AI Tools for Sales
Episode 74: AI Tools for Sales, with David Kreiger
View this episode on:
AI Tools for Sales, with David Kreiger. Discover cutting-edge strategies and insights to elevate your game with AI tools for sales.
AI tools for sales — On this episode of Sell With Authority, I am excited to welcome back special guest David Kreiger, the Founder of SalesRoads — a remarkable sales outsourcing and appointment setting firm. He has led SalesRoads through significant growth and the company was twice listed on the Inc 5000.
David was my guest for Episode 65 of the podcast, where we dug into several uses of AI in sales, as well as, sales fundamentals. After that conversation, I immediately invited him to join me for an encore because the conversation was so amazing. Even though we covered a ton, and David was super generous in sharing his smarts, we both knew that we had only scratched the surface because the topic of AI in sales is big and the opportunities are vast.
AI tools for sales will be the focus of today’s encore. David and I are going back to the well — and are continuing to explore how you and your team can use AI inside your sales process — while ensuring your process still feels human-centered with a personal touch.
To boost your sales strategy, it’s crucial to learn the AI tools for sales, empowering you to make data-driven decisions and optimize your approach in today’s competitive business landscape.
What you will learn in this episode is about AI tools for sales:
- How you and your team can successfully use AI in your sales process while ensuring a human-centered and personal approach
- Implementing AI tools for sales can revolutionize your approach
- How to avoid fake personalization when using AI tools
- David’s blueprint for brainstorming and considering possibilities
- Best practices for using AI tools focused in sales
- How to build a prospect list
- Why jumping in and trying new things with AI tools is the best way to accelerate results
Resources:
- If you want to learn more about AI tools for sales — go here and listen to our first interview with David Kreiger: Using AI in Sales
- Learn more about how David Kreiger and his Sales Roads team applies AI tools for sales by visiting them online here.
- LinkedIn Personal: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidkreiger/
- LinkedIn Business: https://www.linkedin.com/company/salesroads/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/kreigs
Additional Resources:
- Predictive ROI Library: https://predictiveroi.com/resources/
AI Tools for Sales: Full Episode Transcript
Welcome to the Sell with Authority podcast. I’m Stephen Woessner, CEO of Predictive ROI, and my team and I created this podcast specifically for you. So if you’re an agency owner or a strategic consultant, and you’re looking to fill your sales pipeline with a steady stream of right fit prospects and get the at-bats, the leads, the right fit leads that you need in order to build and scale, well, then you’re in the right place. Do you want proven strategies for becoming the known expert in your niche and attracting all the clients in need? Yep. We’re gonna cover that. You wanna learn how to step away from the sea of sameness so you actually stand out from your competitors and own the ground you’re standing on. Yep. We’re gonna cover that too. Do you want to future-proof your business so you can successfully navigate the next challenge that you know is going to come our way?
Well, then, absolutely. We will help you there too. I promise you each episode of this podcast will contain valuable insights, tangible examples, and best practices, never theory, from thought leaders, experts, and owners who have done exactly what you’re working hard to do. So, I want you to think practical and tactical. Never any fluff. Each of our guests has built a position of authority and then monetized that position by growing their audience, nurturing leads, and, yes, converting sales. But all the while, they did it by being helpful. So every time someone from their audience turned around there, they were with a helpful answer to an important question. Their right-fit prospects never ever were made to feel like they were a prospect. I also promise you every strategy that we discuss and every tool we recommend will be shared in full transparency in each episode so you can become the known expert in your niche, fill your sales pipeline with a steady stream of RightFit clients, and again, never make them feel like one of your prospects.
AI Tools for Sales: David Kreiger’s Introduction
Okay. So I am excited for this opportunity to reintroduce you to my very special guest expert today, David Kreiger. So, if you’re meeting David for the first time, he’s the founder of Sales Roads, which is a sales outsourcing and appointment-setting firm. David was my guest for episode 65 of this podcast, where we dug into several uses of AI in the sales process as well as took a deep dive into sales fundamentals. But, no joke, as soon as we finished that first conversation, I looped back to David almost immediately and said, oh, my word, you have got to join me. Well, maybe I wasn’t as bold as that. And I said, would you please join me? And for an encore, because that conversation was so amazing, and it absolutely was. So, if you haven’t listened to episode 65, I would highly encourage you to do so because even though we covered a ton, and David was super generous in sharing his smarts, we both knew that we’d only scratch the surface because the topic of AI and sales, it’s big, and the opportunities are vast.
So for today’s encore, David and I are gonna go back to the Well, and we’re going to continue to explore how you and your team can use AI inside your sales process while ensuring that your process still feels human-centered with a personal touch. Candidly, after David and I recorded our first interview, my team and I took a deep dive inside our predictive labs so we could become more versed with several of the tools that David and I talked about. While we were blown away, we shared what we had learned initially with our predictive clients during our two-day intensive in July. And I gotta say the enthusiasm and energy of the conversations inside the intensive, as everyone in the room brainstormed and considered the possibilities, made me even more excited to record today’s encore with David. I promise you, if you take and apply the insights, best practices, and wisdom David shares with you in today’s episode, as well as go back to episode 65, you’ll accelerate your results and escape the feast and famine of biz Dev that often plagues so many agencies and consulting firms.
