Using AI to Drive Sales Relevance and Better Prospect ConversationsUsing AI to Drive Sales Relevance and Better Prospect Conversations

Using AI to Drive Sales Relevance and Better Prospect Conversations Transcript:

Jeff White: Welcome to The Kula Ring, a podcast for manufacturing marketers brought to you by Kula Partners. My name is Jeff White. Joining me today is Carman Pirie. Carman, how are you doing, sir?

Carman Pirie: I am happy to be here. Look, I don’t know when this episode is going to come out, Jeff, but we are recording it as 2025 winds down. And things are getting colder here to talk about the weather and be Canadian for a minute. But all in all, can’t complain. And you?

Jeff White:  Yeah, no, great. First of the snowy bicycle commutes. That was interesting. We’re getting into winter for sure.

Carman Pirie: And in addition to embracing winter, it should always be said that The Kula Ring Podcast is very interested in embracing AI and talking about AI and how it’s evolving both the marketing and sales process, and just continuing to dive in and explore, the impact of the technology and today’s guest, I guess no exception to that, Jeff.

Jeff White: Yeah. And I love this notion of really deepening your understanding of your prospects by AI, yeah. We’re not just using it for pumping out bad copy or weird art. We’re doing actually useful things with it, and I love that notion. Yeah, I’m excited to get into it and see where we can go here. So joining us today is Sam Richter. Sam is a Hall of Fame keynote speaker and an AI technology creator, among many other things. Welcome to The Kula Ring, Sam.

Sam Richter: Hey, thank you. It’s great to be with you.

Carman Pirie: Sam, thank you for joining us. I’ve gotta say, before we jump right into the AI, let’s talk about that speaking bit for a while. I’m assuming you didn’t just speak about AI since you’re a Hall of Fame speaker and AI has been a recent somewhat recent development.

Sam Richter: Yes and no. If we define AI the way it should be. It’s been around for more than 30 years, probably 40 or 50 years. So AI is machine learning.

Generative AI is what’s new. It’s the ChatGPT. So that’s been around for about three years. So I’ve been speaking about sales, primarily sales insight. So, how do you use technology to find information on others? So you can be highly relevant in sales calls for a long time. And because of that, I built… 20 years ago started building an AI-powered, so machine learning powered tools that help, for example, search, Google search, social media to gain insight on other people.

Carman Pirie: Really cool. And yes, I suppose you’re quite right. A guy who works with us here, at Kula, Jonathan, who did some of his graduate studies in AI, is fond of telling us AI is not new.

Jeff White: Guys, stop thinking. You just discovered this.

Carman Pirie: I think that that even deepens my interest because as we talk about the fact that you’ve been exploring how to make sales and the business of sales prospecting, basically a business of being more relevant via having better insights.

You’ve seen how the technology is impacting that. And so I guess let’s jump into that. First things first. It seems to me that all these changes are happening, and so many of the benefits of technology to power sales insights still haven’t been harnessed by sales teams yet. Even if we’re talking about the technology that was available three years ago, would you tend to agree with that?

Sam Richter:  Yeah, I do. And it’s interesting, this concept of being relevant or understanding or insight isn’t anything new. We can go back to the 1920s and Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People.

It’s really all about understanding what the other person cares about, and the sales aspect of that is, can you help the other person get what they care about more efficiently, effectively, profitably than they might be able to do on their own? Or are you alleviating the fear of them not getting it? More efficiently, more effectively, profitably than they can do on their own.

So it’s not anything new. And what I’ve seen happen over the years is that for salespeople, the ability or the willingness, maybe, to do homework has actually decreased. So, for example, before the internet came out, maybe before Google came out. 28 years ago, salespeople would take prospects out for two-hour lunches.

Now, prospects were willing to go on a two-hour lunch ’cause they knew nothing about us, and so we would learn about each other and not need it. Nowadays, nobody takes two-hour lunches. Very few people even eat lunch anymore, but that level of understanding still has to be there. And the reason prospects won’t even allow us to take ’em out for a two-hour lunch, besides the fact that they can’t do it, is they think that they already know everything there is to know about us, right?

They’ve Googled us, the seller, our company, our solutions, or they wouldn’t be talking to us. Now we get 20 minutes over a five-inch screen like we’re doing today over Zoom, but yet as salespeople, what has happened I found is that we’ve gone away from relevance and doing our homework to being very data driven.

