Highspot’s State of Sales Enablement Report 2025 unearthed the operational pain points and business challenges facing enterprise go-to-market (GTM) leaders today. They include:
- Consistent sales performance (60%)
- Effective sales training (47%)
- Customer experience and retention (47%)
- Engaging new buyers (41%)
- Effective sales coaching (36%)
The common thread among all these universal go-to-market activities, tasks, and goals?
None of them are siloed.
They’re all carried out by and shared objectives among both your sales and marketing teams.
There is a symbiotic relationship between the two departments (two sides of the same coin), the strength of which dictates your GTM initiative success and overall business growth.
What binds these two teams together—and empowers them to work in harmony toward their shared North Star goal of driving consistent, scalable revenue growth—is a go-to-market strategy built, executed, and optimized with a leading GTM enablement platform.
Specifically, sales enablement software that infuses AI for sales and marketing operations is what helps both teams gain real-time insights into their shared work so they can steadily improve and provide your business with a significant competitive edge.
How AI in sales and marketing has evolved in the last few years
The introduction of AI tools to marketing and sales organisations at mid-sized and enterprise companies alike has led to some AI ‘whiplash’ in the past few years.
Regarding the findings from KPMG’s Global Tech Report 2024, digital innovation leader Steve Chase noted, “AI is constantly evolving, putting pressure on businesses to outpace the disruption as they scale their AI-driven transformations across their organisation.”
Despite challenges with tool evaluation and adoption, the use of AI in sales and marketing has already transformed the way both teams operate for the better.
“As markets continue to evolve at an accelerating pace, the ability to make informed decisions quickly—whether through automated reflexive systems or accelerated reflective processes—will increasingly separate market leaders from those left behind,” sales expert Prabhakant Sinha wrote for Harvard Business Review.
As a GTM leader—whether in marketing, sales, enablement, or revenue operations—you may be curious how your business can best adapt to the rapid proliferation of AI.
More specifically, you might want to know how to onboard the right marketing and sales AI tools to keep your company ahead of the AI curve and win in your respective category.
“While AI has transformational potential, its success depends entirely on the readiness of the system it supports,” Highspot Chief Revenue Officer Stuart Gammon explained in Highspot’s Go-to-Market Performance Gap Report.
“When embedded into a coherent, well-governed GTM model supported by clean data, clear ownership, and consistent reinforcement, AI scales coaching, personalizes engagement, and surfaces risk,” Stuart continued in the report.
“But when applied to a fragmented foundation, AI simply exposes the disconnect faster.”
The best way to assess the state of your AI maturity and readiness?
Look at how other B2B companies already use AI to do everything from analyse customer behaviour and market trends, to eliminate repetitive tasks and speed up sales cycles.
| AI use cases for sales | Activation and intended ROI |
| Instant content answers in CRM | • Activation: Get answers to deal questions without leaving your CRM. • Intended ROI: Cut sales rep prep time and boosts confidence in buyer chats. |
| Meeting insight summaries | • Activation: Highlight key topics, buyers objections, and next steps from calls. • Intended ROI: Save reps hours and helps managers pinpoint coaching moments. |
| AI-powered sales plays | • Activation: Custom-tailor sales outreach, based on buyer persona and funnel stage. • Intended ROI: Help reps execute more consistently to increase conversion rates. |
| Auto-generated pitch decks | • Activation: Provide sellers with deal-specific, branded decks in seconds. • Intended ROI: Keep reps in the flow of selling to reduce admin work time. |
| Role-based skill coaching | • Activation: Evaluate reps’ calls, and give targeted coaching suggestions. • Intended ROI: Turn reps into top performers by reinforcing good behaviours. |
| Persona-specific AI role play | • Activation: Help reps practice real-world situations using AI-driven feedback. • Intended ROI: Turns practice into performance, fast-tracking ramp. |
| Smart nudges to move deals | • Activation: Suggest next-best actions, based on deal health and lead activity. • Intended ROI: Reduce ‘stuck’ pipeline, and accelerate reps’ sales velocity. |
| Pipeline health analysis | • Activation: Spot deal risks, based on CRM data and buyer-activity insights. • Intended ROI: Enable proactive deal coaching and forecasting for managers. |
| Self-serve knowledge checks | • Activation: Give reps pop quizzes and learning paths tied to plays or launches. • Intended ROI: Reinforce sales readiness, and limit reps’ reliance on managers. |
| Top-performer behaviour modeling | • Activation: Benchmark every rep against high performers across all behaviours. • Intended ROI: Empower reps to learn what ‘great’ looks like—and repeat it. |
Sales: Finding new ways to level-up their customer relationship management efforts
The ‘right’ AI tools—ones proven to help scaled B2B companies like yours improve sales efficiency month over month—can leverage historical sales data to help your sales representatives personalize outreach to leads and optimize sales engagement.
