Making AI Work at the Speed of Sales

Stop Wasting Time With AI - Set It Up Right!

Hey there, sales innovator!

Ever feel like you’re:

• unable to remember all the great prompts you have seen?
• typing the same thing into ChatGPT over and over?
• spending more time explaining your business to AI than actually using it?
• unsure where to implement new whizbang AI tools and prompts? (yes, I said WHIZBANG!)

Well, you are not alone. We will address this today and more!

Today, we will dive into how you adopt AI, prep it for speed and set up a system to make it easier to use AI..so you use it early and often.

Let’s get into it.

Here are 2 mind-blowing stats:

#1 - Results indicate that sales reps spend only 28% of their week actually selling, with the majority of their time consumed by other tasks like deal management and data entry. (This is no surprise to me.)

#2 - 70% of Reps feel overwhelmed. (New Research Reveals, Salesforce 2023).

But here is one of the most poignant stats about the power of AI, in our stat of the week.

Stat of the Week:

So by deduction, most sales reps are wasting 2 hours daily on repetitive tasks that could be automated with AI. This means you can virtually double your selling time by using AI. Here is my Texas math--->

[28% of 40 hours = 11.2] + [2.25 hrs per day X 5 days = 11.25 hours] = 22.45 hours per week of selling.

What can YOU do with twice the selling time?!?! I imagine this could make a big impact. Let's accelerate you down this AI path today.

This Week in AI Sales:

• The Secret to Lightning-Fast AI Responses
• Your Complete Context Creation Guide
• Building Your Prompt Management System

Let's. Level. Up! 🚀

Deep Dive:

Topic 1: Prepping Your AI for Speed

The fast-arising term, "AI Native", means that you weave AI into your process flows. AI native isn’t just about knowing cool prompts, it's about setting up your AI assistant and AI Tools to understand YOU but also YOU understanding AI to know how and where it can help you/your business.

So if you want to go AI Native and if you want to go fast, there are a few things you need to do and do them ASAP:

1 - Make a plan to adopt AI, including Learning AI through training. Find a summary plan here.

2 - Assess where best to implement AI in your business. Find a business self-assessment form here.

3 - Prep your AI for speed, discussed below. More detailed instructions here.

4 - Build an AI Management System for success, discussed below. Find a detailed Prompt Mgmt System overview here.

The worst thing you can do is implement the hottest AI tool or prompts, haphazardly. That will just make you busier, without a return on your investment. Instead, you want to audit where you actually need it, and go there first.

First, let me discuss the Personal Adoption Plan. Here is what you need to do to get up to speed with AI.

Personal AI Adoption Plan​
Every adoption plan will differ because we are all at different levels of understanding with AI. Step 1 is educating yourself. So it is up to you to find training or groups that discuss AI and its application to your field. Step 2 is to assess where it is best to integrate AI. Where you integrate AI is determined by several things.

Think about the assessment this way:

Review Key Business metrics - Early Stage/Mid Stage/Late Stage

• For example - Lagging Pipeline requires that you focus on building new business pipeline
• Example - Low Meeting conversions - Use AI to personalize, prove value
• Example - Late Losses - Use AI to enhance validation, return on investments

Time Delays - use AI to speed up

Areas of low expertise or capacity - use AI to beef up expertise

It is incumbent on you to audit your business and be honest with yourself. This is where you need to use a process or systems brain to break down your sales process into steps to see where there are inefficiencies. If you are a sales leader, you can do this as a team but also help individuals in areas where you see them struggle.

For a 30-day plan, here is a summary that I have seen used successfully. The key here is to measure the resulting impact and go slow.

Week 1: Build Your Foundation

🎯 Focus: Understanding AI & Setting Goals

• Learn AI basics in sales
• Map your current sales process
• Learn essential prompting
• Identify prime opportunities for AI

Week 2: Taking Action

🚀 Focus: Implementation & Basic Mastery

• Research and refine the prompts or decide if a narrow AI tool is more appropriate.
• Select and begin using your first AI tool
• Integrate AI into daily tasks
• Track initial wins, metrics, and challenges

Week 3: Expanding Your AI Arsenal

💪 Focus: Advanced Applications

• AI-powered lead generation
• Email automation and personalization
• Meeting prep enhancement
• Progress evaluation and adjustment

Week 4: Mastery & Measurement

📈 Focus: Integration & Impact Analysis

• Prompt: Advanced objection handling
• Prompt: Proposal Creation
• Prompt: Performance Analytics
• Prompt: ROI measurement

If you are a sales leader, the assessment plan only changes a bit where your team finds stumbling blocks within the company, and each rep finds their gaps. You can run assessments on the larger metrics and make some determinations for individuals and the team, based on metrics.

