AI sales tools and techniques you need to know in 2025

Artificial intelligence (AI) has reshaped the entire sales process. While traditional CRMs help you store contact details and track conversations, AI tools can predict revenue, automate follow-ups and spot sales opportunities in your data that human reps might miss.

If you manage a sales team or run a small business, it’s essential to understand what AI tools can do for your bottom line.

In this post, you’ll learn about the benefits of using AI in sales and how it can help your team finalize bigger deals faster. You’ll also discover top AI sales tools you can use to sell smarter.

What is the role of AI in sales and marketing?

Using AI in marketing and sales makes your teams increasingly focused and efficient. By analyzing large amounts of data and automating tasks, AI tools help companies save time and make more accurate decisions.

For example, AI can analyze sales conversations to detect buyer sentiment, which helps sales teams adjust their approach proactively and improve their chances of closing deals.

In marketing, AI helps brands connect with the right audience more effectively. It can predict which messages, ads or content will work best for different groups of people. For instance, programmatic advertising uses AI to show ads to the most relevant audience at the right time.

Generative AI tools for sales and marketing also help teams create great content with minimal resources. Reps can draft personalized emails, scripts and sales enablement content, while marketers can write targeted ad copy, e-books, reports and other helpful material.

AI’s impact on sales

Sales have been data-driven for years, but AI’s ability to process vast amounts of information and generate human-like responses has changed how sales teams understand and act on data.

Specifically, AI is influencing four key areas in sales.

• Prospecting: AI helps sales teams find and focus on the best opportunities by analyzing thousands of customer signals, scoring leads automatically and suggesting tailored outreach.

• Selling: AI guides your sales reps’ conversations by monitoring lead and customer engagement, recommending timely actions and even drafting emails and call scripts.

• Sales training: AI helps sales managers, coaches and trainers analyze rep activities at scale, identify winning patterns, deliver real-time feedback and create personalized training plans and programs.

• Sales forecasting: AI enables sales teams to accurately predict revenue and deal outcomes by analyzing pipeline data and historical trends.

Businesses using AI for sales focus more on proactive selling than reactive strategies, backing every action with data-led insights.

AI’s impact on marketing

Marketing powered by AI is more adaptive and customer-centric. AI tools help marketers understand their audience on a deeper level, personalize messaging at scale, augment creativity and optimize campaigns in real time.

More importantly, AI tools learn from your data rather than simply reacting to it. AI’s dynamic nature helps marketing teams stay relevant and effective, especially in fast-changing environments.

Here are four primary areas of marketing that AI is continuously changing:

• Segmentation and targeting: AI (combined with predictive analytics) helps marketers accurately identify and group customers by needs, behaviors and preferences. Granular segmentation enables more precise ad targeting and tailored campaigns.

• Content creation: Generative AI can help marketers create high-quality, trending content faster. It can brainstorm, draft, summarize and improve ad copy, marketing emails, subject lines and social posts and even generate on-brand visuals like photos and videos.

• Campaign optimization: AI helps marketers track performance and tweak their strategies in real time. Based on live data, it can automatically adjust targeting, optimize send times and reallocate budgets.

• Customer insights: AI uncovers deep insights into customer behavior by analyzing data from various touchpoints, such as purchase history, browsing patterns and sentiment analysis. These insights allow marketers to create more effective campaigns that resonate deeply with the target audience.

Using AI for marketing helps companies create better content, focus on the right prospects and optimize resources – all critical requirements for staying competitive and relevant over time.

The benefits of using AI in sales

Companies are increasingly investing in AI sales because they’re getting actual returns. A study by McKinsey identifies several top benefits B2B sales leaders see when applying generative AI.

The research shows that the main AI advantages for B2B purposes are to:

• Drive growth and profitability (40%): AI helps companies improve sales performance and gain market share by focusing on high-potential opportunities. It also enables them to stay profitable by keeping costs low with automation and improving their pricing.

• Boost team productivity (24%): AI automates repetitive tasks and speeds up company processes. This allows sales teams to focus on more critical activities (e.g., negotiating deals) and get more done in less time.

• Improve customer experience (22%): AI sales tools enable personalization at scale, which drives higher engagement. Conversational AI also lets you offer real-time customer support around the clock, which keeps prospects happy and interested.

