
Sales and marketing should work together—but too often, they don’t. Instead of collaborating, teams operate in silos and miss opportunities hiding in plain sight. Victor Adefuye is here to change that. In this episode, we talk about how AI is...
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Andrea
Welcome to episode number 354 of the Mindful Marketing podcast. And today we're talking all about the relationship between sales and marketing because they go together like peanut butter and jelly. And today I'm excited to have Victor Adeffier on the podcast to talk all about it. But first, a word from our sponsor. Riverside is the all in one podcast recording and editing tool that I use for this right here show. I use it to edit not only the audio and the video, it is like Chef's kiss magical, making the entire process so, so easy. Plus, I love their magic AI clips. Their little AI robot in the background pulls out the most impactful moments of the episodes without me having to comb through and do it myself. Resizes them for social media. So those vertical videos you see on TikTok and Reels, those all come from Magic AI inside of Riverside. It's literally one click. It spits out 10 clips. I pick the best one and away I go. Saves me so much time. If you want to get on the Riverside train, check it out today. The links in the show notes and make sure to use my code DREA D R E A at checkout to get 15% off your membership. Victor, welcome to the show.
Victor Adeffier
Thank you, Andrea. Nice to see you.
Andrea
I should say welcome back because you are a returning guest and I'm excited for the conversation today because you've been doing some really interesting things with AI specifically. But before we get into all of that, tell the listeners, what is the relationship between marketing and sales?
Victor Adeffier
Oof. Well, in my experience, it's a contentious one. You know, you would think that there would be greater alignment between these two areas of business that are so dependent on each other. Right. Sales needs marketing to get them the leads, to figure out the right strategy, messaging, give them the assets they need to be successful. Marketing needs sales to close the leads that they drive. But all too often there's a lot of finger pointing and blaming and misalignment between the two teams. And yeah, I mean, I think, I think it, it's always a sign of a challenge for an organization when there's a lot of contention between these two sides. And unfortunately I see it all the time. So yeah, definitely one of friction, if you, if you will.
Andrea
Yeah, in my experience. So I used to work for Marriott Hotels and I was on the marketing team. Marketing team feels like very like nerdy. We're in our offices. Sales team is always like suits five star restaurants. Like it always feels like a totally different vibe too, just from the people who work at the different departments too. Has that been your experience as well?
Victor Adeffier
Yes, definitely. I mean, you know, there are different types of salespeople, the different types of marketers, but I don't think it's a coincidence. It's marketing as a discipline is taught at business schools while sales is less taught. Right. It's. That's changing. But historically speaking, marketing has been a foundational topic for business. And so what that tells me is that marketing is thought of as an intellectual enterprise, right. Where it's like strategy and what's the right message and what's the who's the ICP and all of that. And how do you articulate value while sales is seen as execution? Right? Like go out, meet the people, shake their hands, you know, articulate that value and try to get them closed. And so I think naturally it attracts different types of personalities. Those that are analytical versus those that are more like, you know, just go out and do. And yeah, I think that is also a root of the conflict is that, you know, the marketers, I think sometimes, you know, as a sales guy myself, I could critique both sides, but I think oftentimes salespeople feel that marketers are more kind of like ivory tower, kind of like theoretical, when they just need like practical how to guides for, you know, in their day to day work.
Andrea
Yeah, 100%. And I find that a lot of the people that I work with, especially the smaller businesses or maybe like the ownership of one businesses, you know, there's just one person wearing all of the hats, tend to lean more one way or the other, but they kind of go hand in hand. Like you, you need the marketing message to be able to, you know, really execute on the sales call. And you need the sales calls to then fuel the marketing. And one of the interesting things that you and I were talking about was these sales calls. So tell us what you're doing with sales calls and how that benefits marketing.
