Generative AI and LLMs for Sales: Today’s Impact and Tomorrow’s Opportunities

Artificial intelligence is rapidly reshaping how sales teams engage with prospects and close deals, in contact centers and beyond.

In particular, incredible innovation is being driven by increasingly sophisticated generative AI, or GenAI, solutions that go beyond traditional analysis to create entirely new content formats—including text, images, and code. This ability to not just analyze data and language but also creatively generate it is revolutionizing how sales teams work.

For sales and lead gen teams, generative AI is present in powerful tools to personalize outreach, automate repetitive tasks, and gain actionable insights from vast amounts of sales data. If your own team isn’t yet using GenAI, you could be missing out on a competitive edge—and soon risk falling behind.

Learn how your team can unlock the transformative potential of generative AI for sales with the help of this guide.

If you've ever used an AI chatbot like ChatGPT or an image generator like DALL-E, then you've already experienced at least some of the power of generative AI.

How does it work, though? While a full answer to this question likely requires a graduate education’s worth of explanation, a simpler summary will suffice for our purposes: At its core, generative AI leverages sophisticated algorithms to create entirely new content formats like text, images, audio, or even code. This stands in contrast to traditional AI, which focuses “simply” on analyzing data or performing specific tasks.

GenAI’s ability to create stems from deep-learning models called foundation models (FMs). These massive AI systems are trained on enormous datasets, which allows them to develop an “understanding” of complex patterns and relationships. Further, what makes FMs unique among historical AI models is that this training is incredibly versatile. A single FM can be fine-tuned to complete and ultimately specialize in a variety of downstream tasks, like predicting words in a sequence, writing code, composing marketing copy, generating creative images—or even conversing with a customer.

Generative AI, then, represents a fundamentally different approach to artificial intelligence. (And this revolutionary approach is what’s behind all the GenAI hype of the past year or so.) Rather than requiring heavily supervised learning that’s focused on improving an AI’s performance for a single function, modern generative AI can master a multitude of tasks, evolving and adapting to new challenges remarkably quickly. This makes it an incredibly potent technology with vast potential across industries, including sales.

Let’s tackle another foundational buzzword: the large language model. Much of the power of generative AI comes from a specific type of deep-learning FM called a large language model (LLM). LLMs are massive neural networks trained on enormous quantities of text and code. Think of them as extremely sophisticated learning engines that ingest and process language at incredible scales.

Through this process, LLMs learn how to predict word sequences. Indeed, in the early days of ChatGPT’s widely publicized release, the platform’s skeptics regularly referred to it as “auto-complete on steroids.” Of course, as models like GPT continue to advance, we’ve seen just how well they can also understand context, translate languages, and generate remarkably human-like text. As such, these form the backbone of the popular AI chatbots and creative text generators you’ve heard so much about—but they also underpin the advances in specialized GenAI that we’ll see in the months and years ahead.

LLMs are also what are—and will continue—to power many of the innovations GenAI brings to sales. Their ability to understand language, craft personalized content, and automate tasks has the potential to streamline the entire sales process, ultimately enabling sales teams to achieve their objectives more efficiently and effectively.

The abstract concepts behind generative AI and LLMs are fascinating, but this isn't just a theoretical exercise—not by any means. The influence of generative AI on the sales landscape is rapidly expanding. From acclerating lead generation to personalizing the buyer's journey, as we’ll see, AI is augmenting the abilities of sales professionals in significant ways.

In fact, McKinsey reports that 90% of commercial leaders expect to use generative AI solutions frequently within the next two years. Plus, those investing in AI are already seeing compelling results, with revenue increases between 3-15% and sales ROI rising 10-20%.

How exactly are they achieving these results? Let's explore five specific areas where generative AI is actively reshaping the sales process.

One activity GenAI is revolutionizing is how sales teams score and segment leads, making the process far more efficient and accurate. AI models ingest vast amounts of customer data—demographics, behavioral patterns, past interactions—and uncover hidden signals that predict their likelihood to convert. Plus, these sophisticated models can even identify traits within your ideal customer profile that influence buying decisions.

