How Artificial Intelligence is Changing Sales

Quotes

• “Remember when the internet was first brought into the scene and it completely disrupted the entire industry. I believe that AI will change everything in sales and marketing to an exponential level. I’ll quote a paragraph from Dr. Joel Le Bon, who wrote the foreword to my book, AI for Sales, ‘In sales, times kills deals, in modern sales, AI kills time.’” -Chad“The first chapter of the book is about lead and list building. I interviewed the Head of Data Science at InsideView and other experts and they showed me how AI and Machine Learning changes the game especially when it comes to defining your ICP.” -Chad“They showed me 4 quadrants, and on the left side ofthe quadrants are your customers that don’t spend a lot of money, they’re hard to get and they churn at a high level. Then you move over to the right, these companies spend a little, but they don’t turn as much churn as much so they’re okay to have. At upper right, they spend a lot, they want to spend more and they never turn.” -Chad“What they showed me is you can take your database and say, ‘Hey, I’ve been in business for three years, if I run through the InsideView data grinder, it’ll tell me in a bar chart or a quadrant, ‘These are the upper right and these are the ones you want.’ So I was like, ‘Wait a minute. If I have a 10 million business, are you telling me that I should fire those 4 million that is sitting on the wrong side of the chart?’ And he said, ‘No. What I’m telling you is, you should put more companies that are like the ones you have in the upper quadrant and you should put less and maybe not even focus on them at all on the ones that are in the left quadrant. So I think data is so, so important and often overlooked.” -Chad“So there’s a profiling and data modeling exercise to be had here where you are looking at who your customers are, and trying to figure out what are the signals that show you that they are going to be valuable customers and then you’re basically starting to prospect to people that match that pattern. In a way, it’s very similar to what’s happening on the consumer side where Facebook is building look-alike algorithm and performance marketing start to do a very similar thing and it’s obviously AI-driven as well.” -Ben “There are so many channels that you can use. There are paid ads, LinkedIn outreach, email, phone and so much more and we never profess to know the best channel when working with a customer before we go in and try the channel.” -Chad“I had a customer this year, a company in LA, they converted their entire production line from apparel to masks in response to the pandemic and they had the capacity to create 100 million masks a week and sold just that on Amazon so they came to us and ask how we can solve the problem.” -Chad“What we did was entirely unique. We said, let’s go pull a list of the top 1200 heads of procurement from all the Fortune 1000 to 2000 that meet this industry who could have a need for masks as people go back to work. And literally, this was all deployed in one morning. You gotta be a speedboat sometimes, as the market shifts and ebbs and flows that we’re living in.” -Chad“I look at the dataset as the important factor of that approach because we’re able to pull the email address of the particular heads of procurement from the top 1200 of the Fortune 2000. The voice mail is what I’d call automation as opposed to AI. So after the first months of doing the voicemail drops, then we moved to email strategy, social outreach, as well as the SMS approach. We added a lot of that multi-faceted outreach.” -Chad“I think what you’re going to find is that a lot of the products that we know and love will start to all of a sudden have an AI aspect to them. They may not advertise them as AI but they’ll advertise them as the outcomes. How would you like it if you push ‘Send’ on an email blast of a million emails and it was fully optimized on time of day subject to get a 10% reply rate as opposed to the traditional 1 to 3%. That is how AI can be used from a marketing perspective around big data and optimization.” -Chad“WIth ScaleX customers, and I look at it as 3Ds. There’s data, digital outreach, and dials. When it comes to data, ZoomInfo is the market leader and SalesIntel is the up and comer. The difference in SalesIntel is it has a lot more mobile numbers. Let’s focus on the data piece. Where does AI play into the data? Bombora happens to be integrated into SalesIntel and ZoomInfo has their own intent data scoring algorithm.” -Chad“We have a customer right now who is looking at outplacements services for companies who are having to reduce staff. Some companies already have that type of company on-hand, so what we need to do with them is figure out based on the Bombora intent signal is, who’s in the market for outplacement, and they’re about 180 that were identified in the last month. We figured out a few more things but that’s the first part, data. That’s how AI is used in triggers and signals.” -Chad“With digital outreach, basically it is an email piece that we use AI the most. My point is, no one really knows what types of capabilities are available and that’s why we went into the market with ScaleX because the way AI works is we create a virtual assistant.” -Chad“So the list all had mobile numbers because we used a company called SalesIntel and then we recorded a 42-second audio greeting from Danielle.” -Chad“If I had to go hire seven real SDRs, I would be spending at least half a million dollars right now per year. Instead, I spend $500 a month per virtual assistant so now I can build an army of virtual assistants whether it’s outbound or inbound.” -Chad“Isn’t the idea in the sales process is you gotta cut your teeth as an SDR and understand what the process is as and learn how to prospect before you can be an effective AE. Right? You’re learning sales skills as an SDR before you’re ready to start closing your own deals and if somebody is going to Jr. level AE, they’re not gonna know what they’re doing or how to sell.” -Ben “I think the things that are needed by a rep that are just combining 0s and 1s, after all when you send an email it’s just a combo of 0s and 1s, the AI is going to get smarter and smarter, and it’s going to know if I’m sending an email to you vs. Todd vs. someone else. It’s going to know how to send it based on you as a recipient and I don’t think you can train that to a team of entry-level SDRs and BDRs.” -Chad17:40 -How AI can help you in sales analytics and driving conversion rates “The best I can give you here is, it’s more of what you are saying inside the conversation. Imagine this conversation is a sales call, we’re on a Zoom video, and on the right-hand side of my screen, I’ve got an AI bot that is there to tell me when and whatto say. So if you bring up Conversica, it would pop up a little screen on my right-hand side and I would say, ‘Oh, that’s really interesting you bring up Conversica. Have you looked into that yet from their pricing model?, ‘No’, ‘Oh. Interesting. Make sure that when you’re checking it out it’s charged on a skill basis. So if you need to drive people on a webinar, that’s a skill and maybe a thousand bucks a month. And so before you know it, you’ve spent $8,000 a month on a skill on all different skills thattruly could’ve been done by one virtual assistant.” -Chad“Where I am going with this is, it’s hard to train salespeople and then have them actually execute what you want them to say. So think of it from a marketer’s perspective. When you build a paid ad or an email or a campaign and you track for conversion rates, imagine if you could do the same thing for a sales conversation where you know that the entire sales team of 50 to 500 people are all within a 5% or 20% reasonable approximation of what it is they are supposed to say. Now you don’t have all these massive variabilities where Rep A says something completely opposite of Rep B and C. So now you have better conversion rates.” -Chad“I think understanding the data that goes into the conversion rates and doing things like being able to look back over what was said in a call, figure out what messaging is effective, who it is effective for and then being able to communicate that through the rest of the team, that’s where technology and AI really helpssalespeople become better at sales.” -Ben