Victor Adeffier
Yeah, so I mean, ever since the chat GPT moment of a few years ago when everyone was like, wow, these large language models are really working and they're powerful, you know, I've been really excited about them because to me, you know, I've been describing large language models as calculators for words, right. For the first time we're able to analyze words and meaning at scale. And so, you know, something that used to take a long time, I. E. Even if somebody recorded a phone call and you want to listen to that call, you have to put aside almost as much time as the call itself to review it, right? You can speed it up a little bit, but you can't speed it up too much. Right. Because you're going to miss some of the details. Right. And so it's never actually been realistic to analyze the large volume of text, but now with AI, it is. Right. And so one of the first things that I started using AI for was to analyze sales calls and initially started with individual calls to help reinforce coaching and a methodology. So for example, if a company uses, there's a common methodology called MEDPIC for enterprise sales. It starts, you know, stands for a lot of different things, but metrics, economic buyer, decision process, et cetera. And so if you want to, you know, reinforce that methodology, I can teach an AI chatbot what metrics mean. Economic buyer means decision process, et cetera, and then feed it dozens, hundreds of pages of calls and, and be like, what patterns are you seeing here? Right. And so for the individual rep, it's, you know, for this deal, how well qualified is this deal? Did you get the economic buyer? Did you talk to them about metrics? But then also on an aggregate across the entire team, you know, over the course of a quarter, over the course of, you know, you could slice and dice them all the win the deals that you won versus the deals that you lost or the, the certain segments of your market and compare them to each other. Now we can analyze those transcripts and pull insights from them in a way that we couldn't before. And that just opens up a world of possibilities in both sales and marketing.
Andrea
Yeah, like I'm so obsessed with this idea because I just naturally record all of my sales calls anyways and I use them a lot for my own kind of information. Just as you said, going through it manually, I'll listen to it or I'll pull the transcript and I'll be like, oh, you know, here's something someone said that's a problem. So now I'm going to pull, put that on my sales page or I'm going to put it in a sales email. But the fact that you're taking this and then putting it into AI and going, okay, collectively out of, let's say, these 10 sales calls, what are the trends? I feel like this is one of the strongest uses that you can use with all of this information that we already have. Are you like, what tools are you using for this? I want to be nosy. How, how are you doing this?
Victor Adeffier
Yeah, I mean, look, I think so the first thing I always recommend to people is as much as possible, use what are called the frontier models. Right. Like the, the ones that are the cutting edge. Right. And so that's ChatGPT and their various models. Claude is another one that I use a lot and they have a great model or series of models, Gemini from Google. You know, if you stay in those categories, you're, you're going to get the best of modern AI. And then specifically though, which tool depends on the amount of text that you want to analyze. So you know, if I'm doing just one call or just a handful of calls, then you know, any of them will do ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude. But if you want to do like large volumes, like hundreds of pages of calls, I lean more towards Gemini. And that's because Gemini has a large context window. So think of the context window is like the bot's short term memory. You know, there's like it's trained on the history of the Internet, but then you want it to keep certain ideas in its mind and those include the transcripts or whatever else you want to use as part of the analysis. And so you need a context window that's large enough to handle that volume of calls. And Gemini has, depending on which one you use, between a million tokens to 2 million tokens of a context window, which is I think, a few thousand pages of words. And there's a specific tool that is built off of Gemini that's actually free and I love using for this use case called Notebook lm. And so just Google Notebook lm. One of the great things about Notebook LM is that it allows you to, I think, upload a few hundred sources and each one can be 50 pages or more long. And so you can really do a lot of, you know, put a lot of, you know, transcripts in there. And then the great thing about Notebook LM also is that it provides you with citations. So if you're going to make big strategic decisions about, oh, these are the pain points that are coming up in this call. And so therefore I'm going to create marketing assets around that. You want to make sure that, that you know, you're basing it off of validated information. And so yeah, I think having those citations in Notebook LM is really helpful.
Andrea
Okay, I'm glad you mentioned that because one of my next questions was about this, like hallucinating that AI does sometimes where you're like, oh, this sounds like it could be real, but then you try to go and find the information and it's just made it up because it's a people pleaser and it's trying to just here I think this is what you want. So I love that I literally put Notebook LM in another tab because I'm like, I'm going to look at this because I do think one of the challenges that we face as this emerging technology is being developed is that sometimes, especially if we're feeding it hundreds of thousands of pages, we can't verify what it's spitting back out at us. So I like that you that you did that. Are there any other kind of downsides to using this strategy, using AI to kind of filter through and find voice of Customer research using large language models?
