Introduction: Why AI Workflows Matter in Sales

Hi, everyone. I'm here today, as Drummond mentioned, to talk about sales workflows. Before I start, I wanted to share a couple of key things, which I hope help everyone in this room who's looking at these demos and our slides today and thinking, well, how is this possible for them?

A Non-Technical Perspective on Using AI

So I am from a non -technical sales background, and I am totally an AI enthusiast. So I love to use AI for various purposes.

Public Sentiment and the Rapid Growth of AI Tools

And I was at a conference recently this week, and according to Ipsos research, 42 % of Britons today agree that AI is having a positive impact on the world we live in. right? But 41 % of Britons disagreed in the same survey.

So I want to start off with a tiny bit of controversy here, just thinking, right, I think I can guess which camp most people in this room are in.

But just to say, in terms of the rise of AI as well, according to Ipsos data, there are now 18 million users of ChatGPT, right, compared with about 4 million when ChatGPT first got started.

And it was just a few months ago that I was at one of MindStone AI's events in Oxford. And I was saying to Drummond, well, the next time we meet, there might be some changes in terms of AI. And since the last time we met, there's actually the Manus AI platform, which I don't believe that anyone was talking about about three or four months ago. So if this gives everyone an indication, Manus was recently bought by Meta for a lot of money.

So, again, and the aim is not to emphasize the platforms, but the change and the shift that is happening right now in AI. But also, more importantly, how accessible AI is today to you and I, right, in terms of affordable, low -cost solutions to everyday problems.

Building an End-to-End Sales Outreach Workflow

So, in my own case, right, I'm a sales enthusiast and a salesperson, right? So, I set myself a mini task. Now, just to be clear, I have absolutely no coding experience and I'm not technical, right? 1But using Manus AI and the strengths that it has, I was able to essentially create myself a sales workflow and an automation in probably a couple of hours, right?

Right. So, again, however you want to use AI and whichever tools you choose to use, whether they're the most known ones or the up and coming ones. I think there's so much potential right now for you just to play and experiment.

What the Workflow Does (Research → Leads → Messaging)

And I know that we've looked at quite a lot of kind of slides today. So I wanted to start more with like the demo part of, you know, and show show everyone something. Right. So let's have a quick look at essentially what I built.

Right. Right. So this is oops.

Sorry, let me just. Right.

So this is a so in terms of a sales workflow. So I wanted something which was essentially going to search for companies that I might want to reach out to in cold outreach. And then I wanted it to recommend to me leads and contacts to reach out to. And then I wanted it to help me to create messaging via email.

So personalized messaging, good messaging. And so this is essentially what it created. And you can see that essentially it's sped up what could be a really manual process.

Live Demo: Search, CRM Integration, and Slack Notifications

So if I just click run demo here, you can all see this working in real time, right? So the different steps are that it's using Manus, first of all, and then it moves down to do a search, right?

It's doing the research. search, then essentially it's connected with my HubSpot, so my CRM, and then it's connected with my Slack as well.

So essentially it's just sent a Slack message with the lead detail so that I can follow up with them later. So why this is helpful is because essentially it's that all would have been different steps in different platforms and tools, right?

So this is a really neat, for me, really neat time -saving way for me to understand and prospect and again everything is working here from a trigger so the trigger is my search right so and I'm happy to take from the room as well like suggestions in terms

of key companies and contacts but really the aim of this so here I've got Jaguar Land Rover right as my company I've got head of marketing as a department that I I want to prospect. And then I'm just going to click search.

And it's just going to start live searching. And I mean, I think this is really neat in terms of how fast it's working. And also,

more importantly, how with virtually no effort on my part, right, it's able to do this. So again, my aim was to show you this to say, what would you all like to build with AI? And what would

you all like to create? Because actually, you may or you may not see yourself as a technical person. But today, whatever your use case and your interest, you know, you can really, really have fun with AI, more importantly, right?

Whether you want to create a fun app like we saw earlier, you know, with AirBLT, right? There's so many possibilities. And so, you know, I'd love to hear from the room if anyone has any kind of ideas, right, about how today they might want to use AI in a workflow.

