AI in Sales Leadership: Where the Hell Do I Start?

Richard Smith: And have never just kind of realised how AI can really automate and speed those processes up. Tom Ridley: There's loads of ways to like start finding time back, clawing back your time in terms of frankly, if you apply AI across all and many more areas. Richard Smith: Even those who have access to AI tools, their research is highly manual. Tom Ridley: So, how can I tell it about me, about what my business does, what we sell, what our typical ICP or persona might look like, Richard Smith: so yeah, there's two use cases that you can use for kind of making yourself look more better prepared for your, for your meetings with prospects, but also helping you with your messaging as well, I hosting.

Ollie Whitfield: We've got rich, experienced sales leader, an AI void. You call yourself rich, like experimenter. Is that a bit undercut there? Richard Smith: Possibly I'd like to kind of maybe relatable to some people in this, in this room, is that I feel like my use of AI in sales is is growing, albeit feel like I'm probably still at a reasonably junior level.

I'm here to learn as much as anything else. Ollie Whitfield: Very good. And Tom, what would you call yourself? Tom Ridley: AI, early adopter, guru, whatever you want to call it.

I just love a technology, so I tend not to put a name on it. I'm just all about sales people getting the most out of the technology, and frankly, having great conversations. So, salesperson first, AI evangelist second. Let's say that.

Ollie Whitfield: Cool, I like it. Well, we got a lot to get through, as I said. So, here's what we got. I got an icebreaker, a bit of fun for you to start off with.

Bit of why to adopt AI right now. There's so much talk about it. I think it's important to remind ourselves of what's really going on, where it fits into your sales team, and some key use cases you can walk away with and start right now. We're sales people, we don't want to talk about something that's nothing useful for today.

We want to be able to start tomorrow morning, so I've got my stopwatch ready. We're going to play a little rock paper scissors to decide who goes first, but I have 30 seconds up on my phone, and I'm going to make you pitch the best use case of AI you will personally execute in sales, and there will be a loser. So, rock paper scissors, please, dudes. Oh, Richard Smith: scissors wins, Ollie Whitfield: okay?

Right, so on three, I'm going to tap, and I'm gonna cut you off on 30 seconds, 321, fire. Richard Smith: Yeah, mine's a little bit different. I'm a content creator, I guess. On LinkedIn, I post every day.

One of the hardest things to do is kind of think of new ideas for posting content. What I have done is extracted a year's worth of my LinkedIn posts into a CSV sheet. I've then used AI to kind of categorise all of the different posts that I've done over the last 12 months. It's a few 100, tag them by topic, and Tom Ridley: then I'm 30 seconds.

You better hope they saw Ollie Whitfield: where you were going, because we'll see. We'll see. So, Tom, I'm going to count you in: 321, fire. Tom Ridley: So, a few months ago, I built a hyper-personalized emailing system, or cold outreach system that takes insight from LinkedIn profiles, websites, industry, or publications about an organisation, even their financial documentation, if it's publicly available, and aligns all of that to your value proposition, and writes all your cold emailing scripts for you, and even puts you tasks in HubSpot.

More Richard Smith: succinct than I am, I'm gonna have everybody like messaging me saying, tell me what happened at the end, Rich. Tom Ridley: It generated you a nice, lovely recipe for Yorkshire puddings. Richard Smith: Leave people hanging Ollie Whitfield: while it's not visible to everybody yet. It's not a whitewash, that's all right.

So, we've got that, Tom. You had 81% Rich. I think you let's round that up to 20% Richard Smith: Thank you. Good Ollie Whitfield: effort.

You had to go first, though. So that's worth 30% of the vote. So all good fun. Now let's get to the serious stuff.

So Richard saying, let's start with you. You probably nudged me in this direction a while ago. I thought AI was the new NFT stupid thing that was gonna high and die, but it's not really the case. So I'm going into NFTs very soon.

Why adopt now? I think you've had a real good beat on this. So what's what's the case? Why do we need to adopt right now?

Richard Smith: I think a lot of sales people probably felt like, hey, no, I'm gonna push back against AI, it's here, take my job, and perhaps there's that realisation that it is here to stay, and not only that, but I think the realisation that if AI is gonna become, as you know, prolific, and maybe more prolific than using the likes of Google in your day-to-day life, and so the reality is that if you can't embrace it, then you are going to be left behind. That's you're probably already left being left behind, hence why you're possibly on this webinar today, because you're sat there thinking, I probably feel like I'm not capitalising on this, and you may have made very little to no progress.

