Transcript
Intro:
Hi, everyone. I'm Ben Wright, successful entrepreneur, corporate leader and expert sales coach to some of the most talented people our amazing planet has to offer. You're listening to the Stronger Sales Teams podcast, where we bring together and simplify the complex world of B2B sales management to help the millions of sales managers worldwide build, motivate, and keep together highly effective sales teams…teams who grow revenue and make their businesses actual profits.
Along the journey, we also provide great insights and actionable steps to managing your personal health. A happy and productive you is not only better for your teams, but everyone around you. So if you're an ambitious Sales Leader who wants to build the highest performing and engaged teams, Stronger Sales Teams is right where you need to be.
Ben Wright:
Welcome back to Stronger Sales Teams. The place where we provide real world and practical advice to help you develop super powered sales teams. Sales Leaders, Sales Professionals today is the topic where I want you to really listen in. And that’s because we are going to talk through how AI is going to impact your sales coaching, your sales training and your general learning this year. It’s not about what’s coming down the track, it’s not about what we need to think about in the future, but it’s about what’s available right now and things that as leaders and even sales professionals, we need to be aware of.
It’s a punchy episode that’s going to focus on three particular areas around the AI landscape, deal, reviews, coaching and do it for you AI sales agents. But one that I’d really recommend you invest the next 25 minutes or so into listening to.
But before we do so, for a lighter hearted moment, those watching me on video will see that there’s a few longer shadows in this room than normal. And that is because I’m recording as we get into the evening. Why, might you ask? Well that’s because today I had a first and in fact my customer that I was speaking to had a first also when I was calmly sitting in my office only to have a very curious and in the end quite aggressive red belly black snake come charging in towards my study. Lucky. I heard a little rustle as it came through some carbon that I had just outside the office and boom. Before it could strike at the ankles, I was up on my desk and out of its way. And I tell you what, for a normally non-aggressive snake, this one surprised me because he came in really hot. Not only did it torch my day, but geez, did it throw me out. And we talk about sales agility and being able to act on a process that you can consistently and repeatedly recollect. Well, today was an example of not knowing what to do when a snake comes charging your way because not only did I yell and scream and jump out of the way, but it completely upended my meeting with my customer.
Thankfully, it missed didn’t quite get its fangs into me. And Luke the snake catcher was here in a flash because the snake even more quickly disappeared behind some shelving in the room and there’s no way I was going after it. But boy did it remind me when we think sales about the importance of having a default process, particularly when we’re doing things over and over again. Because when something can get in the way that is an intruder into your sales meeting, it’s nice to know that you have something to fall back on. And in this instance, I had such a strong agenda set out with my customer, I was able to remove my computer out of the room, set up again, and it probably gave us a three-minute interruption to our meeting. But for me, I think that the ego’s done more damage that a customer could see me jump so quickly out of the way of a snake. But thankfully it’s gone. And yes, it didn’t quite get me. Anyway, something a little bit different to start the day. And for those that are living in snake prone areas, you’ll just be nodding your head. For those that haven’t had as much exposure to snakes, yeah, for a city slicker like me, it was definitely confronting having one inside the house versus outside where we normally encounter them.
Okay, so let’s get back on to AI. So right now, the buzz around AI is extreme. We don’t need to talk about that any further. And there are serious impacts around productivity at a sales level that we’re certainly seeing. Data scraping tools, abilities to integrate our systems together, even using ChatGPT to help us understand our customers, who they are, what their goals are, what their problems could be, and really supercharge our preparation before we get into meetings with customers. But the three areas I’d like to focus on today is how we can be using AI to develop both as leaders for our teams and also as individual salespeople.
So, I’m going to break this down into three segments. The first one is the AI tools that I’m seeing out there that are helping us get better at constructing how we flow through deals. And what I mean by this is that when we have a target customer who we’re working towards a deal with software and LLMs that we can use in our deal flows to help us increase the likelihood that these deals are going to close. Best example I have, we actually explored this last week in our episode with Brian Dietmeyer from CloseStrong. So, for those who missed it, it’s episode 113. But I’d really encourage you to jump back and have a look at that episode, regardless. For me, where we start to talk about deal reviews is upping the capability at a specific deal cycle flow.
