So What? How To Use AI as a Sales Copilot

Well, happy Thursday, everyone. This is the So What Marketing Analytics and Insights live show. It's with me and John Katie is at the what is it? The Marketing AI Institute. AI for B2B Marketers Summit, uh, where she is delivering her keynote talk on uh becoming AI ready.

So uh which if you what uh I don't know if you'll be able to catch her recording uh of it or not, but if you want to catch what she's talking about, it is in our new AI ready marketing strategy kit. Go to TrustInsites.ai slash AI kit to get it for free. This week is part two of our talk on uh AI and sales. We're gonna talk about how to use AI as a sales co-pilot. Nothing to do with Microsoft Copilot.

I should prepare study that uh, but it is a popular term. So John, as a sales leader, what things would you like AI to be able to tell you about the condition of like the sales pipeline, for example? Yeah, the the greatest thing in there would be automated processes that map our existing procedures, you know, where we want to be and where we want to do. Because one of the biggest challenges we have are leads and prospects where we engage at some point and then for some reason it fizzles and it sits out there. And to have a backstop where after two weeks it goes back and says, okay, what's going on, you know, with this lead and where are things going.

And also to qualify and score and keep track of just raw leads. Like you're just talking about the paper we dropped, it's gone berserk. We've had hundreds of leads come in in the past two days. And so we do have some systems in place where those get prioritized. Like HubSpot's done a decent job with categorization.

I get um notice of the ones I've already engaged with, so I'm able to cherry pick, but doing more on that front. Um, yeah, I'm just really excited uh for what you've got because all this stuff we've seen people getting 10, 100x, the effort, you know, being able to automate stuff that was normally a pain and now have that just happen is huge. So yeah, I'm looking forward to this. Okay. So let's for let's start my first saying this.

You need to have done the sales playbook. If you have not done this part, today's episode will not work for you. Like nothing we do today can be done without this. So uh if you missed last week's episode, it's on our YouTube channel. Go to trustinsites.aisube.

You must have a the consolidated sales playbook because in here are things like ideal customer profiles, um, the pitches that and and the processes that you have in your sales uh process for each stage of your pipeline and things again. If you don't have that, you can't do anything. So I think the first place I would want to start, and uh we know that in general, CRM software is uh fairly bloated. Uh the reporting is challenging, and or you know, some systems are like, Oh, yeah, yeah, insert additional coins for for this or that or the other thing. So we're gonna start by saying, let's just start with a basic snapshot.

What we want to think about here with the co-pilot is we want to have a co-pilot be something that that flies along with us. That um from time to time you can maybe give it a little bit of control, but you're you're still the pilot. I'm going to load in some JSON data. So here's where this data came from. Uh I took our actual HubSpot data from our actual HubSpot serum, exported it as a CSV, a uh spreadsheet.

Now we've talked in the past, you cannot give spreadsheets to generative AI. It's just a terrible idea. Never do that. What you can do is you can hand generative AI a spreadsheet that has been converted into what's called JSON, JavaScript object format. And what I've done is I've made a synthetic version of our HubSpot pipeline that has none of the actual person identifying information or or the people who are actually working with the sales because that's just basic data privacy.

But what you can see in this file is things like it is our solutions, it is uh our fake conversation. So, you know, John and Chris and Katie are in here, um, and we have all these fake companies with fake stakeholders, but modeled on our very real HubSpot uh data. So I'm gonna start by putting the the JSON file of our HubSpot real data in, and we're gonna give this a prompt to say turn this into a sales dashboard. Let's let's just get a look at our pipeline. So the prompt is using HTML CSS Tailwind, create a summary infographic of our current pipeline based on the JSON endpoint so that sales leader John Wall and CEO Katie Robert can instantly see the status of our sales pipeline.

