EP 94: Boosting Sales with AI Tools - Personalization Tips for Success

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One of the knocks about AI is that it takes away the personal touch. But what if you could use different AI tools to actually be more personal and to maybe make more sales? That's one of the things that we're going to be talking about today on Everyday AI. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you're joining us from. My name is Jordan Wilson. I'm so excited to have you on today's show where we're going to talk about different AI tools for actually better personalization and more sales. So what is Everyday I? Everyday AI is a daily live stream podcast and free daily newsletter helping everyday people like me, like you, helping us all better learn and leverage AI. So so much of that is, is, you know, cutting through the fluff. This is a, a live, unedited show. So this is, this is real right here. So before we get down into the real of AI tools for better personalization and more sales, talk about what's going on in the world of AI news. All right, so first, are AI stocks valued too high? Well, Goldman Sachs actually says that, no, they aren't. Goldman Sachs just came out with a new report that said, yes, AI stock valuations are a bit high, but they're not excessive. They're actually kind of right on track. It's something that we've talked about a lot on the Everyday AI show. Just, just about how, especially here in the U.S. how different AI stocks are really helping just hold the economy up. So speaking of the economy worldwide, AI is helping economies boom and China is finally able to kind of ride this AI wave. So after finally receiving a lot of needed regulatory approval, China is now being flooded with approved large language models hitting the market. So recently they just announced that more than 70 different AI models with billions of parameters have been released in China. So we've talked about a couple of them here on the show already. But I would be prepared to see a lot of new innovation and AI tools coming out of China now that a lot of these regulatory kind of steps have been met. Last but not least, X AI is going to train its model off of X. That's confusing. That's alpha, that's Alphabet soup.

Right?

So essentially this Twitter, right, Elon Musk is launching and will be launching his new kind of large language model, xai, but kind of, it was just recently recently announced that they will be using models or, sorry, they will be using data models from X, formerly known as Twitter, to train its models. So they are updating their terms of service to allow for that data scraping and data training. But enough, enough AI news. Let's talk about what y' all probably came here to listen or maybe why you clicked on this on the podcast. Let's talk about more sales, because whether you're in marketing, sales or something else, so much of life is sales. So let's talk about how we can use AI to get more sales. So I'm very, very excited to have on the program Jeremy Grande on the owner of the Forge. Jeremy, thanks for joining the show.

Thank you for having me.

Forge and, and everything you have going on here.

Yeah, yeah, actually, it's very fresh news for me because I'm, I, I've been head of sales for three years and it ended last. Last week. So, yeah, I'm, I'm launching my own thing, my own business, and I named it the Forge because the goal of it is to actually provide knowledge in sales and marketing and AI, obviously to help people, business owner, founder, salespeople, to actually forge their own growth. So, yeah, that's the idea.

All right, and thank you. Thank you, Jeremy, for sticking on as we dealt with some technical difficulties. And thank you. Yeah, thank you, everyone else in the audience who's still. Still sticking with us. So, you know, Val, Ahmed, Audrey, thank you all for joining. You know, Jeremy, maybe let's go a little bit into your background. So, you know, you're. We'll talk here in a minute about the Forge and, and what that is, but you have a pretty, pretty large background in sales, so. So just let's quickly talk about that and maybe also why you. You kind of decided to start your own venture as well with the Forge.

Yeah, actually, I think I've done everything possible. I made all the mistakes and I've tried everything, including AI, to make more sales. And I felt like, okay, it's now time for me to share it, share this knowledge, share this experience. And, yeah, I wanted to do my own thing. I've been. I wanted to do this for a long time. So, yeah, now sounded like a good time. And, yeah, I felt ready. I feel like I have a lot of knowledge and experience to share. So, yeah, here I am.

So kind of when AI was first kind of making a splash, so to speak, I think a lot of people were hesitant to really give it a try or to put it to use in different aspects of business. What about A.I. did you see? And, you know, you saw, hey, in sales, this could actually help. So what was it that kind of made you believe or you know, kind of through your own experience. But talk us through what that was like when you were like, oh no, sales can actually really benefit from AI.

Yeah, yeah, actually funny, funny story. It's for the first month of this explosion of AI, I was like in the hesitant ones and I was like, okay, what is this buzz? What know, it's, it's just hype. But yes, afterward I take a, I took a look a bit closer in it and yeah, I found that it would definitely help to reduce the time of the repetitive tasks. So if there is any salespeople in the audience, they know that you, this is time consuming. You need to, if you want to do it well, you have to personalize everything. I'm speaking more specifically speak specifically to about sales prospecting. But yeah, you need to personalize everything and it's very time consuming and I can just literally do more than the half of it.

