How to Increase Sales with AI in 2024 and Beyond

Sales are the bread and butter of all businesses everywhere.

When sales don’t meet your hopes—or even your baseline expectations—it’s easy to feel anxious.

But with the rise in sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) tools, there’s plenty you can do to boost sales.

Why Growing Revenue Matters for Businesses

For any business, being able to consistently increase sales over time is essential for success and growth. Here are three key ways that higher revenue benefits a business:

• Increased profits and business valuation. Higher sales translate directly into larger profits, as each additional unit sold adds to the bottom line. Increased profitability makes a business more valuable by improving its price-to-earnings ratio.
• Ability to reinvest in growth. The revenue from sales provides the capital to fund expansion initiatives. These might include developing new products, hiring more staff, and acquiring other companies. Growth requires investment.
• Competitive differentiation. If your business can increase sales and revenue while competitors lag behind, you gain market share. You strengthen your leadership position. This competitive edge helps make customers more loyal and attracts new business.

Getting to this point requires more than just a business mindset. What really turns first-time buyers into lifelong supporters is the relationship you build with them.

Loyal customers are crucial for upselling, offering discounts to encourage repeat business, and running promotions to reward loyalty.

Embracing technology to meet their needs and improving your digital presence can also help retain loyal customers.

That’s why it’s no surprise that the most common barriers to sales growth have to do with the customer-business relationship.

Common Obstacles to Sales Growth

Before we can talk about the best ways to drive sales, we have to address the three main obstacles that bring businesses down.

They include a limited understanding of the buyer’s journey, poor lead nurturing and follow-up, and weak value propositions. Improving these areas requires focused marketing efforts. Let’s take a closer look at each one.

1. Limited Understanding of the Buyer's Journey

There are billions of potential customers out there. You have to sort through countless preferences and personalities to understand who your customers are. Doing this manually would leave you with zero time to actually run your business. But if you skip this step, you risk putting out messaging that isn’t relevant to anyone.

Cue the drop in revenue.

That’s why it’s time to move past manual research into buyer personas and journeys. Instead, you must mine customer data to pin down buyer needs, pain points, and preferences. There’s no room to guess at why prospects don’t buy.

And once you do know who your customers are, you must create content that’s tailored to each stage of the buyer’s journey. Generic content will always fail to resonate with buyers and prospective customers.

2. Poor Lead Nurturing and Follow-Up

There’s no point in spending money on attracting leads if you follow an ad-hoc outreach approach. Throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks doesn’t work. You need the right information at each stage to nurture leads along on their journey to becoming a customer. And nurturing needs organization.

It also needs reliable follow-up.

Businesses with inconsistent or non-existent follow-up risk letting their leads go cold. The follow-up can’t stop after one email, either. One-off emails don’t build relationships. The sales team needs to connect meaningfully over time.

3. Weak Value Propositions

One of the hardest things about running a business?

Knowing you’re competing with millions of other businesses for your customers’ loyalty. If you don’t show your target audience how your product is different (and better) than everyone else’s, they won’t bite.

At the same time, you can’t be too pushy or flashy. No one likes a bragger. Instead, sales material must focus on resolving buyer pain points.

Even better if you have concrete metrics that show how your product or service improves the lives of your customers. A well-crafted marketing strategy can help communicate this value effectively.

How Sales Teams Operated Before AI

Before AI swooped in to help sales teams manage campaigns at scale, here’s what we had to deal with in both traditional sales environments and online stores:

• Manual Data Entry and Tracking: Manually entering and tracking data was a major headache. It took a lot of time for sales reps to gather customer information by hand. Mistakes were common, leading to unreliable sales data. Also, because the information was spread out across different systems, it was hard for reps to get a clear view of their customers. This made it difficult to understand customer needs.
• Generic Outbound Messaging: Businesses sent bulk emails with identical content, resulting in low engagement. It was like receiving a billboard in your inbox: zero personalization whatsoever. This approach made people feel overlooked—if they bothered to read the messaging at all. Most of the time, this impersonal outreach went ignored, leading to response rates below 5%.
• Slow Response Times: Sales teams struggled to reply quickly because they had too much on their plate. This meant they often missed the chance to connect with interested customers who expected fast responses. This delay in replying made people feel unimportant and hurt sales, as quick answers usually mean more deals.

Now let’s look at how AI is changing sales for the better.

How AI is Transforming Sales Processes

Sales teams can now drive sales without using up all their time and energy with these AI-powered tools:

• Automated Data Capture with Workflows: AI streamlines sales by automating the collection of prospect details. With tools like Copy.ai, you can automatically fill in customer relationship management (CRM) profiles without manual input. AI analyzes emails, calls, and documents to offer important insights about each potential customer. This means sales reps have all the information they need to build a relationship with a soon-to-be customer.
• Personalized Lead Nurturing at Scale: By diving deep into past conversations and CRM insights, AI transforms how we connect with each lead. It helps sales teams like yours create messages crafted just for one particular lead—a thousand times over. That way, each interaction feels deeply relevant and personal. This tailored approach is a game-changer in making sure your outreach resonates perfectly, every single time.
• Real-Time Insights for Reps: During live calls and emails, AI acts like a personal coach for reps. It suggests the perfect talking points and questions tailored specifically to each potential customer. Thanks to these AI-powered insights, reps can give a more convincing pitch and close more deals.

