← Young and Profiting with Hala Taha
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha
Hala Taha: AI-Powered Sales, How to Automate, Optimize, and Close More Deals | Sales
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- [00:00]
Hala Taha
Today's episode of YAP is sponsored in part by Microsoft Teams Rakuten Factor, Robinhood, Airbnb, Shopify, OpenPhone and indeed, if you're looking for a way to collaborate with remote workers, your co founders, interns, volunteers, then you need to check out Microsoft Teams Free. Try Microsoft Teams Free today at AK Ms. Profiting get the Rakuten app now and join the 17 million members who are already saving. Cashback rates change daily. See rakuten.com for more details. Eat smart and fuel your wellness goals with Factor. Get started@factor meals.com FactorPodcast and use code FactorPodcast to get 50% off your first box plus free shipping. With Robinhood Gold, you can now enjoy the VIP treatment, receiving a 3% IRA match on retirement contributions. To receive your 3% boost on annual IRA contributions, sign up@robinhood.com Gold Hosting on Airbnb has never been easier with Airbnb's new co host network. Find yourself a co host@airbnb.com host Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you grow your business. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com Profiting OpenPhone is the number one business phone system. Build stronger customer relationships and respond faster with shared numbers, AI and automations. Get 20% off your first six months when you go to openphone.com profiting attract, interview and hire all in one place with Indeed. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com profiting terms and conditions apply. As always, you can find all of our incredible deals in the show notes or@younginprofiting.com deals I'm starting this New Year in Texas, y'all. Well, I still need to work on the y'all part, but I've taken a big leap into the unknown and booked a beautiful Airbnb here in Austin. And so many entrepreneurs that I know love it here. And I'm going to see if I love it here as well. And so far, so good. And while I still have to make a decision if I want to live here in Texas permanently, one decision I've already made is what to do with my new pad when I'm not in it. And that's hosting it on Airbnb. Of course. The thing is, when it comes to hosting my place on Airbnb, I don't really want to worry about the hosting part. I'm so busy with my company and podcasts, I couldn't possibly put another thing on my plate. And plus, you know me, I love to delegate, especially if it saves me time and money. And now with Airbnb's new co host network, I can just do that when it comes to my place. That's right, hosting just got a whole lot easier with Airbnb's co host network. You can hire a high quality local co host to take care of your home and guests Vetted on Airbnb. Co hosts have knowledge in the hosting space and can help get your investment properties set up for you. Imagine having someone who can handle reservations, guest communication and on site support for you so that you can handle other things like your own business, y'all. It's never been easier to host or co host your home on Airbnb. Find yourself a co host@airbnb.com host foreign I always say that knowing how to sell is the most important skill that an entrepreneur can have. Selling is at the core of every business. It's how you connect with your customers, build your brand and grow your business. And today I'm going to be giving you a mini masterclass on how to sell. I recently partnered with pipedrive, which is a CRM platform, to host a webinar about how you can crush your sales goals and we're going to be replaying it right now on the podcast for anybody who missed it. You're going to hear all about the benefits of activity selling, how to hit your sales goals, optimize your funnels, boost conversions, leverage AI and more. I'll also go into how to visualize your sales pipeline with pipedrive. Now this is a webinar where I presented a fancy slide deck with it.
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Chris Voss
So if you want to follow along.
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Hala Taha
With the presentation and demo, go check out the show notes and you can get the link to the presentation. If you enjoyed this webinar and you're ready to step up your game, I highly recommend that you get a free 14 day trial with Pipedrive. It's 100% risk free, no credit card required. You can just go to youngandprofiting co sales for a free 14 day trial and 20% off your membership. That's youngandprofiting co sales for A free 14 day trial of pipedrive. All right, if you're ready to make it rain, let's get started.
- [04:39]
Shelby Sapp
Foreign.
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Chris Voss
Welcome to our Crush your sales goals webinar presented by pipedrive. This is the first sales webinar that we've had for the year. If you just joined, I was mentioning that I totally updated all the content, so lots of new ideas and hopefully going to set you up for success at the Top of the year here. So if you haven't yet, let me know how many people are on your sales team. Uh, so far, it's. It seems like it's all a lot of small sales teams, which is perfect for what we're going to go over to now. If you guys have ever been to any of my webinars, you know that it's real work, right? So this is not something some fluff. We're going to go over real concepts you're going to learn. You're going to want to take notes. So what are you going to do to make the most out of today's class? Are you going to grab some tea or coffee? I've got tea, I've got water. My phone is on silent. I'm not checking my email. Get a snack. Make sure your kids are out of the way, your pets are out of the way. You're going to focus. We're going to be here for about 75 minutes going through content. So want you guys to be focused. Let me know what you're going to do in the chat to make the most out of today's session. Drop your name and date to solidify your commitments in the comments. Yeah, you guys will get a replay of this. So you don't like, but I still would take notes because it helps you, like, really remember things. So let me know what you're going to do to make the most out of today's session. Write your commitment in the chat. Well, you guys are gonna. Something new that we're doing is I'm pulling like the best content that I have from my podcast to make these a little bit more interactive, engaging. And so you're gonna hear from Chris Voss, you're gonna hear from Shelby SAP and a few others in this webinar. So it should be fun. Okay, so before we are jumping into the contents, we're going to have about 30 minutes of content. We're going to do demo, another 30 or 40 minutes of content. So before we do that, so I don't have to interrupt in the middle of the session, since we've got a lot of the folks on already, is to sign up to the demo. So Kate, if you can drop this link in here, Young and profiting co crushersales, I would join it on your computer because we're going to do a demo that you can follow along with. So Kate will drop that link in the chat. Make sure you guys sign up. It's no credit card, there's no gotchas. Just sign up so that you can try it for 14 days. Okay, we're going to move on. So in case you don't know a little bit about me, I am the host of Young and Profiting Podcast. It's the number one entrepreneurship and business podcast. I've been doing it for over six years. I'm the founder and CEO of YAP Media. It's an award winning social media and podcast production agency. And then most recently a couple years ago, I founded the Yap Media Podcast network which is my main focus now. So essentially I grow and monetize other top business podcasters like Jenna Kutcher, Amy Porterfield, Neil Patel, Russell Brunson. I've got a lot of legendary podcasters in my network and we're the number one business and self improvement podcast network. So I do a lot of sales. My main job at YAP is I'm the spokesperson of the company and I really am taking most of the major like brand sales calls, agency sales calls. A lot of our agency retainer deals are like 10k minimum a month. Most of them are like closer to 20 to 30k. Our brand deals, you know, I'm closing million dollar deals sometimes. So I've got a ton of experience with sales. I would say that's like one of my main skill sets aside marketing. So I love sales. I know a lot about it. I've interviewed every sales expert in the world that you could imagine. And so a lot of this learning is just things that I've come across on my podcast and my own personal experience. And so I'm excited to share with you. So today we're going to talk about Bottoms up sales strategy. We're going to talk about driver trees becoming a sales psychopath. We'll go through pipeline management with pipedrive, we'll talk about funnel optimization, we'll talk about the concept of the favorite and the fool and halfs and elves, which is just something that can help you identify your leads better. And then we'll talk about AI in the future and how AI is going to impact sales in the future and what you can do to prepare. All right, so starting with Bottoms up sales strategy. And guys, I've got your chat up, so let's make this interactive. So if you have questions after I'm done with this section, I'll pause and kind of take a look and see if I can help answer anything. But let's make this interactive and as fun as possible. So starting with Bottoms up sales strategy. So first off, how would you guys all define the word selling? How would you Define the word selling. Don't look it up, don't Google it in your own words, what is selling? Okay, we got a lot of good answers. So we've got giving value, being of