• Fuel creativity and innovation (14%): Generative AI can significantly improve your research process, inspiring new products, services and designs that align with your brand, market trends and customer needs.

According to KPMG’s AI Quarterly Pulse Survey, 79% of business leaders now consider productivity the top ROI metric for GenAI investment, closely followed by profitability at 73%.

With improved results in growth, productivity and customer experiences, AI is evidently improving sales outcomes. In the next section, you’ll learn how to implement AI in your sales process to reap these business benefits.

9 ways sales teams can use AI in their processes

Understanding AI’s potential is essential, but the real value comes from knowing when to apply AI and machine learning in your sales cycle. Here are nine ways AI can help your team sell better, alongside examples of specific use cases.

1. Prioritize high-potential deals

AI sales prospecting tools can analyze large amounts of data to show you exactly which leads are worth pursuing. Focusing on high-value opportunities helps your sales team work more efficiently and close deals faster.

With AI’s support, it’s easier to identify which prospects are most likely to convert or boost your company’s sales revenue, even when you have hundreds of opportunities in your pipeline.

A comprehensive CRM like Pipedrive can help you leverage AI-powered features to spot high-potential deals and prospects.

Pipedrive Pulse, for example, analyzes each contact’s history, engagement and sentiment to highlight the most promising deals (i.e., prospects with strong buyer intent). Here’s a video summarizing its main features:

Let’s say a lead opened your last three emails, downloaded a product brochure and visited your pricing page multiple times in the past week. Pulse might flag them as a high-potential deal, so you can send a personalized email offering a sales demo.

Pulse also shows deal summaries to help you understand context and interactions at a glance, prioritize leads and plan the next steps.

2. Automate lead data enrichment

AI-driven data enrichment tools like Pipedrive’s Smart Contact Data automatically fill in missing information in your database.

Complete, up-to-date details on your prospects help you qualify leads quickly, personalize outreach and add more context to your sales conversations.

Researching prospects manually can be highly time-consuming. Sales teams often spend hours searching company websites and social media to piece together lead profiles.

Pipedrive’s system speeds things up by pulling information from multiple sources (e.g., LinkedIn) to populate lead profiles with valuable details like job title, company, location, phone number and social media links.

This automatic data enrichment saves you time on manual research and equips your team to personalize their outreach more effectively.

3. Get recommended next steps

AI sales tools can analyze successful deal patterns and customer behavior to suggest the most effective actions your salespeople should take.

Knowing your next move in a sales deal can mean the difference between winning and losing. However, when juggling multiple opportunities, it can be challenging to identify the right action for each prospect.

A tool like Pipedrive’s AI-powered Sales Assistant shows you recommended actions for each deal, such as following up, replying to an email or scheduling a demo.

Let’s say a prospect just finished viewing your proposal. Pipedrive’s AI might notice this and recommend setting up a meeting within 48 hours to discuss pricing plans.

4. Draft personalized emails

Generative AI tools, especially those built into CRM systems, can help reps quickly create personalized email drafts based on contextual cues like conversation and deal history.

Sales reps often rely on email to contact leads, follow up and engage in nurturing sales conversations. A well-written, thoughtful email tailored to each prospect’s unique needs and buying stage can resonate deeply and drive a higher response rate.

While writing dozens of emails from scratch takes time, Pipedrive’s AI email writer can suggest tailored responses and follow-ups to speed up your writing process.

For example, one of your reps might receive an email from a prospect following a sales demo. Pipedrive’s AI email writer can instantly draft a response that addresses their specific concerns, as in the example below:

5. Analyze sales conversations

Sales managers can use AI-powered conversational intelligence software to extract insights automatically. These tools sift through spoken, written and video sales conversations in real time, picking up on specific keywords, topics and underlying sentiment.

Emails, chat records and call transcripts all contain valuable information about your prospects’ needs, pain points and buying intentions. Understanding these nuances helps your reps personalize their interactions and win more clients.

Pipedrive’s AI email summarization tool supports your efforts by generating concise and actionable summaries of long email threads with potential clients.

Reps can see each prospect’s journey, sentiment, readiness to buy and action items at a glance, enabling quick decision-making.

6. Predict future sales

AI sales forecasting tools (or predictive analytics) assess your entire sales history and current pipeline to predict future sales accurately. They look at factors like deal stage, customer engagement and historical data to estimate business growth and revenue.