This deeper level of insight empowers sales teams in critical ways. Leads are scored on how closely they align with a high-converting profile, letting reps laser-focus on those most likely to buy. Segmentation becomes dynamic, grouping leads based on shared characteristics for precisely targeted outreach that increases engagement. All told, this AI-driven approach results in a more streamlined sales cycle, higher conversion rates, and ultimately, increased revenue.

Generative AI is also helping sales and lead gen teams provide more consistent, personalized communication across all channels and at scale. The latest abilities of AI go far beyond simple chatbots; generative AI-driven solutions like intelligent virtual agents for sales are capable of navigating complex conversations fluently over text and voice to answer questions, pre-qualify leads, set appointments, and more. These AI-powered agents can understand context, interpret complex requests, and respond with tailored information that provides value to the prospect.

Meanwhile, GenAI is unlocking deeper insights into customer sentiment, providing invaluable intelligence to sales teams, both in real-time and over longer periods. By analyzing the language and tone of customer interactions over voice and text, advanced AI models can accurately detect emotions like excitement, frustration, indifference, and more.

Real-time analysis of these sentiments, conducted alongside customer case history, ultimately offers sales reps crucial insights and guidance during live calls. AI-driven prompts can provide in-the-moment suggestions, provide revised messaging and rebuttals, or even alert managers for timely intervention.

Sentiment analysis extends beyond those decisive moments on calls, however. AI-powered tools can quickly dissect transcripts of sales calls and customer emails. Looking at aggregated data of entire teams, the model can generate valuable insights into common objections, areas of friction, and elements of sales messaging that resonate most strongly. Sales teams can use this intelligence to continuously refine their approach, adapt training materials, and ultimately improve customer satisfaction and conversion rates.

This is almost old news by now, but tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and specialized platforms for sales are rapidly streamlining the creation of personalized sales content at scale.

These AI assistants offer a range of capabilities to deliver tailored marketing and sales assets. They can draft blog posts and articles informed by specific customer pain points, generate compelling advertising copy aligned with campaign goals, and compose highly personalized emails and social media messaging that are based on your customer data. This not only saves sales teams valuable time and empowers them to focus on closing deals, but also ensures their messaging is highly targeted and resonant.

Generative AI generates insights into customer sentiment and sales performance, but it’s also revolutionizing the way sales leaders and decision-makers interact with all of their data. Rather than digging through spreadsheets, GenAI enables teams to interact directly with data sets in a conversational manner, unlocking insights that once took hours or days to surface.

That is, rather than relying on complex queries or dashboards, managers can ask natural language questions like "Show me all of my calls where the buyer expressed interest in a competitor" or "Which of my reps successfully closes deals after addressing a pricing objection?" Responses are generated instantly, revealing actionable insights for sales coaching, competitor analysis, and strategic decision-making.

The existing use cases for GenAI in sales are undeniably powerful, but it's important to acknowledge the technology is still in its early stages.

Though they’re improving, certain challenges persist—among them, factual errors, biases in training data, and occasional misinterpretations of complex language. Nevertheless, the pace of progress in this field is astonishing. AI learns and evolves at an extraordinary rate, meaning solutions to these issues are likely coming soon.

More than that, in the future will also see even more powerful LLMs tailored more and more specifically to the needs of sales teams. These specialized, “smaller domain” models will be far more attuned to the unique language patterns, operational processes, and dynamic challenges that sales teams face.

Of course, some of these purpose-built solutions are already here, already delivering incredible value, and only improving as time passes. Solutions like Voso.ai, Convoso’s conversational AI solution, are already tailored to the unique needs of today’s sales and lead generation teams.

Ready to harness the power of GenAI for sales at your team? Learn more about how Voso.ai is accelerating performance and unlocking incredible scale.