service, selling words, presenting a product, exchanging a service for money, providing true value, helping somebody make a decision and change, convincing somebody what they need, creating value tied to client needs. Okay, so lots of good answers. Annoying for some people. Okay, so you guys gave a lot of good answers. But in my opinion, and technically selling refers to the actions that you take throughout the sales process and the closing of the deal. So a lot of people refer to sales as making money, making the sale. Right? Providing the value at the end of the sale. The value is really after the selling happens. Right? Selling is all about the actions you take throughout the process. There's a certain actions that you take that will cause a higher probability of getting more deals. So most people focus on the results rather than the actions and the process leading up to deals. And you need to do the opposite. Okay, you need to focus on, instead of results based selling, activity based selling. Okay, so you want to go from results based selling to activity based selling. So a lot of people's go to market strategy are falling flat because they're doing it backwards. They've top down approaches and it could be from the executive team, from the finance team. Maybe you are the executive in the finance team and you've got some goals. You have industry standards of growth, percentages, you have broad metrics like the marketing spend that you have and it's essentially just not based in reality. You've got random goal oriented metrics, they're set on different targets that you've created, but it's not actually based on tested outcomes. So that results in no realistic or actionable plans. So you actually, instead of wanting to take a top down approach, you want to take a bottoms up approach. And essentially what a bottoms up approach strategy is is that you work backwards from the close. So you go from close to the first sale activity. Now this requires you tracking your data. So this means that if you haven't been tracking your actions and a lot of you guys mentioned you've got a small team, you're solopreneurs or you're, you're just like a single entrepreneur, you've got to work backwards and start to track your data and you've got to figure out what are the different sales funnels that I have and what are the actions that I take in these different sales funnels and which one of my sales funnels Works best that I want to lean into. And so sales is really a volume game. How many clicks, calls, conversions do you need to hit your sales targets? And then you're going to want to track your data and figure out how many actions you need to complete each part of your sales process to hit your goals. Once you do that, you can set a stretch goal when you and I'll go over an example. So if this is feeling cloudy, I'll go over an example in a second. Once you do that, you can hit your stretch goal and make sure that your number is right. And then you can break the targets into easier chunks so that you know what you need to do and what your team needs to do to achieve that result. Okay, so driver trees is how you do this. This is how you determine what actions you need to take, all of your different rates and things like that. And there's three steps to create a driver tree. Number one, you determine your pipeline activities, so you determine the measurable actions that drive results in your best performing sales funnels. So this is all the calls that you've made, your email sent, your direct messages sent, your follow up, sent, the lunches that you've taken clients to. It's just any sort of action that you take to close a deal. And like I mentioned, you're going to want to think about all the different ways that you get clients because I'm sure it's not just one way. And you're going to want to figure out what are these separate funnels and map out the actions to each of these funnels. And then you'll actually be able to see which funnel is working better and what, which funnel you want to spend more time with and what actions you want to spend more time on. Okay, then you have to collect the results. So a spreadsheet or a CRM tool, sales tracking tool, you want to collect all your past results. And these can include things like clicks, webinar registrations, webinar attendees, emails opened, calls booked. Okay, number three is you want to calculate your performance rate metrics. So that's analyzing your past data to collect all the key rates to help you forecast future performance. So that's conversion rates. Click through rates, average order value, attendance rate. So let me know, do you guys understand how like the, the general concepts, steps one through two, three, to create a driver trade. Okay, I'm going to put it into, I'm going to show you an example. So do you guys know what the different sales funnels that you have that currently you're using in your business? Let me know, type it in the chat. What are the different types of sales funnel? Are you doing webinars? Are you doing discovery calls? Are you going to live events? Okay. And then do you know, out of all the different funnels that you have, do you know the best performing one? Or do you feel like you need to analyze your data and determine what the best performing sales funnel is? And do you guys know what key activities that you do in order to get that? All the different actions in your sales funnel, do you guys know the different actions? So for example, when we have a webinar, it includes DMs, it includes an opt in to sign up, it includes a follow up email, it includes a bunch of different things. Do you guys know those steps or do you need to actually map out those steps? That's great. So you got, this is going to be super relevant for all of you guys. This is going to be a game changer. It was a game changer for me when it came to selling my courses specifically. So I'm going to go over our driver tree example. And we use webinars, so typically we have a webinar with a one month lead up for promotion. Okay. And so the first thing that you're wanting going to do is analyze your past results. So like I said, you've got to be intentional. So now that means you've got to map out all your sales funnels, you got to map out all the actions that you take and you're going to start to track that data. It could just be like in a spreadsheet, but you need some sort of past result in order to get started. And then you can keep adding onto it and start to get averages and things like that. So you map out your funnel, you use past data to determine your key rates to forecast future results. So in this example we have, we made $21,000 in revenue. Okay, so we had 21 web course conversions at a thousand dollars. So essentially when I, when I'm mapping this out, I start backwards from a past result. Okay, so $21,000 in revenue. That was 21 course conversions at a thousand dollars. We had 350 webinar attendees, so it was a 6% conversion rate. We had 700 webinar registrants and emails which was a 50% average attendance rate. We had a thousand clicks which, and it came from 10,000 direct messages. So once you understand all of your actions and the results that you got, the clicks, the people who actually registered and so on, you can start to get your performance metrics, which is the 10% average click through rate, the 70% average registration rate, the 50% average attendance rate. Okay? And then you can decide on a new team goal. So if I want to generate $35,000 on the next webinar, then all I need to do is plug in the performance metrics that I have and work backwards to get the result that I want. So I basically need 35 webinar conversions at $1,000. Then I just do the math. That means we need 584 webinar attendees. That means we need 1168 people to register. Okay. And then that also means we need about, you know, 1700 clicks, which means we need to send about 17,000 direct messages total and about 4,000 direct messages per week. Okay. So basically I've just figured out how to get to my new team goal based on actual results. I didn't just, you know, point my finger in the air and say, I want $35,000 next time. Go do it. I have clear direction. Hey guys, I need us to move from 10,000 direct messages to 17,000 direct messages. If we want to hit this goal, does that mean that we need to extend the time to the webinar? Does that mean we need to add another salesperson to help us do more direct messages? Right, and then you can also divide this by the day and give people what they have to do per day in order to hit that goal. It also helps you understand, like if you're midway and you haven't hit a certain amount of registrants, you know that you're behind your goal. So all the time when I'm doing webinars, I'm like, hey guys, we need X amount of registrants. We still don't have that. We need to do more. We need to do more DMs. We're behind. Maybe our message needs to be improved, maybe our opt in needs to be improved. Something is broken because we're not hitting our average metrics. And we need to figure out what we can do better to, to get the result that we want. Okay. Now once you have your team goal, you can then figure out your per rep metrics. So if you have five sales reps, which is the example here, you can then work backwards and figure out how many direct messages they need to do per, per week, per day for the month long period. And you don't only want to figure out how many, you know, first step actions you want. You want them to understand that their ultimate goal is that they need to get 117 webinar attendees and ultimately 7 hour webinar conversions. And the other thing when you're doing a per rep analysis to think about is that you can then see like who's doing something differently that's working better. So you give two