Yeah, let's, let's talk about that because I know that probably a lot of people joining us live here on the show do have some experience in sales. But maybe Jeremy, for those that don't kind of go through maybe what some of those more repetitive tasks are or some of those more time consuming things. And then let's also talk about how AI can help specifically in those areas. So whether it's a different tool, software technique, but yeah, what are those more repetitive tasks and then how can people use AI to help make it better?

Yeah, I think the first obvious thing is about copywriting. When you are writing some offer, when you are writing some messages, cold messages, warm messages, you want it to be properly written. So ChatGPT or Claude, which is pretty good in copywriting can really be helpful in this and save you a lot of time making templates or just you can just write a draft and put it in the tool and it would be better. So this is the first thing, I think it's really time saving. The second thing I see is in sales prospecting there is a lot to say in here starting with ICP ideal customer profiles. If you want to be efficient in sales, you will have to target the right people for your offer and building. Actually the ICP is not that easy and AI can be really helpful. It depends. If you already have customers, you can just extract the data from your CRM for example and put it in code interpreter in chatgpt plus and just ask what are the common interest of my customers? What are, I don't know Anything you can ask, just give me 10 analysis of this data and it would provide you some things you will ever think about. So this is really super, super powerful. If you don't have any customer yet, you can also use your gut, obviously try to make some research but Also use, use ChatGPT plus or any of the other on the other chat to craft your icp. Like, okay, this is my offer, this is the value I want to share. Who is the perfect profile that I should target and it will help you to craft your icp. I think this is the first step which is very important if you want to make some sales prospecting and it's helpful.

Yeah. And I think even in my own experience, Jeremy, I've seen a lot of people in sales, it seems like using AI can be somewhat divisive because I think that there's people that have maybe been in sales for a very long time and they say, hey, AI systems can't, you know, understand my customers like I can or they can't help me. You know, AI can't help write an email like I can because I've been in sales for, you know, multiple decades. Not asking you to respond to that hypothetical, but if someone is kind of in that line of thinking, what advice or maybe even from your own experience, what would you offer to say? Hey, actually AI is pretty good when it comes to sales.

Yeah, I think the, the good thing in this, the right way to see it is you should see the AI tools, any AI tools, as an assistant, a super assistant actually. And these people, okay, I'm, I'm, I'm writing my own emails. Yeah, they probably have, sometimes they have an assistant, a human assistant and it can do the same even more. So you can see it like this and I think it would be super helpful. You can. In the sales world, as I said, you do a lot of repetitive tasks and it's time consuming and sometimes you want to do more but you can't because this is the end of the day and your super assistant can do the repetitive tasks for you and you can focus on what is really valuable in your job. So yeah, I would, I would, I would say that to these people.

Yeah. And, and just as a reminder, thank you all for still sticking with us as we had some technical difficulties this morning. So if you do have questions for, for Jeremy, please go ahead and drop them in now as we, as we go through them. So great question here from, from Brian. Jeremy. So Brian is asking, do you combine automation tools with AI and if so, how?

Not yet. I've seen some stuff on this. I think you can, for example, enrich your Prospect, click your ICP lists with information based on, I don't know, LinkedIn or even Google or whatever. And I have a tool to share with this in this topic. But after. And, and yes, yes, you can, you can boost it with automation, I think. But my advice in this would be before automate or even use AI actually in any field or any topic, you should first improve your skills and your knowledge to master it. Because if you are doing the wrong thing and you automate it, you will just spread a mistake a lot. And this is kind of risky. So be sure to. Yeah. Do it in your sandbox first. Try a bit and then you can, you know, scale.

Yeah, Ahmed, Ahmed here saying, you know, the advice is just try ChatGPT. You know, that's. It's. It's actually like. It sounds funny, but you'd be surprised, I think, how many people still learn about Chat gbt and they hear it and maybe they even talk about it, but they're not using it. So, Jeremy, I'm actually curious what's. What's kind of the best way that you're using ChatGPT. So you kind of, you know, gave an example of using the mode formerly called code interpreter. It's called something else now. But to use code interpreter to essentially, you know, crunch, you know, sales data. But what other kind of easy or practical ways are there for people to use ChatGPT to improve their sales or marketing?

Yeah, I think to refine and improve their ICPs. It would be a good start. Just asking it. Okay, here is my icp. I'm setting this and this. What do you think that would be a first step? I think it would be interesting. You could also do the same thing with your current cold emailing or cold messages on LinkedIn sequences. You could say, okay, this one is performing that well. This other one is performing that well. Give me an analyze of this. That would be helpful, I think. What else? You can improve your copywriting, of course, and then I have some, some insight. But it would involve code interpreter. So you tell me.

