Leveraging AI-Powered Prospecting for Sales Enablement Success with Dave Meyer

What's up Hub heroes? It's your boy, George B. Thomas. I am super excited to bring to you today an important and timely conversation around sales, prospecting and ta da AI. But I have to ask, what does your prospecting look like right now? Is your team killing it? Are they struggling to find enough and dare I say, the right people? Or do you laugh, wonder and wish maybe someday we'll get a prospecting system in place? Well, today talking about leveraging AI powered prospecting for sales enablement success with the man, the myth, the legend, Dave Meyer. Dave, how the heck are you doing today?

I'm fantastic, George. I'm so excited to be here.

It's going to be a good time. Now, ladies and gentlemen, if you don't know, you should know. Dave Meyer has more than 25 years of experience in marketing and communications and has presented digital marketing topics to thousands of people across the US and Canada on on behalf of companies including Google, HubSpot, Digital Summit and many, many others. Dave's presentations include more than 400 webinars on topics like SEO, advertising, content marketing and today we're talking about sales. So sales, sales strategy. Dave was named 2016 Entrepreneur of the Year by the TwinWest Champion of Commerce in Minneapolis and has been recognized by organizations including the International association of Business Communication, the the association of Builders and Contractors and many others as thought leader in marketing and communication space. Okay, let's get into the good stuff, Dave. First thing I like to do here on the sidekick strategies is really level set meaning so that the viewers and listeners know for the rest of the episode when we talk about two big things, what you and your mind really mean. So the first one is what is AI powered prospecting? What do you mean by that?

Perfect. So AI prospecting is really everything that is kind of new technology that goes into helping you to generate more sales. It doesn't need to be fancy. There's all of these buzzwords and all this other stuff. There's ChatGPT, there's Bard, there's all of this other cool stuff that's out there. All of it is kind of in a big bubble. It's called generative AI. And that just means that it goes out to the database in the world and it kind learns from itself which has inherent drawbacks and wins. And we'll talk about that later.

I love the fact that we tease drawbacks and wins. And here's the thing, the other one, I love that we're going to talk about this second one in level set because by the way, I Spoke at inbound around this topic, sales enablement. And man, I'm going to tell you, one of the problems is for five people it could be five different things. So for this piece of content that we're creating in your mind, how do you explain to people what is sales.

Enablement in this conversation particular? And I'm speaking with the sales enablement guru. So the sales enablement as we're talking about it is really just improving your sales process by working with your sales team. It's about smoothing out the bumps, it's about improving the ratios, improving the topics and the content that you get, all in order to generate more leads and help you close more sales.

And boy, do I love to generate leads and close more sales. Here's the thing, we're talking about two completely different things. There are people who are watching this if they're part of the community or listening, if they're listening to the podcast and they have this historical prospecting system or thing that they've maybe cobbled together or crafted over time. And then we're talking about AI powered prospecting. So how does AI powered prospecting differ from, from traditional prospecting methods? Dave?

Yeah, I think traditional methods have always been kind of brute force and sort of spray and pray where you do as much as you possibly can in order to get a big list. You know, there's the zoom infos, the, you know, list builders, there's good old fashioned going to your local library or just googling around for those best leads. AI powered prospecting uses the power of generative AI to do a lot of the heavy lifting for you. So you can think of it almost like, you know, in Ironman. What was the name of the assistant?

Oh, Jarvis.

Yeah, Jarvis.

It's kind of like Carter, they know there's going to be a test, but let's go.

So you can think of this as kind of like a Jarvis thing because Jarvis was of course AI, but it's your virtual assistant. And so it's that person that you would have had sitting across the cube from you, or you're just spitballing and thinking about stuff and bringing things in. And a lot of times the power of AI, AI comes in learning to embrace that conversational tone. And so it's really knocking down the problems inherent with just generating content on the sales generation side, but also doing that research. So give me five great email topics to capture my prospect's attention and prompt generating or prompt optimizing so that you're actually, you know, I am a sales expert and I have 25 years experience, and I'm an expert in whatever your field is as that Persona, tell me five things that I need to do or whatever. Right? And then you can also use it to help generate lists, to generate content. I'm sure we're going to talk about Chat Spot because it completely integrates with HubSpot's CRM, which is one of our favorite things. So there's so much that goes into this, but it really helps you improve the quality of your inbound outreach by not just forcing that entire heavy load on your shoulders. It lets you take some of that out and put it into the cloud and get more learning from just artificial needs.

