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Outside Sales Talk
AI, Automation, and the Future of Sales: What Works (and What Doesn’t) - Outside Sales Talk with Bill Rice
00:59:01
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- [00:00]
A
I have it write a follow up email that gives me key takeaways and specific next steps. A lot of times again, we come off of that adrenaline rush of the call and then we're like, now I have to write an email and so we just don't. Or we write it a day or two days later and instead I have this nice prompt that tells it exactly how I want to write it. Plus I've got some examples that I've put into that and I ask it to write that follow up and it gives just a beautiful email that tells that client, hey, I enjoyed talking with you. Here's some of the things specifically we talked about or maybe some of the strategies that we reviewed. Nice bulleted list and then here's what I think we should do next. And a nice bulleted list and then you can kind of have a call to action for the next step.
- [00:46]
B
This is Outside Sales Talk, the best podcast for outside salespeople. I'm your host, Steve Benson and we're here to chat with the world's top sales experts so that you can get their best sales tactics to level up your game. Welcome back to Outside Sales Talk. Today we're going to talk about AI automation and the future of sales. Who doesn't care about that?
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A
Right?
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B
We're going to talk about what works and we're also going to talk about what doesn't work. I've got Bill Rice here with us to teach us all the things today. Welcome to the show, Bill.
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A
Thanks. I appreciate you having me and looking forward to this conversation.
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B
Yeah. So the, just a little background on Bill. He's the founder of the Kaledico Group and the. Sorry, how do I pronounce that exactly?
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A
Yeah, it's. So I have two agencies. One's Kalydeco, mainly B2C. And then Bill Rice Strategy Group is focused on B2B.
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B
Outstanding. And he helps company. I never want to mess up the name like that. You know, it's, it's got an E and an I in it.
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A
Yeah, it's a little tricky. Yeah.
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B
Wasn't sure what to do with that.
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A
Yeah.
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B
But Bill Rice Strategy Group, now that is a name I can nail all day. Never not going to screw that up. See. And he helps companies develop effect, develop effective lead generation strategies and optimize their sales operations. Bill's expertise spans from the early days of pre Google and Facebook to modern AI driven solutions. So yeah, on today's episodes we're going to discuss specifically how you can use AI and automate more of your. Of Your sales process. So Bill, to jump into it, how can automation tools help outside sales reps be more productive?
- [02:45]
A
Yeah, I don't think there's been a greater time to kind of talk about productivity in the sales process. With AI coming, coming on to the scene, it's probably more a question of prioritizing where you use AI because as far as productivity and the sales process goes, AI is introducing all kinds of, of different entry points. I think probably the easiest or the lowest hanging fruit and place to start for prioritization is just simply making more efficient some of your communications. So just chatgpt and things like Gemini and Claude and all these kind of simple tools at the kind of first and foremost application that we saw is just allowing you to communicate better, putting out a prompt into ChatGPT, asking for it to help you write a follow up email or write a email sequence. And I think these large language models sort of are predicated on being able to write and communicate in a reasonably efficient way and certainly probably for most salespeople a little bit faster and probably a little less error prone. And so that's kind of where I would start. But there's a whole lot of other things you can do around sales transcripts that we're getting. You know, typically we would record calls and we would have our sales director sitting there listening to these things and then going in and coaching. There's a lot of applications of AI that can help you to kind of self analyze and work as a sales team of one, if you will, and have sort of that sales director type impact and feedback coming from AI. And then of course, I know we're going to talk about this a little bit later, but even just putting AI into the system itself, and this is a little more technical and complex, but using the predictive aspect of sales data inside of your CRMs to do things like lead scoring and intelligent distribution of leads and stuff like that. But again, it's probably more of a prioritization than it is like figuring out what it can do for you.
- [04:53]
B
Yeah, absolutely. That makes total sense. And the good news, so many of the tools you already use are incorporating AI into them, right? So the stuff that you've been using for years, all of a sudden you turn it on and they're like, oh, hit this button. It does this thing for you automatically because they're leveraging these tools and surfacing them within their, their products, whether it's your CRM or we, we've certainly done that at Badger Maps where we've got some nice, nice Easy buttons at this point. But I think most software companies are doing that. And a lot of these APIs that the big, the big, the big AI companies have, they're, we're able to leverage those, which is great.
- [05:36]
A
Yeah, for sure. I think it's important for salespeople to kind of like you pointed out, be aware of that and look for that innovation coming into software that you're already using or the tools you're already using. And don't be afraid to play around with it and use it and see how it can make you more efficient. Because you're absolutely right. All of these tools are looking some better than others to integrate AI into that system. So it's going to come to you and the better sales reps and business development reps are going to be the ones who are playing and testing that and using those features.
- [06:13]
B
Yeah. And like they don't, you might not even know you're using it. Right. Like, I don't even think in. We're, we're not even really advertising. Oh, this is AI doing this. We're just like, would you like us to suggest, you know, what to add to your route, what, what customers you want to be using? And people can just click a button and we're like, we, these are our five suggestions given where you're looking at right now. And you know, I think everyone's kind of doing that and it might, they might use words like what suggestions would you like? Or would you like us to help? Or would you like us to assist you in that? Like, would you like us to re, rewrite that for you? Whatever it is, like where, you know, a lot of software, a lot of them, you know, obviously going, going to chat, GPT and kind of using it as a different type of search engine is one is the obvious way people often get started in AI. But, but it's really, I think it's a lot of the time it is, it's just kind of showing up in your life and being useful.
