AI sales assistant

What is AI sales assistant software?

AI sales assistant software is a type of technology that uses artificial intelligence to help sales teams with different tasks such as communicating with prospects, handling objections, and rep coaching. Some tools literally act as assistants or co-pilots on sales calls, helping answer reps’ questions if they’re stumped and pulling information for them, while other tools may focus on helping sales leaders with coaching and QA.

An intelligent sales assistant powered by Dialpad Ai

Dialpad Ai Sales Center gives you an AI sales assistant that can guide sales reps through tough questions from prospects, pull up useful content for them in real time (like case studies, battlecards, pricing, and even PDFs), help managers with coaching, and more. Here are just a few examples of what you get.

Real-Time Assist (RTA) cards

Create RTA cards that automatically pop up on sales reps’ screens with relevant information for different topics as soon as Dialpad Ai recognizes that trigger keywords or phrases are spoken. For example, sales managers can create custom sales battle cards that pop up when prospects say words like “pricing,” “Competitor X”, or “support.”

Ai Recaps

After a sales call ends, Dialpad's Ai Recap feature automatically creates a call summary with the transcript, action items, highlights, and any manual notes into an so you can quickly recap important discussion points and follow up with teammates or customers.

Ai Playbooks

With Dialpad's Ai Playbooks, coaches and supervisors can track rep adherence to sales methodologies like BANT, SPICED, SNAP, and SPIN—without having to listen to every call from beginning to end. Dialpad Ai can automatically suggest questions and phrases that reps need to say during a call (for example, asking about budgets), understand whether the behavior was met, and check the task off the list.

QA scorecards

Speed up quality assurance (QA) reviews, reduce compliance risks, and improve adherence with Dialpad's Ai Scorecards. Instead of supervisors having to review call recordings manually, Dialpad Ai automatically suggests when QA Scorecard criteria have been met and highlights sales coaching opportunities.

Live sentiment analysis

When you have a large team of sales reps, it’s not possible to keep track of how every single call is going. Dialpad Ai can do live sentiment analysis, showing managers whether calls are going positively or negatively right in the active calls screen so they know instantly if they need to hop on the call to help the rep.

Advanced analytics

See all the analytics for your sales conversations, from idle time to time on calls, and how frequently your tracked keywords come up—all in Dialpad's built-in reporting and dashboards.

Native CRM integrations

From Salesforce to HubSpot to Zoho CRM, Dialpad has a wide range of CRM integrations that will embed Dialpad’s sales dialer inside those tools (so sales reps don't have to toggle back and forth between apps to make phone calls), automatically log activities like texts and calls, and more.

AI sales assistant benefits

The benefits of AI sales assistants are pretty wide-ranging—they can do a lot of different things and help make your sales team more efficient across the sales journey, from automating repetitive and low-value tasks, to organizing and uncovering insights from data much more quickly. Here are some key advantages:

It helps your sales team make better use of their time

By automating otherwise time-consuming tasks like manually searching for information and battlecards, AI-powered sales assistants give both sales reps and managers back more time in their day to focus on actually making sales.

For example, with AI sentiment analysis, a sales leader won’t have to painstakingly listen to every single ongoing sales call. They can easily keep an eye on hundreds of active calls and quickly see which ones have negative sentiment. (In Dialpad, calls with negative sentiment are flagged with a red icon while calls with positive sentiment have a green icon.) If they do spot calls that are going south, they can click to open up the real-time transcripts, scan it to understand the context of the conversation, and decide whether or not they need to help the rep save the deal.

It helps sales teams use data more efficiently

With such large volumes of data available to sales teams today, it’s almost impossible to extract meaningful insights about conversations, prospect preferences, and sales performance—efficiently, at least. It would easily take hours every day just to sift through everything.

Even though AI can’t quite do as well as humans when it comes to empathy and nuance, it can analyze data much more quickly. Dialpad’s Ai Agent Assist, for example, can instantly search through a sales org’s entire knowledge base—every training article, FAQ page, past customer call, and so on—to pull up the right answer to a prospect’s or sales rep’s question. In real-time.

And yes, this applies to answering customer support agents’ questions too:

It automates the most repetitive and time-consuming tasks

Sales automation is one of the biggest perks of AI assistants, simply because there are so many repetitive manual tasks that reps have to do.

For example, one of the most time-consuming (and low-value) tasks for sales teams is having to manually enter all the data that results from every single sales call, text thread—basically every sales interaction they have every day.