Some AI technologies offer predictive analytics that can identify customer needs from sales calls and interactions, empowering reps to anticipate demands.
The primary value of onboarding the best AI sales tools that enable each of your reps to learn and grow daily and streamline their repetitive tasks is:
- Smarter lead scoring and prioritization: Predictive AI assesses customer data to identify high-value leads. Sales reps can then prioritize accounts to work now versus later and move engaged leads through their sales funnel intelligently.
- Accessing real-time sales coaching: The natural language processing (NLP) functionality in our GTM performance platform analyses live sales calls for rep effectiveness and delivers actionable feedback to boost rep performance.
- More personalized customer communication: A critical component of modern sales prospecting is meeting sales leads where they are and having meaningful conversations with them across channels by tailoring messaging to them.
- Getting dynamic content recommendations: Leveraging real-time data, AI-powered, B2B sales enablement solutions like Highspot can suggest tailored content for reps to include in account-based selling interactions, such as pitches.
It’s not just your pre-sales team that benefits from AI tools.
Your enablement staff and account managers can also work in tandem to harness cutting-edge AI technology through sales play creation for upsells, cross-sells, and renewals.
“The right readiness program equips post-sales teams to engage customers better and unlock more expansion opportunities, harnessing both alignment and agency to create personalized experiences that lead to value,” according to Highspot’s A Versatile Strategy for Customer Value guide.
That means using leading AI tools, like a GTM enablement platform with sales content management capabilities, to set post-sales professionals up for success.
| AI use cases for marketing | Activation and intended ROI |
| Auto-tagging content at scale | • Activation: Scan and label new assets for quick discovery and governance. • Intended ROI: Speed up publishing, and ensure reps use brand-safe content. |
| Content performance scorecards | • Activation: Analyse engagement signals to highlight what’s resonating with leads. • Intended ROI: Help marketers double down on what influences pipeline |
| Smart content recommendations | • Activation: Serve deal-relevant assets, based on stage, persona, and history. • Intended ROI: Increase content usage and conversion across campaigns. |
| Persona-specific content personalization | • Activation: Tailor decks for different leads, based on pain points and needs. • Intended ROI: Boost engagement by sharing relevant messaging that lands. |
| Real-time buyer intent insights | • Activation: Flag which content prospects engage with and when in real-time. • Intended ROI: Enable responsive, high-conversion follow-ups with warm leads. |
| Sales play adoption tracking | • Activation: Monitor usage of sales plays and related messaging across teams. • Intended ROI: Prove what’s working, and optimize go-to-market execution. |
| Automated campaign optimization | • Activation: Review asset usage and buyer activity to suggest campaign pivots. • Intended ROI: Drive more pipeline from fewer touches by focusing on what works. |
| Voice-of-customer trend detection | • Activation: Surface trending objections and questions from meeting transcripts. • Intended ROI: Equip marketing with the voice of the customer to refine messaging. |
| Brand compliance enforcement | • Activation: Identify expired or off-brand materials, then restrict or cut off usage. • Intended ROI: Minimize regulatory risk and protect brand equity at scale. |
| Campaign-to-revenue attribution | • Activation: Link engagement with won deals with AI-scored insights. • Intended ROI: Prove marketing’s impact on won deals with precision. |
Marketing: Turning recent and historical customer engagement insights into GTM actions
“Companies have long used sales methodologies to align on what good selling looks like and used storytelling frameworks to craft their messaging,” Highspot’s Essential Guide to Content Management explains. “What has been missing is an enablement methodology to get those ideas implemented consistently and effectively.”
Enter AI-powered sales content management and governance.
Sales enablement software gives B2B marketing teams visibility into reps’ recent sales activities, like when they shared certain collateral and with which leads.
This unified, historical data reveals how the sales team leverages enablement content during customer interactions and if they are helping with advancing or closing deals.
Monitoring reps’ sales workflows through an enablement platform can help your marketing team capture detailed buyer engagement data so they can identify which assets resonate most with prospects and at which stage of the sales funnel they are used.