So, without further ado, welcome back to the Sell with Authority podcast, my friend. David.
Thank you so much, Stephen. It’s great to be here, and it’s great to be back and have another conversation with you.
Amen. This is going to be a lot of fun. As I just mentioned, as you heard me say, I want our audience to go back to episode 65. So, let’s just have a brief reintroduction, if you will, if you want to go high-level regarding sales, roads, your path and journey, and then we’ll dive into all of the questions for today.
AI Tools for Sales: Balancing AI and Human Touch in Sales Processes
AI tools for sales? Yeah, that sounds great. Thanks. So I run sales roads. We are an appointment-setting and lead-generation company, so we help our clients create a predictable revenue stream as far as building top-of-the-funnel opportunities for their sales team. And so we really work really closely with our clients to try to understand the types of clients that they’re looking for, the types of customers that they want to prospect into, and then we develop a really robust program to help them get those best-fit clients. So that is sales roads in a nutshell. And so we love talking about these types of things and how you can build predictable revenue
Amen to that. Well, as you heard me say in the introduction, I was just absolutely blown away by our first conversation. And as you know, I was being honest and candid when I said that, no joke, that I looped back to you right away. And I asked you if you’d be kind enough to do or record an encore because what you shared was so powerful. Then, it led us to run some experiments with, more specifically, apollo.io and ZoomInfo and to run those experiments inside the predictive lab to better understand not just the tech but also how that could work in a sales process. So as we’re thinking about AI and you’re having conversations with like, sales roads, clients, let’s look at that scenario. And you’re mentioning the AI tools and the power and that kind of stuff when you start working through the strategy. ’cause you also mentioned how you use AI to also develop the strategy too, and, and sort of the efficiencies of that, generates. But when you’re having those conversations with clients, what might be some of the, maybe obstacles isn’t the right word, maybe hesitation, maybe concerns when they’re thinking about AI and how that might affect the sales process sort of dehumanizing the sales process. So let’s work through that piece because I know that that is of particular interest to you in keeping it human-centered.
Yeah, I think it’s so important. So I’m really happy that you started there, Stephen because I think a lot of the buzz around AI is to be able to do things so much faster and to automate and to be able to replicate what salespeople are doing. And I just don’t think that that’s the right mentality. I think if you try to automate and you try to replicate, not only are you losing the most important thing, which you refer to as the human feel of the sale, but you are also losing the human feel of the sale, which is just so important, right? And AI is gonna get better and better, but it’s never gonna get to a place where it really, truly understands what empathy is and might try to fake empathy, right? That is great; salespeople, those intangibles are so important, and AI is never gonna get there, or it’s gonna be fake.
AI Tools for Sales: Leveraging its Power Without Losing Humanity
AI tools for sales? And you can kind of smell fake, right? Yeah. And so, what I think is really important with AI is, and we touched on this in the last episode, but so important to, to keep front and center, is it is a tool to augment and do what you do better, not to do what you do necessarily even faster. It can do it, but with that mindset, you wanna be careful of just going down that road because then I think you’re gonna be using the tool and not harnessing its true power. And so what you want to do is leverage it as your assistant. So if you’re a salesperson, you now have an assistant, everyone has an assistant for either free, or if you want a little bit of an upgraded or a large, you know, for $20 a month, and you’ve got an assistant to help you think about your prospects, brainstorm with it around that, that that pro prospect’s problems. Think about your ICP. You can create, dialogues with your ICP and have conversations back and forth. You can brainstorm several iterations maybe of your call script and then brainstorm and iterate off of it. And so I think it’s an amazing tool to do what you do better, to create a lot more opportunities to think about things in different ways. But if you just look at it as a way to replace yourself or replace people on your team, not only do you lose humanity, but you’re just not gonna have as good results.
That is such a great job of level-setting expectations, and it gives us so many paths to go down in this conversation. Because I think what you just did was confront, maybe I’ll just call it the misperception that, oh, I’m gonna connect, apollo.io and I’m gonna connect it in with LinkedIn Sales Navigator, and all of a sudden on Tuesday inside my inbox, or going to be, RightFit prospects raising their hand and saying, we want to give you a bucket of money. And that’s not at all what we’re talking about here, is it?
No. AI is like there’s no easy button in sales, right? We would love to have a button where we just press the button and leads fall out of the sky, or sales fall out of the sky, and it’s just the way it is. And if you’re looking for that and you’re looking for the shortcut, at the end of the day, I just don’t think you’re gonna be successful. I completely agree. It is a way to take some of those processes. make them better, but not to replace the salesperson or click a button, because if you do that, and people are creating sequences and emails using ai, but you can already feel that it’s AI-driven. Right. And it’s, it’s fake personalization, right?
