4 Ways I’m Using AI in My Sales Process Right Now | Donald C. Kelly - 2048

A year ago, I thought AI was mostly a research tool. That assumption didn't age well. In this solo episode, I walk through the four places AI actually earns a spot in my sales process today and where I still insist on doing the work myself. Finding the Right Prospects Without Guessing I use a tool called Zenith to research prospects on LinkedIn through Sales Navigator, pull up what they've recently posted, and queue up a relevant comment or connection request based on that content. A human still has to approve every message before it goes out. I'm not letting this run unsupervised, and I edit plenty of what it drafts before it reaches anyone. This process alone books around three appointments a week for me, and the difference comes from how relevant the outreach is, not just how much of it there is. Building Sharper Prospect Lists With AI Research I connect Claude to data platforms like Apollo and Lusha to build and enrich prospect lists for email campaigns with a level of precision that used to take hours of manual digging. A real example is finding publishers in a specific state who have a set number of books releasing this year and a newly hired director over content. That's the kind of narrow, specific research AI handles well. AI can find better prospects, but it isn't sending the emails or doing the relationship work on its own. The research has to be precise and relevant, and that precision is what actually moves the needle. Meeting Recaps, Follow-Ups, and Prep Emails Fathom joins my calls and takes the notes, then Claude turns those notes into a meeting recap with clear next steps that I can send straight to the prospect. That same process updates our in-house CRM automatically, logging notes and creating follow-up tasks on the account without me touching a keyboard. Before the next call, I can also get a prep email drafted that references the last meeting's action items and asks the prospect to confirm or add to the agenda, which saves a meaningful chunk of prep time. Drafting Proposals From Discovery Call Notes I can take the notes and conversation from a discovery call and have our AI agent draft a full proposal based on what was actually discussed, following our standard template. AI drafts it, then my team or I review and refine it before anything goes out, since it isn't perfect every time and can misstate an address or an offering if the original prompt wasn't clear enough. Human judgment is still required on scope and pricing specifically. AI has helped me think through pricing structures for different types of clients, but I'm the one making the final call. Keeping the CRM Honest AI logs my activity and updates CRM records and pipeline stages automatically, which keeps the data current without me manually entering it after every call. The accuracy still has to be mine to own. Whatever the pipeline shows is what I'm reporting up to leadership, so I double-check that it reflects reality rather than trusting the automation blindly. Dictation tools like Wispr Flow are pushing this even further, letting reps update records and direct their AI agents by talking instead of typing, which is only going to get more common. What AI Still Doesn't Replace AI doesn't replace the relationship, the judgment calls, or the actual conversation with a prospect, and that's exactly where I want to be spending more of my time. Research has shown reps spend a large share of their time, somewhere around 60%, on administrative work instead of actual selling, and that's the gap AI is closing for me. Some teams are taking this even further with inbound lead bots that hold full conversations and book meetings directly onto a calendar, with zero human touch until the call itself. "AI handles the admin so that I can spend more time actually selling." — Donald C. Kelly Leadership Advice, Books, and Quotes My challenge for you is: Write out or dictate your entire sales process to Claude or ChatGPT and ask it to identify exactly where AI or an agent could take something off your plate. Most reps underestimate what's possible here, mainly because it feels unfamiliar, not because the tools can't handle it. Resources Tell me what AI tools you're using, or why you're holding off, on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/donaldckelly. Check out Zenith https://www.zenithproject.co/ for LinkedIn-based prospecting and outreach. Check out Fathom https://www.fathom.ai/overview for automated meeting notes and recaps. Check out Wispr Flow https://wisprflow.ai/ for voice dictation that updates your tools directly. Check out Apollo https://www.apollo.io/ and Lusha https://www.lusha.com/ for prospect data and list enrichment. Sponsorship Offers This episode is brought to you in part by Hubspot. With HubSpot sales hubs, your data tools and teams join a single platform to close deals and turn prospects into pipelines. Try it for yourself athttps://www.hubspot.com/products/saleshubspot.com/sales https://www.hubspot.com/products/sales. This episode is brought to you in part by LinkedIn. Are you tired of prospective clients not responding to your emails? Sign up for a free 60-day trial of LinkedIn Sales Navigator athttps://business.linkedin.com/sales-solutions/cx/20/09/sales-navigator-podcast?src=re-pod&trk=tse&veh=tse&mcid=6897323946090332160linkedin.com/tse https://business.linkedin.com/sales-solutions/cx/20/09/sales-navigator-podcast?src=re-pod&trk=tse&veh=tse&mcid=6897323946090332160. This episode is brought to you in part by the TSE Sales Foundation. Improve your connection on LinkedIn and land three or five appointments with our LinkedIn prospecting course. Go to thehttps://tsesales.typeform.com/to/UCMfjZbXsalesevangelist.com/linkedin https://tsesales.typeform.com/to/UCMfjZbX. Credits As one of our podcast listeners, we value your opinion and always want to improve the quality of our show. Complete our two-minute survey here:thesalesevangelist.com/survey http://thesalesevangelist.com/survey. https://tsesales.typeform.com/to/lc5yAa8P We’d love for you to join us for our next episodes by tuning in onApple Podcast https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-sales-evangelist/id788738885,Google Podcast https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL3RoZXNhbGVzZXZhbmdlbGlzdC5saWJzeW4uY29tL3Jzcw?sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj5kaXI3Pj2AhVKcjABHW5PDVwQ9sEGegQIARAC,Stitcher https://www.stitcher.com/show/the-sales-evangelist-sales-trainingspeakingbusiness-marketingdonald, orSpotify https://open.spotify.com/show/1NjzsFjQwVrgboUfDvbzd5?si=LdQOJDc1T-WBPMxr1h3RsA. 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  So I'm answering a question today. How am I using AI to help me when it comes to sales? Well, hopefully this can guide and give you some assistance. It's really amazing and I'm super grateful for it. Check it out.

