60 | AI-Powered Sales Mastery: From Lead Generation to Closing Deals with Bjion Henry of Navreo

0:00Hello and welcome to Leveraging AI, the podcast that shares practical ethical ways on how to improve efficiency, grow your business, and advance your career with AI. We have a special live episode again today. We are going to be doing these lives more or less every week now, unless I'm speaking at a conference. So it's going to happen pretty frequently, probably three out of every four weeks or so. And our guest today is going to talk with us on a very critical topic for businesses today. So if you think about B2B sales, doing B2B sales correct is a good balance of art and science. But the reality is that if you know the science, especially combined with AI capabilities that exist today, you need very little art to get results that are very good.

0:48But what do I mean by use AI for sales? So it's anything from identifying your perfect ICP, your target, your ideal client persona, to identifying the specific pain points that they're probably going through so you can address those, to personalize the outreach messages, to helping you write proposals, to close the deal, every single step of that process can be assisted by AI driving higher efficiencies and higher conversion. So you gain on basically doing less work to get better results. You win on both ends of that equation. And our guest today, Beyond Henry, is the CEO of Navreo, which is a company that does exactly that.

1:30They provide these kinds of services to multiple companies, helping them implement AI in their sales process, which is a critical aspect of any business now and definitely any business moving into the next few years when AI is going to take more and more aspects. So if you learn to do this today, you're going to be ahead of the competition, sell more while doing less, which is probably what everybody wants. So I'm really excited to welcome Bion to the show. Bion, welcome to Leveraging AI.

2:02in the next three years AI technology will change our world dramatically whether you are a business executive trying to catapult your business forward or just somebody who refuses to be left behind and want to advance your career this is the show for you I'm your host Isar Maitis a serial entrepreneur and an AI enthusiast you'll hear invaluable practical tips from innovative business leaders AI practitioners, and some of the brightest AI minds in our world today on how you can leverage AI in ethical ways to advance your career and grow your business.

2:43Hey, thank you for allowing me to come onto this tour to share some of the knowledge that I have. Awesome. I'm really excited about this. You and I got to chat several times and you bring very important information to companies because I think many people today, and I teach AI courses and I speak on stages, I get to engage with a lot of CEOs of companies. Most people don't really know, like they're excited. There's a serious FOMO, everybody's doing it and I'm not yet. And the reality is most people are not doing it yet, but you really have it down to a very clear process on how to use it for sales.

3:19So let's really get started. Like what are the different steps that AI can help you with, and then we'll go one by one and dive into how to actually do it. Yeah. So with us, we help companies literally from the content, which is the thing which brings people into the funnel, all the way through to actually, okay, now we've actually got a deal. Where did that come from? And how can we learn from that data to then take it to the next level? and i think the way that we've learned is doing it for ourselves first and then we just share it with our clients and through that process is a case where we can weed out all the little weeds and everything and then present them with a process and then with your permission what i'll start doing is i'll share my screen and start walking you guys through that that process okay is that yeah just so i got this credit all the tech is working you can see a diagram on my screen right which is a rainbow i can see the diagram on your screen wonderful wonderful so all of this the whole process for all b2b starts with with content and i know a lot of people shun away from or shy away from content because they believe it's just not measurable but through this whole demo, I'm going to show you exactly how it's, you can connect a booked call definitively to activity on, on social media.

4:46So the way that we do it is it starts top of the funnel. This is the most of a funnel you can really get. It's personal stories. So what it is, it's stuff like five things I know at 29, which I wish I wish I knew at 20. Now the whole purpose of these stories is to build a connection with whoever's watching. Now, the amount of times that I've been on calls and someone's come on and said, I saw that you worked, I used to work at Google or I saw you do this, or I think I put up a post a couple of months ago about an accident that I had and they were saying that someone came onto the call and we were talking about that.

5:26It builds a rapport. It changes you from just a faceless company entity to someone who's actually real and personable and they can actually relate to. And from our point, from my content, this may actually perform the least. However, it's what anecdotally we within Navrio would say is one of the biggest tipping scales to actually bring people over the line and bring them onto a call. So we next move down the funnel. this is free resources so what you'll see here is i've put the caption is ai is awful at driving leads that's if you haven't used these and basically it's a free resource it's just a cheat sheet so there's five ai tools that i recommend five prompts three ai assistants and you'll see you got 200 likes 20 000 impressions that when i took this screenshot was in a space of a day.

