How AI is Changing B2B Sales - What You Need to Know for 2025

Automated Transcript

Alastair Cole 0:00

Hello, good afternoon, and welcome to The Sales Scoop. This is a weekly show for tech business founders who want to improve how they sell. My name is Alastair Cole, and I'm your host for today. I'm joined by my good friend and business partner, Kiran Gill. Good afternoon. Kiran,

Kiran Gill 0:20

Good afternoon. Alastair, hello everybody. My name is Kiran Gill and co-founder of The Uplift Partnership.

Alastair Cole 0:27

Thank you. We've got a very exciting topic on our hands for today's show, how AI is changing sales, loads of great content to get through, which is why we're just going to crack straight into it. If you're following us live on LinkedIn, then you can leave us some comments. You can ask us questions in real time, so feel free to do that. We'll see if we can get on to those at the end of the show today . Like I said about AI changing sales and a very interesting piece of news just this week, Mark Benioff came out and said that Salesforce would not be hiring any coders this year. Whether that's true or not, we'll see, but he's wanted to hire 2000 or more sales people in order to articulate the benefits of AI to potential customers of Salesforce. So it's just exploding. It's everywhere, isn't it, isn't it Kiran?

Kiran Gill 1:35

It is, and especially when it comes to sales, and marketing, you can see how everything, within two years has just changed so rapidly. So it's not surprising that Salesforce are coming out with these kind of, you know, very bullish demands at the start of 2025 to make sure that the rest of the tech kind of cohort of companies suddenly understand that they're they're going to be serious this year about AI and how they're going to attack the market going forward.

Alastair Cole 2:03

Yeah, it's absolutely fascinating. It's literally everywhere, literally everywhere in sales. And we've done some research into it, and we've assessed the extent of the impact that AI is having on sales, and we reckon it's a whopping 83.6% of sales is being impacted already by AI. And we've got to that number by looking at what we see as the seven core areas of sales for technology businesses and our 360 degree sales diagnostic that has 52 metrics underneath. And we've analyzed each of those seven areas and looked at the technology platforms and the tools and techniques that are available, and assessed how much of an impact AI has had on all of them. And as you can see, they're very high. So you know, you know, any, any highlights of things that are coming up in the show that you'd like to, you'd like to pick out Kiran, what are you excited about talking

Kiran Gill 3:10

about? I want to talk about how I'm using AI in sales, you know, being somebody who's been in sales for a long, long time, how it's revolutionized the way I've done some work and some of the tools that I'm using. So I'm using a lot of voice interfaced AI when it comes to recording meetings, and also using voice to help me be quicker at emails and and get my thoughts down on paper. Also the tools that are integrated into those tools as well to make sure that if I am going to send an email using voice, that it's basically going to be grammatically correct and corrected for me, without me really needing to do anything. Then looking into prospecting, how AI is helping me choose the companies that we should be, you know, prospecting, who are key for us, and how, exactly how that does so quickly. And then also deal closing, you know how CRM is now incorporating AI all the way across the board,

Alastair Cole 4:05

yeah, it's, uh, it's, it's, it's a very exciting and fascinating world. And when we, when we break down the types of AI that are being used for sales, there's really, you know, there's the enterprise level, we're talking about the leading platforms that have been around for a while. They're very robust, and they have a strong API so you can connect into them with your other sales tools and the other applications you're building. You've got open AI's, chat, GPT, everybody familiar with that, but I'm sure you've heard of Claude. We're using perplexity a little bit as well. There's Google's Bard, Microsoft co-pilot Watson, and the open source llama from meta. So there's a broad range of enterprise level platforms that can be used. We've chosen to go down the route of open AI, not sure we'll stick with that, but we're tinkering with other tools as well, but that's where. That we like to play at the moment. And then you've also got, you know, mid level single use AIS into things like HubSpot. We're going to talk about chatting as a chat bot and natural language assistant, and things like napkins. And then the last layer you've got everyday utility, you know. And we're going to get on to getting on to some of those exciting examples in a little bit. So much to cover in this area. You know, as we said, 83.6% coverage from Ai. What we're doing today for this show is we're going to focus on five areas where AI is changing from B to B sales. Those are the five, and we're going to get straight into our number one, which is strategy. We're going to get into that strategy and start talking about two areas. One is where we're using it really is focused around large language models for ideation and document creation. So, you know, I know this is an area that you're using. AI and Kiran, give us a give us a little overview of of how you're using large language models

Kiran Gill 6:21

when it comes to realistically refining our target market, buyer, personas, value propositions, whatever it may be in that first strategy kind of part of the sales engine, taking information that we gather from our clients and also information that we're getting from other sources, and then Using a large language model to help us then take it and summarize that information into a point that we can we're working with the AI. We're not asking the AI to actually do it for us. We're working with it. We're manipulating that data. We're making sure that what comes out makes sense, and those value propositions that we're creating for our ideal customer profiles are actually resonating with our customers by going back to our customers and testing those things. So it really does speed up that whole process. And back in the day that used to take forever to do, and now suddenly, with these large language models, you can really get to that quite quickly.

