7 Ways AI Can Accelerate Sales in 2024

Download the Takeaways

A crystal clear 2-page PDF outlining the key takeaways and links to all the AI tools mentioned.

LinkedIn Live Recording

This episode of The Sales Scoop was recorded live on Tue 19th Dec at 0700 ET / 1200 UK / 1300 CET.

Automated Transcript

Alastair Cole 0:54

Hello, good afternoon and welcome to The Sales Scoop, a show for startups who want to improve how they sell. We tackle the biggest topics in sales and bring you the shiniest pearls of wisdom from experienced sellers. And that's the goal, your host for today and co-founder of the partnership. I'm a computer scientist with two decades of experience in sales and marketing.

Kiran Gill 1:19

My name is Kiran Gill. I'm also co-founder of the uplift partnership with 25 years worth of business development experience in enterprise selling, also in finance and in tech.

Alastair Cole 1:33

Thanks my friend, Curran, and together we simplify sales for startups. Today, we're bringing you seven ways AI can accelerate your sales. And we're going to dive straight into those seven right away. First, we wanted to share our findings from running our 360 diagnostic tool in startups over the last six months. And one of the areas that we dive into his tech stack. And within that we look at how startups are using AI and how maturely they're using it to work on their sales and accelerate their growth. And our findings, that across the board, it's not, it's not great reading. Lots of companies dabble with it, some more professionally than others. Health and Medicare actually out in front 8.8% higher than the average, which was a surprise to us over the startups we've looked at software as a service. Unsurprisingly, at slightly ahead of average, I think you'd expect that a lot of these AI tools are provided as software as a service, and they're easy to access, professional services and nonprofits. Not doing that well. Big surprise for us we're seeing it and software companies really under indexing on use of AI and their mature use of AI. As we've looked at them, and it feels to me Kiran, having worked in a number of technical houses, that the reason for that might be a kind of not invented here. And then a lot of those back end systems that are being built by IT companies that we've talked to, they're being built by engineers in house and a lot of their time and their thinking and the relevant time has been put into those systems. So some some interesting stats there anything you pick out from our research before we moved on, Kiran, nothing

Kiran Gill 3:36

that sticks out there. For me, I think the major thing here is in the last 12 months, obviously we've chatted GPT. And the whole generativity of AI kind of movement now moving into the mainstream, you're seeing a lot of AI now being put into a lot of sales tech out there anyway. So companies that are behind at this moment in time or have been getting, you know, scored low, will automatically find that because of their CRM systems, and the sales tools that they're using, they are slowly integrating AI. And the ones that aren't are probably going to disappear slowly but surely, because the AI wants 10 will have an advantage. And you're going to be used to using those anyway. So what you'll find is, even though these companies are scoring low at the moment, you'll find by default, a lot of companies are going to use AI anyway without even knowing it.

Alastair Cole 4:25

Yeah, I mean, it's fantastic to see the pace of change over the last 12 years when I chose to read computer science and AI University in the late 90s. I had no idea that we were going to see this. This changes quickly. It's very quiet with very little customer centric kind of progress in this aspect and it's exploded now. It's been built into all kinds of tools. And as you'd expect, as well as bringing huge efficiencies and time savings. AI is also able to crack big problems and come up with ideas in terms of the future where this is going for salespeople and sellers. Gartner has some fascinating research from just four months ago, looking at the extra bandwidth that's going to be created for sellers, a whopping 27%, for those that are able to harness AI effectively, and we're already seeing a lot of these changes ourselves, you know, we're doing, we're saving time on sales planning, certainly on customer meeting preparation, and a load on prospecting and starting to enjoy the benefits of that extra time. At the same time, you know, we know as well as anybody that you can get overwhelmed by using too much technology and too many platforms. And there's naturally a kind of desire to play with and start playing with AI can go too far. Certainly, salespeople, when targeting their quota, when they're looking to hit their quota, those that are overwhelmed by technology achieve a 43%, lower quota than their colleagues who are actually able to harness it, and use it, use it in a positive way. So no surprise, there, it's easy to get overwhelmed, you've got to pick the right tools and use them in the right way. So a little bit of background there. So our seven are seven ways. We're going to kick off now, the first of which is we're calling to collect your thoughts, right? And this isn't about the kind of intense processing power of creation that AI has, but more its ability to collect your thoughts and help you get them down on paper. The place I'd start is I'm an enormous fan of Google Voice Typing. Now that doesn't seem like AI. It's been around for a while, but it absolutely is. It's using speech to text AI technology. And if you batch up your time, whether you're sending emails or writing documents, and using Google Voice typing, we speak at three times the pace that we write. And so you're able to create three times as much content at the same time. So I'm a big fan of Google Voice Typing. It's brilliant for everyday sales. You have something else that you use as well, Karen. Yeah,

