How AEs can reimagine workflows with AI

Using AI to keep sales teams running smoothly.

Autumn Witter

Autumn is a SEO Strategist at HubSpot, a proud Howard University grad, a music producer, traveler, and law student.

How AEs can reimagine workflows with AI

By Autumn Witter

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Blog > AI · 5 min read
All high-performing sales teams, whether in-person or remote, are looking for ways to improve win rates and lead pipelines, and to shorten deal cycles. And successful account management is a team effort. Each team member has a different expertise, territory, or role, so everything from account strategy to lead routing relies on collaboration and reliable workflows. From meeting formats to where and how to share updates, teams need even more flexible ways to collaborate. Fortunately, the emergence of artificial intelligence provides an exciting opportunity for sales teams. When AI completes manual sales tasks, from note-taking to creating meeting agendas, AEs have more time to invest in more authentic collaboration and focus on needle-moving tasks. At HubSpot, we are always looking for ways to make our teams more efficient. We know that applying AI to business process management can make all of our teams - including our Account Executives and sales teams - more effective. Keep reading to learn about the top challenges facing account executives in 2023 and how sales teams can benefit from using AI for business process automation.

Identifying current challenges

Challenges for account executives in 2023

Engaging customers

Over the past few years, there has been a large shift in the ways that sales teams can reach and engage a customer. As most meetings have shifted to Zoom and other video-based platforms, conversations are now more presentation-oriented (”can you see my screen?”) versus a quick email check-in or phone call.

Budget cuts

Getting clients to dedicate budgets to your product has always been an art, but as we look across the current economic environment, we don’t see signs of this getting easier. Businesses are freezing budgets and evaluating which tools are critical to their work, which means longer deal cycles, fewer sales opportunities, and a greater emphasis on demonstrating value early. Account executives will need to think creatively about how they can overcome these challenges to win deals.

Improving workflows

Using AI to overcome challenges in the sales process

Some of the most important tasks in an AE's day can feel repetitive. Whether looking up email addresses, drafting email campaigns, or summarizing sales meetings, AEs want to spend more time speaking with customers and less time on manual tasks like keeping the CRM data updated. Sales teams can use AI to eliminate some of this manual work. This is known as robotic process automation (RPA), which means using bots to automate high-volume tasks. When combined with AI algorithms, software robots become even more powerful automation tools. Here are some tasks AEs can automate using AI.

Aligning early

Account executives can use AI tools to streamline meetings by generating agendas and sharing them early with their teammates and customers. Sharing these agendas in advance helps the team prep materials and provides more information to make the most of the live conversation.

Meeting topics tracked and upvoted in Coda before the meeting.

Creating sales assets

Tools like Coda AI and HubSpot’s AI Blog Writer can help sales teams create content and assets that can be used to educate and nurture prospects. For example, Coda AI can generate blog post ideas and first drafts based on each topic provided.

Coda AI to generate blog posts

In HubSpot, you can start a draft and ask the AI tool to generate a paragraph, outline, ideas, or conclusion.

HubSpot AI Blog Writer.

Writing sales emails

AEs can easily find themselves spending hours each day on emails. AI can help AEs write and manage emails to free up time for more important tasks. Coda and HubSpot are two examples of AI tools that help design and write marketing campaigns to nurture sales leads. With Coda and OpenAI, you can specify a prompt to generate tailored follow-up emails for your contacts based on notes or other criteria.

Coda and OpenAI sales followup email generator

With Hubspot’s Free AI Email Writer, you can quickly generate emails for marketing campaigns and for customized, individual follow-up.

HubSpot AI Email Writer

Nurturing leads with chatbots

If sales reps are working with different teams or team members are spread across multiple locations, AI tools can help quickly relay information to the right person. With HubSpot, an AI chatbot immediately answers questions from leads or customers. The chatbot also passes on contact information and other details to the sales team, helping generate and track more leads. Ultimately, this frees up the team and ensures they have the context they need to provide the prospect with a tailored response.

Debriefing after a call

AI tools with natural language processing (NLP) have the ability to create transcripts from sales calls, generate post-meeting notes, and post the notes to the CRM. This makes it easy for your team to stay informed and make data-driven decisions based on themes across all calls. We have found that when there’s a recording and an auto-generated summary, it helps team members focus on active listening instead of taking notes, ultimately making the conversation more valuable for all participants.

Using Coda AI to summarize meeting notes, log them in the CMS, and share them via Slack.

Getting starting with AI

Final thoughts

By outsourcing repetitive tasks to AI, account executives can focus on high-impact activities, reduce operational costs, and improve collaboration within their sales team. Using intelligent process automation across an entire sales team makes it possible to collaborate effectively, even in hybrid and remote work settings. At the end of the day, the sales teams that figure out how to leverage the latest technology will be able to create strategic advantages and respond to changes in the economy and the workplace.

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