Here’s what a revenue forecast chart might look like in Pipedrive:

Sales forecasting helps you plan your resources, set realistic targets and make strategic decisions about your company’s direction. Teams relying on gut feeling or basic math alone to predict sales often miss key signals about whether a deal will close.

For example, UK-based marketing agency CreativeRace used Pipedrive’s sales forecasting feature to predict monthly sales and lead lifecycle velocity.

As a result, it saw a 600% increase in year-over-year client acquisition and a 42% increase in its lead-to-opportunity conversion speed.

CreativeRace’s sales director Oliver Lee highlighted Pipedrive’s impact on real-time data precision:

7. Offer intelligent 24/7 customer support

Using conversational AI (or AI chatbots) is a cost-effective alternative to hiring human reps around the clock.

Quick response times are non-negotiable in sales. A study by intelligent sales engagement company XANT showed conversion rates were eight times higher when companies responded to leads in the first five minutes as opposed to between five minutes and 24 hours.

When your customers are in different time zones, timely responses can be challenging without 24/7 support. Modern AI chatbots can understand complex queries and provide contextual, human-like responses by accessing your knowledge base and sales data. They can qualify leads, schedule meetings and answer technical questions even when your team is offline.

Financial services company Qander even saw how AI chatbots can handle sensitive situations with empathy. When a customer needed to cancel a loan after their father’s passing, Qander’s AI chatbot responded with condolences and a supportive message, handling the interaction with the same care a human agent would provide.

Some chatbots do not use AI technology but can still smartly capture leads and answer questions. For instance, Pipedrive’s Chatbot applies customizable conversation flows instead of AI to enable you to offer friendly customer support around the clock.

You can customize the chatbot’s behavior, responses and actions through the Live Chat feature and seamlessly transition to human reps when needed.

In fact, Pipedrive’s sales team uses Chatbot (and other LeadBooster features) in their workflows to capture more opportunities and automatically sync contact data with the deal pipeline.

Here’s how Pipedrive account executive Fabiana Barbosa describes the Chatbot experience:

8. Find the right apps and integrations

AI recommendation engines analyze your sales process, industry, team size and existing tools to suggest the most effective app combinations. Pipedrive’s SmartApp suggestions, for instance, can recommend tailored CRM integrations.

Having the right tech stack can dramatically improve your sales productivity. However, with hundreds of available tools, choosing the ones that best fit your specific needs and ensuring they work together seamlessly can be tricky.

Using natural language queries, you can ask Pipedrive’s AI-powered Marketplace search to find the most relevant apps for you.

For example, if you type in “schedule meetings”, you’ll see several options for scheduling or communication apps to connect to your CRM.

9. Create sales enablement content

Salespeople can use generative AI tools to quickly create and optimize:

• Sales presentations

• Case studies

• Product comparisons

• Feature guides

• Proposals

• Infographics

• Explainer videos

Your sales team likely uses various materials to educate prospects, show them your product’s value and facilitate their buying process. Research shows that B2B buyers typically consume around 13 pieces of content before making a purchase decision.

With AI, you don’t need to spend hours developing sales enablement content from scratch or go through several stages of design and copywriting.

Grammarly, for example, offers an AI case study generator that speeds up the process of writing case studies for your business.

Using AI to create sales content also helps reduce costs.

For instance, the sales team at LocusView struggled to share its complex product documentation with customers and prospects. Reps used an AI text-to-video tool to turn those documents into 100 animated videos and short ads within a month, saving $20,000 in production costs.

4 AI sales tools for small businesses

You don’t need an enterprise budget to incorporate the power of AI into your sales process. Many AI tools specifically cater to small and growing businesses, helping them solve specific problems at affordable price points.

Here are four sales AI software that can make your job easier.

1. Pipedrive: Best All-Round AI CRM

Beyond offering tools for capturing leads, managing your pipeline, automating follow-ups, extracting insights and forecasting revenue, Pipedrive also acts as an AI-powered CRM for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs).

Here’s a quick video tutorial to walk you through Pipedrive’s AI features:

Additionally, the table below summarizes Pipedrive’s top AI features – covered in the previous sections – to help you sell more efficiently:

Pipedrive’s user-friendly AI capabilities empower businesses to streamline sales processes, improve team productivity and close deals more effectively.