I've just came to realise that we all likely do tasks every single day in our sales jobs, which we've probably done for years, we've always done them a certain way, and I've never just kind of realised how AI can really automate and speed those processes up. And I think for some people, and I probably count myself in this, was I have this kind of embarrassment sometimes that, oh, what if I send this email to a prospect as like a follow-up to a meeting, and it can, they kind of get a sense that it's I've used AI for it.

I think I've come to realisation that I shouldn't be embarrassed by it. Like, prospects should realise, and hopefully this is what the human being will realise, is that people who use AI to help them with these tasks is just part and parcel of how we're kind of moving with the world. But I do think there's a careful line to balance there I. Thing you know, the careful line between using AI to go really fast and removing the human element from the from what we do as salespeople, but I kind of one stat that really kind of stalled me that I came across is that this is from last year, by the way, so I can only imagine this number is quite a bit higher, 71% of employers prefer AI skills rather than experience, right now, pretty staggering, right?

If you can evidence that you've got high aptitude or even a competent aperture when it comes to AI, they will prioritise that before they look at kind of where you worked in your last job or what you actually did. And I just think you need to consider this. Let's imagine you are applying for a new role in sales. What do you think the employer, the VP of sales, the CRO, the sales manager, whoever's interviewing you, who do you think they're going to choose in a head to head?

Do you think they're going to choose the candidate who has evidenced how they're using AI to help them become a more effective seller, or they're going to choose the person who doesn't really know how to use this and is kind of still doing things the manual way, and still spending huge amounts of their time doing manual tasks, like which person is going to stand out, and you think if you lay it out as kind of just sort of direct, is that it kind of the realisation of I need to embrace this, if I'm not embracing it.

So there's kind of my, you know, realisation. I again, I feel like I'm by no means like an expert on this topic, I'm probably I'm not starting at the bottom, but I'm still probably quite average in how I leverage AI, quite frankly. But I think people need to realise that it's what companies are looking for, it's what you will need to have if you're gonna stay relevant in sales. And hopefully we can share some, some good starting points with people today.

Ollie Whitfield: Anything to add real quick? Tom, shall I? Shall I kick us off on how we do that? Tom Ridley: Only, and this is not planned in any way, shape, or form.

No one's gonna believe that, but it isn't. I didn't even know Rich was gonna give that example from an employment perspective, but I literally had a colleague of mine, his son's going into the first, his first proper sales role, or account executive role, should I say, they wanted someone with a black book, he didn't have one, but he spoke to me about how they could use AI to build out their funnel, got the role because of the fact that he was introducing some new ways to grow their business and actually expanded beyond his book, beyond his black book, which obviously would run out at some point, and moved on to actually, how like a sustainable way to maintain a pipeline and a funnel, so just evidence of Richard's point there.

Ollie Whitfield: All right, Tom, talk me through this. This is something that was really eye-opening when we talked through this the first time. Tom Ridley: Yeah, so this is based upon entirely based upon data that both Salesforce and HubSpot did in order to understand what sales people are doing on their platform. We've given it different terminology here, but the actual original terminology was around, like, value add.

Okay, so value add time, in my, from my perspective, and the perspective of this study was time spent engaging with prospects, with clients, selling right, doing the human things that Rich so perfectly pointed out, that like really important activities we're doing. It's also, I reckon, if we took a poll of how many people enjoy doing the selling part, as opposed to doing the admin part, I think we'd have 100% vote for I like doing the selling, I like engaging with people, but the reality is, is that we spend as sales people, regardless of the level at which we operate, and being a sales leader, I can tell you it spends more time in the admin than you do the selling the further up you go.

It's amazing how much time we spend on admin time. So that left hand side of today is showing us that we're spending somewhere in the region of between 75 80% of our time doing admin, and I would actually categorise that as, frankly, for the most part non-value add. It's not to say it's not without value, but it is to say that it doesn't necessarily deliver anything against your number directly. The engagements that you have with prospects and clients do.

