4 Powerful Ways AI Can Help You Say No To Seller Burnout (And Yes To Happier Sales Reps)

Everywhere you look, sales reps are seeming more and more drained, spent, and fatigued. It’s no wonder that seller burnout is on the rise with a startling 90% of sellers reporting that they’re experiencing or on the verge of burnout.

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The thing is that it’s more than just being overworked or stretched too thin that is leading to seller burnout. There are actually systemic issues that can exhaust your reps and cripple their sales performance and stamina.

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So how do you overcome seller burnout, and cultivate a culture of happier sale reps?

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Believe it or not, the answer might lie in AI. With every new iteration, we’re seeing how AI is redefining the role of the modern sales professional. By freeing up sellers to step away from routine tasks and help them win more, AI can enable sales teams to pivot to more strategic and rewarding activities and stop the burnout.

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In this post, we'll look at:

- Understanding seller burnout

- Personalize your outreach

- Generate reliable sales forecasts

- Score your leads

- Stay on top of your CRM

- The impact of AI on seller burnout

- Closing Thoughts

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Understanding Seller Burnout

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Burnout can take a serious toll on your sales team. Symptoms usually include chronic physical and emotional fatigue that isn't just temporary and goes deeper than just being tired after a long day. Burned-out sellers experience decreased productivity, higher rates of job dissatisfaction, lower enthusiasm, and even physical symptoms like headaches and insomnia.

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Burned-out sales professionals can be up to 18% less productive – and 37% more likely to be absent from work. Seller burnout goes beyond just taking a toll on your team – it's cutting into your bottom line and slowing your potential for growth.

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A key driver of seller burnout? The routine tasks that come with the territory in sales. Tasks like lead scoring, personalized outreach, sales forecasting, and CRM management can be incredibly time-consuming, tedious, and mentally draining:

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• Personalized outreach can become creatively exhausting as sellers struggle to craft individual messages for each potential customer that can stand out in the inbox
• Lead scoring requires sellers to sift through large amounts of data, which can quickly become mentally draining and time-consuming
• Sales forecasting adds to sellers' stress and mental fatigue as they rely on analytics skills to predict future sales 
• CRM management can quickly become overwhelming as sellers try to stay on top of endless customer interactions

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Burned-out sellers are less productive, less motivated, and less likely to hit sales quotas – so it's no surprise they're less likely to stick around. In 2022, Gartner found that nearly 90% of sellers reported feeling burned out at work – and over half reported they were looking for a new job. And in the same study, 59% of sellers said their leadership doesn't know how to motivate them – with 67% adding their leadership is disconnected from the day-to-day reality of selling.

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But there's good news. There are AI solutions available now that have the potential to transform the everyday lives of sellers by taking these routine tasks off their plate – and letting them focus on the higher-value, strategic priorities that drive sales growth and build customer relationships.

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1. Personalizing Sales Outreach

Sending quality, personalized outreach is table stakes in 2023 – but it's also one of the most challenging aspects of the sales rep's job. Writing personalized messages takes time. They’ve got to have a deep understanding of each prospect’s needs, preferences, and buying behavior. Trying to do it at scale will only result in a ton of generic, impersonal messages that don't engage buyers and leave your sales people exhausting themselves.

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AI tools like Regie.ai are stepping in to address this challenge. By analyzing customer data and industry best practices for outreach, Regie can automatically generate email sequences and personalized steps that resonate with each individual lead – without burning out your sellers. Regie.ai goes beyond generic email templates, using Generative AI to craft messages that speak directly to each lead's challenges, needs and interests, at the click of a button.

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Personalized outreach dramatically improves the results you can achieve. Subject lines that are tailored to customers’ pain points drive 28% higher open rates – and when email body copy is personalized to the recipient, response rates can increase by as much as 142%. 

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By using AI to personalize outreach at scale, you cut down on seller burnout by reducing the time and effort required for sellers to leave a great first impression. It's a great way to transform outreach from a research slog into a manageable – and even enjoyable – process that'll help you connect with leads in a meaningful way.

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2. Generate Reliable Sales Forecasts

Sales forecasting is a critical part of the sales process, but it's also one of the most complex. Predicting future sales depends on a complex array of data, as well as market trends and economic indicators that can change rapidly and are influenced by a multitude of unpredictable factors. With all its complexity, sales forecasting can be a high-stakes guessing game filled with stress and uncertainty.