Victor Adeffier
Downsides? I think it's hard to think of what the downsides would be. So, you know hallucinations? Yes, for sure. Right. But they get better and better at this. And I would argue that you never want to fully substitute your judgment to the tools. Like they're, you know, I like to think about them as like an over eager but very inexperienced intern. Right. Very smart. But you know, you need to check their work. You wouldn't take an intern's paper and just hand it to a client. Right. You would review it, you would give them feedback. Right. And iterate on it until it gets to a good place. And I think it's the same obligation with AI to double check the work before it goes out, especially if you're going to make big strategic decisions based off of it. But besides hallucinations, you know. Yeah, I mean, I don't know, what is the downside of having more insight into your customers? Right. What is the downside of understanding directly from their mouths, how they describe your pain points, what objections they have, what competitors they're seeing, what their buying criteria is. To me, like, this is less about something new that is risky and more about democratizing something that already exists in the world but now can be done at scale and a lot more cheaply. I'm thinking of a client of mine who was one of the first people that I did this voice of the customer analysis with. They, prior to working with me and engaged the consulting firm that they paid a few hundred thousand dollars, I want to say like $300,000 to do a market study for them. And so they like went out there, did a bunch of interviews, you know, panels this and that, and they came up with this very elaborate presentation that my client then shared with me. And so when I did the voice of the customer research, I was like, I just uploaded the, the report from this consulting firm and was like, what's accurate, what's inaccurate? What did they get? Right. What didn't they get right? And there was a good amount of things that they didn't get right. And I don't think that this is a bad firm in any way. I think markets change, right? And there's a difference between, hey, let me go and hire somebody to do a focus group to go back in hindsight and explain what matters to them, their buying criteria, things like that, versus directly out of the mouths of the, of the prospects themselves on the sales calls, you know. You know, I think the real value here is, you know, regular marketer, you know, even in a small company using a tool like NotebookLM, if they're recording their calls, can get, do a win loss analysis, voice of the customer analysis on a dime, get the value of that without having to pay tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands for a consultant to come and do that. You know, it's, that's probably prohibitive for most small companies. But now you can do it with, you know, Notebook LM for free or for some of these tools, like 20 bucks a month, you know.
Andrea
Yeah. I mean, I can't even imagine how long that report took to put together. Like, like months, if not a year to like build out that report and like, even just the shortened timeline, be able to get this information. One of the things you said was interesting was how you prompted AI to give you the results that you want. And I think this is also a skill that we have to learn as marketers, as salespeople is like, we, the language models are learning us, but we're also learning them. And so you said something specific which was, tell me what they got wrong, but tell me where they also missed the mark. What are some of the, what are some of the prompts that you use to make sure that AI language models are giving you the results that you need?
Victor Adeffier
Yeah, I mean, I find that the more constraints you give these models, the better results you actually get. So they're getting a lot better at following instructions. And so being prescriptive and saying a, this is your objective. That's always required. If it's important to specify the steps in its reasoning, that is also really helpful. Giving it the right context, right? Meaning, like, here's my buyer Persona document. Here is a PDF of my website that describes my products and services. Here's a one pager, right? You know, something that describes our sales process, whatever it is, that helps it give you better responses. And then you. And so in the prompt telling it like, you know, draw on this document for that reason, Draw on that document for another Reason that level of specificity helps. And then finally I, I think it's really useful to tell it the format that you want the output in. You know, I like to think of it as like something that's writing me a report. Right. And so if it's for a sales call, right. To specify, you know, in the start with a 200 word summary of the call, then you know, give me an assessment of the prospect sentiment at the end of the call and throughout, then identify the red flags, then give me some coaching on how to improve this call. Right. You know, what questions that I missed that I didn't ask. And so being very thoughtful about what is the content of the output is really important. Yeah. And you know, there's a lot of stuff out there about prompting and best practices. I do think that guidance works. And yeah, again, the more constraints you put, the better you are. You know, sometimes when I, for some of these prompts I'm using like you know, two, three page long prompts. Right. Because it's very detailed and that I found gets the best out of it.
Andrea
Yeah. I find that when I'm talking to people about AI, especially people who are not convinced that it's helpful, usually after pulling back the layers, it's like they asked it two questions and they were like, oh, this is terrible. And I'm like, whoa, whoa, like we need to get more specific here. And I love that you mentioned like a two to three page prompt to get what you need. Okay, so that's using the, the sales call itself. Creating voice of customer marketing. One of the other things that we've talked about as well is like what to do before the sales call. So using some of your marketing to help before the sales call. Talk to us about that.