So I'm gonna add that, and I'm also of course going to add in the sales playbook because that has all the things like what each stage of our uh deals means. If I don't put this in, then then this is an exercise of futility. So and I'll also give some brands brand style guidelines just so it makes something that isn't completely ugly. Uh so I'm gonna go ahead and run this, and what it's gonna do is it's going to generate raw HTML. Now, raw HTML is not going to be nice to look at.

Um, however, we can copy and paste that and then just load that in a browser window. Why we would do this is again because sometimes what's built into sales products, uh CRMs, uh Salesforce, I'm looking at you, are the most convoluted, complicated, overthinking dashboards when really someone like you or Katie just says like what's going on? Like that's all I need to know. What's going on? Yeah, this is it to be able to get a picture of where you're at, you don't need 35-page dashboards.

Well, uh, that's the thing is I've when I log into HubSpot, you go to the dashboards and reports page, and it's just this wall of dials and space. It looks like it reminds me of like what they do in like in Star Trek or in Doctor Who, where they just add dials just to make it look complicated, right? Yeah, well, and yeah, we could go on forever about you know dashboards and how that works as far as upper level management versus people actually making change. Exactly. Um, so let's see how it's doing here.

Oh, it that's interesting. It's actually trying to put in the deal data itself. So we can see the sales pipeline snapshot, open total open deals, total active deals, pipeline by stage. But I see it's it's actually putting in summary level uh data that we might be able to manipulate, uh, which I did not ask for, but you know what? That's pretty cool.

I'll take it. Um, while it's doing this, Sean, what are the things that you currently have on your sales dashboard that and and how often do you look at the dashboards that are built into like HubSpot? Yeah, it's a pretty simple process for us because it's we have four checkpoints and then closed and loss. So it's I mean, it gets used every other day or better because I just go in there and say, okay, what's on the to-do list? You know, who do we need to check in with?

Where are they at? And it does have the HubSpot deal record has all the key points as far as amount and stage and um the referrals, you know, where the stuff came from, source codes. Um, but after that, it's really not that complicated. You know, I it's we're a small enough org that once I know what's going on with the 15 or 20 things that are live, that's about it. Um, you know, it's it's when you get once you had that second sales rep, like that's when it really starts to kind of get crazier because you've got records that you know the other person doesn't even know what they are, so now you need to start having more rigid process and be able to figure out what's going on.

But yeah, for right now, it's just you know, it does work in that it's here's the picture of everything that's going on and where it's at, right? So this is what it's snapped together. It's at sales pipeline snapshot, total open pipeline value 587,000, 40 active deals, 393 in proposal, 193 in opportunity, 18 newer unqualified leads, leaders of action items needs attention, deals with no activities in 30 days. We have health bridge pharma, global educonnect, and pixel spark digital. Um, health bridge farm in particular, no activity on that, which is kind of bad.

And then high value deals. Here is Momentum Marketing Group, Cybersecure, Ascendia Health. Obviously, like I said, these are not real companies. Um, and then what's supposed to be closing uh this month, August 2025. So I will say this this is a lot easier on the eyes than the hideously bright orange everything and helps but if you had this dashboard to look at, John, what if anything would this help you with?

Yeah, well, having the the needs attention, like that's great. The stuff that is you know stalled or so there's been a violation of process, so like something needs to get done with those is great. Uh the only thing that that's kind of missed that that's missing from there that I can see so far is having them broken down by stage, you know, because the ones where we have scopes already out and are waiting signature review, those are more important than the ones that you know they read a white paper and we've got a call on the docket for next week. Um, you know, those can kind of sit and simmer, whereas we do have the high priority ones that you know we're continually babysitting. Okay, I think that's a really good idea.

So let's take that feedback and let's say, okay, um, let's figure out next best action. We've got our sales playbook, we've got our pipeline. Um, let's figure out what the next best action is uh and have the tool attempt to um let's list them in outline format by deal name, uh, opportunity stage and next best action. Explain each next best action, and we'll have it do it in um in HTML and Tailwind, so that's not just console output. But one of the things that I often find, and I remember this from my sales days, is trying to figure out like what am I supposed to do today, or what's the next step with this deal?