So, when we’re working through a customer that might be at the early quotation stage, for example, we’ve had our lead generator, we’ve met them, we’ve greeted them, we’ve built a rapport, understand their problems and their opportunities. We’re moving into that phase around how do we quote them? This is software that we roll in that helps us construct how we approach the deal from that point forward. It’s a guide that takes into account, for example, our sales process, pairs it with the customer needs and tries to map the path forward for us to be able to enhance our likelihood of closing the deals. Think of it as your deal coaching that you would do as a sales leader with your team or as teams being pulled together. Right? Think of that as AI powered software that does that job for you. I love it. It’s real. It’s here. The brand that we’ve spoken about last week was CloseStrong.AI, so CloseStrong.AI through Brian Dietmeyer. I haven’t seen a lot of these type of tools out there. CloseStrong is the only one I know about, but I’m sure there are others out there. However, for me, there’s an opportunity right now that if we’re looking to rapidly increase the number of deal reviews that we’re running across our business. That is, if we’re looking for deal coaching to help us negotiate, to help us plan, to help us increase the chances of deals succeeding, then there is software available for us now. I’d encourage you, if you’re thinking about this, to first of all look into deal coaching at a people level, right? To start that habit and that process within your business for a period of a few months and then move into something like a close strong. However, if you already have deal coaching in your business and you’re doing deal reviews and deal meetings and those who work with me will be doing this because it’s a big part of what we do, right? Then here’s some options around AI tech that can help you expand on the number of deals that you’re reviewing. Great AI initiative. I love it. It’s allowing us to get More coaching into salespeople at an individual deal level.
Number two is where we move from deal coaching to broader core coaching. And that’s where we’re having an AI piece of software, an LLM or an IA piece of software. Right. That this landscape is evolving so quickly. But in essence, where we’re having a piece of software analyse a number of our calls, if not all of our calls being made as sales individuals, as teams or even as leaders and providing us real time coaching around how we can better improve our performance.
So, we have brands out here like Gong, we have brands out here like Icana that are doing a great job, Gong.io I believe, and Icana.ai that I think are really making an impact on how we can provide ongoing coaching to our teams.
What I like about providing coaching through an AI system or an AI piece of tech into our teams is that it allows us to do a few things. Number one is when we build out our sales strategy or we have our impact event which I really commonly talk through our teams with, what it’s allowing us to do is help with the implementation. So, it’s requiring less hands on effort to assess how we are rolling out that event or that strategy that we built and uses the piece of tech which we can program to look specifically for certain elements of our deal flow or our sales process or how we’re talking with customers that we want to analyse, I. E. If we identify through our sales process strategic mapping that we need to be better at understanding what we need to do to ensure a successful deal. I.E. if I, Mr. Or Mrs. Customer, will you move forward? Right. So, if we’re looking at that as an example of what we want to be providing coaching on our piece of tech can specifically look into those areas and provide some commentary at an individual deal level or across a thematic, more macro level as to how we’re progressing on those points. Right. So, we can program these LLMs to be looking for specific areas of our sales development or our sales adequacy that we like it to help us improve. Right. Fantastic. Reduces man hours, but really increases the cadence in terms of how we’re reviewing the implementation of what we’re learning.
The second piece I really like about this is we can look at performance at an individual level and pick out pockets as to how we’d like to see that individual improve. Now for me, salespeople listening out there, please, I see this as a great opportunity for you. Sure. It could be used to understand if you’re, you know, if you’re doing Your job as effectively as you can be and it can be used on the other end as more of a stick impact. But I think for those people looking to genuinely grow and get better, the upside here is far more significant than the downside. Because if we can find a way to identify systemic areas where we can improve, i.e how we’re qualifying deals, i.e how we’re engaging a deal for feedback, how we’re engaging a customer for what we need to be doing around next steps, how we’re asking for the business, right? Lots and lots of different things that we can be looking at, where we can be seeing patterns consistently across how we perform as individuals. There is significant upside for this. So I love the approach that something like an Icana and Icana is the one that I’m putting my chips behind. I think it’s going to do some terrific things. It’s had a really good baseline of early stage customers and I’m really looking forward to seeing what it does in the future. But for me, where we can have that feedback at an individual level, super powerful for how we improve.
