Why are AI sales tools becoming so popular?
Two words: efficiency gains.
By automating parts of the sales process, AI software allows reps to spend their time on high-impact work. As a result, companies with AI assistance can close more deals with fewer inputs.
To get ahead of the AI revolution, here are ten of the best AI sales tools across six key categories.
Artisan is an all-in-one AI BDR platform that automates all of the early and middle stages of the outbound lead generation process.
Ava, Artisan’s AI business development representative (DBR), handles the following cold outreach tasks:
Here’s an example of a personalized email written by AI BDR Ava:
Although Ava is one of the most autonomous prospecting tools around, you still maintain control over how she interacts with your leads.
You can, for example, choose from a variety of sales campaign playbooks:
In addition, you can choose if Ava is on autopilot. When the autopilot is off, Ava will still automatically craft outreach campaigns. But she won’t send them until you approve them yourself.
Key features:
Who is Artisan best for? Businesses of every size, from early-stage startups to enterprise brands, that want to do more personalized cold outreach on LinkedIn and email without hiring more sales reps.
Pricing: Reach out to sales for a custom quote.
HubSpot CRM is known for being user-friendly while still offering top-tier functionality for lead management, pipeline management, and sales reporting.
It comes with various advanced AI features that help B2B sales teams generate and close leads. Perhaps the most notable of these is AI copilot Breeze.
The AI copilot has two features— Agents and Intelligence.
Breeze Agents automate manual tasks associated with lead generation, such as cold outreach. Meanwhile, Breeze Intelligence enriches your lead data and identifies which target companies are visiting your website and showing buying intent.
Other AI features include meeting scheduling, forecasting, and “guided selling,” a nifty feature that provides sellers with contextually relevant ideas for moving a deal forward.
Compared to other CRMs on the market, HubSpot makes it easy to implement and use these AI features. However, the customizability can get a little overwhelming, so expert assistance might be required.
It’s also worth noting that HubSpot offers a free all-in-one CRM, although it doesn’t include many of the AI tools mentioned in this article. For those, you’ll have to upgrade.
Key features:
Who is HubSpot CRM for? Small to medium-sized businesses looking for an intuitive, all-in-one CRM solution with AI-powered sales automation and deal management tools.
Pricing:
Salesforce is in the CRM Hall of Fame at this point.
And with its latest upgrade—the baking of AI into almost every aspect of the CRM—the platform stands as one of the most advanced CRMs in terms of AI functionality.
Sales reps can use the core AI, named Einstein, to perform a variety of generative and predictive tasks. These include writing personalized emails, generating call summaries, and using real-time sales predictions.
Salesforce also offers a tool called Agentforce, which uses autonomous AI agents to nurture inbound leads, answering their questions and booking meetings. All of their responses are based on business data from your CRM, such as FAQs, sales plays, and case studies.
Salesforce comes with various integrations, deep customization capabilities, and even the ability to build your own prompts and AI models.
However, you’ll likely need to hire a Salesforce Administrator or external consultant to take advantage of this wide AI feature set. There is onboarding help, but having someone in-house to set up automations and integrations will help you maximize your investment.
Key features:
Who is Salesforce best for? Salesforce is best for mid-sized to enterprise businesses looking for a comprehensive AI CRM platform with plenty of customization options and enterprise-grade reporting.
Pricing:
Mailchimp is one of the most widely used email marketing platforms.
It’s designed to help businesses of all sizes create targeted email campaigns, segment their audience, and optimize performance.
Mailchimp comes with several AI tools, including a content creation AI feature that uses marketing data to suggest campaign creative assets. In addition to making aesthetic suggestions, the AI can also write email copy, headlines, and previews.
While not technically AI-driven (yet), the platform’s trigger-based automations enable your campaigns to adapt to each recipient’s online behavior, making these campaigns highly personalized.
For example, by connecting Mailchimp to Shopify, you can create automations based on how customers are interacting with your online store.