Like, I I have no idea. And again, this is going back to our sales playbook from last week where you have the sales process mapped out. Here's the prospecting, qualification, discovery and things, uh key metrics. And then you have the sales tactics. Like, so at each stage of the pipeline, here are sales tactics.

So if you have that in your sales playbook, then you can come up with a a here here's a recommended next best action for each of these things, each of the deals that are in the pipeline. How do you how do you as a human met manage next best action, John? I just use the force with that, you know. I didn't go through. Um we go down the list and yeah, there's notes in HubSpot.

So we do have checkpoints and we use group Google Drive for a lot of stuff because for us it's pretty simple. You know, we do initial screening call just to prove that they're for real and they have budget and that we may be able to work together. The second stage is to bring in you or Katie for technical and review as far as okay, you know, we we realize a project could happen, but is it do we feel we can be successful once we've got the whole team on? And then we actually write up a formal document, and it that's kind of the classic sales chasing the signature and making sure we get through their procurement process and all that stuff. So it's not super complicated as far as what the steps are.

So as long as I can see what stage they're at, I know what we're supposed to be doing next. Um, but yeah, otherwise it's kind of clunky, you know, because it's I'm relying on email and the HubSpot Notes field to give me a specific point as far as like, okay, here's where we are today and what we need to get done tomorrow. Have you worked with any CRM software that builds that has a built-in next best action to as a co-pilot to tell a person like, hey, here's what you should be doing. No, I've, you know, I've worked with simpler systems that were just kind of like, okay, the next checkpoint is X, but yeah, I've never seen anything that was smart enough to actually, you know, kind of say, like, okay, you should be sending this email or you know, giving you really more specific and accurate um next steps. Okay, well, let's see what it came up with.

So it says next best actions in the sales pipeline. Pixel Spark Digital, AI content lead gen solutions. Next best action, execute gentle nudge value reinforcement play from the sales playbook. So we can all see what we're doing, looking at here. Um the deal has stalled.

Send a polite follow-up email that provides new value, link to a new relevant blog post, inquires about their decision making timeline. Playbook rationale re-engages the prospect without being pushy, keeps trust insights top of mind, help uncover hidden objections as in playbook play 6.4.3. You connect, next best action, proactively address legal review. Uh schedule brief call with their primary contacts, see if they need clarification for their legal team. Off to have Katie join if they need strategic stuff.

FinTech Innovators, next best action, confirm next steps and timeline, follow-up emails with primary contact. So how does if you imagine if this was our actual pipeline, John? Um as a sales leader or sales lead, does this give you a sense of what you what you would want to do? Yeah, it gives you a clear, you know, approach on to like, okay, what's the next lever to pull and where to go? Um and the uh the huge value I see with this is when you get to the point where you've got too many leads going, you could have a virtual assistant that could scrape through this and do the you know, kick off the tracks that don't require any extra effort, you know, take all the the easy work, uh the less uh challenging work off the plate.

Why why a virtual assistant? Um yeah, no, I could definitely be an AI agent. I mean, automating it would be even better. But yeah, you know, as of today, BA would be how we would handle that. No, I would make it together.

Yeah, I'm all on board. I'm in. Um, one of the things though that I see also useful here is because the next best action is pretty well canned. Um, there actually is a field, a default field in HubSpot called next step. But it the software doesn't populate with anything, it just says next step and expects you, the human to fill it in.

I could easily see, since on the back end in the JSON file, we have the deal IDs having a tool like N8N uh literally just go into HubSpot, say, okay, I've got my next best action recommendation from the LLM. Let's put it in the records. Like let's put it in the actual next step field within the the record. Yeah, yeah. And because then you can even have a dashboard run that so you can see them all.

