8 ways RevOps professionals are using AI and automation

Things move fast in RevOps. Your job is all about deftly coordinating multiple revenue-driving teams and tools—from sales to marketing to customer success—while staying ahead of any obstacles to your company's growth. Not only do you need to react quickly to market and industry changes, but you also have to swiftly steer your team away from potential bottlenecks or roadblocks.

Thankfully, AI and automation tools work just as fast—which means they can shoulder some of the burden and help you do your job with more agility and efficiency. 

We asked eight RevOps professionals about their workflows to learn how they've integrated these tools to boost growth and optimize revenue operations.

How RevOps professionals use AI and automation

Here are eight ways RevOps experts are using AI-powered tools to make their jobs easier. Skip ahead to one that interests you, or read on for the full list of insights.

• Streamline lead capture and follow-up

• Automate the sales feedback loop

• Automate lead scoring and prioritization

• Develop an AI-powered forecasting tool

• Build an AI-based onboarding flow

• Get real-time insights and bottleneck detection

• Get smart insights about prospects from a range of unique data sources

• Automate audits for Google Business Profile

Streamline lead capture and follow-up

AI-driven workflows can simplify and streamline your lead management. For example, Colorado marketing agency Inkyma designed an automated system to manage lead capture and follow-up tasks after networking events and trade shows.

Chief Marketing Strategist Audrey Kerchner explains how it works: "A salesperson uploads a photo of a business card to a shared folder. This triggers a Zapier automation, which uses ChatGPT Vision to extract contact details from the image. The extracted data is then formatted into JSON and seamlessly integrated into the client's CRM, email system, or any system they would like."

Audrey says that the workflow goes further for clients running event-specific campaigns. "Each new contact is tagged with the event name, automatically triggering pre-configured email and text follow-ups tailored to the event. This ensures every lead is nurtured promptly and contextually, increasing the likelihood of conversion."

This workflow delivers measurable results for their clients. "Sales teams typically save five hours per week, previously spent on manual data entry and lead management tasks," Audrey shares. "More importantly, the system helps drive a 20% increase in closed deals by ensuring timely and accurate follow-ups. Because the workflow is built on Zapier, it's highly customizable. We can adapt it to fit the specific systems our clients use, ensuring a seamless integration."

With this solution, Inkyma helps their clients' sales teams operate more efficiently and drive measurable revenue growth by making sure no leads fall through the cracks. Learn more about how to automate your CRM, or try one of these templates to get started automating your lead management workflow for yourself. 

Automate the sales feedback loop

Sales is more of an art than a science—but it's still important to be methodical about learning what works and what doesn't. Otherwise, your team will waste more time in trial and error than necessary. AI tools can help you gather and analyze sales call information quickly, generating actionable insights for improvement in just a few seconds.

Belkins, a Delaware-based B2B lead generation agency, uses Zapier and ChatGPT to automate the sales feedback loop. According to the co-founder and managing partner Michael Maximoff, "We generate the meeting transcript after every call between our sales executive and a prospect. Then, Zapier triggers an automation that sends this transcript to a pre-trained GPT agent knowledgeable about our sales best practices. An agent analyzes the transcript and generates the key insights: what was done well, which sales opportunities were missed, and which areas can be improved. This feedback is then automatically sent to a sales executive via Slack."

But they don't stop there. Michael continues, "Over time, we collect a large dataset of transcripts and sales outcomes. This allows us to find the statistically best sales scripts and eliminate errors. Every business that is sending cold emails, has sales calls, or holds any other form of repetitive communication, should make it a habit to integrate the feedback loops using automation software and AI."

If you're curious about trying this process for yourself, here are a few popular Zap templates to get you started. Or, learn more about how to automate meetings and sales calls for your team.

Automate lead scoring and prioritization

Lead scoring is one of the most important parts of revenue operations, and that's what U.K. marketing agency LiamFallen.com uses AI and automation to optimize. They've been able to streamline lead scoring and prioritize outreach, which has had a positive impact on efficiency and revenue growth.

Owner and technical SEO consultant Liam Fallen shares, "One specific workflow we've set up involves using an AI tool to automatically score incoming leads based on behavior, engagement level, and fit. The AI ranks each lead in real-time, so our sales team knows which prospects are most likely to convert. Once a lead hits a certain score, the system triggers an automated workflow that notifies the appropriate sales rep and generates a tailored email sequence for outreach."

Liam confirms this process has cut down manual sorting and follow-up time, which has helped their team focus energy on high-potential leads while reducing time wasted on cold ones. "The result? Better-targeted efforts, quicker response times, and an overall lift in conversion rates."

Develop an AI-powered forecasting tool

One of the best ways to apply AI tools is to let them process information and give you an actionable summary of the results. 

Eliot Vancil, the CEO of Texas fuel management company Fuel Logic, says their RevOps team has changed how they predict income by adding an AI-powered forecasting tool. "Before this, we had to spend hours collecting and analyzing data by hand, which took time and left room for mistakes," Eliot explains. "With AI looking at past sales trends and real-time market data, it is now nearly 30% more accurate to make predictions. With this level of accuracy, we can quickly adapt to changes and change our pricing plans as needed."

These predictive abilities can be crucial in industries where prices change so quickly. "Changes in the price of fuel earlier this year are a great example," Eliot elaborates. "The AI tool picked up on new demand trends that our team hadn't seen right away, which let us make price changes quickly. So, we saw a 15% rise in quarterly sales just by acting on ideas that we might not have seen otherwise. By automating forecasts, our team can now focus on bigger growth plans instead of doing data work by hand, which makes them more productive and brings in more money."