different reps, the same straight, same goal. I need you to get 117 webinar attendees, seven webinar conversions and somebody does better. Even though they sent the same amount of direct messages, for example, it could be that their message was better, maybe they did better follow ups or something about their process is different. You want to figure out why is this person performing better and how can I then scale that to my team and keep improving what we're doing, Right? So it's really cool to start tracking team wide, to track, track per person and really start to evaluate all the actions people are doing. Okay. So one thing to remember with activity based selling is that you are really focused on your actions. You're focused on what you can control, you're focused on the process and you know that if you do all the right actions that sales is a volume game and you'll end up getting a good result. And you can't worry about the results while you're taking these actions. You want to have a really strong, confident mindset while you're activity based selling. And we all know that sales is very stressful, right? Sales is the type of activity where most of the time you're going to fail. There's other professions out there where, like for example, if you're an accountant, you learn the rules of accounting, you'll be a good accountant. If you're an electrician or a plumber, you learn the process of fixing something, you'll probably have a good result. But sales is based on other people's emotions and you can control other people. You can do all the things you know will tend to have a good result, but at the end you don't really know what's going to happen. And so you need to approach every single sale, every single interaction with a mindset of confidence and that you are going to close the deal. You need to have a high level of confidence and you need to be able to control your energy, control your emotions and just do the actions that you know you need to do, even if you keep getting no's along the way. Okay? So you need to replace your anxiety with confidence. And here we have Shelby Sapp, who is a young sales influencer entrepreneur who's generated millions of dollars in sales and she's Going to talk about becoming a sales psychopath. So you're like blowing up on social media. You're doing really well on Instagram and TikTok and i1 of your videos and you were talking about how you need.
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Hala Taha
To be a sales psychopath.
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Chris Voss
Oh, yes, you do talk to me about that.
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Eamon
So I like to say you have to be a complete, literal psychopath in sales because a lot of people think this is super cool, the shiny thing, you can make a lot of money. It's like, yes. But you don't get paid to show up. You get paid to go the extra mile. And sales is something to where it's a direct reflection of your work ethic. So if you really want to make it worth it and to be that top 1% percent cream of the crop, you have to be a little bit of a psycho. Not only in your work ethic, but also in your ability to just know how to regulate your emotions throughout the day. Like, for example, you're gonna go call, call, call, door, door, door of no, no, no, no. But you have to go into every single encounter thinking, this is the sale. This is the person that's going to buy from me. When maybe the last 10 people told you to yourself, you know, so to me, that's so psychotic because that's not normal. That's not normal human behavior. You have to trick yourself into being this psychopathic mentality in order to really reap, in my opinion, the true benefits of sales. Because that really does come from the top of the top, the best of the best.
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Hala Taha
It's so true because, like, nobody really.
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Chris Voss
Knows, like, what your track record is. Nobody knows how many sales you made before that day.
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Hala Taha
The customer knows nothing about you.
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Chris Voss
They don't know your ranking. They don't know anything about you. So you can come there with good energy and, you know, just have the confidence and know your stuff. And they have no idea how well you've done in the past.
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Eamon
Exactly. And it sounds so simple, but it's really not. Because having that conviction in your voice and that sure tone and that confidence, that energy in the aura when you just got demolished by every single person before is so hard. But like you said, they really have no clue. So you almost have to like brainwash yourself into being like, this is the client that's gonna buy, and that one client that buys that commission is gonna make up for all of the no's that you had that day. So all it takes is the one. And you can't let the other people get to.
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Chris Voss
Yeah. So you heard it from Shelby. You've gotta become a sales psychopath. That means approaching every opportunity like you're going to get the sale. That means not being worried about what happened before and just being in the moment, focusing on the process, like we said, focusing on the activities, the actions you have to take, having a really good work ethic, and making you sure that you hit the actions no matter what the results were in the process. After the event is over, it's not about ignoring the results. We want to evaluate the results. Once it's over, once the event is over, once the month is over, we evaluate what we did. How can we be better? But in the moment, it's all about the actions that you take and the volume of the actions and just being as positive and as confident as you can in that moment, whether it's in DMS or on the phone or in person. Okay, so we had some questions. So you're. So we have some questions. I'm going to just go back and clarify some things. So just to make sure that everybody is on the same page, somebody had a question. Course conversions versus attendees. So I'm gonna go back to this really quick. So conversions are people who actually bought the course. Attendees are people who attended the webinar. So that's how granular you wanna get. Okay, so you send a dm. The DM has an opt in link. People click that link. Then they go to an opt in page for the webinar. They type in their name, their email and they register for the event. They get a calendar event. There's probably some automated emails that happen because they give their email, they register for the event, but then only 50% of the people show up to the webinar. Right. Then you do the webinar. And if they buy on the webinar or, or afterwards, that's up to you to decide like what the time period is of tracking conversions associated with that webinar. And that's people who actually buy. Right. So that's. Hopefully that answers your question. How do you send 10k DMS efficiently? Virtual assistants on LinkedIn. Your DMs are unlimited to your first connections. So it's just all about getting first connections and then you can DM them whenever you want. Question. If this is new Salesforce and do not have much past history, do you use past sales from other salespeople? Yes, you can just use past sales data from other people, other events that you've had, and then you can try to tailor it. Once you have more realistic information about Your new sales team, what strategies to manipulate conversion rate. We're going to talk about that later when we talk about optimizing funnels. All right, cool. I think those were all the questions. Okay, so do you guys want to lean into activity based selling? Is this different from what you've already been doing? Yeah, this is also something that you've probably done before, but like things get busy and then you just kind of like are on a hamster wheel. And it's always good to just like reset, especially in the beginning, beginning of the year. And also make sure you stop doing things that are not effective or you can kind of optimize like we were talking about. We're going to talk about optimizing funnels. You can optimize a step that might not have like industry standard performance. Like for example, let's say, you know, your conversion rate is 2%, but it should be 6%. So what do you need to do differently? Right. So I think just evaluating what you're doing is always smart. Slowing down, stepping back. Can you guys see yourself using a bottoms up strategy if you're not using one yet? All right, so according to Pipedrive sales team, use the following tracking, 4% pen and paper, 17 spreadsheets, 79 CRM software. What are you using today or are you not tracking at all? Let me know in the chat. Are using pen and paper spreadsheets, CRMs. Well, that's what Pipedrive is. Just so you guys know, Pipe Drive literally was started to revolve around activity based selling. That's like their whole ethos is that sales is all about the actions you take and to be more activity focused rather than results focused. So pipeline management is an incredible way to visualize your sales process to track all your activities. Having the right CRM is crucial for your sales success. And this is coming from pipedrive's website. We believe that in sales and marketing, just like in life, you can't control the results, but you can control the actions that drive deals towards completion. So their whole thing is designed around helping you understand all the actions that you're taking, Tracking that automatically and being able to see like, if there's anything going wrong. It actually has like AI that will.
