The Hottest AI Tools for Sales - a Rapid-Fire Roundup

Automated Transcript

Alastair Cole 0:07

Hello, good afternoon, and welcome to The Sales Scoop. This is a weekly live show for founders and senior leaders of technology businesses who want to accelerate their sales. I'm Alastair Cole. I have a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence and two decades experience in sales and marketing. And I'm delighted to say I'm joined today by my friend, co-founder and B2B sales expert, Kiran Gill. Hi Kiran,

Kiran Gill 0:39

Good afternoon Alastair. Good afternoon everyone. My name is Kiran, and I've got 20 years worth of experience in sales, operations and in business development, working in both in corporate finance and in technology.

Alastair Cole 0:52

Fantastic. And together with our co-founder, Douglas, we're with the uplift partnership. Today's topic, very exciting. The hottest tools powered by AI in sales. And, I mean, we've been, we are, I feel like we're right in the deep end almost every day with this stuff. Um, Kiran, what's your kind of, what's your level of usage and interaction with some of these, some of these AI powered tools.

Kiran Gill 1:17

I think it's continuous, isn't it? Now for most of us, it's no longer. I can remember about two, three years ago when open AI came on, and everybody suddenly had this panic that, you know, the bots were going to take over the world, and we were all going to lose our jobs, and nobody knew what was going to go on. And now suddenly every tool, whether it's your mobile phone, your microwave or your dishwasher, suddenly has AI integrated in it.

Alastair Cole 1:42

Yeah, that is, that is exactly how it feels. A very exciting topic today, the hottest AI tools for sales. Please dive in if you're live on LinkedIn, hit us up with a question. Our restream platform allows us to bring those through so you could be featured live on the show with your question answered. The opportunities for salespeople with AI is massive. You know, we're going to get into power. But here's Gartner saying that those sellers harnessing AI can create an extra 27% bandwidth. And it totally feels like that to me, my friend, you know, it feels like we've just it's a superpower keeps growing, and just as well, because one of one of our favorite numbers, one of your favorite numbers, is the 618 tell me about the pressure to hit 618

Kiran Gill 2:36

Yeah, the 618 the mythical number that we've got here is the amount of sales interactions or actions you as a salesperson should be doing per month to hit your target. Now that target is dependent on how much or how many sales you have to do. For us, we've done that calculation, and we've taken a bit of a mean, and it's 618 that's a lot of things to do each day of your week. And some of these are automated. Some of these are things that you know are happening automatically, but most of these are so especially, especially towards the top end of the funnel, where, where you're getting into the meat of the deal itself, you're not going to be able to automate those kinds of actions. This is where AI really, really does come in and save you loads of time

Alastair Cole 3:23

across our 360 degree sales diagnostic product, where we look at seven areas of technology sales, we've done some analysis in those seven areas, looked at where and how far AI is influencing on them, And you can see across the board, very high scores, averaging another 83.6% of sales operations and sales focus across those is influenced by AI. And you know, it's worth bearing in mind that even though there's a lot of tools out there, it really is about how you use them and what goes in. This is a fantastic post on LinkedIn. Hat tip to Dr Krug here saying it doesn't matter whether you're using machine learning or AI generative or even agents. Now, if the quality of your data going in is not high, then the results are going to be, you know, they're going to be poor. They're going to be substandard. In order to break down our favorite tools, the hottest ones we see, we are looking at three tranches today, right? We've got, you know, everyday utility, just the smallest, most repetitive tools that you can use to, you know, kind of like the oil better, oil in your engine, everything getting greased and moving faster power players, where we're going to spend most of the time, like specialist single use operational firepower tools. And then right at the top there is that kind of ability for AI to be a strategy partner, for you, genuinely helping with planning, ideation and critical thinking. So those are the those are. Three tranches that we're going to get into, and we're just going to dive straight into that, that bottom tranche right, the everyday utility. So just improving all round aspects of sales, and we have huge users of voice apps and note takers and writing support and image manipulation, things that you're doing on a regular basis every day. What? What do you like in that area? Kiran, what are you? What are you using more than others, in terms of tools for everyday use?