The goal would be, or the Mecca would be, how do we get to tomorrow? How do we flip that completely, so that we do much less admin time and spend way more of our time engaging with people, having more fun? Is the funny way of saying it from a salesperson's perspective, right? Richard Smith: Add on there as well, like whilst these pie charts are a stock when they kind of show you what you possibly are to where your time is being sunk today versus where it could be invested, the impact on sales teams with AI, we're so focused on time savings, which is true.

However, like I think we need to focus on like how it can actually improve the quality of everything that Tom's talking about, of the actual interactions that we're having in our jobs, because there's no point increasing your selling time if you aren't actually getting better at selling, right, you're just basically doing more, perhaps mediocre, doing things maybe the way that you did it yesterday, which is maybe not optimum, and the impact of AI needs to be realised about how it can actually help you not just save time but have improved quality of interactions, how it can help you be more researched, more timely, more relevant, sound more expert to your prospects, all the things that we should be focused on.

That's for me quite important to note. There is that yes, it's a massive time saver. Absolutely, but you have to also look at it from the sense of how can it help me be better at selling as well. Ollie Whitfield: Speaking of, let's look ahead, Tom, a couple of things that.

Time, you could put back into place. Talk me through. Tom Ridley: Yeah, so the statistic up front and centre here is 22% of your time back, and actually this is from an individual productivity perspective. I think it was two, maybe two, almost two and a half years ago that this statistic came out.

So it's probably most likely it's increased since then, but it seems like a crazy number to think that you can get 22% of your time back in a given period, and I often frame that in the idea of who here has ever said I'd love to have an extra week in the month or a quarter in the year to close that deal, right? That's what we're talking about here, you know. Essentially, a quarter of your time, we could find ways to speed up, get time back, or repurpose, or refocus onto more beneficial activities.

The difference making things in terms of what that looks like, it could be on harder, more like in traditional sales activities, there like prospecting, discovery calls, follow-ups, proposal writing. It could also be on proving yourself, which is to Richard's point, role playing. I set up some real-time AI agents last month to help sales teams embed their new sales methodology, and they were role-playing scenarios based upon various ICPs they have or personas they've got within their, within their target audience.

This was to an audience of typically non-sales people who hate role playing, and they said they got huge amounts of value out of it because they could do it in a non, in an environment that was was was comfortable and safe, as opposed to just doing it live, or with someone human that might be judging them, coaching both live with coaches, like we do here at High Sales Coach, but even to some degree coaching, or at least getting feedback on things that you're doing in calls and ways you might improve from call to call, and doing that right now is creating a bot that provides from call to call guidance on how that next call you're about to do in 10 minutes could be improved beyond your last one, just in the moment feedback.

There's loads of ways to like start finding time back, clawing back your time in terms of frankly, if you apply AI across all and many more areas, you know the world's your oyster. And I think Richard, you said at the start, which was like there are so many ways to apply this, you could pretty much apply it to anything. It's a case of, for most part, people don't know where to start, and hopefully we'll give you a few of those guidance points here about ways that you could start leveraging AI, perhaps beyond the old tried and tested way of it's my new Google, or I'm going to rewrite this email.

Right, there are much more sophisticated ways to do it. Ollie Whitfield: All right, so speaking of, I think you kind of hinted that we want to get to the two or three things that are the most actionable use cases to try today, but to give a broad spectrum, Tom, there's a lot of ways we could start. Right, yeah, Tom Ridley: there are. So this might replicate your business perfectly, but it was designed to be a generic sales funnel that we can all recognise.

Down the left-hand side, you can see a quite a wide variety of actions loosely aligned to that sales process, but frankly, most of these could have some place regardless of the stage of the sales cycle that a prospect is in. On the right-hand side, we've got the impact over there. So, roughly speaking, what kind of things would we expect to see from using tools like this? What's the impact potentially on that stage of the sales cycle, and for any sales leaders or managers that are on the call, we've also got the strategic use cases at the top there, and again, none of this is exhaustive, this is constantly evolving, evolving.

We pull out three of these to have a conversation about today, but the idea here being, look at the wealth of opportunities to start leveraging AI that go beyond send an email or research a prospect, and although we are going to cover, we're going to dip into those. The way we're going to do it's much more sophisticated, I imagine, than the ways you've been doing it. But there are lots of ways to start injecting AI to save you time, and I think Richard, actually, your example, which you would have got to your case study had you had a minute or a minute and a half to finish explaining, it was getting to some of those, which like strategic or longer term view of data, which is really, really powerful, which I don't think probably sales people take the time to think about, for the most part, in their actions.