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  Hey, hey, hey, everyone. Welcome to another great episode of the Sales Evangelist Podcast. I'm your host, Donald C. Kelly. The Sales Evangelist, and I'm so excited for another great episode. I'm so excited to be here with you today. And on this episode, I'm going to tackle the question, how am I using AI in my sales process? And hopefully some of these ideas and strategies can help you as well. And some of these tools you can take advantage of. If this is your first time listening to our podcast, please subscribe. And I'll make sure we notify you every time we drop a new piece of content. So you can be pumped, excited and energized and ready to go out and do big things. Now, if you've been listening to the podcast for a minute, thank you so much. Please consider sharing this on LinkedIn or sharing it with a friend that could benefit from it as well.

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  And if you're an audio listener, go check out our YouTube channel where you can find the Sales Evangelist and see the YouTube videos. And if you're a YouTube listener, go download the podcast on Apple or Spotify so that you can get it when you're out running, working out at the gym or whatnot. Now let's dive into this piece and go ahead. I am a big fan of AI. It has been revolutionary and I've found that in the past, what I have, I anticipated, when I first started using it, I anticipated AI was going to be more of a research tool. I didn't necessarily feel that it could, we didn't know what we didn't know back then. And with the evolution of the, of AI agents, it's becoming even more amazing. So let me tell you some of the things that I am doing. And we're going to have these pop up on the right-hand side so you can see them.

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  I'm going to name top four that I'm, ways that I'm using AI in my sales approach. And inadvertently, some of these things are also in our business as well. So the first thing I want you to say, finding, to talk about, I'm going to go to the top of the funnel and finding the right prospects. So I use a tool called Zenith and I'll have a link in the show notes that tie back to it. So Zenith does the research on LinkedIn, using Sales Navigator to find prospects who I feel, who I know are my ideal customers. It finds their LinkedIn, find them posts that they're, have on LinkedIn. It then queues up what I could comment, what I could send in a connection request to those individuals. We send a connection request and then afterwards I start a conversation with those individuals relative to the content they've already shared in their posts. And this starts dialogue.

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  So this helps tremendously and I love it. We get about three appointments booked per week through this process. Now I want to clarify, human has to go in and approve any of those messages. So it's not just this thing going by itself and just sending out random messages. You're in there, you're policing it as the individual and I edit some of those messages at times.

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  So Connecting Claude, this is another tool that I like. Connecting Claude to my Apollo or Lucia. And what this does, it builds and enrich the list of prospects that I might use for an email campaign. Claude helps me to do deep research on, maybe I'm trying to find niche clients. And I've done episodes on this. Maybe it's like publishers in the state of New York that has X amount of books coming out this year that has a new managing director or somebody new over content. Like this allows for me to be that precise. And then that goes into, so it, then the data comes from Lucia and also from Apollo. Both amazing platforms and I recommend you check those out. Now here's a key point.

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  AI can help us find better prospects, but it's not just going to send out all those emails and do all that work for you. It is more than just the research. It is the precise, relevant research factor that I get from AI. And that makes such a big difference as I'm working with prospects. Number two, meeting recaps and follow-ups and prep emails. I absolutely love this. So I use Fathom that joins my meetings. What it does, it, it will then take the notes from meeting and Claude. So then Claude goes into Fathom, takes that note, create a meeting recap that I can send to the prospect with some plan of actions. And then we also have our CRM that we use, it's called Tidy Mango. So this is for our production agency. And this is something that we've built ourselves.

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  So then now the AI agent is able to take that notes, update the CRM, but also put action items that we can have on that in the account with task. And that's really, really saving tons of time and that's pretty amazing. It also provides prep notes that I can send to the prospect beforehand. So telling it, I want to get, you know, based on my last meeting, here are some action items for our, that we are going to discuss for our next call. Please let me know if these are still good or anything you'd like to add to the agenda. And that's a really powerful way again, it's just taking away some of that time. Number three is, I love this one, is creating the proposal. So I can turn my notes and my conversation from the disco, the discovery call into actual proposals. So I reach out to our, speak to our AI agent that we have built with our CRM.