Consider how B2B marketing teams use Highspot’s AI and analytics engine:
- Our solution uncovers usage patterns and engagement trends, including through our AI sales agents that provide Instant Answers tied to historical data.
- This helps marketers who use our solution—including our AI agents that help unearth this data more quickly—ensure they create collateral that actually helps buyers with their decision-making during interactions with your reps.
- With these precise, AI-derived insights, marketing teams can continuously refine their content strategy and, over time, help turn more potential customers into paying ones and contribute to your big-picture sales growth.
“Sales enablement provides a link between marketing and sales teams, not only housing the content that marketing produces but also providing guidance on how to best deliver content,” per Highspot’s Put an End to the Content Chaos guide.
With an AI-forward GTM performance platform collecting and reporting content usage and effectiveness, your sales and marketing teams can better align and optimize their focus and investment in content creation and sales automation.
How to use AI in marketing and sales to streamline operations and improve ROI
There are certainly instances in which marketing and sales operations benefit individually from using team-specific AI tools within their respective teams.
That said, a unified GTM enablement platform with native, AI-powered capabilities is highly advantageous for both business units—and one both need to improve shared sales metrics.
Here’s how companies across industries make the most of the software to strengthen their shared data-driven decision-making and refine their sales process.
Manufacturing: Arkema vastly improves sales content discoverability for reps
Specialty materials manufacturing company Arkema needed a single-source-of-truth content repository that offered intuitive version control and helped address content-related inefficiencies for its sizable global marketing and sales teams.
In addition to creating a central hub where all up-to-date sales collateral can live and be easily findable by sales reps, Arkema also gained AI-powered sales enablement analytics that helps marketers see which assets are being embedded in selling activities.
“By leveraging these insights, our marketing teams can make data-driven decisions, focus on high-performing content, and allocate shared capacity more effectively,” said Arkema Marketing Communications Manager, Consumer and Construction Lenel Brown.
Financial services: Allianz Trade empowers sellers to attain quotas and close deals
Lacking an enablement solution to host its wealth of sales content not only deterred existing sellers at international insurance company Allianz Trade from finding content but also newly onboarded reps from gaining the specialized knowledge they need to develop custom-tailored pitch decks that spoke directly to specific buyers’ needs.
Embedding Highspot in the centre of its GTM tech stack helped boost platform adoption and content engagement among Allianz’s sales team.
The trickle-down effect of embracing our unified sales enablement solution was a 20% increase in quotas attained and 10% lift in reps’ win rate.
One facet of Highspot that Allianz has used to improve sellers’ effectiveness is our Engagement Genomics, which allows the company’s sales and marketing to track the ROI of specific sales materials and identify areas for improvement.
Engagement Genomics automatically ties recent buyer engagement activity to their customer CRM records, ensuring go-to-market leaders have a holistic view of content’s impact on marketing and sales enablement and revenue.
Answers to your questions on leveraging AI for sales and marketing
You have questions. We have answers. This may not cover everything you and your marketing and sales leaders want to know about the use of AI in GTM today.
However, this can shed some light on how other marketing and sales teams identify solutions worth investing in to accelerate their sales cycles, make the most of machine learning capabilities, and take advantage of predictive analytics, giving your GTM team a roadmap for adopting and embracing the technology.
Is artificial intelligence really that important for marketing and sales?
Absolutely. Artificial intelligence makes life easier by automating those repetitive sales tasks that slow your sales team down. It streamlines lead generation, sharpens lead scoring, and helps sales managers guide their teams with laser-focused coaching.
Plus, it’s not just about working faster when it comes to using AI in sales. It’s also about working smarter by understanding what potential customers really want.
(That means putting your plethora of sales data—the lifeblood of AI—to good use.)
The result is a higher-performing and -converting sales strategy that boosts reps’ sales productivity, lifts revenue, and frees up your team to focus on high-value tasks like.
No longer do your sales and marketing teams have to manually rank, prioritize, craft messages for, and analyse prospects and their activities. The top AI technologies can:
- Automate lead scoring for faster follow-ups with high-value accounts
- Hyper-personalize interactions to build stronger customer relationships
- Discover which sales collateral most influences closed-won and revenue
More time saved, efficiencies gained, and revenue generated, thanks to AI: As a GTM leader with lots of balls in the air simultaneously, that’s the dream, right?
Which AI tools actually help sales and marketing teams thrive today?
There are a few tools leveraged by both teams to drive future sales and revenue:
- Conversational AI is a game-changer for personalizing interactions with website visitors who come to your website, making them feel heard and understood.
