How AI Can Give Sales Superpowers with Lars Nilson #256

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a topic near and dear to my Sales Babble heart. Most AI conversations center around the great possibilities that it brings to the world. Good examples in selling includes processes that automate, save time, increase quality. This includes ways to decrease frustration with more automated and intuitive software. But AI conversations can also center around the darker side. By that it means concerns of automation taking away our jobs and our humanity. In this Sales Babble sales podcast episode we meet Lars Nilson. Lars wrote an article on LinkedIn titled “Will AI Replace Sales Development, NO but it will give us Superpowers”. Because of the concerns and interest of AI, Lars and I discuss emerging tools and processes that you can use to become more successful in sales.

Good Time To Get Into Sales

Its not B2B it’s P2P, people to people. Because of this Lars believes it’s never been a better time to get into sales at a venture backed B2B company. If you pick a company with great management, great onboarding and a set of great selling techniques, you can be successful.

Account Based Selling

Account–based selling is a multi-touch, multi-channel strategy coordinated across the entire company to pursue a target number of high-value accounts. Marketing and Sales work together from the very start, and throughout the revenue cycle. Because prospective buyers take themselves down the sales cycle by accessing information online, sellers need to target individuals (stakeholders) who make buying decisions. Next target specific companies and a person which counters the past practice of branding and sending out messages to random people. We now consider that spam.

Tools to Target Opportunities

Lars mentioned a number of sales engagement tools that provide sales superpowers for sales reps. These tools use AI to target ideal accounts:

Discover.org
Zoom.info
LinkedIn navigator
Outreach.io
Salesloft
Insidesales.com
Outreach.io
Gong.io

These tools can be used to do a one to many (1:M) cardinality of outreach. Meanwhile the goal of each of these tools is to personalize and automate your:

messages
emails
voice messages
direct mail
social media

Because humans are still needed to make it all work, one of the best sales superpowers is the old fashioned warm introduction curated out of LinkedIn. LinkedIn is still one the best ways meet people and yes it used AI too. Next find people that have the titles who might best represent your company. Humans are necessary here! You have to do the work to find your ideal clients and the titles of the people that are relevant.

The CRM is still a solid technology to keep sales reps organized. They leverage read receipts on email and chatbots. Lars recommends that sales reps also turn to the tools leveraged by LDRs and SDRs. The more they work in an account-based selling environment, the better.

How To Find Lars Nilsson

Lars mentioned his company Sales Source

(415) 840-5168
lars at salessource.com

This was the LinkedIn article we talked about. “Will AI Replace Sales Development? No… But It Will Give Us Superpowers”

Sales Tools Boost Productivity

Here are some past Sales Babble sales podcast episodes on sales tool that make a difference.