Kiran Gill 5:34

So everyday I tend to use a voice that is a plug in on Google Chrome that allows me to record or write for me. So this is a great tool when it comes to whether I'm speaking into a large language model, or whether I'm speaking straight into Grammarly, where it's going to turn into an email that I'm sending. My typing skills are okay, but I speak a lot quicker than I type. So it would be stupid of me not to leverage AI. It probably saves me a good few minutes if I just work those go that, you know, the savings per day that I find from that alone probably saves me at least an hour a day, or probably more. Yeah,

Alastair Cole 6:15

yeah, totally. I mean, voicing is great. You know, I'm a huge fan of Google Voice typing that you can get in Docs and slides, and we're using that for everything, crafting every DM almost there's no communication really, that I'm sending out that I haven't spoken into the computer first, because it's three times the speed. And then we're also on that every day. Certainly I am using text speech readers in order to listen to articles or white papers, just to listen to content, because, again, it's quicker, and you can be doing something else. So that voice out, I think, is huge. We're using a lot of Otter AI, not just for meeting notes, but also for transcriptions after this show, and I know you're, you're a big fan of a UK based equivalent

Kiran Gill 7:07

to what, yes, so I'm using the UK equivalent called eric.ai very similar to otter, but I feel that it's a little bit easier to navigate. And obviously the big saving here is going into a customer meeting where you're not transcribing the meeting notes. And, you know, you can get a great, you know, tool here that will basically do that for you. A lot of tools now, even you're seeing even Google meets have got theirs integrated. I haven't used it. I'm still using Eric at the moment. I know Zoom has got their version. So it seems to be that this is common knowledge, and everybody should be using this. And if you haven't got a note taker in your meeting, you're probably already, well, far behind the curve.

Alastair Cole 7:58

And then in terms of that, you know, that day to day you talk there about, you know, Google, Gemini and other large operating systems, kind of bringing, trying to bring theirs in. It is taking them, you know, a long time that they're not, they're not great. At the moment, I'm sure they'll get there, but certainly they're, they're not great. Yet, something else that we use on a regular basis as we're building things and creating sales assets is to remove the background, remove.bg it might be my, one of my most visited destinations, online. Super helpful, cool. So that's like, that's the everyday utility tranche, right? And they might not feel very powerful in terms of AI, and that's because they're not right. But the truth is that if you're using those on as many of your sales and other business operations, then you're saving time across the board. And that really is like having, you know, better oil in the machine immediately. Everything is moving faster. So let's move on from that first tranche into the kind of the big zone where we're going to cover most ground here, the kind of power players, right? Specialist firepower you can use for specialist tasks. We've listed a few there. We're going to get into them. What are those power AI players that you're using for sales? My friend,

Kiran Gill 9:20

yeah. So when it comes to using tools, you've really got to think about what you're trying to do and how you're going to use those. So the first tools that we've been speaking about, they're kind of ones that are just speeding up how you do certain activities when it comes to then looking into a CRM system. And I know when we spoke about this last year. And you know, even before that, you can tell that they were trying to integrate AI into some of the features, and they weren't really getting their HubSpot. I've really moved on now, when it's coming to AI and they brought out the breeze, what is their co-pilot, and the new version is. So powerful. If you're not using this, you're already, I think, probably missing out on an opportunity. It's able to help you understand what's happening in the deal. It tells you exactly what potentially the next move should be. Looking at your meeting notes, if you're integrating that again now with voice in you're able to leave your meeting, your meeting notes, straight into HubSpot, so you don't even have to, you know, write that up. Or you could even bring your transcript straight in from Eric into co-pilot, so you've got it somewhere where you know what's happening again. It's all that what you were saying before Alastair about the data in and one thing about what I really still have a problem with some of the clients I work with and some of the sales, I still feel that people are still shying away from CRM. However, if you want to get the best out of breeze and other equivalent CRM AI tools, you need to put data in, because it's only then that these, these, you know, the co-pilot can actually help you and move the deal on. So, you know, I use it a lot. It helps a lot with analytics. It helps a lot with creating new email drafts, next moves, who could be potential, you know, other people within the company you could reach out to. These things are getting very sophisticated, yeah.

Alastair Cole 11:20

And essentially, you talked about combining a couple there. We're going to cover that one but really, the real, really powerful areas where we're getting some of these power players together in order to solve some bigger problems. So that's HubSpot. Tell me a little bit about Apollo as well. I know that you sound from our conversations, things have moved on there as well.