6:24And you'll see that when you guys start doing it is that these can really start to drive reach for you. And it's also a case where they start to position you as the industry leaders. So I want to touch on the first two things that you mentioned. The first one, the purpose of the first one is to make it personal, right? Is to, oh, you're not dealing with a company, you're dealing with an actual person. Here's who I am. Here's my fears, my processes, my achievements, my personal life. Make people know you because then they're more likely to connect with you and then want to do business with you.

7:01The second does two things, right? So this free content that's actual beneficial to people, and it could be in multiple ways, right? But at the end of the day, it's giving people access to your knowledge does two things. A, it gets a lot of likes and shares because it's practical content that people want. So you get the exposure. And B, it establishes you as somebody who knows what they're doing because you're continuously sharing knowledge that other people don't have. So by combining these two things, and I'm actually curious to know at what ratio do you combine them in your content? And by combining these two things, you get the exposure, you get the people understand that you are an expert on the topic and you get the personal connection.

7:45So what's the ratio you do these things and how frequently do you do them? Yeah, yeah. So I post seven times a week and I do personal stories twice a week. I do this twice a week and I do this third one three times a week. And going back to what you were saying, you're exactly right. This personal story part is as in, I think most sales reps and sales leaders will probably not want to do it so much, but I can't like everyone knows that sales is just all about relationships. The amount of relationships and cop like candid conversations I sparked with these is just countless. So it really helps to get your foot through the door and then start building towards a sale.

8:33Cool. So what's the third one? Oh, yeah. So this is the third one. So what this is service specific demos. So what is basically doing is it's you demoing what you do or what you're selling, but in a way where you're not giving away everything that you do. do it's almost like a teaser and this is the one way like you're giving just enough information to show people and then you have a strong cta so the cta that we always use on linkedin is right now i have two options you could be doing what you're doing or carry on doing what you're doing the next couple of months try to work it out for yourself but it's and it just you'll just waste a lot of time or you can come work with us and we can build this whole process for you now as i say these i I want to generalize that for a second.

9:24For companies who are more established, bigger companies, these could be demos of what your product does, right? Exactly. Or what your service provides to your clients. Or it could be an interview with an existing client that has achieved whatever results, like something that actually shows what is the outcome of working with your company is going to deliver to somebody who is considering working with your company or that has a similar problem. So if you can do that, and as you said, that's most of your content, that's half your content basically is these kinds of things that again, not just establish you as an expert on the topic, it's actually showing the results that it can get, which I assume also helps you overcome objections by addressing different aspects of what you do.

10:14Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. That's it too. And just to put this into numbers. So you can see, I've got 17 ,000 followers. In the last 30 days, I've had 400 ,000 followers. I think that's actually a little bit out of date. But in Q4, so sorry, in 2003, when I started my content creation journey, in the whole year, I amassed 1.2 million views. So 1.7 million views. However, when I started to crack the code, which is this three trifecta, if you want to call it that, in the last 90 days of Q4, I did 1.2 million of that 1.7 million views in 2023 in those last 90 days. And in Q4, we booked around 181 calls.

11:05And this month so far, we've done 59 new discovery calls for a business. So it really does work. Amazing. Cool. So now what I'm going to actually do is I'm going to show you how to actually, the secret behind it, the mechanism behind all of this, because yeah, those numbers are amazing. The bigger magic behind all of this is that most of that was actually generated using AI. And I'm going to show you exactly how we do it.

11:40so basically we use a bunch of prompts okay and i'm gonna show you exactly so to those of you not seeing the screen uh bion is just going to his google docs and picking up a specific prompt that he has prepared in advance that he's using regularly that's what's called and you heard me talk about this on the podcast multiple times. It's called having a prompt library. Once you figure out the prompt that works well and generates results, there's no need to reinvent it or retype it every single time. Save it into whatever repository you want, and then you can reuse it again and again. So let's read at least some of that prompt so people that are listening to the podcast can see what it is.