How many calls are you making? What percentage of those people are doing what we want them to do? What percentage of those people do we close? What’s the average order size? How many people click on our links? How many people visit our websites? Open rates, click-through rates, and there’s nothing wrong with all of that.

But what it’s caused is salespeople to have less time to do their homework, which is weird at a time when we have every word ever printed in human history in a device that fits in our pocket. So it’s actually really easy to do. We don’t do it because salespeople feel like they don’t have the time, or it’s not necessary.

Jeff White: I really like this idea that you mentioned that the buyer already knows a whole bunch about us, we’ve been producing. They think they do. At least they think they do. And at least they have some information. We’re. Doing some regular research here and finding this as a common occurrence is that people are being put on a shortlist before the seller even knows that the prospect exists.

If in a world like that, where someone is coming to you, what kind of information do these salespeople who don’t like to spend a lot of time doing the research, how do they get to the stuff that they need? Like how. Find that.

Sam Richter: Yeah, I think simple. Actually, the easiest thing to do is type in the company’s name in Google, not in ChatGPT, but in Google.

Put the company name within quotation marks. So you treat that like a single entity. And then that’s important, especially for company names. That might be a common name. And then on the results page, that’s fine. You’re gonna go look at their website. That’s Google. Preschool, of course, you’re gonna do that.

But then click on the Google Results page, click on the news tab, and just pull up news articles about the other company, what’s going on in their world. Another tool you can use is a tool I’ve developed, it’s called You Got Intel, Y-O-U-G-O-T-I-N-T-E l.com. It’s completely free. And there are a number of resources.

One of them is that you got the news. So go in there and type in the company name. Now, in my tools, you don’t have to type in quotation marks or anything. That’s where the AI, the machine learning, comes in handy. You’re not required to know complex Boolean queries, but the same thing, and you got the news.

Just type in the company name, maybe a word, whatever you want. And on the results page, you can click on Google News or on extended news. Now, extended news covers news articles that Google might miss. Things like local newspapers, trade journals, social media posts, those sorts of things. But either one and get something that’s going on in the other person’s world.

That’s the easiest thing. Because the reality is, we’ve all been taught value-based selling and all those sorts of selling tactics and strategies, and those are all great. But the reality is your buyers are amazingly passionate about one thing. And that’s themselves. So doesn’t it make sense that the first words out of our mouth in any meeting or any email, or Zoom call, or LinkedIn should be about them?

Hey, I saw that. Hey, congratulations on that. Can you tell me more about it, because the reality is, when you talk about them first, you start to break down the brick wall. That’s always there between buyer and seller. You show that you care, and then that gives you. I like to say the word permission to ask those more challenging questions, but if you walk in and the first words outta your mouth are, Tell me about yourself.

It’s what are you doing? What’s keeping you up at night? You don’t have permission to ask that question.

Carman Pirie: And so often I got a lot to unpack here from a question perspective because part of me is you’re talking about the two-hour lunch with the prospect as being when you used to do homework.

And I’m thinking, I don’t know if salespeople thought about that as the homework so much as they thought that was the selling. That was the real deal, and now they’re no longer able to do that. I don’t know that they view the desktop research homework that can be done as a suitable replacement.

And then of course, to your point, you just can’t ask people, Hey, what am I? What keeps you up at night? You haven’t earned the right to ask that. Yeah. In many cases, the salespeople are looking for these insights so that they can. Try to find a way to earn the right to say anything at all, because very often it’s gonna be an email or a LinkedIn InMail or an invitation where they’re going to be dispatching first to that prospect.

Yeah. So I, I guess it just, I. Seems to me to be such a different world from that two-hour lunch scenario, which arguably I’m probably more suited to. But when you, I guess when you think about that, what are the types of insights that you see as being? The real things that are the door openers that actually get you into that conversation, that work in this digital-first prospecting reality that most salespeople the

Sam Richter: The first one would be something that’s going on at the company, a merger or an acquisition.

They landed a new client, and they’ve relocated their company. They’re launching a new product, something relevant to them. Now, we sometimes can’t find that right. And so the next one might be an industry. Hey, I saw that. Or did you read about, or did you see the most recent research report, even things, current news, how are tariffs impacting you in your business as a manufacturer?

