responses based on past conversations using an AI-powered Smart Email Assist feature
• Monitors and tracks engagement across emails, calls, and meetings, offering predictive analytics on when deals might close

Seismic (Content Recommendation Systems)

Seismic is an AI-powered sales enablement platform that recommends the best content for interacting with prospects and customers. Delivering the right content leads to a personalized engagement approach and can accelerate deal cycles towards closing.

Sales funnel stage: Content delivery, customer engagemen

Advantages:

• Uses AI to find the most relevant content, based on the account, contacts, and sales stage
• Empowers sales reps to share content quickly, cutting down the search time for the appropriate documentation and files
• Allows for personalization at scale, tailed to different buyer personas and roles within the sales pipeline

Proposify

Proposify helps sales teams create and send AI-powered proposals to close deals faster. Through customizable templates, automated data entry, and real-time tracking, this solution streamlines the proposal process, ensuring consistent branding and accuracy in sales documentation.

Sales funnel stage: Proposal creation, deal closing

Advantages:

• Creates personalized and professional proposals, quotas, and agreements for sales teams
• Tracks when prospects open proposals and delivers detailed analytics into their engagement
• Reduces human error by auto-populating sales templates with CRM data

The Future of Sales Management: Leveraging AI for Competitive Advantage

As AI continues to evolve at a rapid pace, sales managers must make a crucial decision: embrace these cutting-edge tools or risk falling behind their competitors.

Undoubtedly, the future of sales is tied to the strategic implementation of AI solutions. Adopting these tools unlocks new opportunities to optimize team performance, increase successful deals, and give you the predictive metrics you need for success.

Ready to supercharge your sales processes? Reach out to Cirrus Insight for a demo of Meeting AI, our AI-powered solution for automating prospect and customer research. Don’t forget to ask us about our free trial period.