Why Human Input Still Matters for Personalization

But essentially what this is doing is from end to end, it's helping me to research a company. It's helping me to get key contacts. And then it's helping me to create personalized messaging, which I can then refine. And you might say to me, well, there are platforms out there that do this, right?

But I can tell you, and I'm a sales expert, that essentially those platforms are not currently able to personalize to the level which actually is required today in prospecting. 1If everybody is relying on automation, in my view, it needs input from us, just like AI needs input from us in order to get the best prompts and the best output. it.

So again, what you can see on my screen is a little summary about the company. Then it's got some roles and some messaging. So this is kind of my starting point.

And then the final bit that I would do is when it comes through to my email, I would then, you know, kind of personalize it, add in some key points, right, and then send it off.

But it still helped me to get massively further in a process that used to take me, you know, maybe 30 minutes per company per lead. And this is a huge problem for the sales industry as well.

From Workflow to Story: Letting AI Explain and Package the Result

And also, just to say that the platform was then able, and again, with very little kind of input from me, to create a little advert about what it built, right?

Industry, growth signals, and recent activity. Phase three, it searches LinkedIn and Google for real contacts at that company by role or department and suggests the best people to reach out to.

Phase four, it drafts a hyper -personalized email for your chosen contact, ready to review and edit before you send. One click, the email goes via Gmail, Slack is notified, HubSpot logs the contact from lead to inbox in under a minute. That's Manu.

So the other really clever thing about AI and these platforms is their ability to explain, right, explain what they're doing or what they've done, right? So we can then, again, whether we're technical, whether we're not, right, be able to present our ideas like today,

right? Or maybe it's to help us to understand exactly, right, how it got to that result. results.

So I wanted to share that because I think to me it's phenomenal how fast things are moving and how many options we have today, right, with tools like these at our fingertips anytime we want to try them out and see what they can do for us.

The other thing I wanted to share as well is, I mean, so this is the interface. So again, we've seen some interfaces today and we've seen some AI agents. So I'm not going to kind of go into extensive detail on that.

Reusable Prompts for Pitches, Objections, and Marketing Content

But what I did want to, again, just live demo is where I have prompts, right? Prompts specific to pitching and sales pitches and business. So again, whatever your interest area, you might have your set of prompts and you might want to try these out, experiment and play with them, right?

So here I've got my prompt and I'm literally, again, I'm just going to tweak and adjust it for whatever business use case I have. So let's say my business is a real estate business selling apartments.

So the prompt is pre -written, but again, something really nice is how we can then personalize the outputs that we get from AI and really quickly just get to a quality output which helps us to go forward with whatever we're working on whatever we're brainstorming on so it's again it's ai as our co -pilot and for um enhancing um so this might

be maybe you're struggling with a sales pitch or maybe you're struggling with um for example does anyone have anything that right now they're struggling with like would be interested in in leveraging AI for? Does anyone wanna call out, share any idea? Yeah, go ahead.

Audience Use Case: Generating Promotional Videos

We have a service accommodation, we actually would like to make like promotional videos more to promote our company and the works that we are doing, but it's very limited right now, like especially the free version, which is six seconds, seven seconds to build the videos. So yeah, if we can leverage that more, I think it will help our business a lot,

Yeah, so like the example that I showed you, right? So to that point, right, this is a low cost paid platform, but now we might be paying, let's say we're paying 30 pounds a month, right? But the output we can get to and the difference in those models for the free versus the low cost pay can be really significant. So if you are interested to develop videos specific to your brand and business, yeah, Yeah, I would highly recommend, right, because, again, you can get to multiple, multiple outputs with the platform, and you can keep refining and adjusting it as well. And because now, with the way these are multimodal, right, so whether it's text, whether it's video, whether it's music, yeah, they are so much more advanced today.

Yeah, go ahead. The video you made was around one minute. Sure. Did you use Manus? I used Manus, yeah. I used Manus, exactly. Exactly.

So again, you can simply use a prompt just like I did just there. Right. And then so here it's given me, so I just put in a sales prompt and it's given me an investor review type. Right. It's given me some specific objections that I may receive if I were to pitch to investors from that prompt. So again, if I was wanted to prepare for an investor meeting, this would be a great way that I can, again, brainstorm, get some ideas, what might people ask me in that.