Kiran Gill 11:45

Yeah, so my combination play is normally my first place to go to is Apollo, because that's helping, helping us for lead generation. It helps our clients for lead generation. So and a great thing about Apollo is that you can set it up and it'll do lead scoring for it for you now, Apollo now, as you can see from this screenshot, is using loads of AI now, and pretty much, it will look for equivalent leads that fit your ICP and will bring them straight into your list. So you already, it's continuously looking for potential opportunities for you. Now, that wasn't happening six months ago, and it was not as good. But now this is really, you know, if you're doing business development, it should be your tool of choice,

Alastair Cole 12:34

yeah, yeah, okay. I love that. The fact that they're coming on, you know, leaps and bounds. There's been a lot of chat and a lot of kind of false promises, I would say, like 12 months ago, but feels like the second wave is really starting to deliver now, you know, they had to put something in there, you know, HubSpot and the like, bringing out something in order to fill the gaps. It looked like they looked like their heads. I mean, I got real, real power coming through. Now, one of the, one of the areas that you love that we've implemented, as well as is, you know, AI powered support, we've we've brought that onto our website and in various guises, in different forms, using chatting, which is an excellent chat and AI knowledge based platform that allows you to create chat bots, either using, you know, a large language model, AI, so they can talk about a various range of topics, or setting it up using a knowledge base. And you're able to feed assets into that chat bot in the same way that you do an agent that we're covering later in order, and then deploy that, that chat that, that kind of agent specific, knowledge based chat bot in in lots of different ways, and provide fantastic and like really quick, you know, self self service supports if you haven't got a chat bot, something like chat link, you know, works brilliantly with Squarespace and the assets that you've already got, you could, you could have something up and running right really quickly, which is exciting. I know you're a big, big fan of self service. Kiran,

Kiran Gill 14:15

yeah, I think depending on what you're selling, I think when it comes to self service, you know, if you, if you're spending all that time trying to bring somebody into the actual lead, you need somebody at the shop front be able to convert that, and that's where chat bots are, really, really useful. I think, you know, if your website, and if you're doing self service, and you're trying to get people to purchase your product without actually interacting with somebody, a chat bot is pretty much your salesperson on the shop floor trying to push people through. And so, you know, a website that has one, I feel that they're scoring quite high when it comes to the 360 sales diagnostic. A company that hasn't got one is probably missing a trick.

Alastair Cole 14:57

Yeah, and we am You know, it's a great way to provide, you know, intelligence, because you can create different chat bots and feed them with different rules and different information in order that they are very specific. So the chat bot we've created just for the 360 Diagnostic page, that's all it knows about. That's all it talks about. It's able to intelligently converse with potential customers on that subject. And then other landing pages have other chat bots. So it's really, really supporting multiple buyer personas. Another big area for us in the sales world is the creation of images. So fantastic new site that I've been playing with recently called napkin, where you're able to load in, say, a bullet list of services that somebody provides, and napkin will turn your text, your lists, or your prose, into a diagram it creates, using AI, instant diagram. So illustrations that can be used in slides to articulate points or can be used in other assets and other sales material. So check out napkins. I think it's napkin.ai. It's absolutely genius. And if you're no good at sketching something out, it does it in seconds. And it's a really interesting kind of image creation and manipulation platform, as is the power combo of powerful players we're using, which is mid journey and runway and a little bit of remove PR in there. But mid journey and runway together are able to create, you know, fantastic, really short videos, and the video pieces delivered by runway and mid journey. You know, mid journey is something that, as we've grown with it has become increasingly more powerful in the sales world, because the ability to set exactly what the subject of a photograph or a video might look like allows us to mirror a buyer persona and an ICP almost perfectly right in a visualization, and that you have to work with the prompts and improve them and engineer them properly in order to get to the right result, but with a bit of patience, it can deliver fantastic results and create sales assets that just feel 100% like your ICP and your buyer persona without needing to spend weeks and weeks trawling through image libraries, right? And the deal is, even if you spend that time, you can't get there. So really powerful mid journey. And another huge favorite that we're using a lot with this show is vexed. So we'd previously been with Hey Jen for creating AI powered avatars in videos, and that's still the case with V. We're able to create short videos by feeding it text and have an avatar. And so we've got learning content that we've produced for our revenue coach.ai platform. We've got educational videos for the partnership we've created all in feed. And feed now has launched a new feature where they're able to ingest a video and then create in just 60 seconds, like five clips. And I'm showing you two clips here from Last Tuesday's show with Diana maturity, a co-founder at Cole, the property management business. It just produced in 60 seconds, five fantastic clips that it scored and and I was then able to edit those and then reuse those clips instantly as a job that would have taken hours, right? It is done in minutes, and not just that to a higher standard, right? Because it's automatically picking stuff out. So two power players and and I think when, when we're wrapping up the show and recording it, we've got v going on. We've got an otter using the transcription. There's multiple AI power players that we're putting together to deliver in that kind of, like, powerful mid area, and we haven't really covered them all. And then the last section, the top tier right, is using AI as a strategy partner, right? And this really needs enterprise platforms that have APIs, and because we need the advanced GPT models, right? And, you know, we've backed open ai ai from the start with their chat GPT. We have API access and a kind of enterprise level access to tools and using it in lots of different ways, building agents and going on, you know, strategic. Journeys, multi stage journeys, to get to fantastic outputs that we're going to we're going to chat a little bit now, but let's, let's start with you, Karen, I've been chatting for a long time. Tell me about how you're using those kinds of, like enterprise language models to do strategic thinking and be a strategic partner for your thinking. I'd love to hear how you're using it kind of as a strategic partner.