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Hala Taha
Tell you you need to do more.
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Chris Voss
Emails, you need to do more calls, and you just basically input that historical data so that pipedrive knows how to guide you and your sales team along the way. Pipetribe is a CRM that enables you to customize your sales process based on your specific individualized sales funnels. It was specifically Designed by salespeople for salespeople, it is both a sales tracking tool and a CRM. So there's lots of CRMs out there that are really focused on communications and contact management. Pipedrive is both a sales tracking activity, sales tracking tool and a CRM traditional CRM where you can see every single email you've sent, every single DM you've sent, save all your contact information. Pipedrive also has a lot of automations. They're really innovative and they've got lots of new AI tools that are really exciting that are coming out. You can do automated follow ups, you can do AI generated email templates and then they have amazing reporting. I think my favorite part about pipedrive is all the reporting that they have. And in our demo we're going to show you what their reporting looks like. Pipedrive is also, you know, a very popular platform that's integrated with every single app that you can imagine so you can check out their integrations during your free trial. So we have more content after this. About 45 minutes of educational content. But before we do that, we're going to start the demo. You guys already sign up to the demo. If you guys have not yet, please go ahead and do do that. Drop that link in the chat. Kate, we're not going to spend a ton of time because I had everybody who is on earlier sign up and I'm going to answer some questions while you guys do that. If you guys have not done it yet, please sign up. Let me know down in the chat if you've done that. Mark is asking if one only uses Pipe Drive, should that be the only tool CRM to track your sales or would you recommend also tracking an Excel as well? I think that if you set up pipedrive properly, you won't need to use Excel. That's the whole point is that you want to get out of spreadsheets and move to pipedrive to track all your sales. And pipedrive on their blog has all this documentation of like how you can basically make that transition. So if you've been tracking in sheets, that's great because you basically have the foundation to then, you know, upload that information into pipedrive.
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Hala Taha
Let's hold that thought and take a quick break with our sponsors. Hey, young and profits. These days I find myself with no time. I'm juggling work, dating, everything else that.
- [33:10]
Chris Voss
Life throws in my way.
- [33:11]
Hala Taha
And honestly, healthy eating has fallen to the wayside. There's just never enough time to plan, shop, cook, clean up after cooking. And what happens is that I end up ordering all these groceries, being optimistic because I want to eat healthy, but all the food goes bad before I get a chance to cook it. So I knew that I had to make a change. And I recently discovered Factor. It's been amazing because they've got chef made gourmet meals that make eating well so easy. All the meals are dietitian approved. They're ready to heat in just two minutes and so I can feel right and feel great no matter how much time that I have. And Factor arrives fresh to your doorstep. They've got 40 different options to choose from across all different types of dietary preferences. And so I personally like to have protein. Plus I work out every single day, so I like to have protein with every meal. But if that's not for you, you can try Calorie Smart or Keto Factor helps you feel good all day. They've got breakfast options, snacks, wholesome smoothies, and I love the smoothie variety pack. It is perfect for me. So why not keep it simple and reach your nutrition goals this year with ingredients you can trust and convenience that can't be beat. We all need to save time. We all need to eat smart. And you can do that with Factor. Get started@Factor Meals.com FactorPodcast and use code FactorPodcast to get 50% off your first box plus free shipping. That's Factor Podcast at Factor Meals.com Factorpodcast to get 50% off plus free shipping on your first box. If you want all the links quick and easy, just head to our show notes or younginprofiting.com deals. Hey app fam. Do you guys know that feeling when you're juggling a dozen sales leads with your team, you're trying to close all these deals and then suddenly you realize, wait, did we forget to follow up with so and so? Shoot, nobody did. And now we lost the deal because we weren't organized.
- [35:01]
Chris Voss
Yeah.
- [35:01]
Hala Taha
Bam. You've got to get the right system in place for your pipeline management if you want to scale your business. And my favorite CRM and sales tracking tool is pipedrive. They're the first CRM made by salespeople for salespeople, pipedrive visualizes your sales process and it's really all you need to track your sales communications, contacts and run your team meetings. Pipedrive has a powerful pipeline management. You can see exactly where every lead stands at a glance. They've got automated reminders and follow ups to increase your productivity and it eliminates repetitive, time consuming tasks. Pipedrive CRM features were developed around the principle of activity Based selling. They have real time reports and an AI assistant that helps you focus on the activities that are most likely to lead to a sale. And pipedrive is always innovating. In fact, they're gearing up to launch a whole new suite of AI tools. With pipedrive, you're not just managing your sales, you're supercharging them. So if you're ready to take your sales game to the next level, head over to YoungInProfiting Co Sales and start your free 14 day trial today. That's YoungInProfiting Co Sales for your free 14 day trial on Pipedrive. Young and Profits. I know so many of you are in your grind season. You're working your nine to five and then you're five to midnight building out that side hustle dream. And that's how I started YAP Media and now we are on track to hit eight figures this year. If you're a side hustler, you know that it can be hard to find the right tools without breaking the bank. And that's where Microsoft Teams Free comes in. With teams you get pro level collaboration tools without the hefty price tag. For example, you can host free video meetings for up to 60 minutes. That is so professional for your client calls. You can also get unlimited chat for real time collaboration with your team no matter where you are. It replaces so many apps. So for example, file storage. If you want to keep your client documents, invoices and brand assets organized, Microsoft Teams Free has you covered. You can have everything you need to access in one place. You can also create community spaces to organize your teams, volunteers or creative collaborators, making it easy to track your business or projects. Microsoft Teams seems like a dream come true for small businesses. It's secure, professional, reliable and it is amazing to have all your tools in one place. Stop paying for your tools. Get everything you need for free with Microsoft Teams. It's a no brainer. Try Microsoft Teams today and start growing your side hustle without extra cost. Head to aka ms./profiting today to sign up for free. That's aka ms./profiting to sign up for free to Microsoft Teams today.
- [37:47]
Chris Voss
Okay. All right. So if you guys want to sign in and follow along the demo, you can. If you want to just pay attention and play with it later, go for it. It's up to you. But if you have access, you can actually follow along during the demo. And now I have a from my sales team going over a demo account of pipedrive to just show you guys specifically how you can use Pipedrive for activity based selling. We're not going to go into like too much of like the contact stuff that is traditional CRM. We're really focused on how this is related to activity based selling.