And similarly to you who wants to promote your business on video, right, you could leverage it to say, what are, you know, what are this type of business, right? What are they most interested in? And then you can say, create me a video with this and this and this element, you know, building that into your prompt and then saying you know my company name is this and so again with relatively little simple information you can then get to some video outputs which you could use multiple times right so so yeah that thank you for sharing that example because that's a perfect use case right of the kind of thing we can get to now right so um and so all we might need is you you know, is our platform, is our prompts, right? Here I have some example prompts that I've put together. And we can get to something really pretty decent to work with.

Making Outputs Unique Through Iteration and Brand Inputs

Now, the other thing that I wanted to demo, right? So who here has created or been interested to create a chatbot? Has anyone been interested? Oh, sorry. Yeah, of course. Go ahead. Go ahead. Yeah.

How do your businesses come up with the same video? So it looks like personalized. Very good question. Very good question.

So you could put in your logo, right? You could upload your logo. So just going back to the platform, there are ways now with these multimodal platforms that you can upload a photo.

You could also say things like, so you would have to add this into your prompt, but you could say things like, I want something really unique. Keep this confidential in terms of my output. So you could kind of prompt it in to say, create me something really different to other, what's your, what would be your business in this case?

A law firm. Okay. So I want, I want a video, which is a standout video for a law firm in Oxford, right? And I'd like it to be really distinct and different and please make it unique to my brand. Create three versions for me, Right. Create three video versions and then you can compare.

Right. Really nicely. You can say, OK, well, I quite like this one or maybe I like something a bit of that one and that one. Right. You can be like, I'll build it. So iterative is a key thing.

And just like the the demo dashboard. Right. That I put together is totally iterative. Right. So all the time I can build it, prompt it and just keep refining it until it's where I want it to be. And I think that's one of the biggest, you know, helps about AI as it is today. It's really, you can have so much input and really, really iterative, right?

So again, it may not be the first output is your favorite, but if you keep going with it, I mean, with this, right, I still need to work on certain aspects of this to, in terms of the lead connection, for example. but still I know that I've got a nice base here and it's doing a lot of the workflow that I want and then maybe I'm going to work on it a bit more so it's a little bit like with a car you know if you were like tinkering away right you can you can keep going and that's the other thing right because AI it's

learning and it's training on what you put in so in terms of your specific prompts and your company it's learning from you all the time so ideally it's kind of like we've got to use it we've got to we've got to like if that makes sense we want to experiment with it to get to better outputs and that's really what i'm wrecking you know if

ever i'm sure everyone here is interacting with ai in different ways but i would just say give it you know think think what you'd most like to get to and then approach it that way you know in terms of what what do i want to change in my marketing in my sales um you know and then let it help you to, you know, create suggestions and brainstorm.

So yeah, I would just say, yeah, definitely don't underestimate in that sense.

Chatbots in Practice: A Digital Concierge for Hospitality

And I know, yeah, I've got a couple more minutes, I believe. So I just wanted to share as well a chatbot, which, so this is in Zapier. So, but again, there's a number of different platforms that can help you all to create your own chatbot.

This chatbot was was created for a hotel. I was hired to create this for a hotel, right? Which wanted to create a boutique experience for its guests, a digital concierge, essentially.

So what you can see here is actually the backend, right? Because again, I don't want to just present slides to you. I want to show you, you know, the kind of nuts and bolts of it.

Designing the Chatbot: Greeting, Objectives, and Common Questions

And you can see here, right, that it can, you know, what you have here, you set your greeting, you set your objective for the chatbot. So, let's say you want your chatbot for your website, for customer service, for example.

I think, again, the use case for chatbots could be customer service FAQs, something like that that's likely to repeat, which you want to just have a quick way to direct people to. And that was exactly what this hotel wanted to do, right? They wanted to simply direct people to the chatbot so that their reception was not inundated with people. So then what you can see and how this works.

So essentially there's the greeting, which is all set up. There are some preset responses that people can simply click on. And these are ones that people might be likely

to ask at the hotel. For example, do you have an issue with your room access check -in? So someone could click that

Escalation Paths, Keywords, and Knowledge Bases

and it's a kind of triage, right? It's immediately going to ask for their name, email, and room number to essentially escalate that to a live person.