AI Tools for Sales: Authenticity Over Automation
Yeah. You sure can. And, as you said a few minutes ago, you can smell fake when somebody is not being sincere. You can smell automation. And when people are taking shortcuts, you can see that coming from a mile away. And, and, consumers’ perspective, clients today are so, sort of, whatever the right word is, trained to sniff that out. I mean, it’s, it’s just the, the wrong approach. So when you said harness the true power. So, let’s go back to that piece. Harness the true power, in your opinion, because you and your team are experts at this, and you use it every day, all day long. What do you recognize as being the true power of the AI tools?
Best AI tools for sales? I truly feel, with the exception of maybe a few amazing engineers. I don’t know if anyone’s an expert in AI, but I appreciate everyone’s learning as we go along here. And I also think everyone has to have that mindset going into AI. You can be scared of it, but if you just dive in and start thinking about and getting better, nobody really understands the best ways to use it. And so it’s just great to experiment. So, some of the things that we’re doing and finding are effective for us, even just for me as an agency owner. I know you get a lot of agency owners who listen to it. You know, some of the things that I leverage it for that really help me in my day-to-day is one thing is just sort of touched on a little bit with having assistant, but is, is just for brainstorming, right?
So if I have an idea, a company actually just came to me last week, another agency wanting to potentially be acquired, right? Okay. And so I’ve got people that I talked to about that, and I’m not gonna replace that, but this is a great way just to, for me, in my own thought process, to brainstorm, right? And to brainstorm a decision like this or other decisions. And, you know, I tell the AI one of the one little tips and tricks that I’ll try to put different ones in here as we go along, but okay, always start if you’re using chatGPT to tell the AI which it is. Okay? ’cause when you start with a blank screen, right? It doesn’t know, it doesn’t know if it’s a lawyer, if it’s a copywriter, you know, things like that.
AI Tools for Sales: Maximizing AI Brainstorming
So just tell it who it is. So, like, for instance, maybe I wanna brainstorm with A CFO, right? About acquiring a company. And I might say that you are at CFO who’s worked at several tech startups, you know, gone through many, one successful IPO, like, as detailed as you want to get with telling it who it is before you get into prompting it, is really important. That’s something we’ve worked at, you know, for all the different things. We sometimes have a few paragraphs telling the AI who it is and the types of people we want it to mirror. And if I’m jumping a few different places, but just to crystallize the point, like if you’re thinking about stock tips, right? Maybe you say, I want you to be like Warren Buffet, right?
And think about Warren Buffet and give me advice like Warren Buffet. It’s not the same as Warren Buffet, but it can scan all of his papers and all of his things, and then it will answer you in the mindset that it does. So that’s one pro tip, I think, is just to tell the AI who it is. So the way that I love using it is just to brainstorm. I painstakingly look at decisions, maybe too much, but it helps me to brainstorm and talk about things. I ask it to be contrarian. Like, if I say, I’m thinking about buying this company, and the company and put information about it and say, what are some of the reasons that I shouldn’t do it? Right? Okay. And so contrarianism is awesome, too. So just, you know, one of the great things that we found is with brainstorming ideas, brainstorming call approaches, right? So, put in a call approach and brainstorming and give me a few different iterations. You know, I want to target this ICP, so give me one that would target this and change it for this ICP. And so it’s just an amazing tool to brainstorm whatever it is that you want to be working on and to iterate off of that. Okay.
Holy bananas. Wow. Let me rewind that for just a second. Okay. Sorry, I mean, this is absolutely amazing. We’re just getting started. So, if one of our listeners, one of their prospective clients, were Company X and they were looking for a way to successfully open the door, maybe spark a conversation with Company X. So, I think if I’m understanding you correctly, and let’s say that the CMO inside company X was their ICP, their ideal client profile and then they might say to ChatGPT, you are Sarah Jones, she’s the CMO at company X. And then ask AI or ChatGPT in this case to play the role of Sarah Jones, and then maybe to go back and forth and brainstorm that conversation about how best they might open the door with Sarah Jones. Am I tracking with you?
AI Tools for Sales: Unlocking AI Role-Playing
Yeah, it’s great. And as much information as you can give about Sarah Jones as possible, right? Even maybe some of their career history, tell me a few of the pain points that Sarah, someone in this role like Sarah Jones would have, you know, so what are the big initiatives that they might be thinking about? If you have any information about them, ask about the buyer persona. Then you sort of set the stage, like you said, and then you can role-play. You can have a conversation. You could almost like be having coffee with Sarah Jones, right? How are you doing? You know, what are some of the things you’re worried about? Well, what if, you know, and then you could bring in things, well for sales roads, right? So Sarah’s, one of the things I’m worried about is that I’m having to hit my number in Q3, and I’m feeling a little short.
