16. How to utilise AI tools to analyse your data

Introduction

Alright, folks, let's dive into the exciting world of AI and its incredible applications in the realm of sales and analytics. Today, Simon Harvey and Daniel Kleber are going to spill the beans on all the fantastic things you can do with AI to supercharge your sales efforts. Get ready to be blown away!

Picture this: with the power of AI on your side, you can revolutionise the way you approach sales. It's like having a trusty sidekick that crunches data, uncovers patterns, and provides valuable insights to help you make smarter decisions. No more shooting in the dark!

So, my friends, if you're ready to take your sales efforts to the next level, it's time to harness the power of AI. Trust me, once you give it a go, you'll wonder how you ever survived without it. So buckle up and get ready for a wild ride into the future of sales and analytics!

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Episode Transcript

Maybe you've got loads of leads coming into your pipeline, but now you've got no idea which ones to follow up with first. Or perhaps your deals are getting to a certain point in their life cycle, and then you're losing them. As salespeople, we're all busy folk. So how do you spend your time on the activities that will bring you the best return? And how do you make sure you hit gold as often as possible? Creating content is only one of the tricks that AI can perform. Looking for patterns in data though, is what it does best of all. So today we're going to take a look over some of the applications of AI within the area of sales and analytics. Daniel's going to talk about some of the things that you can do with AI and some of the tools that you can try out to improve your sales effort. So grab your headphones, settle in and prepare for today's discussion all about AI in the domain of sales. Let's get started. So hi there and welcome to the Authentic Marketing Podcast in association with Demodia. I'm your host, Simon Harvey, and with me as always today, I'm joined by my co host Daniel Klaber. Hi there, Daniel. Hello,

Simon. And hello listeners.

So Daniel, in this series, we've been talking about AI and how it's really sprung up from nowhere over the last couple of years and really is the hottest topic now on every CMO's lips. I've got to say that I think that's quite understandable, I think, at the minute, you know, there's a lot of marketers out there that are really concerned about the impact it's going to have on their jobs, concerned about the work that they're doing at the moment, and how it's going to change all of those things, I think, overall. So, as a marketing leader, you know, we need to understand what we can do with AI, you know, how we can use it, how it's going to impact our teams, and when's the right time to react and to start actually using it. Yes, exactly. Yep. Back in episode 14, we took a look at the fantastic number of tools that have sprung up to support marketing. And then in the last episode, if you recall, we dug deeper into chat GPT specifically, and you gave us that step by step approach for using it to create the first drafts of website content, email, social posts, blog posts, those sorts of things. Yes. So, Daniel, in this episode, What I wanted to do is to tap into your knowledge of how we can use AI more to support the sales function and intelligence around that. Sounds good to me. Good. Well, I look forward to seeing what we can hear from you then. So maybe a good place to start. It might be right at the beginning of the sales journey. I'm sure everyone listening today has come across chatbots. They're something that's been around as a technology for quite a while, and most of the time you'll find that those are actually programmed. You know, there's a set of responses that are built into those. They're great for interactive messages, but I know one of the challenges that many companies have found, and certainly customers that we've worked with in the past have found, is that whilst they're great when you can use the automation that's built into those, and they follow that pre programmed logic, There becomes a point where fairly quickly, most often they need to be handed over to a real operator because, you know, the knowledge of the programming or the limitation of the programming there. So, what I was wondering is whether there's anything that's going on, you know, that could help people on that side, you know, how is AI potentially working in that chatbot

space? Yeah, I know this can be costly for many companies and they question the value of This is a great area where AI has been helping sales now for quite a while. What we're talking about here is something called conversational intelligence and AI driven chatbots are still in development. So it will be interesting to see what comes in the next year or so. That definitely would be. Yep. One tool I would recommend looking at though is TDO. They are integrating AI into their tools to process simple requests automatically, as well as provide suggested responses to live

operators. Interesting. Yeah. I've never come across that one before. I'll definitely go take a look at that TDO. You say TDO. I don't know how you pronounce that. Yeah. Uh,

it sounds funny.

Yeah. It's going to be really interesting to see how these website chatbots evolve and these external chatbots. I do think they've sort of hit the limitations at the moment and we'll see how AI takes over and becomes more useful in the future. One thing definitely though that I've seen is more using chatbots for internal purposes. They really do seem like they're taking off now and they're able to do much, much more on that side. I mean, particularly one example that we were looking at the other day and that we're using a lot internally is this HubSpot tool, the ChatSpot AI that they've developed in there. You know, maybe you can tell us a bit more about that and your experience is there.

Yes, you're right. Great example of this is Chatbot from HubSpot. They have jumped into the space really quickly to create a chatbot specifically to support sales efforts. It collects information from within the HubSpot CRM as well as other tools including DOLL E2, uh, Google Sheet, Google Slides, as well as personal, company, and keyword research. So

it really is integrated into a whole ecosystem here.

