Is your CRM saving you time or wasting your time?

Is your CRM saving you time or wasting your time?

I want to thank everyone who attended the Sandler Webinar last month, "Will AI Tools Replace Salespeople?"?The turnout was more than we could have expected and we hope you enjoyed the discussion!

If you weren't able to attend (or you enjoyed it so much you want to watch it again), here's a link to access the recording, tools mentioned during the webinar, and more.


Is your CRM your bestfriend or a necessary evil?

If you don't know what a CRM is, it stand for Customer Relationship Manager. Think of it as a platform for salespeople to organize their contacts, companies, and deals as well as the associated activities and documents.

If you're in sales, there's a good chance you despise your CRM and potentially have a small panic attack just hearing your boss mention the acronym. After a long day of back-to-back meetings, updating the CRM is usually the LAST thing a sales rep wants to do.

Why do salespeople hate CRMs?

A CRM is typically designed by the management team with little or no input from the sales reps that will be using the platform everyday. While it is important for management to be able to get data for tracking deal progress, activities, and more; salespeople often see minimal value other than making their sales manager happy (or staying out of trouble).

What if I told you that, contrary to popular belief, a CRM can actually save a sales person a countless amount of time, help close more deals, and become their new bestfriend? All while providing management with the information and data they need to grow their organization. Sound too good to be true?

With the potential to now automate processes and implement artificial intelligence, a CRM can actually do a portion of the selling freeing up salespeople to focus their time elsewhere. And the insights that AI is able to provide can actually take the guess work out of selling and help salespeople sell more.

In 2022, Sandler became official partners with HubSpot to:

  1. Improve the alignment between sales and marketing across industries
  2. Provide sales teams with "Sandlerized" technology and tools that can shorten sales cycles, increase average deal size, and help sellers hit more targets more often.

This article will be based on the HubSpot CRM (Sales Hub) but there are many CRMs available that incorporate automation and AI. At Sandler, we are official partners with HubSpot as well as an integration partner with the ability to build customized HubSpot CRMs with Sandler's methodology imbedded in the form of:

  • "Sandlerized" Pipelines
  • Sales Playbooks (based on Sandler Tools)
  • Sales Automation/Sequences
  • AI Software and Tools
  • And more

For more information or a full demo of how I use HubSpot, fill out the form on the bottom of this page !


Automated Prospecting and Outreach

What if you could be in two places at the same time?

While that's not exactly possible (yet), you can now get twice as much done in the same amount of time thanks to automated prospecting and outreach sequences.

While you're sitting down with a client, meeting about the contract they are about to sign, you could also be reaching out to new prospects to fill the top of the pipeline.

While you're out at a networking event making new connections, you could also be following up on that lead you got introduced to last week who hasn't set a meeting with you yet.

What does automated outreach look like?

Let's pretend we get introduced to a potential lead. We know that good introductions can be one of the best sources for qualified leads!

73% of buyers prefer to work with sales professionals referred by someone they know.

Despite this, many introductions never get followed up on more than once, end up lost in an inbox, and become missed opportunities.

Instead of replying to an introduction and then forgetting to follow up, we can enroll a prospect into a series of automated emails and reminders to reach out until we get a response or meeting on the calendar.

In HubSpot, this tool is called "Sequences" and below is an example of an introduction sequence:

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You'll see the sequence above is 7 steps and takes 23 business days to complete. Once someone responds or sets a meeting with my scheduling link, the sequence is paused and I take over!

So instead of replying to an introduction email once and losing the opportunity to connect, I enroll my introductions into a sequence that will automatically send pre-written emails and create reminders for me to make a few phone calls until I set a meeting or disqualify the opportunity.

How many missed introductions could have been avoided by simply enrolling someone into a sequence? I wont make you quantify that number into dollars...but I will tell you that can be a problem of the past if you incorporate automation into your outreach process.

The same type of sequence seen above can be applied to cold prospecting, inbound leads, and any scenario that may require multiple touch points before getting a response.

This article is focused on CRMs as a whole and we aren't going to dive into prospecting with AI, but I did write an article a few months back that explores prospecting with AI in more detail.