Kiran Gill 7:11

I don't use the Google one, I use a free Chrome plugin called voice in. So we'll make sure that we'll get these tools out there for you guys. So you know what they are. It's a Chrome plugin, it does have a paywall. So it doesn't work on all websites or places that you want to use it. And as we tend to use Google anyway, you can speak straight into a Google document, and it will write in for you whatever you want to and exactly for what Allister said there, you know, because you can speak a lot quicker. And as long as your thoughts are clear, and you know what you're going on about. It's brilliant to use, it's so fast that it can pick up, the mistakes are ridiculously low. What surprised me when I first started using it, is just getting email, copy down, getting your thoughts down for a blog post, anything that you need to do, it's just so rapid. And I'm not the quickest typer as Alistair will probably tell you. So it helps when you know, you can suddenly just speak at the speed that you normally speak.

Alastair Cole 8:19

And I'd add that it isn't just about pace. When you use these voice grabbing tools, you're able to actually put the keyboard down, kind of sit back in the chair, lean back a bit and actually take some time to think about how you would phrase that message or how you rephrase that paragraph in the document. And actually, a lot of writing coaches teach us to try and write the way we speak. And so if you're speaking voice in or Google typing of Google or Google Voice typing, your content is going to be much more natural, much more the way that you would speak which is easier on the reader and easier on the listener. And then we love using those two, that's a great way for us to get content down on paper really quickly. And once you've got it down there, we use tools like otter.ai to crunch a huge chunks of text and turn that into transcriptions from sessions like this, but also to pull out sections and basically crunch that that big chunk of data, all those words and then we pass that on to other tools as well. You're a big fan of Grammarly. Kiran Yep.

Kiran Gill 9:34

So the great thing about Grammarly is if you're, if you have to create content, and most salespeople know did because we were moving away from a place where salespeople tend to just sell that if you're if you're actively on social media or on social, you know, on LinkedIn or wherever you are, you're probably creating content in some such way and and a lot of sellers I can see now are probably doing both a business development kind of product acting job where they're developing content, they're also they're also selling traditionally trying to do the parts that we have to do in selling. And the great thing about Grammarly is that if you're uncertain about your copy, it's brilliant for quickly checking over your copy to make sure that you know, you've got another pair of eyes when they're not in the room, making sure your copy is right. And the great thing about Grammarly is it's, it plugs into a majority of your tools that you're going to have out there. So it's constantly checking your copy, whether it's an email, whether you're writing a direct message or wherever you are, just to make sure that you know everything that you're doing is, you know, makes kind of sense. You can turn it off and on. Sometimes it can be a little bit finicky. Like all AI tools. It works really well with voicing, as well. That's a nice one where you combine them both together. So you're speaking and automatically Grammarly at the end of the paragraph is pointing out what's grammatically wrong with that, to try to make it more into a piece of copy that you can use instantaneously.

Alastair Cole 11:02

Yeah, and though it's about combining those tools together, like you've just said, so, you know, we'll use voice typing, we'll use artistic transcriptions. We'll feed that into Grammarly back into Google Docs to check for any other errors. And then out it goes. So yes, we will provide a full list of tools in the show notes for today. But we've covered Google Voice Typing and we've covered voice in otter.ai Grammarly. And another one that's really helpful actually, for capturing staff is Google Lens or similar kind of tool. If you've sketched out some notes during a session, or two or three pieces of a4, actually, Google Lens can be incredibly helpful. I've got an example here where I was making some notes recently. And here I've taken a photo on the left hand side, I've tapped the lens button. In the second frame, I'm tapping on select text, the AI is then pulling out all the copy that it can read. And these are my atrociously handwritten notes and on the right hand side, it will start to make that list for you. So that's only taken 30 seconds. And you've already got the bones of what you've written out. Obviously, if you've got something printed, you know letters or printed copy on text, some lens is unbelievably accurate, pulling that copy and giving you a kind of Head Start to get going. So lots of different ways there are for collecting your thoughts and getting down on paper. Section two, the second way that you can use AI, to boost sales is about crafting. captivating copy, okay. And the reason I've alliterated there is because actually that is one of the ways that you can use AI, you can you can brief it, to create great titles that are alliterative, and lots of other lots of other small ways. And we use it to create captivating copy for short form content. And for long form content. Kevin John took us through the process that you go on for the creation of social media posts,

