Using AI across the B2B sales motion: Tools, processes and playbooks that work

So maybe robots haven't completely replaced humans in B2B sales. Frankly I'm not sure that will ever happen.

But just over a year after ChatGPT launched publicly, AI is actively being leveraged across the entire sales process to increase efficiency AND effectiveness.

Last Friday's CMO Coffee Talk highlighted several sales motions influenced by today's leading B2B marketing leaders. Chat highlights from both sessions are below, including tool preferences, resource recommendations and much more.

If you are in the CMO Coffee Talk community , don't miss several specific AI stack overviews and process/playbook samples in the #swipe-file channel in Slack .

If you are a B2B CMO or head of marketing and want to join a community of 2,800+ of your peers, let me know or click here to learn more and sign up .

I’m bullish on AI for productivity gains, but not so sure about differentiation - it seems like AI is set to become tables takes at record speed.

3 years ago I made strong argument to ramp tech spend and got support, we are higher then benchmark for industry as well. 6Sense, Pathfactory, Aroma, Marketmuse, metadata.io . 2ppl part time handle the tech stack plus SF admin assist

Build rapport. Ask questions. Understand what the person is afraid of. What’s their fear?

if you work for a PE owned company, ask the operating team if they have any data on what other portfolio companies are using for MarTech. That can help show that you are not asking for something others don’t do, and might be expected by your board.

Understand what info the person needs to?? allay his fears. “Fears” can obvi mean something less dramatic.

And also - Don't move their cheese. and understand their "personal motivation" diff than professional motivation

Build a business case

no PMO office no process maturity. I had a new, 3 person MOPS teams. Used some consulting help to augment.

https://aisdr.com/

https://sailes.com/

I think cold outbound to the C-Suite is a losing game, whether it’s humans or AI

Monday: “CEO dream = let’s go after C-Suite!” Tuesday “As CEO Wow hate it when sales & marketing people come after me from all those vendors.”

you ask a great question on same Gen AI tool. We were only using Jasper. As I evaluate options now, and think about so many tools that have Gen AI, I think that is going to be one of the biggest challenges. Because you need a whole system of assets and training and optimization around EACH LLM. And they are all a little different so getting consistent messaging etc with multiple men ai systems. is a real operational challenge

can you talk more about the “real-time” personalization - what exactly did you change on the website based on Gong convos etc. The sounds super cool.

An interesting one that reached out to me recently is trigly.io .? Looks like a relatively new AI for SDR/BDR.? Has anybody come across this company?? https://www.trigify.io/

I’ve had great success with old-school direct mail to C-Suite techies by sending something really intriguing… assuming you can get a mailing address if they are WFH.

Gong was the call recording and transcription software, one of the key capabilities of Gong was to listen for key phrases and tag the call so you could judge sentiment or interests. So we took key terms that were buying interest or signals, and when they came up in calls that then led the page to look for those tags and present certain products or messaging or content based on those terms.

Here’s the overview of what Taylor’s system looks like. I was super impressed with him. https://coldemailinfrastructure.com/#home

thanks, we use Gong as well - did marketing/BDR team manually write the emails based on the Gong data, or was there AI for that as well?

It is way too easy to pretend to be a competitor and add FUD into the LLM

If anyone is looking for an ai tool that is geared specifically for marketing, check out https://gocharlie.ai/

we were testing if using it for all visitors from that domain would respond better to that tag led personalization or not, but I left before the test finished. My hypothesis is certain words and tags should be used at domain level, but given diversity of interests across the buying committee that we can't assume that one persons interests are another's even in the same buying committee

I’m really loving hearing all these use cases for sales. Some validate what we’ve heard, and some are new. Thank you all for sharing!

it was more near time than real time. But we started really simple. If this was a first call, then the sales lead is doing discovery, and the customer is mentioning products or business problems. And we only started with about 10 key terms. The site would then serve up the right case study, or right product component and not make the visitor hunt through the web architecture

If I’m reading to learn something functional…OK, maybe summarize with ChatGPT. But I enjoy savoring a book, so I’m generally not gonna outsource reading, beer drinking, or BBQ to ChatGPT. It’s supposed to free me to do the fun stuff.

I don’t know anyone who gets more excited than me when someone says taxonomy or ontology. LOL.

There are ways to do AI that are much lower budget though if you don't have that kind of budget

As a result of this AI tech stack, did you change the make-up of your teams/job titles/remits?

Biggest problem I keep encountering and needing to solve for is past “over buying” of tech, with not enough resources to run the stack. Would be great if AI could help the stack run itself!

Love the stealing from programs to fund tech/people. Spreading all your bets evenly across the table is a recipe for mediocre returns.

Clean data! Speaking my language again.

“Scaling Stupidity” is a great book title.

I always start with the “cornerstone” app, like Marketo and SFDC (if you have money, otherwise it is often Hubspot of little to no money).

Best resource to invest in…Superior Revenue Operations person who has MOPS chops

For those concerned about costs, I've been dipping into the offerings from copy.ai . It's been great for scaling content (e.g. across verticals, new segments, etc). If I recall correctly, it's less than $1k per seat per year.

Jasper.ai is very affordable too

I built custom GPTs for each of my brands and we are using those for content and copy.