Alastair Cole 7:18

Yeah, and I think everybody is going to be, you know, familiar with, you know, chat GPT, and that as a large language model, everybody's had a play with it. And of course, you can go and ask quite difficult things, and you will through text. And in fact, the audio interface, the voice interface are fantastic. You can go on a long journey and really dig into these, some of these strategic challenges, but really the real juice comes when you go, we go a little bit further than just that kind of chat GPT instance, and we climb a bit closer into an enterprise platform. In this case, we're looking at open AI's back end model, and here one of our assistants, one of our agents that we've built over the last few months is called Project Mercury. This is our strategy companion and our strategy assistant, and we're using this to go on long journeys of discovery in the ways that Kiran just talked about, and what's, what's, what's fantastic here is that we're pre loading this agent, this assistant, as a dedicated sales resource for us, and we're able to train that model on files that we upload that define What our company's about, how we approach things, and also the details about the customers that we're working with, the clients we're working with, what's happening in the industry, what's happening out there in the wider world. And that allows us to have a kind of live sales assistant, an agent, that we're using for all of our strategic considerations. And you know that is a fascinating place to be when we're talking about, you know, drawing insights from historical data to forecast, suggesting the best sales methodologies for our clients, researching target markets and suggesting untapped use cases for their their products and services, so that that strategy and planning area really works very nicely with large language model. And if you can get into the more enterprise end, and we'll come on to how we can use that into agents a bit later. So a fly through in terms of strategy. Our next section is lead generation. We've got a few things to share before we do. Kiran, how are you using AI? Or what tools are used for AI for lead generation?

Kiran Gill 9:51

So, after the point of using, you know, an open AI to actually, then, first. Find out the value proposition of all that data that we've got from our customers, you're then able to find the kind of ideal customers you want to find. Now, using something like Apollo at this point really makes real sense, because they have so much client data out there that you can go in there, you can set up a lead scoring system in there that is also generated from the information that you put in. It's now got a lot more AI in there. Apollo, in the last few weeks, they've released a lot more behind it. So now what you're getting is real companies being added to your list that fit your ideal customer profile from the scoring you've got, and what you'll get there is a bunch of companies that will be excellent fit. Now, obviously, this is AI generated. You need to do the hard work of looking at that company to make sure that it actually does fit. Because, as always, these things cannot always be 100% correct, but they do make your life a lot easier and quicker to get to that point.

Alastair Cole 11:00

Yeah, thank you. And I think one of the examples we wanted to show here is Apollo, and the lead scoring that you're using inside Apollo. Do you want to tell us a little bit about what we're looking at and what some of the benefits you see from using this. Yeah, so

Kiran Gill 11:25

see on the left hand side there, you'll get a company list there. So I've, I've gone down to the filters. I've created the ideal kind of customer size. Most people who do prospecting understand this. This is where you'll categorize who you're looking for. You can see as you go down, you can put more and more filters in there. As you can see, there's a new button there that says AI filters. This is where you can actually now load in a lot more information, as Alastair was saying before brand books, all sorts of information that you need to put in there to make it even more refined. And then you'll get a list of companies. If you look towards the center there on the right hand side, you can see what the scores are. You probably can't see them very clearly there, but these are all companies that when I was searching for an ideal customer profile for ourselves, looking into all of that data, we have these companies that fit them. What we have then in the center there is the company name, and also we've got links straight into their emails and also straight into their LinkedIn profile, so we can do our research straight from there, also using Apollo, we'll be able to even gather more information about the company, relevant news, what's been released lately? What have been some movements within the company? So it's all there for you to find.

Alastair Cole 12:38

Yeah, I mean, absolutely brilliant that it's doing that work quickly, and that's that's some of the stuff that we're seeing here, where we're able to increase our power and do things we weren't able to do before, and also reduce the time, which is all absolutely critical, because 87% of buyers are expecting to be delighted Right before and after purchase, According to Forrester. And so what we're going out in lead generation with is absolutely critical, and one of the tools that we've built for ourselves is our white paper wizard. And that takes an existing white paper template and a theme and loads mashes up with it, the lead general the leads that we have in our pipeline, and we're able to create 1000s of hyper personalized PDF white papers at the drop of a hat and and we're not just talking about having the clients, buyers name on the Front and the date. We're talking about a hyper personalized first section where there's a letter from you to them, and we're contextualizing the rest of the white paper so that they know which bits are going to be most important for them and their business. And the more data we're loading into that white paper wizard, the higher quality that that output is so lead generation, really, you know, really succeeding with AI. The third section is how AI is fast tracking, accelerating self service. I mean, it's an absolutely critical area for sales right now, I know you're very experienced in the world of enterprise. Kiran, talk to us a little bit about self service. How important is that today? Oh,

