Episode 121: Where To Start Using AI Now in Your Teams

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And engaged teams, stronger sales Teams is right where you need to be. Welcome back to Stronger Sales Teams, the place where we provide real world and practical advice to help you develop super powered sales teams. It's a topic that I've been asked, or at the very least am talking about in just about every sales strategy workshop that I'm running at the moment. And it's quite simple, Ben, where do I start using AI and where do you think I hold? And this is commonly coming from sales leaders, but also sales individuals who can see some of the broad brush, broad stroke benefits of getting involved in AI now and probably have a little bit of fear associated with that as well, but at the same time simply don't know where to start and don't want to take time away from working with their customers and doing some of the stuff that's really important when it comes to hitting numbers. Now you'd argue that getting involved with AI now is really important in hitting your numbers, but I think when we talk about day to day activity, the majority of sales teams globally, outside of those that are very much phone based and small repeat transactional sales, the majority of teams nationally are still very much focused on customer activities ahead of AI. However, things are obviously moving really rapidly and I think that whilst right now AI is playing around the edges for non phone based sales teams and when I mean playing around the edges, it's helping with productivity, it's helping to research and there's a few things where people are able to uplift their job spec by maybe 10, 20, 30%, right? It's not drastically changing to the point of 70, 80, 90% the majority of sales roles. However, we're going to see more and more of an impact as the months and years roll out. And for me, those sales teams and sales leaders that are going to be best positioned to take advantage of this are those who have begun to implement some basic AI tools now. And what I mean by that is there's a deep learning curve in the majority of things that are not so straightforward in life, right? We can talk about learning to talk, riding a bike, learning how to run, right? All of these things take significant learnings to be able to get you there, but more importantly have steps that you take towards being proficient at those in terms of talking. We start to mumble and grumble and grunt and groan and say basic words. We start to listen to those around us and take in thousands of words each day. Then we start to use single syllable word and then words with more syllables and then we start to put sentences together and then we start to read and put logic and so forth, right? And the same, I think goes for a lot of things when it comes to our lives, our professional lives, right? Whether it be selling, where we learn how to engage with people, how to talk to people, how to listen, how to ask great questions, how to provide value, how to handle objections, how to close deals, right? How to do more than just make a sale. I think the same will go with AI that we're going to need to learn to understand some of the basics first, right? How AI models work, how LLMs learn how we can at the very base level, use some AI tools to help us with very minor tasks, even if it's something as basic as going to ChatGPT and getting some inspiration around ideas. And then we start to move deeper into AI agents and deep research and how we can do sequencing and use AI to streamline workflows. And then from there I think we'll move into things like where AI can replace some key sales activities, whether or not AI can replace salespeople, in fact, in the future, right? And some of that we're seeing now with people starting to roll out more back of house replacements for teams and certainly basic front of house teams. So I think the point of what I'm saying here is that whilst AI may not be substantially changing many sales roles now, and yes, there's an argument that there are some sales roles out there where AI is having a profound impact, particularly those based on the phone and for very straightforward sales, there is a learning curve with AI is my argument. And I think that if as leaders and individuals we're not start now to embrace AI, then what we might find is we're quickly left behind. And the talk about first home buyers not being able to afford a house because they've waited too long. I think that type of language and that type of Discussion becomes really real for sales teams. So the practical outcome here, which is really my role here, and that's to provide those practical snippets of advice as to how we can get better and better as leaders and in our sales careers. But my role here is I'm going to go through 10 activities and put a hell yeah, let's start doing it. Or maybe pause and hold. Very much specific around AI tools and whether or not I'd be rolling them out into my teams right now. Some of these I'll certainly share experiences where I am rolling them out with myself or with my teams now and more than happy to debate these offline for anyone that's keen to have a discussion or of course, as we post this podcast out live. Yeah, feel free to comment in on the socials and tell me what you think because I'm certainly one man's perspective with support from a lot of other people and a lot of sales teams that we work with. But this is not a topic that has a black and white, I think, approach. So let's get into it. 10 things. Do we use AI? Hell yes. Or are we holding or pausing on our usage of AI right now? So the first one that I'm going to give an absolute hell yes to is research and