- [07:10]
A
Oh yeah, absolutely. And I think like you said, more and more of these things are going to be embedded, particularly sort of predictive things. I mean that is kind of the nature of large language models. They are predicting sort of the next thing and they're predicting from knowledge, you know, what would be kind of a better approach or better workflow. And so I think predictive AI is already starting to kind of work its way into the system. But I think that's probably going to be a theme that we're hear more and more about is you Know, beyond generative AI where we're just generating text or generating images, and this predictive AI where we're actually using data that's inherent in our sales operations and predicting what we should do next or what we should be working on, or, you know, the kind of classic prioritization of our, you know, sales activity and that sort of thing. We've tried to do kind of manually with rules over the years. And that can be good or bad, but the problem with rules is they're little bit sequential. If things change, you have to rewrite the rules from kind of one person to another. As we kind of cycle through folks that are managing those rules, they tend to turn into spaghetti. And it's nice to have AI doing that because AI kind of can infinitely understand complexity and kind of rewrite those, those rules, if you will, in, in a more productive way on the fly, so to speak. So, yeah, I think there's a lot of elements that are coming. Software that, like you said, will be under the hood, so to speak, or you'll need to have, you know, a dedicated predictive engine, if you will, sort of bolt it on to your, to your CRM in particular, I think. And, and, and it goes not only sales automation, but also marketing automation. I think you're going to see that kind of stuff.
- [09:03]
B
Yeah, absolutely. And your emails are just going to get completed automatically too. And LinkedIn's always asking me, do you want me to write this? Who for you? I'm like, how would you know how to do that? And I'll try it out. And I'm like, no, that's not what I would have.
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A
Now.
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B
That'S not what I was going to say. But, but like in Gmail, I've noticed, like it keeps completing my sentence and I was like, that is what I'm going to say.
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A
But I think that that gets to the point of not to get, you know, too nerdy on this. But I think it also goes to the point of what it has access to. So Gmail sees like all of your conversation and your voice and your tone and how you normally answer things. And so it has sort of complete visibility. You are kind of the knowledge map, if you will. Some of these things that are external, that are, you know, maybe even chat, GPT or something like that don't have as much of that information to go. So I think the more that you give it or the more these tools allow you to have sort of a secure workspace and you can see this rolling out in ChatGPT and stuff like this I've been really kind of interested in playing with what's called Notebook lm, which is Google's solution. And it can kind of pull in a variety of different resources, primarily from Google Docs, which for me and a lot of other sales folks is a kind of a primary repository of all the deliverables and things that we've done, everything from decks to documents and white papers. Plus you can add in YouTube videos and that sort of thing. So Notebook LM is an example of being able to kind of have your own sort of testing data if you will. And we're using, and we have built on the strategy side of things using NotebookLM, we've built full sort of sales director like or sales coaching systems just analyzing the transcripts that come off of Google Meets and sales calls and stuff like that. Everything from video to the actual text transcript. So, so that's kind of really exciting when you can have a secure workspace and kind of your own training data, data if you will, and letting it sort of look at that information and, and really become come alongside of you as a true assistant that knows like everything about Bill Rice and kind of how he approaches things in sales. So those are really exciting innovations as well.
- [11:34]
B
Yeah, absolutely. What other types of tasks and sales processes should field sales teams automate and which ones would you say still require more human touch?
- [11:49]
A
Yeah, yeah, I, you know, we work a lot in lead generation and generating, you know, primarily inbound leads, but we also do a lot of outreach and that sort of thing. So I kind of have this little kind of thing mantra I always say is that we should have automation and technology work leads and we should have people talking to people. So I'm a big advocate of as you look at your sales operation and your process as much as possible, you know, have those high value folks and expensive resources interacting with live humans. Right. So doing sales calls, doing demos, doing discovery calls and those sorts of things. And as much as you can allow your sales operations, your systems behind the scenes sort of queue up those conversations. So, so I really look first to things like scoring my leads and figuring out like which of these leads are the best and which should I be working on and maybe others that should go off to nurturing and I shouldn't be putting my high value resources on those just yet as I'm kind of getting them from maybe marketing qualified to sales qualified. So I think again that predictive AI which isn't as mature is definitely probably where we're going to get the most impact as soon as that becomes more standard and people are consciously looking for those solutions and integrating them into CRM. I think as an individual sales contributor, the most important thing you can do is fill in the gaps of things that typically you leave behind but have like high impact. So the one that I always cite is most of us love getting into the demo, love getting into the discovery call, love talking to people, telling them about the solutions we have, and then as soon as we get off that call, one, we rarely sort of analyze it and figure out like what went good, what went bad. You can use AI to do that. In fact, I have a dedicated prompt that after every sales call, I ask it to review and analyze the call. And from that I get all kinds of interesting feedback. Probably the most important is part of that prompt asks me or asks the chat GPT in my case, what did I miss? And we as salespeople and ChatGPT is really good at highlighting this or finding that we've got a sort of a straight line that we're trying to achieve on that call. And sometimes as the client or the prospect is talking to us, we don't pick up on all the cues and all the opportunities that they're giving us. So that's one good use. And then right after that prompt I have another one. And this is probably the most often dropped piece that impacts our conversion rate the most. I have it write a follow up email that gives me key takeaways and specific next steps. A lot of times again, we come off of that adrenaline rush of the call and then we're like, now I have to write an email and so we just don't, or we write it a day or two days later. And instead I have this nice prompt that tells it exactly how I want to write it. Plus I've got some, some examples that I've put into that and I ask it to write that follow up and it gives just a beautiful email that tells that client, hey, I enjoyed talking with you. Here's some of the things specifically we talked about, or maybe some of the strategies that we reviewed. Nice bulleted list. And then here's what I think we should do next. And a nice bulleted list and then you can kind of have a call to action for the next step. Maybe it's to schedule the follow up call or maybe it's to talk internally using some materials that I give you, or maybe it's to bring some other folks into the conversation. So that follow up email, if you take anything away from this whole conversation that's probably your biggest impact? Because I think probably, I don't know, 80% of the salespeople delay and maybe don't even ever send that follow up email in a timely way to kind of create that impact.
