How to increase sales: The AI-first blueprint for sustainable sales growth

No business day is ever over without the looming question of “How to increase sales”. However, with GenAI taking over every aspect of business management, sales teams are now exploring how this new technology can help them generate more leads, close more deals, and boost revenue. 

Improving sales numbers is a daily challenge for every business competing in crowded markets, juggling inconsistent sales processes across locations, and trying to connect with customers across dozens of fragmented touchpoints.

The problem? Traditional tactics no longer keep up. Customers expect instant replies, personalized experiences, and unified interactions whether they’re calling, chatting, scrolling on social media, or reading reviews. And sales teams? They’re overwhelmed, reacting instead of strategizing.

Businesses are using AI to increase sales:
Gartner research shows that by 2027, 95% of seller research workflows will begin with AI, up from less than 20% in 2024
Zoominfo research shows teams using AI are more productive (47%), have shorter deal cycles (78%), and have improved win rates (67%). 

AI is no longer an option, but your key to winning deals. 

Here’s how you can break the cycle and empower your sales team: Purpose-built AI tools that streamline your entire sales engine, from local reputation and listings to social media, insights, and conversion.

In this blog, you’ll learn how to increase sales using AI faster, smarter, and at scale.

Bottom Line Up Front 
Your next sales breakthrough won’t come from working harder; it’ll come from working smarter. With AI handling repetitive tasks, surfacing insights, and engaging leads in real-time, your team can focus on what matters: converting more customers. Let’s break down the AI blueprint that actually moves the needle.

Why your current sales strategy might be holding you back

For many multi-location businesses, the sales playbook hasn’t evolved fast enough to match modern buyer behavior. While teams still rely on fragmented systems, legacy CRMs, and delayed follow-ups, customer expectations have undergone a dramatic shift. They want speed, personalization, and consistency across every location, channel, and conversation.

Let’s break down the gaps in outdated sales strategies—and how AI closes them with precision.

The gap: Reps waste time on unqualified leads

Sales teams spend hours sifting through cold lists or manually prioritizing follow-ups, often without clear indicators of lead quality. This results in missed opportunities and slower pipeline movement.

AI solution: Predictive lead scoring models, such as those built into Birdeye’s Insights AI, identify high-intent potential customers based on their behavior, past interactions, and review signals. This means reps can focus on leads that are more likely to convert, improving the efficiency of your sales team and shortening the sales cycle.

The gap: Inconsistent messaging across locations

When each location writes its own emails, social captions, or review responses, the brand voice gets diluted, confusing the target audience and hurting conversions.

AI solution: Birdeye’s BrandAI ensures messaging stays consistent across all your communication platforms. From templated campaigns to automated captions tailored to local context, you can centralize and scale communications while staying on-brand.

The gap: No real-time engagement on websites

Customers visit your site, browse a service page, and leave without ever speaking to someone. That’s a lost sale.

AI solution: Birdeye’s Chatbot and Messaging AI helps engage website visitors instantly, answering questions, booking appointments, and collecting lead data 24/7. This not only boosts online sales but also ensures that every prospect receives exceptional customer service, even outside of business hours.

The gap: Customer feedback gets buried in spreadsheets

Manual review tracking often reveals valuable insights into customer satisfaction and service gaps that are ignored or worse, discovered too late.

AI solution: Birdeye Reviews and Insights AI analyzes thousands of reviews and surveys across locations, surfacing trends by keyword, emotion, and urgency. Sales and marketing leaders get a clear, real-time view of what influences buying decisions.

The gap: No visibility into competitors’ moves

You’re optimizing your sales strategy, but are you keeping up with competitors in your area? This is where most businesses drop the ball. Salesforce study shows that over 57% of sales teams agree competition is actively increasing and becoming challenging to manage since 2024. 

AI solution: Birdeye Competitors AI monitors local rivals’ reviews, ratings, and listing performance so you can spot where you’re falling behind or where your value proposition gives you the edge. It’s like market research on autopilot.

The gap: Teams work reactively instead of proactively

Without AI, your sales team is often stuck in a reactive loop: chasing leads, fixing errors, and responding too late to trends.

AI solution: With Birdeye’s unified platform, insights flow directly into your sales ops, from review sentiment to listing performance, enabling data-driven decisions that grow sales revenue and improve the entire customer journey.