You can see by next task what they've got to do. Um we could also do uh goodness of fit, which is something that is very, very difficult for us to figure out. Um so let me go back to our pipeline analysis. Uh, and here I'm gonna say let's do some analysis and diagnosis of our pipeline. Match each opportunity against the ICPs, return the deals and companies, the closest match, and the goodness of fit on a scale of zero to zero to one hundred uh as to whether the company deal fits the against fits one of the seven ICPs.

Return your results in HTML, CSS, Tailwind. So this is now sort of going a level deeper to look at if yours is if you were a sales leader, you're looking at this and going, uh, we got four 390,000 in proposal and 190,000 opportunity, and 18 new leads. You might say, gosh, we're we're we know we have like you said a thousand new prospects in our database from from our LinkedIn paper and like 800 new prospects for the new AI readiness kit. Why isn't this bigger? Like why is why is this this why is our why is the pipeline so bad?

Or was it from Glenn Gary Glenn Ross? The leads are weak. Um we might want to run a diagnosis. So let's uh call this diagnosis. And let's take our sales records as it's generating and say how good a fit is our pipeline.

Because we last week when we did this, we have our ideal customer profiles. We have um all these, and then we have the buyer personas in here. So we know who our ideal customers are. And we could measure what's in our pipeline, go, you know what? Part of the reason we the pipeline might be stalled is that the the companies that are in the pipeline just they're not the right customers.

They're they're not gonna do the job for us. So let's paste this in and look at our pipeline diagnosis. And we go down here, like alpha investments. Oh, that's uh niche solution seeker, but it scores only a 35. So it's like, yeah, that's not great, right?

We have a lot of we have a lot of ICPs ones too. We have some a lot of fives. And so we might even rejigger this to say, like, you know what? Those ICP5s, the niche solution seeker, they don't have money. I ignite fitness studios.

You know, I I know most fitness studio chains, they they do not have great margins. Right. They're not looking to spend. And and so that's the stoplight indicator is against just ICP, ICP match. Yeah, I guess I fit the fit of ICP.

So we could equally do this again for things like budget, for things like deal age, uh, just getting a green, yellow, red of like how good a fit is this company um or any given companies based on our criteria. Yeah, that's a fantastic way to screen. How else would you want to look at our pipeline? You know, other slices there, if you can get any commonality, that's something that we're always kind of wondering about. You know, is there anything as far as the types of orgs in there?

Can it tell us who else we should be talking to in the database based on the the folks we've been able to get into the process? Well, we covered that a lot last week with the ICPs themselves. Like these uh these are all the the types of companies that we work with. Are you saying that you might have stuff that are laterals outside of our ideal customer profiles? Yeah, and and really that idea of you know the best proof are the folks that have actually stepped up and have budget and are gonna go to deals, you know.

I mean, that's even better than just the database and the house list. Um, yeah, yeah, that's really more deal analysis. Uh uh, and yeah, I hadn't thought of that. That opens up a whole door too of like just looking at the wins, you know, what kind of stuff can you get from the winds? Because now you're not um you you've got all the stuff in the raw pipeline that there's a bunch of it that never makes it to close.

Okay. Well, let's ask it this. Um, using our existing IP ICPs and the sales pipeline, what other kinds of companies should we be looking to market to? Who might be most lucrative? I mean, I think that's a reasonable question to ask.

And again, I can't emphasize this enough. I'm gonna beat this everyone over the head of this. You have to have all this data predefined so that the AI knows what is exists already. If you attempt to do this without it, you are in you're in hallucination territory that looks a lot like Keith Richards. Yeah, completely uh no idea what's gonna come out, and don't think you can just jump on it.

Exactly. So let's see. Here's a report. Oh, it's it's it's decided this is going to make me a report. So it apparently thinks I want web pages for everything now, so it's just gonna start generating uh because I'm gonna I'll spin up a new ops.html file here so that we have a place to put it.

Let's see. It's impressive. Um, it's going by the different opportunity categories. That's interesting. All right, let's take this whole thing because it it partially mangled the response.