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B
Absolutely. And you mentioned lead scoring. What are your thoughts on AI tools helping sales teams and salespeople predict the readiness to buy of their customer base or their prospects?
- [16:10]
A
Yeah, actually I've got a lot of experience with this. We have. So on the Bill Rice strategy group side, we spend a lot of time with fintech companies and we're working specifically with a company that does this type of predictive AI. And so without sort of talking my book, I think what's interesting in lead scoring in particular is there's this common misperception that in order to do lead scoring there's kind of a couple of typical approaches. One, you just take in the characteristics of the lead and you look at all of the information that you're building been given from, you know, from that lead. And again, this could be outreach where you're pulling it from databases like Apollo and stuff like that, or it's an inbound lead where they fill out a form and they give you some information. We have a tendency to want to create a rule based system that weights certain characteristics and most people don't even acknowledge or understand this, but we're rating it based on the desirability of that lead. So if you were to look at that lead, you know, we would maybe rate bigger organizations higher because what, what happens? Right, Larger contract, bigger commission. Right. But what the actuality is possibly in your data, if you were to really truly analyze the, the historical data that you have available and create an AI predictive model, because you might find how smaller organizations have less decision constraints, less people involved, and so you can turn more of those into closings quicker. And so if you were to do true predictive AI to analyze your historic data, you were to sort of teach it and create a model, which is definitely a possibility, then it would predict for you based on what you've traditionally closed, you know what that score should be. And I think that makes sense. The other thing nice about using AI to create predictive lead scoring is, is kind of twofold. One, you'd be surprised. You don't need as much data as you think. Usually the, the, the, the elements that are predictive in a data set are just like two or three things. So to give a concrete example, it's not sales, but it's one that I've heard about AI. So if you were Given a list of NFL football players and you were giving height and weight from that, you could probably, with 80% accuracy, tell what position they played based on historical information. So you don't need to know like how fast they are, how big they are, how much they bench press. Right. It's. And same thing with sales data. So just a couple of little, you know, features can often do that predictive score really well. And then the other thing that's kind of a misnomer is we get detracted by activity predicting closings. So we think the more activity or maybe even the more responsive that someone is that that would predict a better lead. But what we find in the data, even in B2B, and we also see this in B2C, since I've worked on both sides, is actually the consumer or the prospect or the client, their intent is far outweighs anything that we do in order to be sort of persistent or persuasive. Right. So their intent. So a lot of times that intent comes through some features of that lead and we don't even need to worry about like the internal sales activity. And it doesn't necessarily predict anyway. So there's, there's a couple different things as we start to learn how to do predictive AI that we find some things are a lot simpler and some things that we from our gut think are more predictive or heading towards a close are just plain wrong. Oh, I think I lost your sound.
- [20:18]
B
Oh, I just muted myself. What do you think the, the impact is to AI and automation on the relationships that sales reps have with their prospects and customers today? And how do you think that's going to change over time as we look out into the future?
- [20:37]
A
Yeah, I think this is one we have to really be careful with. Right. Because AI can be really good and there's a tendency for us to sort of want to automate everything. But what I do find is if we can automate some of the more mundane tasks like follow up emails and that sort of thing, the actual relationship improves. Right. Because the fact that we were responsive, that we made it simple to kind of summarize, because those people came out of that meeting too kind of overwhelmed. Like, what do I think about what's, what's the most important? What do I consider, what do I actually do next? So I think from a relationships perspective, automating some of those mundane tasks, you just simply do them and you're, you know, you're more responsive, you make their life easier. I think that's going to be really Great. But and this is something my daughter's still, my youngest daughter's still in college that I say all the time is we have to be careful not to fall victim to trying to get AI to do our homework right. So if we just use AI blindly and have it do everything for us, write every email, prepare us for every interaction, write every blog Post, write every LinkedIn post that we're using, then that can be a slippery slope to really being obviously sort of off putting to everyone. So again, try to use AI where it can, you know, the way you kind of queued this all up initially is perfect. Try to use AI to make you more productive, to leave you time to be more relational in the actual sales process. And that's probably the theme that will, will guide you and lead you in the right direction as it relates to AI coming into the process.
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B
That makes a ton of sense. And do you see any potential downsides or risks to over the over automation of the sales process? Like what happens if we let it do our homework too much? Why shouldn't we do that?