It's like, done that deal, it's closed, it's closed one, closed last, doesn't matter, on to the next deal, on to the next deal, on to the next deal, right? In pursuit of our targets, AI can help us do that analysis much faster, and I think it's a great way of using it, particularly as we end up down this funnel towards the end, and we're into growing. Ollie Whitfield: And it's the new and average, or should we go into the first one? Richard Smith: Let's, let's get into the first one.

I think you know, I know that we have geared this webinar to the people who are perhaps kind of sat there thinking, where do I get started? How do I kind of achieve that level one of of use case, and hopefully we're going to show that, and I know what we've got planned for future webinars. This over between now and the end of the year is more advanced use cases where we can dive into some of these more complex examples in a bit more detail. So Ollie Whitfield: here are the ones we're going to cover.

Research, before we go too much into it, we're going to explain a little bit of the what's it like today, and I think there's a bit of a stark truth that we're kind of unaware of. It's a little bit under our nose. I really like doing research on a prospect. What I've considered is that I don't like the researching, I like picking what bit of the research to lean on, and that's I think the key difference as we come to what is it like to do research today.

So maybe I'll start with Rich to. Is probably something you can speak really well to. What of this really stands out to you? What do you do?

What takes the longest? Is it.. you know, how bad of a pain is this at the minute? Richard Smith: I think for a lot of people, they haven't actually sat there and actually realised the extent of the pain.

You know, if I think of how a lot of people research today, for whether it's they're about to cold call someone, they're about to jump on a discovery call with a prospect, they're probably kind of going on the prospect's LinkedIn profile, and they're probably scouring the profile or trying to pick out something relevant on the profile. They may even go to the company's website, and they may even click into the latest news. But here's the thing, for a lot of people, that's probably where they stop.

They've probably, by that point, spent 1015, minutes and thought, "Wow, I'm struggling to find anything relevant here, and their frustration just kind of leads them to just, "I'm just going to stop there, I'm going to cut corners, I'm just going to kind of jump on the call with the prospect, and maybe not show that I've done my research, because they actually spend 1520 minutes and didn't actually find anything. I mean, I'm sure a lot of people here are sat there thinking of the amount of times they've, they've started their research, not actually made progress, and kind of given up, right?

You multiply that by the amount of meetings that you've, that you've got that week, the amount of calls that you've made, and actually those 15 minutes starts to multiply by, in some cases, a significant number. So, I think the reality is that for so many people today, even those who have access to AI tools, their research is highly manual. It's largely starting, probably on a prospect's LinkedIn profile. It might extend to their website, or maybe looking at a couple of notes in the CRM system, but that's probably where it stops.

And a lot of that is because it's a time commitment, and they get frustrated when they don't actually find anything relevant or something that they can bring to the conversation, Tom Ridley: so I want to just caveat anything I show you today, whether it's a tool or whether I'm mentioning other tools, which we'll get to. There is a wide range of expenditure and time investment into getting some of those up and running, from nothing free and very little like instantaneous value to set up time, but huge amounts of value if you take the time to do it, and obviously with it cost.

So, whatever I want to try to do these things, my general feeling on this guys is that I'm always about experiment with something cheap, free, prove the concept first. It might have some manual steps in it. It might feel a bit clunky. If you're using AI, there is 100% a way to automate it.

And this first one about research specifically shows that, and the example of automation I show you is even a super simple one. It can go way beyond that. So, the first tool I'm going to mention is Perplexity. Perplexity is an amazing tool.

It's just so good. It's been out a long time. I want to say it's a little over two years now. And essentially, Perlexi was originally created for in the education space for people to be able to feed in documentation research papers, which can be massive in length, and be able to understand the context of it inside those documents from specific sources, and then draw conclusions as it's evolved.

It's added in other functionality, like they just came out of a browser that you can use that rivals Chrome. In some cases, they've added projects and all this kind of stuff to it. It's really good. Oh, and they've added creative writing capabilities to it, which is an important one as well.