Let's discuss what else can be done to go faster.

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Prepping Your AI For Speed - Context

Think of your AI assistant as a new sales intern who knows nothing about you, your company or your product, or sales, for that matter. Although everyone will be a bit different, the following primary areas of context must be pre-written and stored somewhere handy for easy recall.

Here's the Context Framework that I use with all my clients:

1. Personal Context Setup - Your AI needs to understand you, especially for personalizing your communications.

• Your role and experience
• Industry expertise
• Personal communication style
• Success stories and case studies
• Target market understanding

Here's your first prompt template:

Personal Context Prompt Template:

2. Business Context Creation - Your AI needs to understand your business inside and out:

• Product/service details
• Unique value propositions
• Common objections and responses
• Target market specifics
• Competitive landscape

Business Context Prompt Template:

3. Product/Solution Context Template: Your AI needs to understand your product, the value and the clientele so it can build proposals, emails, presentations, etc.

• Technical specifications
• Feature benefits
• Use cases
• Success metrics
• Implementation process

Product Solution Context Prompt:

Target Market Information Context Prompt

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Here's where most reps go wrong - they treat prompts like disposable notes. Instead, build a system for use, reuse and evolution. Let's get into it.

The Game-Changing Prompt Management System

The first few times I used AI, I realized I was typing in the same things over and over and over. Then I realized I would be using AI on my desktop, on my mobile device and then within apps that I purchased but also apps that my company selected.

For this reason, I knew I needed to write and reuse both context and prompts. I also realized I needed something that would go across mobile and my laptop, but also be available on the web, something that automatically synchronized across those platforms. There are various tools, some that are free, some that have minimal cost and some that are a bit more formal. Let me address these options,

My Recommended Prompt Guide Setup (If you want Free):

• Use Google Docs (free and accessible everywhere)(Can be Azure Word, too)
• Create clear categories (Personal, Business, Product, etc.)
• Use the Outline View for quick navigation
• Store variations for different scenarios
• Include metadata (when to use, variables to modify)

AI Tool of the Week: TextBlaze If you're serious about prompt management, TextBlaze lets you create shortcuts for your most-used prompts. Plus shortcut keystrokes to recall the prompts. It is a game-changer for speed!

My Recommended Setup (If you are okay with spending $):

• Use Text Blaze (about $3 per month and accessible laptop and phone)
• Create clear categories (Personal, Business, Product, etc.)
• Has shortcut keystrokes that auto pastes into fields
• Store variations for different scenarios
• Can also store context for easy recall

My Recommended Setup for Teams (If you are okay with spending $$):

• Use Teamai.com (about $5 per month for 10 user team, accessible laptop). This is a prompt storage tool with search.
• Create clear categories (Personal, Business, Product, etc.)
• Store variations for different scenarios
• Can also store context for easy recall

Okay, now it is time for you to pick your solution and begin recording prompts, context and anything that can be reused.

What You Learned Today:

• How to create comprehensive context for your AI
• The framework for organizing your prompts
• A system for managing and recalling prompts quickly
• Tools to accelerate your AI workflow (Text Blaze and TeamAI.com)

Ready to become AI Native? Here's your homework:

1. Fill out the context templates above and store for easy recall
2. Set up your Google Doc prompt management system
3. Start categorizing your existing prompts and share them amongst your team, ask them to pitch in as well.

Don't let poor AI setup slow you down. Get these fundamentals right, and watch your productivity soar!

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Explore More:

• AI Sales Starter Kit (Dropping Soon)
• AI Sales Accelerator (Dropping Soon)
• AI Sales Revolution (Dropping Soon)

That is all of this week but keep pushing forward

See you next week,

Steve