Top AI sales tools for Account Executives

Looking to cover more ground as an account executive? Read about the best AI sales tools and how they can accelerate your day-to-day workflows.

Key takeaways:

• Account executives are tasked with maintaining client relationships and winning new business, and many of them are adding artificial intelligence to their workflows to work more efficiently
• AI-powered sales tools are flooding the market; to make it easier for you to pick tools for your team, we’ve captured highlights from 10 of the best AI sales tools available today
• By understanding your objectives with new tools, grading them on usability, and measuring how performance has changed over time, you can gauge the effectiveness of each solution — or lack thereof

How can AI be used in sales for account executives?

In 2024, an account executive (AE) is a member of the sales team who’s tasked with nurturing relationships with existing clients and converting prospects into paying customers. AEs often serve as the primary contact for clients, offering support, answering questions, and otherwise doing everything they can to help customers maximize the value of their investments.

With budgets tightening up, markets growing even more saturated with SaaS products, and deals requiring sign-offs from an increasing number of stakeholders, the AE job is becoming more difficult. To cover more ground and win more business, sales leaders are increasingly asking account executives to explore ways that they can use artificial intelligence (AI) to accelerate their workflows and achieve better sales outcomes.

Are you looking to incorporate AI sales tools into your day to day? You’re in the right place. 

We’ve put together a list of top AI sales tools for account executives, and we’ve also laid out some ways that sales teams and leaders can evaluate the effectiveness of each of them to decide which works best for their unique circumstances.

After all, what’s the use of implementing a new tool or process if you have no way of evaluating its effectiveness and impact to your sales pipeline, deal flow, or revenue generation activities?

This list of the best AI tools for sales (in our opinion) is in no particular order; we’ve either used these tools ourselves or know customers that are using them.

Without further ado, let’s jump right in!

Best AI Sales Tools [May 2024]

With hundreds upon hundreds of AI sales tools on the market, it can be tricky to figure out where to get started. 

To make your journey to more efficient sales workflows an easier one, we’ve compiled this list of what we believe are the 10 best AI tools for sales available today (in no particular order).

1. Salesforce Einstein

Salesforce Einstein is an AI-powered suite integrated within the Salesforce platform that offers predictive insights, recommendations, and automation. Leveraging machine learning algorithms, Einstein analyzes data from various sources to provide personalized insights, automate tasks, and predict outcomes, enabling reps to make data-driven decisions.

AI enhances Salesforce Einstein by enabling it to continuously learn from data, improving accuracy and efficiency over time. For AEs, Einstein solves challenges related to sales forecasting, lead prioritization, and customer engagement, streamlining workflows and boosting productivity.

Pricing: $500/user/month

2. Gong

Gong is a sales conversation analytics platform that employs AI to analyze sales calls and meetings. Using natural language processing and machine learning, Gong transcribes and analyzes conversations, extracting insights based on customer sentiment, objections, and key topics discussed.

AI enhances Gong by swiftly processing reams of data, identifying trends, and providing actionable recommendations to improve sales strategies. For AEs, Gong solves challenges related to understanding customer needs, refining pitch strategies, and enhancing overall communication skills — adding up to more effective sales outcomes.

Thinking about adding Gong to your sales tech stack? Consider bundling Gong and LeadIQ together to get the power of both platforms at one unbeatable price. 

3. Salesloft

Salesloft is a sales engagement platform that helps teams automate and optimize communication with prospects and customers alike. Salesloft uses AI for predictive analytics, personalization, and workflow automation. LeadIQ recently unveiled an integration with Salesloft Rhythm, an AI-powered signal-to-action engine that brings buyer behaviors directly into AE workflows and recommends actions.

AI enhances Salesloft by analyzing data patterns to predict the best times to reach out, personalize messaging, and automate repetitive tasks — like when to send follow-up emails. For AEs, this solves lead prioritization challenges while improving response rates and enabling them to scale their outreach efforts seamlessly, boosting productivity and increasing win rates.

Pricing: $2,000 for an annual license plus $125 to $165/user/month (source) 

4. HubSpot

HubSpot is a comprehensive customer relationship management, marketing automation, and sales platform. It uses AI for features like predictive lead scoring, forecasting, conversation intelligence, and email generation and also provides AI-powered website builders, image generators, and even formatting recommendations. 

AI enhances HubSpot by automating repetitive tasks, personalizing user experiences, and providing data-driven insights. This simplifies lead management while enabling AEs to prospect more efficiently and engage customers more effectively with highly targeted outreach and at-a-glance visibility into the highest-value leads. 

‍Pricing: Starts at $90/user/month

5. LeadIQ Scribe

LeadIQ Scribe is a generative AI writing tool that enables sales reps and AEs to compose personalized messages in just a few clicks. With LeadIQ Scribe, users can add prospects from Gmail, Salesloft, Outreach, or the LeadIQ web app, pick a value prop, and select personalized insights based on LinkedIn activity, education, current events, and more. Scribe then whips up three personal email drafts, and the AE then chooses which one to tweak or fire off as is.

AI enhances LeadIQ Scribe by continuously learning with each draft; AEs can give a thumbs up on drafts they like and a thumbs down when the tool could have done better. LeadIQ Scribe also learns from open rates and response rates, helping AEs get increasingly better outcomes over time. Add it all up, and LeadIQ Scribe helps AEs eliminate writer’s block, reclaim tons of time, and engage more prospects more effectively at scale.

Pricing: Starts at $0/user/month

6. Crayon

Crayon is a market and competitive intelligence platform that helps businesses track competitors and keep pace with industry trends and market changes. Crayon uses AI to gather, analyze, and summarize data from various sources, including websites, social media, and news articles.

