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Revenue leaders the world over are rewiring their organizations to benefit from AI. According to a 2024 survey by Gong, almost half of 600 revenue leaders polled said their teams are using the technology. The key stat: Revenue orgs utilizing AI reported 29% higher sales growth than their peers.
Whether a revenue leader is taking their first plunge into the space, or aiming to improve existing processes, there are several best practices to keep in mind. Revenue Brew spoke with four revenue leaders about how they’ve incorporated AI into their teams, and what’s working best.
Automate it: Outreach CEO Abhijit Mitra spoke about how AI-based automation helped his revenue organization increase the efficiency and accuracy of lead generation.
It’s a far cry from the days when sales reps would spend hours hitting the phones, combing through data, or banking on referrals. Mitra explained how agentic AI has helped streamline the process exponentially, while also helping his team target more lucrative leads.
“It’s very standardized, so it doesn’t really depend on how good I am as a person to do this work because AI is doing it in a standardized way and is doing it at scale,” he said. “It’s doing it 24/7 and coming to me and telling me, ‘Hey you should talk to this person about this and by the way, I’ve already contacted this person and she’s actually willing to take a meeting with you.’ Now you have everything you need to know.”
Employee satisfaction = customer satisfaction: Digital consultancy Bridgenext uses AI to improve employee processes and customer success. CRO Rajesh Khanna says employees use AI to help with research and case studies.
“How do we improve the experience for employees so they can get to the information faster, they can be more productive, and obviously leading to sales as well as marketing productivity?” Khanna said. “We provide a lot of solutions and offerings for our clients in the AI area. Part of it is we eat our own dog food. We experiment with many of those things we’re doing for our clients. It is also about my own productivity: Can I use AI to improve the ways I work and make time for the most important thing?”
Better forecasting: Fullcast CEO Ryan Westwood explained how his teams use AI to improve sales forecasting–a crucial aspect of the revenue organization. AI tools help the sales performance management platform collate all the data in its CRM and form a detailed forecast in minutes. Without AI, he said, this kind of task might take days and many employees to accomplish.
“We become more accurate in our ability to identify the right opportunities to work on,” Westwood said. “Imagine how many salespeople have worked on opportunities that are not ready, that we’ve guessed as humans or we’ve created an arbitrary criteria for when they convert. Now we have the ability to analyze all this data and get a very specific score that’s more accurate than most of these other models, so then your salespeople aren’t wasting time on opportunities that aren’t going to convert.”
Supercharging the sales funnel: Outsourcing the lion’s share of your outreach to AI sounds convenient, but in reality, nuance is required. At Nebuly, a user analytics platform for LLM-powered products, co-founder and CRO Julien Roux discussed one of his learnings from using AI to reel in prospects. The company used an email automation tool with an aim to contact targets more efficiently, but Roux quickly saw the method wasn’t yielding any connections.
“We are selling to large enterprises,” he said. “Those companies have very sophisticated anti-spam filters and so anything coming in that looks automated, as good as it might look, tends to basically be stuck in the anti-spam filter.”
Though this process wasn’t the right fit, Roux explained it has taken the learnings and adjusted how to use AI in its outbound channels. “So I think the technology works, but given our focus on large customers, it’s not as applicable to us,” Roux said.