- Meanwhile, generative AI software that automates content creation, producing tailored emails and messages at scale, is like having a creative assistant that helps your sales representatives, product marketers, and enablement personnel. These teams can craft on-brand collateral that ‘speaks’ to buyer pain points. When deployed correctly, that collateral has a high likelihood of positively helping your sales professionals’ turn presently engaged opportunities into future sales.
- On the backend, sales intelligence platforms use machine learning to sift through customer data. This gives your entire team clear insights—think customer behaviour of closed-won and -lost accounts—and can help sharpen your shared GTM efforts.
Combined, these sales AI tools don’t just boost efficiency but also supercharge your sales reps’ ability to convert leads in a timely, predictable manner.
Put another way?
Artificial intelligence takes complex customer data, makes it easy to digest in sales scorecards and reports, and provides your sales team with quick, reliable answers. This empowers sales and marketing leaders to make confident decisions and coach effectively.
Are conversational AI and conversation intelligence tools the same?
Not quite. They’re closely related, but each has its own strengths:
- Conversational AI refers to smart chatbots that interact directly with potential customers and business professionals—including GTM teams—providing them with instant, personalized responses.
- Conversation intelligence software, in relation to GTM operations, involves analysing and understanding sales calls—pinpointing what works, what doesn’t, and giving sales managers actionable insights.
Think of conversational AI as your front-line assistant, while conversation intelligence is your behind-the-scenes coach helping improve sales performance.
“Players and coaches use game film to learn from mistakes and successes on the field,” Highspot’s Essential Revenue Tech Stack eBook explained.
“Winning sales reps and leaders do the same with conversational intelligence,” per the guide. “Listening and learning from sales calls allows teams to improve their tactics, ladder up to better strategies, and design sales training or coaching programs to help their reps grow.”
How can we incorporate generative AI into our go-to-market strategy?
Some of the most popular ways GenAI is used in GTM strategies today include:
- Moving leads through the sales funnel: Crafting tailored, rules-based email sequences using generative AI sales tech helps your sales professionals grab the attention of previously engaged prospects to let them know they’re still here to help.
- Generating sales presentations and proposals: Highspot enables inside and outside sales reps alike to develop bespoke pitches to particular prospects by telling our solution to automatically form a relevant compilation of assets.
- Automating sales content updates: Keeping sales materials fresh and relevant is top of mind for marketing teams. Using a sales enablement platform, marketers can equip sales professionals with only the most pertinent and timely collateral to share.
- Addressing buyers’ objections and asks: Generative AI equips sales reps with immediate, precise talking points during calls, addressing leads’ pushback effectively as conversations unfold and helping to answer any questions they may ask on calls.
- Engaging with prospects on social media: Certain GenAI tools can also rapidly create social media posts that can be used for cold outreach. This helps reps with their social selling—an underrated, yet pivotal part of their sales prospecting.
- Simulating sales training with role plays: Highspot’s sales AI role play capability helps sales reps get real-life experience selling in a risk-free, practice environment and helps managers coach effectively without manually scripting each session.
The trick to making the most of GenAI is to recognize it’s not a panacea or silver bullet. Humans (your go-to-market team) still need to be heavily involved in its utilization to ensure these use cases produce your desired results and streamline GTM work.
“Integrating AI in GTM strategies offers unprecedented opportunities for efficiency and personalization, marking a significant shift from traditional methods,” Meta Sr. Product Marketing Manager Gunjan Paliwal recently wrote for Forbes. “By balancing AI technologies with human expertise, businesses can develop more effective and agile GTM strategies.”
Elevating your sales and marketing team’s AI maturity with proven tech
The opportunity in front of go-to-market function like yours to leverage predictive analytics to analyse and take action on customer interactions and behaviours and onboard other emerging AI technology your marketing and sales leaders can use to educate and empower their teams is one worth embracing.
But allocating budget to AI sales tools for the sole reason you know artificial intelligence in sales is a game-changer for GTM organisations isn’t enough.
You also need to ensure your overall AI maturity level reaches the point where sales representatives, account executives, enablement managers, and other team members can capably and consistently ‘wield’ marketing and sales AI tech for lead generation, nurturing, and conversion and—collectively—hit revenue targets.
Already a Highspot customer?
Take our AI for GTM Leaders course, as part of our Enablement University, to level-up your artificial intelligence knowledge and set the stage for greater go-to-market success.