I love this idea of an assistant. I love this idea of not having to do as much meaning, maybe even leaning out to, like, burning out your sales reps and your sales team. But I'm super curious though, like, and I want to almost frame it in, like, why now? But also in the back of my mind, I know there's people watching this or listening to this and they're like, great, great. Another AI conversation. This is amazing. And there's also folks that are like, but it's always worked that way. I don't want you to move my cheese. I don't want to change. And so when I start to unpack all those, like, different elements or pieces, I really want to ask you, Dave, the question, why is AI powered prospecting crucial for sales enablement moving forward from, like, this day forward?

Yeah.

Why is it so important?

There's a couple of things with that, George. First is that the noise in our world is massive now, you know, we've got all of these social networks, all the social networks are changing names or focuses, and the emails have never been more plentiful and annoying, it seems. Right? So there's so much noise. Being hyper focused on who your customer, on what your customer wants is more important than ever. And AI helps with that. But we also, inside of that, I think you mentioned that we have this massive weight on our shoulders. Writer's block is intense now because all you got to do is Google sales enablement strategies or SEO tips. God help us all, right? And you're going to get billions of results back. So how do you cut through that clutter? And how do you just come up with effective strategies? And how do you make more use out of the same 24 hours we all get in one day? Help me streamline this email, help me rewrite this content, give me better leads, or help me to streamline. And I don't only want every company that uses HubSpot in the Midwest. I want companies in my industry. So it helps you to navigate and narrow down all of those things. So saving time and cutting through the clutter is one of the biggest things that AI can help us with.

Yeah, I love this idea of saving time because, woo, we need more of it usually and sometimes even the time we have we're not using effectively. So again, having this assistant to give us stuff quicker maybe help us focus on how we can use it better. Thinking of that though, how does AI powered prospecting align with the mindset of what? And I fully understand Dave, there might be organizations that when I say these next words are like, what is that? What is a modern sales and marketing process? Hey, if that's you, then you should probably start by googling that as an action item. But the real question is how does AI powered prospecting align with the mindset of modern sales and marketing today?

So the mindset of modern sales and marketing is the inherent willingness to try new things. We want to work smarter, not harder. We want to get more with the same or less budgets. And so modern sales and marketing is really embracing that technology. And it doesn't just have to be computers, it doesn't have to be just devices, but it's all things that can help you to augment your mind and really bring more in, even down to really easy tools. Theoretically, you know, having zoom meetings that we all probably have every day. You can plug in AI assistants, and I'm betting most of the folks that are listening have been or tuned into an AI assistant. You may have noticed a massive uptick recently in the utility of those assistants because they not only report back and give you like a transcript, but like I use otter and a couple other tools like that, it'll actually give you the summary and the pain points. And you can set it right up inside of your sales script or inside of your playbook. Here are the things that that customer is looking for and then you can automate that up. So bringing all of that together, modern sales and marketing is really letting you bounce back and forth between Jarvis and say Jarvis. What? What did we say three weeks ago when I had that discovery call? And it'll tell you this is what that prospect was most interested in.

I love this because, Dave, you're starting to bump into kind of our next section which are going to be tool steps in the future. But ladies and gentlemen, if you're listening to this on the podcast and you'd rather view it or get all of the interview. Then make sure you head to community.hubheroes.com Become part of the community and watch the thing instead of just listening to the thing. And plus, there might be some additional resources there for you as well. So Dave, what are the and I know we're going to nerd out on this section, by the way, because you even alluded to HubSpot CRM a little bit earlier, but what are the tools and technologies needed for AI powered prospecting? Can you share like a step by step guide of implementing AI sales prospecting and how that and tools kind of fit together?