Kiran Gill 20:24

Yeah. So the simple way of using it, from my point of view, is I use it as something to bounce ideas off. So I make it imitate, potentially a client or a persona that I need it to be, and then give it as much information about that persona. So I don't just tell it to be, you know, per a CEO from a company. I try to give it as much detail as possible, and then I make it try to think critically about what I'm trying to do to that person. So it's not that I'm asking it to, you know, create something from scratch, and then I'm just going to use that verbatim as it comes out, I'm using my own material and making it, enhance it and criticize it in a way that makes me think about it differently. So having that to and throw with with, you know, with the agent, makes it a lot easier for me to actually figure out what's happening. Where, if I was doing that with either another person, potentially the person probably wouldn't even have the skill set that I require. So when I'm doing a lot of financial analysis, I need somebody, or I need somebody who at least understands finances quite well and understand also where I can pick up on mistakes that I might have made. So the great thing about, you know, creating an agent of your own that you can really make it into what you want it to be. So you know, if you're building an investor deck, you want the agent created within within chat, GPT, to really be an investor, or from a large company, who then will criticize your investor deck and look for mistakes where potentially you might have missed them. So this is the way I'm trying to use it.

Alastair Cole 22:06

Yeah, I mean, looking for gaps and challenging is such a great way, you know, because it's so quick to just say, What have I left out and what's missing and stuff, and that is fantastic. And, you know, agents, AI, agents sounds scary, but they're not, you know, that much further on than the kind of chat bot stuff we're talking about, you know. And we've, we've got agents that we've built assistance in the back end, in in open AI, and we've got one that helps us score clients on a 360 another one for another product. And so we've got a kind of small army of them, and they get fed with documents and rules, and they operate as individual components. And another great platform that we're using to bring AI to the fore for our associates and our customers is bubble, which is a no code platform that allows you to create shells for intelligent agents and connect them, which allows you know us to provide new kinds of interface, you know, ongoing, month long interactions, because we've got Data stored where we're able to build up a knowledge base and have an agent really get under the skin of individual clients and individual challenges. And this is for me, all about breaking being the strategic partner. Is about breaking the challenge into different elements and then interacting with the agent in that way. And so we recently sat down and created a 12 month email campaign plan right for fortnightly campaigns, Fortnite emails. And as well as creating that and setting the themes we we got the AI to align each one of those newsletter outputs to a previous version of the show that we would run, and then to write precis and get into analysis. And so a kind of multi step process using large language model agents that allows us to create something really big that you can't just ask for it a question you need to stitch several phases together, but the output is, you know, super high quality and done in a fraction of the time. If you're interested in sales agents, you know, feel free to reach out to us. We're building them for ourselves. We're building them for our clients. So, so that's that, that that last layer, really that strategy partner layer, where, you know, there aren't so many players there, because that requires advanced reasoning models. And so, you know, you've got some of the big players, like Claude and perplexity. And an open AI. What's really required at that level is a is for is the human investment of time, our investment of time, the thinking, the creation of agents and and their deployment and use. So, you know, that's it. I mean, we spent most of our time talking about the kind of the power players in the middle. It's the ones at the bottom end that are kind of, you know, that I get excited about here, and the kind of everyday use of AI, as well as the strategic staff, fantastic. Well, look, that's us. That's our run through rapid run through of the hottest AI tools for sales. Our white paper is available on our website. It is all about helping founder sellers, so founders of technology businesses to feel more empowered and more confident as sellers, you can go and get that from our website now at the uplift partnership.com, forward slash white paper. Apologies for that. Kira the net, we're having a break next week, the next show that will be live on Tuesday the 11th of March with fantastic Carmen Lincoln. Carmen is the founder at Ivy Tech growing technology recruitment business that sources high quality talent for technology businesses. Carmen will be joining me on the 11th of March, Tuesday the 11th of March, if you're interested. In any of the other shows that we've recorded, you can, you can get to them here on the sales scoop.com that's us for today. Thanks very much for your time, everybody. Thanks for your time. Kiran, okay, bye, everybody. Bye, bye, you.