12:20Absolutely. So the way that we break down the prompt is we say to the, we're actually using Claude. And if for the people in the audience who don't know what Claude is Claude is a chat GBT competitor backed by Amazon and a number of very big companies the reason why we use Claude and not chat GBT is because for what we're about to do we basically create a mini database of unique personal stories now those unique personal stories is just and this is what we ask all our clients to do is just answer 10 questions about themselves, but in full. And there's stuff like, when did you, what was your first job?

13:04Tell me a time that you struggled in your life. And what that does is it gives the AI a lot of ammunition to then mix with your content pillars. And what I mean by that, let's say, for example, you want to do posts around finding leads. If you were to ask ChatGPT or Claude to do that or to create content around that, you're going to sound like every other person on the internet or on any social media platform. It also goes back to what I was saying around, you have to be personable on LinkedIn. And so what this AI does is it takes your personal stories, mixes it in with these leads, and creates something beautiful.

13:47So let's break down this prompt. So it says, develop three LinkedIn posts. The target audience is senior roles, so CMO, Chief Revenue Officer's Directors. Then what I tell it is themes that I want to orientate the content around, such as like creating, using AI to create accurate leads lists. I then tell the AI what things I wanted to avoid create talking about, such as like email marketing. And then finally, I give it a breakdown as to how I want it to present the ideas. First of all, I want it to give me the title. Then what I want to do is I want it to tell me how I should personalize this specific content idea it's about to present to me.

14:27And then the final part is how it should be structured. So it's telling me, okay, do this or create a video saying that and create a video doing this. And what you can see is one of the responses is one of the ideas is how to use AI to find your ideal customers, how I use AI to uncover my best fit clients. When I was struggling to grow my design agency, I wish I had an easy way to identify ideal clients. And this is referring back to back in COVID. When I was running a design agency, it was very hard back then because back then you didn't have all these LinkedIn automation tools and whatever. And it was super, super difficult.

15:06However, if I had those tools today, it would have been a lot easier. And that's how I bridge into the recommendation of a tool. And That's a content idea in itself. Just for everyone who can't see this on the podcast, the two other ideas is how to automate personalized outreach with AI. And the other one, the final one is crafting my personal brand story with AI. Now, this gives me at least an idea to run with. And the beautiful thing about this is all I actually have to do to... Give me three. all i have to do to get to give me more ideas is just ask give me is type in give me three more ideas and it will consistently keep on giving me ideas so having writer's block or any creativity block is no longer an issue i just want to pause you for one second going back to what i said in the very beginning learning which content to promote in order to attract your ideal clients is an art and science, but this, the AI can help you with the art, like figuring out, okay, you said you post these kinds of posts three times a week.

16:20I'm like, how do I come up with three topics a week to write about? You don't. This helps you come up with the topics. And then I assume the next step, it actually helps you write the topics. This is just more in the brainstorming phase. And I want to say one more thing. The very first thing people jump into with AI is writing content or creating content. And actually, the biggest strength of AI is ideation, is this thing that you're doing right now. It's not drafting the actual content, but it is coming up with the right ideas that what you know about your client, what AI knows about the industry, and the combination of that can come up.

16:55It's basically a brainstorming partner to come up with new ideas that then, together with the AI, you can probably create the content, which I assume is the next step. It is indeed. Yeah. And the reason why we do it in these two steps is if you ask AI to come up with the ideas and then ask it to come up with the caption as well, it will just not do it. It will hallucinate like crazy and you'll just never get good results. And that's why for the 90 % of people who have tried creating content using AI have all failed because they tried to do it all at the same time instead of piecing it up like we're doing here.

17:29What I'm going to do now is I'm going to actually move on to the next part, which is a tool that we created for ourselves. And I say tool. All it basically is what I'm looking at right now is a Google Sheets with ChatGPT put inside of it. And you can do that using a simple Chrome extension. And then we've created our own little caption maker. So what I have to do is from Claude is the idea that I liked, I just copy and paste it into this into the section where we've put paste your caption below. And then what will happen when we go on to the next tab is that we have a list of about 48 different LinkedIn templates.

