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Using dedicated AI for sales teams, sales leaders are improving forecasts, optimizing territory and quota plans, and empowering their reps.
For sales leaders, adapting quickly to changing conditions and using data to aid decision-making are nothing new. But with the rapidly growing availability of AI tools, sales leaders are now in a position to adapt even quicker and make smarter decisions even faster.
Those who adopt sales performance AI will see improved results for their teams and organizations. Those who don’t? They’re likely to get left behind.
According to Gartner, by 2027, 95% of seller research workflows will begin with AI, up from less than 20% in 2024. This research also suggests that the biggest benefits will be felt by sales leaders who can use AI for productivity gains today, rather than waiting for tools that can more directly impact revenue growth later. Actual impacts will depend on how sales leaders activate AI insights right now.
So, how is AI transforming sales performance management? In this guide, we discuss the evolution from traditional SPM processes to AI-driven automation. We cover how AI tools for sales teams can improve forecasting, optimize territories and quotas, and empower sales professionals to deliver tangible results across their organizations.
What is sales performance management (SPM)?
Sales Performance Management (SPM) is a set of analytical functions and practical workflows meant to streamline operational efficiency and optimize the sales cycle.
SPM includes components such as sales territory planning and management, account segmentation, sales quota planning, sales capacity planning, incentive compensation planning, sales forecasting, and pipeline management. Each of these components helps provide a well-rounded sales planning strategy with proven, tried-and-tested methods combined with smart innovations.
The success of a sales-led company is directly proportional to the efficiency and empowerment of its sales team. Essentially, SPM helps ensure every member of the sales team is equipped with the right resources and motivation to not just achieve their goals, but quickly meet their customers’ needs and maximize potential revenue.
Why traditional SPM can fall short
Agile companies with sales organizations, no matter the industry, should be looking to harness the power of SPM to increase operational efficiency and create more productive sales teams. Done right, SPM improves accuracy in forecasting and reporting and helps sales leaders better align their goals with the organization overall.
While the benefits of SPM are clear, many of the processes used in SPM today are broken. Without data-driven insights, sales teams waste time fixing planning issues instead of pursuing strategic goals.
Sales forecasts and models are often rigid, as testing out multiple scenarios requires time and resources that sales teams don’t have. Additionally, making changes is risky, and it can be easier to rely on past performance and biased assumptions – despite potentially sacrificing growth and revenue.
Even when it’s obvious that changes need to be made, a lack of visibility and misalignment among cross-functional teams can make those changes difficult to implement quickly, leading to missed opportunities, avoidable errors, and costly back-tracking.
Despite its flaws, SPM is still seen as a vital tool for companies looking to meet and exceed revenue goals or build highly motivated and productive sales teams. Optimizing SPM processes with sales performance AI is an opportunity for sales leaders to create a larger strategic advantage for their organizations.
What is AI for sales teams?
Artificial intelligence (AI) is defined as technology that enables computers to mimic and carry out human capabilities, allowing programs to automate manual tasks and execute them quickly at scale. But what does that mean for sales teams and SPM?
Unlike traditional SPM methods that involve spreadsheets, static data, and manual analysis, SPM AI tools for sales teams can leverage real-time data, learn from emerging trends and patterns, and adapt to findings automatically.
The result? More accurate sales and revenue forecasts, adaptable territory and quota planning, and faster decisions that get teams aligned and products to market quickly.
AI technologies for SPM
While there are several different kinds of AI technology, two are particularly useful for sales teams: machine learning (ML) and agentic AI.
ML is the most widely used form of AI in business, allowing systems to learn from data inputs, identify patterns, and adapt to changes. For sales teams, ML is especially valuable for forecasting and trend analysis. It can also model how variable inputs affect sales goals and revenue outcomes.
Not yet as widely adopted as ML, agentic AI represents the next big leap in AI technology. Agentic AI systems leverage autonomous agents that can reason, plan, and execute tasks independently with minimal human intervention.