Victor Adeffier
Yeah, to me this is, this is another game changer in the relationship between marketing and sales. You know, in my career, one of the most common contentious points between marketing and sales is marketing believing that sales is not using all of the marketing materials that they've created. Right. You know, you've created case studies, you've created, you know, certain Customer stories or 1 pagers or messaging guides. Right. And too often that stuff gets in a shelf somewhere, you know, nobody's using it. And so to address that issue, one of the things like bots that I built for my clients are bots that help them sales rep prepare for calls. And so imagine a sales rep is about to get on a call with a particular prospect. They can go to LinkedIn, download that person's LinkedIn profile, maybe use A tool like Perplexity to do some quick research on, you know, that businesses and their priority. And then, you know, upload those into a bot that I built that helps them identify what's the most relevant points to hit on with the person you're about to speak to. It gives them questions to ask, discovery questions to get them to open up. And then importantly, it also recommends to them assets and resources that may be available that is most relevant to that Persona. And so simple use case. If I'm about to get on the phone with the cfo, it's, you know, it's a late of late stages of a sales process where, you know, I know that the CFO just cares about the bottom line impact. Right. Not how's it going to help, you know, Peggy sue be 5% better at her job. They care about how does that impact revenues, et cetera. And so the talk track, the value statement has to be a little bit different. And so what if you had a case study of that was focused on a CFO as a hero, right. That was able to articulate the value that that CFO got. Or if it's some sort of messaging guide that marketing's come up that says these are the notes to hit when you're talking to a cfo. I can then, you know, serve that to the salesperson at the right time. Right. When they need it. They don't need to go searching through their materials to go and find this stuff, which they don't do anyway. Right. And so, you know, being able to give it to them at the right time makes it much more likely that they're going to use it, which makes it much more likely that they'll get the benefit of all that hard work that the market is put in to identify that Right. Messaging. So yeah, that's another powerful use case that, that's driving a lot of value with clients.
Andrea
Yeah. This again, feels like just like paying attention at scale because I do find that anytime I'm on a call and someone notices something, I like social media posts that I posted recently or email I shared recently. I'm always like, oh, okay, they're paying attention. And so I can imagine someone coming a call, trying to pitch me on whatever, and they just know, they're like hitting all the right notes, they know all the details. And if I found out that they were using AI to do this, I would be even more impressed because I feel like there's this, like you said, it's the calculator effect. I feel like there's this Almost like glamorization of, like, not doing this, where I feel like some people are like, oh, we want it to be natural and instinct and like, this person just cares that deeply. And I also feel like there's a power in using the tools that we have available to us to, like, make the best, the best impression. I don't know. What do you think about that dichotomy of like, is this cheating?
Victor Adeffier
No, it's definitely not cheating. First of all, I remember the. For that particular tool that I built the first time I did it, it was to help BDRs, SDRs who were making cold calls to figure out what's the right message before they reach out to the person. Right. And so these were folks who just graduated from college, right? They were ramping up in their new job, and in that particular case, they had a pretty complex product to sell and they were selling it to, like, electrical engineers, right? And so it was the kind of thing where if you aren't at their level, if you don't hit the right notes with these engineers and like, they're just going to hang up on you. And so this. One of the value of that tool was to accelerate their ramp time, right? Just read the script that the bot gives you, and over time you'll be able to connect the dot between this Persona and their pain points and the right value articulation. But until then, this tool is going to get you pretty far. So I don't think that's cheating. I think that's like, you know, helping to accelerate productivity and get them, you know, as productive as possible. And, you know, there is this. I have encountered this idea of, like, that some people have, of if they use AI, they're not going to learn the right skills. Or it almost feels like people who had, like a rough childhood or something are like, oh, like everybody has to suffer because I suffered. But no, we're not. This isn't a game. This is about revenue and productivity and helping salespeople be as effective as possible. And so if you're not using these tools, your competitors are going to be using these tools. And I feel, you know, we're still in the early stages of this stuff getting out there. But I, in the not too distant future, I see a world where customers are going to expect you to have deep knowledge of them, to come into meetings with a unique point of view based on what you know about them, because it's going to be table stakes to be able to do that level of research. And so if you're going to be like, you know, I'm going to do this the whole way. And your competitor, who they're also talking to is much more thoughtful, is much more targeted in their messaging and their approach, much more aligned with the needs of the customer. You're just going to lose. Right. And so yeah, it's to me, we're very closely approaching a world where it will be a competitive disadvantage to not use these tools because your competitors are going to use it and they're going to deliver a better customer experience.