Mailchimp does, like all tools, have a few weaknesses.
Despite its intuitive drag-and-drop email editor, it's lacking in the email template department. Many of the pre-made templates look the same, not to mention a bit outdated. However, they should do the trick for most businesses. And the system lets you code or import your own email templates. Another small issue is that some users complain about slow customer service.
Overall, Mailchimp is one of the best email marketing platforms available. And with more AI features in the works, like new conversion prediction features, it should remain at the forefront of AI in sales and marketing.
Key features:
Who is Mailchimp best for? Mailchimp is best for small and medium businesses that need an affordable, easy-to-use email marketing platform with basic automations, AI content generation, and a good set of integrations.
Pricing:
ActiveCampaign is an all-in-one email marketing automation solution that helps businesses generate leads through highly personalized campaigns.
With ActiveCampaign, businesses can segment their audience in targeted ways, build behavior-based email campaigns, analyze results, and even create landing pages to capture the contact info.
As for artificial intelligence, ActiveCampaign has some pretty impressive features. The AI automation builder, for example, lets you use conversational AI to add automations to your email campaigns.
This saves a lot of time. When you want to build an action-based automation, instead of going into the campaign builder and manually configuring the rules and conditions, you just type something like “Add a tag, then send one email after three days.”
ActiveCampaign also offers AI segmentation suggestions. For example, you might see a recommendation to create a segment of your most engaged leads. You can then preview and enact the suggestion.
When it comes to content creation, the software can generate on-brand email templates, written content, and even images, all based on your natural language commands. There’s even a predictive scheduling tool that uses data about customer behavior to identify optimal times to send your emails for the highest open rates.
One limitation is the pricing. Small businesses might find it restrictive. And while the Starter plan is only $15 per month, it doesn’t come with the bulk of AI tools. Due to its deep feature set, it also has a steep learning curve compared to tools like Mailchimp (here’s a comparison of the two).
But if you have large email lists and the technical skills to implement the platform, it’s a highly valuable AI sales tool for generating leads.
Key features:
Who is ActiveCampaign best for? Businesses looking for an AI-powered email marketing platform with some of the most advanced automations available.
Pricing:
Clari is a revenue operations platform designed to help B2B companies streamline their revenue processes and improve forecasting accuracy.
The AI component, known as RevAI, automates repetitive admin tasks associated with revenue operations, such as generating summaries about specific sales interactions or deals.
RevAI also comes in handy for sales forecasting. Using industry projections, it makes highly accurate predictions about sales revenue, at-risk deals, pipeline conversion rates, and more.
But Clari isn’t just for sales leaders and RevOps professionals. Clari Copilot arms sales reps with real-time intelligence that can help them perform at their best. For instance, reps on a call with a prospect receive personalized cue cards explaining how to overcome an objection or handle a pricing question.
Moreover, the AI deal scoring feature helps reps prioritize opportunities by analyzing historical sales data to assign each deal a score.
Key features:
Who is Clari best for? Mid-market to enterprise sales organizations that have a high volume of sales interactions and want to start turning that data into revenue insights, coaching opportunities, and accurate forecasts.
Pricing: Reach out to sales for a custom quote.
Aviso is a forecasting and sales intelligence solution that automates routine tasks and empowers sales teams with actionable performance insights.
Its conversational intelligence is its big shiny feature and tracks the stats of every sales interaction. This is powerful for sales coaches, who can review a rep’s talk ratio, question rate, interactivity ratio, and other sales call success metrics to find ways for them to improve.
Aviso also offers powerful relationship intelligence that leverages AI to provide reps with insight into their accounts, as well as guidance on how to best nurture the stakeholders.
When it comes to drawbacks, users have complained on G2 about its Salesforce integration failing to accurately sync data.
Key features:
Who is Aviso best for? Companies looking for a predictive sales analytics software that has great data integration flexibility, powerful conversational intelligence, and AI automations.