At its core, it still remains a research tool, and what's great about it has citations and amazing features that really just well designed out of the box for going and doing well or good quality research? So, if anybody's ever used Chat GPT and Gemini, I can see Ash does sticks with Chat GPT and Gemini. If you find you get hallucinations or things that you don't think are quite true, or where did that data come from, those tools are better now, but Perplexity actively tries to remove those, it won't publish you information that's incorrect, for the most part.

All right, the thing I like about Perplexity, you don't need to share any public data, like personal data or data about your company. You can just go and research, so there shouldn't be any issues for you being able to use it in your businesses today, because you don't have to share any financials or anything like that if you don't want to, any customer information specifically. It's faster, and the fact that can go into websites and scrape them as a whole website instead of having to point to individual URLs is massive importance.

It's a great research tool. I'm going to share my screen for a second. So, perplexity.. I'm not going to go..

it's not a deep dive tour of it. You can come and use it. It's a similar chat interface to everything else. I have a prompt.

It's a good prompt, I've written much more comprehensive prompts in my day, but this is a good one to start account planning and account research, and I'm just going to stick this in. It's on an old company I used to engage with frequently, so I know them, I don't know if it's pulling good stuff or not. What I'm doing in this prompt, real quick, and it's not as not designed to be about prompt engineering, I'm pushing into perplexity, exactly what I want. I'm giving it, obviously, a role.

We've all probably seen that in prompt stuff. I'm giving it a singular URL in this instance for this company Transform performance.com I'm also feeding in - I'll separate, as you can see it - the value proposition of my company. So, really important, when I typically see people engaging with these tools, they go do me some research.

Search on this company, but what they're not doing is giving it enough context, it being the AI. So, how can I tell it about me, about what my business does, what we sell, what our typical ICP or persona might look like? The all of that stuff is super relevant for giving the AI context for what good would look like. You could even say this is what good would look like, and give actual examples, but that context is massively important, and if there's something to elevate your prompting, regardless of this, it's giving it context about what you would do or what you want to see, see it take into account when doing its activity.

And then the second part of this is the structured brief, obviously you can change this to be whatever works for you, right, but the idea here is I'm being very, very clear about what I want from this. I want to have a company overview, I want their products and services, who they target, any recent news, all that kind of stuff. Okay, plunk that into here, and I'm just gonna hit go quite rapidly. You can now see that I have a relatively comprehensive plan about this organisation.

What I love about perplexity is a fact. I could, they can now do a deep dive if I wanted to, right? Yes, I can ask follow-up questions, I can go into more, more detail, but I've also got citations for exactly where this information is being pulled from. So this is being pulled directly from their website, and I can see all my sources and everything sitting up here that I want to delve into deeper.

Go and have a play perplexity is excellent, particularly for doing things like well, you've mentioned this thing here, and I want to go into some follow-up questions around the area, much more rapid, and the key thing for me here is this has searched for 20, gone through 20 sources in this instance and looked for that insight, I have that prompt saved up, I can just chuck that prompt in and start researching that prospect. Shane's asked the next question, which is pre-empting, so somewhat prophetic.

There, Shane, and that was coming next. Perplexity has this built-in thing called spaces. This space has custom instructions. If I come up to my custom instructions, there's my prompt in here.

I've actually given it the value proposition, so anytime I post a link into here, I'm going to be then generating account plans or research, we're going to call it with that same prompt, and I'm just sending the instructions into here, research https form performance, and it should just run. It goes for the same process, might be a slightly different output, because I'm going in for a second time and having a bit of a conversation with it, but same thing. Fact, it actually found more sources this time.

So, the point is you can reuse it, and now all of these, all of these searches are saved, and it will appear here shortly when it's finished. But all of my account planning or research will be stored in this space. For anybody wanting to take this one step further, I've got a Google spreadsheet. This could be your CRM, like HubSpot.

I mentioned about connecting to an API, and any tool can do it. A tool has an API, and all of the AI tools do it. You can connect that system without you guys ever having to lift a finger. This could be 1000 records, it could be 10,000 records in your system.

If we want to go and research them, I simply would allow an AI to go and access it. You know, I'm not putting any prompts, that's what we trained in the back end, and in a second, you'll suddenly see information just appearing in those cells for that AI research for those two organisations sitting in my sheet. The first step in this is AI is a research tool, get the information, it's massively powerful in terms of getting us insight, which we can then use in further steps, whether we want to do those manually or we want to do it with AI.