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A
Yeah, yeah, I think that's obvious for many of us have been doing this for a while. We've used role based systems and we've used email sequences and email automation. And when we try to overly rely on things like personalization, putting in a little variable like how many of us have gotten the email that says insert first name here, stuff like that. So I think AI could potentially cause the same sort of like awkward interactions and sort of immediate trust and credibility traps that just kill anything further because you're just sort of irritated. So I think we do have to be careful with it. We do have to watch what it's doing and focus on the productivity. But as with anything, there's, you know, there's this age old saying that, you know, marketing ruins everything. But I think we as salespeople can kind of do, do the same thing where we, we get too enamored with the data and the automation and the tools and that sort of thing and it just takes all that human nature out of it. But if you can make it more, make you more productive, you're going to seem so much more attentive. You're going to feel like you create more urgency in that sales conversation. You're going to be like as all the other people as they're comparing and contrasting, like you're going to be the one they want to work with because you always seem to be there, you always seem to be followed up, following up. You always seem to Be consistent and reliable, all those sorts of things. So it is a sort of a very fine edge that we're walking. But yeah, be careful not to overuse it. For sure.
- [24:24]
B
Yeah, it makes sense. I'm getting so many emails mentioning coffee shops and in the neighborhood where my office is. Like, I, I was thinking about coming to this, to, to your neighborhood soon and I was going to go to this coffee shop. Do you ever go there? I'm like, get out of here. I know, I know you know my address and I know AI can recommend a coffee shop by, by my office. Yeah, I get, I'm getting so much that now I'm just like, oh God, you're killing me. Because it's like it's figured out how to do. We figured out how to do a couple gimmicks, so we keep doing the gimmicks.
- [24:57]
A
Right? Right. Yeah, it's, I mean, like I said, I, I equate it back to like the, the over personalization that a lot of us went through as, as we were able to, you know, to, to slot in some pieces of information, but same thing. And it just, again, the moment you make one of those mistakes or the automation makes one of those mistakes, trust and credibility, like I said, is out the window and it's really hard to recover that relationship.
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B
Yeah, well, well. And half the time it's not even a mistake. I mean, they are correct. That is a good coffee shop. But like.
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A
Are you gonna be there? Right? Yes.
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B
Even if I accept it, the gimmick is tired or, or mentioning some bar on my college campus, I'm like, yes, I was there. You know, let's see, that was 25 years ago though.
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A
Yeah. Just randomly, randomly pulling something out of your LinkedIn profile, right?
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B
Yeah. Right. Which I guess we could do by hand too, but I can kind of tell because it's, it's the same gimmick every time.
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A
Time, right? Yeah, for sure. Yeah, for sure.
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B
What, what are some other ways, like as you look at the sales process, that these AI tools can help improve the customer's experience as they, as they go from, you know, first initial touch prospecting all the way to closing?
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A
Yeah, I think so. The initial touch. I think there's a lot of opportunities for AI. You know, I always say sales is a sort of a sorting and filtering exercise and I think AI can help with that. Right. Because it's equally frustrating to a prospect to come in, schedule an appointment, waste time on a discovery when it's just totally not a fit or it's not Accessible. So I think being able to use AI initially to kind of work through that, or being transparent as they come in, if it's inbound, or you're going to. With outreach, you know, in particular, to be concrete, like, I think LinkedIn outreach, we do a lot of, you know, sort of connection outreach, and there's a lot of times people, and we've all been, you know, the recipient of this, where they try to sneak up on you, and I want a connection. I'm a big advocate of just telling them, like, I have a solution. It looks like from your LinkedIn profile, you, the type of people that we work with, if, if this is interesting, I would love to connect with you and have a conversation. So the transparency up front to. And again, a lot of times we're using AI to help with that communication initially and, and just make sure that you're, you're being credible. You're telling them exactly what you're sort of intending to do. So that if there is a fit or there is an opportunity, they will know immediately if this is worth their time. And they don't end up in your pipeline where you just start to irritate them because they're trying to get you to go away because they know you're not a fit, right? Or they, they know they're not a fit for you. So I think in that upfront process, again, having AI help you with that sorting and filtering process, and then of course you as a sales process, being kind of upfront with that as they come into your pipeline, again, AI and automation makes a ton of sense in helping you to build more conversational, intentional, you know, relevant sequences, right? As we're going through certain stages, as we're moving them through our pipeline, you know, have AI assist us in that communication as we move through the pipeline so that the moment that they're ready to do something or something's changed in their situation, right? That happens all the time. This is why I love lead nurturing inside of a large pipeline is because particularly in the B2B context, people are changing roles, they're moving up in the organization, they're moving out into other organizations. And so a lot of times an opportunity is clearly not there, but in the next three to six months that might change. And it's probably because there's a change in their role. So I think in the nurturing process, that allows you to, one, be able to see some of that activity taking place, but also to, to help you with the communication. So again, you have the system working the Leads and then when there's a conversation between to be had, it kind of resurfaces that. And then closing, I'm going to go back to the follow up email. Just being responsive to those interactions and, and being very communicative about what happened on the meeting, what you took from it, sort of syncing up with them to make sure that they got the same sort of, you know, feedback or the same sort of intent out of that meeting and then tangibly setting up next steps and then where, when you're going to follow up with communication, those sorts of things. So for closing, just again I'm going to make it the theme. I say it all the time. Just doing that follow up email, even if AI helps you with it to make sure that it goes out the door, you know, as quickly after that discovery, demo or conversation that you've had is just going to make that prospect or client just feel like you're the one, you're the person they need alongside of them that's going to make them look good in their organization. So big fan of that on the closing side is just getting those communications out in a timely and urgent way fashion.