preparation for our customer meetings. Right. The days past used to be we'd look up a brand on the Internet, have a quick scan through their website, maybe look them up on LinkedIn or Instagram and find out a little bit of basic information about them or, or ask anyone else we knew. But now that is absolutely changing and there are so many tools out there now that are helping us do really good research on customers before we get involved or before we meet with them. Right. Who are they? Easy. What does their business do? Easy. But things like challenges. What challenges is the business facing? What are the opportunities ahead for them? Where are they spending their money? What are their customers saying about them? What are their staff profiles? Right. And this is where we can be using things like ChatGPT or Grok. I think that's the first kind of entry point to get in and do some base research on customers and type in some great prompts. Right. Can you please talk me through the challenges or the opportunities for this customer and how they might relate to whatever the service is we're doing. But I think the next layer of preparation, support from AI is well and truly and that's something like a humantic, which allows you to scan the web itself and find information on your buyer and give you Some ideas around how they may buy. Right. What their buying style is. Someone did it on me recently and they shared this with me in the meeting and it came out that I was someone who was open to listening, moderately open to change, but it would be fact based. And that's pretty much me. Right. I'm always happy to listen. I'm certainly open to making some changes if they make sense, but fact's going to win me over rather than emotion. So I think Humantic's really becoming a tool that we can use to start preparing ourselves for our buyer Personas. And then we've got things like Clay AI that's been around for a while. But what Clay does is it really scrapes the Internet for lots of contact details and information about our customers. So in our preparation, it can provide us more modalities to get in touch with customers or warm our customers up, if you like. Right. To start to create those relationships. So I'm giving research and preparation. An absolute must do for sales teams. Now to start using AI, let's walk into outreach. Outreach is a really interesting one. We're seeing a lot of it on social media, a lot of it on emails, and when I mean a lot of it, people using AI to almost mass connect through a tool like LinkedIn or mass connect through emails. Right. Or blast out some form of AI generated content through a number of other different channels. For me, it's something I would be holding on. What I think globally, I'm certainly starting to see, and there's lots of commentary starting to appear around this, is that people are starting to get a natural sense about what is AI generated content and what is perhaps more real or natural content. And that's because there are some really common words and phrases and tonalities being used by AI writing tools around the world at the moment. I don't think there's personalization according to the user just yet. So the Ben Wright personalization of AI outreach. But I think that will come in time. And for me, this is extending into not just social media. And by the way, for those doing it, please drop the automated AI outreach messages on LinkedIn. They are just so obvious. I get hammered with them. And you can just so clearly see when they're not driven by real people to the point that they just get archived. Right. And same is going for emails. But the second area here is around actual outreach. Cold calls and scripts. Right. Using AI to write your scripts and, and even do some of your cold calls. For me, that's also something that's not Quite yet, You know, it might work really well, I think, in ideation, and we'll get to that as one of our 10. But for me, outbound work via AI is a hold, it's a pause and a not yet. Okay. Third one I want to look at is sales decks. And what I mean by here is, in fact, I should probably expand this to sales decks and sales pitches. And I'm actually giving this one a yes, let's get into it. And the reason I'm doing that is that for me, I think AI can really support when we're trying to communicate how our brand, how our products, how our services can offer value and outcomes for our customers. And for me, that goes something like doing our research on our customer and then asking AI tools, right, whether it's a ChatGPT or a Grok or whatever it may be, or a deep research agent to actually say, okay, how can we pair our products and services with what this customer wants? And I want to give you a couple of examples here where this has worked really well for me and it's specifically around my business. And I'll use sales training as an example. One of the areas that I was really keen to understand on is sales team members that are using social media versus those that aren't. First of all, what's the global usage rate? And then how are salespeople performing? Those who do use AI versus those who don't. Right. And I had some stats come out. Essentially 70% of salespeople now are using social media and of those 70%, 78% of them are performing better than their peers. Right. So I was able to use that through ChatGPT to support one of my points of difference when I'm running workshops around how we need to be present and visible on social media, not necessarily using it to drive all of our outreach, but present and visible. The other piece we did was for our brand, Ikana. Ikana is an AI call coaching brand that measures one what you say and how you say it for recorded calls. Right. It's