- [38:20]
Sean Cannell
Hello everyone, I'm Eamon and today I'm going to walk you through how our sales team uses the core features at pipedrive to crush sales every year. Let's get started. So the first step in pipedrive is to set up your pipeline stages. Think of your pipeline as a visual representation of every step a deal goes through before it closes. Pipedrive allows you to fully customize these stages so they match your specific sales process. Here is how to do it. Click on the pipeline button in the right corner of your dashboard. Create or rename your stages to reflect the steps you typically take, such as prospecting, qualifying leads, closing the deal, signing the contract, and so on. As you can see, pipedrive already gives you a template that you can use. So once you set up your stages, you can start adding deals into the appropriate stage right away. The visual approach keeps your team aligned and ensure nothing slips through the cracks. Next, let's talk about focusing on actions that move the deal forward. It's easy to get caught up in the final outcome causing the deal, but really the day to day activities are what makes the difference in the sales process. So a sales activity in pipedrive can be anything from a phone call, an email or a scheduled meeting to a launch. Maybe for example, with a potential client. Whatever you need to do to nurture that deal, you can log it in and schedule it in pipedrive. Here's a quick example. Let's say you have a new lead. You might schedule a discovery call, then follow it up with an email and confirm the next steps. Pipedrive will book these times in your calendar and remind you of these activities. So you're always on top of your tasks and never miss an opportunity to connect. As you work on deals and complete activities, pipedrive will provide you with real time tracking and insights to help you crush your sales and refine your approach. If you need to adjust course, let's say you notice conversion rate drops when moving the deal to qualified stage. With pipedrive reports, you can spot these trends early and take correctional actions. Maybe offering a more compelling proposal dedicating more time to customer needs in that stage. This kind of visibility ensures that you and your team can pivot quickly and keep hitting your goals. Finally, when you have your pipeline set up, you're focusing on the right actions and your tracking progress. It's time to optimize and grow. Pipedrive's automations help you scale your sales process and achieve even bigger goals. For example, the automations can take care of administrative tasks like sending follow up emails. You can schedule the follow ups beforehand or updating deal stages, saving you time and efforts. As you refine your winning formula, you can set even bigger sales goals and continue to push your team to new heights. All right, this is pipetribe in a nutshell. Hope you got some insights. And back to the webinar.
- [41:30]
Chris Voss
Yeah, so as you can see, super effective, especially those of you who are not using a CRM yet. Even if you are using a CRM, one that is designed specifically around your sales process is super helpful so that you can do activity based selling, not have to work in spreadsheets and be able to see your dashboard to evaluate how things are going.
- [41:54]
Sean Cannell
Hello everyone, I'm Eamon.
- [41:56]
Chris Voss
Yeah, I think pipedrive would definitely be good for a recruitment agency. It would work for any sales funnel. And the beauty of Pipedrive compared to other CRMs is that you can totally customize your steps in the process. But like I said, you need to just outline what your sales steps are first. So if you guys aren't using pipedrive right now, are you excited to give it a try? You've got a 14 free day free trial. Are you excited to give it a try and see if it will work for you guys? Okay, we see a lot of yeses. What about forecasting? Yes, pipedrive has forecasting abilities. Pipedrive is one of the most reputable CRMs in the industry. So anything that like HubSpot would have or any other CRMs Pipedrive has and it's more of like a nimble tool. And I'd also say that it's really great for small teams. It's more affordable. HubSpot's very expensive, but yeah. So I feel like it's just a really, really great option for smaller business businesses and sales teams. Okay, so if you guys want to sign up to pipedrive, you can click that link if you already haven't yet. You already get the 20% off your annual if you end up signing up. And right now you have a free 14 day trial to give it a spin. That's how we started with Pipedrive before they were even a SP sponsor or a partner. We just used it for 14 days and we loved it and we just moved all our sales ops to pipedrive. So give it a try. You don't really have anything to lose. You don't have to put your credit card. I would just set up some sales funnels. Try to see if you like the ease of use. It's a really intuitive tool. It's very easy to use. Okay, let's move on to optimizing our funnels. So here is Sean Cannell. So now we're going to move on into how do we actually improve our conversions? How do we improve all the different activities that we're doing and continue to get better? Because it's not only about taking more actions, it's also about stepping back and figuring out what is broken. How can I improve so that I can ultimately get more conversions and better results? And this is what you do once the period of sales is over, when you're analyzing everything that you've done in the past. So here's Sean Cannell on your funnels being broken.
- [44:15]
Russell Brunson
And then it's kind of like online marketing best practices, I think the naming of whatever you're giving away free, the desire of what you're giving away free alignment on the entire thing. And congruency. Congruency is that when they land on the page, they're on the right page. People have horrible landing pages. Navigation above, it doesn't even seem like it's them. There's not authority there doesn't load. It's. It's like malware notification. There's all kind. I mean, it's kind of stressful. Someone's like, man, there's so many things you just want to remove friction. Sometimes the biggest mistake is like you're making a video that have people thinking one way and giving a call to action that's not related. Think about what video would attract the ideal person for your opt in. What opt in would attract the ideal person for your offer. And those things are broken all the time in people's businesses. Like someone opts in, but they're not the right psychology, psychographics, demographics. Because it was a cool free thing. But did it really align? And then the YouTube videos, if you were talking about how to hire team members in a video and then you were like, and by the way, if you want to download my 21 tax savings guide, like, not horrible. Because maybe some people are like, that does sound interesting. The reason they're there. The better guide would be a freebie that's like, you know, and if you want to get my scripts, my job interview scripts for how to really filter out the wrong candidates and lock in the right candidates, just go to think filter think hiring scripts.com or click the link in the description. So that would be my biggest Thing is like I think the strategy of the content that attracts right people, then the opt in that ties together concurrency in the whole thing. And then again, a good sales process and funnels, you know, you probably have endless episodes in your own library of some good stuff on, on, on making great funnels. But what's powerful about that is it is a psychology everybody listening to this needs to know, thinking about their whole, you could call it sales journey, the whole customer journey, thinking about the entire thing, start to finish. And that is a never ending process of tweaking. All of us could improve it. Ours is probably a 6 out of 10 and we've done pretty well. Like there's, there's so many, you know, things that small tweaks lead to giant peaks. And so just being willing to be like, can I change my opt in in the future? Can I change my offer page? It's not even just my offer page, the checkout page and the thank you page and, and then follow up and what do I want to do next and is that all aligned? And usually when, when things are not working, it's just because a piece is broken and there's some kind of like cognitive dissonance that happens or something sometimes from YouTube to your landing page, it's, it's not quite what it looks like. And you know, all these little details.
- [47:09]
Chris Voss
Like that one of my. So hopefully that gets you in the mindset of being willing to analyze your entire funnel. So not only the activities you do, but what is the language on the page? What does it look like? Is anything broken? Right. So that should be helpful.
- [47:26]
Russell Brunson
And then it's kind of like online.