- [30:05]
B
Yeah, my, my greatest piece of, of of sales content I've ever made. I did a course for LinkedIn on their platform that I think like 250000 people have taken the course and it's like it's just about follows follow ups and sales and I feel like I, I feel so, so foolish now because I didn't even mention AI I did it like six years ago. So there was, there was no way I, there was no AI but now I'm like, oh, I gotta, I got to go back and like make a note on it. Like by the way, when you write this email you could just give it this sample template that right here that I wrote and you could, you could ask AI to do it for you again by listening.
- [30:41]
A
Yeah, recast it. I mean that's, yeah, that's again, I. Even from that process, it's amazing how many responses I get personally from my sales process where they're like hey, this is great, thanks. Like thanks for capturing this. Like, I mean again, anytime you can make the prospect or the client's life easier. Yeah, there's, there's so much appreciation there. And then of course that builds that reciprocity that we need to, to close the deal. Right? So.
- [31:11]
B
Yeah, absolutely. Well, and this all causes so many, this causes change and this is disruption. I think a lot of people are, you know, worried AI is coming for their job. And I certainly. Well, that's never true. I think that's, that is true for a lot of jobs, but it's not true for field sales. But I do think that it will change some things in field sales already has, but will, will continue to. What sorts of skills do you think will be most important for outside sales professionals in the future? As, as AI continues to evolve, more and more automation occurs. And what skills do you think won't be as important?
- [31:55]
A
Yeah, yeah, that's, that's a great question. So, you know, just to frame the question, I think it's really important to understand and I don't know who to attribute this to, but I heard it and I use it over and over again, is like, AI won't replace you, but someone who is really good at AI will replace you. Right? And so I think that's the frame in which we kind of, we need to answer that question. So one of the areas that, why I think salespeople are going to have such a good kind of. They're going to be advantaged by AI so much is because salespeople are actually good at communicating, right? We're good at having conversations and these things like ChatGPT, these large language models, they are essentially, and this is by nature, right? The user interface for all of them are chat windows, right. And so to be really good at it is to get really good at chatting, to have a conversation with this large language model in order for it to help you and assist you. And I think salespeople are great at that. So just getting over the fear and anxiety of sort of figuring that out and getting in there and using it in a variety of ways. Like I always say this all the time as well, like never start with a blank sheet of paper. Paper, right. If you're going to write an email, like why would you start with a blank box, right? Have a conversation with AI and say, hey, I just met with so and so and they're a person like this. And you know, I'd love for you to give me some feedback on maybe what I should do next with them or what, what would be the most important to them. Or look at this transcript. So I think salespeople are going to do really well with AI, but I think you have to get in there and use it. So it needs to, you know, whatever you're. And the interesting thing is they're all trained on the same data. So which model you use? Chat GPT Claude Perplexity. It's becoming less and less material. It's just kind of picking one. Just like CRMs I think are the same thing. Pick a CRM because all the competitors are going to come out with all the same features, right? So pick a CRM that you love, invest in it, double down on it, just wait for the features to come to you. I think AI is the same thing. Pick ChatGPT or one of them that's the most convenient for you. Just have it up on your desk all the time and when you're going to do something, you know, as part of your workflow, have a quick chat. And we, like I said, as salespeople, we're good at collaborating, we're good at talking with colleagues. We were used to working in teams. We're often used to sort of coaching each other, doing role plays. ChatGPT and these AI tools, tools are great for that. I'll say, hey, you're my ideal customer profile. And I'll obviously give it context and outline it and then I'll have a conversation with that person like hey, what are your pain points? Like what are you most frustrated with? And again, people that I coach are like, like amazed at what ChatGPT will come back with. They're like, oh my gosh, like that sounds just like the CMO that I just talked to and tried to say sell them X, you know. So anyway, I think salespeople are probably in the best category and position to really leverage this up because we are good at communicating. And again, probably a misperception is I find that the least technical people are the best at using these tools because ChatGPT, yeah, there's a whole bunch of technical stuff behind these large language models and things like chat GPT, but the actual interface and interaction that it expects is a non technical conversation. And again, salespeople can do that really well. So don't be intimidated by the tech because if you see it, people interacting with it, it's awful, right? They're very. Not that the people are awful, but the interaction is awful, right? It's very binary. They try to kind of like, you know, do it in code, if you will, and they get sort of less rich responses. Whereas if we. And now on top of this, a lot of these are coming out with like voice interfaces and that's really good too. So if anything, salespeople are good at, we're good at talking, right? So even just having a conversation and just being able to talk to it, sometimes that's better than typing to it because sometimes when we, when we type, you know, we flashback to our High school, you know, essay writing. And again, that doesn't produce as rich or as good a response as you just having a conversation with one of these large language models. So anyway, I think we've got all kinds of reasons to be bullish on salespeople using AI.
