10 AI Tools for Sales: Power Up Your Process

Automated Transcript

Alastair Cole 0:08

Hello everyone, good afternoon, and welcome to The Sales Scoop. This is a fortnightly live show for tech startup founders and sales leaders who want to improve how they sell. Every episode, we bring you the shiniest pearls of wisdom from experienced sellers, and tackle the hottest topics in the world of tech startup sales. I'm Alastair Cole, your host for today, and a co-founder of The Uplift Partnership. I'm an ex-software engineer, and computer scientist with two decades experience in B2B sales, and marketing. And I'm delighted today to say that I'm joined by my co-founder…

Kiran Gill 0:52

Good afternoon, everybody. My name is Kiran Gill. I am also a co-founder of The Uplift Partnership with 25 years of experience in business development, and sales operations working in both in tech, and in banking.

Alastair Cole 1:07

And with our co-founder, CTO Douglas, we are The Uplift Partnership - we accelerate sales for tech startups. And this week's very exciting show is ‘10 AI Tools for Sales’ that will help you ‘Power Up Your Pipeline’. So welcome, everybody. Hi, Kiran. Great to see you, my friend.

Kiran Gill 1:28

Good to be here. Again, Alistair. So it's good to see you. As

Alastair Cole 1:32

I said, we accelerate sales to tech startups. And we're different because we build and sell SAS ourselves. So we understand your world. And our impact in the last five years working with over 50 startups has been positive in a lot of areas. And before we dive into our our top 10 tools, the background we want to set is just the amount of effort that is required today for founders in sales or the sales leaders. And we have a magic number of a formula that my co founder here has put together how many sales actions are you anticipating founders need to deliver each each month my friend

Kiran Gill 2:20

had? Well, when we sat down and we looked at the mathematics of what it needs to be to try to get sales across the road. And depending on where you are, and what you're selling, the numbers might be slightly different, but around 618 sales actions per month need to be done. Now. That also includes meetings and other things. It doesn't mean you're doing 690 meetings, we're talking about emails, LinkedIn messages, it could be social posting, or commenting on social posts. These are all sales actions. And depending on where people are in the sales process, or where they are in their buyers journey, you're going to be doing different actions. And then a great way of doing that is by recording what you're doing. And if you are doing around about 618 a month, I'll tell you this now the chances are you're going to be successful. Because that shows positive activity. If you see, you see yourself coming under that number. And let's say in your day, you're only doing maybe a handful, you might realise that that might not be enough for you to actually be successful at what you're trying to do.

Alastair Cole 3:27

And that might feel like a daunting number. But AI is here to help, technology is here to help and Gartner put out some research at the end of last year suggesting that sellers could find extra 27% bandwidth from using the right mix of AI tools. And you know, that's fantastic they AI is able to help in that area in terms of improving efficiency, it can also improve on quality and 87% of buyers, According to Forrester expecting to be delighted both before and after the purchase, you know, almost 90% You know the pressure is on for the highest quality content. So, as well as improving efficiency AI is also able and through things like hyper personalised outreach to improve the quality of your sales function. So lots of reasons to be on board with AI. We're going to go straight into our top 10 now and we're going to run through from the more cold end of sales, starting with kind of email, cold outreach all the way down to the warmer end at the end of the 10 with kind of images and dynamic video creation. And so without further ado, we're gonna dive into number one, which I'm gonna let my co-founder here introduce.