- [47:28]
Chris Voss
And Russell is going to talk about actual strategies for optimizing these content pages. I love that. And I can, I can just hear all the passion in your voice. And I teach marketing too. And something that I always tell my students is like it's all about the nuance. Right. It's like these little tiny tweaks that get people to make the decisions that you want them to make. So can you talk about subtle nuances that people can do within their funnels.
- [47:57]
Hala Taha
That can make or break their funnels?
- [47:59]
Steve
Yeah. So first off, it comes back earlier. So there's always three things in every page of a funnel. So hook a story offer. And I always tell people, like, if you were to hire me, I do console days for 100 grand a day. People fly out here. Like I always tell them, like, the only thing I'm going to do is I'm going to look at every page in the funnel and see, they're going to be a hook, a story, or the offer. One of those things is. Is always off, right? So, good example. I have someone that's in my inner circle, and they had a webinar that was teaching people how to, like, make money with local reviews or something like that, right? And they had this webinar, and they had a webinar that was really good. The landing page, register, everything was there, right? But it was costing them. I think on average, it cost them like 25 per lead to get someone to register for a webinar. And then from that, it was like, I think they're like 12% of the people who registered actually showed up. So it's costing them like $150 for every person to show up on this webinar. And then the webinars actually converted really good. Like, they're teaching the process. They sold a really good offer, and they did really, really well. But it was just the conversions were bad. So they wanted me to help them rebuild the entire funnel and the webinar and everything. I was like, I don't think it's that big. I think you're just missing one thing. I said, when I look at the registration page, their headline was something like, learn how to make money with helping local businesses with local reviews. I was like, the problem with that is there's no curiosity when I see that, I'm like, oh, this is a webinar. Teach people how to make. You know, they're going to teach me how to make money with local reviews. And if you think you know the answer already, then first off, you're not going to register. And if you do register, you may or may not show up, but you're like, I think I know this is well registered. And if I, you know, if I'm bored, maybe I'll show up, right? And so all we did is we took that. I was like, let's just change the hook and make it more. Like, let's make more curiosity in the hook. And so we changed it from how to make money teaching people how to do local reviews or whatever, to, like, if something like this is the loophole we found to help make extra money helping local businesses. And this is not. And we talked about all the things it wasn't. This is not doing Facebook ads. This is not doing Instagram, whatever, all the things that people might think it was, talk about what it was not. Instead, register to find out exactly what this new thing is, and then we'll show you how to use it inside your business. So we just made it more curiosity based. That's all we changed. On the registration page, it went from like $25 per registrant. Now I started getting registrants at $5 a piece. So drop the cost down to 1/5. And then because people didn't know what it was unless they showed up the red, their show up rate went from like 12%, like 26%.
- [50:11]
Chris Voss
Wow.
- [50:11]
Steve
So between those two things, all of a sudden the metrics of the business change. And this funnel went on to make them millions of dollars just by changing a hook on a page.
- [50:19]
Chris Voss
Right.
- [50:19]
Steve
So that's how like you talk about. It's just like simple psychology that these little tiny tweaks, little tiny changes have huge impact across the funnel. Right. And so for me, like that's what I'm always looking for. So I look at so many people's funnels just to get ideas of like, oh, look how they did that, look how they did this. And the more I see people buying ads, like the telltale sign of like, people always ask me, how do you know a funnel's working? Like if the company is spending a lot of money on ads, you keep seeing it over and over and over again. They probably are doing something right. And so I'll click on it, I'll go look at like, oh, look how they did that, look how they frame that. Look how they made this offer. Look what you know, and we're just looking at those little things and they'll come back and test them on our pages. And like I said, a little tweak like that can dramatically change the metrics of a business. So it's like searching for buried treasure and then applying it back to your business, which is so much fun.
- [51:04]
Chris Voss
So I love what Russell said, especially at the end of analyzing your competitor funnels. Who is your competitor? What are their funnels looking like? What activities do they do for top of funnel, for mid funnel? What are their landing pages look like? What is the language that they're using? And you can take their, like the things that you think are working well for them and apply it to your own business. And so not only optimizing your funnels, but optimize, but analyzing your competitors funnels. I love that and I can. So an example of this is something that we, we do at YAP and that we've tried to fix, which is our attendance rate. Our attendance rate is great for webinars. We get a 50% average attendance rate. However, I interviewed Kat Norton and she told me that for webinar registrants, she gets a drastic increase in her attendance rate by collecting people's phone numbers and then texting them. So an example of optimizing a funnel for us would be to start testing text. And so if we were to just not change anything. So if I just had the team continue doing 10,000 DMS, but we implemented text reminders which can be automated and we're able to jump from 50% attendance rate to 80% attendance rate. I can hit my 35k ish goal with that change and not necessarily sending out more dms. So it can really have big impacts. And you want to see like what part of your funnel can you actually improve? Is there a way that you can improve the click through rate? Is there a way that you can improve the conversion rate on the actual event? Right. So you always want to look at that and try to optimize. So based on everything you just heard, are you inspired to start optimizing your funnels? And if so, like, what's one idea that you will do after this call? Well, thank you guys. You can listen to all those episodes. Kate, maybe you can drop the episode links in the chat. That Russell Brunson episode was epic. I have so many sales episodes, guys. I've interviewed every single human behavior and sales person in the world. Okay, so benchmarks for conversion rates, they're going to be different by industry, but that's something you can go on ChatGPT and check out. That's going to be totally different for every single activity. It's going to be totally different for every single type of event. So for example, like webinar events are going to have different conversion rates than a sales call, but you can find that information online and you can also use your own past results as your benchmark and just keep improving from there. Working backwards, figuring out how to automate, laying out the funnel. Yeah, the hook story offer is brilliant. That entire episode with Russell is amazing. Also, if you guys want more webinar content, I'll write this in the chat. I have a two part series with Jason Fladline and we go over how to create the best webinar ever for like two hours. So if you guys want to get into webinars, check that out.
- [54:28]
Hala Taha
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- [55:54]
Chris Voss
Yeah.