And let's put it into on screen here. So it said, Hey, uh, our current pipeline reveals four highly lucrative adjacent market opportunities. They're not entirely new ICPs, but rather high potential specializations. Prioritizing these segments will allow us to generate to leverage our proven strengths. The regulatory specialist, the agency enablement partner, the old economy digital transformer, and the enterprise AI strategist.

And let's make this a little bit bigger here so we can see what we're doing. The regulated industry specialists, companies operating in highly uh regulated environments, supporting evidence from the pipeline. These are the deals. Why it's lucrative, high cost of failure, complex problems, budget availability. Um the agency enabled partner, yeah.

All these agencies, why it's lucrative, force multiplier, one agency partner can become a channel for dozens of end client projects. They find the clients, we provide the expertise. I really like that. Uh high lifetime value, scalable offerings. Marketing on sale, double down on the trust in our name.

Uh create targeted content on ethical AI and healthcare, AI financial compliance. Well, Katie's gonna be uh doing that. Uh develop a formal trusted sites partner program, uh, offer referral fees, the old economy digital transformer, uh manufacturing B2B industrials, why it's lucrative operational budgets, green field opportunity and tangible ROI, and the enterprise strategist. Uh engage clients, uh solves problems owned by the C suite, high strategic value, full stack trust insights value. So there's there's your pipeline adjacent stuff, John.

Yeah, that's really interesting. Um I'm surprised that the um AI agency one comes in lower, you know. That but that doesn't make sense, I guess as you dig in deeper to the deals, that those profiles are the ones that tend to get all the way to close, you know. So it makes sense. Okay.

So next, um, what do you want to know as a sales leader? Uh we've now gone through we have better reporting, right? So that that that automatically helps. We have next best actions for our entire pipeline and what we should do. We have pipeline ICP fit to see what companies in our pipeline and how well they fit our ICPs, and now we have a go hunting, go fishing for a new business.

Yeah, you know, it'd be cool to can we run a backstop, run something, you know, look at the losses that are more than six months old or three months old, and show me the ones that based on what's closed that should have closed, you know, get get I don't think I generated that in the fake data. Oh, yeah, yeah. There's no the closed stack is not over there. Yeah, I think I only have I'm like let me just double check that to make sure I'm not lying. But I'm I think I only faked um yeah, fake the live stuff.

Yeah, there's there's no closed one or closed lost in here, unfortunately. Oh, okay, yeah. Cause that would be one thing is um, you know, re-engagement because it like there's tons of clients out there where we went through the whole process and then suddenly the champion got laid off, or they were like, Oh, we don't have the budget for this quarter. Um, so to be able to find stuff that could be ripe now, you know, that that we had missed through the past one would be good. Oh, it's like re-engagement, like win them back.

Yeah, totally. Um yeah, I guess with wins you could do that too. Upsells, yeah, up sell right. You but we don't know what's upsold versus like who bought a six month project and then didn't come back for more stuff. Um but yeah, that's so then that creates another interesting question.

Uh lifetime value, you know, of of what's in there, who are who are the best over time because we lose sight of that. You know, we kind of we have some clients we think we're doing great because they're doing all these tiny projects, but then we have other ones that you know they kind of come in once every other year with a giant project. Like actually, who are those are the the best people to be working with? Like of the customers we have who are the ones we should be trying to clean. Okay.

Well, I'm having it generate uh 10 closed one and lost uh files. So okay, great. Uh from those one and lost. So let's build a backstop report. So what's in the what's in the backstop report?

Yeah, backstop, it's always you know, stuff that got dropped or left behind, and you know, can we go back and bring something back to life? Is there something that uh again got dropped, right? Because as a sales manager, that's always the biggest one is the hey, we gave you this list, and they said, Oh, well, I called everybody, nobody called me back, but you know, is that the case? And is there anything that they missed in that? Okay.