Kiran Gill 4:48

So this is apollo.io. They've got plenty of AI features within the actual Apollo kind of software itself. Now for those of you You don't know what Apollo is, it is primary, I wouldn't call it a primary email software that is there to help you enhance your kind of email outreach. So this is normally cold outreach, but it also you can use it while you're still contacting people, it's a great way of understanding whether people are opening emails, whether your emails are going into the right place, whether they've been bounced spam, whatever is happening out there, it's a great way to use these tools. So I prefer to use Apollo myself, I have been using it now for over a year. If anyone asks me, I tend to push them that way, there's functionality within Apollo is that it actually you can build your own list of your clients or your prospects within Paulo and you can build sequences around those lists. It integrates with LinkedIn very effectively. And it's easy to use both platforms together. It also integrates in with HubSpot, but makes it very easy to push your prospects from one platform to the other, and saving on time and effort. So all those integrations you would expect this from one of the major players at the AI functionality, what we have in there, it's mainly sequencing. It's helping you to write emails, it also helps you it will ask you questions when you're setting yourself up at stars, where it will then build you a sequence of emails, depending on what you're doing in your cold outreach. So it will help you as a first template to say, Okay, we've got our product, these are our challenges, these are the pain points. And these are the benefits of our product. And from that information, it will then start scripting emails, and because of the functionality in the background, and because of Apollo's kind of list of where they're getting all their email data from, that you're able to then target the people that you really want to. So once you know your ICP, it'll score your ICP for you. And then it will then help you make sure that the email is verified, you can find that LinkedIn is also connected in there, you can check the person out, make sure it's the right person send this cold email initially, put them into a sequence and wait for them to respond, hopefully, through this process. The great functionality here is once that person does respond to you, within the platform itself, it actually has a calendar that they can then book themselves from the Apollo side, while also having a video. Sorry, it's not a video, it's more of a What is a tech script writer for you, that will then link into your video call. And you will then script or describe your entire meetings for you. So loads of functionality there. The AI capability is really good. And when I've used it, it does make sense. However, you will use all generative AI. The chances are sometimes you have to look over the script and rewrite it. That's number one.

Alastair Cole 8:00

Thank you. Fantastic may, you know it's super helpful, and really powerful. And I think what's interesting with some of these examples that we're pulling out, they're not just people who are tools that have bolted check TBD on the side, that isn't going to take it anywhere as a demo was out there. But Apollo really thought about it obviously. The second one we want to dive into is moving into the world of LinkedIn. We're here live on LinkedIn. Now. It's an absolutely critical area for sales, especially b2b sales. And the second platform we want to pick up on is vos, Rob, and Annika in Manchester, built a cracking platform that is a comprehensive content creation, management and analytics platform that we're using to not just schedule our posts, right, we've used buffer and other things in the past, but vault is able to support with the creation of posts. But more importantly, they have a kind of content theme builder. You can start to put your themes in there, tailor it to create short, medium and longer term posts. So there's a really, really powerful theme content theme feature they have there. And also an article summarises so it's a much more comprehensive approach to creating content for LinkedIn, which is really great. We've used other platforms similar to vaults in the past. One of the things I like most is that the UI seems to be updated regularly. It's absolutely scintillating, easy to use, and just really smooth. So that's about all stop.co. And let's keep cracking we'll stay in the world of LinkedIn and move into our our third platform, which is

Kiran Gill 9:48

this is one that we've spoken about before or featured before in one of our earlier. earlier webinars, webinars. Podcasts I called were getting things mixed up. Sally dot Pro, you can find this one. Ladies and gentleman, Sally dot pro spoke about it. Like I said before, however the great thing about Sally is it's continuously updating with new features. And again, a small team based out of Malaga, Volodymyr and Anna, who are out there and Bogdan are the people in the background. These guys are constantly updating and putting new features on there. What is Sally dot Pro, it is an extension to your LinkedIn kind of platform. So what it does is it works through Google grid. So Chrome, it'll attach in as an extension. And then what it'll do will help you hyper personalise your messaging using chat GPT 4.0, they have a free version. So you can try it, it's 3.5 I honestly think you should try it because it really does help you. I was explaining it to a person a few days ago, it's what it is where you have these other LinkedIn tools that tend to be automated, automated and do kind of what you call a very slight personalization, where it's just changing the name and maybe the company name. The great thing about salary dot Pro, it is hyper personalised. So what it is, it's looking at the person that you're going to be sending that message to, and then writing a connection request that is hyper personalised to that person. So the likelihood and the percentages that I've been told by our friends at Sally dot Pro is over 60% to 70% connection request acceptance, compared to normally these tools are looking around about 25%. So it's more like a shotgun or sorry, more like a rifle than a machine gun when it comes to the approach. So for those of you who are looking to really get connected with somebody that is a perfect ICP it is the tool for you to use.