We had done some custom prompts before - but now build the dedicated GPTS.?

Difficult for organizations to absorb a huge amount of rapid change, if the plane is already flying.

I always pick a small subset that I pay for out of the marketing budget, to wet the appetite of the CRO to fund the remaining rollout since those are really that person's remit

I’d love to hear from others who are dealing with helping the SDRs (inbound reps) handle the volume of leads, via AI (before the leads get to the reps).

If I had a $1mm budget for marketing I would be finding 75k-125k target spend. but remember what drives the cost is database size and users, so you can have pretty sophisticated stack that isn't that expensive because it reflects a much lower volume of records, programs running, or user licenses

?the cornerstone point is so important. For me it's MAP + ABM as the foundation. Eventually just ABM, but that's a different convo. Then I build up and around that.

on you building a custom GPT for each brand, we are going to use it to build custom communications for every e employer we serve. I can train it on their brand voice and terminology and scalable build custom content

I keep going back to being overwhelmed. I feel CONSTANTLY behind, playing catch-up and not “doing it ‘right’”.

We all feel that way! No worries. Take 1 bite of the elephant at a time. You’ll get there, as will we all!

Curious if anyone has used pure calling services, to complement AI BDR tools? The BDR service I’ve used the past year was most successful with calling (to get meetings), whereas the emails we more supporting.

Lavender also shows the profile from LinkedIn and gives a personality profile in addition to scoring their emails. It also can open a ChatGPT chat.

Would also like to hear folks’ approach for “selling” GTM AI, when the CEO is very concerned about corp IP being sent outside the firewall.

We sell to large enterprise. We are using ChatGPT to summarize public 10Ks to get summaries of what corporate objectives are to arm our BDRs with good info for their call.

I did a review of outbound AI tools recently if anyone wants to take a look: https://medium.com/@tahneeperry/how-to-build-an-outbound-sales-strategy-using-ai-6ad0cf5f6c66?sk=619fb96b0558ca85a7d46a6585dd597c

The marketing ops role is going to quickly morph to an AI technologist role.

Earlier in my career, I would dig in to learn/study nights and weekends. I feel like stakes are higher these days, but my life and brain are so full already.

The fractionalization of AI tools... like Mobile Apps... hard to know which tools are credible...

Start small and keep it simple. I started with creating content like “write an abstract for this webinar” (review, edit), then write five emails and five social posts.

we need to free the Marketing content workers from manual work slowly personalizing content. they should still be able to review things before they go out but too much time is spent poking around in scripting languages while campaign deadlines approach

And CEOs I'm talking to for roles have a perception that marketing can now be all automated and you will need smaller teams, fewer resources to get same quantity. Tricky convo as a candidate.??? Some of that may be true but it doesn't negate marketing fundamentals

that’s the ultimate fear.? That perception is that work can be done WAY faster but without the understanding of the human components involved.

100%.? Everyone was a marketer before AI.? Now you don’t even need people ??

do those low-quality lead queue show results via conversational AI? Can you share an idea of response rates

I also found that smaller teams that are really scrappy tend to be more hands-on with AI. Because of lack of resources and money, they have turned to AI for help and continue to push its limits. Amazing how much creativity happens with hardships.

your selling to CEO question. It's just like early cloud conversations. They don't really understand. You can have dedicated clusters with your data, a LLM that doesn't learn on your data at the core model level, just for your instance, so all the same data governance and management of prop data here as there. Gets a little more interesting if you are talking about PII, or regulated data. But that highlights the need to strip identifying information which orgs should be doing anything.

I’m an older CMO than most (all?) on this call. And I actually see AI a career extension tool, as I think I am far ahead of many of any of my cronies as to how to use it. A lot of which I owe to the likes of @nicole leffer (and being a tech nerd)

We are kicking off running our own CTV Ad campaign, one of the test parameters is using AI to develop the ad creative

on my Jasper comment, the answer is when we did the vendor eval it was Wryter and Jasper and that was it. The choice set is so much wider, and specialized now, I think I would make a different solution set

I forgot to mention Lavender as another really great sales AI tool to be aware of

for sure, the expertise we have as more seasoned marketers - I think we will dig deep for use cases we have always wanted to do but now AI makes it possible.

Oddly I am using AI to better understand competition, value prop, use cases and other stuff. Sometimes to find sources for best practices that my client doesn’t believe me about. Great to hear about how it’s being used on the sales side!

We are switching our content strategy for 2024 to focus on original research, video of internal experts making informed analysis on topics and actually putting original opinion. Everything else we were doing in the past has become commoditized by AI

You can also give it a document with lots of writing samples if you want more content for it to be trained on

In this era for chatgpt generated content, data and people are going to be valued more.

I use this GPT see if a company is potentially a category maker or just a better mousetrap. There are a lot of better mousetraps right now. We see it with every OpenAI announcement ?? Use if it’s helpful to get alignment with exec teams on positioning, https://chat.openai.com/g/g-91b7gp5jK-market-position-defensibility-guide

If you’re looking for a free tool, WriteSonic is pretty good too.

Writer is a great option, and really great if your company won't allow ChatGPT for security / training reasons