So with the chatbot, you can essentially program in keywords that when somebody says, you know, you want specific actions to happen. So all of that can be done.

And then you've got your knowledge base as well that the chatbot will be drawing from. So again, whatever you would like to set up with your chatbot, as long as you've got a knowledge base, a source it can reference, you can create this really, really quickly and really easily.

And so I just want to show you so I'll finish showing the kind of back end, then I'll just quickly show how it would look to someone just coming in.

Live Examples: EV Charging and Local Takeaway Recommendations

But let's say someone says, tell me where to charge my my electric car, right? So then it's just going to think about the request it's received, and it's going to reference the knowledge base. So that's what it's actually doing live while this is going on. And then in a moment, it's going to give the recommendation.

So it said, we don't have them, however, our team is happy to direct people, right? Right. So although that isn't the final answer that the user might want, it still gives them a next step. So they're not stuck and left wondering.

So another would be, let's say, for example, a lot of people staying in a hotel might want takeaways. So recommend me a local takeaway. So, I mean, again, the aim of this is just to show everyone how these can be set up.

this chatbot has an objective and then it's literally able to give people you know those it kind of signposts them to next steps so here it's got different options people can browse and select so yeah again yeah go ahead no it is on you

can see just down here so this is the back end so I can show you this right so

Model Choice, Creativity Controls, and Branding

you can actually have you can select in this platform and in other platforms too you can actually select normally your model. So this is actually from ChatGPT 4 .0 Mini. Yeah. So whichever platform you're using, you can typically just select a different one.

But yes, with these, you'll have kind of baked in options. So you can see it's kind of only got maybe one option. And that helps in a way to just kind of get to write your model. And then you can see here as well, you can also tweak and adjust the creativity. So if you want the AI to be more or less creative in its outputs, you can customize that and refine it. So, yes, hopefully, again, for everyone, this is just really, yeah, like just demonstrating again how simple.

And this is the mobile view and you can see those little logos. You can customize this with your own logo and branding, whatever your business might be or whatever your business idea might be as well. And that's kind of how it works.

So love to take any other questions that anyone has on either demo one or two.

Training, Testing, and Iteration Over Time

Yeah, that's a great question. So essentially, there was a lot of training. And so I met with the hotel team, the staff, in terms of what was the specific, right, what was the correct information?

What did they want to get to with their specific chatbot, right? What were they comfortable with? Because as you can imagine, with an in -person team, right, they were concerned perhaps the AI wouldn't be able to handle certain questions.

But essentially the rules, it has a rule system built in. And so if it doesn't know something, it would actually say, sorry, I don't know that. Can you check with the team?

But what we were able to get to was specific scenarios, which would come up where, and these would happen time and time again. So it's kind of built on specific scenarios and then a lot of training and testing around the specific questions and the knowledge base.

And And so we got to a point, this is about knowledge base three or four. So, again, it had to be updated, refined and added again to make sure that it was really comprehensive and including most of the scenarios.

So, yeah, that's really a bit like in the first talk that we heard where, you know, he was saying, right, to iterate and just, you know, test. So I would say with your chatbot and with anything, of course, that you're creating, do expect to test it out with the sales workflow that I've built. I've tested it quite a few times to see is it definitely giving the correct department, the correct role, still not quite there yet. So that's just an example.

I mean, I only built that on like Saturday. So and this chat bot it probably took about six weeks roughly Over just to refine and and fine -tune and test, but hopefully that gives you I mean compared to some projects I think that could be relatively fast in some ways, but yeah

Yes, great question so what they do have they can download and export the chats So it does save you have the option right you can save save and essentially store the chats. And then the hotel can essentially download and look at

the trends and what people are asking. So yes, the chats are like recordable. And I think that helps with, again, coming back to what we were saying about refining and enhancing as well.

Because you can also potentially see, did someone get frustrated where something wasn't addressed as quickly as it could have been, for example. Yeah. Yeah.