- [36:46]
B
Yeah, absolutely. And specifically like I guess, well, I'll say what I, what I've used and been successful with and then. And like let me know what you have, what thoughts you have and what else you'd add to the list. But I use Chat GPT for just kind of a lot of questions and explaining how different things work. Almost like if I could have it Summarize the first 10 results of Google and talk about the exact thing I wanted to know, that's. It does a really nice job of that. I use Perplexity for more like you know, in in depth research I guess I'd call it like if I wanted like you know, like a. To go to, to double click on something and then if I wanted to be able to upload data that I knew about and wanted to. To synthesize it or understand have it help me interpret it. I think Perplexity is really good at that. Or I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Notebook. The last one was Notebook. Google Notebook LLM I think they call it from Google but those. That's where I like to upload. It's almost like that'll be a large language model just on the things you gave it.
- [37:50]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [37:51]
B
So totally. Anyway that's. Those are three that I use for different, different elements of sales and business.
- [37:59]
A
Yeah, I think it's. Yeah, my stack is pretty similar. I would say for the person that hasn't done any of this right. They're just going to try something. I would send them to ChatGPT GPT first. I think that's just kind of the easiest to use. Seems to have the best results. So I would go there first.
- [38:19]
B
I got my mom using that because it debunks all. Debunks all the, all the, all the weird ideas she can get from Facebook.
- [38:25]
A
Oh yeah, totally. I love to travel and one of my favorite things to do is. And again I, I've gotten pretty complex with my prompts but just to have a conversation with it and have it plan a trip for me and it always highlights some kind of interesting things but. But I would kind of double click on some of the things that you said there. Perplexity is great for deep research Notebook LM like I said for analyzing my sales transcripts and I use Google Meet for all my sales calls. I take that transcript and I can have Notebook LM look at the whole thing and I use it like a, like a sales director or like a sales coach and I have it give me feedback in aggregate across all of those transcri scripts. I think that's really important. A lot of my follow ups, again, because I started with Chat GPT, I've got sort of the, the most kind of dynamics in there and the prompts sort of dialed in. So I use that a lot for my follow ups and that sort. And then now they have their own workspaces. So if I'm working with clients, I create, you know, dedicated workspaces so I can load, load up some documents. So again, back to the notion of every everyone kind of collects the same set of features. You know, Chat GPT. Now how's workspaces? You can load up a bunch of documents and you can give it context based on those documents. Perplexity did it, you know, early on, Notebook LM within the Google environment is kind of the best. So but again, you can probably do, you know, 80 to 90% of what you need to do by just selecting one of them, but knowing you know how to use all of them or having a variety of them kind of built out in a stack. I don't think is, is harmful either.
- [40:11]
B
Yeah, absolutely. A challenge with doing podcasts about something like this is it's almost obsolete by the time I publish the podcast.
- [40:19]
A
Yeah, for sure.
- [40:22]
B
If you're listening, it is now March of 2025. If you are listening to this in 2027 and it sounds stupid, there's a reason.
- [40:30]
A
Yeah, yeah. Well, hopefully they've gone along for the journey and they'll be nostalgic when they listen to it, so.
- [40:36]
B
Yeah, yeah, exactly. I should have just claimed this at the beginning of the episode. If it is March of 2027, you should probably skip this one. Right? Look, look for the more updated one.
- [40:48]
A
Totally, totally.
- [40:50]
B
This is. This, this is going to go stale fast. So what, what do you. I guess a good thing to do. Why don't we jump to sales in 60 seconds? I've got some quick questions and quick answers for you. What are some common misconceptions about AI and automation and sales?
- [41:16]
A
Yeah, I think the common misperceptions again is us falling trapped to thinking to use technology we have to be, you know, very tech savvy. I think AI is allowing us to, to really access incredibly powerful tools and assistants. I think of them as assistants without having to have the same bar of technical expertise that maybe we do to set up sales automation or CRM or set up marketing automation on a marketing automation platform. Like those are technical skills. And sometimes we get stuck and we can't do it for ourselves. AI is blitzing that. So I think that's the biggest misperception is sitting there with anxiety over the fact that I need to be technical in order to use this tool and absolutely not the case. You probably have an advantage.
- [42:06]
B
Absolutely. And what about differentiating yourself and from, from your competition and just excelling at your job? What are some quick tips you have for using AI tools to, to get ahead of, to get ahead of the company competition as a salesperson?
- [42:22]
A
Yeah. This goes straight to productivity. You know, most of the time because of how long it took us to do things before people's expectations of the follow up. Getting me some sales collateral or a deck or something that's, that's customized to me as the potential prospect. Usually they just expect it to take a few days. Right. I mean the common response is like, hey, I'm gonna gather some stuff and I'll be back to you by the end of the week. Right. The fact now that we can literally do that in 30 minutes after the call, deliver all of that, you give that wow experience. Right. All of a sudden they have this expectation of time, how long it's going to take to do something, even the quality of that work and what it will be. Because when things are hard, sometimes we excuse expression, but we half ass it. Right. And so they're just like have low expectations of the quality and the time. And with AI, we can close both of those gaps. We can be very quick and we can work at a high quality because we can let AI do sort of the first run, the rough cut of it, and then we can use our expertise to up the quality significantly and again get it out the door in an hour or two after that interaction or even just condense the time if you're in some other area, just condense. The time it takes you to deliver a deliverable is super powerful. So I think that's the differentiator. All of a sudden they're interacting with a sales rep that is more responsive, has a higher sense of urgency of making you, the prospect look good than anybody else that you're talking to. And that's, that's a, that's a closing winning combination. Oh, got your mute.