Here’s how you can use AI and other strategies to increase online sales in 2024.

13 Techniques to Increase Sales in 2024

1. Refine Your Sales Funnel with AI

Using AI to improve your sales funnel lets you automatically figure out which leads are the most promising. This helps get rid of the decision fatigue that comes from sorting leads yourself. It allows your team to focus on the right people. 

How? Because AI looks at how ready and suitable each lead is, highlighting the ones that are most likely to become customers. This means your team can spend more time on leads that will really pay off.

Plus, AI helps you understand what makes leads convert, so you can make your whole sales process better. 

2. Offer Customer Loyalty Programs

There’s a reason almost every business under the sun has a customer loyalty program. These programs reward repeat business and referrals.

They encourage customers to stay and bring friends, which helps your business grow. These rewards, like VIP treatment and discounts, create a stronger bond between customers and your brand. 

They also encourage customers to make more purchases over time, rather than just once, increasing their lifetime value to your business. This approach not only keeps customers coming back but also turns them into advocates for your brand. 

The better their experience with you and your rewards program, the more likely they’ll be to shout their satisfaction to the world. Building a referral program can make it easier for these customers to benefit from their advocacy.

3. Run Targeted Promotions

Running targeted promotions means using customer data to figure out the best offers. By looking at what customers have bought before, businesses can create special deals that really appeal to them, instead of sending the same thing to everyone. 

This personalized approach works better because it feels more relevant to each customer. Also, by tracking which deals lead to sales, businesses can see which promotions are working and how much they're helping the business grow. 

This smart way of doing promotions makes sure they're effective and really catch the customer's interest.

4. Analyze Competitors

Keeping an eye on your competitors is crucial in staying ahead in the market. By tracking their product launches and pricing strategies, you can get a good sense of their next moves and spot any weaknesses in their approach. 

This insight allows you to identify areas where they're vulnerable and where your business can stand out by doing things differently or better. 

Using competitor intelligence helps you differentiate your offerings. It also positions your brand as the preferred choice for customers.

5. Improve Product Variety

Using AI to figure out what customers want helps businesses add more variety to their products.

AI looks at customer data to spot trends, showing where there might be a demand for new products or services. This way, companies can think up new items that fit well with what they already offer, making sure they're giving customers what they're interested in. 

By providing more options that appeal to their existing customers, businesses can encourage them to spend more. This approach keeps customers happy and helps the business grow by meeting a wider range of customer needs.

6. Tap into the Power of Social Media

Using social media platforms smartly can do a lot to help businesses grow. When you put special deals and offers in front of the right people with social media ads, it grabs their attention.

But it’s not just about ads. Sharing interesting and fun content on your social media accounts keeps people interested in what you’re doing over time.

This kind of content naturally gets shared by people, which can bring more visitors to your website and get you more leads. Including social media in your overall plan to reach more customers, like a Go-To-Market (GTM) strategy, makes your business more visible and attractive online.

7. Collect Customer Reviews

Asking customers for their feedback is incredibly helpful for businesses. It lets you know what you're doing right and what needs to get better, and you also get nice comments you can show off. 

If someone has a problem, fixing it fast can stop them from leaving. And when you get really good reviews, sharing them on your website, ads, and social media can make more people want to check out what you offer. 

Encouraging feedback—and responding to it with grace—builds trust between you and your customers. 

8. Send Personalized Emails

Sending personalized emails can significantly boost your engagement with potential customers. By using AI, you can craft emails tailored to each lead, drawing on past interactions and data to make every message feel unique and personal.

You can even include personalized discount codes in your email marketing campaigns. Or offer deals like free shipping. Or create packages that speak to each customer’s needs.

All of these efforts help improve sales.

This approach can dramatically increase your email open and response rates. Personalized messages often see open rates above 50% and response rates over 15%.

Beyond just metrics, this kind of relevant email marketing strengthens relationships with potential buyers. It shows that you understand and care about their individual needs. And that sets the stage for a deeper and more meaningful connection.

In addition to personalized emails, leveraging social media platforms can further enhance your outreach. Being present on various social media platforms allows you to connect with prospects and customers, optimize profiles for different audiences, and engage in valuable interactions to build trust and increase leads.

9. Reduce Cart Abandonment

Cutting down on cart abandonment helps businesses sell more products online. By figuring out why customers stop their purchases at the last moment, businesses can fix these issues. 

How? By offering special deals or discount codes to customers who leave their cart.

These promotional efforts can increase the chances of turning interest into actual sales.

