My Secret to AI Sales

Hi Non-Techies,

Today I’m sharing something that, previously, I’ve only ever shared with clients and my AI Academy members*.

It’s a breakdown of how I generated $75m in sales pipeline using one $50/pm AI tool and a lot of human help. At the time, Microsoft called it “the most intelligent version of this type of campaign we’ve ever seen”.

Whilst I bloody love that testimonial, I reckon I could do a better, more efficient job if I needed to do it today. So I’ll also be talking you through the tools you can use right now to do it yourself.

If you’re in the business of new business (aren’t we all??), find yourself a comfy chair and invest the next three minutes into this email. I’ll do my best to give you a decent ROI.

*By the way, my AI Academy is getting overhauled next week. I know I would say this, but it’s going to be more valuable than ever for members. I’ll share more details soon.

Traditional personalisation vs Hyperpersonalisation.

Salespeople used to group potential customers into cohorts. Plenty of them still do. Stuff like location, industry, job title and the problems they might be facing.

Traditional: This list includes US-based marketers who don’t have the time to learn a new piece of software. I’ll send them an email that reassures them it’s quick and easy, and I’ll be sure to use words like “garbage” instead of “rubbish” because they’re American.

But now we live in an age of hyperpersonalisation. We’re able to be way more targeted with our outreach because we have tools that can help us find individual data.

Hyper: Sandra is a marketing executive living in Manhattan. She’s only two months into a new role, and it was her birthday last week. Maybe I’ll send her some cookies.

Here’s a slide that is absolutely, 100% not stolen directly from a deck I present to clients:

How I did it (pre-ChatGPT).

ChatGPT isn’t even out of nappies (or diapers, if you’re outside the UK) yet, but it’s already hard to remember life before it.

Still, there was a life before it, and there were plenty of AI tools back then too. One of them was an amazing tool called Crystal Knows (it looks like it’s rebranded to Crystal now).

It gathered all the digital breadcrumbs of prospects on LinkedIn and turned them into a scarily accurate loaf of info.

Here’s what the process looked like:

As you can see, there was still a fair bit of manual labour here. Crystal is only one part of this process, and the other stuff - researching, writing the outreach, editing it and sending it - was all done by humans.

How you can do it now.

These days, there are even more AI tools to enhance nearly the entire process:

Clay - An incredible tool for building prospect lists (warning: it ain’t cheap).

Humantic - Like Crystal but cheaper.

Perplexity - For the company-focused research.

Claude - For the copywriting.

A human - Yes, I still want a human to double-check my outreach and hit the “send” button.

For bonus points, throw in Lead Magnet Larry. Those of you familiar with the Tolkien-esque AI For Non-Techies lore will already know Larry from this newsletter. Feed him the findings from Perplexity and Humantic, and, provided it isn’t the morning after one of his infamous nights out, he’ll create hyperpersonalised lead magnets too.

So there you have it. The AI tools are already out there to start generating hyperpersonalised sales that, in a big twist of irony, actually speak more to the individual humanness of your prospects than the old, human-powered way.

All you need to do is start using them.

See you next week,

Heather