The 16 Best Bots and AI Assistants for Smarter Selling in 2024

As a sales professional, your time is your most valuable resource. Every minute spent on repetitive administrative tasks or manual research is time not spent engaging with prospects and closing deals. But what if you could have a virtual army of assistants working around the clock to make you more productive and successful?

Enter bots and AI-powered tools. By automating time-consuming tasks and providing vital information and insights, today‘s cutting-edge bots are becoming a salesperson‘s best friend. And they are only getting smarter.

In this guide, we‘ll showcase 16 of the most innovative and useful bots and AI assistants for sales professionals in 2024. Whether you want to automate key parts of your sales workflow, access lead intelligence, or leverage an AI-powered virtual assistant, there‘s a bot that can help. Let‘s dive in.

Bots for Automating Your Sales Workflow

One of the best applications of bots for salespeople is automating specific parts of your sales process. By connecting these bots to your CRM, marketing tools, and communication platforms, you can eliminate tedious data entry and streamline your workflow.

Chorus.ai

Reviewing sales call recordings is hugely valuable for coaching and identifying best practices. But it‘s also incredibly time-consuming. Chorus.ai solves this by automatically recording, transcribing, and analyzing your sales calls.

Their Conversation Intelligence platform uses AI to identify key moments in the conversation, such as when pricing is discussed or the customer raises an objection. It then makes these moments easily accessible and shareable with your team.

Chorus.ai‘s Slack bot integration makes it even more powerful. You can get real-time alerts for important call events, share clips and playlists in Slack, and track key conversation metrics over time. It‘s like having a sales coach and researcher rolled into one.

Attentive

Speed is everything in sales. The faster you can reach out to a high-intent lead, the better your chances of winning the deal. Attentive helps you stay on top of buying signals and jump on opportunities in real-time.

Their bot monitors your target accounts and can alert you the moment relevant news breaks – like funding rounds, product launches, or leadership changes. You can even automate outreach based on these trigger events. Customizable Slack alerts make sure you never miss a chance to reach out at the perfect time.

Leadsync

Facebook and Instagram Lead Ads are an affordable way to capture high-quality leads. But historically it‘s been a hassle to get those leads into your CRM and follow up in a timely manner.
Leadsync fixes that by instantly syncing your lead ads into Slack. As soon as a lead comes in, you‘ll get a Slack notification with their info. You can even automate a sequence of follow-up tasks to make sure the lead gets contacted right away.

Donewell

Tracking sales goals and metrics is key for motivation and improvement. But creating manual reports and leaderboards takes precious time away from selling. Donewell puts your real-time sales data right where you work – in Slack.

Using information synced from your CRM, Donewell can generate custom performance reports and broadcast them to any Slack channel on a set schedule. Leaderboards and contest updates keep the team engaged and aligned around targets. And reps can even check their personal stats and goals with a quick Slack command.

Troops

If your team lives in Slack but your data lives in Salesforce, Troops is a must-have. This powerful bot is like adding rocket boosters to Salesforce, with game-changing features like deal alerts, workflow automation, and pipeline reports delivered right to Slack.

Troops monitors Salesforce 24/7 and can alert you when key things happen – like a big deal moving to a new stage or getting stuck. Its Slack-based workflow builder lets you move deals along with the click of a button. And its robust reporting keeps you on top of targets without spending hours squinting at dashboards.

Bots for Productivity, Travel and Scheduling

In the busy day-to-day of sales, it‘s easy to get bogged down in the minutiae of meetings, scheduling, and travel planning. Luckily, there are bots that can act as your personal assistant to streamline these tasks and keep you organized.

To-Do Bot

Sometimes the hardest part of being productive is just keeping track of what you need to do. To-Do Bot acts as your task management system right within Slack or Microsoft Teams.

You can quickly create and assign tasks, set deadlines and reminders, and mark items complete – all using natural language commands. The bot will keep you on top of your to-do list and notify you of upcoming or overdue items so nothing falls through the cracks.

Hipmunk

Booking travel for sales meetings and conferences can be a huge time sink. Hipmunk‘s "Hello Hipmunk" bot aims to make it painless by letting you book flights and hotels right from Slack, Skype, or email.

You can message the bot with your preferred dates, locations and any other criteria. It will search across providers to find you the best deals and itineraries. You can finish the booking with a few button clicks, and the bot will send a confirmation and add it to your calendar. It‘s a huge time-saver versus navigating various travel sites and apps.

Uber and Lyft

For booking transportation on the go, the Uber and Lyft Slack bots have you covered. Both let you request rides from within Slack by typing simple commands with your pickup and dropoff locations.

You can get status updates on your ride‘s progress and share trip details with colleagues if you‘re running late. And with Lyft, frequent riders can even access a corporate rewards program to earn points and perks.