How are AI tools for sales important? Well, we have sales roads, and we build SDR programs for our clients. Do you currently have some SDRs? And you can go back and forth and talk about it. And, you know, it’s not the same as talking to Sarah Jones, but how often can you go and sit with your ICP and actually speak to them and brainstorm? And also, here’s the other thing: do not feel afraid to ask stupid questions, right? Cause if it’s your real ICP, you can’t try different things because you’re on the hot seat, right? But here you can try different things and even ask them. How did that resonate with you, Sarah? Is that something that would be important to you?
Well, it, okay, so let’s, let’s take this scenario, one step further. If let’s say, Sarah Jones happens to be a public figure, or she has a lot of maybe public content that is sort of sift, or maybe Company X is a publicly traded company, so now there’s even more, that’s out there. Does that mean that the role-playing scenarios and so forth can be even deeper? Because the amount of content that’s available for AI to sift through is deeper.
Yeah. The more content it has, the better it’s gonna be. Now, the one issue just with ChatGPT is I think it’s 2021 is the cutoff for the data. So any nearer, like if they just had like a battering scholar or things like that, it’s not gonna know those things. So just keep that in mind. Okay. But absolutely, barring that, you’re absolutely right. So more of a public figure, it’s gonna have more information, it’s gonna be able to sift through it. Also, if you have information about it, and it’s not as public, you can feed it into to it. Say, you know, here’s some information. Here are some blogs that Sarah Jones wrote. Right? Or here’s a paper that she wrote. and then it can get some insights that way.
AI Tools for Sales: Using AI for Insightful Conversations
Wow. Okay. So, let’s maybe go with a more generic example. So we’re gonna take Sarah Jones out of it, for instance, or for a second. You mentioned dialogues with your ICP or conversations with your ICP’s ideal client profile. So let’s say that somebody is still trying to figure out what their I CCP ought to be, or they want to go more narrow in their CCP, are you saying that you can have a conversation back and forth and through that maybe go narrower based on what somebody would learn through that sort of mock dialogue?
And here, I’ll walk you through some of the steps that we do great for ourselves or for our clients when they’re not, maybe not a hundred percent sure about it. You know, what we’ll try to do is we’ll try to get as much information about the client as possible, you know, like in our kickoff meetings and things like that. And then also, obviously, they have a lot of information on their website and whatnot. And you can feed that into ChatGPT, okay? And then you can start thinking and brainstorming around value propositions. And so start really understanding, what are some good value propositions here? Or even better starting with just an overview. What are some of the key, key pain points that this can solve?
AI tools for sales? What are some of the types of prospects that might find value in this pain point? So then you’re starting to think about the, the icp, or if you have a few examples of good clients, you know, here are a few of the clients that we found have VA have found a lot of value. If you have some of your case studies, for instance, feed those in there, right? And then ask ChatGPT to help you create an ideal customer profile. Now, the one other, another sort of bonus tip is it’s good. I think you got, you, Stephen, some really good assets around this that people could leverage. Or if you have internally a certain way that you want your ICP presented for us, we have ways that we want, you know, here are the different aspects of how we presented an ideal customer profile. Giving ChatGPT. That context saying here, for example, is a good overview of a generic ICP, then it will return some ICPs based on the formats that might be helpful to you.
AI Tools for Sales: Optimizing AI Input
Okay? So then, when feeding this content or context, whichever would be the right word, into ChatGPT, my assumption is that it’s like a layering or iterative process. You give it a little bit, and you get a thing; you give it a little bit more, and you get a thing. Or is it you do this big data dump? So, how does that process work, based on your experience?
So I would say you want to bucket each thing you’re developing. So, for instance, with an ICP, here I’ll give you another step back to a workflow. So if we’re thinking about a client, and if your clients, if you know, people are listening to this and they’re an agency and they have a client they’re thinking about, I would feed all the information that you have about the client in first, right? Okay. That one other thing, too, just to be careful, that you want to wanna do is just make sure it’s not any proprietary data, right? Because you’re fee or, or get your client’s permission first, right? So, you know, but publicly available data as far as what’s on their website and any information that they’ve given you is, you know, generic types of things that would be helpful in this.
But feed that information first. So it has a sense of the type of company that you’re thinking about and trying to design this for. Then, from there, go block by block. So, you know, start with your ICP, you know, or even, you know, start with your total addressable market, right? Going big to small. So, what would be the total addressable market for this? Have some prompts around that. Then prompt it around the ICP, then some buyer personas, and then the value propositions that would appeal to those buyer personas. Wow. So block each one individually, but you don’t have to repeat the information every time you’re trying to, you know, go at the cool thing about ChatGPT is in any thread, it will remember what, what’s already been written, transpired, and also leverage that information to give you better answers as you go along.
I’m so glad you just said that because that was going to be my follow-up. I am a neophyte, so I was thinking, okay, do we have to reload the entire thing again? Or is it going to remember, like, you know, two steps ago, we fed it this, and now we’re just looping back to that in a slightly different way, right?