brilliant for phone based sales teams or customer service teams. But one of the questions we've been asked a few times is why do you provide analysis post call rather than during call? And for me, I know, certainly anecdotally, that when you've got something in your ear or on your screen during phone calls or during meetings, it can be really disruptive. So for me, I think the net negative is actually larger than the net gain. Right? So the sum of your gains here I think is lower when you have something providing you feedback during a call and you're actually better to take that feedback post call. Right. But we needed to get some information from global sources on that. So we did and we found lots of information. One of those being that after you've been interrupted in the next 2 to 3 seconds, your error rate on whatever task you're doing doubles. Right. So that's really significant and that's able to provide us some great support for our points of difference when we're talking to customers. The other area here where I think when it comes to sales pitch decks and materials and how we're communicating with customers that's positive from AI is using a tool like a Canva or a Gamma or a beautiful AI to create some of your decks in your communication templates. For me, I think they're fantastic because it's saving a lot of time and it's reducing that creativity that you're needing as a salesperson. Right. Particularly when you don't have maybe support from a marketing team or you don't have a marketing team. But it's also up specking if you like the type of materials that salespeople are putting out there, which, let's be frank, most of us aren't designers and the quality of that material is not always amazing. Okay, so that's three things where I'd put in a hell yes or not quite yet in terms of AI. Okay. Fourth one comes down to strategy and ideation. Right. So that's actually building out our sales systems and our processes. Right. And what we need to be putting out to market as a sales team. Now, this one, I'm actually giving a hold and pause. I know there's some great thinking out there around strategies or when you use AI tools, but for me, the people side of this, the understanding of your product, the understanding of your service and your customers and what your business can and can't deliver, this is critical to be done by teams together, by humans. So whilst perhaps ideating some additional ideas through AI is positive and will help expand on that ideation exercise, the actual creation of the strategy and the systems and the processes and the thinking behind it, for me is very much AI driven. And certainly for me in sales training and coaching, I am not allowing AI to drive any of that process. For me, it's very much a human exercise. And particularly when you get the team to build it, buy in for me is much larger. And I'd actually say that that is as strong as any of the other points I've raised around making sure. That our team is buying into our strategy so that they can execute it. So for me, building out sales process and ideas is a no, is a hold, it's a pause, it's not quite yet. All right, moving on to number five. And that's training and coaching implementation. Right.

So that's a little bit different to.

When we've built our strategy and built our process. How do we actually go about implementing as leaders what we want to happen, be it training, be it coaching, be it, be it any of that on the job or formal learning. Now, for me, I'm giving this one a yes, an absolute, really strong yes to use AI. There's a few areas around this. The first one, and let's look at the most straightforward approach here, is when we have teams who are heavily phone or video based, which I think a large number of teams globally now do, certainly do a lot of calls over phone or video. For me, the gold standard is to start doing some recordings. In fact, let me take this back a step. For me, the gold standard here is if you are a phone based service or sales team and you already record your calls, I'd be using an AI coaching tool right now to be analyzing those calls. This is a quite simple and linear one for me. As sales leaders, we just cannot get across the volume of calls that our teams get through. We might get through 1% if we're lucky, but AI coaching tools out there now are getting through all of them and a lot of them are able to provide great analysis on our sales individuals and sales teams performance on calls. Right. And some of them even sentiment, which is done by reading transcripts. That's not too bad. Or tone of voice, which is actually by listening to the calls and understanding the empathy and the emotion and the pacing. Right. And the inflections teams are using. So for me, that is just a no brainer to roll into teams that are phone based or call center based. Right. Very, very easy to do. We've got a tool, Ikanaicana AI. Not going to do a plug for it. I've spoken about it a few times in the last few podcasts, but I think this, this is a must do now for teams that are majority phone based and recording their calls. Okay, so the next piece here is when you have teams that are doing a large number of video calls. Right. And I think a lot of teams are actually doing this if you're not heavily phone based. Certainly a lot of video calls even for face to face teams. And for me we've got a couple of options here. One is using some AI note takers. I've been using Fathom, I've tried loom for a little bit. Right. Using some of these tools to actually record your data and your information and provide insights out of those calls. I think that is absolutely handy, particularly for teams that need to get summaries into your CRMs. Right. Nice