Just general conversation. Now, other things as well might be personal information. So, for example. I think it’s pretty obvious, yet most people don’t do it. If you’re meeting with someone, go to their LinkedIn profile, right? Visit their LinkedIn profile, scroll down to the bottom. See something that might be interesting where they went to school.

Hey, maybe they played Division one basketball in school. Mention that. Hey, before we get into our meeting, I want you to know, I looked at your LinkedIn profile, and I couldn’t help but notice that you played division one basketball at Iowa State. Wow. That’s so cool. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

It just shows that you did your homework. It’s what you would’ve done in the two-hour lunch. You’re just compressing it.

Jeff White: Don’t creep their Instagram profile, though.

Sam Richter: It’s ah, yes, and no.

Jeff White: I know

Sam Richter: creep it, but don’t just because, and this is, I think, really important. Just because you have information doesn’t need doesn’t mean that you have to share that you have the information.

Yeah, but you can use it to ask a better question. So, for example, if you are on somebody’s Instagram profile and they just posted yesterday that they got home from a two-week trip to Europe, you probably don’t bring that up. But you might use it to ask a really good question.

During the small talk part of your conversation, Hey, have you done anything cool recently? Do you have any vacation plans? They’re gonna say I just got back from Europe. You already know the answer to that question. And then you think about the time that you went to Europe, and you think about something you really enjoyed.

And so you might say, yeah, you know what? I went to Europe two years ago. One of my favorite cities was Venice. Did you happen to go there? You might already even know the answer to that question because you looked at their Instagram profile. So just because you have information doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to be a stalker and show how smart you are that you have the information.

Use it to ask better questions.

Carman Pirie: Sam, I’d be remiss if I didn’t try to probe this. Any regular listener to the podcast knows that I love to make fun of salespeople who try to leverage exclusively personal relationships in the business context. So I’ve noticed that you, I noticed that you seem to be very deliberate in your ordering of the information there.

You went from company to industry to current news, then to personal. I guess it was that intentional? And how have you seen that change over the years in terms of how you ought to be ordering that priority?

Sam Richter:  First off, I think you’re gonna agree with me based on your last statement.

I don’t believe in business relationships. I don’t believe in personal relationships from a business perspective. Now, does that mean you can’t ultimately become friends with a client? Of course it does. Friends with a customer, of course, it does. But I’ll just give you an example. I’ll use a personal example, right?

I have a financial advisor. I have a guy who does my HVAC. I have a guy who does my sprinkler service every year, right? I’ve been working with these people for 10, 15, 20 years. I have no idea if they’re married. I have no idea if they’re kids. I have no idea where they went to school. I have no idea what they like to do.

I have no idea if they have pets. In no offense to them, I don’t care. Now, do I expect them to know some of that information about me? Absolutely. Do I expect my financial advisor to know if I have kids and what my kids do and what my wife does and what’s important to us? Yeah. I, yes, of course. So the word CI always like to say in my presentations, we talk about CRM, customer relationship management.

And when you think about that, we give bonuses for people on the C of CRM, is customer, right? Hey, if you can increase our rates or decrease our average time spent on customer service calls, you’re gonna get a bonus. M is management. So a lot of companies use their CRM system. Either to integrate with ERP or even within the CRM system, automate business processes.

You onboard a new client, and you click a box, and you hold down the menu, and business rules get implemented, and we give our tech people a bonus for doing that. Show of hands, do all of our listeners today how many of you ever received a bonus for having a relationship? What does it even mean based on what we were talking about?

See, I think CRM should stand for customer relevance management because I don’t want my, I don’t, it’s not that I don’t want, I don’t need to have a relationship in, and I know I’m playing semantics here. The traditional explanation of a relationship is that we know about each other equally.

I don’t need that with people who sell me stuff, but I need relevance. I absolutely need my sprinkler guy to know that I have two dogs, because I don’t want him to get bitten. But but so it’s relevance, it’s not relationships.

Carman Pirie: That’s really, I love this notion that you’re shaking the listener here, saying the personal doesn’t have to be reciprocal.

Sam Richter: No.