Yeah, Val, Val here with a great comment saying he uses ChatGPT in his sales process to determine if certain customers really fit the icp, which is. Which is a great, A great use case. And then, Audrey. All right, we got to ask this because. Audrey, Audrey, thank you for joining us. So Audrey's asking, do you know of any tools that are great for building an automated flow? We're waiting. I think you're teasing a couple. But what kind of tools might help with automation? And I know automation can be a tricky subject because not all platforms encourage it, but you know, even just within marketing automation tools like Zapier, you know, web scraping. Jeremy, do you have any tools you know, that you might be able to recommend, whether they're more AI or more automation that can really help in the sales process?

Okay, Okay, I will share some gems here. So, okay, when you are going to send your first email, your first messages, you want to create a good icebreaker. So I'm thinking of a tool named Human Linker, which is actually a chrome extension and it can scrap data from LinkedIn. So you're going to your prospect LinkedIn page and it will scrap the information you need from it, but also add other information, like what kind of tone of voice I should use with this profile. Yeah, that's it. What are the latest news of the industry? What are the latest news of the company of this prospect, et cetera. So this is really, really helpful. It will save you a lot of time to craft the right icebreakers. Then I'm using also sometimes another tool named Browse AI, which is an automation tool actually boosted with AI. And it allows you to monitor some information. Let's say for example, you are selling something related to hr. You can just monitor a website of your target and see when they are recruiting, for example, if their HR page is changing. So this is kind of helpful too. It can be at least regarding automation, of course, you have to send these messages. You can send this email. So Lemlist is the first coming in my mind. It's also powered by AI. So this is kind of powerful. I think it's super helpful. Yes.

We finally got a little bit out of you. We got a little bit out of you. Audrey had to pry a little bit there. But thank you, Jeremy, for, for, for sharing some of your tools. So I guess I'll ask this. So I think one thing, especially in sales and marketing, people sometimes always like to, you know, always find the next tool for this or tool for that. What's, what's your best advice for people to balance between, you know, jumping all of these, you know, jumping between all of these different softwares and all of these different, you know, SaaS products with still being able to keep in touch, you know, with the person that they're maybe selling to. So how can people find that right balance, you know, between still using AI and saving time, but still really being in good connection with their customers and with their pain points? How can people do that?

Yeah, I think at some point it's, it's always a human buying from, from another human. So you need to maintain this, this relationship. This, this, this has to be true. This can be replaced by AI so you can automate with AI, with tools, all the process. You can be faster when crafting the messages, scraping the data to actually create open this conversation. But at some point you will have to take it manually because at the end the final prospect, if you want him or her to become your client customer, they want to buy from you, not a robot. So I think that would be a good trigger.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So we've been through a lot in this call, Jeremy. We've talked about different tools, We've talked about ChatGPT, we've talked about trying to balance AI and automation with keeping in close contact with what your customer actually wants. So what, what would be kind of your, your one tech, your one takeaway for people or your one piece of advice? So if they've listened to you and if they feel excited about being able now to go tap into, you know, new tools or techniques, what's kind of that one piece of advice that you hope people can follow to have, you know, more, more personalized marketing and sales copy to help improve, to improve their business.

I have two pieces of advice in this topic in this area. The first one is first do it manually. Just learn about it. Don't burn steps. It's really important because I said it before, you will replicate a mistake probably. So first, master it, master the knowledge, master the process. And the second one is test, test. You won't find the right email sequence in the first time. You won't find the right script called call in the first time. So you have to iterate and be persistent. It's not an easy job. You will have a lot of no before you have a yes. So keep going.

Yeah, that's a great point. I think in sales and marketing people can just be a little scared of, of the nose. But you know, like, like Jeremy just said there, that's great advice. You're gonna hear a lot of no's and see a lot of no's on your screen before you get that yes. So, so Jeremy, thank you so much for joining the, the everyday AI show, the live show. Because hey, as we saw, sometimes, sometimes we get hiccups. But hey, thank you so much and uh, for joining and very excited for your new venture which we're gonna be sharing about. So make sure, make sure you go to your everyday AI.com Sign up for the free daily newsletter. Jeremy's got some exciting things coming with his business that we'll be sharing about. So Jeremy, thank you again for joining us on the show.

Thank you very much. Thank you.

All right. And hey, like I just said, thank you for sticking with us even though we had a couple hiccups in there. And do please go to your everyday AI.com we have a lot of other great live shows for you in store this week with hopefully fewer technical issues. So we hope to see you back then and every other day for every day. AI Thanks y'.

All.

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