Kiran Gill 13:07

yeah, potentially. So we'll still do the whole kind of, you know, we'll go through a process but we're not abandoning everything. So the way I like to use AI is trying to make up for my shortcomings. So you know, there are going to be places where I'm using AI as a crutch. Realistically, I'm not asking it to do my job, what I'm asking you to do is to help me out where I'm getting kind of stuck or where I may need to speed things up slightly or even exponentially. So I find the task easier to do. So the great thing to do is if you've got an idea for let's say a blog post or anywhere, you can easily go from using voice in where you're you're speaking in about your idea, you could speak that idea straight into Jacci chat GPT what will then start to making some kind of answer out of it. So your prompt in there will then start coming out with certain parts of that whole kind of blog post that you can then take away from there and put it straight into Grammarly will then start correcting all the language behind it. Now remember you are using these tools, this is still you so is your thoughts the way you want to think now you're not going to go into charge GPT and just say hey, write me a blog post about seven ways to do AI and make it fun and make it also if you do that fine, you can get away with it. However, I want to keep it authentic. I want to use AI where I can use it to make myself better and make myself quicker and use tools where I'm using technology to speed up the process. So that's the way I tend to use it when it comes to content creation. However, the idea of the content is still coming from a brainstorming that Alyssa and I'll do at the start of the month where we will come up with a visa for the ideas for this month and I'll use AI or I'll use technology to speed that process up.

Alastair Cole 14:58

Yeah, fantastic at And you talked about those prompts, right, and a lot of people have got in touch and asked about how deep we're gonna get into prompt to prompt engineering. We're not going to go super deep today. That is something we could cover off later for, for chatty beauty and other large language models and other generative AI image creation tools. But certainly, it's about refining your prompt, right, so the more information you can give to the large language model, and the more specific you can be in the prompt about what is the background of the blog post article, for example, where it came, where the idea came from, what you're hoping that the benefits will be for somebody reading that article. And so you can be very specific about those prompts, including asking me for a range of different titles that may be alliterative or snazzy. And the hashtags that might go without any supporting information. And gradually over time, as you build up your kind of reserve your your databank of prompts that have worked, you'll keep expanding on it until you've got one that is incredibly powerful that you're able to feed in these ideas that Karen talked about, that we've captured, through voice in and then have Chechi fatigue, go and look at a particular topic, and pull back a whole raft of information, not just a blog post, but all the supporting content that goes with it that's needed to be pushed out. And so we use that for long form creation as well, not just for individual blog posts, but also as the basis of creating larger white papers. So how a piece of documentation should be broken down into the sections and the subsections. And use that to create a framework for us from which we can build. So really, I think check GBT probably is the main one we're using for writing, long form and short form, copy our take care. And that's that fair?

Kiran Gill 17:04

Yeah, I've messed around a bit. Is it the one from Google? I found that very similar to the GPT chat bit, but I've become very easy. It's very easy with chat GPT, especially now that you can put in your parameters in the settings and you can kind of give it a starter of who you are. So you can already say, you know, I'm a 50 year old sales coach living in Austria, who is amazing and wants to write in British English and wants answers to be so you can give it already these kinds of prompts beforehand. So you can put that into your setting so that when you do go into a language or go into a kind of speech, or the kind of answer you're looking for, it's already going to answer you in the way that it's expecting you to look at it. So that's the great thing with chat, GBT. It's moving on very, very quickly, you know. And yeah, that seems to be the one that I tend to use as and when I need to.

Alastair Cole 18:04

So there you go. using AI to craft captivating copy. The third of our seven is about painting a powerful picture we've used daily. Before the third one was hidden behind the paywall on ChatGPT we've been using the journey from the beginning. And my journey is absolutely fantastic. I'm showing a screenshot of how we use it. He'll split the screen in half on the left hand side. It is my journey. You need to have created a discord account because the majority sits on top of discord or certainly that's the way we use it. And then on the right hand side, I've got a blank page where I'm iterating, evolving and improving prompts as they go on and then pasting them from there into mid journey. On the left hand side, you can see the bottom one “Photograph of a yucca plant in a dark wooden pot on a plain white background. Hyper realistic maximal detail”. And those elements are ones that we've learned over the last 12 plus months about how they work, the reason there's a hashtag on the end. So that makes it easy for me to go and search for the results that I've had over the last few months. And you can see the search panel here on the right hand side. So because I've tagged everything with hash SLC my initials, I can search in that panel on the right, and you'll immediately get your images back. And magenta is fantastic because if you use the new buttons you can upscale and really the two that we use all the time to kind of modify the images. Once we found that we like to zoom out to use the two times zoom function where you've got a nice picture. It's great, but Mitch only tends to fill it right to the edges of the frame. And so you can zoom out twice to pull back and then when you found the one that you like, you can use the upscale button in To get a high definition image that you can extract, and you can feed that any kind of kind of creative prompts you like, including your brand colours in hex values, or RGB, and get images that are absolutely perfect for your creative campaign. So you can use AI to paint a powerful picture. The fourth one is about preparing, prioritising and planning. And we use AI all the time for planning. How do you use it? Planning ahead of your sales meetings, Karen,