Yeah, of course. So as we're building a process, first you have to be familiar with the tools, right? And so there's a lot of really amazing tools. My favorite, and it's in very early alpha, but I think it shows intense promise is Chat spot. So chatspot AI. Most of the folks that are at least even tangentially familiar with HubSpot have heard of this tool. But the thing that it does that most others don't is it seamlessly integrates with your CRM, with your HubSpot CRM. So not only can you look up and do research or do research and find, you know, all of the companies in your hometown or that meet a specific set of qualifications, but you can, with one click load that record into your CRM. So you're identifying bestprospect.com and best prospect. You just hit one tap and it loads bobsmithestprospect.com right into the CRM. And then you can do some automation around that. So that's super cool. But regardless of the tools, you know, Google has come out with Bard and there's some additional AI enhanced search that are coming up. And if you haven't played with any of that, that's just at AI Google, there's all kinds of cool stuff. At Microsoft, they've got copilot. ChatGPT is a huge name. If you have Salesforce, they have Einstein. All of these tools are wrapping together and the key is finding something that's going to work for you. Step by step guide for getting started. First, figure out what your needs are. You know, what am I struggling with as a sales team or what is my sales team struggling with? If you're like a CRO or a cmo, what are the bumps in the road? You know, do we have a new higher quota that we have to meet and we don't have any more headcounts, so we're just all going to have to get better? What Is the struggle, you know, are we falling off at a specific point in our prospecting cycles? Are we just low on our list? Do we have or do we not have enough content or enough potential prospects to play with? Are we struggling with closing those leads so we don't have the right content, or we don't have enough to reassure those prospects at the stage of their buyer's journey that they're in to reassure them that we are the fit for them? So you identify your needs, then you got to start playing with the tools you really need to have what I call a Tinkerer's mindset. People ask me, how do you get so involved or so knowledgeable about all this stuff? A I subscribe to Hub Heroes. I see all the stuff that you guys are doing. I play with these tools. Your job is to have the same minds that you had in kindergarten and say, oh, this is cool. This is what I'm going to play with. Does it pop wheelies? Does it have a bell on the bike? Can I do whatever, you know, can I do fancy tricks? You need to get comfortable with all those tools.

Yeah, I love that we're talking about the tools. I love that you brought up kind of the Tinkerers mindset. It leads me into thinking about curiosity and the superpower that curiosity is and can be for your business, your sales process, your marketing. The thing is, they're going to go out there, they're going to start to tinker, they're going to play with these different tools, try to figure out what's right for them, implement that plan that you talked about. But I at least want to give of them. Let's call it the safety belt. Maybe it's that theme that comes down on the roller coaster that kind of holds them in from flying out at like 50,000 miles, you know, high up in the air. And that's a couple little best practices. So what are the top three? 2, 3, 4? It's up to you. It's your show, it's your world, Dave. I'm just living in it. What are the top three best practices that are essential for AI powered prospecting?

I love this because the biggest part of what I do as the owner of BusyWeb is I work with all of our clients to set up these best practices, and we're just kind of forging a path. So first, of course, is Tinkerer's mindset. You have to be willing to play. You have to embrace change. The sad and amazing part of AI right now is it's the worst it's ever going to be again, that's the best part too, because it's only going to get far, far better. Right. The next thing is once you're playing with this, you have to document and think in a systems first format. So you have to make sure that all this stuff is going to fit in to your sales structure. So you always need to be looking at how you're going to scale, how you're going to use these tools, what might happen down the road. And then finally, you need to be careful of your content. You can't just trust AI. There's some inherent biase if you do any, if you've done any research around ChatGPT, for example, GPT will straight up lie to you. You just ask it, you know, give me this thing and it'll just based on the data set that it's looking for, if one of those data sets is false, it's straight up going to tell you the wrong thing. So like college kids are getting in trouble with this. They're just saying, write me a paper. And it's talking about books that have never been authored. It's like, so our bibliography is, you know, apes in the Modern World or whatever. And that's not even a book. Right. So you need to verify and trust the content that you get out of AI and then learn to constantly measure and improve so that you're not just running down a rabbit hole. Marketers, which we are primarily George, suffer from Shiny Object syndrome. There's never been a shinier or crazier time to be a marketer. And you just need to have a framework in order to guarantee success.