Andrea
Yeah, yeah. I think it's going to be interesting to see what shapes the next five to 10 years because I think we're at, we're at an inflection point with this and it's here like AI is here to stay going anywhere. It's how we all use it as the tools that we can to our benefits and actually help us grow our business business by leaps and bounds. It really does remind me of when social media first started too and people were like, oh, I don't need this. It's, you know, it's just the kids played around online and now as a business you can't imagine not having some sort of marketing present digital marketing footprint. Right. And so yeah, the future is here. The future is here. Okay, so we've talked about using AI, like using the actual sales calls, we've talked about preparing for the sales calls. What about after the sales calls? I know you have a strategy around using AI to build like landing pages and marketing content, things like that. Tell us about.
Victor Adeffier
Yeah, so AI has a lot of different uses and means a lot of different things in different contexts. You know, there are presentation tools like I use one called Gamma that can create landing pages in an instant and they're now these AI coding tools that actually can create much more sophisticated landing pages in an instant. Well designed. And then content creation is so much easier now, right. To be able to go and do some research on a company and then you know, have like a piece of content that you've written before and upload both to AI and be like, can you rewrite this in a version that's going to be most appealing to this particular customer with this particular research. The combination of the research, the ability to create unique content or landing pages on demand again tells me that marketers, salespeople can build those assets into their, for example, account based lead generation. Right. If you're going after some targeted enterprise accounts, you're trying to close six figures, seven figure deals with them, they're going to expect you to really understand their business. And you're going to have to develop relationships with lots of different stakeholders. And so if we can create a landing page, for example, for lead generation that is tailored to that particular customer, why JPMorgan Chase can save $7 million by adopting this new way of doing things. Right. You know, and it'll be a personalized one. If you want to write a white paper that's just for them, that takes into account their research, right? Things that used to take weeks and a team of dedicated writers and designers, these are things that can be done instantaneously with AI. And so yeah, that's another really powerful use case is creating that personalized content at scale, that personalized buying experience at scale and really making the customer feel like, you know, you are crafting something that's unique for them, whether that's at the top of the funnel or during the sales process. You know, for example, I one of the uses of AI that with with clients is, is ROI analyses, like coming up with customized tools to do an ROI analysis that, you know, basically the rep just has to ask a few questions, upload it their transcripts and then it'll do put together like this customized report that looks beautiful. That used to be a very expensive thing for businesses to build on their own, you know, with software especially, but now with AI, with a lot of this AI software development tools, you can build those customized ROI calculators, etc. On a dime. And so again, it's what can, what do these tools make possible today that we can insert into our existing processes or do things that we wish we could have done in the past, but we're prohibited by time, by effort, by resources. Now we can do those things on demand, at scale, in a much more custom way. And sales, marketing, we are in a world where our initiatives should produce revenue, right? We can directly connect what we do to revenue. And so if you have a broken process, if you're unsatisfied with your conversion rates on this or that, I bet you personalization can help a little bit more. And so we can measure what's the baseline of, you know, engagement, qualified opportunities, whatever it is, then we insert these tools in and then we measure are they moving the needle? And the ones that tend to move the needles are the ones that are about how do we personalize this, how do we engage customers in a new way that makes that educates them. Those are the types of things that I see really moving the needle. So yeah.
Andrea
Oh my gosh, I think this is so fascinating because for a while Especially in my space, in the marketing spaces, this idea of scaling was it right? It's like everyone wants to do more, they want to do bigger. But the problem with scaling is you do lose the personalization, right? Like there's some of that that gets lost along the way. But then when we add back in AI, we can scale and we can have personalization at mass when we kind of combine these tools together, which I find so fascinating and interesting. And again, I'm curious to see how this plays out in the future as, as more tools get developed, as things happen, because I know it can happen even better. Like I think about companies like Amazon for instance. They have so much information on me because I buy so much stuff on there that I feel like they could, they could really take AI and start like personalizing that whole experience. Like they already have some things like reminders to buy. But I feel like there's so much more they could do. It be like, hey Andrea, I know you're thinking about this, but have you thought about this? Or here's another option we know you'll like, like I would give them all my money.
