🚀 Why Every Sales Rep Should Be Using AI Now

Hey there, fellow revenue hunter!

🎉 Welcome to the inaugural edition of this newsletter where the goal is to help revenue team members improve and grow revenue through the use of AI, while learning the tactics of elite sellers!

Unless you have been under a rock for the past 24 months you know the AI era is underway. While some are scared that AI will take their jobs, others are embracing AI to dominate. I firmly believe AI will not take our sales jobs (for now, at least), but can help us be more human and uplevel our sales game.

But is AI a homerun? Before conducting AI Training for a large Sales Team recently, I polled the team and found that only 12% of the attendees were meaningfully using AI in their day-to-day activities. If it was a home run, it would have gained much more adoption within sales. In my opinion, so much potential is being missed!

Most Reps do not understand where AI can be applied in their sales process. And guess why most have not invested the time to learn? Well, they do not understand the value!!

Today we will dig into “The Why” of doing anything with AI, as it applies to sales reps or any member of the revenue team.

Let's. Level. Up. 🚀

"Companies using AI for sales have reported increasing their leads by more than 50%, reducing call time by 60-70%, and achieving cost reductions of 40-60%"

AI Statistics for Small Business 2024 (Colorwhistle)

This Week in AI Sales:

• Why Do Anything with AI? The Game-Changing Benefits

• Time Killers: What's Eating Your Productive Hours and How-To use AI to overcome 2 common time wasters.

• The Secret Sauce of Elite Sellers (and How AI Can Help You Join Their Ranks)

Deep Dive:

Why Mastering AI-Powered Sales is Crucial

Look - AI isn't just a buzzword - it's revolutionizing when used correctly. While I will introduce you (or refresh you) to a business-level understanding of AI soon, just know that AI can understand human language, is trained on massive amounts of data, and is strong in creating content like emails, research, proposals and summaries. So, with an AI sales assistant like this, you stand to be much more productive. But the value is more than that, here's why you need to get on board ASAP:

• More Time for What Matters: AI offloads menial tasks, giving you more time to focus on high-value activities and achieve a better work-life balance.

• Competitive Edge: AI allows you to produce higher-quality work, focus better on listening, and dedicate more time to relationship building.

• Money in Your Pocket: AI frees up time for high-value activities, enables hyper-personalization, and helps you win more deals.

• Stress Less, Achieve More: Get more done easier, win more deals, and enjoy a better work-life balance.

If more time, more money, more wins, and less stress don’t speak to you, let me show some real-world examples…starting with the most significant time crushers in the sales game.

Conquering Sales (and Deal) Time Killers with AI

If “Time Kills All Deals”, then sales time-killers, kill many deals. Have you ever felt like your day evaporated without making real progress? We have all been there, while we need to be following-up on an important meeting, you are holed up finishing administrivia. Let me show you the 5 biggest time killers for reps and a few ways how AI can help you crush them in seconds and minutes, as opposed to hours and days per week:

1. Administrative Tasks: AI can assist with providing summaries to massive amounts of data, including call transcripts, emails, proposals, etc, allowing you to cut and paste these summaries into the correct CRM fields. AI can provide call transcripts for your calls in seconds if you are not getting these today.

2. Client Research and Preparation: AI simplifies searching massive amounts of data, content, analyst reports, and websites, and within minutes, you can have your meeting preparation, account planning, contact research, meeting agenda creation, and relevant discovery questions prepared for you. Within 20 seconds, you can complete this.

3. Content Creation: AI helps tailor presentations, create follow-up materials, and draft personalized emails. When tuned, these can be created in seconds.

4. Proposal Generation: AI can help create custom proposals, configure pricing models, and develop ROI business cases.

5. Prospecting: AI streamlines researching potential clients and creating hyper-personalized outreach that resonates instead of falling flat.

How much time do you spend on these tasks per week? Five hours, ten hours, twenty hours? Imagine reducing this by 80%! Imagine investing that time in your business's current gaps and the potential over a month or quarter. That is the potential here, which is why you need to start this today.

Meeting Research and Prep Prompt

Let's face it, we often schedule meetings back-to-back and often do not have time to follow up. The action items from the day's first meeting get a bit clouded after you have had six more. I recommend recording your meetings, most are anyway. But save the meeting video to your computer, and you can easily submit them to AI to provide you a transcript if Zoom (or whatever service you use) does not automatically do this.

