70: How I Use AI in My Sales Process

Read time: 4min

In today’s newsletter, I’ll share two ways I’m using AI to eliminate manual tasks so I can focus on meaningful ones.

Plus, I interviewed two sales experts to get their insights as well.

Agenda

1. My Thoughts on AI in Sales

2. Writing Better Emails, Faster

3. Eliminating Manual Tasks

4. How Two Sales Experts are Using AI

Regie is the Generative AI tool specifically designed for sales.

Or as I like to call it, my personal copywriting assistant :)

You can use Regie.ai for free here. 

My Thoughts on AI in Sales

I am no expert in AI.

There’s a lot of miseducation on how it should be used.

For example, I would never recommend using AI to write your entire email. Everything needs a human touch.

However, I do think you should use it to accelerate what you’re already good at and to help you in areas where you struggle.

That’s what I’m doing (as you’ll see soon).

The goal of this post is to share the tools and tactics that have worked for me so far.

Most of these tactics are doable (to various degrees) with many free and paid solutions.

Now let’s get into it!

#1 Writing Better Emails, Faster

I’m doing this in 4 ways:

#1 Personalized emails from LinkedIn content

Most of my ICP is active on LinkedIn.

If I see a post related to cold email, it’s a home run (since that’s what we do at Mailshake).

I use Regie.ai’s Chrome extension to one-click generate an intro line based on their relevant content.

I can ask the AI to create question-based openers, humor-based openers (my favorite), and more.

It takes their post + my value prop and finds a creative way to connect the two.

Whatever AI tool you use, asking it to mix up the tone is huge.

We have biased ways of writing.

So asking AI to mix up the tone helps keep your messaging fresh and unique each time.

Also, if you don’t like something, just ask the AI to keep generating new ideas.

#2 Icebreakers

I love basketball. I love poker. I love a lot of things.

What I don’t love, is finding ways to tie that into my value prop if I notice my prospect also loves those things.

It always sounds cringy.

So I use AI to generate icebreakers by connecting two dots.

Ask your AI to take whatever observation you found on the prospect and connect it to your value prop.

This will do the heavy lifting of personalization for you so you can tweak it from there.

#3 Subject lines

I suck at thinking of new subject lines.

I tend to fall back on the same 2 or 3.

So when I’m done writing an email, I’ll ask AI to analyze it and give me several subject line ideas to choose from.

Changing up your subject lines is also a great way to stay out of spam folders. Gmail & Outlook notice if you’re using the same one every time.

#4 Analyzing my best emails

This is my favorite.

You should be saving every successful email you’ve sent (i.e. emails where you got a positive response).

Upload them into your AI tool and ask it to write future emails in this style.

Asking AI to write “good emails” is not enough.

You have to train it to write emails in YOUR style based on data that’s been proven to work for YOU.

Eliminating Manual Tasks

I’ve automated these 3 tasks using a tool called Omni (my friend Alex Modon is building something sick!).

#1 Account Research

When I’m doing account research, I look for a list of 5-10 ‘buying triggers’ that I use to write my emails.

I call this my personalization checklist.

It saves time because I know exactly what to look for. And when I do find a buying trigger, I have a pre-built template with relevant messaging for each one.

With Omni, I give it a list of accounts, then ask it to identify these buying triggers for me (new job changes, what tech stack they use, how many SDRs they have, etc.).

#2 Scraping LinkedIn posts

With Omni, I can find relevant LinkedIn posts and use it to scrape the data of prospects who engaged with it.

From there, it will tell me which prospects are in my ICP (based on role, company size, location, team size & industry)

#3 Finding & Getting Contacts into Sequences

A lot of my time is spent finding prospects on Sales Navigator and pushing that data into my Sales Engagement tool (Mailshake).

Instead, I can just give that list of prospects to Omni and it will pull the data for me, and push it right into Mailshake.

How Two Sales Experts are Using AI

I asked two sales experts - and friends :) - how they use AI in their sales process.

Here’s what they had to say:#1 Morgan J IngramMorgan shared 3 ways you can use AI to increase your active selling time:(1) use it as a testing ground(2) use it to accelerate good behaviors(3) use it to synthesize your callsHere are some examples:Similar to what I shared earlier, say you wrote an email that got a good response.You can tell the AI to analyze the tone, sentiment & language of that email.Then ask it to replicate this language for X more emails to these Y prospects.Or, upload the transcript of your disco call & ask AI to write a custom follow-up email for you.My main takeaway from Morgan:If used correctly, AI should remove manual & repetitive tasks so you can focus your energy on more creative & thoughtful activities (prospecting, selling, negotiating, etc.).#2 Eric Nowoslawski"AI is your CoPilot, not your replacement."Eric uses AI to speed up how quickly he can match a potential problem to a prospect based on research.Eric works for Clay, which removes manual research for SDRs.So he’ll tell the AI to look at open SDR positions, to see if manual research is part of the role.

Instead of reading a hundred job descriptions, he can score thousands in minutes.

Helping him find perfect ICPs to target.

Thanks for reading,

Jed

P.S. My good friend Jason Bay put out a free cold calling course. Literally, everything you need in <18min. Check it out!