These challenges are inefficiencies that become sales killers. But we’ll show you how to increase sales using AI strategies that fill these gaps across every touchpoint.

How to improve your sales strategy with AI tools starting this quarter

Improving your sales strategy doesn’t always require a complete overhaul. With AI, you can make targeted, high-impact adjustments that align with your target audience, optimize your sales funnel, and increase both sales volume and customer satisfaction, without overloading your team.

Here are four ways to build a more innovative, more adaptive strategy right now.

Conduct market research to define your buyer persona

Without understanding your target customers, your outreach will miss the mark. AI tools can analyze review data, chat conversations, and competitor insights to surface patterns in demographics, behaviors, and preferences.

Accurate buyer persona profiles enable you to personalize offers, tailor messaging, and direct your team’s efforts where they matter most.

Pro tip: Use Birdeye’s Insights and Competitors AI to extract key terms, emotional drivers, and frequently asked questions by location or service type.

Craft a strong value proposition tailored to your market

A vague or generic pitch won’t convert, especially when potential customers are comparing options online. Your value proposition must clearly answer: “Why should I choose you?”

Businesses that articulate what makes them unique see better engagement, stronger trust, and increased sales across all locations.

Pro tip: Refine your messaging using AI tools that analyze top-performing review keywords and competitor gaps. Highlight strengths like “fast turnaround,” “trusted service,” or “exceptional customer service” in listings, social content, and email outreach.

Use customer data to predict behavior and personalize outreach

AI tools turn your customer data into strategic insights, helping you predict customer behavior, forecast drop-off risks, and tailor follow-ups for each lead segment.

Personalized outreach drives higher conversions and increases the likelihood of repeat purchases and referrals. It also helps build stronger, longer-lasting customer relationships.

Pro tip: Use AI-generated lead scores and engagement triggers to launch automated nurture campaigns for existing customers, high-intent prospects, or re-engagement opportunities.

Identify your best marketing channel and double down

Not all platforms work equally well across regions or audiences. AI tools help pinpoint which marketing channels, such as Google, Instagram, Facebook, email, or SMS, deliver the highest ROI, based on location, service line, and customer type.

Allocating your resources to high-performing channels increases efficiency and drives faster sales growth.

Pro tip: Track conversions from each channel using Birdeye’s Listings, Social, and Messaging data. Optimize underperforming campaigns or shift budget to top-performing locations or audiences.

How to increase sales with AI: 13 strategies that work across every touchpoint

From attracting new customers through optimized listings to converting potential customers via real-time chat, purpose-built AI tools help sales teams work smarter at every stage of the customer journey. 

In this section, we’ll explore 13 actionable strategies that show how to increase sales using AI, from lead generation to reputation management, social media, competitor benchmarking, and more. Each strategy is designed to streamline operations, drive repeat purchases, and provide better insights and sales growth across all your locations.

1. Attract new customers with optimized business listings

One of the fastest ways to increase sales is to ensure your business is discoverable in local searches. However, inconsistent or outdated listings across directories can reduce visibility and confuse potential customers.

How can AI help?
Birdeye Listings automatically syncs accurate business information like hours, services, and location-specific offerings across 150+ platforms. It also optimizes each listing with AI-generated descriptions, categories, and photos to enhance local SEO and increase online sales.

Why it works: When your listings are optimized with keywords, updated images, and verified information, you show up more often in “near me” searches. This builds trust with new customers and increases foot traffic and online conversions, especially important for businesses with multiple branches.

Pro tip: Track performance by location using built-in sales analytics to identify which markets are contributing the most to your sales volume and adjust your marketing strategies accordingly.

2. Convert potential customers faster with AI chatbots and instant messaging

When customers visit your website, they’re often browsing with a purpose. But if they don’t find answers quickly, they’ll bounce, and that means lost revenue.

How can AI help?

Birdeye Chatbot and Messaging engage visitors in real time, answer common questions, book appointments, and qualify leads automatically—24/7. These tools ensure you’re meeting customer expectations for speed while delivering good customer service across every interaction.

Why it works: Businesses that use AI chatbots see higher conversion rates because they reduce friction in the sales funnel. Whether someone is looking to schedule a service, compare locations, or ask about pricing, they get the help they need instantly.