A thorough and quick follow-up from the meeting demonstrates professionalism and maintains the deal's momentum. Here are the key areas to research and best practices:

Besides the details about the company, the contact, and the industry, here are a few other key areas to know before that initial meeting:

• The potential areas of pain, based on the annual report or industry status

• The personal connection points with your primary contact, can lead to a subpar relationship or a tight relationship where they sponsor you over the competition.

• Build a great list of Discovery Questions so that you can open your contact like a can of beans (or something like that)

• and it is also important to build a great meeting agenda

Meeting Research and Preparation Prompt:

"You are my AI sales assistant helping me prepare for an initial client meeting. Please help me prepare based on the following information:

Meeting Details:

Company Name: [Company]
Industry: [Industry]
Meeting Attendees: [Names and Titles]
Meeting Duration: [Time]
Meeting Type: [Virtual/In-Person]
Context: Our solution: [Brief description of your product/service] Meeting objective: [What you want to achieve]

Please provide a comprehensive meeting preparation summary including:

Company Research: 
• Recent company news and developments 
• Key challenges in their industry 
• Main competitors

Attendee Insights: 
• Professional background 
• Recent activities or posts 
• Potential pain points based on their role

Conversation Starters: 
• 3 relevant industry topics 
• 2 company-specific talking points 
• 1 personalized ice-breaker

Discovery Questions: 
• 5-7 open-ended questions about their:
Current challenges
Goals and objectives
Decision-making process
Timeline and budget considerations

Value Alignment: 
• How our solution addresses their likely challenges 
• 2-3 relevant customer success stories 
• Potential objections and responses

Meeting Agenda: 
• Suggested flow for the conversation 
• Time allocation for each segment 
• Key points to emphasize

Please keep the tone professional but conversational, and focus on building rapport while gathering crucial information."

Pro Tips for Using This Prompt:

1. Add any recent news articles or social media posts as additional context. You can screen-capture LinkedIn Profiles.

2. Include any specific company requirements or preferences

3. Add in sections based on your specific needs or meeting topics.

4. Use the output as a foundation and customize based on your experience.

5. Store this and all prompts in a Prompt Guide.

Can AI Make You an Elite Seller?

Sales can be an incredible career. Becoming an elite seller will allow you to join any company you desire, and elevate the ranks into leadership (if you desire) plus it comes with elite money. Being comfortable in life, due to our hard work is very rewarding, and usually the reason most choose a sales career. That is the opportunity - to earn more the more we produce.

But can AI help you to become elite? If used correctly, yes it can! Let me explain how.

Here is what I believe elite salespeople do differently than average seller. Elite Sellers:

• Build authentic relationships with clients

• Actively listen for needs, value, and pain

• Are better prepared through research

• Develop and communicate value effectively

• Act as consultative partners with deep knowledge

• Close better and handle objections effectively

• Maintain a growth mindset

Here is how AI can help you uplevel your sales game: AI can help you cultivate all these traits! By leveraging AI, you can:

• Spend more time with clients

• Simplify research and preparation so you are more professional

• Analyze sentiment and uncover pain points to "listen better"

• Automate and improve value statement development

• Access vast product and industry knowledge

• Improve your closing skills and objection handling

...And by doing these things, AI gives you the best chance to improve your craft, win more deals, and make more money...to become ELITE!

AI Tool of the Week: Perplexity AI - AI Assistant

If your AI assistant cannot access the internet and its data is from last year, consider Perplexity AI. Perplexity is designed to find information on the web, as opposed to a LLM. It can search the web and access financial, corporate, (many, not all) social sites, etc so does very well at account research. Well worth the $20 monthly investment IMHO.

Perplexity AI is now my go-to search engine now, it is so much better at finding the information I need instead of me reading through tons of terrible websites that all have copied the same information.

What You Learned Today:

• AI can significantly boost your sales performance and improve your work-life balance

• AI helps ameliorate time-wasters for sales reps

• With AI, you can develop the traits of elite salespeople more efficiently

Don't let AI leave you in the dust. Supercharge your sales skills now!