Kiran Gill 14:30

you're you're the you're our resident guru when it comes to self service. Alastair, so I've seen the shift is massive when it comes to enterprise. You can see how the actual sales funnel is now contracting, where a lot of the buyers are making their decisions at the website. They're already doing their research. That's why your website and your self service, even if you're selling something very expensive in enterprise, needs to be perfect. So you know what kind of what kind of. You know, information. Could you give us Alastair? What should be the creme de la creme that our viewers should be thinking about?

Alastair Cole 15:08

Well, you map out building self service capability. You know, it's not something that happens overnight. You're always going to start with a traditional sales team, certainly when you if you're in a startup mold, but you want to be moving down that route beyond just a quality product UI, which should be helping customers, you know, obviously this website landing pages, we surely be moving to the right hand side here and getting, you know, self service, self guided learning and support. You know, an integration API. So there's a, there's a whole range of things, you know, guiding, guided onboarding and tours. There's a whole range of things that are absolutely critical, and we're going to touch on a few of those. Now, the real world is that eight out of 10 buyers prefer self service. You know, there's still a place for human sellers that always will be both to overseas those tools and to help close bigger deals, but the kinds of things that AI can help you with, you know, basically, you know, basic stuff, like building out your website, your home page, right? The sections that you've got there, the copy, the images that you're using. You know, we are big fans of mid journey and discord. And here's an example prompt for a male business tech founder struggling with AI. You should be using large language models to turn out your FAQs right? That can be done at the drop of a hat once you've loaded your data into the back end. And you should be having high quality chat bots, right that are there as self service assistants on your website. And the one that I'm showing here is a chat link, which is a fantastic chat bot that can be embedded into square space and really deliver on the goods. Chatting has a really simple UI in terms of building the chat bot model, and I've highlighted here on the right hand side, where you can choose between a knowledge base or the AI model. And you know, if you just take the AI model, then that allows people chatting there to open up and ask any kind of question, right? Whereas, if you go down the knowledge base route and you load in some of the assets that you should have should have to hand, you know, brand and sales assets and trading data on your products and services, you load those in as you would load into your enterprise AI system, then your chat bot is hyper tailored. And actually, we would advocate having a different assistant with different information on each landing page to support those products and services. And then from chatting, it's just instantly able to drop into your website in a different number of different ways, floating or in line or full screen, and that is using an AI interface effectively to take your questions and answers and interrogate you have a choice about opening that chat bot up for full AI model, or narrowing it down to the knowledge base, which we would recommend. But pretty much every aspect of your website right should be being built at lightning speed using some of those AI tools. The fourth area we want to focus on today is deal closing. You know, one of the harder areas for AI to support, but yet, we're seeing movement in this space. What's How are you feeling about this Kiran deal closing? Supported by AI,

Kiran Gill 18:44

it's getting there. It's been one of the parts where AI hasn't really it's there in the background, and it's slowly beginning there. And now, what I've seen in the last few months or so that you can see that it's really now helping these enterprise sellers, or people who are selling something that's got a longer sales cycle, also something a little bit more expensive, that needs a lot more human, interactive, traditional selling, as we would like to call it, where you're seeing that is, first of all, you're looking at the voice recorders themselves. So companies like eric.ai that is a British based voice recorder. I'm a big fan of, you know, British tech. We've got to support it where we can, this takes on the big boys like otters and the other ones. This really makes your life really easy, because what you've got to think about is that you're recording your meetings, your video meetings, and you're getting all of that information summarized. You're getting your task clicks built. And if you've got multiple meetings with that same client, you need this one place where you can feed all this information into your CRM. That CRM now with co-pilot, can then summarize where the deal is, tell you where your gaps are, what you've done with your last emails, how many times you've sent on, you know, messages and all those. And then finally, you're going to bring that all together with a revenue coach that'll help. A deal score, telling you what's going to be your next move. So you can see that I'm integrating three tools there. These are things that I actually do myself day to day, and it's making a massive difference. Because in complex selling, you need all the help you can get, because it's not easy.

Alastair Cole 20:17

Yeah, you talked about HubSpot co-pilot there. And you know, it's relatively new, even on their knowledge base, they're still talking about it as beta, very exciting. And as an early adopter, you're in there. This is the result from co-pilot on your usage. You want to articulate how this is beneficial to you and how it's helping with deal scoring.