Uh build your report in HTML with this and tail end. So since it made the the lovely files, let's see if it can create a uh a backstop report uh on who we lost. I like the idea of of this because there's there is always but like we always say is they always come back, right? Yeah, yeah. And uh even oh, and I hadn't thought about that.

I don't know if you have contact info, but it jumps company to company, right? Because ultimately we're selling to people, and there's tons of people who love what we do, they see the value, but it's just not the right time at their org for whether whatever reason. Like they're not in enough of a position of power to make a decision, or they don't have the budget this time, or you know, there's a million reasons why this is not the time that can be done. But the person is a champion, isn't on board and wants to do something. We have plenty of folks.

Um, you know, we have the no budget crew that we make fun of who you know, every time they move jobs, they come back and want to get something rolling, and they can never can. But you know, even those people are champions, and uh, so yeah, if we can find deals where you know we've made some inroads in the past, and now we can go back and see if it's finally time, yeah, because they always come back. Okay. Well, let's take this backstop report first and see how that looks. We'll put it into the window here.

So we have backstop report to analyze every loss, you'll understand the root cause loss and provide a playbook to strategy for in potential recovery. Data well corp, predictive modeling pilot, lost on price budget, future prevention and recovery plan, the selected vendors less experienced set of four-month follow-up tasks, re-engage with the gentle nudge, play six. Call when cheaper solution under delivers. That happens a lot. Someone goes for the the cheap solution, and then six months later they're like, so the cheap solution didn't work.

And then we're like, Yes, the expensive solution is still available. However, unfortunately, it's more expensive. Right, exactly. Umvest chant internal champion left, right? So during discovery, actively map out and build relationships.

As noted, says six months follow-up execute the content-driven ICP outreach play six dot one dot four to the new leadership. The goal is to re-establish contact and revalute the original need, treating it as a new warm lead. First chapter books, lost to internal DIY effort. Yep, that happens a lot. Internal IT projects face delays or fail to meet business needs.

Set a three-month follow-up check in, ask how the internal project is progressing and offer to provide a second opinion or to help them get unstuck. Yeah. Those are it's funny, those are always an interesting role that dice because you still never know who's vested in the internal project when you come knocking. You know, there's some people that it's their intention to bury you when you come asking, offering a second opinion, because that's the absolute last thing they want to see. But hopefully, you know, sooner or later they get to the bottom of the bucket and can't make up excuses, and somebody will come in who has to make things right and be effective.

Exactly. New CMO comes in and is like, what are you guys doing? Why have you been working 10 months on something that you know nothing's gone out the door? Yep. Momentum dynamics, enterprise attribution modeling, loss to entrenched incumbent, large firm.

Yep. Long-term nurture, the large firm will likely deliver a generic solution. Periodically send the client contact our cutting edge thought leadership on specifically attribution modeling, position ourselves as the true specialists they can turn to when the generic solutions are good enough. And then finally, global logistics corporation process optimization project pause due to external factors. The reason for loss is not rejection of value, add the contact to long-term nurture sequence in modics at a firm CR test CRM task to re engage in late Q4 2025 ahead of their stated Q1 2026 restart.

The outreach should reference the prior discussion as they're beginning to plan for the new year. There are a couple of leads in our pipeline, and I know who they are. Um that this is the exact description. It's just that the generative AI just changed all the names. Um that I can say, like immediately after this live stream, I need to go email them and say, So your fiscal year's starting in a month.

Uh, what do you want to do? Right. Yeah, yeah. The folks that said, hey, we don't have money this, you know, this year, but come back and talk next year. Exactly.

So the backstop report, again, very cool, very straightforward. And I want to emphasize this is not like super high tech. This is one spreadsheet file from the CRM that has the notes data as well as all the the other company data, convert it into a JSON file that we have been just asking uh uh stock out of the box Google Gemini these questions and asking it to build these reports in HTML with our brand style guidelines. That's all this is. This is not high-tech, this is not uh you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars in in technology and consulting.

