How to Empower Sales Teams with Salesforce and AI

Artificial intelligence (AI) has grown significantly in recent years with more and more businesses adopting AI to enhance their product offerings, and better support their customers through innovative new features. One example of this is Salesforce, which has recently introduced various AI elements to its platform that effectively boost sales teams to grow their leads and successfully close deals. In this guide, we’ll be exploring Salesforce’s new AI features and how they are supporting users as well as the benefits of integrating E-Sign and Salesforce for sales teams. 

How can sales teams use AI?

Before we look at Salesforce specifically, it’s important to acknowledge that AI is being widely adopted across various industries due to the benefits it can provide, and sales is no exception. Sales teams can use AI in several ways to empower them in their workflows depending on their roles. For example, account executives, inside sales reps, and sales managers are responsible for different processes and metrics, so will use and benefit from AI in different ways. At the higher levels, some of the most popular and common use cases for AI in sales include:

• Highlighting important emails
• Prioritising the best leads
• Finding colleagues who are connected to important contacts
• Identifying on-track or at-risk opportunities
• Increasing forecast accuracy

Salesforce and AI and how it empowers sales teams

AI is an invaluable tool for sales teams, revolutionising workflows and helping them move away from clunky CRMs that are overflowing with data to interpret. It simplifies processes and allows salespeople to prioritise important leads instead of spending an unnecessary amount of time on admin. Below are some examples of the new features of Salesforce AI and how they can support sales teams.

Data analytics

In traditional sales, teams would often use spreadsheets to track their deals and workflows, which created more work for salespeople and increased the risk of errors in the data. However, with Salesforce’s new feature, AI analyses historical sales data to predict future trends with precise accuracy. This allows teams to plan strategically based on real insights and get a clearer picture of how much revenue the business will generate in the next financial quarter. As a result, they will know which areas are doing well and where improvements could be made in the sales workflows to maximise efficiency. 

Automating admin

Routine tasks such as data entry and lead qualification can often bog down sales teams, diverting their attention from high-value activities that drive business growth and close deals. By leveraging AI-powered automation, businesses can streamline these processes, saving time and resources. This allows sales teams to dedicate more energy to nurturing key relationships and converting prospects into customers. Also, by integrating E-Sign and Salesforce, automating admin tasks becomes even easier as you can create, sign, and send sales documents in just a few clicks, saving valuable time and increasing productivity in your teams. 

Identify buying signals

AI can also be beneficial in analysing customer interactions and purchase history to find buying signals. This provides key insights into which leads are most likely to convert, so sales teams can focus their time and energy on the hottest prospects, rather than putting too much effort into lukewarm leads that are less likely to convert. Therefore, teams can close deals quickly and more successfully and ensure your best sales tactics are being utilised where it counts.  

Personalised messaging

In traditional sales, using generic pitches for every lead is less likely to be successful in converting prospects into customers. AI helps you craft personalised messages that resonate with each customer’s unique requirements and preferences. For example, sales teams could send out emails with product recommendations tailored to their past browsing habits and purchases. This level of personalisation allows salespeople to establish a stronger connection with prospects and makes them feel valued, so they are more likely to convert into customers.

General AI assistance

Salesforce introduced its AI-driven sales agent and AI coach, designed to train salespeople, assist with qualifying a lead, and support teams with their pitches. Also, the AI-powered chatbots act as virtual assistants to handle basic customer enquiries 24/7. This means sales teams don’t have to worry about missing a potential lead or risk negatively impacting relationships with customers as their query will be responded to promptly, even if staff are unavailable. 

Why use eSignatures with Salesforce?

In addition to AI, sales teams can also be empowered by using electronic signatures in Salesforce. This is because eSignatures in Salesforce simplifies the process of creating, editing, negotiating, managing, and signing contracts by doing it digitally through the platform. You won’t need to switch between different applications, once integrated, all your document requirements can be managed through Salesforce.  

After a contract has been negotiated and agreed upon by all parties, it needs to be signed. Traditionally this would be a lengthy process as the involved individuals are required to apply a handwritten signature to a paper document. Whereas digital signatures make the process practically instantaneous, and the document can be securely stored in Salesforce. So it can be easily referred back to as and when needed. Signers can create a unique, secure, and legally valid signature on any device. Which can then be digitally embedded in the signature field on a contract.

Benefits of E-Sign and Salesforce for Empowering Sales Teams

By combining the features of Salesforce and E-Sign, sales teams can experience a wide range of important benefits that will empower their sales processes and increase success.

• Reduce document turnaround time – digitally signing documents can minimise the time spent completing transactions, from days to hours, speeding up business processes.
• Generate e-signature requests directly from the contract object in Salesforce – save valuable time for your sales team and maintain organisation in your workflows by managing all your document transactions directly from Salesforce.
• Save costs – by digitally signing documents through Salesforce you can eliminate unnecessary spending on paper, printing, ink, document storage etc, and this part of your budget can be reallocated to more important areas of your business.
• Manage multiple signers – E-Sign in Salesforce makes it easy to collect signatures from several signers, saving a significant amount of time compared to traditional paper processes. Also, you can set a specific signing order if needed to ensure a seamless transaction for all parties. 
• Keep sensitive data secure – Salesforce is a highly secure platform and if integrated with E-Sign, you can feel confident that your digital documents are protected. All documents stored in Salesforce require an access code and E-Sign electronic signatures come with a full audit trail, detailing the date, time, location, and IP address of the signature. To ensure legal validity and improve organisational compliance with relevant regulations.
• Improve the customer experience – providing potential customers with the smoothest possible experience is essential to closing deals. E-Sign in Salesforce makes it easier for customers to review, sign, and return documents to businesses, with the entire process taking only a few minutes. The flexibility to sign from any device is another benefit when offering customers a seamless signing journey.

Conclusion

Salesforce and its new AI features are a beneficial resource for empowering sales teams and streamlining workflows. They can remove the admin burden from salespeople, effectively freeing up their time to focus on more important priorities as well as providing useful analytics and innovative personalisation that keeps sales departments on track for sustainable growth and success. Also, by integrating E-Sign with Salesforce, sales teams can significantly reduce their document turnaround time and create seamless processes through fast, efficient, and secure e-signatures and digital document management.

To find out more about our Salesforce integration contact us today and our digital transformation team will be able to discuss your requirements. You can also get started with E-Sign by registering for our 14-day free trial. This will allow you to explore the features and functionality of the platform for yourself and how it could work for your organisation.