AI enhances Crayon by rapidly processing vast amounts of information, identifying key insights using natural language processing, classifying data into categories, scoring intelligence using machine learning, and providing actionable recommendations. This helps AEs understand market dynamics, competitive positioning, and customer preferences more effectively, which enables them to craft strategies that help them stay ahead of the competition.

Pricing: For 200 employees, a contract ranges from $16,800 to $31,000 per year (source)

7. Zoom

Zoom is a cloud-based video conferencing solution used to facilitate virtual meetings, host webinars, and collaborate. Zoom uses AI for features like noise cancellation, background blurring, and transcription services. The platform also offers an AI Companion that drafts emails and chat messages and summarizes meeting transcripts.

AI enhances Zoom by improving the user experience, helping folks have more productive meetings, and allowing users to quickly digest the contents of a meeting in short order. For AEs, Zoom is a life-saver when it comes to delivering a seamless virtual meeting environment, making it easier to engage prospects wherever they are. Rather than sit through an hourlong company meeting, super-busy AEs can read meeting summaries to get the gist of what was discussed, enabling them to spend more time selling.

Pricing: Starts at $13.32/user/month

8. Dialpad

Dialpad makes AI-powered customer engagement, sales intelligence, and collaboration solutions. The company’s Ai Sales Center product provides coaching, sales guidance, and QA tools, all powered by AI. Using artificial intelligence, Dialpad users can ensure reps are adhering to playbooks, immediately identify areas for improvement, and automatically score every conversation against the most important metrics.

AI enhances Dialpad by automatically transcribing calls, ensuring 100% of customer interactions are graded, and giving sales leaders the data they need to identify coaching opportunities and where additional resources might be needed — all in real time. For AEs, this makes it easier to handle high call volumes, capture important details during conversations, and ultimately have more productive customer interactions. At the same time, the platform helps AEs prioritize leads, understand customer sentiments, and adjust their approach accordingly — leading to better business outcomes.

Pricing: Starts at $95/user/month

9. Avoma

Avoma is an AI-powered meeting assistant and conversation intelligence platform that helps sales teams capture, transcribe, and analyze meetings. Avoma uses AI for tasks like speech recognition, topic extraction, and sentiment analysis, among other things.

AI enhances Avoma by automating note-taking, summarizing key points, and identifying action items from meetings rapidly. For AEs, this solves the challenges associated with retaining and organizing meeting information, allowing them to spend more time engaging with prospects and driving sales.

Pricing: Starts at $0/user/month

10. 6Sense

6Sense is an account-based marketing platform that aims to help sales teams identify and engage with potential buyers at the right time. It uses AI for predictive analytics, intent monitoring, and personalized content recommendations.

AI enhances 6Sense by analyzing large amounts of data to predict buying intent, prioritize leads, and personalize messaging. For AEs, this makes tasks like lead qualification, pipeline management, and targeting simpler thanks to actionable insights into prospect behavior and preferences, which improves sales effectiveness.

Pricing: Contracts are based on company size, number of users, features, and credits; annual contracts can eclipse $50,000 (source)

How to evaluate the best AI sales tools for account executives

Every account executive wants to close deals faster, automate repetitive manual tasks, and increase their productivity however they can. But how can you be sure that a tool that you’ve implemented really helped you cover more ground?

Answering this question can be more difficult than most teams and sales leaders care to admit. When AEs adopt new tools, they often only have a short time to evaluate its efficacy before having to convince leadership to pay for it. Even worse, it’s not uncommon for sales leadership to force a lackluster AI sales tool on the AE team and expect them to use it even if it’s the wrong tool for the job.

If you’re considering implementing any of the tools in this piece into your workflows, here are some steps to follow as you evaluate their effectiveness.

Step #1: Define the tool’s objective

AI sales tools come in all shapes and sizes. When it comes to determining whether a solution is right for your team, you first need to ask yourself exactly what you’re trying to accomplish with it. 

Do you want to close deals faster? Are you trying to write better cold emails? Is your top priority automating repetitive tasks? By clearly defining what you hope to achieve with the new tool, you can evaluate the current state, set your baseline, and measure your effectiveness from there.

Step #2: Evaluate the tool’s usability

While new sales tools and tech gadgets can be a shiny new object for AEs, the first step to understanding whether they’re actually helping is to learn whether the team is actually using them. You might deploy the best AI sales tool the world has ever seen, but if your team isn’t using it regularly, what good does that do? 

Once you understand what you hope to accomplish with a new tool, it’s time to assess the tool’s usability. Does it take a lot of effort? Is there a steep learning curve? Does the tool require AEs to overhaul their entire workflows or does it tightly integrate into their existing processes? Does the tool deliver a strong user experience or is it buggy and unreliable?

By answering these types of questions, you can start to evaluate whether a specific AI sales tool is really the right fit for your team.

Step #3: Measure performance metrics

After 30 to 90 days of using a new AI sales tool, you can both qualitatively and quantitatively measure sales performance metrics from the baseline you defined in step one. (You might need more time if your sales cycle is longer.) 

But those metrics aren’t the only data point you should use. The numbers might not be up yet, but your team might be loving the tool and may agree that it’s super beneficial to their prospecting workflows. If that’s the case, you might want to be a bit patient and give the tool more time to work its magic. Any tool that increases engagement and makes life easier can still be incredibly valuable. 

Ready to add AI sales tools to your prospecting stack?

As every AE knows too well, there are only so many hours in the day. With more and more responsibilities to manage and more and more companies competing for attention, account executives need to do everything they can to work more efficiently and effectively every day.

This is one area where AI-powered sales tools can be a true game-changer. By adding the right AI sales tools to your tech stack, you can engage more prospects in less time, while connecting with them on a truly personalized level.

When you’re ready to see what this looks like in practice, connect with our sales team to learn more about how you can compose personalized emails in seconds using LeadIQ Scribe.