2. Clay: Best for AI lead enrichment

Clay helps your sales team automate lead research and outreach. It uses AI to enrich contact data from 100+ sources so your reps have complete and up-to-date information about prospects.

The platform also has an AI agent to support research tasks such as summarizing case studies, finding reports and tracking company sales activities. It also has AI writing features to help reps draft copy for personalized emails or LinkedIn messages.

Clay integrates with most CRMs, including Pipedrive. Once you link your accounts, it can automatically create new contacts and update existing ones to your CRM data, so your team can always access fresh, accurate lead information.

3. Overloop: Best for AI sales prospecting

Overloop automates your entire outbound process. It finds verified prospects that match your ideal customer profile, and then writes personalized cold emails by analyzing their company details and social profiles.

You can also automate workflows to build multi-channel outbound campaigns that involve several actions (e.g., for email and LinkedIn).

Keep everything in sync by integrating Overloop with Pipedrive, which lets you automatically push new leads to your CRM and create deals based on their responses. The integration can even add notes to your Pipedrive contacts when prospects open emails or reply on LinkedIn.

4. MeetRecord: Best for conversational intelligence

MeetRecord records and analyzes sales calls to show you precisely which approaches land deals. The platform’s AI captures important moments, tracks talk-to-listen ratios and flags key topics so you know exactly what’s happening in your team’s conversations.

Integrate MeetRecord with Pipedrive to keep your sales data organized. Every call is automatically logged into your CRM, along with AI-generated summaries and follow-up emails.

The integration also syncs conversation insights with your deals and contacts, so your team can track customer interactions and deal progress in one place.

What are the potential risks of AI in sales?

While AI offers plenty of benefits for businesses, it does not come without challenges. Even as technology develops rapidly, sales organizations currently face several significant risks they need to understand and manage:

• Inconsistent data can compromise results. AI algorithms work on data. When your data is incomplete, outdated or biased, so are your AI outputs and recommendations. Regular audits and strong data validation processes can help your team make better, more accurate decisions with AI.

• Over-automation can alienate customers. While AI can handle many sales tasks, too much sales automation makes interactions feel robotic and impersonal. Sales teams need to find the right balance between AI and human connection to keep prospects effectively engaged.

• Teams may struggle with adoption or skill gaps. AI is a rapidly evolving technology, meaning it’s easy to get left behind. Providing high-quality, timely training is crucial to help your sales team make the most of AI sales tools and stay competitive.

• Privacy concerns can damage trust. AI can often predict or surface sensitive information or combine data sources in ways customers haven’t consented to. For example, a prospect may feel uncomfortable when a rep reveals information they haven’t explicitly shared. Companies must be transparent about how they use AI and follow data protection laws to maintain trust with buyers.

Addressing data quality issues, overautomation, AI adoption challenges and privacy matters can enhance customer relationships and business efficiency without compromising trust.

The future of AI and sales

With AI affecting every aspect of sales, it’s easy to wonder if it will eventually replace human sales professionals. Experts like Gaurav Aggarwal, CEO and co-founder of Truva, doubt that AI will take over:

While AI can automate routine tasks, it lacks the emotional intelligence and creativity to build and navigate customer relationships. Instead of entirely replacing salespeople, AI is more likely to support and redefine their roles.

For example, outsourcing transactional work to AI means sales teams will have more time to focus on crucial tasks like developing sales strategies and relationship-building. They’re also armed with more data than ever, allowing them to hyper-personalize every interaction.

AI will also enable sales teams to work smarter and focus on more high-potential opportunities, which means companies using AI in their processes will have a significant competitive advantage.

Final thoughts

AI has impacted every part of a company’s sales operations, from lead generation and lead scoring to analyzing customer data and beyond. Understanding exactly how AI solutions can improve your team’s productivity and streamline processes is essential for business success.

It’s equally – if not more – important to balance sales and AI with a human touch. While AI is great at data analysis and automation, it can’t replicate the empathy, creativity and trust that only humans can deliver. The best sales teams use AI to enhance human capabilities rather than to replace them.

Sign up for a free 14-day trial to learn more about Pipedrive’s AI features, see them in action and close deals faster.