The thing is, collecting that data is critical. It’s a non-negotiable for sales teams because it provides essential information about buyer preferences, the latest objections, and more.

AI can automate a lot of that information collection, like transcribing sales conversations. That means your reps won’t have to type notes and log all that information after every call with a prospect—software like Dialpad Ai Sales Center can automatically add those records to your CRM, without any extra work needed from your reps:

It reduces the chances of human error

On a related note, even though AI virtual sales assistants aren’t perfect, they can reduce human error by automating data entry and offering objective and consistent evaluations based on data. For example, instead of a tired and overworked sales manager doing QA on sales calls for an entire team of reps and potentially making mistakes as they review the calls, AI can go through all of these calls automatically, pick out keywords that signify whether the rep touched on the required questions or topics, and grade the calls instantly.

Some sales AI tools can also transcribe calls and automatically populate call notes in CRMs, which means they don’t have to be entered manually and risk typos or mistakes.

(Of course, this depends on the AI tool being sophisticated and having a level of transcription accuracy.)

It makes it easier for managers to coach at scale

AI sales assistants can help busy sales managers coach large teams of sales reps simultaneously. For example, Dialpad Ai Agent Assist feature automatically searches connected knowledge sources to find information for reps as they’re talking to prospects, so they don’t have to message their managers for help as frequently.

The AI-powered sentiment analysis feature also helps managers. We mentioned sentiment analysis earlier, but coaching is another big piece that AI can help with. In most sales organizations, there is usually a sales methodology that SDRs and AEs have to follow, whether that’s BANT, SPIN, or SPICED.

But training reps on these methodologies and making sure they follow them consistently takes a lot of manual work and review by sales managers. Not anymore. Dialpad’s Ai Playbooks feature uses real-time speech recognition and generative AI to lay out the questions that you need to ask during sales calls for the methodology your sales team uses and marks it on the screen for sales reps once they’ve asked them.

Whether you’ve just onboarded a group of new reps, or are updating your sales methodology for the whole team, Ai Playbooks can provide those timely reminders to keep everyone aligned on the questions and topics they need to hit when talking to prospects without sales leaders needing to do a lot of that leg work and manual review:

It shortens sales cycles and improves conversion rates

The result of all of these benefits is, ultimately, twofold: a shorter (or accelerated) sales cycle and high conversion rates.

During customer interactions, a good AI sales assistant tool can analyze conversations in real-time, extracting valuable insights about prospects’ preferences, pain points, and buying signals. This helps sales representatives tailor their pitches and responses more effectively to directly address customer needs, which then focuses the conversation and should increase the likelihood of a successful conversion.

And with AI sales assistants that provide real-time coaching, there’s less back and forth needed between the sales rep and manager—the assistant can offer instant feedback, guidance (for example, through Dialpad’s Ai Playbooks), and relevant information to help sales teams navigate complex interactions more effectively. This on-the-fly coaching not only improves the performance of individual reps, but also ensures more consistency in messaging and higher adherence to sales strategies.

Along with real-time assists provided by the AI, sales teams essentially have a real-time copilot who can provide support, information, and guidance during sales interactions to overcome objections and answer tricky questions.

How does an AI sales assistant work?

AI sales assistant tools typically leverage Natural Language Processing (NLP) to understand and process human language (like what you’d find in sales calls), which means they can analyze prospect questions and extract relevant information from emails. This also allows the software to interpret call sentiment, identify key phrases, and automate coaching.

Machine learning (ML) also plays a critical role in AI sales assistant tools because it enables them to learn from data and respond more accurately as they ingest more data. For example, ML algorithms can be used for tasks like lead scoring, where the software learns from historical data to predict which leads are more likely to convert into customers.

There is a huge variety of AI sales assistant technology already on the market and they’re not all the same. You’ll want to make sure that the solution you choose can actually address the challenges that your sales team has. Here are just a few of the tasks that AI sales assistants can help take on:

• Data entry and organization

• Real-time conversational insights

• Handling sales conversations via chatbots

• Lead qualification and scoring

• Scheduling and calendaring

• Email automation and follow-ups

• Sales training support

• Forecasting and predictive analytics

• Document and proposal generation

• Task reminders and alerts

• Competitor analysis

Empower your sales team with an AI sales assistant

Using an AI sales assistant could be the key to scaling and optimizing your sales team's effectiveness.

By leveraging a tool with proprietary AI, Natural Language Processing, machine learning, and generative AI, AI sales assistants can automate a wide range of routine tasks for your reps and managers, accelerate your sales cycle, and provide valuable data-driven insights.