- [44:17]
B
I'm not muted, am I?
- [44:18]
A
You just popped it off. We got a hotkey there or something?
- [44:23]
B
No, I must so yeah, the, I'm using AI for a bunch of, bunch of stuff professionally, but it doesn't do a ton of my job. But what it does do that I'm really finding useful is a lot of like the little annoying tasks. Like you know, someone that worked for me eight years ago once a, once a, a letter of recommendation because they want to go to law school and it, I can ask it to write something like that. It does a way better. I feed it, you know, a couple of paragraphs of like my thoughts or bullet points about the person and it'll, it'll, it'll come up with something way better than I could have written and in seconds. Right. So it's a lot of those little. And doesn't do a lot of my job, but there's a lot of little annoying tasks that it does really nicely. And, and sales is full of little annoying tasks, you know, that just need to get done. Like you, you know, you mentioned the fall. That's a fantastic example. There's so many so important to be good at follow ups and yet it gets done so badly so often. What would you say are your favorite non obvious sales hacks or just getting work done in general that you're getting done with AI today?
- [45:37]
A
Yeah, I'll give you one. This is a little sales adjacent but unfortunately it feels like the job market's getting a little softer. So one of the things that I coached with some folks that were trying to get their next opportunity and we found AI worked really good for this. So in the past, what would you do? You would write a resume and you'd probably write a cover letter and they would just be kind of locked in time. That's what you're going to deliver. And then you go out there and you look for all the opportunities and openings or you hand them out to people that you know and ask them to forward it around and, and that's how you did it. And so what did, what did that look like on the receiving end of that? It's like, oh, this is generic. Like I don't know if he's the right fit. Like he didn't even seem to read, you know, the job description or anything like that. So what we did and I coached and we, we did some examples of this together is okay, like we have that first format, we take the job description, we feed it into ChatGPT, we say hey, review and analyze this, take a look at what they're requiring. Take a look at my resume and my cover letter and customize this for this job highlighting like the most important things or making, you know, the hiring manager, you know, feel like I'm the candidate. Right. And again you can kind of work on the prompt in and then it would revise that resume and that cover letter and it would be spot on to the job description. It would weed out any sort of, you know, red flags. Maybe the job description said we don't want this. Right. And it would weed out some of those things. And then so now I'm going to do the same number of submissions, but every one of those submissions is going to be completely in lockstep with the job description or is going to be perfectly optimized for the person I'm asking to reach out on my behalf. Right. So I think that is, is a great use case if you are looking for another opportunity is don't just, you know, spray and pray your resume, but really taking it in in an essential way, working through it. And quite honestly in that process, you know, you might discover like maybe I don't want to apply for that. But again, one of those things that I think is a combination makes you much more productive and responsive. You can kind of be the first one in the door and then it ups the quality as well. Right. Because obviously the person receiving that is going to feel like this is of a higher quality than anything else that they're getting because it looks like you read it with a lot of detail and spent some extra time to personalize and customize your submission. And so that again, there's probably some other specific sales examples but I think that one is really spot on how you can get a significant leg up on the marketplace that you're working in because you're using AI.
- [48:40]
B
And as an actionable takeaway, what should the field salespeople listening today do as a very first step to using AI and develop more automations in their sales processes?
- [48:55]
A
Yeah. So the first thing is to pick a large language model. I would suggest probably ChatGPT and then again a common mistake is pay the 20 bucks. There is a significant differential between the free and what you get for your $20 a month. It's probably the cheapest, most impactful, highest revenue producing or ROI that you're going to get on any other tool that you have have. So, so buy it, use it again, open it on your desk, have it open all the time, have it automatically open, you know, when you, when you boot up your computer and then as you're working through your day, use it as an assistant. Right. Use it in your workflow. Play with it. You won't always use the output, but I can guarantee you as you're interacting with it or as you're doing something and you're like, oh, I wonder what Chat GPT would say. You interact with it, you're going to learn faster than everybody else on your team. And I would stand to say that there's a high likelihood you're going to ascend into that top performer category just because you're going to be more responsive and the quality of the things that you're doing is going to be enhanced by a whole field of knowledge that ChatGPT has that you just can't possibly. Even with 30 plus years of experience, I'm still surprised, like, oh yeah, I, I hadn't thought about that or I had forgot about that particular thing. And Chat GPT brings it back into my field of view and gives me an advantage.