Google Calendar and Scheduling Assistants

Keeping your calendar organized and scheduling meetings can be a full-time job. But with bots and AI assistants, you can put much of it on autopilot.

Google Calendar‘s Slack bot can give you a daily rundown of your upcoming meetings and notify you when events are added, changed, or canceled. More robust scheduling assistants like X.ai can actually coordinate meeting times for you, emailing invitees and checking everyone‘s availability to find the best time to meet.

AI-Powered Virtual Assistants

Some of the most exciting developments in sales tech are happening around conversational AI. Intelligent virtual assistants are emerging that can understand context and provide substantive information and recommendations – almost like a human assistant would.

Growthbot

Created by HubSpot co-founder Dharmesh Shah, Growthbot bills itself as your "personal marketing and sales assistant." And it lives up to the title with an impressive range of skills.

Connect Growthbot to your HubSpot CRM and marketing platform and it can deliver all kinds of useful information on command – like company overviews, key contact details, competitor insights, personalized content recommendations for prospects, and more. It‘s like having a researcher and content curator in your pocket.

Facebook M

Facebook‘s Messenger assistant M is rapidly expanding its capabilities to help with an ever-widening range of tasks. Powered by human-supervised machine learning, M can understand the context and intent of your conversations to make intelligent, timely suggestions.

For salespeople, some of the most useful features include scheduling meetings and reminders, making payments to clients and vendors, and getting AI-generated copy suggestions for things like product descriptions.

Mosaic

For road warriors, Mosaic aims to be a mobile concierge to make your trips as smooth as possible. You can ask it for personalized flight, weather and traffic information, connect it to smart devices to automate your environment, and even get AI-powered foreign language help in a pinch.

On the productivity front, Mosaic can give you a daily rundown of your schedule and to-dos across all your connected accounts. And it‘s got powerful features for coordinating plans and booking reservations with clients and colleagues.

Poncho

Sometimes it‘s the little things that throw off your day as a salesperson – like getting caught in the rain without an umbrella on the way to a big meeting. Poncho is a bot that aims to help with its cheeky weather forecasts and advice.

You can chat with Poncho on Facebook Messenger, Slack or Kik to get daily forecasts and real-time alerts for things like rain or snow. You can even ask follow-up questions to get recommendations on what to wear or when to leave the office. It‘s a small thing, but the right insight delivered at the right time can make your day go that much smoother.

Tips for Leveraging Bots Effectively

With so many promising sales bots out there, it can be tempting to go hog wild and connect them all. But that can quickly lead to notification overload and a fragmented workflow. Here are a few tips to leverage bots the smart way:

1. Start by identifying a few key tasks and processes that take up a lot of time or tend to fall through the cracks. Focus on finding bots to help with those specific areas.

2. Make sure any bots you adopt can integrate seamlessly with your current workflow and platforms. The goal is to centralize and streamline, not add complexity.

3. Remember that bots are meant to enhance, not replace, human interaction. Use them to handle the repetitive tasks so you can focus on building real relationships.

4. Regularly assess which bots are delivering the most value and don‘t be afraid to cut ties with ones that aren‘t moving the needle. Less is often more when it comes to sales tech.

The Future of Bots in Sales

The bots on this list are already unlocking huge productivity gains for forward-thinking sales teams. But in many ways, we‘re still in the early innings of what AI can do in the sales world.

As machine learning continues to advance, we can expect bots to get better and better at understanding a sales organization‘s specific needs and processes. We‘ll see more deeply customized bots that can adapt on the fly to provide ever-more-intelligent recommendations and automation.

We‘re also not far off from a future where bots and virtual assistants can handle much of the initial legwork of prospecting and qualifying leads. By engaging web visitors and inbound leads in personalized conversations, these AI agents will be able to surface the most promising opportunities for human reps to follow up on.

Of course, this future won‘t build itself. Forward-thinking sales leaders will need to continue exploring and experimenting with these technologies to stay ahead of the curve. Complacency is not an option in a world where the most tech-savvy teams will have a massive advantage.

Bots: A Modern Salesperson‘s Best Friend

Sales has always been a field where the spoils go to those who can connect with prospects in the right way at the right time. In the past, that required an almost preternatural instinct for reading people and situations.

While those soft skills are still essential, the playing field is rapidly expanding. As buying journeys grow more digital and complex, sales professionals need a new breed of tools to stay one step ahead.

Bots and AI are emerging as the ultimate salespeople‘s sidekick – tirelessly handling the critical but time-consuming tasks that can bog down even the best seller. By taking over jobs like research, scheduling, reporting, and lead qualification, these virtual assistants free up human reps to focus on the high-value, high-touch interactions that make or break deals.

So whether you‘re an early adopter or just bot-curious, now is the time to explore how this new generation of smart tools can take your sales game to the next level. Start small, stay focused on real business value, and never stop learning and you‘ll be well on your way to thriving in the fast-approaching future of sales. Happy bot-selling!