Yeah, I've always wondered, like, what would it be, what would it have been like to be around when like the cotton gin was invented or the, you know, the printing press or the first automobile. I really do feel like we're living in one of those moments in time that people will talk about. And it's funny because you started to kind of go down this road of like, be careful. And hey, if you're watching this episode, you see I have a Star wars shirt on. Yes, I'm a big nerd. I love, I love Marvel DC Star Wars. So how can businesses avoid the dark side, the common pitfalls of AI powered prospecting that some might try to dip their toes into? Dave.

Yeah, so the, the biggest thing is to trust but verify. So as you're getting data, as you're getting content, as you're writing and authoring things, you need to make sure that you're backing up any research that you're doing with real research, right? So do a Google search on top of after you've gotten some data. Next is don't ever trust it completely because as I mentioned before, sometimes there are negative weird feedback loops for sure. Most of these language models are going off of data that can be a year or two old. If you've played with any of this stuff and if you've tried any of the generative AI in images, you know how fast that's come ahead and how fast it's improved. Imagine getting an echo chamber that the echo is a year old. You're just going to be working with really weird old stuff. So you can't trust that completely. And then finally you need to be incredibly careful about copyright and not publish blogs or other public facing content using AI solely because we haven't figured out any of this stuff. If you've played with any of Adobe's content, the big disclaimer on Photoshop, which has an amazing generative AI tool where you can just say insert a background into this tool. None of it is copyrightable, at least not yet because we're figuring out all this stuff. So back up your research, don't trust it completely and keep copyright in mind.

Yeah. If you haven't watched a YouTube video on what Dave's talking about, about the power of Photoshop and Gener, it's almost mind blowing to be honest with you. Dave. One of the things that I love to do on the Sidekick strategies is give people some ways, some actionable ways that they can get started. So when you think about this picture that we're painting, we're tinkering with tools, there's a lot of directions that we could go. How do we know we're kind of going in the right direction? What are some strategies to hit the ground running with when we're talking about AI powered prospecting?

Perfect. As you're just getting started with prospecting in AI, I would start with the big tools Play with Chat Spot. It's in early, early alpha but you can go into Chat Spot. It has built in templates where you can say give me companies by size with a specific technology. So I want every company with less than 100 employees that uses HubSpot or that uses WordPress or that uses, you know, insert your tool here, maybe it's your competitors tools. I want every company in a specific region. So every company in the Midwest, every company in Boston that uses a specific technology. Now you can get way better than that using GPT and Some of these other natural language models, but you need to start playing with that. So the big ones, chat spot, of course, chatgpt Play with Bard. Bard is actually there. Each of these tools is better at certain things than other things. If you input the exact same prompt into ChatGPT versus Bard, you're going to get very, very different results. Right. So you need to play with all of that. The third thing that I would do to hit to get the ground or to hit the ground running is to try some of these all in one tools. I've been playing around a lot with a new tool called jounce, which is really, really slick, and it's got dozens, I think over a hundred templates right now where it's like sales script template, and you just input like 14 different things and it asks you questions. I'm actually working on an AI tool called Robot of Business with a friend of mine. And not only does that go through and it asks the subject a bunch of questions, but you click a button and it pops out a website or you click a second button and it builds you a marketing strategy. Give me a strategy based on. And it asks all of these fun questions like what's your unique competitor opportunity? Or who are your best clients? Or what does success look like for you? So all of the things that a cmo, a chief Marketing Officer used to have to ask, you can actually do that through AI now. So the first thing to get to hit the ground running is really to just start playing and tinker with some of the big boys to get an idea about what's possible.

I love that. I love it. I understand that we're in the early days of this, and I think every interview I do, I'm going to ask this question in the assumption that somebody might not have an answer. But hopefully and, and prayerfully that one day we'll start to get the answer to this next question that I'm going to ask. Because all of us, as we're getting started and it's brand new, we're like, well, where's the bullseye? What does success look like? Right? And so I'm super curious if you can share a success story of a company that has been, even in the early days, leveraging AI powered prospecting for sales enablement that is as epic as some saga we might go see on the movie theater, right?