As you can see here, it's pulled through that information directly into the into a spreadsheet, no effort required from the salesperson. Richard Smith: Wow, Ollie Whitfield: things you like to see, huh? Personalization. Let's go rich.

Richard Smith: For a lot of people, if they're honest to themselves, they don't personalise, right, because personalization is timely. But again, we're kind of going through the same exercise as before, right? Like for research, we're probably clicking into prospects' LinkedIn profiles, we're probably clicking on the button that says recent posts. We're probably scrolling through posts and looking at what they've posted about.

Again, we're maybe looking at things like, oh, we're clicking on their jobs, clicking, seeing if there's a, there's a, there's a jobs board for them, looking at, are they hiring right now. And then, for a lot of people, they might access things like, you know, earnings reports, financial reports, and kind of scrolling through those things to identify, here's there's something in here that I can pull out to kind of personalise my approach to this prospect. Again, this stuff is like we're all doing it today, but we're probably not aware of how much time we're sinking and doing this for every single prospect we're engaging with, and yeah, like, for me, this is kind of how I, how I do it today, right?

Well, before I used AI, this is exactly how I, how I was doing it. It might take me sometimes 10 minutes just to find something relevant that the prospects posted about on LinkedIn in the past three months, to so that I can, I can reference something when I, when I contact them. Ollie Whitfield: All right, Tom, should we show them how it's done? Tom Ridley: Show them how it's done.

Is what they are one way it could be done, because there's always more than one way. Ollie Whitfield: Some of the ways, Tom Ridley: so two tools here, very different ends of the spectrum. And actually, it was a great example of how fast the AI space moves. When I started presenting these slides, reggie.

ai was a browser plugin, and now it is a full AI. I layer that sits for the most part in enterprise grade software, so it's crazy how fast the space moves. Tuesday is a slightly different tool, so we'll jump into both those tools in a.. I think the next slide shows it, and in the interest of time, we can probably just jump to it.

So, both of these tools, it can be used to create personalised messaging. All personalised messaging comes from the kind of same concept, which is to my perplexity point earlier, the more context you can feed an AI, the more personalised you can make the message. So that research that we did in perplexity a moment ago, that would be context and information we would feed into a - I'll give it a quote - personalization engine. Okay, but also prospects websites, broader Google searches, you can scrape people's LinkedIn pages, I'm sure she won't mind me saying it, but Nia, my sales coach, and I were working on a project for the last few weeks on scraping insights out of the My Sales Coach posts that they're making in the business and understanding the engagement on those, that's all context, so both of these tools operate in a similar way in the sense that they harness multiple data sources, and then they use that to start writing emails or writing communications in your tone of voice with your value proposition in mind, and with your target, and specifically with your target prospect.

So, on the left-hand side, we've got Reggie, so it's an enterprise-grade AI enrichment tool designed to work around multiple areas of knowledge, CRMs, SharePoints, all this stuff, it can pull that together. Tuesday is a bit more light touch, and it's a tool that you can force a load of data into in one go, 1000s of contacts, and it will go and directly work with what's on LinkedIn and start creating using content based on what's on their profile. So, both really nice tools, but if you want to start doing this with Chat GPT or an equivalent today, then you can.

What you need is that context. So the research from Segaplexity put into a folder on or a project in say Chat GPT or the same equivalent in Claude or Gemini. If you did that documentation around what your value proposition is, what your standard sales emails look like in terms of the ones that are good that get good response rates, so it gives it an idea of what good looks like for the business. Put all of that in a project and then start giving it some specific context on on chats that you have around, I want to write an email for this customer, and this is the information I'm going to, this is the information I've got, and some chucking some specific documentation into there, so you can create your own simpler versions of these tools, which I said are a bit more manual, but would deliver huge amounts of value, and when you start to see that they are generating you benefits in terms of the quality output that you get to, the better, and you can start to scale those to give you an example of some of the things that I would prompt for in these, I would be looking for where prospects are using language that would align directly with my value proposition, so if I - I'm an AI company, right?