Alastair Cole 11:59

Awesome, thanks, my friend. That's number three. The fourth we want to choose is where we are now. So LinkedIn linkedin.com, you know, we're using this obviously very, very heavily live right now. But also using all their features that come out. You know, I've been playing with experimenting with the rewrite with AI, you get at the bottom of posts, I don't always use what LinkedIn offers. In fact, I rarely do. But certainly I haven't generated posts and I have a look at the kind of quality and how it's developing over time. I think that's an important part of staying abreast of what's going on, which is to take the opportunity when offered by platforms to go and have a look at their latest features and what they're doing, what they're doing next. What about UK and your thoughts on on LinkedIn

Kiran Gill 12:56

improved for those of us who are in social selling mode. And I think most companies have to have some kind of social selling kind of functionality within their company. LinkedIn is the go to place for b2b. So one thing if you're going to be selling on LinkedIn, your profile needs to read and look like somebody wants to connect with you. So if you're going to use something like Sally dot Pro, it's no no use having a great tool that can write you a great kind of connection request, if your actual profile looks weak and isn't well written. Great thing about LinkedIn now with AI aid actually, and if you are on premium, and it is a premium functionality. For those of you on basic, you won't see this. However, what you could do theoretically, if you've never taken premium before, is join up for the two month free trial, use the AI functionality to improve your actual, your profile, and then turn it off. And that way you don't have to pay anything. However, you still get the full functionality of making sure that your profile looks perfect and will be better. I wouldn't say it's perfect. And again, like Alice has already said here. Always be careful of what it's saying. You know, you have to reread it to think actually does that make sense? And is that how I should? Is that really me? So double check, but it's a great place to start. I definitely would use it to help me improve my, my, and my actual profile. So

Alastair Cole 14:31

Okay, wonderful. Number. The next one in the list is chatting GPT you know, which I'm sure everybody on the call has heard about. There's no question that we'll be using, everybody's bolting it into their products at the moment. And there's lots of different ways this can be used in sales. I would say one of the ways that I'm finding it very helpful is kind of the icing on the cake or going from an 80% to a 95 I've percent kind of score or quality when producing documents. So for example, we'll have to change the t create numerous buyer personas are ICPs, or buying journeys for, for an individual target market and accompany. And while there's a good chance that you've used what it comes back with, you'll have already nailed or covered 80%. Often by rerunning those prompts and having it create more information, you'll find something that possibly you missed. So we're using it for for that in a strong way to support sales strategy, fleshing out, even value propositions, ideal customer profiles, a buyer personas, buying journeys, everything that's part of the sales strategy by engaging changing beauty and asking those feedback on that you're getting a much kind of broader picture and lay able to lay out all those answers on the desk and then make sure that you're you're covering less which is what, covering more salvage, which is what helps you move from kind of 80% quality up into the mid 90s. Nothing is left out. Care and what about you and any how you use chat GBT in the sales world.

Kiran Gill 16:17

I've revolutionised the way I work. I've got to say when Alastair first showed me, chat, GBT, I was blown away by what this thing could do. And it's just getting stronger. It really does help when it comes to writing blog posts. So for those of you who aren't articulate, like myself, sometimes, you will get stuck for ideas, it's so easy to go into GPT and just help yourself . Keep your social profile that by and again, you are an expert in your field. But sometimes you need to start off something and it's a great place to start, I will never use its content straight, straight from the box and put it straight into something. What it's helping me is, it helps me try to get my understanding of what I'm trying to do with this, or a topic and I'm using it mainly for those blog posts. However, like Alice's said, I can see where it can help very quickly with value propositions, I can see where the value is there. When it comes to building buyer personas and getting these things done. Again, you must be an expert. You need to understand what a value proposition needs to read like in the first place. So just asking you for a value proposition and you have no understanding where our value proposition is, you don't know whether it's right or wrong. However, if it throws out 10 Different versions for me for one particular product, I can then start morphing these into something that kind of thing kind of sounds like something I want it to sound like. So it's an amazing tool, and it's going from strength to strength. Do you know if this is 4.0? I've heard rumours about 5.0. And that is going to be awesome when it does come. Another