Well, I don't have an epic, like crazy thing that requires kryptonite or anything, but we have a client that we've been using Chat Spot extensively with to prospect for New markets. So they've went, they've gone through and it's early alpha. You have to sign up and you have to be approved. But then once you start playing with it, the one click integration with CRM means that they don't have to generate Excel spreadsheet and then import it and then do all of this other stuff. Right. What they're doing is they're really building a tool where the sales team can literally play. They're playing, they're doing the research, they're getting those leads and they've actually seen some amazing new leads come through as part of that. Secondly, we're also looking through our existing clients and past clients and you can just say, okay, everybody that I haven't touched in the last, in the past seven months, give me a list of those people. And then you can go through those companies and say what's happening with them right now so I don't have to do all of that heavy lifting. I can just go in and say, Mary, it's been six months since we chatted last. You can actually import all of this stuff into HubSpot. And so you can say inside of your workflows, you can actually do a lot of this and do some proactive outreach where it's much more customized and it's much, much more just in their best interests instead of yours. That's one of the classic traps of sales and marketing is we talk too much about us. Right? We are the preeminent blah, blah, blah, instead saying, I've identified something that I know you need and then that changes your script from as a salesperson trying to sell something to trying to help. And it lets you help by being more laser focused on who you are. So, you know, no massive thing is what I'm what I'm getting at yet. But everything is so much easier and everything is faster and better. And I was going at busyweb, we were going to hire a third salesperson. We don't need to. We're actually selling more than ever before because our productivity is 30% better than we were before.

There's a, there's a key to success right there, ladies and gentlemen. I hope that you pick that up, drop that in your notepad, maybe hit the rewind. That is a great nugget that you just dropped. Dave. I want you to put your futurist hat on for a second. I want you to allow yourself to maybe dream what's the future look like? Right, right. Regarding AI in sales and sales prospecting, again, we've, we've alluded numerous times, this is just the beginning. If you let yourself dream, what does the future look like?

I think near term, what we're going to see is prompt engineering is going to be one of those core skills that you're going to start seeing in resumes for sales teams and marketers. Prompt engineering means asking AI the right questions to get better results. So that's going to be a big part of every sales team, every marketing team. You're just going to need to know how to converse and to get what you need out of this massive new artificial assistant tool. And so doing that is going to be big. There's going to be some setbacks, I think, and some unexpected issues because we just don't know. And that echo chamber, it's kind of like social media. We all thought it was going to be the absolute panacea of the world. And now we've got two big camps and everybody's full of vitriol and hate. And, you know, there's a lot of things that blow up. And so you need to be very careful about, again, taking all of this with a grain of salt. So that's again, near term now, longer term. We ain't seen nothing yet. I mentioned it before, George. The AI that we see right now is the worst it'll ever be again. And that means that it's going to get much, much better. You're also going to be able to just have conversations with AI. You're not going to have to wear out your fingers or your thumbs, depending on what tool you're in, generating new prompts. You're just going to be able to say, okay, I need to brainstorm AI tool. So let me get this off my chest for a minute. I need these people, I need it to fit this Persona. I need these things. It needs to get after their unique issues and needs. And I need to put in my content, my things that I do. And remember, AI, I am best at this, this and this. So help me weave these things that I do into the needs of my customer. And it's going to be able to spit that out. And then you're going to be able to say, oh, and by the way, AI, I need three images for my blog post, and I need you to write that blog post and then it's going to spit something out and you say, that's a little bit long. I need you to shrink that by 30%. And it's going to do all of that in the span of a few minutes. So that's kind of nearer term and then longer term. I'm kind of an Apple geek. And so I think that some of the headset and the new interactivity with the world, we're going to be able to do some of that stuff like Minority Report where we're going to be able to pull some things in and look at this and drag it around in the graphical interface of the way that we're going to work in the world is probably going to change. And our kids are going to be having conversations like we have with our kids about not only when we talk to our kids, like I remember before computers or before cell phones, we're going to go in and we're going to say I'm going to go back to we had flat screens when we were a kid. It's going to be so much different and we are going to be able to see that we have this help and we have this conversation that we can have that's fluid. It's like you and I chatting right now. It's not Dave or George sitting in front of a computer just hacking away and trying to type things. It's literally just a conversation that's going to result in something and then prompt engineering and knowing how to ask those right things is going to become increasingly more fluid, increasingly just simple to use and more transparent. It's just going to be part of a salesperson's life. You're not going to have to jump into AI. You're just going to be doing your job and you're going to have all of these tools at your beck and call without even having to think about it.