Kiran Gill 20:44

Yeah, so basically, what this is doing is summarizing where this deal is. Now I know this, this screenshot is quite basic in what it's giving me. However, like all AI models, it's only as good as the information I'll put in there and also the prompt I'm asking for, so the more information I put in there. So if I put in all of my conversations with multiple stakeholders at this company, I'm going to get a more rounded understanding, or a rounded summary of what has to be done next for this client and what I've done last. It's doing this extremely quickly. I mean, it is rapid. So those of you who are HubSpot users and haven't pressed that co-pilot button yet, honestly, give it a go. Have a workout, give and give me some feedback. Tell me how you're using it so we're all learning together.

Alastair Cole 21:30

Yeah, and then you mentioned, you mentioned revenue coach, and you know that that's a tool that we've built ourselves that is a personalized sales coach for the price of a coffee and gives you immediate sales coaching on the deal your live deals. It integrates with HubSpot and other CRMs, and you can get more information at revenue coach.ai. Let's move on to the last section where AI is impacting sales, or the last one that we've picked, and that is in customer success. I know you're a big fan, my friend, of the potential of video to go and target, you know, leads and nudge deals along. And we've been heavy users of Hey Jen, in the past. Where do you see this going? Kiran,

Kiran Gill 22:34

I think it's perfect for customer success for small startups that haven't got the, you know, the people power to continuously be on side things like you were talking about with the chat bots being on your website and then using avatar generated customer success managers who are going to be making sure that you keep in contact with those Customers that you've it's taken you so long to win. Now you'll be able to create a video for them and make it personalized and send it to them, and because they've already got that relationship with a real person, if you say to them, Look, we're going to be sending you something from our AI avatar here, they're going to be open to that, because they know that there's somebody real in the background further earlier on in the sales process, I think people might be a little bit hesitant being sold to by something's not real. However, after you've sold to them, I feel that there's going to be some kind of movement there. You know, you're not going to be worried too much that the generated image in front of you isn't a real person.

Alastair Cole 23:40

Yeah, it's a very exciting world. It makes me feel a little bit anxious about how that's going to work. But these things will come out as culture adopts and then and then another. Another huge area in customer success is the ability to expose some of those agents I talked about earlier, expose them to clients right to help them accelerate their sales power, and accelerate their income generation. And one of these platforms is, or my favorite, the one that we've played with most is called bubble. It's bubble.io and bubble is a no code platform, right? That allows you to build components, build web pages and build applications without, you know, with very, very little technical knowledge. And we use it to have various projects in there, various agents that we've built. One of them is our 360 sales diagnostic interrogator. And we have an assistant that people can play with on the website to learn about the 360 but in the interrogator, it's actually able to sit down and treat you like a client and go on a long journey with you, a long conversation, asking the 62 questions that we ask during the 360 and. And we're able to expose that bubble instance publicly and allow our clients to go in there and sign in, and the conversations that they have with these agents through bubbles are recorded, so we can go back and see what their answers are and help the AI get to a really powerful score and a really great understanding. And we're creating these individual agents, these sales agents, for ourselves, and we're creating them for our customers as well. You know, it's a no code platform. At the same time, there are a little bit of technical nuances that are needed. You know, connecting to APIs and the like through bubbles isn't always easy, but the results are quite phenomenal, and we're seeing clients use our agents in their own time, at their own pace to get where they need to get to with a lot of our products and services. So those are the big five. Are January 14 picks of how AI is changing sales. If you, I think that's pretty much it. We're just going to wrap up there very quickly. I want to give you the opportunity, my friend, if you've got any you know, closing thoughts, or one tip you'd want someone to take away, or one tool for them to try.

Kiran Gill 26:33

I think the major thing here is to have a look at your sales process and see where you need help. So have a look at the sales process, wherever it is. How can you use potentially AI to help you either generate more leads or close more deals or create better content? Have a look where you can start and reach out to us. We're happy to help. Happy to have a conversation. Point you in a direction that will help.

Alastair Cole 27:02

Yep, thank you. White Paper, the most recent white paper, went live just at the end of last year. The empowered founder, seller. You can get that at the uplift partnership with comm forward slash white dash paper, our next show, which is a week today, I'll be interviewing Aaron Jerry. Is the co-founder of the Ag finance and technology groups. A very exciting platform he and his team have just launched. It's the world's first and only tech led tax and financial services app. It's had some exposure in the independent world and it is growing, going great guns. So really looking forward to talking to Aaron. If you'd like to see any of the past episodes, even of the sales group, head over to the sales scoop.com you might find something you like there, and that's it. That's us. End of the show. Hopefully you've gained a lot of insight into how AI is impacting sales. Really, all that's left for me is to thank you. Kiran Pleased Alastair, absolutely loved it. Thanks everybody for watching and recording. We'll see you. Live here Tuesday, next week and midday, see you next time bye, bye. You.