Artificial Intelligence in Sales: AI-Powered Solutions for Wholesalers & Distributors
Martin, sales manager at a wholesale firm, opens his laptop on a Monday morning to find 47 unread emails, three client calls to prepare for, and a spreadsheet that’s somehow both broken and essential. A few minutes into the morning, he’s already behind.
Sound familiar? For most sales teams in wholesale and distribution, the constant juggling of data, deals, and client communication is a regular thing.
But that’s starting to change. AI is quietly slipping into sales workflows and saving teams time, offering valuable insights based on data, and minimising administrative burden. It’s helping reps like Martin focus on moving the needle through sales.
If you’re wondering how exactly AI improves sales processes, this guide is for you.
How AI Improves Daily Sales Workflows
Time is a cherished commodity for sales reps. That’s exactly what AI offers your team—it saves them time so they can focus on selling. Let’s talk about how AI does that.
Accessing the Right Data Quickly
Try pulling a client’s order history from three different systems while they’re waiting on the phone. You’ll see how painful those few minutes are.
Fortunately, AI can help you skip those awkward moments. It can gather the right customer, order, and product data from across your CRM, ERP, inventory, and other systems, offering you a complete context for the conversation you’re about to have.
AI can also help you with data on the backend. For example, think about the last time you were rummaging through a spreadsheet looking for information. Now, imagine asking an AI assistant your question and getting an accurate, detailed answer.
See how little effort it takes and how it speeds up the process?
Summarising Conversations
Sales teams spend hours looking for information in long email threads, meeting notes, and call transcripts. But yours doesn’t have to if you use AI.
AI can take those endless walls of text and summarise them into something actually readable. Imagine opening your CRM and seeing a neat recap of all your communication with a client, including tone and sentiment.
A distributor could, for example, get a one-paragraph summary before their next call. The summary might say, “Client mentioned price sensitivity and seemed positive about the new product range.”
Drafting Emails
AI helps get through emails faster. Your team can use AI to draft emails and proposals tailored to a specific client or situation.
Suppose you’ve got a warehouse client who regularly reorders cleaning supplies. AI could suggest a personalised email along the lines of, “Your stock of disinfectant is running low. Shall I add a reorder to your next shipment?”
Using AI to draft emails speeds up the process and ensures consistent communication.
Prioritising Key Actions
If you work in sales, you know how easy it is to lose track of what’s urgent, especially when you’re dealing with dozens of clients and multiple priorities. AI platforms can help organise your tasks by priority by analysing recent interactions, order patterns, and more.
For example, it might bring to your attention that “Smith and Co. are likely to reorder this week. Follow up today.” That’s one less thing you have to remember and one more chance to get that order before it slips away.
Real-World Use Cases for AI in Wholesale & Distribution Sales
Everyone’s talking about AI, but those conversations often lack industry-specific context. Let’s look at some use cases of AI specifically for wholesale and distribution businesses to understand how AI can add value to your workflows.
Identifying Upsell Opportunities
Sales reps typically review customer purchase histories to find upsell opportunities. It’s a tedious, repetitive process, but fortunately, you can automate it with AI.
AI can analyse order data for all SKUs and accounts and recommend products related to a customer’s previous purchases.
Suppose you’re a B2B food distributor. Your sales team spends hours manually going through purchase histories before suggesting add-ons.
You decide to use AI. Now, your team channels all that effort into building relationships, while AI continues to offer suggestions like “Customer X’s purchase order is missing an item that 80% of similar clients buy.”
Preparing Sales Reps Before Client Calls
A typical B2B customer journey encompasses multiple email threads, product queries, and pricing discussions. Every time you get in touch with a prospect, you may need to review previous interactions for context. But there’s a better way.
Instead of wasting time manually going through conversations, you can ask AI to summarise a conversation or ask questions about the transcript.
So, if a sales rep at a plumbing supplies wholesaler asks AI to summarise a customer conversation, the output might be something along the lines of, “Client asked for a copper fittings quote, delayed payment last month, keen on a bulk discount.”
This allows the rep to initiate the next conversation with enough context and be prepared with a solution for the customer.
Sending Smarter Follow-Ups
Have you questioned your decision to follow up with a client? It’s often because you don’t want to seem pushy. Like it or not, follow-ups are an inseparable part of sales. But if you’re not too excited about them, you can always let AI draft and send follow-up emails automatically.