AI Tools for Sales: Leveraging AI for Streamlined Processes
Wow. Okay. So let’s loop back to when I mentioned harnessing the true power to you or when I asked you about it, and we went brains. You mentioned brainstorming, and then we just went on that run about the brain story, which was just absolutely amazing. So when we’re thinking, or when you’re thinking about harnessing this true power brainstorming being one, and you gave us lots of layers there, what might be another way that you would like to see or that you would suggest that people lean into the AI tools to harness its true power?
So I think there are sometimes tasks that feel really big to us as agency owners that we don’t necessarily get around to, that we think are really important. For instance, training documents or SOPs, right? And so it feels like a huge test. You’ve gotta document everything, you’ve gotta talk, talk about. But what I’ve found with some of these things is it is amazing at synthesizing data and putting it into a digestible format. So, for instance, let’s say you want to create an SOP for how you onboard a client. Again, you would go into chatGPT, and you would tell it you know that you are a COO, right? At a marketing agency that has extreme attention to detail and is very good at explaining how things are done, right? Yeah. Something to that effect. You might wanna make a little bit, you know, longer than that or as much detailed about the type of industry that you’re in as possible.
Then, use the little microphone tool in Windows or in Apple in the ChatGPT, but then just start talking about the process. So the first thing we do with onboarding the client is we have a kickoff meeting. And in the kickoff meeting, you wanna address this, you know, and anyway, you go through the whole thing and dictate to it, and then at the end say, please document this as an SOP for my agency in a very clear way, and have it spit out the SOP. Now again, you don’t wanna just then, okay, I’m gonna use the SOP, and then it’s done. Right? So you can’t just say that it’s the easy button; you click it, but now you’ve got a draft. Wow. Your SOP, and then you can start editing it or iterating on it, or ask it a question and say, if I’m a new hire, what are some holes that I might be confused about here? Right? And so it’s an amazing tool to be able to help you do, yes, your work faster, right? Because this is, this does speed up your work, but it’s not necessarily, you don’t wanna just press a button, it’s done and you iterate it. But I would argue it not only is it a bit faster, but you’re also gonna come up with a better product because you have someone actually writing this,
AI Tools for Sales: Enhancing Work Efficiency
This is brilliant when you just said, then ask questions about the holes that I might be confused about. We just went through the internal process here at Predictive, creating drafts, if not drafts, of the onboarding process for RightFit Clients University. What, so this is, this is so brilliant and directly applicable. I can’t wait for when I see Megan Kimmel, our operations manager, in a couple of hours, I’m literally taking this piece of the conversation and sharing that with her because I think that she’s gonna find this to be so awesome that we can take these drafts that we’ve already built, we can dictate them using your words, dictate them into chat GPT, and then ask what are the holes? If you’re a brand new member, what are the holes? What are the questions that you would have given this draft of the SAP? That is so brilliant, David.
Thank you.
It really just an amazing tool. It blows your mind. It means the things that I’ve had to draft that usually would take me a while leveraging chat, GBT, and again, editing it; you cannot take it; you’ve gotta go through it, and it will make mistakes. And it heard of the whole, you know, the people say it hallucinates it will sometimes go in the wrong direction. It is not a perfect tool. And you have to remember that. But none of us are perfect, right? We all make mistakes. Yeah. So you just need to make sure that you do edit it, and you iterate based upon it. But really, it is amazing in that regard. And even with emails, it’s a little clunky now ’cause you kinda have to go back and forth, but I have an email tool that has AI built into it.
Okay. And I’m a very bad speller and, so Spellcheck has been my friend, but Spellcheck doesn’t always pick up like the grammatical spellcheck things. And I’ll miss words and whatnot. And so I can just, with a click of the button, I use a tool called Superhuman, ah, have it fix my spelling and grammar, or I can have it improve my writing or like, and so it will do edits for just little things like an email, which I wouldn’t have anybody edit before I’d read over a little bit. But it helps a lot on even some of these little tasks.
AI Tools for Sales: The Power of AI Tools Like Superhuman
So, we run everything on Google Workspace here. So when I think about my own email, it’s essentially Gmail, and I’ve got Grammarly plugged into that. And, and so Grammarly does, you know, some cool things. Yeah. So, in your opinion, like, I don’t know if it’s right to say Superhuman versus Grammarly or whatever, what are the advantages that that you feel that Superhuman gives you? Whether that’s accurate or grammatically correct. Speed. Can you walk us through that a little bit? I’ve heard some really cool things about Superhuman, but I haven’t tried it yet.
Yeah. So a few things. One, superhuman started as a way just to better process emails to get to inbox zero and get through emails. And so that’s, you know, I’ve been using it for about three years now. And so that’s what’s one thing that’s great about Superhuman versus just a regular email processor. As far as Grammarly versus Superhuman, I, I’ve seen Grammarly, I think it does great things. It will check your emails for grammar, probably, as well as a superhuman. The two differences I would say is one with Superhuman, it will actually rewrite. So let’s say the grammar’s off. Okay. It will kind of reconstruct the sentence a little bit, so it’ll make it a little clearer of a sentence versus just saying that this is off and you need to add a comma or things like that. Okay.