Using a CRM to automate some of your outreach can be a game-changer but it's still important to keep track of who you're reaching out to and the different opportunities you're working on - this is where Sales Pipelines come into play.


Automating Sales Pipelines

In sales, a pipeline is a visual representation of a salesperson's active deals at each stage of the sales process. It is also a tool that sales managers use to track their team's activities, progress, and forecasted revenue. Many managers hold regular "Pipeline Reviews" with their sellers and the pipeline can be a main indicator on whether or not a salesperson will hit their targets.

For this reason, a pipeline can be one of the most important tools for a seller. It can also being one of the largest sources of anxiety, especially when it is emptier than it should be...

As salespeople, our main priority (and how we usually get paid) is by filling the top of the pipeline new opportunities, moving qualified deals through the pipeline, and closing deals that make it all the way through the process.

With automated pipelines and AI, we can:

  • Automatically track the necessary information required to move a deal from one stage of the pipeline to the next
  • Automate deals to move across the pipeline based on actions taken by our prospects
  • Close more deals thanks to AI insights that learn from the deals we win so we can understand why we won and replicate it

Let's take a look at a pipeline and sample deal so I can show you what I'm talking about.

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That image might be a little tough to read, but you'll see the different stages I set for our selling process.

Let's pretend we schedule a meeting with our "Sample Deal" who is just a lead. We will want to move this deal to the next stage of the pipeline, Discovery Meeting Scheduled, and when we do, this window will pop up:

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We've customized our CRM to collect specific pieces of information as we move deals from one stage to the next! This may be somewhat useful for recording discovery meeting dates, but next lets look at what pops up when I move a deal to "Qualified":

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If you've been through Sandler, you will recognize the properties above. But the best part is, you can create custom properties to log any kind of information you need to collect based on your sales process. Here is an overview of how I set up my pipeline, the weights assigned to each stage, and some of the stage properties that pop up for each step.

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Within HubSpot, there is also the ability to automate the creation of tasks or internal emails as a deal moves from one stage to the next. This can be extremely helpful in team selling situations to ensure every team member is on the same page when it comes to a deal and the stage it is in.


Deal IQ - AI Insights to move Deals through the Pipeline

Salespeople are often known for having a strong gut instinct. However, some salespeople can also be known for being overly optimistic and sometimes having a case of "happy ears" - thinking a deal is going to close solely based on how much they want the deal to close.

What if, instead of relying on gut instinct alone to predict if a deal was going to close or not, we could rely on data, historical patterns, and AI to predict the likelihood of each deal closing? And what if the AI learned and got smarter as we fed it more and more deals? And even better, what if AI gave us a clear roadmap of the actions we needed to take to get a deal to close?

Thanks to AI and a brand new tool called Deal IQ, you can do just that. Deal IQ uses AI to learn from your previous deals to help better understand:

  • Win Themes
  • Key Risks
  • Action Items
  • And more

This tool can guide sellers through the selling process by suggesting key action items and questions to complete throughout each stage of the sales process. Based on what has been completed, the tool then predicts the chance of closing this deal - all based on data.

This is one of the more complex AI tools I've mentioned but it is also one of the most valuable tools I've seen with the potential to have a massive impact on sales cycles, close rates, and ultimately revenue. If you want to better understand this tool, check out the video below:

Sandler and Auctus IQ recently partnered up to integrate the Sandler Methodology into Deal IQ for our clients. If you want to learn more about this incredible technology, send me a message!


Lastly, I want to bring all of this together and show you some of my favorite ways I use AI inside of HubSpot to make my life easier.

Below is an example of a contact profile. You'll notice I have a few windows/tools pulled up to help me navigate a conversation.

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Starting on the left, we have HubSpot calling. I can make calls through my browser or with my cell phone through the HubSpot app. This lets me record my calls which HubSpot automatically transcribes and provides a breakdown of the percentage of time I spent talking.

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Above is an example of a conversation I had with my friend and fellow HubSpot user Kyle Ramer (I'll share how he is using HubSpot to engage with prospects at different stages of the buyer's journey).

The transcription isn't perfect...but like anything else related to AI, it will get better as time goes on. And having a recording of my calls to refer back to has proven to be extremely useful. To make it even more powerful, you can search through all of your call transcripts for specific words or phrases!