10. Train Reps on Value Props

Training sales reps gets easier and more effective with AI avatars of your best performers. Reps can use these avatars to practice their sales pitches and learn how to handle tough questions. 

This kind of practice helps them get better at showing customers why what they're selling is special and how it stands out from the competition. By learning these skills, reps become more confident and clear in their sales conversations. As a result, it’s easier for them to connect with customers and close deals.

11. Listen to Customer Feedback

Paying attention to what customers say helps businesses get better. Most of us are short on time, though. Which is why using AI to look through call transcripts, surveys, and reviews is such a game-changer. With AI, you can quickly find and understand  common complaints and use that knowledge to help guide improvements.

This allows you to fix problems more quickly. In return, customers feel like their opinions matter and that you care about improving their experience with your brand. Happy customers mean repeat business. 

12. Craft Unique Selling Propositions

Crafting unique selling propositions (USPs) involves using AI to stand out from the competition. AI tools can swiftly analyze what competitors offer, helping pinpoint exactly how your product differs and excels. 

By identifying and quantifying your product's concrete benefits—like how much time or money it saves compared to others—you can make its advantages crystal clear. With these quantified details at hand, communicating your product’s differentiation and value becomes much easier. 

13. Make Buying Easy

What’s a better sales driver than making it easy to buy a product? Here are our top tips for making the checkout process super simple: 

• Reduce the number of steps to buy: Streamline the purchase process by minimizing unnecessary steps. Making it easy for customers to find and purchase products/services quickly.
• Make pricing transparent: Providing clear and upfront pricing information helps build trust with customers and eliminates any surprises during the checkout process.
• Offering a variety of payment options: Cater to diverse customer preferences by offering multiple payment methods, including credit/debit cards, digital wallets, and alternative payment solutions.
• Introduce creative purchasing models: Financing plans and installment options can make expensive purchases more affordable and accessible to a wider range of customers.
• Provide exceptional service after the sale: Make sure customers receive excellent support and assistance even after completing their purchase. This helps build long-term relationships and encourages repeat business.

Using these tips, businesses can improve the overall buying experience for customers, driving loyalty and positive word-of-mouth referrals.

How Copy.ai Workflows Improve Sales

Copy.ai is the first-ever GTM AI Platform. Rather than help you with one-off tasks, it automates end-to-end processes without removing the human-in-the-loop.

Here are a few specific ways Copy.ai workflows can help improve sales.

1. Lead Management Workflow

• Automated Lead Capture and Segmentation: Automatically capture leads from various channels (website, social media, webinars, etc.) and segment them based on predefined criteria such as industry, interest level, or product fit.
• Lead Scoring and Prioritization: Assign scores to leads based on engagement and fit, ensuring sales efforts are focused on the leads most likely to convert.
• Lead Nurturing: Deploy automated email sequences that provide valuable content, product information, and personalized offers to move leads through the sales funnel.

2. Sales Process Workflow

• Deal Registration: Automatically log new opportunities in the CRM and assign them to the appropriate sales representative based on geography, product line, or customer segment.
• Task Automation: Generate tasks for follow-up calls, meetings, and emails automatically based on the deal stage or rep activities to ensure no opportunities are missed.
• Sales Approval Processes: Streamline approvals for discounts, pricing adjustments, or contract terms by automating the approval chain, reducing bottlenecks in closing deals.

3. Customer Onboarding Workflow

• Welcome Sequence: Send automated welcome emails guiding new customers through the first steps of using your product or service.
• Onboarding Tasks Automation: Automatically assign tasks to relevant teams (customer success, technical support) to ensure a smooth onboarding experience for each new client.
• Feedback Loop: Initiate automated check-ins or surveys at critical milestones to gather feedback and address any customer concerns proactively.

4. Data and Reporting Workflow

• Automated Reporting: Set up automated reports for sales performance, lead conversion rates, and other critical metrics to be generated and shared with the team on a regular schedule.
• Real-time Dashboards: Implement dashboards that provide real-time visibility into sales pipelines, deal health, and team performance, facilitating quick adjustments to strategy.

5. Post-Sale Customer Engagement Workflow

• Customer Retention Programs: Automate the creation and delivery of loyalty programs, renewal reminders, and upsell/cross-sell offers based on customer purchase history and engagement.
• Customer Support Ticket Routing: Automatically categorize and route customer support requests to the appropriate team or individual, ensuring quick resolution of issues.
• NPS and Feedback Collection: Automatically trigger Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys or feedback requests following significant interactions or milestones to gauge customer satisfaction and identify areas for improvement.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg! With workflows, your imagination is the only limit.

The Future of AI-Powered Selling

Your business can use these strategies and tips to help drive the growth and sales you need to thrive. It sounds counterintuitive, but AI plays an important role in personalizing the customer journey.

And the more heard and valued your customers feel, the happier they are. Ultimately, it’s these happy customers that increase your sales.