This is literally just asking questions and having it put it in something that doesn't look like garbage for output. That's it. Um if we wanted to convert this into a true co-pilot, our next steps would be to take the sales playbook, take our CRM data, and take the prompts that we've been using them and put them into actual workflows like the N8N environment or Python code or whatever. And instead of trying to process all the data at once, because obviously for trust insights, I would love that I would love it if we had the problem of like we have 10,000 deals. There's no way that Jem and I can process all 10,000 all at once.

We don't have that problem yet. Jem and I can handle our it still fits within the month one million token window. Um, but you would instead have a system that programmatically goes and does each deal individually one at a time and then passes the updates to and from an LLM back into your sales CRM. So from in terms of a live co-pilot, as deals. In fact, one of the things you can do in uh in a system like NAN is you can have triggers themselves, uh, where the trigger is something that happens in HubSpot, and then the N8N system listens to HubSpot.

So, like when a deal is created, that could trigger a next best action flow to say okay, I've looked at the deal, I've looked at what you've put in it, here's your next best action. And and obviously you can create the if we look up here, you can update tickets, you can create deals, you can create um contacts, you can create engagements, uh tickets and things like that, or you could just tie in like a Gmail thing and say, Hey, I see the deal, here's your next best action. And then when you assign it to a person in HubSpot, that person gets the email saying, Hey, your next best action on this deal is to do this. Yeah, and there's also value even for the stuff that doesn't close, you know, as something dies to have it go through and say, Okay, we do a check back in six months and and a year, you know, things like that to take care of all that, you know. Otherwise, you have somebody that's having to set up all these tasks and appointments further out in the calendar.

That's completely work that can easily be automated. Exactly. So within within a system like N8N, you would just be enabling these reports and these analyses, it would just be automatic rather than manually doing it. But even if you don't do that, if you just do the manual thing that we've just done now over the last 35 minutes. If you do that at the end of the week, I mean it didn't take that long.

I this week, uh, due to time constraints, I didn't have a chance to pre-bake anything. So we did this entirely live, and we have what five really solid reports uh from our sales pipeline that will take you under 20 minutes, a 20 minutes a week to look at and go, okay, these three deals we need to talk about them at this week's sales meet. Um, here's what we need to do for each of these new deals in in the pipeline. Um the the ones that are at the bottom here that are just not good fits, like kick them off the deal board. If they're not gonna buy, kick them off the deal board because we're we're just not gonna provide value for them.

Um here's the next four webinars we have to do, right? To say, like, yep, we need a regulatory regulated industry webinar, AI for regulated industries, and then the the I guess the cleanup and maintenance, like who can we win back? Yeah, that's all solid stuff. And but again, a plug for just as you said, you know, this is all possible because we have the process and procedure set up, and so that's the thing. If you are not to this point and you want to know how can we configure our CRM and set up a book of policies and procedures so that we're gathering this data so we can finally take advantage of this stuff, we help out with that kind of stuff, and we can uh you know get you where you need to go so you've got actionable data.

Exactly. Anything else on your wish list as a sales leader, John? Uh yeah, no, I just wish there was like an arm twist button, you know, that I could hit and just make a signature appear on a document. That would be the real ultimate power. But no, it's you know, it's like every single deal is there's human behavior, there's emotion, there's empathy.

So having these tools to simplify and build a process, it allows you to spend the time on the difficult stuff to qualify and to see you know what's holding you back why you're not getting that signature, as opposed to spending your whole day like setting up tasks six months from now, and and you know drilling through the database trying to find that one that you forgot, you know, last week and now it's buried in the pile and you can't get to it. So it's yeah, the this is all great stuff to make you more effective and and put you where on the problems that you need to take care of and get everything else off your plate. Yep. So I imagine uh as Katie is watching the replay of this, she will be asking where the the trust insights version is that uses our actual data. So after we hang up in the live stream, I know exactly what I'm gonna be doing.

