AI can be your sales reps’ superpower. 

Jonathan Bein, Managing Partner of the Distribution Strategy Group, recently hosted a panel exploring the role AI can play in sales: 

• Michael Delgado, Canals AI 
• Chris Van Ittersum, Supply Movers 

AI can increase sales productivity, automate workflows, drive better customer insights, and tighten customer bonds. 

Missed the webinar? You can watch it on demand. 

Serving Up Actionable Data 

Sales reps with the right data at the right time can add value to the customer without just being an order-taker. But distributors have a lot of data, with thousands or millions of SKUs and hundreds or thousands of customers.  

Distributors often cull data from several platforms to create forecasts, but the trick is to find and present the right information to power the insight you need. “Where the magic happens with AI is the ability to take that data and provide insights to the salespeople in real-time,” Van Ittersum said. “If I’m a salesperson, I want to understand what’s going on with this customer. AI makes data that would’ve been in one of those routine reports, surfacing it in a more insightful way so that there’s not a lot of hunting for information.”  

Delgado agreed, pointing out that software previously required pre-programmed reporting, where IT teams had to manually carve out the parameters. AI, by contrast, is not pre-programmed. It’s not deterministic; it’s probabilistic, and you can interact with it using natural language. 

Delgado continued: “The significance of AI now is that you don’t need a team of engineers to program this new data into your reports and then program the interface for your frontline people to be able to interact with that data. Now everybody can use plain language to say, ‘Hey, what’s really going on here?’” 

Personalizing Customer Experiences 

Even in a digital world, customers still want to feel like they matter, and that you know them. 

Van Ittersum outlined a list of questions that a company should answer before taking this path: 

• What is the customer buying? 
• What should they be buying, based on prior trends? 
• Should they continue those behaviors?  
• Are there risks or opportunities based on what we see in the data? 

According to Van Ittersum, when the distributor understands the answers, the sales rep can move from having a monthly customer conversation highlighting discounts or specials to: “‘Hey, this is what’s happening with your business. I’ve seen you doing this.’ With AI, you can start to get a lot more intelligent with the feedback you provide to a customer based on their prior patterns.” 

He also pointed out that distributors already have this data, but collating it across an organization has been challenging. AI can see and summarize these patterns so a sales rep can quickly spot behaviors they can affect.  

“As an extension of that, you can build a lookalike audience — the customer that is like other customers. If I’ve got one customer and understand their patterns, I also know the behaviors of folks like them. You can become an advocate to help them understand things they might not notice otherwise.  

“Maybe you start to email them once a week about products to consider, powerful offers they want to see as opposed to the noise they’re getting from other marketing programs.” 

Delgado pointed out that AI can differentiate partial product descriptions based on prior customer behaviors or cross-matching natural language.  

He described how this could work for the average distribution customer: 

“How do you get them that quote fast, even though they’re giving you generic descriptions, sometimes written on a brown paper bag at a construction site? They say this type of part generically, not the part number. Through AI, we know from having served that customer that they mean part A, but when they say that description for a different job, they mean part B.”  

It’s much faster and doesn’t require humans to respond to these customers, even when the information they provide is incomplete. 

These tools improve over time. “The generic can be surprisingly generic or even vague industry slang, shorthand, just these terms that only people in the industry know,” Delgado said. “Like a slang term that only electricians in Texas use to describe something. In the background, our AI models are getting smarter, so we know what this term means now. We know what it means in general, and we also know that when this guy asks for it, he prefers this specific brand because we know he’s working on projects 1, 2, 3.” 

Building a ‘Magical Relationship’ 

Personalization on an ecommerce website is now the bare minimum for skin in the game in this area. With AI, true personalization can carry over to the human interactions between the sales rep and your customer.  

“AI is fascinating, but humans like to buy from humans,” Van Ittersum said. “They like to form relationships. You love the salesperson who protects and takes care of you. If AI can help the salesperson do that, that’s a magical relationship, but they’re not empowered with the right information in a normal system. So, you start to layer in AI, and they become more valuable because the salesperson becomes an advocate for customer success.” 

Delgado said the impact on an inside sales rep can be significant, “freeing up that inside salesperson from spending 80% of their day on data entry to maybe 10% of their day overseeing AI that does the data entry.” He called it freeing up sales teams “for the human side of the work.” 

Supercharging Productivity 

Van Ittersum says AI “makes customer service reps into the kind of person you want to call as opposed to one you dread calling because they just never seem to know what’s going on. AI can make them smarter, more intelligent than you want to call them again.” 

AI’s speed and ability to summarize data translates to faster customer interactions. These tools empower even the newest sales reps with intuitive information that improves customer interactions. 

Delgado said this impact starts with a basic emailed order. “Think about a customer email, just plain text in the body of an email or a spreadsheet with 200 items that lands on the desk of an inside sales rep. They may have to spend two hours building that list of products, translating from the customer’s generic description to their part number in their ERP to create the quote or to place the order.”  

AI can do this work, and the CSR spends just 10 minutes checking accuracy. 

AI can also supplement institutional knowledge that often leaves your business when a sales rep leaves. “AI is constantly learning based on users’ actions,” Delgado said. “It captures the institutional knowledge of your most seasoned sales reps so that when a customer asks for something in a certain way, even the newer reps have the information at their fingertips to see how you’ve been handling something like this in the past. There’s a huge efficiency gain there, too, in terms of training and time to be at full power for new employees by capturing that institutional knowledge.” 

Van Ittersum said AI can stretch your resources. “Given that one inside sales rep may be tasked with calling 20, 30 or more accounts, AI can maybe turn that into 40 or 50 accounts and have more powerful, insightful conversations and better received.” 

Finally, Delgado pointed out the value of AI in competitive bidding scenarios, which are often time-sensitive and pressure-filled. The fastest quote is often also the winning quote.  

Delgado described distributors that win the business a day before anyone else, because they’re using AI. “If you’re a contractor, your concern is, I’ll have labor on a job site tomorrow. Am I going to have all the stuff we need to be productive? Suppose I get a quote back in 10 minutes or 30 minutes and the next one’s not coming for five hours. In that case, I’m going with that fast one because my bigger concern is about the productivity of my labor tomorrow on that job site, not saving 5% on this other quote that may not be available by the time I need it.” 

What About AI Chatbots? 

Van Ittersum insisted that chatbots or other AI technologies must also protect the relationship between humans. “Humans make decisions based on relationships. You’ll have a situation where something goes wrong, and the great relationship protects the account.” 

He cautioned that customers may grow frustrated if they perceive they are being pushed to the AI bot as a cost-cutting strategy. At the same time, the chatbot can work well for customers seeking basic information quickly, such as, “When did my order ship?” or “What is the tracking number?” 

Delgado agreed that chatbots are best for supplying basic information. “One piece is having all that relevant data. I think a second piece is a judgment, and that’s the hard part. That gets into where customer support people do a better job.” 

Importantly, Delgado said feedback loops should move from the customer to the sales rep to the AI so the software can improve. “That’s the outline for next-level chatbots.” 

There’s more — and you can watch the entire webinar on-demand.