18:13And what the AI will then do is take that idea that we just did and just start to pump it straight into these templates. So what you can now see is some of these examples of like how, for example, the first one is did X today. So did some digging today when I was struggling to grow my digital, my design agency. I wish I had a way to easily identify ideal customers after my agency folded due to COVID. I realized I needed to get laser focused on how I could best serve. Here are five things that I learned in my search for uncovering my best fit clients. Bam. Okay. Okay. And then - So I want to pause you just for one second to share what's on the screen so people understand how brilliant this is.

18:56And I want to break this down to the people who are listening and not watching the screen. By the way, if you want, this is going to be on YouTube as well. So if you want to see the screen, you can do that after you're finishing listening to the podcast. I don't suggest you watch the YouTube while you're driving the car or doing the dishes or walking your dog, but you can later on go back and watch this on YouTube. But the first tab had what we literally copied and pasted the idea from Claude. The second tab has an automation that has three columns. Column one is a structure of a prompt. Column two is an example, and those AI engines are very good when they see examples.

19:36So I'm sure it gets fed both the prompt, general prompt, and then the example. And then what it does is it picks the content we just took from Claude, which is the idea, the new idea, drops it into here. And in the third column generates a brand new post, but it's not doing one of them because there's, like you said, there's 40 templates. So it takes 40 templates with 40 examples that now generates 40 posts based on the new idea that we got just from Claude. And this is, I've seen a lot of people do a lot of really cool stuff with AI content, this is very high on the list. This is incredible. So to tell people from how you can crack this yourself, you have to figure out, oh, look at other people, copy others, people structure of successful posts.

20:31Okay. What are they doing? They're sharing what they did today. They're sharing successes. They're sharing a process. They're sharing a tool. They're sharing, Like what are they sharing? The top five, whatever. Break down the structure of the actual posts that you like, create it as a template, copy and paste the example. And it could be the third party example. It could be Beyond's example. And then connect it in the backend. And I assume you're using a tool, something like a GPT for sheets and docs on one of those. Yeah, exactly. Awesome. This is freaking amazing. Now you can continue, but I just wanted to share with people who can see what we're actually seeing.

21:11Yeah, exactly. And so what you're able to do is look at all of these different ideas, and you don't have to just copy and paste it and post. You can dive into it and make your own slight little tweaks because the AI is just meant to reduce the work for you. It's not meant to do everything for you. And once you get into the habit of just putting it in here and then being able to tweak it slightly, you'll be off to the races because it removes the biggest issue with content creation, which is that it just takes way too long. But this crushes that whole process. So what I wanted to finish this with is just going back to numbers.

21:53And I'm going to go through my own profile and just literally read off the last impressions for the last couple of posts, just to give you a bit of an idea of where you could be at some stage. So the post I did today already got 5 ,000 views. The one I did yesterday, 5 ,000. The one the day before that, 25 ,000. The day before that, 13 ,000. The day before that, 3 ,000. 21 ,000. 5 ,000. 6 ,000. And it keeps on going on and going on. 9 ,000. Another one just got 100 ,000. And two of the ones that I've done this month have gotten over 100 ,000 impressions, views. Now, when you consider what you just saw in terms of a process, if you were even watching the clock, how long did that take me to actually create that piece of content?

22:44It was literally an idea in Claude, copy that idea into the spreadsheet, copy that spreadsheet, sorry, the idea that came out of it and put it into LinkedIn. And that's the process. Don't get me wrong, as Issa has said, there is an art to it. So the next part of that is spotting and learning through your own content or putting out so much stuff what actually works and what doesn't work. And then from that, you're able to start to really put a solid content creation strategy together. Two questions before we continue that comes from the audience. One, the first one was why Claude and not ChatGPT?

23:28So we'll let you answer that and then ask you the second question. Yeah. So the reason why I don't use, I do use ChatGPT, but the reason why you would use Claude in this instance is because Claude handles big data a lot better than ChatGPT. What I mean by handle is that it hallucinates a lot less. And when you have a lot of personal stories, which you need in order to give the AI a breadth of different bits of material to create content. When you need a lot of information, like I've experimented with it so much and ChatGPT just consistently hallucinates. And also one final point is, and I've heard this from a lot of people, is that Claude sounds more like a human than ChatGPT.