If you’re a distributor, for example, your AI platform may generate an email that looks something like this:
“Hi John,
I noticed your stock of eco-friendly packaging is running low. Want me to reserve the next batch before prices go up?”
The rep might make some edits to this output and get the job done in under a minute.
Prioritising Hot Leads Automatically
We’re all guilty of working through clients alphabetically, usually because it’s the most straightforward approach. But it’s also a terrible approach.
To prioritise effectively without investing much manual effort, you can use AI. For example, you can have the AI rank accounts by reorder likelihood, engagement, recent communication, or other factors.
So if a building materials wholesaler uses AI to prioritise clients, they’d want the AI to look for clients most likely to reorder based on site activity and seasonal demand.
The wholesaler might configure the AI platform to prompt one of their sales reps to put a customer at the top of the priority list with a message that goes something like, “Taylor Construction placed large orders in March and July, and their next order is due again soon.”
Streamlining Sales Forecasting
AI also offers help on the backend. It builds accurate forecasts based on historical data, pricing data, and external factors such as weather, the economy, or supply chain disruptions. This saves your team time they’d otherwise spend looking for data and building a forecast manually and offers a crystal-clear outlook for the next quarter or year.
For example, a beverage distributor might use AI to predict spikes in cold drink sales before heatwaves. The sales team then pre-books stock and secures client commitments before demand peaks, ensuring smooth operations.
Overcoming Common Challenges
Preparing for potential challenges makes your implementation smoother. Let’s look at some common pitfalls you should be mindful of before you invest in an AI platform:
Resistance to Change
Many reps fear that AI will replace their jobs or make their roles less personal. In reality, AI’s there to do the grunt work, like the number-crunching, note-taking, summarising, and admin tasks, so sales reps can focus on selling.
To minimise resistance, start small. Introduce AI for one or two low-risk tasks like summarising emails or updating CRM data.
Once people see it saves time rather than creates extra work, buy-in comes naturally. It also gives them a chance to experience the technology firsthand and see that they don’t intend to replace humans in sales.
Trusting AI Outputs
Nobody wants to walk into a client meeting with data without feeling confident about it. It’s natural to question AI’s output. In fact, relying entirely on what AI says is a recipe for disaster.
Always keep humans in the loop. Make it clear to your sales team that AI’s role is to assist, not to make decisions. Encourage reps to verify data the first few times and share feedback. Over time, as accuracy proves itself, your team will feel more confident about the AI’s output.
Data Privacy and Security
If your wholesale and distribution deals involve sensitive data, such as pricing, client details, and contract terms, you need to protect that data.
This means you need AI solutions that meet industry-grade security standards. As a best practice, avoid free or consumer-grade tools for anything involving client data. And yes, always read the fine print before you hit “accept”.
Too Many Tools, Not Enough Integration
AI works best when it has access to data through integration with other platforms in your tech stack. If your AI platform doesn’t integrate with other tools, you’ll need to migrate data to the AI platform manually to build AI-powered workflows.
For example, unless you integrate your AI-powered CRM and order management system, the CRM can’t answer a question like “What was the most common reason for returns over the last four quarters?”
Once integrated, you can ask this question in plain text and the CRM’s AI will have an answer for you. That’s why you should always look for AI platforms that integrate with your existing tech stack.
The Future of AI in Sales for B2B Businesses
AI adoption in sales has accelerated rather quickly over the recent past. According to a recent LinkedIn survey, 88% of sales professionals have integrated AI into their weekly workflows, and 56% into their daily workflows.
Over the next decade, the world will move from “AI helps us with tasks” to “AI drives our workflows.” AI will initiate actions like scheduling meetings, alerting you about stock shortages, and proactively recommending products—all in sync with your team.
Here’s what that means for a wholesaler or distributor:
- Proactive sales instead of reactive chasing
- Clients being served before they even place the request
- Your sales team spending more time nurturing relationships and less time firefighting
- The business operating with fewer surprises and more agility
If you’re resisting AI, you’re falling behind. Most smart teams have already implemented AI in their sales workflows, which means they’re completing workflows at a far greater speed. If you’re a wholesaler or distributor looking for AI-powered sales, take a 14-day free trial of Prospect CRM to learn how it can augment your sales team’s capabilities.