Carman Pirie: Which,

Sam Richter: Unless there’s something in common. For example, using my example, let’s say pretend that I played basketball at Iowa State, which would be impossible unless they played on an eight-foot hoop, then I’d be okay. But let’s say I played basketball at Iowa State, and I go on somebody’s LinkedIn profile, and I see that they played basketball, or even if I played basketball at a different school, I could say, Hey, I see that you play basketball at Iowa State.

I played it at Missouri State. I don’t think we played at the same time, do you know so and so, that’s where I think it’s okay. When you bring it up right away, personal first, ’cause you’re connecting with somebody based on something you know, they care about.

Jeff White: Is the old adage that people do business with people they like?

Sam Richter: course.

Jeff White: Of course they do. Yeah. Of course, I think a big part of that is finding some way to have a personal connection, even if it’s just a surface that allows you to go further. It gives, gives you the ability and, the reason to go further. Yeah.

Sam Richter: And it’s not a technique. It’s not a strategy, it’s being human. The reality is this: the vendor sales relationship, I think it’s gotten worse over the years because so many people are bad at it. And so oftentimes, if not all the time, there’s that, and I mentioned this earlier, a brick wall that’s between the two people, even though we’re on Zoom right now. If I were trying to sell you something, there’s a brick wall, that you’re like, what is this guy gonna con me into?

And if I start talking about me. If I start going into my PowerPoint presentation, you don’t care. So I’ve gotta do something to break down the brick wall. Sales is pretty simple, right? When you really drill down to it, it’s really based on a concept. And I learned this through an organization I work with called the Summit Group, but it’s called US Fit Proof.

Tell me about them. Tell me about us. What are our solutions? Is there a fit? Have you done it for other people? And. Probably, what’s becoming more and more important is the them part. Matter of fact, the people at Summit call me the them engine. It’s what do they care about?

Carman Pirie: You mentioned that CRM should really stand for customer relevance management, and I just think that’s a really powerful lens to look through, sales enablement investments and programs, and things of that sort. Sure. Just so many people would look at that as saying, this is a way for us getting our product information or solution information out.

But, probably, more importantly, it’s about tailoring your messaging to make it more relevant to those specific prospects at those specific times.

Sam Richter: It’s not, listen, the relevance part of the CRM is the most important. Why? Because I, you wanna make sure, first of all, first and foremost, again, following the that must fit proof model.

Are you selling something? Are you presenting something? Are you providing a solution that they actually want, need, and will work for them? It doesn’t mean any good to pitch. If I come out with a brand new product that might be, yeah, I’ll use AI as an example. Let’s say I come out with a brand new product that leverages chat, GPT, and I talk for 15 minutes about how amazing this is.

And it’s great, and it’s incredible, and I don’t shut up. And then when I finally do pause, the prospect says that sounds really cool. However, at our company, we’re restricted to using Copilot for security reasons. That’s a simple example, but that’s a relevant example. And how you would find that out is, you might say, let’s say it’s a financial services company or a company that is has HIPAA in the United States, there’s certain laws you might say, Hey, a lot of other companies I’ve worked with in financial services, although they’d love to use chat, GPT are restricted from using that because of security reasons.

They’re restricted to using Copilot today. Is that an issue for your organization? So just something simple like that, without just launching into what you do.

Carman Pirie: It’s about not making the first 15 minutes about you is pretty helpful in that example.

Jeff White: Maybe the most important part.

Sam Richter: Yeah.

And let’s be clear, everything I’m talking about is much more on the sale, right? If you’ve got an existing client or a prospect that just needs to order a part, fine, great. And frankly, you should be leveraging AI to automate a lot of that type of selling. This is much more on the complex side, or once they become a client and or a customer.

They’re continually ordering some parts. It might be worth doing some homework to find out, geez, they’re ordering this part. Let’s learn a little bit more about this company and what they do, because there’s probably a lot of cross-sell and upsell opportunities we’re leaving on the table in that.

Carman Pirie: complex sale and leveraging AI to either speed along, make it more efficient, more effective, what have you.

What are the guardrails that come immediately to mind for you were times when you’ve seen the use of the tool? Maybe go a little awry.

Sam Richter: First off, don’t use, and I mentioned this before, but I’ll mention it again. Don’t use what you find as fact. Use it to ask a better question because not only can AI be wrong, but Google can be wrong.