Kiran Gill 20:32

just to go back you were so geeking out hex colours, or prompts with hashtags. Oh, you loved it. You look honestly, deaf, ladies and gentlemen, this is where he lives. That's his thing. When it comes to mid journey, all the beautiful pictures that you ever see that we're posting of Alice's prompts coming to it, he is an absolute wizard that you can tell that he's on his point. Sorry, coming back to where we are? What's the next

Alastair Cole 21:00

part? So prepare, prioritise and plan right, we use it for meeting preparation and tell us how do you how are you using AI to prepare for meeting

Kiran Gill 21:10

Okay, so the big thing that I'm using AI there is I use otters in meetings. So I tend to be the point of contact while trying to be a point of contact when it comes to our sales function. So when we're doing customer meetings, and when we're liaising with customers, and all the kinds of work that we do with customers, and the great thing with Otter is that you can actually be engaged with the customer on a lot of my calls or video calls, the vast majority. So the thing that happens, there is auto in the background is just collecting all of those notes. So I don't actually have to, you know, move away from the conversation, I can actually see what Otto is doing in the background, taking then otter away from there, and then you can put that into chat GPT, to summarise that, that that actual poll call. Yeah. What's brilliant, so you can summarise it very quickly.

Alastair Cole 22:02

Yeah, it's awesome. And then ahead of the meeting, we're using it to, to research individual companies, research their field, look at who's and then combine that with Google Advanced Google searches to look into whose published news. In that industry recently, we'll ask Chad GVT what are the top five challenges that that industry is having right now? What are the top five problems about businesses growing in that industry? And what are the top five topics that have bubbled to the surface in the last 12 months, so that we've got our finger on the pulse about what companies are facing, what obstacles they're facing, and how we can help them overcome them. And we're also using it for a lot of lead generation. So taking lists of startups that are out there, you know, top 10 startups in Germany, and cop scraping the copy, copying the content of that page, and feeding that into GPT. And asking it to produce a tabular output of all those companies. And from the article, including the URL and so that we were able to create, I think in a couple of hours, we were able to pull together a 300 strong list of target companies with potential contact people and potential email addresses that need to be checked. So we're using it for a lot of preparation for lead gen as well. Let's keep cracking. Number five, the fifth way that you can use AI is to solve complex problems. And we're using it for a lot of strategy and ideation, we're actually using it for our 360 product. So as Kevin talked about using otter, for capturing our meeting notes and the meeting content itself, the audio meeting will then feed that into chapter 80. And we feed in with it our 360 framework, and the way that we score startups in maturity across 52 areas. And we have the AI feed back to us and give us its thoughts on where that company might score across the board and what its recommendations would be. They're not always right. And obviously we have to work, we have to improve them and add where the holes are. But we're working in collaboration with AI to solve a big problem, which is, you know, how is the startup doing right now in terms of its sales function, and what should it do in the next 12 months to improve? So lots of focus on solving complex problems. The sixth area AI can help accelerate sales is invest is by investigating or you should investigate some dedicated sales tools that have aI built in and we've got two or three now that Cubans going to talk you through what's the first one my friend