Alastair Cole 18:02

The area that we use it for is for meeting preparation. So we've kind of boiled down to asking it three questions. So if we're about to go and have an initial meeting, or with a prospect, then we'll go and ask to change CBT for lists, right? I want a list of the 10 challenges in that industry. And it'll, it'll churn them out, maybe we'll ask it for another 10. Then after the challenges, we'll say what are the 10 biggest opportunities in that market. And again, you'll get a fantastic list. And then finally, what are the kind of like 10 areas of best practice, when you've got the challenges, opportunities and best practices within an industry and you're sitting down for that initial meeting, you're immediately ahead of the curve up to speed and I've got some interesting talking points with that prospect. So a really powerful meeting prep to continue the meeting vibe. Our next one is otter.ai, which I'm sure you're familiar with. otter is a way to automatically record meeting notes. By inviting it to a meeting as an assistant. We also use it when we're updating our videos . Like recording of today's show, or podcast episode, we'll use it to transcribe content really quickly. And it seems to be going from strength to strength or to keep adding new features. The way that it's summarised is now what's happened in the meeting with actions, and it is really getting very, very powerful so and so powerful that we've been using it now for about six months to support our 360 sales diagnostic tool. So we'll sit down with a client for 90 minutes, record the whole session. And then we feed the transcript of that session in to get to get that back from otter and then we're feeding that interchange GBT with our 360 framework and having the AI come up with a kind of initial, initial score and initial thoughts on on how they're doing And then we'll go into it ourselves by hand to otter really helpful for recordings really helpful for meetings. Kevin, I know you have some examples in this space.

Kiran Gill 20:12

Yes, those. Yeah. So just the same thing with Alastair Cole, when it comes through, I've done so many meetings with client meetings where I used to have to scribe my own meeting notes. And I was always in this world where I'm half trying to pay attention to the client. And I'm also writing at the same time where you can't really do both things . Or, you know, back in the day, we used to send two people to meetings, occasionally, one would be scribing, while the other one was the one engaging with the client. So these things used to happen in enterprise settings. However, the great thing about otter, now it really does allow you to engage with the client fully where auto will take it. Now, a local player for those who want to keep towards Europe, and not go towards those big tech companies out in America is eric.ai. And they offer a free version. So if you have a chance, they also have another tool called emma.ai. That is a meeting scheduler that will if you've those of you who are on the road, who need to know you're going from point A to point B, it will actually help you schedule your meetings in your calendar to make sure that you've got enough travel time, for those of you still travelling to meetings. And I know, you know, sometimes I do. Such amazing tools. And again, these are two UK based local tech SAS platforms, and we shouldn't be supporting them. So please have a look at those two. I'm using them, then we're not getting anything back from them for endorsing them. But I think we should support homegrown tech if we can. Sorry, that was my righteousness. So that's ai

Alastair Cole 21:53

n ml.ai. Really great. And if we continue on the kind of the voice vibe, right with auto transcribing as as does. Eric, I want to pick out the next one, which for me is an absolute game changer, which is Google Voice typing, which is available in Google Docs and Google Slides and the Google search engine as well. But in Docs and slides, all you have to do is tap Ctrl Shift S and in Google Docs, the microphone will come on and you can just talk into Google Docs. And in slides, if you Shift Ctrl S or turn it on in Google Slides, then you'll be talking into the presenter notes field. And this is real , I mean, this is absolutely phenomenal. Because for a couple of reasons. Firstly, we speak three times the speed we write so you're immediately saving a ton of time by voting by using voice typing. The other real benefit that it has is that sometimes we you know, we get stuck, I can feel myself getting stuck about what to say and actually turning on the voice typing and just taking a few steps around or looking, you know, looking out the window, you're able to type or write something in the way that you'd speak it, which is just a much more natural way of doing things. So Google Voice typing, absolutely brilliant. You can get it in Google Docs, and Google Slides. And while we're on the speed of voice, let's, let's pick the number eight, which is an app called read aloud. This work has a mobile app, a native mobile app for your phone and also a Chrome extension for your browser and others you can get the various versions that read aloud or app. This will read back to you the webpage that you're looking at right you're doing the washing up or something else if you're somebody that enjoys audiobooks, right, you'll know that that is a really easy way to consume information, read aloud screen reader of some kind like this. And obviously to consume that content really, really quickly. You know, web pages are often covered in adverts or notifications or distractions and the screener used to just strip that all out and give you just the high quality content and actually when you've got rid of all those distractions we're able to consume information very quickly. Number nine, the last two are in in more creative world number nine is mid journey mid journey which you have to access to Discord is a really powerful they have a free version, a really powerful way of creating images based on a text prompt. And this might not feel like a kind of classic sales tool but actually the ability to add a kind of personalised or a handcrafted to a certain degree, you know front cover to a proposal or images in Say that proposal is very, very powerful, because majority will create the subject of your post right in the middle of the picture with very high quality, resolution. And it's just a great way to, to augment and add great visuals for free into your proposals. And then the last one of the 10. I've skipped over another favourite of mine, I just want to mention which is also very useful in the image well, which is remove.bg. Right, if you've got a picture of maybe one of your colleagues or a picture you find online or something that is mostly there, you just need to remove the background, you go to remove.bg, it's completely free, you can get a decent resolution, you can pay for super high resolution. But if you need to remove the background and drop that the majority are the main focus on that image into a pretzel checkout remove.bg. It's one of the tools that I use on a most regular basis. It's absolutely fantastic. And I'm our 10th tool today. The AI tool is Hey Jen, which creates personalised videos using the range of avatars they have and the voices. And hey, Jen is just a brilliant way to create a whole range of video content, we use it to support our revenue coach.ai platform by creating learning content, so we'll have some of our slides in there, we'll have an avatar, go and talk through various training modules. And Nokia and you've been investigating or have some experience of using in other ways as well. So please, elaborate.

