How to navigate the hype around AI sales enablement tools

An increasingly common complaint across my network is the increasing volume (and clearly AI-generated nature) of cold outreach via email and LinkedIn – one recent example, shared anonymously, reads: 

“Dear X, I wanted to share a quick thought. At XXX we automate key parts of your sales process to reduce human error and make data instantly accessible. This empowers your team to focus on decision-making, with AI handling the heavy lifting of data—pure, reliable, and ready to drive the best outcomes. Would it make sense to connect and explore how automating data flow can accelerate your sales cycles?” 

However, while we have all been on the receiving end of this kind of message, such AI-driven sales enablement tools have received huge investment (from VC funds in particular), and are being increasingly deployed across businesses of varying sizes across all sectors – albeit with mixed success (70% of sales reps claim to be overwhelmed by the number of tools). 

So – what is going on? And what should businesses (and their investors) do about it? 

We hope this article will help you to separate reality from hype, and provide a set of principles for how to think about and navigate this topic. This article does not provide any specific recommendations or endorsements around specific software or vendors – in part because the market landscape is evolving so rapidly, and also because the right choice is so dependent on the specific business context. 

Understanding the AI Sales Enablement Landscape 

What are sales enablement tools, and why are they such a hot topic currently? 

A sales enablement tool is software which is designed to help sales teams or sales people work more effectively (i.e. more productively, and/or increase conversation rates, deal flow, speed up the sales cycle, etc.). They are generally positioned to complement rather than replace core CRM systems (e.g. Salesforce, Hubspot), although in many cases CRMs are broadening out from their original core use cases, so are in effect competing against more focused tools. According to Salesforce, salespeople only spend about 28% of their time actually selling – many sales enablement tools are designed to optimise or build efficiencies around non-selling tasks (e.g. research, documenting notes, working through follow-up actions, etc.) 

A large number of solutions now exist in the market targeting different specific aspects of the sales ‘funnel’. These can broadly be categorised as follows: 

Note: This is not intended to be an exhaustive list, and the examples above do not represent a recommendation or endorsement of the software.

Given the nature of what these tools are designed to do, advances in Generative AI have significantly increased the speed of development cycles for new software and increased the scope for these types of solutions to be deployed effectively – for example, the quality of sales call transcripts we see from AI tools used by Coppett Hill clients has increased significantly over the past 12-24 months.

Cutting through the hype

There are a large number of articles, datapoints, and LinkedIn posts which would lead you to believe that go-to-market (GTM) and sales leaders need to act urgently to deploy this type of software, otherwise they risk falling behind their competitors – for example this article which states that 75% of sales leaders believe that organisations failing to incorporate AI in their GTM processes will fall behind competitors within the next 3 years.

While there are certainly opportunities for AI-powered tools to deliver productivity benefits across the sales process for most businesses, leaders should approach with caution, as the risks (and costs) of poor selection, and/or poor implementation of these tools, can be significant.

How to evaluate the opportunity and where to focus

This is a complicated topic, so I spoke to a seasoned sales veteran (and good friend of Coppett Hill) who has experience of buying, selling and implementing these types of tools in global markets – Jimmy Simons, Head of Mid-Market Sales, EMEA, for Hightouch (recently valued at >$1bn).

Jimmy’s advice is to start with the fundamental principles of understanding the customer (more on Coppett Hill’s guidance on ICP here), and developing a deep understanding of the sales process.

There will be no ‘one size fits all’ answer to where the opportunity for optimisation lies, and depending on the company culture, a top-down approach to vendor selection and deployment without consulting the sales team will be likely to backfire. “There are too many sales leaders that come into an organisation and start implementing new tools just because it worked well in their previous company – this approach usually doesn’t work”.

Building a detailed understanding of the sales process, and getting detailed feedback from sales reps on where they are struggling, or see room for improvement, is likely to identify specific areas of focus.

The other key consideration is to assess the impact on the existing sales process. Getting people to do things differently can be a challenge, so the better a solution fits into the existing sales process, the better – in some cases, tools can be implemented without sales teams needing to be aware that a tool has been deployed (e.g. richer data embedded into an existing CRM). If there is a high requirement on additional input data to execute on an implementation, this increases the risk for failure.

Risk is another factor to consider – for example, software which provides specific prompts to sales reps on a live call is relatively high risk, whereas a solution which provides background research on a company prior to a prospecting call, is relatively low risk.

Jimmy’s view is that optimised targeting represents a significant opportunity “taking data from a company’s CRM, and combining this with external data sources to enable a sales team to target the right buyer at the right company at the right time – this is a big opportunity which can be unlocked by AI and the input data is relatively straightforward”.

How to execute

No sales leader wants to adopt software which either doesn’t get adopted, or even worse, can’t be implemented properly. This is where RevOps comes in (more on our view of this role here). Implementing any of these tools without a RevOps function will – in Jimmy’s language, guarantee a “world of pain” with implementation.

Engagement with the users (mostly sales teams, but this could also extend to marketing and finance / data) through the process is key, and it goes without saying that any new tools needs proper onboarding and training to be implemented successfully. To encourage adoption, sales leaders (or Rev Ops) should monitor and track the impact of adoption, and report back with the data and case studies which evidence the impact.

In many organisations, just getting sales people to use the core CRM properly can be a challenge, so leaders should not underestimate how difficult it can be to drive adoption, even where the use case is simple and the business benefit is obvious. Tools which help to “make the seller the hero” and help them to achieve their objectives (and ultimately make more money) are more likely to land.

At Coppett Hill, we have seen execution issues in recent client engagements - we had a client which had implemented sales call transcript software - the quality of the transcripts was actually very good, however there were no actions or recommendations built into the workflow of the sales teams, so there was no meaningful impact on sales performance or productivity. Prior to implementing any tool, there needs to be careful consideration around how it is actually going to impact the workflow of the teams using it.

As AI-driven enablement solutions become increasingly widely adopted across companies, their relative advantage for a business vs. its competitors diminishes – therefore, the quality of implementation (measured in part by the degree of adoption) is absolutely critical in driving return on investment from sales enablement tools. Another key measure of success should be a measurable, quantifiable impact on the business – what metric or KPI changed as a result of implementation of the tool? This question should be considered early in the process and also reviewed post-implementation.

Conclusion

AI developments have driven a proliferation of sales enablement tools in the market, with hype driving a sense of urgency that sales and GTM leaders need to act now to avoid falling behind competitors. While there is no doubt an opportunity across most businesses for these types of solution, there are many risks associated with tool selection and adoption.

Our ‘top tips’ to avoid falling into common pitfalls are:

• Don’t implement a tool just because it works well in another organisation – there are no ‘one size fits all’ approaches to sales enablement solutions

• Ensure the customer remains central to any decision making process – what is the impact going to be on a customer or a prospect’s experience?

• Build a deep understanding of the sales process to identify where there is material opportunity for improvement

• Engage broadly across business stakeholders before committing to a change in process

• Monitor and report back on the impact of the new tool – identify up front what the expected quantified impact will be

The landscape for sales enablement tools will continue to evolve quickly with new solutions being launched on a weekly basis – by sticking to the principles above you should be able to cut through the noise and make the right decisions for your business.