Moving to the middle of the page, you'll notice I have a playbook pulled up to make a No-Pressure Prospecting Call. This is a custom playbook with a script at the top for me to refer back to when making cold calls. I can then scroll down and there are fields to log specific information I am looking to uncover during the call that I want to keep track of (keeping in mind the entire call is being recorded anyway). Once the call is complete and I submit the playbook, all of the information along with the recording is now logged to that contact.

And finally, if you look at the very right hand side, you'll notice I have a plugin enabled. This is a Crystal Knows plugin that lives directly in my HubSpot! When I pull up a contact in HubSpot, Crystal looks up their LinkedIn profile and uses AI to predict their personality type and provide suggestions to improve my outreach and the chances of setting a meeting. Every time I am writing an email or making a call through HubSpot, I am also using Crystal to help customize my messaging and improve my communication.

Sandler just recently partnered with Humantic AI when it comes to buyer intelligence and they have some incredible functionality with their tool and the ability to integrate into HubSpot and ENRICH the contacts with predicted DISC profiles and more. I've just started using this new tool and I'll have more to share on it down the road.

Combining all of the tools I mentioned above has saved me an incredible amount of time while also making my outreach MORE effective than it was before. And that's the beauty of AI. It has the unique ability to save time while also improving outcomes.


Selling with Chatbots?

If you read my last article, you may recall this slightly terrifying statistic:

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Kyle Ramer is using HubSpot to solve this exact problem.

By using HubSpot's Chatflows/Chatbots feature, he is able to educate potential buyers, guide them to specific products, and even help them complete purchases entirely through their website!

Kyle has started a Renewable Energy Division for Gross Electric, Inc , an independent, family owned lighting distributor based in Ohio. He recently helped implement HubSpot at their company and shared that including a Chatbot on their website has made it incredibly easy to engage with leads and buyers - check out their website and you can see the chatbot in the bottom right hand corner.

If people are on the Gross Electric website, they can now use the "Bot" to ask questions and get answers. You can automate these bots to have specific conversations or you can have the inquiries go directly to a team member. Kyle uses the HubSpot app so he gets notified directly on his cell phone when someone has a question or needs help finding something on the website. He can then send them the link to the webpage or product they are looking for or respond to their specific question through the Chatbot. For the most part, he gets a lot of the same questions that he can answer with a similar response. So to make his life easier, he uses HubSpot "Snippets" which are just a smaller version of templates. Instead of typing out the same answer over and over, he's created different snippets to quickly respond to common questions with the click of a button.

If you're looking for commercial lighting or any form of renewables (solar lighting, battery storage, EV charging, etc) you can either use the Chatbot on their website or connect with Kyle Ramer and I'm sure he'd be happy to help answer any questions!


There are more ways that HubSpot uses AI and automation in their platform but I wanted this article to be focused on what salespeople might find most useful.

However, I have to mention a few additional features:

  • Lead Scoring is included with a HubSpot Enterprise account so it's not something I have personally used but it can be an incredible tool to understand which leads should be prioritized
  • HubSpot recently released their "Content Assistant" that can be used in their Marketing Hub. The Content Assistant uses AI to generate content for your website, landing pages, or marketing emails
  • ChatSpot is HubSpot's AI tool where users can provide a specific command and the tool carries out all of the steps required to make it happen


HubSpot has become a critical tool for our business and I truly do not know how I would do my job without it. Thanks to the automation, I am able to make it seem like I'm two places at once. And thanks to AI, I have access to valuable insights that help move deals through the pipeline faster than ever before. And this is just scratching the surface. I am a strong believer that an effective CRM that takes advantage of automation and AI can practically double a sales team's efficiency and act as the most important tool to grow a business.

If you don't have a CRM or if you haven't started using any AI or automation in your CRM, then this might feel a bit overwhelming. It can be difficult to figure out where to start or what tools will be most useful. But like always, my recommendation is to start small. Start using a CRM or start with one new tool and become familiar with it before incorporating more. And of course, I'm happy to help if you want to learn more about HubSpot, CRMs in general, or how you can incorporate AI and automation into your CRM.

Thanks for reading,

The AI Sales Guy

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