and easy to do. And it can often provide some handy points around where you proceed next. But also running analysis of those meeting summary notes. Right. To see where your teams are performing well and where they're not. Certainly there's some AI tools out there now that are able to scrape that data and actually provide some insights around what your team is and isn't doing well. Much like you are on phone based tools. Right. And then when we take a next step here, and apologies if I got this, but web based tools where you're doing a lot of communications online through web chat. Absolutely. AI tools out there to analyze and monitor your product performance. Arcana does it, but there's others out there if you want to have a look at those. So I think for me the hardest one here is how do we use AI for field based teams that are face to face with customers. And I don't think that has necessarily been bridged that gap just yet. There's certainly wearables that can take recording of information for you and I don't think it'll be far away. But for me, phone, video, web based teams, web chat based teams, absolutely. AI for your training and coaching is critical. It allows your sales leaders and your people leaders to start focusing on what you're actually doing to improve your teams rather than having to collect and analyze the data. So that is an absolute must for me. Research and preparation I think has been a big must so far. Using AI for sales decks has been a really positive one. And the second big must here is using AI for coaching and for training. All right, let's move into the next one. So content creation. Content creation is a really interesting one. Certainly seeing AI generate lots of ideas. But for me, when it comes to using AI to do your content creation, I'm really skeptical. And the reason I say that is I alluded to it earlier is that for me, AI content is a little bit generic and there's a same same about it when you see it across social media platforms, emails, newsletters, even podcast topics. Right. Where you can see these type of communications being driven by AI, I certainly believe there's a place to use it for inspiration. But when it comes to actually Generating your content and a lot of the big content creators out there, look, I hope agree with me. Jay. Alec or Jasmine? Alec. Based out of Bosnia. I've been doing some work in one of his programs. I've subscribed to one of his programs because I think he's a great writer and you'll see he's quite strong on this as well. If you're going to put content out there, make it valuable to people, which means you need to focus on and actually writing some great pieces of material, they're going to give advice that perhaps people can't necessarily just find by typing it into Google themselves. So, yes, I think there's maybe a 50, 50 here. Use it for some ideation, use it for some proofreading. But certainly when it comes to creating that content that you're going to get out there, I'd be really, really careful about how much content you're putting out there. Okay, so that's six done. Let's get into number seven, which is admin. Admin, I think is going to be an obvious one. Yeah, absolutely. There's some opportunities here to use AM to really help you with your speed of admin. It can be as simple as helping you write emails. Right. Lavender is a really nice tool that's out there that can help you write great emails. Or there's tools around there like Jasper and Reggie that are great at helping you provide some content when it comes to your base level admin. Now, I want to be careful here. I've just spoken about creating content and said this is a no. But then when it comes to admin, I've said, hey, there's some opportunities to use this. And I think where I'm talking about here is using some AI tools to help prioritize which emails you approach when you have a large number of emails to respond to, to give you some ideas around how you might respond. So for me, this is a little bit more responsive rather than proactive when it comes to outreach. Right. For those people or teams that get hundreds of emails daily. Right. Or hundreds and hundreds weekly, using some tools to help you work through which emails you should be responding to, how you can speed up some of those responses, for me, that's really positive. Same goes for admin from a CRM point of view, when you can be using some of that predictive text when you're writing in your CRM notes, or even better, taking your meeting notes and linking that through using API links or a lot of tools actually have these links now where they can simply sequence into your CRMs. Absolutely. I think that's a great idea. And even nurturing campaigns, setting up your broad based approaches to nurturing campaigns before you then go and write some specific content yourself. I think there's some really nice tools out there that will help you with your speed and accuracy of your back of house admin. Right. So there's a few things in there that we can actually look at using AI for when it comes to an admin point of view. But I think the ones I'd focus on for now are integration with your CRM, particularly from customer engagement through to your CRM. Save your team's time from writing notes. The second one's emails, speed of response and your broad based approach to writing emails like a lavender. And then the third one is some structure around your nurturing campaigns. Right. The content still needs to be personalized, but I think you can use AI to set some of these up. Okay, three to go. All right, last one. Lead prioritizing. This is one that I think is moving quickly but hasn't yet been mainstream for a lot of sales leaders. And that's actually