So if I - if I'm looking at an organisation, thinking, are they wired the way I am, it's like things that they say, where they say, where they mention things like we're at the cutting edge of something, and or we're entrepreneurial stuff like that, they're perfect terms for me, because I'd latch on to those. If someone's, if an organisation has traditional, that's not necessarily the best language that I would want to be writing to. So, if I've got to change the way that I might read my communication, or maybe actually don't even send an email them at all, you get the idea about it's trying to get to that nuanced level with all the information we can feed into it, and then using that information to then create truly personalised emails that you would write if you had 30 minutes per email, Richard Smith: yeah, I think an example for our company is like in looking for people's on their LinkedIn profiles where they're referencing things like coaching or development of people is important to them, they're the people that are gonna most resonate with our proposition, they're the people that we want to profile as like higher priority, higher priority prospects beyond just what a lot of people are searching for, which is, you know, hey, I'm looking for these accounts or companies of this size or this job title, like, which is great, right?

That's a good starting point, but how do you actually become more focused on the people who I think you use the phrase wired the same way as you, wired the same way as you, they're going to be easier to get on your side when it comes to approaching them, Ollie Whitfield: right, chaps. I'll move us on then. So, last thing here, I think this one maybe, maybe you disagree, Tom. Does this play a little bit more toward the sales leader point of view?

I get it, could well be both, but is this not that country? Tom Ridley: No, I actually think, and I'm not even gonna.. this isn't.. I don't think it's a hyperbole, so it's an opinion status of fact.

I think call analysis, whether that's video or just the audio transcript, is probably the most valuable thing in the sales or the piece of data you can have in the sales function and customer success, and the reason is it contains a wealth of data that up until AI was really difficult to get, so not just for leaders. Ollie Whitfield: All right, well, Rich, talk to us about what it's like today, and we'll get, we'll crack on to do. Richard Smith: Yeah, well, I think the thing, what's interesting is that probably most people on here are probably using some kind of like call transcription, call summarization type technology.

Think for me that the challenge is that they're probably not capitalising on what they could actually do with that technology, and for a lot of people, they, they may still be watching about their calls one by. On in full, they may be missing some key context. They may be, they may still be making notes from their calls. They may still be trying to self-identify mistakes within the calls, but actually, from experience, most people aren't even doing that.

Most people aren't reflecting back on, "Hey, where did I go wrong in my last call? They're also doing, like, follow-ups to calls, and some people still aren't even using kind of these tools to create great summary emails. I'm actually excited on the next slide to share some of the ways that I'm actually using call analysis, and some share some examples of where perhaps what you're not doing today, which you could be doing, but for again, for a lot of people that probably they have access to this, they're just probably not doing a lot with it, and it's kind of probably harming their effectiveness and productivity, Tom.

Ollie Whitfield: Over to you, mate. Richard Smith: Yeah, I'll go, go, go for Tom. Tom Ridley: So we can probably rattle through sides, because I think we're just right. Most of us will probably have some level of cool note taker now.

If you don't, sometimes I turn up to things I'm testing them, and I've got five, and it's me joining, so it's a bit outnumbering for me, or whoever's joining my calls. Gong and sales loft, and I want labour on these. I think the big thing across the spectrum of note takers is that when they first came to the market, they were good, but people didn't necessarily know how to use them. We have seen an abundance of these things pop up in other technology, like for example, Apollo added a note taker some time ago now, but they added a note taker because they recognised that a lot of SDRs were wanting that kind of functionality at their end of the sales cycle, it wasn't just probably where I've been focused a little bit more towards the in-flight deals and account management type stuff.

Historically, we have tools now that can actually give you real-time guidance and playbook information, if you want to have it. They're more expensive, but you can get them. The point is, it doesn't matter what AI tool that you're using or transcribing with even if you don't get access to that transcription until after the call, what matters is that you've got now a huge amount of data that you can use for a variety of purposes. The key thing for me is thinking about how you want to leverage those tools in your workflow.

Let's say you're an SDR using these tools, or someone that focuses on the qualification, the early stage of the sales cycle, then, like Rich was saying, you want to be using those calls to analyse scale what you're doing, you want to be looking for trends in the way that you're doing things, possibly not an individual call to call situation, but what are you doing over a period of time. So you need to take all those transcripts and feed that into a project within Chat GPT or some form of AI tool to analyse what's going on inside of your calls at large, counter to that, if I was, say, you know, working on enterprise level deals of six to 12 month sales cycles, I've probably got lots of long meetings in there, which could be hour, hour and a half, even two hours at times.

