AI for sales is one of the most common needs and SAAS solutions.
But this isn’t always a good thing.
If you start searching sites like cliffnotes.ai or theresanaiforthat.com, you can burn through hours or days of testing and only leave frustrated.
It’s hard to know what or who to trust.
Hopefully, we can help you today.
In The AI Strategy Playbook, (#11) I talk about how AI can be used to research and personalize messaging for prospecting. With ChatGPT, I explain simple prompts like entering a URL or PDF and asking for a personalized outreach message based on the company.
If you have only a few people to research this is an easy win. But if you’re running a larger campaign for a team you’ll want a system to process hundreds of thousands continually. That’s what I want to talk about today.
Now, before we get started let’s set some expectations.
My goal is to share tools and workflows you can build out yourself. ( if that’s your jam )
If you want something fully automated and done for you I can recommend some personally but it depends on your exact need. Message me directly or comment below and I’ll follow up.
Wait… I will mention one done-for-you solution.
Yes, it’s a biased recommendation :)
VAgents is a call center AI that qualifies leads – outbound or inbound. It benefits sales teams by becoming the first contact to ensure leads are ready for the next step and then transferring them to a closer. It’s not something you can build yourself but if you’re already using a BPO, this could be a good scaling solution.
Now, back to the core tools and tactics I want to cover.
Respell, Bardeen, and Clay
The main tools I’ll highlight are Respell, Bardeen, and Clay. (Though we’ll have a cameo from a few others).
Typically when you think about building automations or workflows, people go to Zapier, Make, or Pabbly. But there are unique advantages to these.
*Note: If you prefer video, I’m posting a short clip of me using these tools in real-life projects.
Zapier and Make have been around for a while. Others like Phantombuster, Pabbly, and possibly other no-code automation workflow builders are common in the marketing automation world. The thing that separates these newer tools is the inclusion of AI.
When I say inclusion, I mean the AI features are not something you have to separately connect and integrate. You don’t have to go through an API or login to ChatGPT to bring in generative AI features. Instead the tools I’m highlighting have it included. And that makes a big difference in speed and ease.
Let’s start with Respell.
Respell is the closest to Make and Zapier.
It also has the least amount of features and thus could be easiest to use.
See the screenshot below.
If you use Hubspot as your CRM or email platform, you can connect to Respell and instantly research any contact based on their email address.
Here is a sample of the output from running this for a real project.
The prompt in the spell will research the contact and their company based on the domain and come up with ideas to persuade the individual to start using AI in their business.
Note: You can use a free Hubspot and a free Respell account to test all this out.
To run this workflow for hundreds of emails, upload a .csv of emails and it will work on all of them. OR you can run it based on a trigger that you set, ie, a contact form or calendar event.
Again note, that you don’t have to log in to any API or external AI model to bring in the intelligence for scraping or summarizing the data. All the AI options are built-in.
A few modifications you can make to this are: (1) use Salesforce instead of Hubspot and (2) output the results in a Slack channel.
Next, let’s look at Bardeen
Bardeen reminds me of PhantomBuster. It brings a wide range of workflows and automation. Even better, the user interface can be powered by AI thus… you can allow AI to help you build the workflow that meets your needs.
My recent strategy was to take a LinkedIn group that I was already a member of and see if I could grab all the members’ profiles and then start an outreach campaign to them. With Bardeen, this was easier than I imagined. See below:
This worked extremely well.
I normally use Dripify to manage my LinkedIn campaigns, connections, messages, and follow-ups. So for this, I took the list from Bardeen and uploaded it to Dripify. With a group of 10,000 members, I could set this campaign up in 10 minutes and have it work on autopilot for the next 6 months. (you gotta be careful with LinkedIn automation – can’t send out too many per day)
Alternatively, you can do the same with all the comments from a LinkedIn post. So instead of scraping a group that may not be active, you can grab profiles who commented on a specific post. Your post or someone else's.
From their comment and the post, you have relevance for your connection request.
*This will probably be my next Linkedin strategy.
Lastly, I want to highlight Clay
I’ve been hearing about Clay for months but only recently tried to test it for a recent challenge. From the outset, it can look a bit techy and intimidating. But once you go through the 20-minute welcome video you can get the basics of using it.
As I’ve repeatedly mentioned, the key to all these tools is the AI that’s already built-in, combined with automation and workflows. Clay uniquely has a suite of tools that are included which makes its research and data enrichment very comprehensive.
Meaning, when I was looking up a prospect’s email, Clay leveraged multiple resources to scrape, enrich, and verify personal and business contact information. I was very impressed with its range of capabilities.
... to quote Clay and give more context …
Clay buys data from 50+ data providers in bulk, and passes the discounts from economies of scale on to their customers… both in terms of the price per unit of data, along with the fact that you don’t have to sign an annual agreement with Clay, and you get access to all of their data. This allows you to “waterfall” data providers, which essentially means checking one provider, and moving on to another provider if your first choice doesn't return the information you’re looking for.
Conclusions and Distinctions…
Clay can scrape data, and enrich… all can be exported as CSV, into a CRM, or into an email outreach sender like Instantly, Lemlist, or Mailshake.
Bardeen can similar scrape, but it engages with various social media sites, interact in WhatsApp, SMS, Slack, etc. Bardeen is also a Chrome Extension and thus can dynamically be pulled into various daily tasks and go to work instantly as an assistant.
Respell can do some scraping and some enrichment, but it also has a voice calling output and various audio (ai) summarization features.
Homework: Level Up Your AI Adoption
AI isn’t necessarily replacing jobs or people anytime soon.
But it is replacing tasks.
So if you want to level up your AI game, start keeping lists of the tasks you do to accomplish various projects. Then start taking time to think about how each task could be accelerated, augmented or replaced with AI.
Whether using a niche app, just ChatGPT, or a no-code workflow builder.
Eventually, you will have tangible experience and understanding.
You will have insights from use and become quicker to discover new uses.
So it takes action. Continually. And a bit of imagination but you’ll start advancing because of your personal understanding of how it benefits your day-to-day work.
Sound good? Cool.
That’s all I got for today.
If you enjoyed this, please share and consider supporting with an annual subscription.
Create a Great Day!
-ARVL
P.S.
I will be adding a behind-the-scenes video of me using these 3 tools over the weekend for monthly/annual subscribers.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to AI Workflows for Wealth by Arvell Craig to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.