Victor Adeffier
Yes, yes, yes. I don't, we, I don't want to like open up a whole other line of conversation here, but I went recently to an event with a company in New York that does video. They've been big in the video space. They compete with like loom, etc. And so they just launched an AI avatar solution that basically a sales manager asks their reps to shoot a 90 second video of themselves and then it creates this avatar that the sales manager can put in like any script into the mouth of this avatar and then send it out on triggered plays. And so in their presentation, the one of the use cases that they use was like confirming an appointment the morning of. Right. And so the manager doesn't need to tell the sales rep, oh, every single time you have an appointment in the morning, shoot me like a 30 second video where you say, hi Andrea, looking forward to meeting you this afternoon. We're going to talk about this in the agenda. Let me know if you have any questions ahead of time, but I'll see you at 4:30. Right. Something like as simple as that. It's so hard to do at scale, so hard to do personalized. Maybe you do a generic one and you send to everyone, but not one that's personalized. But now it's just like submit, like, you know, you substitute the name hi Blank. Right. Looking forward to seeing you at blank. And it looks like it came Right. From your, you know, SDR or your salesperson. And they don't even have to think about it. It's just triggered on meeting on the calendar with a new lead this afternoon. This automated video goes out to them like that, to me, is just another example of personalization at scale made possible by these powerful tools. Yeah, the future is going to look very different from the past.
Andrea
Yeah. Okay. I do have a lot of thoughts about the AI video though, because I know, I know. I don't know. That's the one where I'm like, oh, so like I use Riverside to record my podcast. They have this built in now where you. Because I've done so many on here, they have all of me saying all of the things and I can put. Make myself say anything. And it's like 90%. I'm like, oh, that does sound kind of like me. There's some words that are up. I don't know how I feel about it though. I feel like there's this trust. Trust issue too. With the AI avatar, I feel like we'd have to be very transparent. And I feel like this is where we're still figuring it out as like the humans behind the machines on how transparent can we be with this process? Like, hey, this is Andrea's avatar. Or this is. This is the. The clone. I don't know.
Victor Adeffier
Yeah.
Andrea
Anyways, that is. That is a whole other question.
Victor Adeffier
I think it depends on the use case. Right. So like if it's top of the funnel, you know, prospecting at scale, if it's this kind of meeting confirmation use case, these are low stakes kind of things that, you know, even if they're not perfect, like you're reaching out to a lot of people, you're going to have a really low response rate anyway. So, you know, it's about how do we optimize that response rate. Yeah. And I agree with you. Like, there's definitely more that can be done to make them feel more natural. Maybe there's could be more disclosure about when they're being used. But again, I come down to the practical reality, like, if this thing can make it less likely that the meeting cancels. Right. Which makes it more likely that you add another opportunity into your pipeline which then closes at your typical win rate, then it's really the question is, does this thing work? Right. Can it actually drive these results? And if it does, then I think we have to seriously consider it and overcome some of these resistance. And also keep in mind, like, these things are only going to get better from here on. Out. Right. Like they're going to become more realistic. And so those, those issues about like perfection, I think are going to be less and less.
Andrea
Yeah, well, time will tell. Okay, so for those people who are listening, they're like, I am so curious about using AI, especially in sales. I know you have a blog about this called Super Intelligent Sales. Tell us all about it.
Victor Adeffier
Yeah, you know, I believe that this AI thing is the most important thing that's ever happened in the go to market function. Marketing, sales and customer success. You know, the reality is that all of the good stuff that happens, happens in conversations with customers. And up until now we haven't been able to analyze those conversations at scale. And so once you can, you can do so much with it. A lot of the things that we've talked about. And so I really see myself as being on a mission to help marketers, salespeople, leaders, to realize how to take advantage of these tools and how to adopt them into their sales process in a way that's effective. Right. And not just like, you know, we're gonna roll out and go and buy the latest tool. Right. And so, so that's what I write about on my blog. So I have a blog called Superintelligent Sales AI where I write about sales. I share use cases, I share implementation strategies. You know, I wrote a few articles related to the topics that were shared. So I'll, I'll put that out there so folks can get in touch with me on the blog. They can find me on LinkedIn. I'm Victor Defier. That's a D E F U Y E. You know, I have a consulting practice called Donna Consulting. So that's Donna hyphen consulting.com where we help organizations implement AI into their sales process, you know, with proper training and coaching. And so yeah, hit me up on LinkedIn. Check this out at Dana consulting.com or on a blog at superintelligent sales AI.
Andrea
Perfect. I'm going to put all those links in the show notes. You can find them@onlinedre.com 354. Victor, thank you so much for being on the show today.
Victor Adeffier
Thank you. This was a fun conversation.
