Lesson 56 - Automate with Tools

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In sales, there is so much that can be streamlined and automated if you know where to look and what technology to leverage. This lesson will introduce you to a huge variety of tools that you might not know about, with the goal of making your job easier and allowing you to focus on the fun stuff. Your assignment will involve maximizing the tools at your disposal while exploring and implementing new tools and browser extensions into your sales process.

Transcript

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Nicholas, welcome back to the daily quota. I'm your host, Nicholas Hill, and in today's lesson, you'll learn how to use the tools and technology at your disposal to make your job easier. Most salespeople don't realize just how many tools and extensions and platforms exist out there to help them streamline their work. I've been in countless conversations or lessons where I'm sharing my screen and I'll suddenly show like a browser extension or something that I'm doing, and suddenly three or four sales people will be like, Wait, what was that? What did you just do? Show me that again, that was really cool. And then I show them that this is some way that exists to streamline their work, and they're blown away because they've been doing it manually the entire time. So we want you to we want to prevent that. We want you to get ahead of that before you end up getting stuck doing long, manual tasks that could have been automated from the beginning. Let's start with some of the big tools. Now, the one that I'm not going to cover is your CRM because, obviously that's one of the kind of biggest tools that you're going to use, but mostly that exists as a method of storing information. So when you think about Salesforce, HubSpot, Zoho, any of these CRMs, they mostly exist as like a place to store info, not necessarily as a place to streamline or make your job more efficient. So let's think about some of the tools that exist to make things easier. First, most organizations are going to have a tool dedicated to outreach, messaging. So that could be something like outreach, it could be something like sales, loft, but ultimately, you want to see if your organization has a tool that allows you to create templates that way. You're not having to copy and paste or, God forbid, you're writing everything out from scratch. You want to be able to create sequences which are multi step emails, where you send one email on day one, one email on day three, 714, et cetera. And it will also help you keep track of your click rates, your reply rates, your open rates. And outreach can even do some cool stuff, like letting you know how many of your emails led to a meeting. So definitely lean into learning your outreach tool and using that. And if you don't have an outreach tool, there are some outreach tools that are very, very cheap, like, yes, where, where you can pay, like an annual fee. And at the very least, it will tell you when people are reading your emails, responding to your emails, et cetera. And I think it even lets you do templates as well. So I would look into outreach sales, loft, yes, where, et cetera. The second thing that you're going to have is some sort of a tool that allows you to find and organize your contacts. Now this should probably happen outside of your CRM. One of the most common, the most common is LinkedIn Sales Navigator. LinkedIn Sales Navigator allows you to find contacts in a very effective way. So if you're not using LinkedIn Sales Navigator, it makes your job a lot harder. But this is a way that you can search for prospects. You can narrow it down by industry, by persona, by altitude, title, all of that good stuff, tenure, even. I mean, there's a lot of really cool things you can do with LinkedIn Sales nav. There's also a tool called pocus. If you've never used pocus, it allows you to automatically group contacts into lists, and then it even integrates with outreach so that you can automatically send people from those lists the outreach sequences, so they're kind of some cohesion there. And then there are tools that help you to enrich contacts so giving fuller more up to date information. So tools like Lucia, zoom, info, CrunchBase, they all exist to help you kind of get phone numbers and emails and more up to date info about your contacts so that you can reach out to them more effectively. Lucia tends to be better in the European Time Zones than zoom info, at least in my experience, but they may be catching up. And then there are some tools that will help you to record the meetings that you get. So once you found the contacts, enrich them, reached out to them. Now you're meeting with them. You're recording this call so that you can kind of cover yourself and make sure that your AI is taking notes. And one of the most popular there is Gong. Gong will allow you to record your calls. I believe sales loft will allow you to do that too. And then finally, there are forecasting tools. So we mentioned in a previous lesson, forecasting can be very tricky. There are tools that will help you with that. Clarity is probably the most common, and that will help you to automate your forecasting and track pipeline and deal progression. What's even cooler is that all these tools are starting to work together, especially the more popular ones, so you can build a full workflow. Where you're finding contacts and LinkedIn Sales Navigator, you're exporting them to your CRM Salesforce. You're enriching their information using Zoom info or Lucia. You're adding them into your POCUS list, auto enrolling them into sequences with outreach, recording your meetings with Gong, forecasting your progress and Clary, and tracking your activity and success rates every step of the way, right? So those are the big names, right? Those are some of the big names that can help you. But here's what I would challenge you with for everything that you do as a salesperson, I want you to ask yourself, is there a way that I can automate this? Is there a way that I can make this easier, do it faster, more efficiently? You can even ask tools like chat GPT, hey, chat GPT, I'm a salesperson doing X, Y, Z, manually. Right now, is there