And I think that would be the case in most platforms right that you would use for that but certainly with zapier and chatbots there

Q&A: Differentiation in Sales When Everyone Uses AI

it's possible yes thanks again thanks very much um just going back to your first bit about manners yes um at the moment this is all a big i guess sales differentiator lots of people have stuff yes at some point it's going to be normal yes what do you see other differentiators in sales once

That's a really good question. Do you mean essentially that competition, there will be more competition because differentiation will be easier to do with AI or?

Well, I mean, yes. Once everyone is making videos and everyone is doing that. Yes. How does sales differentiate?

Yeah, that's a really good question. I think when everyone is doing it, there's still going to be, it's a bit like with songs and music, right?

You could say every single song exists. Why should I create music? But actually, there are still variations and versions of songs that you can create, which are original.

So I think the key thing is it changes the concept of originality as well, because often we've created something with an AI, right, which may not be entirely our own. So I think that's a really good question. Right.

I think differentiation is always going to be around how you specifically are better, as good as. Right. So essentially, it's going to be about benchmarking.

And so to a certain extent, if everybody gets better and is using AI more, actually, it makes the models better and it makes the outputs better and it makes the whole thing better. So I would I would argue that the more people that use AI and chat for sales purposes, the better it's going to get at sales messaging, which is phenomenal for everyone, because then it's going to have even better suggestions.

the messaging is going to, so right now, I think, as I mentioned, right, you may need to iterate and refine, but who knows what we might get to. So I would see it as a good thing, right, that the

models become more trained, because that's exactly how some of the biggest models like ChatGPT got so much better.

Quality Improves Over Time: The Spaghetti Video Analogy

And you've probably seen online some of the videos of, I mean, I've got on my social media. So I'm on Instagram and I have a video on there, which is someone eating, so it's Will Smith eating a bowl of spaghetti, right?

And it's comparing over time what that looked like. So about a year and a half ago, Will Smith eating a bowl of spaghetti was really quite clunky.

Now it's getting really smooth and it's getting harder and harder to actually differentiate and see the difference, you know, in terms of the quality.

So I'd like to think, like I say, that in terms of messaging and in terms of differentiation, that it's giving better suggestions, it's giving better outputs so that people can stand out.

Standing Out: Better Prompts, Confidentiality, and Avoiding Generic Copy

But I think coming back to the other question that was asked earlier, yes, businesses do need to keep in mind that other people have access to these tools.

And so including in your prompt, you know, keep this confidential. I want this to be be really unique for me, you know, aspects of that will be important so that you create something which is not just the same as everyone else.

And I think, you know, yeah, the more basic and simple your prompt, the more likely it is that your output is going to be generic. And therefore, you're not going to stand out.

Because I think we can all tell now with messaging and copy, right, where people have been on AI, and there's often still including emojis and things. So again, or with M -dashes, so it can be quite obvious now.

So, that would be important too, right? Make sure that it's not obviously just an AI output, that it's more advanced than that. Thank you.

Yes. . Well, yeah, I think that's a great point, right?

Right. So because we're just going to ads on ChatGPT. So there is now becoming this. So there's an advert piece.

I think you're right. Like in terms of how someone interacts with your end output. Yeah. At the moment, AI can't help us to do that.

We would need, you know, we would need our CRM. We would need something with tags to help us. But I'd like to think that we could get to that.

But yeah, does that. Sorry, I'm not sure if that was a question or a statement in terms of. But I think, yeah, the more that people are interacting with what you put out and the more, perhaps in a social media context, right, the equivalent would be to repost.

You know, if people are reposting, that would be a sign that they like something. I suppose with AI, perhaps we'll start having people will be, you know, using each other's, reusing the same prompts and then posting online to say, wow, this was such a good prompt that I got from XYZ. said, which I think has started to happen now, but coming back to the other point, it's early

stage. It's still like the early adopters who are maybe really standing out on that. But yeah,

Conclusion and Ways to Follow Up

thank you so much, everyone. And I hope you've enjoyed this mini walkthrough in terms of how I, like I say, this is how I personally have applied AI and use it for business, right?

And if for those who are interested as well in the topic and want to follow, right, I do have an Instagram specific to AI and do give me a follow on there that is a barcode and you can

also send me a DM if you would like my pitch prompts just DM with pitch or DM with tools I've also got a list of AI tools just several different ones which I'd be very happy to send out to everyone so yeah thank you so much everyone