So I was doing some research, and I saw that X is true. They might say, Oh my gosh, I get that all the time. There’s another guy who’s also in our industry who’s got the same name. That’s the other guy. So you don’t state it, you don’t use it to state facts use it to ask a better question.

The other part of AI, yes, you can use it to speed things up. Certainly. But you have to write a really good prompt so it doesn’t hallucinate. And there are some; there’s a framework I use for building a prompt, but you have to use a really good prompt or third-party tools. I built a number of tools that have about a thousand-word prompt underneath them, so you don’t have to type that in.

But understanding how to use generative AI and even Google is really important. The problem. With really powerful technology like Google, like LinkedIn, like generative AI is the power of it is intuitive. We don’t have to read a manual. We can fire up and use Google. We can fire up and use ChatGPT.

The problem with really good technology is it’s intuitive, and so you really don’t learn, as I like to say, the good stuff, and oftentimes the good stuff is the really important part. So you don’t mess it up. I’m saying that these tools are also very smart. So doing some homework is certainly doing better.

You’re certainly gonna do better than nothing.

Jeff White: I’ve always said that having good Google FU is among the best possible skills to have. But going to one of your earlier points. One of the things you’re just saying is that these things are intuitive. They’re easy to use, they’re right there.

We don’t have to really learn how to use them. We’re probably already using them somewhat proficiently off the top, but how do you get sales team members who don’t want to do that kind of research to do it, and to actually care enough to do that research before they just reach out blindly?

Sam Richter: My experience is that salespeople will do what they’re bonused on. How do you do that? As an example, I’ve worked with sales teams, and I’ve said, Look a let’s say, do you have, do you have a Friday sales meeting? Sure. Where you all get around the room? Sure. Okay. Very simple thing to start changing activity and start training.

You go around the room. Like right now, you go around the room, Joe, what are you working on? Sally? What are you working on? What’s the percent? How are we moving them through the pipeline? Are they gonna close? Ask one additional question. And that is, tell me one thing about that customer that our competitors don’t know.

And you’ll watch that first sales meeting on how everyone will probably remain silent, but by the second or third, everyone will have something, and it gets fun. And in fact. Even for smaller sales teams in particular, you’re like, okay, we know that Joe’s working on this big account. This is huge for the company.

Here’s what he knows about them. Let’s brainstorm ideas on how we might use that information to build some relevance to close a deal. We’re starting to make it fun. And then what I said earlier, I’ve had some sales managers who have said is if the notes about that. Tell me something about the customer that our competitors don’t know, or tell me something that’s relevant if that’s not in your notes field.

In the CRM, the meeting never happened. Hey, I closed this deal. When do I get my commission? I was looking at the CRM. It’s pretty empty. I don’t think it ever happened. You watch how quickly activity changes.

Carman Pirie: If you know that answer, salespeople will do what they’re compensated for is what they should.

It’s timeless. Yes, exactly. No, you build an entire function that is based on all of their behavior on incentives, and then you scoot around and scratch your head. Wonder what you could do to encourage them.

Sam Richter: But lemme ask you this question because. How many times do sales managers coach salespeople?

You’re not using CRM correctly. What you’re in the stage of activity is incorrect. You’re not putting enough of this, you’re not doing, and it drives salespeople nuts because they intuitively know who cares. Do I, are we really, does it really matter that 32% of our prospects are in the.

Opening something stage of our sales call. Is that really now the answer might be yes. It is really important because you are inputting the data; the downstream effect of not putting it in correctly is that we’re not allowed to. We’re not able to; we’re projecting our business, we’re a publicly traded company.

We need to be able to have accurate projections on where we’re going. Okay. If there’s a reason for it, fine, then track it. But to me, salespeople don’t mind tracking and inputting data they know that will actually help them close the deal.

Carman Pirie: I’m just I’m almost outta loss of where to go with this conversation without opening up another half hour of dialogue, Sam, to be honest, because I really do think that.

Yes. All these tools to learn more about your prospects and to get more sales insight. They’re all there. And if people choose to leverage them, they can certainly know more than their competitors can because their competitors are just going to be lazy and not do it. And to your point.