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That's where AI is changing the game. AI tools like Clari and Aviso use predictive analytics to analyze historical sales data and identify patterns that can generate accurate sales forecasts. These tools automate the sales forecasting process, reducing the burden on sellers and allowing them to generate up-to-date, reliable forecasts in minutes – not hours or days.

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Automating sales forecasting makes things so much easier for your team:

• Increased accuracy: AI-driven sales forecasting tools use historical data to generate precise predictions, preventing stressful situations where your sellers are constantly scrambling to hit their quotas.
• Reduced uncertainty: By using AI-powered forecasting, you can quickly adapt to market changes – and eliminate the stress and guesswork that comes with traditional forecasting.
• Time savings: just imagine: no more spreadsheets! AI-driven sales forecasting saves valuable time – and lets your sellers focus on activities like nurturing prospects, building relationships and closing deals that drive real revenue.

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3. Score Your Leads

Lead scoring is all about prioritizing prospects for follow up based on their perceived value to the organization. It's often based on a wide range of factors, such as the prospect's interaction with the company's website, where they are in the buying cycle, and how well they fit with the company's ideal customer profile. Scoring leads can be an incredibly time-consuming process that requires sales pros to sift through large amounts of data manually – and it's one of the key tasks that can lead to seller burnout.

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AI lead scoring tools like Explorium and Akkio use machine learning to automate lead analysis and scoring. Explorium gathers data from various sources for a comprehensive view of each lead, enabling more accurate scoring. Akkio predicts conversion rates by drawing on historical lead data to help sales teams prioritize high-potential leads.

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AI is no longer a nice-to-have in the lead scoring process – it's becoming a must-have. Using AI improves lead quality by letting your sales reps focus on your most promising leads. This in turn helps your team focus on high-value prospects, focus on building relationships, and ultimately drive faster growth.

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4. Stay On Top Of Updating Your CRM

Closing deals is awesome. Keeping everything up to date in your CRM... not so much.

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Updating data within a CRM is a tedious task that eats up valuable selling time. Your sales reps can end up spending hours searching for customers, tracking interactions, and manually entering customer data... when they could be talking to customers. It's incredibly time-consuming, especially for organizations with large customer databases. And keeping it all current is a huge driver of seller burnout.

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That's why teams that use AI to stay on top of their CRM cleanliness are seeing benefits like:

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• Better understanding of customers: Using AI to keep their customer profiles up to date, sales teams don't have to worry about outdated information – and can craft more effective sales strategies.
• Higher sales volume: Sellers who don't spend time on their CRM can spend more time where it counts: building relationships and closing deals.
• Reduced manual data entry: Automating CRM data entry eliminates one of the most mind-numbing tasks in sales and cuts down on seller burnout.

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AI tools like Seamless.ai are transforming enterprise sales, making it easy for sellers to stay on top of their CRM. Seamless.ai uses AI to automatically update customer data in real-time. It can track customer interactions across multiple channels and update customer profiles accordingly. And it pulls in additional data from external sources to build rich, detailed customer profiles.

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The Impact of AI on Seller Burnout

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AI's impact goes beyond reducing workloads. AI can analyze data far more quickly and accurately than humans – and help salespeople make better decisions faster that lead to more wins. 

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But the biggest impact of AI is that it's changing the sales industry. 

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By taking care of routine tasks, sellers can finally focus on the parts of their job that they enjoy the most, like developing new sales strategies and having conversations with prospects that lead to profitable deals. By shifting the focus to the parts of the job that are the most interesting and impactful, AI has the potential to create sales teams that are happier and more satisfied with their work.

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These benefits of AI in sales extend far beyond the individual seller. Companies that implement AI to improve their sales workflows see increased efficiency, better sales performance – and ultimately reduced turnover.

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With tools like Regie.ai and others listed here, your team can focus on relationship-building and closing deals, while AI handles the repetitive, yet necessary, side of sales. If you're a sales leader, there's never been a better time to get started.

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If you're ready to put Generative AI to work to let your team focus back on what they do best, selling, it's time to try Regie.ai. Check out Regie today – and start delivering ready to use sales messaging in seconds.