Pro tip: Customize your chatbot responses by location or service type to align with your target market, and integrate FAQs that address the top concerns identified in your customer feedback.

3. Drive social proof through automated review generation

Nearly 90% of potential customers read reviews before making a purchasing decision, and existing customers who leave positive reviews can have a direct impact on your bottom line.

How can AI help?

Birdeye Reviews uses automated review requests and GenAI-based response suggestions to streamline the entire feedback loop. You can request reviews via SMS, email, or WhatsApp after a purchase or appointment, and respond at scale with tone-aligned replies.

Why it works: More reviews = more trust. Consistently generating new, high-quality reviews helps increase your visibility on platforms like Google and Facebook. This boosts your sales performance and encourages repeat business from satisfied customers.

Pro tip: Use insights from customer feedback to adjust your sales scripts, highlight positive experiences in your marketing messages, and reinforce your value proposition across channels.

“The simple message that asks the client for a review, the quick customer registration when sending them a review, the auto publishing feature to the company’s social platforms and the interactions module with all it brings the company in staying in touch, texting, webchat etc. It’s a great platform overall.”

Mohamed Abdalla, West Van Irrigation & Landscape Lighting

4. Monitor and improve customer satisfaction using feedback analytics

Understanding how your customer base feels about your product or service is essential to long-term sales success, but manually analyzing reviews and survey responses across multiple locations is inefficient and reactive.

How can AI help?

Birdeye Insights utilizes natural language processing to analyze sentiment, detect customer behavior patterns, and identify emerging pain points in real-time. It flags negative experiences, trending issues, and top-performing locations based on actual customer interactions.

Why it works: This allows businesses to move from guesswork to action. By identifying what drives customer satisfaction or frustration, sales leaders can intervene quickly, optimize their sales process, retrain their teams, or adjust their offerings to better align with customer needs.

Pro tip: Set up alerts for specific keywords related to your value proposition, and use these insights to guide messaging across email, social, and chat.

5. Strengthen reputation management to win over potential and existing customers

Your online reputation is often your first impression, and it directly impacts how many new customers walk through your door. Poor or unaddressed reviews can damage trust and discourage repeat purchases.

How can AI help?

Birdeye’s reputation management tools combine review generation, AI-assisted responses, and sentiment reporting so that every review—positive or negative—is acknowledged in a timely, personalized way. This promotes excellent customer service at scale.

Why it works: Businesses that actively manage their reviews and reputation see an increase in conversions, brand trust, and referrals. They also retain more loyal customers by showing they care about honest feedback.

Pro tip: Use recurring referral programs to encourage satisfied customers to leave reviews and recommend your business. This not only improves sales growth but also creates a community of brand advocates.

6. Increase brand awareness through multi-location social media management

Managing social media platforms across 5, 50, or 500 locations is tough. Content gets lost, performance isn’t tracked, and your target audience receives inconsistent messaging.

How can AI help?

Birdeye Social automates content creation, scheduling, and reporting for all your business locations. It even recommends high-performing hashtags, optimal posting times, and ready-to-use captions, customized by region, service line, or buyer stage.

Why it works: AI ensures that your content speaks directly to local audiences while maintaining brand consistency. This builds engagement, enhances your online sales funnel, and boosts conversions through real-time interaction.

Pro tip: Share snippets of reviews, before/after visuals, and location-based offers to connect emotionally and boost your social media visibility.

7. Benchmark performance using competitor analysis

If you’re not watching your competitors, you’re flying blind. Many businesses focus solely on their own KPIs without understanding how competing brands are performing in the same geography or category.

AI solution: Birdeye Competitors gives you a clear edge by tracking local competitors’ reviews, ratings, listing accuracy, and sentiment trends. It identifies what’s driving their success or failure so you can adapt your sales strategy in real-time.

Why it works: When you know what’s working for others in your market—like service offerings, promotions, or messaging, you can fine-tune your marketing strategies and elevate your own value proposition.

Actionable tip: Set location-level benchmarks for review volume, average ratings, and keywords. This enables your sales team to uncover gaps and act quickly to outpace nearby rivals.

8. Build a stronger customer base through referral programs

Referral traffic often leads to the most qualified leads—but many businesses miss out by not having a structured program in place. Word-of-mouth doesn’t scale on its own.