The third area where I really like that the sales coaching through an AI model is providing is when we look at a team level. So, whilst we might have individuals who have certain areas to improve, while we might have very specific areas of our sales process that we want to try and also upskill on, an AI coaching model like this, or an AI call coach, as we more commonly call them, can actually pull out themes from our sales cadence in general. I.e, are we spending too long on calls, too little on calls, how are we qualifying in general? And it can really pull out those themes and score us against others, I.e. competitors or other general information that’s out in the market so that we can rank our performance. So, where we find that we might be low on really understanding what customer needs are compared to what the general market has available, we’re able to then benchmark ourselves and say actually we need to spend more time training our teams around how we can really get into the weeds around what will make the difference for our customer, what’s their opportunity, what’s their problem? Right. How are we here to provide a solution rather than just a product for them?
I love this because what it also will identify for us is if we have any significant capability gaps, for example, if we’re a little bit short on our ability to close deals, we might then go out to hire some team members who are more impactful at that. If we’re short on our lead generation activities and we’re recording prospecting calls, we might recognize that some pure hunters are what the business needs right now. So not only is there the opportunity to upskill our teams through common themes that appear, but there’s also an opportunity for us to increase broad and baseline capability that we have in our teams.
So, for me, call coaching is here. Now, it’s relatively inexpensive. We’re talking about tens of thousands of dollars to roll out, not hundreds of thousands of dollars. And for businesses that have multiple sales team members, it’s a very, very small investment. If we can improve our close rates by 2, 3, 4, 5% based on a $30,000 investment, then for businesses out there with multiple teams, this investment more than pays for itself. In fact, the returns dwarf what you’re paying on it. So that software is available now, and I’d really encourage you to start looking at it, of course, with any of these three. If you’d like to talk through it with me, I’m more than happy to have that discussion because invariably, it’s fantastic to implement this technology, but we also want to make sure that we’re using it effectively. Right. The recommendations that are coming out, we’re really implementing them well. And certainly, sometimes we need to have others to bounce those ideas off.
Third area that I’m really seeing some progress in the AI space. And look, I’ll say this one will impact you this year, but probably towards the latter stages of this year, and that’s independent AI call agents. So, the first piece here was around agents that help you structure deals. Right. The second piece got deeper into your team, and that’s around ongoing coaching of our sales team through an AI agent. Right. The third piece is do it for you salespeople. Now, please, salespeople out there, I’m certainly not suggesting that we need to be replaced, but what I am suggesting is that there are certain parts of our sales functions that we can use AI agents to replace what we already have. And by replacing what we already have, it might allow our current sales teams to spend more time on what’s really impactful.
Let me give you an example here. Inbound prospecting leads. So as customers call into our business. We spoke with John Horan about this. This was episode 106. He’s replaced some of his inbound call receipts or some functions of his sales team to receive inbound calls with AI sales agents. So, they’re now running that lead generation qualification process. Right. Without needing to have a direct salesperson do. So that’s freeing up his team to be able to spend more time on impactful sales consultations and less time qualifying leads. Another example might be around your post-sales support, right, where you have sales teams providing that post-sales support. We can use independent AI web agents to actually do that for them. Another area would be in data scraping, right? Or email writing tools in data scraping like clay, AI tools in emails or in email creation like lavender. These are tools that are actually doing the work to create the emails for us. They’re doing the work to be able to scrape LinkedIn and other databases. Lush is another good example to build our prospect list for us. And these are all replacing parts of what we had to do as salespeople to allow us to then focus more on customers.
Where we’ve actually gone a step further is again is Icana is a brand that’s doing this as well, is actually being able to provide fully independent sales agents that can take potential customers through the whole process. Now, again, salespeople, please don’t be concerned that this is replacing your job. For me, what it’s doing is it not only qualifying your customers, but it’s also handling the more straightforward customer engagements. So, what that’s allowing us to do as experienced, emotionally intelligent salespeople is have the conversations with the customers who need our support so we can get out to more customers who are going to value our service, our support, our relationship building, and less to the customers who are more likely to make decisions based on process, based on price, right? Based on those types of deals where we tend to lose more than we win, we can be working those through an AI sales agent who will close their percentage of deals without impacting human time. So, for me, where an AI sales agent can replace, certainly some roles of salespeople are ones where we’re not doing them very well, are ones where they are generally lower skills, right? And when I mean lower skill, what I’m talking about is where lower skill in terms of relationship building, in terms of customer engagement, right? Where we can be replacing those such as prospecting data, such as lead scraping, such as email writing, for example, that’s allowing us to focus on the higher end tasks, which is where we make all the difference in terms of closing out sales. So, for me, whilst this is towards the end of the year, what I really like is that we have independent sales agents that can become part of our business and when we have that as part of our business, the rest of the business can ascend from there and get better and better at what we do.