a way that I can automate this? And a lot of times, chat GPT will give you some great recommendations on how you can particularly automate something. Now, speaking of chat GPT, I want to talk about how AI can help you in your sales. Here are a few ways that I've seen my students use AI in the past few months. One Live account research. So tools like perplexity can do live research on accounts. You can give them the questions that you want answered for the account. You give them the account name, and it will help you fill it out very quickly and effectively. Document analysis, AI can actually analyze uploaded documents. So it can review a company's 10k reports. It can review fundraising reports to extract their key initiatives for you. Competitive research, AI can do research on your competitors and develop product differentiation strategies so you can upload information about your product, their product, and get some comparisons. Content Creation, this is probably the biggest way that sales people I know are using AI today. They're using it to write their value hypotheses. They're using it to write emails, to write LinkedIn connection requests. They're using it to write voicemails, to build full step, multi step outreach sequences. You can use AI to draft content for you in a very effective way. And then once you get the meeting, it can help you prepare for that meeting. So brainstorming a list of discovery questions that you can ask, brainstorming potential objections in ways that you can respond to those objections, giving it persona information and having it tell you tips and tricks. So the key to all of this, whenever you're using AI, if you want to use it effectively, you need to give it as much context as possible tell it here's who I am, here's the company that I work for, here's what we do, here's what I'm trying to do. Here's what I'm trying to achieve by doing that. Here are all of the facts that I can give you go and then AI will use the context at its disposal in order to make more informed decisions. The other thing I would say is you should be treating AI like a thought partner, so don't just take its answer as gospel, right? You can go back to AI and say, Hey, I actually didn't like the way you worded that. I thought it was too professional. Let's make it more personal. Let's make it more conversational. Let's make it more approachable, right? So you need to be kind of going back and forth with AI, and you'll find that over time, it will learn your style. It will learn the things that you like the most, which is, you know, maybe a little scary, but it's also very, very effective. So yeah, have them improve. Have aI improve on the things it gives you with your own leadership. Now, besides the big tools, besides leveraging AI, there are a few simple browser extensions that can help you out in your day to day. And I don't want you to underestimate the power of a good browser extension. So let's talk about a few. Grammarly. If you struggle with good grammar, good spelling, that's fine. I did too. Grammarly will help make sure your grammar is correct and polished when you're sending emails or proposals, LastPass. LastPass helps you store your passwords and autofill your passwords so that you're not having to, like, manually remember all of them, Text Expander. Text Expander is awesome. It will auto fill things. Basically, all you have to do is type like three or four specific code words on your keyboard, and it will automatically fill in the exact template that you want it to fill in. It's like using text snippets that you use all the time. It will auto fill them Calendly or tidy. Cal are two examples of calendar extensions that will allow you to easily schedule meetings through links, and you can share those links in your email, and then people can just automatically book meetings with you. It makes it super easy, and that reduces all that back and forth of like, well, I'm available Tuesday, where you're you'll you're available Wednesday. Well, wait Wednesday afternoon or morning, right? You want to use an extension to avoid. All of that hunter.io that will help you to find email addresses quickly for outreach. And then there's one called Crystal nose, which offers personality insights on prospects, which can help you kind of tailor your communication style. So I would encourage you to try these out, and if you really want to get advanced, if you're familiar with, like, basic levels of coding and things like that, you can use tools like Zapier to set up full blown automation. So Zapier has a little bit of a learning curve, because there's like, if then statements and logic that you need to apply. But with Zapier, you can create custom automations. So you could set it up to like, automatically move leads from LinkedIn to Salesforce. You could set it up to automatically upload contact lists from zoom info so that you can enrich them, or to zoom info so that you can enrich them. Sorry. So yeah, I would encourage you, if you really want to get advanced, to think about something like Zapier for automations. So in summary, you should be leveraging tools and technology at your disposal to automate and simplify everything that you're doing in sales. You want to free up your time to do the things that matters, to get in front of the customers, to build relationships, to provide value, to be a thought leader and ultimately to close deals. All right, now it's your turn. Your assignment for today is to make a list of the tools that you already have at your organization, and load that list into AI and ask for tips and tricks that AI has for you on using those tools more effectively. Chances are it will give you some pro tips that you didn't already know, then I want you to write down three ways that you plan to use AI to automate your tasks over the next week, and three browser extensions that you found and you'll need to do a little searching around to make things easier in your day to day. Your study guide will walk you through this in more detail, and I would always ask your mentor, manager, new hire Buddy, what tools they use and what pro tips they have as well, and that is it for today's lesson on the daily quota. Thank you for listening, and we'll see you next time bye, bye.