There's loads of subtlety and nuance. There's multiple stakeholders that I'm dealing with. I need to use that tool in a very different way. So, yes, the meeting minutes are great, and understanding what I said is great, but actually what's better is maybe to use that tool to do a stakeholder profiling all the time to say, well, what was head of procurement saying and doing whilst I was talking about the topic, oh, and also head of HR or head of sales, whoever we're selling to, what were they doing, and use the calls in a much more sophisticated way, beyond just I've got some notes and some actions, it's how can I use the information or the knowledge I gathered during that, that time where I was on a call, the most valuable time we have with prospects and customers to my advantage, and use it in multiple different ways across my sales cycle or across my business.

Richard Smith: Two valuable use cases that I find really powerful with this is using the cold transcripts to create, I call them like what I heard you say slides for my next meetings or demos. I kind of taught Chat GBT. This is the format I would like these slides to look, which is your situation, your challenges, the impact, so it understands the structure of the slide. I just take the transcript, put in a Chat GBT, and it will actually create me my slide into those different categories that I use to start off my next calls with my prospects, so it's got the structure that I like.

That exercise used to take me in some cases 30 minutes, 45 minutes, essentially listening back to the entire call to build those slides. It now takes me literally less than a minute, again makes me look super diligent, super prepared for the meetings. The second one is I like to use this for messaging, so sales people were trying to constantly find what messaging is going to land best by prospects, maybe from a prospecting point of view. So, what I can do now is take my call transcripts and get AI to essentially analyse what were the biggest problems, the most common problems, the quotations of my prospects being used across these calls, where they're describing the problems that they're experiencing, and that messaging essentially becomes my best prospecting messaging, because it's coming from the voice of my prospect, and I'm able to kind of amalgamate that across multiple calls.

So, yeah, there's two use cases that you can use for kind of making yourself look more better prepared for your, for your meetings with prospects, but also helping you with your messaging as well. Ollie Whitfield: All right, guys, I'm going to go for about half a minute. An answer, I got three or four to give you. Tom, first, is it fair to say Reggie and Tuesday are more designed for B2B?

What if B2C is an option? Tom Ridley: Oh, God, good question. In the B2B to B2C, I said caveat across all tech in this space is that you. To find the one that works best for the way that your business operates, and that's the great thing about AI, you can always find something that is that works for your specific business.

I never recommend a tool and say you shouldn't look at others. Of those two, I wouldn't recommend Reggie, because it's just because it's an enterprise level tool. I think that's overkill, if you're, if you are B to C, probably Tuesday or although you might find that there's a custom solution or another solution out the marketplace. It's better.

Ollie Whitfield: Very good. I'll go rich. Do you think that there'll be repercussions for using AI-created openers or content that are sensed by the receiver? How can we keep authenticity while using AI?

Richard Smith: Yeah, absolutely. If you sound like everybody else, doesn't matter if it's AI-generated or it's, you know, something that's been recommended on LinkedIn. If it becomes the norm, then it starts to become recognised as the norm by our prospects. So, I think what you need to look at AI is it gives you the, it gives you a much quicker starting point.

It's about how you layer on your human authenticity, your tonality, or your own spin on things, which will keep the human element to it, so don't just use AI output, use it as like the big structure of the house is already built, you just want to add in your adding your own flavour to it to ensure that you're remaining authentic and differentiated to your prospects. Tom Ridley: Can I just add to that as well, which is a common thing about AI in general. AI is not the issue if you're getting people reacting to what you're saying to them in a negative way.

The AI isn't the problem the way you're prompting that AI is, and what you're asking it to do. If I remove the word AI, for example, and said junior salesperson is making these calls, like has told me to say this, or my assistant, or something like that, we wouldn't, we wouldn't label it that way, we just say our message isn't very good, and so there's an expectation, because it's an AI, it should be perfect, it's only as good as the information we give it and what we train on it and ask it to do, so if you're not getting good results, consider switching things up, because just like if I use the same sales script I used five years ago, that wouldn't resonate today.

You have to evolve, and so therefore the way that we prompt and work with the AI has to evolve as well, Unknown: you.