Yes. It's basically a conversational bot. Something that I'm seeing more and more called an AI co pilot. Okay. An AI co pilot answers questions and executes instructions. But the fact that it is connected directly to your CRM makes it extremely useful. HubSpot users are now able to chat with chatbots in order to get real time data of customer and company activities, campaigns and all other data that is linked to their CRM. It makes it really simple for users to get the information they need without having to rely on filters or reports in the main tool. Cool.

I do definitely think that's going to change the way that we work with HubSpot. I know it's already changing my work processes inside there. You mentioned it can help with actions and research in particular. That's something I found quite interesting. Uh, you know, what kinds of things can we actually do on that side then? At the moment,

it can help you to draft content for emails or blog posts, but it can also provide you with real time data directly from HubSpot and other research tools. One thing I have found particularly useful is the way that you can search for people or companies. Just ask it what it knows about a certain company domain, and it will give you things like the company size, industry, revenue, and so on. And even more impressive, what technologies the companies are using and Even insights into their SEO strategy. If you want to try it for yourself, just ask it something like, who is Demodia. com? That

sounds insane. Really been able to do all that sort of stuff. I mean, you used to have to have so many different tools to do those sorts of research previously, you know, as a salesperson, it's going to be a real game changer, I think on that side, you know, no more searching across SEMrush to get your SEO things and then other tools to get a company background. That's. Fantastic. It really is good and I recommend everybody to go and play with that basically. So it's really interesting to see where HubSpot's going with this and what they're going to do with it I think in the future.

Uh yeah, this is already a great step technology wise but that just makes me more excited to see what the future will bring. Yeah, me too. That brings me on to another conversational AI tool that I would like to highlight here. I'm talking about Avoma. Have you ever heard of Avoma

before? Of course. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we use that internally for recording our sales meetings and another internal meetings. Yeah. Maybe you can explain a little bit to our listeners about what it is and what they can do with Avoma then. Sure.

Uh, Avoma is basically an AI powered meeting recorder that is able to create a transcript of a meeting. The most powerful thing about it, though, is that it can create AI generated notes, which are automatically organized into different categories, like business needs, pain points, and so on. It is also able to do live bookmarking, create augmented notes, identify speakers, detect topics, and track

keywords. So it creates transcripts of your meeting conversations basically then and then analyzes those with the help of this conversational AI to allow you to actually understand what's been said during the meeting and organize it in a structured way basically.

Exactly in my eyes it is. Pretty helpful because it lets you focus on a meeting without having to worry about scribbling down what has been said. Yeah, that's key thing. You can just concentrate on what's being said and what's important while Avoma makes sure that all the key information is documented

well. I have to say that having used that quite a lot ourselves internally, I found that a really useful tool or that sort of capability really useful to have, you know, it's always stressful to have to sit there and think about what people are saying during the meeting and, you know, you want to be able to concentrate and focus on them and focus on their answers, but if you've got to write all down the notes at the same time, yeah, that just becomes a bit too much and it's just distracting basically. So it's good to have a tool like this in the background. Um,

Yeah, I can totally relate. It's just way too much if you have to listen and scribble down stuff at the same time. Mm

hmm. So you mentioned earlier in the conversation and you talked about conversational intelligence or I think conversational AI was something else that you mentioned in there. I've also heard the term informational AI being banded around. You know, what does that mean and what's the difference between those terms?

Conversational AI is centered around enabling natural language conversations between humans and machines, while informational AI is focused on information extraction, organization, and retrieval from various sources. Conversational AI is more directly concerned with human computer interactions, while informational AI has a broader scope that covers data processing, knowledge management, and information retrieval.

So what you're telling me then basically is that tools like Chatspot and Avoma, they actually cover both of these fields then in that case, you know, they're able to actually understand what we're talking about as well as retrieve the right sorts of data. Well,

Chatspot covers both fields because it focuses on human-machine interaction while also doing data processing, knowledge management, and informational retrieval. Avoma, though, is focused on human-machine interactions without providing any additional information besides the

transcript. Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. So the reason I was asking this is I was thinking more about data. I'm wondering particularly, you know, we've talked a lot about sort of conversational type stuff, but on the data side, is there any tools out there that can help sales guys and marketing people to understand the data that they've got, you know, doing more analytics, things like lead scoring and stuff like that, for example.

There are a lot of tools that have been created for that purpose. A WISO, for example, is a great tool for sales process optimization. It uses AI to generate lead scores for contacts to help you prioritize and identify the most promising leads for your sales teams. It's also possible to connect Aviso to your CRM. Once you've done that, you can define criteria by which leads are scored and then Aviso will work with and automatically do the lead scoring for you. Okay.