using an AI tool to determine which leads you should be following up, which you should be chasing hard buyers who are perhaps closer to buying than those that aren't. And you'll see in a lot of mainstream CRMs, they're actually starting to roll. Lead prioritizing and lead scoring out now to deals that you have in your CRM. HubSpot are doing it. Salesforce are doing it. So I think for me this is a one where it's a watch and act pretty soon. And I'd like to see sales teams start to use it really to measure buyer intent and where you think you can be getting leads move forward or perhaps those leads that maybe aren't quite ready and you need to spend some more time in nurturing. So it's a little sidekick that you have sitting there to help you prioritize where you will and won't focus your time on leads. Okay, last two contract negotiations. Certainly for me, getting deals done, closing deals, handling objections, negotiating contracts, that is a really critical part of sales and one that I'm not seeing AI provide really meaningful support around yet. And in fact, I'm going to say this one's probably a little while away. Right. So for me it's a definite no right now. Yes, we can probably use AI tools to build up contracts, but for me actually getting the job done, negotiating those contracts and getting the deal from a. Yeah, I'm interested to. I'M over the line is absolutely one that needs to be done by sales teams. So closers, people that can really form great relationships, people that can ask questions, ask the hard questions. Right. Throw up red flags, understand where we need to be looking at changing perhaps our offer to our customer, our services or our products. For me, that negotiation piece is critical to be kept by humans. That's one that I think as much as I think we'll see some tools start to talk about how they can do this for you. I think it's not there yet. However, I will say I am starting to see some deal review tools come out now. Right. So these are tools that are Brian Dietmeyer from Clothestrong. We had talk about his tool that's providing some advice around how you could help close deals. Look for me, I put that back in the training and coaching piece. It doesn't close the deal for you. Right. But certainly might provide some advice. Okay. Last but not least is long term customer relationships. For me, this is a bit of a 50 50. I think there are some tools that are fantastic at helping you nurture your customers. Right. In fact, a lot of what we've gone through today around using lavender to help you craft your emails so you're getting back to people quicker, setting up your nurturing campaigns, giving you some ideas around how you communicate, some training, some coaching. Right. All of these pieces, I think AI can provide some great support around the edges which will help you spend more time building relationships long term with your customers. But for me, just relying on AI tools to nurture customers in anything outside of your transactional and your repeat smaller business, for me that's not yet working people still like to buy from people. So I think once you have a relationship with a customer, actually getting in front of them, talking with them, having meetings. Right. And finding out and asking the questions around how you can continue to make their lives better or their professional lives better absolutely needs to be done by humans. So leaders out there, I'd be really focusing on making sure that those things we used to talk about, how many customers we've spoken to, how many we've met, how we're building our relationships, that is still critical and I'm not sure that one's going to change anytime soon. Okay, so there we have it. There's 10 things to go through that are a hell yes or not quite yet on AI. I won't go back through them all because they're pretty detailed. But what I will say is, please sales leaders and sales professionals start using AI now. Even if it's just for something small, something very, very minor. Build that knowledge base up so that when things start to roll faster and faster, you're not left behind, you're not starting from zero in a 400 meter race when someone's just gone boom, straight past you, right, you're off, you're running and you're moving with the times because I think then your knowledge will be able to grow and grow and grow, right? So don't wait too long because it might be too late when you get there. All right, so that's everything around AI today. And look for me, this is my last update on the road to Cairns. Geez, it's been a tumultuous journey. We've had a bike crash, been hit by a bus, had some interruptions, had a torn calf. In fact, I don't think I mentioned that on the podcast, but yet managed to tear my soleus. So, you know, there's three strikes straight away, but I'm entered by the time this goes live. I certainly will. Well, I hope I have finished and for me, a lot of the good things in life don't come easy. So this has been a little bit of suffering. I wouldn't say it's been a lot just yet, but I know it's coming when we hit race day, right? 10 or 11 hours out in hot temperature in Cairns. So for me, I'm really enjoying the challenge that I'm putting myself through. I'm not loving all parts of the training, but I think making sure I challenge myself in things I do outside of just my work career is important. So hopefully next podcast episode you will hear some results and yeah, let's hope I've finished and that torn calf doesn't give way again. And I managed to run most of the race, so we'll keep you posted. But for now, keep living in a world of possibility and you'll be amazed by what you can achieve.

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