Using, I think the guidance to use that research to ask better questions rather than just surface it to make it look like you’re smart and to do the, and did your homework. Yeah. That is just impeccable that, if you, if folks listening, if you take one thing from this episode, I would suggest that it is?

Sam Richter: Everybody’s, we’ve all read sales books or sales training courses, right on, you gotta ask questions, and everyone nods their heads, oh, gotta ask questions. And as I like to say, getting back to that word, you don’t have permission to ask questions. You don’t unless you open up with something that you know they care about.

Now, that can be personal. That can be business, and an expert salesperson will be able to read the room. Some people, when they’re sitting there with their arms crossed, don’t go personal on ’em. You start out with a business question. Now, if they ask you, Hey, if the first words out of their mouth are, How was your weekend?

What’d you do for the holidays? What are your upcoming plans for the holidays? They’re giving you permission to go a little bit personal.

Jeff White: I think one of the things that’s also pretty interesting about it, and here, Kula, we have a multi-conversation sales process that goes deeper and deeper before we get to the.

Towards the close, but it’s almost like you actually have permission to do even more in different research at each stage of those calls. So the first one is going to be much broader, and then after you’ve had one conversation, you can perhaps look a little bit deeper at it. Dive a little bit more tightly into the industry category and what’s happening there, and get a better understanding of it through a lot of these AI tools and use that to shape up the next conversation and questions you ask.

But are there a specific kind of, do you, when you think about this, do you think about specific tools at specific stages of a sales process, or is it all just based on how that? How is that flowing?

Sam Richter: Yeah. It’s less about the tools and more about, I think you’re right, how it’s flowing or what stage of the conversation it is.

Yeah. Again, I’ll self-promote here a little bit if that’s okay. I built some tools that go pretty deep. Like, I built a personality analysis tool that will tell me exactly how to communicate with that person, and it’s scary, accurate. Now, do I need to do that on, on, as a professional speaker when I’m speaking with a meeting planner?

Who’s reached out or I’ve reached out to them, and I’m, they’re looking to hire me. Do I need to know their personality on that initial call? No, that’s a little silly. However, if I’m a finalist for a very large conference and there are three other speakers who are really good, and I have the opportunity, they’d like me to speak with the CEO, am I gonna learn what type of language is going to resonate with that CEO?

Yeah, you bet. I am. There, there are some times that are, I think it’s less what tool am I going to use in a specific situation, but more the amount or the depth of homework I’m going to do based on where I am in the state, in the sales process. So, for example, if I’m. If I’m again a finalist for a large account, I might do some research on that company’s competitors, not my competitors, their competitors.

I might do more industry research here. Here are some trends that we’re seeing, and that’s where tools like, for example, if you ask for a tool, perplexity could come in really handy. Just go in and say, Give me a detailed analysis. Write a prompt. So today you are one of the world’s expert business researchers.

Give it a goal. Or I am, you’d say I’m a salesperson. I’ll be meeting with Widget Corporation. They’re in the thermoplastics injection molding industry. Please give me, an analysis on likely trends and issues that are going to impact the thermoplastics injection molding industry. In 2026, and you get a, the reason I mentioned perplexity is I like to say perplexity.

When you do something like that, you get a 70% of a Harvard Business PhD research report in three minutes five minutes. But so that’s where, again, I think it’s worth the situation, more of the situation than who you’re meeting with or when you’re meeting with them.

Carman Pirie: Sam, this has been a fascinating conversation.

I’ve really enjoyed just peeling back the sales process with you a little bit and talking about the areas where AI can help, and just thinking about how you’ve seen it come to life and how sales teams have interacted with it and changed the process as a result. This has been very helpful.

Sam Richter: Yeah, thank you. And I’m not an expert in what it would be like. Handling objections and things like that, there are expert salespeople who can tell you exactly what to do and what to say along with the sales process. What I believe is that whatever process you use, or system you use, or technology you use, the more you know about the other person, the more you’ll differentiate from your competition, and I believe the more successful you’ll be.

And again, whatever sales process you happen to use, if I boil it back up to them, us fit proof. The US Yeah. You gotta know your product. The proof. Yeah. You have, you helped other people achieve their goals similar to what you’re pitching to the prospect? The fit. That’s pretty obvious. Do you have something that will benefit them?

But none of it works without understanding the them part.

Jeff White: Pretty great.