That sounds like the sort of thing, certainly, that I'm thinking about in there. What about insights into some of these other areas? So typically when we're creating sales reports, we're looking at things like pipelines, we're looking at deals, opportunities, those sorts of things. Any tools that can help out with that? Yeah.

Aviser uses AI to generate insights on the health and progress of individual deals. Helps you identify risks associated with each deal, provides insights into the duration and characteristics of your sales cycles and forecasts deal outcomes to provide insights into future revenue projections.

I think that's where we're really going with this sort of data analysis coming in. It's great to have a visual representation of a pipeline, but the trouble is that nobody's got the time to go back and analyze important things, particularly when deals fail. So I think that having data like this, an AI tools available that can actually go through that data, um, you know, continually and look at what's happened historically as well inside there is going to really help sales teams to improve their performance in the process. You know, if we're able to go back and look at that data, look where things went wrong, then if we can identify common threads and common scenarios, basically, then If they start to appear in future deals, then you can actually capture those and take steps to fix it and remediate it basically before the whole deal collapses. So yeah, I do think that's some quite cool things that we'll be able to do in there in the future. The other side of AI where I'm hearing a lot of people asking for advice is around efficiency improvements and automation in general. What about that? Do you got any hints that you can share with us on those sides, perhaps? Yeah,

sure. It depends on the listener's needs because each tool offers different features, but there are a bunch of them out there. Aviso, for example, offers features for analyzing deal health, identifying risks, and optimizing the sales pipeline. Mm hmm. Pican, on the other hand, focuses on predictive modeling and forecasting, rather than specific lead nurturing functionalities. Forward provides features such as lead scoring, sales analytics, and sales automation. Its focus lies in driving sales performance and improving sales outcomes. Then there's Accio. Accio is an AI platform that offers predictive modeling, data analysis, and automation. It provides the flexibility to build custom machine learning models tailored to specific use cases. So, if your main goal is to do lead scoring, I would recommend you to use Forward. If you want to have an overview of all your data through automated reports, I would recommend using Aviso. If you want to play with machine learning, you should use Accio. And if your focus lies in predictive modeling and forecasting, use

Pecan. Okay, I've never heard of any of those tools before, so they're definitely something I'm going to look at. So Avizo, or Avizo as you say, Pecan, uh, Forward, and Accio. Okay, interesting. So, yeah, I shall take a look at those, I think, in the future. Anyway, I think we're getting to the point now where we're coming to the close of a conversation today. Before we go, though, I just want to say thanks very much for giving us all your insights over the last couple of episodes. I know this is an area that really interests you generally and you tend to sort of play around with, so it's been good to sort of get some of those thoughts and background from yourself. And I certainly see that this is going to be an area we're going to see cropping up in the future and probably popping up on a future episode of the podcast here. So I'm sure we'll talk a bit more about it going forwards. So for now, I'll let you get back to your day job and say, thanks very much, Daniel. No

worries, Simon. And thank you for the

invite. It's really great to have Daniel talk more about some of the things that he's enthusiastic about. So as you've seen, there's some really great and amazing tools appearing on the market now that not only help with content creation, but also with that whole end to end sales process. I must say that from my experiences, I've been really impressed by the speed that HubSpot's jumped into this space and they've provided some really powerful tools to the overall sales community. AI, it's there, it's going to be a game changer. But at the end of the day, let's not worry about it, and let's not forget that it's the human element that still brings about that magic. You know, finding the perfect balance is going to be the secret source that's going to drive exceptional results and leave a lasting impact on your efforts. So if you're having problems identifying the best AI tools and practices for you, then you can hire an authentic engagement coach. Just go to Demodia. com to hire a coach that will show you how to increase the effectiveness of your marketing and give you an easier way to grow your business. So, everyone, today's action is simple. I think one of the most impactful AI tools I've seen for sales, and I've had the chance to play with myself over recent months, is HubSpot's Chatspot tool. So today what I want you to do is go and have a play with that. Head to chatspot. ai and sign up for a free account in there. You don't need an existing HubSpot account or anything like that, you can just sign up with your regular email address. Once you're in, you've got access to all of the basic tools that you can use. You can't use some of the tools that link up to the CRM without an account, but you can try out loads of other stuff. One of my favorite things to do is looking up domain information. You can type in a domain name inside there, and it will tell you things like the size of the company, its location, or, you know, even better if you're in the tech marketing space, all of the technologies that it uses. I think Chatspot is going to give you a real taste for the sort of things that you can expect to see much, much more of in the very near future. So jump in there and have a play, you know, being prepared with the knowledge of what's to come is going to make sure that you and your business are ready to take advantage of it when it really does arrive. So that's it for today's episode of the Authentic Marketing Podcast. Thanks very much as usual for listening and don't forget to bookmark the podcast and share it with your friends and colleagues. We love to share our knowledge with you and hope that it helps your business succeed. See you next time.