Pricing: Reach out to sales for a custom quote.
Drift, a Salesloft tool, is an AI chatbot tool that engages your website visitors with personalized conversations to qualify and convert them.
Users tweak their chatbot’s voice using natural language descriptions of their brand’s personality and tone. For example, a healthcare company might use prompts like “warm,” “comforting,” or “grandmotherly.”
One of Drift's most useful features is its ability to reveal the names of potential customers that are visiting your website and assign them engagement scores. Such intel is critical, as it enables reps to adequately prioritize outreach.
One issue regularly cited on G2 is that Drift will sometimes book meetings for reps with leads that are outside of their territory or account list.
For example, Saajan, an Account Development Exec writes, “I wonder if Drift can have more logic built into it to allow for customers to be routed to right coverage team when it comes to the meeting step.”
Overall, if you want an easy-to-use conversational marketing tool to pre-qualify web visitors with conversations that pass the Turing Test, Drift is a great option.
Key features:
Who is Drift best for? Businesses looking to automate inbound website lead qualification and meeting booking with a human-like conversational chatbot.
Pricing: Contact sales for a custom quote.
Intercom is an AI agent and customer service platform that automates online customer support conversations.
The platform’s AI chatbot, Fin, uses information about your company, buyers, and products to accurately answer questions. You can program it easily to respond in your brand’s tone of voice and in line with your support policies.
Global companies will be happy to know Fin supports over 45 languages and can translate support content in real-time and turn it into bite-size answers to customer inquiries.
Unlike some chatbots, Fin isn’t just for your website. You can also unleash Fin on email, SMS, and social, providing customers with support wherever they need it.
Intercom also provides analytics that help you dig into your conversations, find what’s working, and optimize your support workflows. One of the most helpful reports is the Conversation Quality report, which identifies parts of your support system where you need to add more content or train your agents.
Key features:
Who is Intercom best for? Companies that need to streamline customer service with an AI-powered chatbot and also want additional customer service features like a knowledge base and an AI Copilot for their agents.
Pricing:
Tableau is a data analytics tool that helps sales teams analyze and visualize their sales data to make data-driven decisions and find ways to improve sales performance.
A visual platform, Tableau enables salespeople, sales managers, and sales ops to find meaning in complex data via charts, graphs, density maps, and other visualizations.
AI is baked into the platform and acts as both an assistant and consultant to users, automating repetitive tasks and providing in-product guidance.
The Tableau Agent democratizes data insights across your team. Reps can use written prompts to instruct the AI to answer questions about your sales organization, like “How many new logos did we make in Q1?” The AI agent will automatically apply analytics best practices to find the answer, which it illustrates using the most logical visualization.
Whether you’re looking to create sales dashboards or dig into your pipeline analytics, Tableau is a handy tool to have in your tech stack.
Key features:
Who is Tableau best for? Businesses that need an AI analytics platform to visualize and analyze sales and customer data so they can make more informed decisions.
Pricing:
AI sales tools have the power to transform your sales organization through intelligent automation and deep data insights.
For customer relationship management, HubSpot is hard to beat. MailChimp provides an excellent, affordable email marketing solution for smaller businesses.
For data visualization and forecasting, few platforms match Tableau. And Intercom leads the way in customer service automation.
When it comes to an all-in-one solution that combines multiple AI sales tools, Artisan takes top place. Its next-gen AI BDR, called Ava, handles the entire cold outreach process, from researching leads to writing relevant, engaging LinkedIn messages and emails.
Why juggle multiple tools when you can have an AI-powered BDR that does it all? Artisan’s Ava streamlines your cold outreach, from finding leads to crafting personalized messages, so you can focus on closing deals.
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Irina is a Founder at ONSAAS, Growth Lead at Aura, and a SaaS marketing consultant. She helps companies to grow their revenue with SEO and inbound marketing. In her spare time, Irina entertains her cat Persie and collects airline miles.
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