Yes, dude, to-do list is uh again the the live stream always seems to generate heat on the to-do list for both of us. Oh, that which is the way it's supposed to go. I mean, the the fact is that if we have this stuff documented, we should be able to put it into play. Now, what I would like to see, and I don't know, I don't know how close we are to it, is I would like to see this automation built into our CRM so that we don't have to do this in external tools. I mean, it's great that we can go into Gemini or Chat GPT or Claude or whatever and just crank this out.

But I almost feel like they should be doing it for us. Like, what are we paying them for? Well, yeah, that's you open a very big Pandora's box with that one as far as what's happening in some of these big TRM companies, you know. It's uh I yeah, I just with everything happening with N8N, I it just seems like end users are going to be doing this stuff far faster and more effectively than sitting around and hoping and praying that the product team gets to this stuff. Exactly.

And that brings me to the last topic, um, which is and I was talking about this on LinkedIn earlier. This is concept, this is technical concept called MCP, model context protocol. And what MCP allows you to do is it allows you to call external tools and data from inside a chat window. So uh as an example, if uh if I bring up Anthropic's Claude, which is one of the the Claude desktop app supports MCPs out of the box. Um, you have to install it, uh, but then once you've got that, you you you have something that you can work with.

And if I say, let me find a document here that I can use. Oh, yeah, I'll let's use this one. Let's actually use the blog post. I'll say count the number of let me turn on my screen share here. Count the number of words in this document using the word counter tool.

The word counter tool is an MCP model context protocol server that I built that does one thing, it does a word count. That's it. Like it it requires nothing, no other horsepower than that. Uh, let's see if Claude remembers that it has a word counting tool. I'm on Sonnet and I'm in the right place.

It's thinking. Um, but a lot of the prompts and a lot of the things that we talked about today are things that if you were to put them into an MCP server, then you could do like you know, at sales playbook, what should I do with this this deal? Uh and if you bring in like you know, you would say, like at HubSpot CRM. Show me the deals I need to work on, the three deals I need to work on today, and then you could do at you know, uh at sales playbook. How should I process these deals?

Um, it would be able to understand that. So here you could see now, hey, I remembered that I have access to the word count tool. I'm gonna send the word count tool the document. The word count tool is going to launch separately. Um and it's gonna spit back an answer that says 708 was what came back from the tool, uh, and which is the correct uh actual correct number.

Interestingly, if you were to do this without the word count tool, you'll get answers between 500 and a thousand because they these tools can't count. Yeah, you just get a hallucination. Which which is hilarious. Like, why why don't you know this? Math is hard.

Math really is hard for these things, but I think that's the the thing that I would add. Um in is like if you were to think about the sales automation, what would it look like to have your sales playbook as an MCP tool right inside of so if your employees use chat GPT, which will support MCP soon, um you could have it just provide recommendations immediately say like oh okay, it's it's this. Yeah, that's I can see that being very useful. That's another, you know, just like next wave sales. I did there's no catchy term for this yet.

You'd think something would have already stuck as far as next generation AI powered sales. I would have to uh put some cycle time behind that. I mean, you have Salesforce automation, so I guess it would be Salesforce AI. Yeah, no, we're not going that route. We definitely need something else.

Um all right. Well, yeah, I probably can't even use the word Salesforce, huh? Yes, exactly. I did the that. That's uh San Francisco will have a problem with that, so uh we'll have to figure out another way to go.

All right. Uh any final parting thoughts. Give us a call if you want to dig into this stuff. I mean, this is like cutting edge stuff for us, even. And so, yeah, if you have a sales process that you want to automate and run, we would love to talk more about this stuff because this is where we have a couple partners that we're already working with that have use cases that are just crushing it.

So if you need to, you know, want to think about how to use how to use AI to sell more, give us a buzz. Yep. Pop on by trustinsights.ai slash contact. All right, that is gonna do it for this week's show. So we will see you on the next one.

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