But the more powerful thing, and this is what I think will be in, and it’s gonna be in Google, I’m sure very shortly, these AI tools as well, I actually think, and I’m starting to do this just ’cause it’s easier for me to write emails this way, is we are gonna go back to what I call the Mad Men Oh. Way of writing correspondence. Okay. And what I mean by that is Don Draper would, you know, not that they had emails back then when he would write a, you know, he, he would dictate his email to his assistant, right? Right. Or his letter or whatever it was, you know, and we got away from that, right? ’cause we don’t need people to dictate our letters anymore. But what I do now for a lot of my emails is I will write thoughts into the AI and say, you know, you know, write an email to this person saying, thank you so much for X, Y, Z. I had a few questions like this. And very informal, kind of, right? And then I’ll hit it, and then I’ll construct it into a nice email. Wow.
AI Tools for Sales: Best Practices for Sales Prospecting Tools
And so it’s more of a dictating type of thing where just writing a few notes and then creating the email for me. And the cool thing, and it’s not quite there yet, but what it’s going to do, and it’s trying to do, is it has access to all of your emails and your writing style. Okay. And so one of the problems, and it’s still not there quite yet, you know, especially is that it’ll come back and we’ll write in an email that, you know, you never really written it that way, right? Right. Because it says words that you don’t like, but it’s getting better. ’cause it starts picking up on the words that you usually use. And we’ll start writing in your style. Okay. So it’s gonna get better that way. But for me, what I do is I’ll write a few, few things, and then I’ll edit it sort of in my style, and it’s just a little, and then I’ll have it proof it again. So it’s just a different workflow. Now, doing emails is faster for me, especially because I have spelling and grammar and sort of dyslexic type of issues when I’m writing correspondence. But again, it’s not so much quicker ’cause I have to edit it over and look it over. But I feel like the end result is much better.
Okay. So, let’s take this into account; this has been so amazing. let’s take this into sales tools like Apollo, DataIO, and ZoomInfo. So if we’re thinking about harnessing the power of those tools without violating the need to remain human-centered, high touch, and all of that, what would you suggest as best practices for somebody to just get started, kind of stepping into that in, in order to do that, maybe the right way in avoiding some pitfalls or even temptations?
From a prospecting standpoint, yeah. I think there are a few with prospecting and leveraging tools to generate a prospect list.
Principles. So first of all, you know, I think, you know, it would be wonderful to be able to grow our agencies a hundred percent on referrals on our network, right? On inbound and things like that. And that, that, that, that’s great. And those are great leads, and you wanna harness and tap that out. But if you really wanna grow and you want to grow in a predictable way, you also have to take more control over your future. ’cause there are only so many referrals that are out there. Only so many, you know, people in your network, that you can get business from. And so what we’ve found and our clients have found is that creating a predictable outbound strategy is the best way to allow you to have a constant flow of leads. But to your point, you’ve gotta do it in the right way, or at least as human a way as possible.
AI Tools for Sales: AI List Building and Human Outreach
And what we found is being as clear as possible around your ICP. So, who can you help the best and why? And then first of all, start starting from, from there, right? And building using those tools, Apollo and, and Zoom. And there are lots of them to be very targeted in the types of contexts and prospects that you are best able to help with. Okay. And then, if you can go a step further and think about times when your service might be most relevant to them or somebody, one of the buyer personas is part of your ICP when you might be most relevant. So, for instance, a lot of times for sales roads, there are two different times that somebody might be thinking about, you know, SDR outsourcing or out output first. Like when there’s a new hire, like a CRO starts up at a company and they are, you know, are under the gun to try to figure out how to generate pipeline very quickly, okay, that’s a good opportunity for us, and a way for us to be relevant to them, right?
Because they’re thinking about that, that’s a pain. And so you can structure your, your, your, your outbound around that pain and around some ideas around that, that pain and, and, and ways to help them and or when somebody gets financing, right? So when a VC gives this company financing, they’re not doing that just to stay steady state and not, not increase sales. And so that’s another good time for us to reach out to somebody or a company like that. And then in the comp, getting back to the human aspect and making sure that you’re doing it the right way, you wanna lead with how you can help them in their journey at that moment. And that’s where prospecting really becomes magical because you’re reaching out to somebody who has pain and might not know exactly the right way to solve that pain. And you’re coming up with a potential solution. And in that case, both your chances of success as an agency are better, but also your chance of helping them is better. And they’re very tied together. And so there are so many avenues we can go here, Stephen; I’m not sure if that’s where you were driving up, but to create these types of lists from these, these, these different sources, it has to be tied to that greater strategy.