Andrea
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Host: Andréa Jones
Guest: Victor Adefuye
Release Date: April 22, 2025
Episode: AI in Sales & Marketing with Victor Adefuye
In episode number 354 of The Mindful Marketing Podcast (formerly The Savvy Social Podcast), host Andréa Jones engages in a compelling discussion with returning guest Victor Adefuye. The episode delves into the intricate relationship between sales and marketing, emphasizing how artificial intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing these intertwined fields.
Victor Adefuye opens the conversation by addressing the often contentious relationship between sales and marketing teams. He states:
“Sales needs marketing to get them the leads, to figure out the right strategy, messaging, give them the assets they need to be successful. Marketing needs sales to close the leads that they drive.”
(02:00)
Victor highlights the persistent misalignment and finger-pointing that hampers collaboration, despite the interdependence of the two departments. He further explains the cultural and educational distinctions between marketers and salespeople, noting:
“Marketing has been taught at business schools while sales is less taught. Marketing is seen as an intellectual enterprise, whereas sales is viewed as execution.”
(03:00)
This foundational difference fosters varying personality types within each team, leading to potential friction.
Transitioning to AI's role, Victor discusses how large language models like ChatGPT and Google's Gemini have transformed sales call analysis:
“Large language models are like calculators for words. We can analyze words and meaning at scale now.”
(05:00)
He elaborates on using AI to dissect sales calls, allowing for both individual coaching and aggregate insights. By feeding AI hundreds of call transcripts, organizations can identify patterns in successful and unsuccessful deals, enhancing both sales strategies and marketing messaging.
Victor emphasizes the practicality of tools like Notebook LM:
“Notebook LM allows you to upload a few hundred sources, each 50 pages or more, and provides citations to validate insights.”
(10:30)
This capability not only democratizes access to valuable customer insights but also significantly reduces the cost and time previously required for such analyses.
The conversation delves into the importance of crafting precise prompts to yield meaningful AI outputs. Victor advises:
“The more constraints you give these models, the better results you actually get. Be prescriptive and specify the steps in its reasoning.”
(15:20)
He suggests detailed, multi-page prompts to guide AI in generating comprehensive reports, ensuring that the outputs align closely with the desired objectives. This meticulous approach mitigates issues like AI hallucinations and enhances the reliability of the insights generated.
Victor introduces innovative ways AI assists sales teams before engaging with prospects. He describes bots that prepare sales reps by aggregating relevant information:
“A bot can identify the most relevant points to hit on with a prospect, recommend discovery questions, and suggest the most pertinent marketing assets.”
(18:09)
For instance, when interacting with a CFO, the bot tailors the conversation to focus on financial impacts rather than generic benefits, ensuring a more personalized and effective sales approach.
Addressing concerns about the authenticity of AI-generated interactions, Victor assures:
“Using AI is not cheating. It's about accelerating productivity and making salespeople as effective as possible.”
(21:53)
He envisions a future where personalized AI-driven engagements become the norm, arguing that leveraging these tools is essential for maintaining a competitive edge. Victor cites examples like automated video confirmations that maintain a personalized touch without the extensive time investment traditionally required.
Post-sales interactions also benefit from AI, particularly in content creation and personalization. Victor discusses tools like Gamma, which can generate tailored landing pages and marketing materials instantaneously:
“AI allows marketers and salespeople to create personalized content at scale, enhancing the customer experience and driving engagement.”
(25:28)
He underscores the efficiency of AI in producing bespoke ROI analyses and customized reports, which were previously resource-intensive endeavors.
While embracing AI, Andréa raises ethical considerations regarding transparency, especially with AI avatars:
“There's a trust issue with AI avatars. We need to be transparent about their use.”
(32:40)
Victor acknowledges the importance of disclosure, particularly in low-stakes interactions, and emphasizes the practical benefits over the perceived ethical dilemmas. He advocates for a balanced approach where the effectiveness of AI tools is weighed against the necessity for honesty and trust in customer relationships.
Victor concludes by highlighting his mission to educate marketers and sales professionals on integrating AI effectively. He directs listeners to his blog, Super Intelligent Sales AI, and his consulting practice, Donna Consulting, for further resources and support.
“AI is the most important thing that's ever happened in the go-to-market function. We're enabling organizations to implement AI with proper training and coaching.”
(35:04)
Andréa ensures that listeners have access to Victor's resources via the show notes, encouraging them to explore AI's potential in transforming their sales and marketing strategies.
Notable Quotes:
For more insights and strategies on integrating AI into your sales and marketing efforts, visit DonnaConsulting.com or follow Victor Adefuye on LinkedIn.