- [55:55]
Hala Taha
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- [59:16]
Chris Voss
So let's talk about prioritizing your time now. A lot of us seem like we're selling services. It also sounded like you guys are taking a lot of sales calls. I saw discovery calls a lot in the chat when I was asking what your different activities were. So when you're not selling one too many, you really have to be careful with your time. You've got to make sure that you're taking the right calls, that you're focused on the right thing. Because time is the most precious asset that we Have. And Chris Voss told me once, it's not a sin to lose business, but it's a sin to take a long time losing business. So you want to make sure when you're on these sales calls, you're trying to disqualify whoever you're talking to as soon as possible so that you can focus your time on the people who are actually going to buy from you. You don't want to just be a busy bee taking calls that are have like very low probability. You want to focus your time on your best case scenarios with your sales. So you want to think about are you the fool or the favorite? Okay? So as soon as you get on a sales call, your number one goal is to figure out are you the fool or the favorite? Because when somebody gets on a sales call with you, they're 70% made up before they even get on the call. They know if they're going to work with you or not. And oftentimes they're just using you as a reference, like doing their due diligence. They may not actually be like intentionally like trying to waste their time. They might think they should be getting three bids or whatever it is, but their mind is already made up. And you need to decide like, are you the fool or the favorite? So you're the fool. If they're asking you for free information, they just keep asking you for stuff. They're really unresponsive. They keep you waiting, they miss the first call, they're late, they don't respect you, they don't respect your time. They're all about price, right? They're asking for the lowest price early on or they won't introduce you to any decision makers. So they're just wasting your time. Okay? Your favorite, on the other hand, is they're treating you like an insider. They're sharing exclusive details, they're talking about how they're going to work with you, not if you can do something for them. They treat you with respect, they're seeking out your input, they're treating you like a trusted advisor. They're bringing the key decision maker on the call. They're negotiating what they're going to get in the deal, not necessarily the price. They respect your prices, they respect your work. And so you need to find out if you're the fool or favorite early on. And part of that is just paying attention, right? Paying attention to what's happening, what happened before the call. And you can take a 15 minute call to like 100% solidify if you're the fool or the favorite, if you're the fool, you want to disqualify your week, leads early. You want to act, ask direct questions. You want to, instead of lowering price, shift the conversation to value differentiation. And you also could try to uncover gaps and ask like, you know what, what would it take for us to be your first choice? Right. And, you know, if you've got a lot of options, just, sorry, we're not a fit. You know, they could come back to you, and you can be the favorite because you put your foot down and, and stayed confident and assertive. Now for the favorite. You want to stay confident, you want to stay assertive. You also don't want to give them time to think, to basically reconvince them that you're not the favorite. So you want to close quickly. You don't want to let them second guess. You want to push for the highest pricing, better terms. You definitely don't want to throw out free promotions if you're already the favorite. Right. So once you know you're the favorite, offer stands as it is, there's no flexibility in price. Close quickly and you'll do well. So there's a magic question, and we're going to hear about it from Chris Voss. So what questions should we ask ourselves to understand whether we're the fool or the favorite?
- [63:26]
Shelby Sapp
Ask yourselves. How can I fearlessly find out early on without hurting anybody's feelings? Because I'm not going to ask legitimate questions. How do I allow myself to find out early on whether or not I'm the favorite of the fool? If you don't want to try, you're holding yourself hostage. I mean, release yourself because you're the one that's holding you back. And this scares the heck out of so many people. If they can get over this hurdle, if they can just put themselves in a mindset to find out, then they are going to be a long way towards using these skills because it's about releasing yourself in many ways. Steve, would you agree?
- [64:05]
Mustafa Suleiman
Absolutely. And this is a concept that I really resonated with because in football, this is what we were trained to do. Read the situation, read and react. Read and react. There's lots of clues, and you're looking for the clues. You just have to know what you're looking for. No one knew that there was a favorite and a fool. The moment you start looking for the clues, they're all over the place. It's not a sin to lose business. It's a sin to take a long time losing business. And you know, the real reason why real estate agents work seven days a week is because they don't work five. If they actually work five days a week, actually work, rather than spending time chasing after business they're not going to get. They wouldn't have to work seven days a week. They wouldn't have to be on call 24 7.
- [64:59]
Chris Voss
So I take sales calls all the time. They usually start with some sort of discovery call where you try to figure out what's the client's problems. Can I help them? Can I not help them? So what are the things that we can do in that conversation to know whether we're the fool or the favorites? What are the things that people do or say that will give us clues?
- [65:18]
Shelby Sapp
Well, the first thing is to just ask what is the most horrifying question for everybody until they understand how good it is. And that's to say the other person. You got a lot of options out there. I mean, I got solid competitors. You could go to them. They got great resumes. Why me? That's. That is like the magic phrase. I mean, it's an emotional intelligence surgical strike. Why does certain things to people that are vastly different than what is normally portrayed out there? Why is like this. It's a. It's a emotional intelligence surgical strike. You should never ask why unless you want them to defend you, because why always triggers defensiveness, which is the, the bad advice.
- [66:12]
Steve
Find out.
- [66:13]
Shelby Sapp
Their why is good advice, but it doesn't tell you that you shouldn't ask them why. Except if the why is about you and you are going to get an unguarded, honest answer or you're not going to get an answer. And if you don't get an answer why you? There ain't no why for you there at all.
- [66:33]
Chris Voss
That's so interesting. So basically you're asking, why me? Because you want to get a gauge of how much they respect you and if they've picked you already and how much research is done. So if they say, if I say why me? And they're like, holla, you're the number one LinkedIn expert, everybody knows you make all the influencers on Link, then I know, okay, you, I am the favorite. But if they say I googled you and you popped up and I'm interviewing three other people, then I might be the fool, right?
- [66:59]
Shelby Sapp
That one. Or you know what a lot of people throw back on you. The person who either is taking advantage of you on purpose, and a lot of people are doing it by accident. They don't mean to be. You know, they're taught that it's okay get three bits. But they're going to say, well, it's up to you to convince me. And if they throw it back on you like that, or in some fashion, you are the fool in the game.