Okay? So let’s, let’s, maybe, maybe this would be the way to approach it. Let’s split this into halves, sort of identifying the doors like that you’re gonna knock on call that list building and then actually knocking on the door. I think if I understand correctly, harnessing the power of AI tools to find out, as you mentioned, sort of the intent pieces or the trigger pieces. Like they just hired a new person, they just took a series A or series B, they’re moving toward maybe a strategic transaction. So that could be a good opportunity for timing in order to to knock on the door. But then the actual knock on the door would be the human. Am I tracking with you?
Yeah, a hundred percent.
AI Tools for Sales: AI Tools for Targeted Outreach
Okay. So then what that does is instead of the typical salesperson kind of aimlessly wandering through the wilderness of, like, would it be this company? Would it be this company? Should I talk to this company? Should I do a deep dive to see if maybe one of those buyers intends to add scale to who would be a right fit from a timing perspective? So ICP is already done, now it’s thinking about ICP in the context of timing, right? Like that’s being done at scale. Yep. And that would save a lot of time. So then the salesperson already knows what doors to knock on and then can just focus on knocking on those doors in the best way, right?
Yeah. And then going deep in, in, into those doors. So if you’ve got a, if you really understand your ICP and you can make the list even as narrow as possible, then you can be as relevant as possible because then you can really go in and, and also take your time with each of them. And that’s where some of the AI can come in. So maybe you’ve got, you know, 50 leads that are just real, you know, you can help them for X, Y, and Z reason, then you might want to brainstorm, you know, what are some of the approaches for these companies. What are some of the emails that might work and resonate with this buyer persona? And really be very targeted in your messaging and the way that you’re approaching them. ’cause you know, these are companies that are high value.
Okay? So, if the salesperson is taking the personal approach, and this may be the case, let’s loop back to this role-playing scenario that we talked about with Sarah Jones. We build the list and build it at scale quickly using AI, harnessing that power. Then there’s like 50 Sarah Jones, and we’ve gone back and forth, and we’ve done sort of the ICP role-play piece, right? So, now we really know the scenarios in depth. So assuming that we’ve got kind of, we’re we’re battle ready for all that hand-to-hand combat, how, how then best to open the door. Are we doing that literally just a one-to-one email? Is it some sort of AI approach? Is it knocking on the door via LinkedIn and hoping that Sarah Jones is active on LinkedIn? What approach in your experience do you feel is best in that scenario?
All of them.
AI Tools for Sales: Finding the Right Balance
Awesome. So here’s the thing, from a cold prospecting standpoint, okay? You wanna be as relevant and as targeted as possible, but you also have to have some level of velocity because if you just knock on a ha three doors or five doors, it’s not gonna work. You might get lucky that you pick the right one, right? Yeah. You know, as relevant as you can be and as best the time as you, you can find, it’s still, you’ve got to be able to have enough velocity now. So what we leverage is, is a few different things. We mainly use email and phone. I think when you’re really going one-to-one if you’ve got a good LinkedIn network, you can leverage LinkedIn too. Be careful a little bit about just connecting and selling the type of methodology.
Just we’ve all been there on the receiving side. You just gotta be a little careful, of how you do it. I actually, and this is maybe a whole different conversation, I think a content first approach on LinkedIn is, is better. so I’m gonna move away a little bit from LinkedIn. I think it’s really important to check LinkedIn and to be able to understand the person you, you’re, you’re speaking to. And if you have somebody who’s connected to them, maybe use that to get in there, then, you know, and, and then there’s a whole content strategy piece. Other than that, I would leverage email and phone. And so what we do for our clients is we’ll build a cadence around it. So we’ll figure out, we’ll have a certain number of emails that we are sending out and a certain number of calls to try, to get them on the phone and have a conversation.
And at the end of the day, it’s really about getting them on the phone and having that conversation because it’s really hard. You can have your hypothesis, what we call, you know, a hypothesis of need, you know, a hypothesis of what that prospect might be having problems, but you don’t completely know until you actually talk to them, right? You might’ve done all the role-playing on chat, GPT, and chat GPT had some thoughts, but until you really talk to ’em, you’re not gonna know, right? It’s gonna prepare you. But at the end of the day, that’s what we’re working towards, is having that conversation. And so you’ve got to create a good list, you’ve gotta have some good reasons why you are reaching out to that list. But at the end of the day, if you don’t send the emails and pick up the phone, you’re not gonna be able to create those leads and those appointments and generate that pipeline and generate those sales.
AI Tools for Sales: Crafting Compelling Pitches
And that’s the human-centered piece, right? That, that, that’s where you really have to know the ICP. Because if you’re, if you’re fortunate enough, blessed enough that Sarah Jones actually takes the call, well, now, you have to share some expertise with Sarah Jones about how you can help her lean into that. Or maybe the way you’re going to lean into that pain point and tackle business issues, deliver outcomes, deliver business impact, and you’ve got a short period of time to be able to do that, right?
