AI for sales
Make sales happen better and faster with comprehensive data, scalable personalization, and improved efficiency—all while creating a better experience for both buyers and sales teams through AI features that deliver powerful value for everyone.
Get StartedAI explained
AI is a fairly broad term, but the kind we're referring to here uses large language models (LLMs)—similar to ChatGPT and other popular tools—to mimic human-like tasks such as generating text, solving math problems, interpreting patterns, and more. Here, we'll focus on AI tools built exclusively for sales teams.
What is AI for sales?
AI for sales includes tasks such as helping sales professionals draft emails, review prospects' prior interactions, predict the likelihood of successful sales, forecast upcoming quarterly sales, and more. All of this serves to enable sales professionals to engage more effectively with prospects, deliver the right solutions, and simplify the sales process—with less effort and smarter work.
How AI can help you improve your sales
Data enrichment
Incomplete data weakens customer interactions. AI tools can automatically fill in missing details—like demographics, social media profiles, and company info—so your team gets a richer, more accurate view of every customer. This helps you craft more meaningful conversations and personalize your outreach without manual research.
By leveraging AI and machine learning, your sales team can uncover insights to improve segmentation, spot upsell opportunities, and deliver tailored experiences.
This also eliminates data entry errors, reduces manual work, and ensures your customer data stays fresh and reliable—saving both time and effort.
Enhanced productivity
AI can analyze your team's work patterns and identify tasks that you can automate. From sending follow-up emails to updating fields or assigning tasks, AI ensures your sales team spends less time on grunt work and more time on closing deals. Less manual work means faster, more efficient sales cycles.
AI powered by datasets can help sales managers make smarter assignments using record owner suggestions. AI models study past patterns—like geography, product interest, or rep performance—and ensure that leads go to the right people automatically.
This balances workloads, reduces delays, and helps your top reps stay focused on what they do best. Plus, with its Similarity Recommender, Zia helps reps suggest the right products at the right times based on past purchases, improving cross-sell and upsell chances.
Ask Zia is an AI tool available in Zoho CRM Plus that acts as an always-on sales assistant. Your team can simply ask questions—like “Show me today's leads” or “Create a follow-up task”—and get instant results without having to navigate the CRM.
This real-time interaction helps reps stay organized, access key data quickly, and make smarter decisions on the go. It's like giving every rep their own personal assistant—without the cost.
Better customer experiences
Sales teams no longer rely on guesswork. AI studies past interactions (emails, calls, and meetings), along with time zones and response patterns, to predict the best moment to reach out.
Whether it's sending an email or making a call, timing your outreach right means better open rates, higher engagement, and more meaningful conversations.
Many AIs can analyze emails and calls for sentiment, emotion, and intent to help sales reps quickly grasp what the customer really wants. It flags frustration, urgency, or interest so teams can prioritize and respond with empathy.
Features like transcription and call analysis double up as tools for training and ensure consistent quality across conversations.
Zia's Recommendation Builder and Next Best Experience features help sales teams perform smarter actions at every stage. Create personalized product suggestions based on real customer data, analyze what's working, and get recommendations on what to do next—whether it's a follow-up, a call, or a pitch.
This level of intelligence helps sales teams move faster, stay relevant, and close more deals with confidence.
Intelligent alerts
Receive AI notifications to keep your sales team instantly informed of critical updates—like if a lead opens an email, a deal is won or lost, or a high-value customer takes action. These smart alerts help reps respond faster, act at the right moments, and never miss a beat in the sales process.
With Zia's Competitor Alerts, sales and marketing teams can monitor key movements in pricing, campaigns, or product changes made by competitors. Instead of playing catch-up, you're equipped to act swiftly and refine your strategies in real time—keeping your edge sharp and your decisions proactive.
Zia's Anomaly Detection and Trend Analysis features bring deeper visibility into your data. Whether it's spotting a sudden drop in sales or a hidden opportunity, Zia flags irregularities early so you can act with confidence. Over time, it uncovers patterns in customer behavior and sales performance, helping you make smarter, data-backed decisions every day.
Customer engagement and retention
Sales teams can build custom AI models to forecast outcomes across deals, purchases, costs, and more. By analyzing historical data and customer interactions, This helps predict deal closures, identify delays, and prioritize leads.
These insights empower reps to act decisively and help managers refine strategies, allocate resources effectively, and boost overall sales performance.
Zia's Voice of the Customer feature unlocks deep insights into how customers feel about your brand by analyzing touchpoints like emails, support tickets, and surveys.
It extracts sentiments, detects intent, and surfaces patterns using visual cohorts and quadrants. This enables you to segment customers, spot promoters and detractors, understand market perception, and nurture relationships more intelligently at every stage of the customer journey.
With Zia Scores and Churn Prediction, businesses can identify high-converting leads and at-risk customers in real time. AI-generated scores help prioritize engaged prospects while churn signals reveal which customers need attention.
By acting early—through tailored offers or personalized outreach—you can strengthen engagement, reduce attrition, and build lasting customer relationships.
Key highlights of AI offered in Zoho CRM Plus
Zoho’s AI features are designed with a privacy-first approach. Your data stays secure, confidential, and always within Zoho’s ecosystem. We never sell your data or use it to train global models. All processing happens within your account and Zoho’s data centers.
What it means for you: Full data ownership, compliance peace of mind, and complete control over how your data is used.
Zoho’s AI is composable — you can decide what to predict and what data to include or exclude. We follow strict data minimization protocols, collecting only what’s necessary. By default, GDPR-sensitive data, personally identifiable information (PII), and encrypted fields are excluded from model training.
What it means for you: More flexibility, less risk, and AI tailored to your specific business use cases.
Every AI model goes through a Data Privacy Impact Assessment (DPIA), detailed security audits, and adversarial testing to ensure privacy, safety, and legitimate use.
What it means for you: Secure deployment and reduced risk of data exposure or misuse.
We evaluate each model for accuracy, bias, and fairness. Transparency reports include metrics, prediction logic, and confidence scores.
What it means for you: Clear insights into how AI works, so you can trust and act on its predictions with confidence.
Getting started with AI for sales
Identify AI use cases
Find areas in your sales process where AI can help, like lead scoring, forecasting, or automating follow-ups. Focus on what will improve efficiency and drive better results for your team.
Stakeholders collaboration
Involve sales, marketing, IT, and leadership early on to get everyone aligned. Collaboration helps address real challenges and smoothens AI adoption.
Free trial and evaluation
Use free trials or pilots to test AI features in your environment. Check how easy it is to use and integrate, and gauge its impact before fully committing. For instance, Zoho CRM Plus offers a 14-day free trial of our AI-enabled CRM solution without needing your credit card or any commitment.
Talk to us
Reach out to us for expert advice tailored to your business needs. Get recommendations and support to maximize your AI investment.