How can AI help?

Automate your referral campaigns through personalized email or SMS outreach using review and loyalty data from Birdeye. Reward existing customers who promote your brand and bring in new customers with discounts, credits, or VIP access.

Why it works: Referred leads convert 30% faster and have a 37% higher retention rate. When referral programs are connected to customer feedback, reviews, and loyalty triggers, they create a continuous flywheel of growth.

Pro tip: Tie referral campaigns to review generation. For example, offer a reward when customers leave feedback and share a referral link, boosting both your sales funnel and repeat business.

9. Optimize your sales process with AI-led insights

Too many decisions in sales are based on guesswork—what worked last quarter, what a manager thinks, or what a single customer said. This slows sales performance and introduces bias.

How can AI help?

Birdeye’s dashboard combines real-time sales data, customer sentiment, and behavioral trends across listings, reviews, and messages. It helps you identify top-performing channels, measure sales cycle efficiency, and make informed adjustments.

Why it works: When you use AI to analyze every interaction, from chats to reviews to missed calls, you unlock a clearer understanding of what drives revenue. These insights allow your sales team to spend less time on admin work and more time converting leads.

Pro tip: Use location-level filters to understand which markets are driving the most conversions and replicate winning playbooks across other regions to increase sales volume.

10. Personalize every customer interaction using first-party data

Generic follow-ups, templated emails, and static campaigns are no longer effective. To increase sales, businesses must personalize experiences across every channel—from listings to messaging and social.

How can AI help?

Birdeye’s unified platform aggregates first-party customer data from reviews, surveys, web chats, and social engagement. GenAI tools use this data to help businesses deliver customized follow-ups, offers, and content based on past interactions and behavior.

Why it works: Personalized communication increases relevance, trust, and response rates. Whether it’s a review response that reflects the customer’s history or an email that mirrors their purchase intent, personal touches drive more conversions and higher customer loyalty.

Pro tip: Segment your existing customer base by behavior or location, and use AI to deliver dynamic review replies, thank-you messages, and product/service recommendations that increase repeat purchases and lifetime value.

11. Customer relationship management with AI

Strong customer relationship management (CRM) is the backbone of sustainable sales—but for multi-location businesses, managing relationships at scale can be overwhelming. Generic CRMs often fail to surface the real-time insights your sales team needs to build trust and close deals.

How can AI help?

Birdeye integrates reviews, listings, chats, and feedback into a single, intelligent layer, enabling your team to track conversations, understand buyer sentiment, and follow up with relevance. AI pulls in personalized data points to help reps nurture existing customers and win over potential customers with context-aware communication.

Why it works: Real-time insights help your team move faster and respond smarter, reducing drop-off and increasing conversion. The result? Higher retention, stronger loyalty, and a healthier customer base.

Pro tip: Use AI-based relationship signals, like review sentiment shifts or repeat inquiries to prioritize outreach and deliver more meaningful experiences.

12. Automation of routine tasks with AI agents

Sales reps lose hours each week on admin work—logging data, responding to low-value queries, and switching between tools. These distractions slow down the sales process and lead to missed opportunities.

How can AI help?

Birdeye’s suite of GenAI agents automates everything from review responses and appointment confirmations to social post scheduling and competitor alerts. This gives your sales professionals more time to engage high-intent leads and drive revenue.

Why it works: Automation isn’t just about saving time, it’s about reallocating time to what matters: personalized selling, trust-building, and strategic outreach. This shift improves sales performance and shortens the sales cycle.

Pro tip: Identify your team’s top 3 repetitive workflows, then use Birdeye AI tools to automate them within a week and measure the time saved.

13. Map your sales funnel with AI

A well-structured sales funnel is crucial for converting potential customers into loyal buyers—but most businesses struggle to manage it effectively across multiple locations and channels. AI brings clarity and control by optimizing each stage of the funnel:

• In the Awareness stage, tools like Listings and Social increase visibility and help you reach your target audience through localized content and accurate directory presence.
• During the Interest stage, Reviews and social proof build trust by showcasing feedback from satisfied customers and reinforcing your value proposition.
• At the Consideration stage, Chatbot and Messaging convert visitors through real-time engagement and automated follow-ups.
• In the Decision phase, Insights empower your sales team with data-driven personalization that accelerates conversion.
• Finally, at Loyalty, automation tools nurture existing customers, encourage repeat purchases, and support referral programs, creating a flywheel of long-term growth.