Kiran Gill 24:53

The first one I would say is apollo.io. It goes under that it's a. It's a, basically, a tool that will help you do email sequencing, and also research companies. So it sits in the background, it's called Apollo, it's free, there's a free to use kind of model up to a point. And then, and then there's a paywall, that will take you on to the next level. What Apollo uses is AI in its use, it's using it in the place of, I think, from chat GPT, where it's helping you personalise emails in your sequences to prepare them and to send them out as email sequences. It's very good. And there's especially I've been using it for a few months now. It has a lot of features in there, like a lot of these new CRMs and sequencing tools. So that's my first one that I would, I would say, have a look at if you're not looking for something that does that. It's very similar to HubSpot, HubSpot, and there are other sequencing tools out there. I just like this one is the one that I've become accustomed to. But it's also the one I'm seeing that is using AI probably the most at the moment, when it comes to those tools that I've used recently. The next one I would turn around to us and say is crystal.ai crystals a little bit different here. crystal.ai is a personality assessment tool. So it sits again as a browser plugin into your Chrome. And as you're scanning through people's LinkedIn, this is on here. This is what I did earlier. Ladies and gentlemen, here's Alice's and what you'll see on the right hand side, as you will pop up, it will scan Alice's LinkedIn profile. Now remember, it's only as good as the LinkedIn profile that he's looking at. But what is there doing, it's doing an assessment, and it will give me a kind of a scope of how I should approach Alastair if he's a cold prospect, what is the way what should I be should I be, you know, cautious this stuff, and it will give you these, it's very, very good. It's very expensive, though, there's a three paywall, however, it gets quite expensive quite quickly. But if you are in this high end enterprise selling mode, it's probably a little expensive compared to what it is. So you've got to look at what the cost of your tool is in your sales cycle. And finally, I would bring us back to our tools ourselves. As a revenue coach, we call it the RC revenue coach itself. Revenue coach is a tool that helps you sell in the actual deal itself. So it's helping you do your deal qualification process. It's there picking up points that you're doing, where a revenue coach is using AI, it's using it in his coaching copy. And it's also using it as I think it's using in his voice sensitization of the coach itself. So I think it's AWS. Polly, Is it understood?

Alastair Cole 27:42

You're kicking yourself there, my friend? Yes, it's AWS, Polly. Thanks, three, three more great tools. And like we said at the start, we'll put all of these tools and list them out of the URLs in the show notes at the end of this session. And the seventh and final area AI can help is, is about being experimental, right. And I would encourage you, you know, AI, like all things that come along, that are new new practices, you can't just pick them up overnight, you have to build some muscle, you have to get some experience, you have to play with it. And so, so take the opportunity when you get it to, to experiment, and everybody is building this now, I'm sure you've all seen in LinkedIn and now offer you in the bottom left hand corner on this post that I've written a rewrite with AI. So I would say, you know, assuming you've got that copy, written somewhere else, press the button, pressed press the show me what is going to do with AI, you can always revert back to your original version before you send but but take the advantage when you're offered it see what's happening, you will see the evolution the improvement of AI functions in your favourite tools as they start to get rolled in and more of that function becomes available across the entire the entire spectrum of what's possible in in sales. And that really is a state of mind, you know, it's about staying curious and having a play. And that is the only way that you will build experience, say at the cutting edge and be able to maximise the use of AI. And I'd add that what we've shown today is just a snapshot of the way that we're using it across the board in these seven areas. Are there other ways you can do it and things are moving at such a pace that I'm sure we are already outdated in the way that we're operating? But nonetheless we're looking at what's coming around the corner. We're playing with it. And as Kevin said in revenue coach, you know, we are actively building some of the very latest functionality through the API access that we have to check GPT and our revenue coach platform so we're seeing some very exciting developments. Right at the top of the call, we talked about how we've got this data about how different industries are using In AI in sales, and we were able to get that information through the last six months worth of US engaging, almost 50 startups in our 360 degree sales diagnostic, which is a 75 minute meeting, you get a personalised 25 page report, some of it supported by AI, creating recommendations, and and then a presentation and question at the end. And if you're interested in the 360, or learning more, you want to see the road head clearly for your startup, then head over to the partnership.com forward slash 360. Our next live event is next year. This is the last one for this year. We are very excited to have talent strategy expert Louisa military with us. I'll be interviewing her on Tuesday, the ninth of January. So if you're coming join us if you in any way are in need of help, either with a strategy, or the actual hiring of talent into your startup in 2024. If you're looking to grow, you should come and listen to Louisa and her tips on how to find and keep the best talent. Any last thoughts from you, Karen, before we wrap it up.

Kiran Gill 31:12

Mainly just just think about the tools that you're going to be bringing in. You know, AI is there to assist. Like I said, it's coming along. If you're using a basic CRM, the functionalities are coming in. The major thing to do is wherever you're bringing in in wherever you if you're seriously thinking about bringing in AI, do your homework, and reach out to experts if you can, because you don't want to be wasting time on tools that sometimes sound amazing, but when you get into them, they end up causing more harm than they do good.

Alastair Cole 31:44

Yeah, I'd say keep experimenting and don't don't be worried if you feel like you haven't got a Scooby Doo. Get Started do something small go to church, you've searched for chat GPT and or mid journey and go through discord just start having a play. So we'll share all the lists of all the tools, we'll share some example prompts, and hopefully you'll get some value out of that. So we're out of time. We're wrapping up there. Thank you for your expertise Kiran and your company. Thanks very much, everybody. Bye bye, everyone.

Kiran Gill 32:21

Happy holidays.

Alastair Cole 32:22

Happy holidays. Bye bye.