People who know me might say I'm naturally skeptical. This extends to the promises of AI that flood LinkedIn – I often see grand claims but little practical insight on how to set up and use AI to achieve these "amazing" results.
In short, I see a lot of promises without clear paths to fulfillment. That's the purpose of this article. I'll showcase tools and processes I've found useful in my own sales process.
I've found great value in using agent.ai for my meeting preparations. This tool was started by a HubSpot co-founder.
How does it work? You can create a free account on agent.ai. It comes with 100 credits, and they've been generous in adding additional credits so far. I haven't had to pay for anything yet, and I can't find any pricing information.
The agent I use for my meeting preparations:
Some of the things that can be interesting based on your company:
What you see here is the basic overview, but there is a wealth of information to be found:
Some highlights for me are Decision Makers, Website Visits, and Tech Products.
For enterprise sales cycles, analyzing the latest earnings report and business challenges would be great research objectives before a call or deciding to outbound the company.
For now, I've created a snippet in hubspot for the information I need before a call, containing:
Name and title: (name of the person on the call, plus their title), Size of company, Website visits and Tools.
Since I deal with smaller companies, the AI agent won't find earnings calls and challenges, but if it does, I'll add it to the snippet. If there are news articles, I'll go through the headlines and ask additional questions if needed.
You can ask the agent specific questions, and if it can find the answer, it will tell you:
Going through this process makes me feel properly prepared before jumping on a call.
I think the biggest potential for AI comes from meeting recordings. The simple use case is that you don't have to worry about taking notes during the call; you can focus on listening and selling while knowing you'll have key highlights and next steps organized for you after the call.
This has been around for years and isn't new, however: I see greater value for sales reps in building use cases and making strong follow-up actions.
In my opinion, after a qualification call, a prospect should get a recap of the conversation, containing:
A good follow-up can take a rep 30-45 minutes if done properly. It's important so the prospect can start building the internal use case with it, ideally with you, but if they prefer to evaluate internally, this information helps them significantly.
I've improved the quality of building use cases and reduced the time it takes by using fathom.video(I like it so much that I invested in the company via the open round on wefunder.com).
With Fathom, you can get out-of-the-box notes to write the use case. Even better, you can use the transcript ChatGPT-style, asking "what is their use case," and it will give you the highlights. One great thing I've noticed is that it tends to use the prospect's own wording, making the use cases sound more authentic.
With this info and a few snippets in HubSpot, you can build a great use case and follow-up email in 5-10 minutes.
Another neat feature is getting out-of-the-box notes based on your sales methodology (MEDDPICC, BANT, SPICED, etc.). This can help fill out CRM (although I hope Fathom will improve their integration so properties can be filled out automatically or semi-automatically), but it's still much easier than remembering everything off the top of your head.
Most of the functionality described above comes with a paid plan.
HubSpot has recently moved their chatspot directly into HubSpot (currently in BETA, available for all tiers and everyone can join the beta). Now its known a Breeze AI.
It's very useful to get a summary of either deals or company history. Personally, I need a good understanding of the company before I jump on calls, and if they've had any previous engagements, checking this manually can take time. However, with Breeze Co-pilot, you can get overviews quickly, even seeing what the latest calls have been about if the Fathom meeting notes are integrated.
Currently in beta, HubSpot has features to update the prospecting workspace. For those unfamiliar with the prospecting workspace, it's a very lead-heavy system that works great for processing new leads such as trial sign-ups, hand-raisers, etc.
However, HubSpot is in the process of updating it from a "prospecting workspace" to a "sales workspace." This means it won't just be for BDRs or sales reps jumping into the workspace to process their leads, but a place where every sales rep should start their day, regardless of their responsibilities.
In this BETA, it will be possible to get an AI-generated deal summary, providing a direct overview of the deal. The overview contains recent interactions, risks in the deal, while also providing a buyer's goal. This also comes with a score from 1-100.
The Sales workspace comes with a meeting assistant that can give a summary of all notes, emails, meetings, and website visits, helping you prepare for that next crucial meeting.
I currently believe AI is primarily a huge time-saver for reps when it comes to being prepared and knowing everything relevant about customers or prospects before jumping on a call, whether it's the first, middle, or last call in the sales process. It can also help you draft more precise and useful emails based on meeting transcripts by using a tool such as Fathom.
What do you think? I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments.
I wrote this article, but my grammar and clarity were improved by perplexity.ai.