For instance, sales teams could ask an AI agent to model how winning various new accounts would impact quarterly revenue. They could also have AI simulate a top performer's approach to territory planning. The agent wouldn't just offer its analysis – it would provide specific recommendations that teams could implement immediately.
At Pigment, we’re developing AI agents that can automate the SPM process, transforming how sales teams set territories and quotas, forecast sales, and plan for sales capacity. And they’re already showing promise when it comes to elevating productivity and effectiveness for sales and revenue teams.
Examples of AI in SPM
Sales teams face mounting pressure to do more with less while staying aligned across departments. With SPM, they can adapt strategies, quotas, and territories on demand. AI amplifies these benefits, providing real-time data for daily decisions and long-term projections for strategic planning.
Let’s look at some specific use cases:
Optimizing territory coverage
Without the help of AI, sales leaders waste time manually updating plans instead of driving revenue growth. The problem is that their territories rely on past performance and biased assumptions rather than real revenue potential. This manual process lacks flexibility, and making changes is often slow and difficult..
However, with AI tools, sales teams can combine scenario modeling, interactive mapping, and performance and forecast insights to carve out more strategic territories, getting as granular as needed (including by MSAs or zip codes). Using data-driven, interactive maps, teams can maximize revenue coverage, no matter if the team defines territories based on accounts, regions, or other custom structures. Teams can test multiple scenarios, compare updates, and make instant adjustments, working smarter and faster to optimize territory design.
Using AI-powered sales territory optimization, sales leaders can also ensure fair opportunity distribution, prevent territory overlap, and set realistic targets for their sales reps. This helps maximize efficiency, drive growth, and keep teams at peak motivation.
Quota planning and allocation
With AI, sales leaders can set realistic quotas that drive performance, not frustration. By analyzing market potential, historical data, and sales trends, machine learning-driven sales quota planning can recommend fair, achievable quotas that align with business goals. Leaders can use sales performance AI to adapt plans easily, testing out multiple scenarios instantly to see how changes affect revenue and team structure before implementing them.
Using AI-driven insights, sales teams can fine-tune incentive structures backed by real-time data. While these insights can be part of the broader sales planning process, they can also facilitate conversations around account reassignment and give insights to the entire sales team to ensure everyone has a fair shot at meeting their goals. AI tools for sales teams can even help new hires hit the ground running by testing assignments for people not yet on the team.
AI also helps sales teams stay agile as markets shift. With real-time data and flexible modeling, leaders can adjust quotas mid-quarter to match changing demand. They can test scenarios instantly – if a competitor exits the market or a new opportunity emerges, teams can pivot their strategies within hours instead of weeks.
Want to dive deeper into practical strategies for setting fair, achievable quotas? Read the 3 steps to set effective sales quotas
Sales forecasting
Sales planning often fails due to poor visibility into a sales team’s performance, overreliance on intuition-based assumptions, and misalignment between sales targets and revenue objectives.
Using AI for sales forecasting, sales teams can easily create reports and scenarios on customizable dashboards loaded instantly and directly from source systems. Once the data is imported, leaders can slice and dice it as needed, bringing in information at various levels of detail. They can also look at “what ifs” and create multiple scenarios based on performance by stage, region, industry, deal type, or any other criteria and adjust sales strategy accordingly in real-time.
Sales and business planning AI empowers leadership to create reliable forecasts and make informed decisions with up-to-date business data by bringing in relevant cross-functional teams at the right time. Sales leaders can identify the deals that matter most and focus on opportunities with real-time visibility into key accounts and performance.
A precise revenue forecast is key to optimizing sales strategies and achieving overall business growth. With accurate sales projections, organizations can better allocate resources, set realistic revenue targets, and make data-driven decisions.