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  And I tell it to build me a proposal for this particular prospect based on the information that we gathered from our last meeting. And then it queues it up. I go in and review it or my executive assistant and that can send that out. And that alone is, that's a night and day piece. We were using another platform, we had to log in and do all this other stuff. But this does it by itself. It's following the template, but we want to review that. And so here's the key part, AI does the draft and then re-refine it. My team and I will look at those proposals and refine that. We don't want to send the wrong things out. And it's not perfect all the time. Maybe it puts the wrong address or maybe the wrong offering. I didn't quite clearly explain in a prompt. So it's able to fix, I can fix that or double check it.

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  And your judgment is still needed though, to help making sure that the scope and the pricing is great. But I've had it help me to create those pricing, excuse me, those scope based on the conversation. And also tie back to the pricing. I've had it help me as a business owner with making the right pricing for the right type of clients.

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  Since 2013, we launched this podcast. The goal of the podcast was to share wealth of information and I feel that we've successfully done so. As a natural byproduct, listeners like you would reach out and ask, could I coach them? Could I train their team? Could I come and speak in an S K O? Could I consult for them? And that is how we gain the majority of our business and still to this day. So in 2019, one of our clients saw what we did and asked, could we do that for them? We experimented with it and we started a podcast production agency. Now we create podcasts for some of the biggest brands in the world. And it's amazing. I would love to show you and your team how we can create podcasts for you and use it as an entertaining source, but also educational and a lead generation.

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  If you're interested, go to bluemangostudios.com. Again, bluemangostudios.com and our team can show you exactly what we did. It's amazing.

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  Number four, updating CRM. As I shared, this is amazing. This is where I feel like the world is headed with AI agents. The CRM, and I think most software, one of my clients shared this with me, but I think most software is going to be not you using a keyboard, but more dictating, especially using tools like Whisperflow. You can dictate and tell the agent what to do, maybe even from your phone. And the agent goes and does that stuff for you. But maybe I can go too far in the future, but I can have a holographic glasses at that point and I don't need a keyboard and I don't need to type. Why would I need to? My agents are doing all of those work and I can dictate, you know, what it's going to do. So why would I need a physical computer itself? But A, too far in the future, maybe that's going to be a next year thing. But I feel like that is the, that part though helps me tremendously

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  where it logs my activities, updates the CRM records and the pipeline accuracy. The key here is that the CRM is reflecting what reality is, but I, and I want to make sure that's the case. AI can do a great job. It can set those things up, but I, my pipeline is what I'm reporting to, you know, you're, in your case, you're reporting to your sales leader. So you need to make sure that's truly accurate and up to date. So what AI doesn't replace for me right now? AI doesn't replace the relationship. It doesn't replace judgment and then the actual conversation. And that's where I could spend more of my time. AI handles the admin so that I can do more time doing actually selling. As we've learned over the years from Salesforce's reports,

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  it shows that a large portion, I think it was like some, like 60% of our time as sellers was doing things that weren't dealing with actual prospect calls. So it is a huge percentage that we're doing actually in administrative work that could be replaced to have us meet more with our prospect. And you could have the AI agent do some of the outreach as well. If you do have some emails that you create, hyper-focused email and you work with your AI agent, you can design that to start doing those emails and helping to book the calls. One of my clients, he's using a Grokbot. They have inbound leads and Grokbot will communicate with each of those inbound leads, have conversation and set them up on the calendar. It's just a flawless, absolutely amazing.

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  And you have tools like Victor as well that can do this. So I am a big believer in it. Where I want to challenge you is look for ways, look at your, you can write out or dictate your whole process, what you do as a sales rep to Claude or to ChatGPT and say, help me to identify where AI can help me and where agents can help me. And you'll be amazed. Oftentimes, we're not taking advantage of it because we feel that we don't know enough to be able to help us. But man, I'm telling you, you can do some amazing things with this stuff. Love to hear from you if you're using AI. If you're not, go ahead and tell me why you're not using AI. If you are, if something else that I didn't share, tell me what that is. You can connect with me on LinkedIn, Donald C. Kelly. Listen, I want you to thrive. I want you to succeed. But most importantly, I want you to raise your level of thinking.

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  I want you to go out and do big things. See you on the next one.

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  The Sales Evangelist Podcast is created by the Sales Evangelist Sales Training Organization. It is produced by TSE Studios. Our podcast production manager is Nancy Paul. Our audio engineer is Jershun Obayal. Our video engineer is Dusan Kunado. Guest management is done by Jill Vito and Kristi Virtus. Our content writer is Carlisa Galberith. Our graphic designer is Yurvish Savalia. And I'm your host and executive producer, Donald C. Kelly.

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  Sales Podcast Network.