I love that so much and I know for so many of the viewers or listeners they might be getting freaked out. But I have to be honest with you. For me, if I think about a Jarvis type world or a minority, Minority Report world, I get excited because I understand what that's doing from the process and the then need for the human creativity and the power of communication by the way. Communication has always been a key. And Dave, what I heard you say is you're gonna have to learn to communicate or speak the language in which gets the best results from whatever that future AI looks like. I'm. I'm so excited to see. Speaking of that though, this is the beginning. We're on a journey. I am asking this probably for some selfish reasons personally, definitely selfish for the audience. How can a businesses stay ahead of the AI sales prospecting curve? Like are there people you're listening to, places you're watching? Like how are you Going from like, hey, I remember there was a time before computers to like. And now I'm gonna do an interview on AI prospecting.

The easiest way to stay ahead of the curve is to play, play, play. This is double edged sword because remember marketer shiny object syndrome. But you have to be willing to tinker, to explore, to experience all of these things. Every tool that we've talked about so far today has a free component to it. Like you can go even the Adobe stuff, you can go to adobe.com and just play with their AI tool for free. Right? So you need to be able to play with that. So having that mindset to just try it is going to be interesting and helpful. You need to have a healthy appetite of research, both pro and Khan to help get ideas on this. And then you do need to subscribe to thought leaders, you know, Hub Heroes, BusyWeb. The AI Institute is absolutely essential in this. There's a really great Reddit forum on GPT and Generative AI that has all kinds of, you know, they've been doing some weird things with some of these language models. Like they create evil models of this where it, where it says, you know, I want you to do this thing and they figure out how to make it break its own rules tools. It's important to know the bad side so that you can be aware of it and ward against it. I think we all not only have to play, but we have to adopt that grain of salt and understand, okay, not only is this an amazing tool, but I, and I can use it to help my team. But I still need to solve for the customer. I still need to watch out for copyright. I still need to make sure that everything that I say is actually factually correct and true. You need to become a healthy consumer. Just because there's this massive new ice cream bar that's available on the web. You also have to get your vegetables in right? So making sure that this is all available is important. So to stay ahead of the curb. Yes, subscribe, understand knowledge. Try using GPT to tell you some of these ideas. It's like give me four places that I need to know and it'll help you and give you those links. So start thinking smarter, not harder on some of these things and make sure that you're just adopting that little bit of skepticism so that you're still watching your back and you're still careful with how you use this stuff.

Yeah, I love this idea of play, but protect, that's what kept coming to my mind as you're saying that and also I'll circle back around because you mentioned chat spot a couple times. If you're not following Dylan Selberg and that team and going to the chat spot blogs and watching their videos on YouTube, that's a good place to dip into as well. Now, Dave, you didn't know this next question was coming? I always save it for kind of a surprise piece. We've covered a lot of ground, we've talked about a lot of things. So if you had to boil it down to hashtag one thing, what's one thing you hope people take away from today's episode?

Try it. You need to experience these tools with a tinkerer's mindset in order to get a handle on what's coming. And burying your head in the sand is not an option anymore. It never really was. But you really need to play and adopt and be ready for that change. So try it.

I love that. Don't get left in the dust. Dave this has been an amazing time. Love having the time to sit down, have a conversation with you. You if people have questions for you, where do you want to point them for like connecting, conversating in the future?

Easiest way is to hit me up at busyweb B I Z Z Y W E B I'm Dave at and would love to have that conversation there. All of my socials are revolving around. I think you can hit me at Busy Dave on every social. So would love to connect with you up there. And LinkedIn if you're a LinkedIn. I'm Dave1 Meyer M E Y E R so would love to connect up get connected.

Listen to the audio. Are you listening to the audio? Are you listening to the podcast? If so, if you want more, head over to the community. Community.hubheroes.com until next time, remember to have a tinkerer's mindset, but also remember to be a happy, helpful, humble human. And we'll see you in the next episode of the Sidekick Strategy Show.