Build an AI-based onboarding flow

Let's say you have a service that offers a free trial. AI can help you improve conversion and retention rates by understanding, predicting, and responding to customer behaviors. 

Take it from Gev Balyan, the founder of Ucraft, a no-code website builder: "One specific workflow that's had a major impact is our AI-based onboarding flow. When a new user signs up, the AI identifies what features they're most interested in based on initial actions and sends targeted guidance on how to use those features more effectively. For instance, if a user seems focused on building an online store, they receive content on setting up products, payment methods, and store optimization tips."

Gev says the approach has been very successful, not only increasing their conversion from free to paid plans but also helping new users get value out of Ucraft much faster (and ultimately boosting retention). "For any company considering AI for customer engagement, I'd recommend focusing on workflows that align with core user needs. It's efficient, scalable, and has a direct impact on revenue growth."

Get real-time insights and bottleneck detection

One of the most important roles of any operations manager is seeing the big picture clearly enough to spot potential bottlenecks and other barriers to efficiency across your team. AI tools can help you build and maintain real-time analytics dashboards to stay on top of potential issues before they derail your team's productivity.

"At Kognic, our RevOps team has embraced AI and automation to enhance operations and drive revenue growth, especially by leveraging real-time insights and detecting bottlenecks in our sales process," says Daniel Langkilde, the founder of the Swedish software company. "One of the most impactful tools we've integrated is an AI-driven analytics dashboard, which provides us with instant insights into sales performance, customer behavior, and where leads may be dropping off in the funnel. This system automatically alerts our team when it detects bottlenecks, allowing us to intervene before issues escalate."

For example, Daniel says that if a particular stage in the sales cycle starts to slow, the AI identifies the issue and offers suggestions on how to address it, such as recommending additional touchpoints for specific leads. "We've automated our reporting, with daily updates on key performance indicators that track everything from conversion rates to revenue trends. This has reduced manual work and allowed our team to make quicker, data-backed decisions. These integrations have helped us move faster and more strategically, ultimately improving both our efficiency and revenue outcomes. The result has been a noticeable improvement in decision-making speed and overall revenue growth, since we're now able to focus our efforts where they matter most."

Get smart insights about prospects from a range of unique data sources

Manual data collection and analysis is usually a major time suck, but AI has changed that. "Gone are the days of sifting through spreadsheets, scraping the web, cross-checking CRM logs, or manually piecing together insights from disconnected tools," shares Mustafa Saeed, the co-founder and CEO of Luella, a Canada-based software company.

Mustafa explains how this changes things: "Now, we use AI and automation to track when prospects share challenges we can solve on social media, leave negative reviews on competitors' G2 profiles, or repeatedly visit our website. The data is analyzed to uncover patterns, prioritize opportunities, and refine our outreach. This ensures we target the right prospects at the right time with the most relevant messaging. By leveraging unique data sources instead of the same mass-market databases everyone else uses, we unlock insights others miss."

Automate audits for Google Business Profile

Especially if your business has a physical location, it's important to maintain an accurate and optimized Google Business Profile. But conducting regular audits on your profile (not to mention your competitors') can be a herculean task. The good news is that AI tools can do most of the heavy lifting for you. 

For Ramzy Humsi, founder and CEO of Swiss local SEO agency Vortex Ranker, automating Google Business Profile audits and competitor analysis with AI has had a massive impact. "By using AI tools, we're able to pull data on multiple competitors' profiles, such as review counts, keyword frequency, posting activity, and engagement metrics," explains Ramzy. "This allows us to instantly identify what sets top-performing businesses apart, so we can replicate and enhance these tactics for our clients."

So why has this made such a difference? Ramzy says, "Previously, this analysis was time-consuming and limited our ability to serve more clients. Now, with automation, we gather actionable insights in a fraction of the time, enabling us to onboard and optimize profiles for clients faster. By speeding up this part of the process, we've been able to scale our services and increase revenue without sacrificing quality."

Ramzy explains that automation has had a far-reaching impact—beyond revenue operations. "Integrating AI in this way not only improves the accuracy of our recommendations but also frees up our team to focus on strategic work, like client relationship-building and fine-tuning unique optimization strategies. For anyone managing growth in a high-demand environment, automating data-heavy processes like these is a game-changer for increasing productivity and delivering consistent, impactful results."

Improve your operational efficiency with AI and automation

If you've never used AI or automation tools before, it can be intimidating to get started. But you don't have to be a coding or tech expert to start building AI-driven processes into your revenue operations. Zapier lets you set up automated workflows across thousands of apps, so you can connect your business-critical tools to each other and build AI right into the process. In addition to these automated workflows called Zaps, the Zapier automation platform includes:

• Chatbots: Create custom chatbots to answer customer questions. 

• Central: Build your own AI assistants for any task.

• Interfaces: Create custom forms, client portals, and internal tools that integrate with your automated workflows.

• Tables: Store, organize, and act on all the data in your workflows.

To build AI and automation into your RevOps processes, start by deciding what could help your team improve (and scale) the most. What kinds of insights are you missing, and what repetitive actions would be better suited to an automated tool so that your team's time is freed up for more impactful work? From there, it's just a matter of choosing the right tool and taking that first step on your automation journey.

Related reading:

• RevOps best practices

• How Zapier's RevOps team automates lead management

• The best AI sales assistant software

• How to streamline sales with AI and automation 

• A guide to using AI in your marketing strategy