Sales and GTM capacity planning
Effective sales capacity planning is essential for organizational success. Still, a lack of reliable data can result in poor resource allocation and ineffective workforce utilization, leading to assumption-driven plans and a lack of alignment amongst cross-functional teams.
AI can help sales teams get a clear view of their capacity and assign resources exactly where they are required. By looking at financial targets and forecasting potential, AI can also help sales leaders find gaps and make plans to close them, helping teams manage assumptions and adjust expectations as needed.
Sales leaders can connect sales performance AI tools to their capacity model in real time, so they can leverage information like up-to-date financial and HR data in conversations about hiring plans and capacity planning.
Agentic AI for sales planning can provide insights into sales performance, resource utilization, and capacity metrics, helping leaders monitor progress and make informed adjustments. With a simple request, AI tests multiple scenarios to help teams prepare for any outcome. It automatically factors in market demand, performance data, and operational limits to optimize resource allocation.
Implementing AI in your SPM strategy
AI tools like agentic AI for sales teams can be transformative for SPM, and implementing them doesn’t require a seismic shift. That means that leaner, more agile teams can get started with AI quickly, not just larger organizations with ample resources. A few simple steps can make all the difference:
1. Start with data
AI works best when you bring your data together in one place. Focus on consolidating data from across your organization, including sales, finance, and supply chain data, in the same system.
The key is understanding which data dimensions drive your business decisions. Are you focused on product profitability? Client profitability? Both? Identify these essential elements and make them readily available.
While it's important to have clean data, don't let perfection get in the way of starting. Even for organizations with imperfect datasets, the right AI tools can help reveal issues and guide cleanup in your source systems.
2. Choose an AI tool that integrates
To make the process as seamless as possible, look for AI tools that integrate into the systems you’re already using. Consider AI-powered platforms like Pigment that connect smoothly with various data sources and business applications, such as your CRM system, ERP software, and financial databases.
The best AI tools for your sales team will provide a comprehensive, real-time view of your performance, backed by up-to-date, real-time information. That means you can spend less time collecting and entering data and enable better decision-making right away.
3. Take security seriously
Any AI tool you work with should value your data and its security as much as you do. Pigment, for example, uses advanced encryption, customizable access controls, and regular audits to protect your data. Our platform complies with top industry standards and data protection regulations, ensuring that your sensitive information is handled with the highest level of care.
4. Give your team support
AI isn’t just for data scientists anymore. Employing it successfully depends on cross-functional collaboration across finance, operations, IT, and beyond. Invest in building skills and tech literacy across your company. You can look for tools that offer support, like Pigment, and include a range of training, customer service, and online resources. This will ensure your sales team can fully leverage AI’s capabilities to improve your strategic planning.
5. Test it out
Start small with a pilot in one focused use case – say, territory mapping. Once you and your team see how seamless the process becomes with AI, it will be even easier to expand it to other areas of your SPM process and drive adoption across your team.
Key takeaways and next steps
Sales teams aren’t just using AI to plan; they’re using AI to make better decisions and execute smarter sales strategies. To recap:
- AI technologies like machine learning and agentic AI allow sales leaders to leverage real-time data, learn from trends and patterns, and adapt their approach automatically.
- AI can help sales teams optimize territory coverage and quota allocation, better predict sales performance and enable more accurate revenue forecasts, and provide data-backed insights to ensure team members meet goals.
- Transformative AI tools can be implemented quickly and easily, even by lean teams, by finding the right tool that works with your existing systems and offers comprehensive support.
Transform your Sales Performance Management with Pigment
Pigment provides real-time data, AI-driven insights, and flexible modeling to help sales teams optimize SPM and adapt quickly.
Learn more about Pigment’s industry-leading, AI-powered SPM solution for sales and revenue teams – or register for a personalized demo to see what our platform can do for your business.
Don’t miss our webinar on AI-powered Sales Territory and Quota Planning. Discover how leading sales teams are using Pigment to boost productivity, improve accuracy, and hit revenue goals faster. Register today!
