Guides
How to Sell with AI
How to Sell with AI
Always-on prospecting that finds the right leads at the right time, every time.
Karli Stone
Senior Content Marketing Manager
Table of Contents
4 minute read
Introduction
Artificial intelligence found me on the fourth floor of a back alley bookstore in Mexico City.
I wasn’t expecting it, waiting for the librería’s music venue to open up with two-for-one frozen margaritas as my sole companions—one destined to meet an untimely melted death.
Before it could, a gentleman, in his early 50s with a pouf in his hair that harkened of the late ’80s, approached and asked what my brightly-colored drink was.
I held it out as an offering. “Well, I have an extra.”
The partially-frozen offering dripped down the side. Not my best sell.
But still, the deal was closed with an exchange of names and a sticky handshake.
He was a salesman, he said, from the days of cold calls, dog-eared Yellow Pages, and sales floors packed shoulder to shoulder. We talked shop. He marveled at how much had changed and, with a knowing sip, he said, “This AI stuff now, it’s crazy.”
He’s right — and you can’t escape it. AI, and conversations around it, will find you just like it found me.
But, its inevitability isn’t a death sentence for sales. It’s a call to arms. It’s a summons for a new (maybe better?) world full of stronger, better salespeople.
The only question that remains is if you, dear reader, are brave enough to answer the call.
I’m Karli Stone, a content marketer at Apollo.io, and I’ve spent the entirety of my budding marketing career writing about what great sellers do, what works, and what doesn’t. I’ve met some of the top sales execs in the world, written hundreds of articles, started a Magazine, co-authored a book, and as a result, I’ve learned a lot about what great sales processes look like.
Karli Stone
Senior Content Marketing Manager
This is when my boss gave me a new assignment: build a half-automated, half-artificially intelligent system that can do your outbound for you: an “AI SDR.”
If you want to skip straight to how I built the AI SDR, head to chapter three here.
After speaking to experts, testing, trying, experimenting with AI (and a few more margaritas), I did it — and in the pages that follow I’ll show you step-by-step exactly how.
I’ll also show you how to write a good prompt, build prompts for auto-research and content generation, leverage prompts into automated workflows, make your sales organization 3x more effective — and how to do it all in Apollo.
You may be thinking, “Well, that’s a conflict of interest.”
It is and I won’t tell you otherwise. But, the choice my team and I made to showcase AI’s capabilities in Apollo was deliberate — for a few reasons.
- You can’t sell with AI without an AI sales tool. AI doesn’t exist without boundaries and borders, definitions and limits. AI requires a platform and it won’t make you more money if I spend these pages referring to AI in sales as some loose “concept”.
So, I’m applying AI best practices directly to the Apollo product. This will make everything you learn actionable. You’ll walk away with prompts and templates and workflows — and, hopefully, some new ideas — that you can apply immediately. - Apollo is a leader in AI development. In the wake of a $100M Series D round of funding, Apollo has been voraciously investing in AI — built around and within a suite of sales tools that’s made it the most loved sales tool on the market.
It’s more important now than ever to choose software that’s pushing limits, questioning what’s possible, and developing alongside you. - Apollo is free to try. I tried to experiment with a number of heavily-marketed AI sales tools during my research — like Outreach, Clari, Regie.ai, and Artisan. They all required me to talk to their sales team or pay them money to just see the tool, let alone use it.
The perk of teaching you how to sell with AI using Apollo is you, reader, don’t need to pay to play. You can create a free account and apply everything I talk about as you read.
14 minute read
Chapter 1: The State of AI in Sales in 2025
What AI can (and can’t) do — and where humans still win
I was in the 7th grade when the first person I knew got the iPhone. I distinctly remember thinking that it wasn’t that big of a deal, and I wasn’t the only one.
“I remember talking to investors after that first weekend [of the iPhone’s release], and the general sense was that this product, in one investor’s words, was dead on arrival,” said well-known tech analyst Gene Munster.
It only took a few weeks before my friend in Spanish class got one. Another peer got one the following week. Eventually, my Mom came home with the sleek white box and on my 15th birthday, I got one too.
I’m not sure exactly when this new “toy” became an extension of myself (I made the mistake of looking at my phone’s Screen Time in writing this). But, it didn’t take long before I was quite literally thinking in “iOS.”
That’s the thing about revolutions; you often don’t notice when you’re in the middle of one.
And, for you — as business owners and people leaders and commission-earners — the stakes are much higher than middle school peer pressure. Because, we’re far past the “release of the iPhone” stage of AI. Sales teams using AI are seeing a significant edge; those that use AI are 26% more likely to report revenue growth than those that don’t. The once-blurry picture of AI’s potential is coming into focus; the money is following.