Kiran Gill 26:43

So it's a great way of using it for customer success. So you've brought somebody on to your company, you want to keep them engaged on your tool and make sure that they're getting value for money. And they might they're using all the functionality, because obviously retaining them as a client is very important. And hey, Jen is a great way of getting a professional kind of actor to do those things where it might take you several takes to do it yourself or maybe even longer. The great thing about hey, journeys, and yes, it, you know, once you look at it, you can look like it is artificial, it is artificial intelligence. However, it does an amazing job of doing that very, very quickly, and makes it look very professional. So for those of you who have got the SAS platform, you have to do customer retention, I'm sure you're probably using something like this, but if you're not, this is a game changer, it will save you radical amounts of time, you can put scripts in there, and you can put different kinds of accents, different types of avatars, you can really mess around with it to really get the kind of feel that you want. Whether it's casual clothes, business clothes, you know, old people, young people, male, female, wherever it is, they've got an avatar that fits your kind of world, and then obviously voice as well. So if you want the person to have an Australian accent, or a South African accent, you can really mess around with it in the sense of getting that voice that sounds more like your company that you don't have to go for this standardised American Californian voice that unfortunately, not all of us have.

Alastair Cole 28:12

So those are the 10. Those are our top 10 AI tools. We've sprinkled in a few other favourites that we like, personally that we use on a regular basis. If you want you know, we could do a session on each one of those a deep dive. If you've got any questions about any of those tools, anything we show, you can drop a question or a comment in LinkedIn or you can find us on LinkedIn, reach out to us. That's a lot of tools, right and a lot of information. And we know that being overwhelmed by tech is bad, those who are overwhelmed by too many platforms achieve a 43% lower quota than those who are able to harness tech positively. So we're not advocating go and turn all these things on immediately. You'll be swamped, it'd be terrible. But if you are, you know, if you are interested in a deeper dive on them, then reach out to us. One of the ways that we're able to support tech startups with their choice of technology. The choice of platform is through our 360 sales diagnostic, which during which we do score tech startups in seven core areas of sales. And underneath those seven areas, there are 52 metrics where we give a score and that rolls up to an overall score for your business. The 360 delivers a full score and breakdown bespoke recommendations and revenue roadmap, you can get more of the uplift partnership.com forward slash 360. You can see here an example of the overall score, how that's broken down, how the recommendations come through with traffic lights on each of the 52 metrics, and then your overall dashboard showing progress over the last 90 days. So that's it for us. If you're interested, contact us on LinkedIn. And really all that's left to talk about our next show. Tuesday, the sixth of August, two weeks today, we'll be doing another live sales scoop this time on the five sales foundations for 2025. You might be heading out for some summer fun, we're going to be here, pushing those. Those five pillars. You know, this has been a very technical session. And actually, it's important to experiment with new technology at the same time, you have to be doing the basics right, my friend, we've got to come back to the basics. So that's what we're going to be delivering here on LinkedIn in two weeks time. Really all's left for me, we're out of time to say thank you very much, Kiran, for your time, my friend. Appreciate it.

Kiran Gill 30:54

Thank you very much. Good to be here.

Alastair Cole 30:57

And thanks, everybody. Bye for now.

Kiran Gill 31:02

See you soon.

Alastair Cole 31:03

Bye bye.