So, that was pretty hard and fast as we talk through three options I’m seeing right now that sales leaders in particular need to be wary of. So, the first one here was all around deal reviews, how we can use AI software to help us step through our strategies to close our deals. The end game here is to increase our close rates. Right. If we can take them from 30% to 40%, then that’s a terrific result from having a structured coach behind us with our deals. The second piece I spoke about, and sorry, I should go back there, the first brand that I know of is Closestrong.AI. The second opportunity we spoke about was how we can use AI call coaching to allow us to get more data across more of our customer engagements and thereby focus on specific improvement areas and thereby focus on how we can upskill salespeople at an individual level or how we can focus on upskilling our broader team at a thematic level and find those areas where we need to get better at. We’ve got brands like Icana, Icana and Gong, both of those are providing these type of services. There’s lots of others out there, but I want to give you a couple of examples that I’ve had some experience with. And the third, and probably slightly lagging behind the first two is the ability to actually utilize fully autonomous AI sales agents. So, these are agents that can complete part of the sales role, that is the lead generation, the email writing, some of the post customer care or also can actually come in and fundamentally take over some of the more basic sales roles. Right. Freeing up salespeople to work to higher levels or as a sales leader, allowing us to remove the lowest performing salespeople from our team. Right. We all have them in our teams and unfortunately, yes, I think salespeople, if you’re not performing well in your job, there’s a danger here that you might be replaced. Right. So, I hope you take that as encouragement to get better and better at what you do.
So, they’re the three areas that I’m seeing really, really becoming impactful. Now that last area, number three I mentioned Clay for data scraping lead generation, particularly across LinkedIn. Lusha does that. Also I mentioned Lavender for email writing and then I mentioned Icana again. I know they’ve got a fully autonomous web agent. I haven’t seen too many people with that out there, so. And John Horan as well. Episode as I need to refer to my notes, episode 106. Right. I know lots of our episodes, we’re getting up towards 120 now and there’s a few in there.
So, for me they’re the three things that are really impactful that we need to get our heads across. Now, there’s a bit of information that we’ve gone through in that podcast, so I really want to make sure that you’re across it and that you’re comfortable to talk about it. So, for those who I work with and are listening to this podcast, please pick it up with me in one of our sessions. For those who we haven’t worked with before, please find me. [email protected] on LinkedIn. Right? Even a message on the platform, you’re looking at this podcast, we can often get them through. Right. Please get in touch. I’m more than happy to spend some time with you because for me, if we don’t evolve as sales leaders quickly, we’re going to even more quickly fall off the pace. Right. So, there’s a wonderful opportunity for us to really up spec how we’re training, developing and coaching our people.
Okay, so before we go today, over our last few podcasts, certainly my solo ones, I’ve been talking about the Road to Cairns, the Ironman that I signed up to without really thinking it through. Well, an exciting week for me. My new bike has arrived. What I didn’t realise is just how much of a difference tech can make. And I’ll be sure to report back in around some of the differences in ride times. But from my friends that I’m speaking with, I’m going to be expecting a 5 to 10% difference in my time, if not more. Right. Once I get onto these new bikes. So, I’m super, super excited about that. My Ks are definitely building up and one thing that I’m learning is that there really is no substitute to nutrition. I’m learning just how important it is to eat well around your training. So much so that I’m actually going to look to provide a dedicated podcast around nutrition for us as leaders. I think we don’t necessarily need to be elite athletes or even amateur athletes to worry about nutrition. I think as leaders, there’s certain things we can be doing to make sure we’re fronting up right day in, day out, eating the best possible foods and having the most impactful lifestyle that we possibly can. So, stay tuned for that. Stay tuned for more Road to Cairns updates and hopefully for our next podcast I don’t have an intruder slightly before. Thank you. I hope you enjoyed today. Please keep living in a world of possibility and you will be amazed by what you can achieve. Bye for now.
E114 3 AI Tools You Need To Know About NOW