24:18Like ChatGPT sometimes sounds a bit robotic. like for example you'll see some funny blunders like in in normal english or human talk we would say you would get on the bus but if chat gbt was to create a very a variation of that it would say oh he mounted the bus because objectively and by the definition it's more or less the same to get on and to mount but it's you wouldn't say that in normal speech yeah and it uses it has some phrases that nobody will ever say that it uses frequently as well. And by the way, I wanted you to answer that by I totally second that. When we create content for social, most of it comes from Claude for the same exact reasons.

25:05When I take the podcast and I want to create a snippet out of it, Claude does a better job than ChatGPT because it's 45 minutes of recorded content that I'm throwing in there. For you, I assume it's just a Word document that has your stories that you wanted to use as a reference. But so this is one aspect. I also use ChatGPT for other things. So I use both. I'll give people a little hint or a little tool that I absolutely love and I use it regularly. It's called ChatHub and it's a Chrome extension. It's not an actual thing you install. So there's a ChatHub tool that does chat management, but it's not that.

25:41It's a Chrome extension called ChatHub and it allows you to open two if you're on the paid version or as many as you want large language models on the paid version side by side and give them the same prompt and load the same material and see what happens. So instead of copying and pasting it three times, if you want to run ChatGPT and Claude and Bing and what's the one from Google? Gemini and see how they're doing. Bard, yeah. So Bard operated by Gemini behind the scenes. If you want to see how they handle specific tasks side by side, exactly the same process, you can run them one next to the other.

26:20And it's a great tool to do exactly these kinds of things and see, and it's not bad what Chachupet is doing, but I agree with Bion completely that as far as creating prompt that sounds like me, Claude is doing a better job right now. This can change next week. So that's why keep on experimenting. Yeah. And so what we've now done is we've gone back to the customer journey diagram. So just to recap, at the top, we have personal stories. Then we have the free learning resources. Then we have the service specific demos, which is showing what your business does. And then the next part of this, and this is what I was alluding to earlier in this webinar, is so how do you actually identify who's your customer and then are able to actually track how content is actually driving sales or whatever.

27:11So what we do is we use a platform called Clay. And what Clay allows you is what Clay looks like or is more or less that is it's like the Google Sheets, but with loads of data providers embedded into it. So say, for example, if you were to put in a LinkedIn URL, you would be able to enrich that URL and find out where the name behind that URL, where that person works, the description of the company they work at, the company size, and so on. And that's what I'm about to show you right now.

28:00so again for those of you listening we're just logging in into the clay tool and once we are then we can share exactly what we're doing yeah so what you can now see is a bunch of leads and these the all of these leads have come from my own profile in terms of these These are people who engage on my comments or they've liked my content or they've connected with me over LinkedIn. And the way that you would to export these things, to export them is literally, there's so many automation providers out there, but we use Phantom Buster. So you're just able to post in your link and then get a massive list of all the people who commented on that link.

28:48Now, prior to automation, prior to AI, what you would have to do is go through every single comment and then find to see, OK, is that person actually the ideal customer or not? And that could take ages, because if you think you've got to go onto their profile, then you've got to look at where they work at. Then you've got to click onto that at that company. Then you've got to go and research the company. But we found a process which does this in a matter of seconds. So what you're now - Before you do that, just to explain to people what Phantom Buster is, Phantom Buster is an automation tool built for LinkedIn, where you can build different processes, like scouting people who connect it with me, who looked at my profile.

29:31You can build these automations and then decide what to do in different scenarios. And in this case, I assume the scenario is in if one, two, three happens, then just send it to Clay or to a CSV and then you import it here. I don't know how automated this is, but - Yeah, no, you got it completely correctly. So this is an automation which can just be pushed straight into it. Now, so in the window that we have at the moment, there's a column which is name, another column which is LinkedIn URL. And that's all the information we need to get started. We don't actually even need the name column. I'm now going to click run.