Yeah. And, and, and the best way to do it, and that’s how you, why you wanna define that ICP is thinking about the social proof, thinking about ways that you’ve done it for people like Sarah Jones or companies like Sarah Jones’s companies so that you can then share that. Yeah. They say they were also challenged when they were starting up to try to build pipelines very quickly because they were under the gun. You know, one of our clients here, you know, started up in the role. This is what we did with them. Here are some of the strategies that we brainstorm with them to help them to be successful. And here are some ideas that we have just from looking at the website, having some, some calls that we could do for you. Now, these are just very shallow, but because we haven’t had a full in-depth conversation, these are just some ideas just to get things going and started to try to see if these are the types of things that might be able to help you in your journey now as a new CO.
It’s so amazing. Wow. It’s absolutely amazing. Thank you so much for round two of your generosity and sharing your smarts. I know we need to come in for a landing. But before we do, before we close out and say goodbye, do you have any final advice or anything you think we might have missed? Please tell our audience the best way to connect with you, David.
Yeah, no, I appreciate, and thanks so much for having me on again, Stephen, this is, it’s always great having a conversation with you. I love these, and so I really appreciate them. so yeah, I mean, the only final thoughts, and I think they might be similar to the last time, but I think it’s really important both in the context of AI as well as the last, question, which is more about creating that prospecting strategy is it’s all about jumping in, you know? . starting to use it, you know, you know, I listen to lots of podcasts, and sometimes I’m like, okay, I just listened to a whole bunch of podcasts, but did I actualize any of it? You know, what I would encourage people to do is, you know, if there was anything here that resonated that you thought was interesting, the only way for you to really see and internalize it and understand how it works is to start using it.
AI Tools for Sales: Embracing AI Tools for Growth
And if your results aren’t perfect at first, it’s not because the tool isn’t powerful, it’s because it takes a little time to really get used to it and figure out how to use it in the right way. The only way to do that is to really jump in and try different things. And so I would just say jump in, try different things with ai. If some of the things we talked about with prospecting and creating your ICP and doing the outreach resonate, and that’s, you’re, you’re struggling with, with creating a predictable pipeline, jump in. Just try it, you know, and that’s what I’d say. And for, for, for me, you know, I’m, I’m active on LinkedIn, so if anyone has any questions about what we’ve talked about or they’re trying it, and they’re running into a roadblock.
You’re, you’re so awesome and, and, and such a great point that you’re, that we’re coming in, for a landing with the, the jump in the start using it, try different things. and because it takes repetitions in, in e in each of those repetitions, you know, we learn more, we get better. And all of that, just, just like AI is, is it is an iterative process. And in getting that sort of repetitions, really, really matters, and pushing through sort of that didn’t work. We’ll try it again. And then we start making progress, right?
Absolutely, sometimes when you get sort of weird answers and things are going off, off the rails, and you just think about it, that’s sometimes when you get the biggest learning, you look back at the prompts, you’re like, oh that’s why. And so, but I’ve just gotten so much better just by using it every single day. It is one of my tabs, and I just leverage it, and you start to get it.
AI Tools for Sales: The Power of Doing More with AI Tools
One of my favorite stories, I’ll share this, and then, and then we will come in for a landing. But back in the day, and I think it may have been when Arnold was, Arnold Schwarzenegger was, being filmed for the movie Pumping Iron. So let’s think, late seventies, early eighties. And a reporter asked him, you know, like, when, like what repetition, do you, do you get the most growth? And, so then he kind of tossed that back to the reporter and said, okay, let’s say that, that you’re gonna do a set of 10 repetitions. So let’s think of 10 repetitions of using chat GPT, right? You’ve committed that you’re gonna do 10. And so he asked, he’s like, so let’s say you’re gonna do a set of 10 very common, right set of 10, what repetition do you get the most growth?
And the reporter said, 10. And he goes, no, 12 you, you do more than what’s expected, right? Yeah. You do more if you’re going to sit down and use chat GPT 10 times, do it 12, take all of these lessons, everyone that, that David just gave you. He just gave you a blueprint for brainstorming. He just gave you a blueprint for using AI tools that are focused on sales. He just gave you a blueprint for how to build a prospect list. Then he gave you a blueprint for how to knock on the door in a smart way because you are just brainstorming with your ICP in a very dynamic and creative way. So no matter how many times you go back and re-listen to these words of wisdom that David just generously shared with you now twice in two different episodes, the key is you have to jump in, you have to start trying it, you have to start applying it. And yes, you’ll skin your knee and maybe bump an elbow a time or two. And that’s how we get better. That’s how we accelerate our results. And David, we all have the same 86,400 seconds in a day, and I’m grateful that you gave us more of your time and expertise so that we could move our businesses onward to that next level. Thank you so much, my friend.
Thank you very much. I really enjoyed it. Appreciate it soon.
Fill Your Sales Pipeline Q&A
LIVE Wednesdays at 1:00 pm Eastern / 12 Noon Central
The Sell with Authority Podcast is for agency owners, business coaches, and strategic consultants who are looking to grow a thriving, profitable business that can weather the constant change that seems to be our world’s reality.