- [67:27]
Chris Voss
So good. Has that ever happened to anybody where they, like somebody said, you've got to convince me. Show me what you can do. So what question should we ask? Of course it's happening. So now you guys got this magic question in your pocket. The next time you hop on a discovery call, you can instantly find out if you're the fool or the favorite. You can say, hey, why me? Why, why did you want to work with me? So? And it also puts you in the power seat because it shows that you're not desperate that you're asking such a vulnerable question to your sales lead. Okay, Exactly. And you don't really want to work with somebody who you. You have to prove yourself. You want to start the relationship. Especially a lot of you guys mentioned that you're like a small team. You might be working directly with a client that you're not only selling, you're probably executing the offer afterwards too. You want to work with somebody who already respects you. Don't want to work with somebody who like, wants you to keep proving your, proving yourself. Right. They're going to be bad clients. Which brings me to the next point. So also, when you're evaluating your clients, you want to think about, are they halfs or else? So half is a hard, annoying, lame, frustrating client. These are high maintenance, low profit clients or deals. They require a lot of effort, they drain your energy, they often don't pay well. They're haggling you, they cause stress, delays, endless negotiations. They might be like really unresponsive or too responsive. They always want your time. They think you work only for them and you have no other clients. Compared to ELFs, they're easy, they're lucrative, they're fun. These are your ideal clients that are profitable, enjoyable, efficient. They respect your time and expertise. They don't haggle overpriced and cause unnecessary headaches. So if you go and you try to convince the person that believes you're a fool, they're going to be hard, annoying, lame, frustrating clients anyway. So you want to drop them early. You get that. You know exactly when you get on a sales call, if you're doing dealing with a half or an elf, okay, so you want to be able to attract the elfs. Not all good revenue. Not all revenue is good revenue. We are so picky with our clients. At Y Media, if somebody just gives me a tough time on a sales call and I'm like, this person's going to be a headache. I know that they're going to take away time from my elf, and I want to retain my ELF clients, right? You want to retain your good clients. You don't want to bring in people that are going to suck up all your time. You're going to work twice as hard for all your profit. So part of this is also just thinking about the fact that, like, not all clients are good clients. Okay? So one of the things that you could do in Pipe Drive related to making sure you take the right clients is that you can label all of your leads however you want. You could even label them Fool's Favorites, Half Elves, right? You can have whatever titles that you want to help guide how you're going to spend time with these clients. And when you draw the line and when you drop them in the sales process, once you've identified, if they're not a good fit for your company, a lot of people will waste their time, you know, bringing people all the way to the finish line only to discover that they're the fool. So you want to figure that out as early as possible and you want to figure out how interested they're actually in your product before you spend so much time with them. The other thing with pipedrive, and we're going to move on to our AI section of today, is that you can automate a lot of repetitive tasks so you can trigger personalized emails, you can transfer ownership to another rep once a deal reaches a certain stage. They've got AI powered prompts and they've got a lot of new AI features that are coming soon, like deal summaries, where it will take all the conversations that you've had in the past and summarize what the current, like current status of the deal is. It'll also summarize emails for you. So they're coming out with all these new beta AI. And that's one of my favorite things about pipedrive is that they're always innovating and they're really fast to innovate. They have a AI sales assistant. So like I had mentioned on your actual reporting, it will identify patterns, it will recommend high potential deals next actions to prioritize. They've got an email generation email deals, AI deal summaries, like I was saying, and they also are coming out with AI agents. So who here has heard of the concepts of AI agents? Okay, so some of you guys heard of it. Some of you haven't. I interviewed Reid Hoffman, who is the founder of LinkedIn and he's also the co found of I think it's OpenAI. And he talked to me about AI agents. It blew my mind. And it's important for everybody to hear this because this is going to be our future in the very near future. So when you say super agency, basically what you're saying is we have human agency with AI. They'll be helping us become better humans, and that's why we have super agency. And then AI itself is going to be able to do things on its own. Right? So can you talk to us about how AI will have agency and then how do we imagine humans actually interacting with AI? I talked to Mustafa Suleiman, who I know is your colleague, and he told me that, like, every human's going to have an AI companion and it's going to help them, you know, go on job interviews, start companies, so talk to us about those kind of concepts.
- [73:01]
Reid Hoffman
So part of what freaks people out a little bit is like, you know, we are going to this agentic universe. We're all of a sudden, as opposed to having phones and PCs, which we will still have, we'll have agents. And by the way, we'll have more than one. We may have one that we're, you know, particularly the Hollow Reed, you know, ongoing companion, always, you know, always around us and helping us with things. But there's going to be a suite of them, you know, with kind of different specialties and different engagements. And by the way, your, you know, your office is going to have one, your working group is going to have one, and, you know, probably your podcast is going to have one, you know, et cetera. And we hear fairly soon and people say, well, if they're agentic, does that take my agency away? And the answer is no. The same way that when you work with colleagues and you work with employees and everything else almost that doesn't actually, that expands your agency. That doesn't take it away. And by the way, you know, these agents will be making predictions off all the data, which is a lot more than any of us have, about what things will be really good for us. And agents are going to be the primary mode of kind of navigation, what we describe in Super Agency as an informational gps. So in this entire informational digital world, we'll do that and there will be more agents than there are people. One of the things that I think people haven't really fully tracked yet, but I think will be very interesting is how Agents end up talking to each other. Because when we have that many agents, you know, part of how you and I are going to coordinate, like we say, hey, what should we talk about in the podcast? Well, one of our preps will be your agent will talk to my agent.
- [74:36]
Chris Voss
Oh, my gosh.
- [74:37]
Reid Hoffman
And they'll kind of go, well, you know, these topics will be really good. And you know, hey, when you ask a question this way, it'll be great. And when you answer it this way, it'll be great, you know, and da, da, da, and, you know, that kind of thing. Or this could be a really new, interesting thing to try. And that will be part of the world we will be.
- [74:53]
Hala Taha
Yeah.
- [74:53]
Chris Voss
Thinking about agents is so mind blowing. And when I think about AI and all the talks that I've had, a lot of people talk about it as being like a great equalizer. Now, as I've thought about it more, I realize that it's like you have to be the best trainer of the AI. Like, I kind of imagine everybody being an entrepreneur having agents that work at their personal company. You basically have to be the best at coordinating your agents and, and figuring out how to, like, mobilize all that.
- [75:22]
Hala Taha
AI and all your AI support.
- [75:24]
Chris Voss
And so smart people are going to be smarter at that. Right? And creative and innovative people are going to be more creative and innovative when it comes to their own agents. And so I just feel like a lot of people are probably worried that, like, you know, there's not going to be any room for them, to your point, as humans. But I really think it's going to be how you manage your AI.
- [75:42]
Reid Hoffman
In addition to training, it's also deploying, organizing, executing, you know, strategizing all of the above. And that's part of the reason why, you know, kind of with super agency and the other kind of content that I've been trying to get out there in people's hands, like, start playing with it, start exploring, because you want to start building the muscles. And getting engaged with it is really important. And that's. That's the most central thing. And again, part of the reason I called it agency, because it's like, you know, own your agency and go do it. And part of the super agency is when millions of us all start doing that, it benefits all of us much more than just even the technology benefits each of us individually, by ourselves.
- [76:24]
Chris Voss
What are your thoughts around hearing that? Especially if you haven't heard of this concept before, Even if you have heard of it, I'm sure Reid gave you a different perspective. Of how we're going to use AI in the future. What are your initial thoughts when you hear about AI agents and how they're going to help us with all these different activities? You might have an AI agent that helps you drive, an AI agent that helps you with your email, an AI agent that helps you with your calendar. Yeah, it's exciting, but we've got to get used to it now. And that means interacting with tools that also embrace AI. So if you're on a CRM that's not talking about AI and not giving you features and not constantly, you know, improving with the technology that we have today, you're going to be behind if you're not leveraging AI to create your content and create the best content. I use AI, you know, for hours, I use AI. It's my chat GPT is open with me all day and it's saving me so much time. If you're not doing that, there's probably something wrong because you need to start working with it and getting used to working with AI. Right now, one of the best things to do is to just use ChatGPT and use tools that are leveraging AI and OpenAI. So how are you going to leverage AI for your sales strategy? What are some initial ideas that you guys have of how you're going to leverage AI? Well, that's great. Keep leaning into it. It's going to be a wild ride the next few years. And like I mentioned, you want to work with a sales tool that is embracing it. And pipedrive is coming out with AI agents, which is really, really exciting. All right, guys, well, that concludes our webinar on sales. I appreciate everybody showing up today. If you haven't yet, make sure you sign up for your 14 day trial on Pipedrive. You get 20 off. If you guys like it, let me know how you like it. And I look forward to seeing you guys on the next webinars. I've got a lot of different webinars coming up, so I hope to see you guys there. Thank you. Thank you that you guys like the session. I appreciate it. We will send out the recording. Awesome. Appreciate you guys so much and looking forward to the next one. Awesome guys. Have a great day. I'm glad you guys liked it. It by all.