26%
more likely to report revenue growth when using AI
“AI is going to be critical to humanity,” says the very same Gene Munster who saw the iPhone wave coming before most.
He had foresight then. And he does now, too.
If you’re reading this guide, you’re also prepping for the AI revolution ahead. But first, you need a clear picture of the landscape.
What is generative AI in sales?
In sales, generative AI is the use of artificial intelligence tools to autonomously create content, insights, and solutions that improve sales-specific processes and outcomes.
The 3 truths about AI in sales today
Truth #1: If it sounds too good to be true — it probably is
Growing up, my siblings and I would stake our claim on communal treats by licking the ones we wanted to save for later. Gross? Definitely. But it proved to be effective at preventing anyone else from snatching our germy cookies before we could.
Tech companies are doing something equally immature with AI.
They hastily embed some version of generative AI models into their product, rush it to market, and slap a big, fat “[Company Name] AI” sticker on it; all for the sake of shouting, “This is ours! Look at us! We’re in the club!”
But, our team ran a survey, and found that half of all sales leaders aren’t satisfied with any of the AI tools on the market — it’s just a whole lot of soggy cookies.
Which puts the pressure on sales leaders to make an AI investment that’s:
- Broadly adoptable and scaleable within their current process
- Offers clear ROI
- And has a measurable impact
Truth #2: AI makes it easier to get pretty good, pretty quickly
A study from a group of scholars at Harvard, MIT, and Wharton flips the entire “Human vs. Robot” argument on its head.
Essentially, it found that the use of generative AI has two major effects on the workforce:
- It improves performance. 90% of participants, irrespective of their baseline proficiency, produced better results when using GPT-4 for creative or product-related tasks.
- The gap between top and lower performers is reduced. A higher share of participants performed at or very close to the average level. AI pulls these averages up across the board.
Generative AI levels the playing field
Baseline task (without GPT 4)
Baseline task (with GPT 4)
Individual performance score
Low performance on baseline task
High performance on baseline task
Gen AI is creating brand new opportunities for human talent.
This has incredible implications for sales — an industry that, historically, has been hampered by big experience gaps and steep learning curves for fledgling SDRs.
“I think there is a lot of value added in what we can do as humans,” one study participant was quoted as saying, “[Now] you need a human to adapt an answer to a business’s context; that process cannot be replaced by AI.”
Truth #3: AI excels in some areas — but not all
In 2025, AI is assisting in life-saving surgeries. It’s reimagining the way we grow our food and tracking your teeth brushing habits — it’s even ”resurrecting” your loved ones with text and voice language models.
The creative applications of AI are endless — beyond sales — but within it, too.
65% of organizations are regularly using gen AI — nearly double the percentage from their previous survey just ten months ago.
Organizations that have adopted AI in at least 1 business function
But are they applying it in the right place?
The same research article out of Harvard summarized its findings like this:
“The job of the leader is to help people use the new technology in the right way, for the right tasks and to continually adjust and adapt in the face of GenAI’s ever-expanding frontier.”
Harvard, MIT, & Warton study participant
What are the “right” sales tasks for Gen AI to handle at its current state? Here’s an overview.
Where AI Excels | Where AI Falls Short |
|---|---|
Customer Segmentation AI can quickly analyze large datasets, identify patterns, and segment customers based on behavior, demographics, or intent. | Adapting to Contextual Business Needs AI struggles to fully adapt responses to specific business nuances, industry jargon, or deeply contextual knowledge that’s often required in natural B2B sales. |
Personalized Research AI can autonomously scrape the web for specific intent and personalization information about prospects and spit back detailed insights that allow SDRs to engage customers with hyper-relevant information. | Interpreting the subtext AI is good at processing direct information but often misses the deeper, nuanced meaning behind what’s implied rather than stated. |
Lead Scoring & Prioritization AI can assess a lead’s likelihood to convert by analyzing past behaviors, content interactions, and other signals, helping sales teams prioritize their efforts. | Complex Deal Structuring AI is good at processing direct information but often misses the deeper, nuanced meaning behind what’s implied rather than stated. |
Man vs. Machine: What's AI's job, and what's yours?
Look closely and you’ll find a common thread.
Segmentation, lead scoring, research, and copywriting; right now, artificial intelligence is ripe for outbound sales.
This shift means we need to rethink where humans add the most value, not with fear — but with curiosity. The focus is moving from brute-force execution to strategy, testing, and orchestration. In short: less doing, more designing.
Here’s an overview of how the balance between man and machine plays out in a modern sales process.
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