Sales Personalization at Scale, in 3 Easy Steps

Personalization of sales messages has the power to increase conversion rates significantly in digital prospecting. But to do this at scale, sales pros need smart technologies, thinks Chad Burmeister, CEO of ScaleX.ai. 

In the sales industry, leaders have been successful at creating more sales revenue and increasing sales representative productivity with AI sales tools. However, this has got some experts concerned that AI might replace the sales role all together.

Chad Burmeister, CEO of ScaleX.ai and author of “SalesHack,” believes that artificial intelligence is not really going to disrupt the sales role. Rather, it is going to change the way salespeople operate, and give them higher value work to do.

Sales reps can use AI to scale and automate the personalization factor in their activities. This frees up time for more meaningful conversations with customers, explained Chad.

Listen to Chad’s session at the AI Growth Summit

“AI for sales is one of the most exciting things happening now. In fact, it’s going to give professional salespeople higher-value work to do. I think everyone would love having that in our professional industry,” said Chad, during the AI Growth Summit hosted by XANT.

“Every single salesperson will have an Iron Man suit of sorts as they go about prospecting and selling to their customers,” thinks Chad.

Sales Leaders Want Reps to Get Better – Not to Replace Them

As far as AI replacing average sales reps, Chad thinks it’s not likely to happen anytime soon. AI’s role in sales is to enhance sales performance, and most sales leaders know this well.

“Will it make average reps irrelevant? No, because the sales leader actually wants to better the entire team. Would you rather spend $1 million to hire 10 BDRs and drive 150,000 activities per year or less, maybe 100,000? OR would you rather hire eight BDRs (20% fewer BDRs), but enable the entire team to be 10 times more effective? That’s the math equation that I’m seeing being done by venture capitalist companies, by private equity, and by smart CEOs and VPs of sales,” said Chad.

The 3 Sales Metrics That AI is Changing 

Infusing AI into the way salespeople work has completely changed how we think about sales metrics, says Chad Burmeister. Until now, sales development reps were making around 50 sales activities per day. Using AI allows them to triple their output, and significantly increase their revenue. This is visible in three sales metrics: emails sent, calls placed and the number of LinkedIn connections for B2B sellers.

“What are the new metrics of the new SDR/BDR powered by artificial intelligence? We’ve come up with a way to enable SDRs to drive 150 personalized emails per day. It’s also 250 or more dials per day using conversation automation. What we call one-click conversations enables reps to dial more people than they normally would in a week, have more conversations. More activity equals more pipeline, bottom line,” said Chad.

“The third leg of the stool is LinkedIn connectivity. We’ve come up with a way to help our client have more LinkedIn connections. What you might think would take a week of work, or even two weeks of work, now gets done in one single day using the technology stack and the program powered by AI,” he added.

The Power of Personalization in Sales

Personalization highly increases conversion rates for sales emails, shows Chad Burmeister. He advocates always personalizing the first sentence of the sales email, to make sure your prospect responds.

“In today’s world, if you’re not personalizing your message, then you’re not going to get a response. If you talk to people at Outreach, SalesLoft, XANT, most customers are stuck with a 2.4% to 2.8% reply rate. That’s 100 emails sent and you get 2.4 back. If you can automate the personalization piece, now you can see as much as a 10% to 18% reply rate. We’ve even had a few customers go to a 22% reply rate using one-to-one personalization,” said Chad.

“To get that kind of lift that we’ve seen with our customers, you have to personalize the first sentence. First, it’s variable text, so it gets through spam filters in a much more effective way. Second, when they read that first sentence: ‘Congrats on six months at Specialized; How have you liked it,’ Dan Smaida is going to reply to that. He’s going to say, ‘Wow, this person took the time to personalize an email’,” said Chad.

While the average sales rep will spend 20 minutes to write a personalized email, an AI can do it seamlessly by using information already available on the Internet, adds Chad. 

“I’ll paraphrase Chris Beall, CEO of ConnectAndSell. AI can do the research for you. Human suck at research. They get bored easily and they go pretty slowly. 20 minutes for a single email is costing companies about $20 in spend every time they write a single email. Insert artificial intelligence that helps you personalize your emails (…), it’s probably going to cost you more like $50 for one hour of labor,” said Chad Burmeister.

The 3 Simple Steps for Personalizing at Scale

Watch Chad Burmeister’s presentation at the AI Growth Summit to see how Artificial Intelligence can help sales professionals increase connect rates with customers and boost sales revenue. There are three ways that AI can deliver improved conversions in sales, shows Chad:

•    One-click sales email personalization allows you to increase the number of emails sent
•    Increase the number of phone calls they make with one-click conversations
•    Gain more LinkedIn connections with automated sales tools