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Unlocking AI for Sales Enablement, with Jen Allen-Knuth

July 13, 2024
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Jen Allen has spent nearly two decades honing her expertise in the art of selling. As the founder of DemandJen, a renowned sales strategist, and a sought-after keynote speaker, she's intimately familiar with the challenges modern sales teams face in cutting through the noise and engaging prospects effectively.

In a recent conversation, Jen and I explored the potential of AI to revolutionize sales workflows and supercharge "GTM Velocity" - the result you get when you harness AI to streamline and accelerate your go-to-market efforts.

AI: The Secret for Hyper-Personalized Prospecting

One of the biggest hurdles sales reps encounter is crafting personalized, compelling outreach that resonates with prospects. Manually researching each account's unique challenges, growth initiatives, and key players is a painstaking process that eats into valuable selling time.

This is where "GTM AI" (go-to-market AI) can be a game-changer. As Jen discovered during our conversation, AI can quickly synthesize highly specific and relevant insights about a prospect's business:

"I was getting these very generic answers like 'company is trying to drive growth' and 'Company is trying to manage cost.' I'm like, that's every company - nothing about that is unique. The specificity in these answers is why I spend the time normally manually doing it, and this is infinitely faster than if I were to do it on my own."

Supercharge Account Research and Prospecting

By tapping into AI's ability to scour vast data sources and extract tailored insights, sales reps can gain a profound understanding of each prospect's unique situation in a fraction of the time.

This empowers them to spend more time actually selling rather than researching. As a result, your reps will actually keep their CRM clean: 

"I don't think I've ever seen a Salesforce contact record that was that filled out. Usually, it's like 'VP of Sales, not sure.' Like that's wild, and if I'm thinking about someone who is new to an organization, who's trying to understand business acumen, who's trying to understand the product they're selling, the person they're selling to... this solves for a much bigger problem, which is a lot of SDRs just by virtue of the organizations they join, they never get that kind of insight into their buyers, and this makes it inexcusable not to have it."

It's not that sales reps don't want to organize their accounts, but there's simply too much to get done throughout the day to do it consistently.

Craft Hyper-Personalized Outreach

Armed with new and rich insights, AI can then generate highly personalized cold emails and outreach messaging that speaks directly to a prospect's pain points, goals, and initiatives - a far cry from generic, templated messages that get ignored.

Here was Jen's reaction to when Kyle showed the live workflow demo:

"I was full-on expecting you to show me a cold email, and then for me to vomit in my mouth a little bit and have to struggle with how do I tell the amazing Kyle Coleman I don't like it. I am most surprised by that. Like, the quality of that is beyond - I would still edit it probably a little bit by hand, that's okay because I'm saving time on the back end, but I'm also really surprised at the specificity of the account research that I was not expecting."

This level of personalization can significantly boost response and engagement rates, helping sales reps truly "earn their time" with prospects, as Jen puts it.

Seamless Integration into Existing Workflows

Perhaps most crucially, AI can be seamlessly integrated into the very sales tools and workflows reps already use daily, like CRMs and sales engagement platforms. This eliminates the dreaded "GTM Bloat" - the accumulation of inefficiencies that have hit go-to-market teams over the past 5-10 years as they've adopted more and more disconnected point solutions.

"I'm already losing a lot of time... Cory's stat - sellers spend 9% of their time just logging into and out of apps and waiting for screens to load. Stop it, stop that's madness! All of these apps and all this tech is designed to increase efficiency. Where is the promise if I'm spending 9% of my time logging in?"

By embedding AI capabilities natively within the tools sales reps live in, rather than forcing them to learn and adopt yet another standalone app, you remove adoption friction and empower them to leverage AI's power where they already work.

How to Implement This Advice

Integrating "GTM AI" into your sales processes is easier than you might think. Tools like Copy.ai's new GTM AI platform seamlessly embed AI-powered capabilities for hyper-personalized outreach, account research, and more directly into the CRMs, sales engagement tools, and other workflows your team already uses.

With just a few clicks, your reps can instantly generate highly tailored email drafts, prospect bios, call scripts, and other sales assets infused with rich account insights and compelling positioning - no more switching between a dozen different apps and data sources.

The benefits of freeing your team from tedious, repetitive research and drafting tasks are immense:

  • Skyrocket productivity by reclaiming hours each week for actual selling
  • Increase conversion rates with hyper-relevant, personalized messaging
  • Accelerate sales velocity and deal cycles
  • Enhance sales coaching and onboarding with AI-powered knowledge sharing

In short, "GTM AI" empowers your sales team to work smarter, not harder - delivering the right message to the right prospect at the right time, every time.

The Future of Selling is AI-Augmented

As Jen's enthusiastic reaction illustrates, AI is poised to fundamentally transform how sales teams operate. By offloading the tedious research and drafting work to an AI assistant while preserving the crucial human elements of selling, reps can unlock unprecedented productivity and personalization.

"I think I will probably always have a part of me that's like 'I'll trust, but verify,' and there needs to be a human in the process. But if I think of this as ingredients, and then I can go out and verify... I am totally willing to lean on something like this if it saves me those minutes so I can then use that time to bring my voice, my own point of view into that message."

The age of AI-augmented selling is dawning. Those who embrace tools like "GTM AI" won't just keep pace with the competition - they'll leave it in the dust.

Want to learn more about GTM AI?

Speakers

Kyle Coleman
host
Chief Marketing Officer, Copy.ai
Jen Allen-Knuth
Founder of DemandJen

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