- [50:27]
B
Yeah, absolutely. I couldn't agree more. Cool. Well, I'm going to try to, to do a little summarization of, of everything you've, you've talked about today here. So first of all, AI can help you write and communicate in a more efficient way. Great place to just start off trying it up. As a thought, trying it out is with, is with follow ups, you know, and feed it your, your call recording and, and, and, and by the way, he's talked a lot about call recordings. One one tool. The partner that we've chosen to work with call recordings right now is the one that we have integrated with Badger is zero. So you can always ask your Badger rep for a, for an intro, an introduction to those guys or just reach out to them directly but and let Badger and Ciro work together to record your calls in real time. Should you, should you want to enable that. It's an option. But once, once you've recorded a call, you can feed the call into, feed the, the words from the call and into one of these LLMs and ask it hey, here's my sales call and build a prompt that you use every time that says hey, write me a, write me a follow up letter. Here are some great example follow up letters. Use ones you've used in the past, et cetera and it'll generate, generate it for you in a very customized and real time way. AI tools can also help give you give feedback in general. So you can use transcripts during your calls that can help you develop as a sales rep. You know, it can be like your sales trainer, your sales coach. You can say is there anything I missed from this call? Should I Brought everything else up, like what could I have done better? It's worth experimenting with AI tools and just see how they can help you do your job better, live your life better, right? I mean having knowledge at your fingertips is really, really powerful. And I think the great reps, they are playing with these tools and testing things out. I find it's as useful in my personal life as it is in my professional life, frankly. Because your personal life, you get into all kinds of weird things, you know, like my, I, I explained all kinds of things the other day when I took my dog to the vet that I didn't understand and you know, explain to go explaining gallbladder problems in a dog to me. Like I don't know anything about dogs got gallbladders. So like. But it breaks these things. It serves up information in very real time and explains a lot of really complex stuff to you. Predictive AI I think is going to keep growing and it's going to help a lot with sales operations. It helps you think of what you got to do next. It helps you just in general automate and process a lot of information and understand things, have things at your fingertips. You want to use AI to queue up your conversations that you're going to have, right? So like it can, it can summarize data about a company or a person. You know, it can read, it can read a 50 page document about a company's financial health and spit it right out and give you the key, key, key things that you should bring up in your sales call, stuff like that. It can help you score your leads so you know where to focus your time and where to follow, where to really focus your follow up and really, you know, it can help you figure out where to, where, where to leverage yourself to to get the most done. You can use AI to review and to analyze your conversations to learn about what could have been improved. You can have it write follow up emails like we mentioned based on your sales conversations and recap what you talked about and help you help you think about what the next step should be with a, with a person, right? Sometimes just, just hearing what it has to say, it'll come up with one. Maybe you could come up with two things. It comes with up with a different two things. Now you got three things to talk about, right? With lead scoring, you know, it can take in all the characteristics of a lead and you can use predictive AI to analyze what characteristics historically close and then predict what new leads coming in the door are most likely to close, which is really powerful. Right. Because sometimes we humans have biases towards the wrong thing sometimes. But it can very, you know, coldly analyze this information and be like, yeah, even though this person's kind of blowing you off, they, they, they exhibited these buy signals that you might not have even noticed that, that you know, statistically are, are who are are the people who buy from you so it can uncover their intent. I think, I guess I would say a little bit in a way that, that frankly plays a big role in lead ultimately closing. You can use AI to free up time so you can be more effective when you're with a prospect or customer. You can, it can do your research for you. You do want to be careful over using AI. We talked about this a little bit. It can, if done wrong, it can impact trust and credibility and even be a little annoying or a lot annoying. It keeps asking you about what coffee shop go to in my experience. But it's worth building out your skills on this stuff though. It's, it is powerful. You can try it out, you can experiment and, and you can use it to work through any areas of sales that you have questions about you want to improve in. You think you could automate. You can have conversations with AI tools and, and see what, where it can help you and kind of ask you questions. I find myself thinking it a lot which you don't have to do. I'm like thanks for that, that's great. It's a little, little strange interaction. If you've been talking to a, an AI for, for five minutes about a dog's gallbladder, you're like thank you and it's like no problem, happy to help. It's a little weird but you know, we'll get used to it. Try out Chat GPT first. If you, if you're just dipping your toe in, check it out. Perplexity AI is great for deep research. NotebookLM from Google is great for feedback on transcripts and follow up. That's what Bill likes to use to feed his transcripts, his calls to get that follow up information. It's just great at like using Notebook is great for ingesting a bunch of information, kind of using that as the source of information that it's going to give you that it's going to work with anyway. I'll tell you Bill, this is a complex topic. It's one that is very important to a ton of sales reps. I think everybody understands why this is important and what's, and we all want to understand it better and I really appreciate you coming on the show today. Where can our listeners read more about your work and how do they reach us out to you? Obviously you have a ton of expertise both in this and a lot of other things in sales.
- [57:17]
A
Yeah. So I think it's really important to just kind of keep up on trends and what's going on and sort of being on the early edge of those things. So myexecutive brief.com is actually my newsletter and I'm doing a lot of curation there, plus my content. I have a pretty active and growing YouTube channel. So you get a lot of that content will flow into the newsletter. So that's probably the best place to kind of see everything that I do. If you're looking for resources, Bill Rice, strategy.com resources have a bunch of free stuff there, 90 day sales plan, things like that. And then if you just want to reach out to me directly, LinkedIn search for Bill Rice. You're probably going to find me. I was early. They're very active on there, sharing content and interacting with that audience. So but you can reach out, connect there, have a conversation. Again, very active and, and try to be responsive on LinkedIn. So happy to have a conversation there.
- [58:15]
B
Well, thanks, Bill. I appreciate it. And this has been a great episode of the Outside Sales Talk. If you like the show, give us a review on Apple podcasts or Spotify or wherever you're listening to us. And if you work in field sales, you love the Badger map, get a free trial@badgermapping.com today. And if there are any other sales reps that you think could could use to polish up their skills on on AI or, or you think would benefit in any way from what Bill's taught us today, definitely share this episode with with them. Bill, thanks a lot again.
- [58:48]
A
Oh, my pleasure. Thanks for having me.
- [58:50]
B
Take care. Until next time, everybody.