AI seamlessly connects these stages, helping businesses increase sales, reduce friction, and enhance the overall customer experience across every touchpoint.

Building a future-ready sales team with AI assistance: How to ensure AI adoption 

Even the best sales strategy falls short without a high-performing team to execute it. But today’s sales team members are overwhelmed—juggling too many platforms, responding manually, and missing key insights buried in disconnected systems. That’s where AI comes in, not to replace people, but to empower them.

Here’s how AI helps transform your sales team into a modern, data-driven growth engine across every location.

Empower sales professionals with real-time sales intelligence

AI tools like Birdeye Insights provide your team with instant access to key data, such as review sentiment, competitor shifts, and engagement trends, so they can prioritize leads, tailor messaging, and make smarter decisions on the fly.

Why it matters: Sales reps no longer waste time guessing what potential customers want. With AI, they know what to say, when to follow up, and how to handle objections, all backed by real-time insights.

Actionable tip: Integrate review insights and listing performance directly into your sales dashboard to support faster, more informed conversations.

Reduce manual workload so your sales team can focus on selling

Sales reps often waste hours on low-value tasks like updating CRMs, handling FAQs, or chasing unqualified leads, which hurts productivity and increases burnout. By using tools like Birdeye Chatbot, Messaging, and automated review management, businesses can offload these repetitive tasks and give reps more time for meaningful conversations and relationship building. 

Why it matters: Less admin means more conversions. AI lets your team spend time where it matters most: nurturing the right prospects, boosting sales revenue, and closing more deals.

Use AI-driven sales coaching to improve performance

Top sales reps have winning strategies, but they’re rarely documented or scalable. AI platforms like Birdeye help leaders uncover trends, win/loss patterns, and location-level engagement to build playbooks that boost consistency and performance. By analyzing review themes, chat sentiment, and location data, managers can also create tailored training for every sales rep.

Why it matters: AI creates a feedback loop that’s faster than traditional coaching. Reps learn what works in real time—and new hires ramp up faster.

Align marketing strategies with AI-powered sales data

When sales and marketing work in silos, it creates messaging gaps and wasted spend. AI solves this by giving both teams a shared source of truth. Birdeye unifies data from listings, reviews, social, and messaging, helping sales see which marketing campaigns drive results locally. Weekly reviews of AI-driven insights keep both teams aligned and focused on improving revenue.

Why it matters: Shared intelligence improves campaign alignment, targeting accuracy, and lead conversion. It also helps your teams adapt content and tone to match each target market.

Conclusion 

In a market defined by rising competition, shifting buyer expectations, and multi-touch customer journeys, knowing how to increase sales means knowing how to adapt. Traditional strategies alone won’t cut it. Sales success now depends on how quickly and intelligently your business can respond, across every location, channel, and stage of the sales funnel.

AI isn’t just a competitive advantage, it’s a catalyst for sustained sales growth. From automating follow-ups to unlocking insights from reviews and streamlining team workflows, AI transforms sales from reactive to predictive, from siloed to unified.

The businesses that win tomorrow are the ones building smarter systems today. Make this the quarter you stop guessing and start selling with precision.

FAQs on how to increase sales with AI

Increase sales with the only AI platform built for hyperlocal growth

Want more leads, higher conversions, and consistent revenue across locations? Birdeye helps you increase sales by turning every customer interaction into a growth opportunity—powered by AI.

Here’s how:

• Listings: Get discovered by more customers with AI-optimized business listings across 150+ directories.
• Reviews: Automate review generation and responses to build trust and convert faster.
• Messaging & Chatbot: Engage leads in real time and never miss a sale—even after hours.
• Social: Drive brand awareness and engagement with GenAI-powered content across all your locations.
• Insights: Uncover what customers love (and what they don’t) to improve every touchpoint.
• Competitors: Stay ahead of nearby rivals with real-time review, rating, and keyword benchmarking.

If you’re ready to streamline your sales engine and close more deals at scale, it’s time to make your next move.

Book a demo and see how Birdeye increases sales for over 150,000 businesses, one location at a time.