Conventionally, salespeople are responsible for juggling tasks like following a playbook, capturing responses, building rapport and updating a customer relationship management (CRM) system during sales calls. As these tend to be repetitive and time-consuming, tedium can quickly set in. The average salesperson spends more than five hours a week updating CRM records, according to a Dooly survey. In search of a solution, sales tech entrepreneur Eldad Postan-Koren and cybersecurity practitioner Bar Haleva co-created Winn.AI, an AI-powered assistant designed to help sales teams automatically track, capture and update CRM entries. Winn.AI monitors sales calls and records key data, in theory reducing the need for salespeople to note-take themselves.

In brief AI software is being offered to sales teams to analyze whether potential customers appear interested during virtual meetings. Sentiment analysis is often used in machine-learning research to detect emotions in underlying text or video, and the technology is now being applied to help people see how possible future clients are feeling in sales pitches to improve results, Protocol reported this month. The COVID-19 pandemic has moved a lot of meetings virtually as employees work from home. "It's very hard to build rapport in a relationship in that type of environment," said Tim Harris, director of product marketing at Uniphore, a software company specializing in conversational analytics. The hope is that sellers may be able to use AI technology to automatically tell when they're boring clients and can immediately change tactics, such as being more empathetic to keep them interested. In addition, reactions to individual products could be included, so that vendors are aware of what Harris calls "emotional state of a deal."

Virtual sales meetings have made it tougher than ever for salespeople to read the room. So, some well funded tech providers are stepping in with a bold sales pitch of their own: that AI can not only help sellers communicate better, but detect the "emotional state" of a deal -- and the people they're selling to. In fact, while AI researchers have attempted to instill human emotion into otherwise cold and calculating robotic machines for decades, sales and customer service software companies including Uniphore and Sybill are building products that use AI in an attempt to help humans understand and respond to human emotion. Virtual meeting powerhouse Zoom also plans to provide similar features in the future. "It's very hard to build rapport in a relationship in that type of environment," said Tim Harris, director of Product Marketing at Uniphore, regarding virtual meetings.

Second Nature's sale coaching platform analyzes a simulated client conversation and identifies strengths and weaknesses of a salesperson's pitch. This is the dashboard a trainee sees after completing a simulation. Another assistant just got a significant chunk of money to make her name just as familiar. Jenny is a virtual assistant who specializes in training salespeople. Second Nature, the company that created this conversational robot, announced a $12.5 million round of investment Wednesday, Jan. 11 to build out the conversational artificial intelligence service.

As remote and hybrid work becomes commonplace, companies are investigating ways to train salespeople one-on-one virtually -- typically over video chat platforms like Zoom. Even before the pandemic, 59% of learning and development professionals were spending more of their budget on online training than in-person, according to LinkedIn. But not every department is devoting an equal amount of time to coaching, surveys show -- and this can be to the detriment of sales. A recent RingDNA report found that 45% of salespeople have received less coaching than usual or no coaching since moving to remote work during the pandemic. It's estimated that 75% of sales organizations waste resources due to random and informal coaching, besides, the opportunity costs being substantial.

The Covid-19 pandemic has converted thousands of salespeople from road warriors to Zoom warriors. Some companies are making the most of this shift by using tools powered by artificial intelligence to track and analyze their salesforce's virtual pitches. "You definitely miss the lunch, the dinner, the happy hour," says Jeramee Waldum, vice president of global sales at MavenLink, a maker of project management software whose dozens of once-traveling salespeople are now stuck behind webcams. Before Covid, Waldum says the MavenLink sales team spent roughly half its time on the road, treating customers to lunches, holding seminars with prospective clients, and chasing down signatures to close a deal. "We've had to get creative," Waldum says.

As a sales leader for the past ten years, I've spent hundreds of hours listening to calls and searching for the best examples to use in training. It's impossible to listen to every call, though, so sometimes valuable best practices go undiscovered. Here at Armstrong Steel, we sell pre-engineered steel buildings. Our sales reps are sometimes asked very technical questions about our products. Those questions change over time, so our coaching and training needs to adjust to reflect that and address our prospects' current needs.

Modern sales is more about long-term customer relationships than big, one-and-done deals. This has always been true -- lower customer churn decreases marketing costs -- but it's especially true today, as everything from designer clothing to SaaS products moves toward a subscription model. "The best way to be successful in sales is to know yourself, know your customer and know how you create strong relationships with other people," Samantha Harrington opined in Forbes. "Once you've built that relationship, shown you care, and earned their trust, you are on the road to making [a prospect] a customer," Lee Ann Obringe wrote in HowStuffWorks. Machine-learning algorithms can master repetitive, predictable, and, in a word, mechanical tasks -- but despite the future foretold by Her, artificial intelligence hasn't yet learned to empathize or make jokes.

Over the last decade we have seen a transformation in global pharma's commercial model as the industry rightsized itself from the blockbuster era of the '90s and early millennia. The era of competing on share of voice enabled by armies of sales representatives calling on health care professionals evolved into smarter and more sophisticated strategies for deploying sales and marketing resources--and doing more with less. Over the same period, we have witnessed a significant evolution in the rise of advanced analytics and especially the talk and the promise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in commercial pharma, so it's time to ask the question--Can AI really help pharma proposer? McKinsey tends to think so. In a report entitled "Artificial Intelligence in Business", they concluded that AI and analytics would contribute $440 Billion in potential annual value in the pharmaceutical and medical device sector, of which the major share of over $200B resulted in value released from marketing and sales.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a boon to modern workforces. AI can handle mundane and repetitive tasks across the organization, freeing up people in HR, IT, marketing, and more to exercise creativity, solve complex problems, and otherwise focus on getting impactful work done. In other words, AI allows modern knowledge workers to focus on the most engaging parts of their jobs, while making their companies more productive and effective. Check out these 21 examples of AI-powered software tools to learn more about how AI is transforming the workplace for the better. Filling open positions is often time-consuming, expensive, and frustrating.