In a situation when outbound sales processes have evolved and are still changing at unprecedented speed, Linkedin has announced a few AI features that are coming soon. Let us see what they are and let us guess how they are going to change the sales landscape for majority of businesses that rely mainly on outbound sales.

According to LinkedIn Sales Navigator, their plan is to introduce three features to automate and enhance key sales activities: 

✦ A Lead Finder that uses AI and the LinkedIn network to automate prospecting and find new paths in;

✦ A Message Assist that uses AI to create personalized first-touch InMail drafts for effective outreach; and

✦ A Lead IQ that uses LinkedIn’s proprietary data to aggregate and summarize key insights about leads.

“It increases productivity. It’s time-saving to have access to the right information.”-a LinkedIn Sales Navigator user.

The basic plan will include a set of AI-powered features to assist you with search of leads, collecting information about them and making the first contact. These features will serve as a part of your sales intelligence tool or your customer relationship management (CRM) platform, as they are designed to enhance the efficiency of the core processes: lead generation, account management, and outreach.

Here’s a summary of how each feature can benefit sales teams:

Relationship Explorer that serves to identify the optimal approach to engage with a target account. By analyzing persona and relationship signals, this tool will offer you to select the leads with strongest relationships or influence, so you’ll be able to choose the best entry point and increase engagement success.

Relationship Map that creates a visual model of the account’s organizational structure and highlights key contacts within an account. This new feature will enable creating dynamic org charts and alerting sales teams to influential contacts.

Advanced Search Filters will be provided to refine searches for leads and accounts based on multiple criteria. This feature will allow you to target/narrow down prospects according to factors like industry, company size, or decision-maker role, leading to higher-quality leads and more effective outreach.

Lead & Account Recommendations will suggest leads and accounts based on past interactions, saved data, connections, and potential buyer interest. This aims to reduce manual research by presenting relevant recommendations. It seems this feature will help you identify high-potential leads and prioritize outreach.

Real-Time Alerts will notify you of important updates, such as job changes, recent activity, or new posts by decision-makers.

Account Prioritization via Account Hub will help you monitor and prioritize important account by suggesting new engagement opportunities.

All this will be available for sending 50 private InMail messages per month directly to leads and prospects.

While these features are designed to help sales teams work smarter and manage accounts more efficiently, they cannot guarantee you success in sales operations without the smart and active work of your team.

Again and again, businesses seem to face the same situation: you offer your team lots of new tools to intensify the outreach and make numerous new connections, but you have no tools to immediately develop trust with those people. Building trust is something from the area of soft skills; no tools exist to speed up development of trust with a prospect.

So, we have the situation when 73% of deals come to businesses due to recommendations made by third persons, and trust remains the main factor of influence on the success of your deals.

So, shall we build hopes on getting higher revenues based on the appearance of new AI-assisted sales tools? I say, No, don’t fool yourselves, Colleagues! Tolls remain tools, and people are people. With all the amazing tools we have to assist us in work, we can’t forget a simple fact:

You sell a product, a tool, or a service, but you sell it to human beings. And

No tools can help you build better revenues if you stop thinking about your team’s skills of selling. So, you still have to think about your team in the first place, and the tools–no matter how efficient they are–will always come second.

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