Hala Taha: AI-Powered Sales, How to Automate, Optimize, and Close More Deals | Sales

26:30Is this different from what you've already been doing? Yeah, this is also something that you've probably done before, but like things get busy and then you just kind of like are on a hamster wheel. And it's always good to just like reset, especially in the beginning of the year. And also make sure you stop doing things that are not effective or you can kind of optimize like we were talking about. We're going to talk about optimizing funnels. You can optimize a step that might not have like industry standard performance. Like, for example, let's say, you know, your conversion rate is 2%, but it should be 6%.

27:07So what do you need to do differently, right? So I think just evaluating what you're doing is always smart. Slowing down, stepping back. Can you guys see yourself using a bottom-up strategy if you're not using one yet? All right. So according to Pipedrive, sales team used the following tracking. 4 % pen and paper, 17 % spreadsheets, 79 % CRM software. What are you using today? Or are you not tracking at all? Let me know in the chat. Are you using pen and paper, spreadsheets, CRMs? Well, that's what PipeDrive is. Just so you guys know, PipeDrive literally was started to revolve around activity-based selling.

27:52That's like their whole ethos is that sales is all about the actions you take. and to be more activity focused rather than results focused. So pipeline management is an incredible way to visualize your sales process, to track all your activities. Having the right CRM is crucial for your sales success. And this is coming from Pipedrive's website. We believe that in sales and marketing, just like in life, you can't control the results, but you can control the actions that drive deals towards completion. So their whole thing is designed around helping you understand all the actions that you're taking, tracking that automatically, and being able to see if there's anything going wrong.

28:36It actually has AI that will tell you you need to do more emails, you need to do more calls, and you just basically input that historical data so that Pipedrive knows how to guide you and your sales team along the way. Okay. PipeDrive is a CRM that enables you to customize your sales process based on your specific individualized sales funnels. It was specifically designed by salespeople for sales people. It is both a sales tracking tool and a CRM. So there's lots of CRMs out there that are really focused on communications and contact management. PipeDrive is both a sales tracking activity sales tracking tool and a CRM, traditional CRM, where you can see every single email you've sent, every single DM you've sent, save all your contact information.

29:27Pipedrive also has a lot of automations. They're really innovative and they've got lots of new AI tools that are really exciting that are coming out. You can do automated follow-ups, you can do AI generated email templates, and then they have amazing reporting. I think my favorite part about Pipedrive is all the reporting that they have. And in our demo, we're going to show you what their reporting looks like. Pipedrive is also a very popular platform that's integrated with every single app that you can imagine. So you can check out their integrations during your free trial. So we have more content after this, about 45 minutes of educational content.

30:11but before we do that, we're going to start the demo. You guys already signed up to the demo. If you guys have not yet, please go ahead and do that. Drop that link in the chat. Kate, we're not going to spend a ton of time because I had everybody who was on earlier sign up.

30:29And I'm going to answer some questions while you guys do that. If you guys have not done it yet, please sign up. Let me know done in the chat if you've done that. Mark is asking, if one only uses Pipedrive, should that be the only tool to stay around to track your sales? Or would you recommend also tracking in Excel as well? I think that if you set up Pipedrive properly, you won't need to use Excel. That's the whole point is that you want to get out of spreadsheets and move to Pipedrive to track all your sales. And Pipedrive on their blog has all this documentation of like how you can basically make that transition.

31:01So if you've been tracking in sheets, that's great because you basically have the foundation to then upload that information into Pipedrive.

31:12At Yap, we have a super unique company culture. We're all about obsessive excellence. We even call ourselves scrappy hustlers. And I'm really picky when it comes to my employees. My team is growing every day. We're 60 people all over the world. And when it comes to hiring, I no longer feel overwhelmed by finding that perfect candidate, even though I'm so picky. Because when it comes to hiring, Indeed is all you need. Stop struggling to get your job post noticed. Indeed's sponsored jobs help you stand out and hire fast by boosting your post to the top relevant candidates. Sponsored jobs on Indeed get 45 % more applications than non-sponsored ones, according to Indeed Data Worldwide.

31:47I'm so glad I found Indeed when I did because hiring is so much easier now. In fact, in the minute we've been talking, 23 hires were made on Indeed, according to Indeed Data Worldwide. Plus, there's no subscriptions or long-term contracts. You literally just pay for your results. You pay for the people that you hire. There's no need to wait any longer. Speed up your hiring right now with Indeed, and listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at indeed.com slash profiting. Just go to indeed.com slash profiting right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast.

32:18Indeed.com slash profiting. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring, Indeed, is all you need.

32:27Young and profiterers. I know there's so many people tuning in right now that end their workday wondering why certain tasks take forever, why they're procrastinating certain things, why they don't feel confident in their work, why they feel drained and frustrated and unfulfilled. But here's the thing you need to know. It's not a character flaw that you're feeling this way. It's actually your natural wiring. And here's the thing. When it comes to burnout, it's really about the type of work that you're doing. Some work gives you energy and some work simply drains you. So it's key to understand your six types of working genius.

33:01The working genius assessment or the six types of working genius framework was created by Patrick Lencioni, and he's a business influencer and author. And the Working Genius Framework helps you identify what you're actually built for and the work that you're not. Now, let me tell you a story. Before I uncovered my working genius, which is galvanizing and invention, so I like to rally people and I like to invent new things, I used to be really shameful and had a lot of guilt around the fact that I didn't like enablement, which is one of my working frustrations. So I actually don't like to support people one-on-one.

33:33I don't like it when people slow me down. I don't like hand-holding. I like to move fast, invent, rally people, inspire. But what I do need to do is ensure that somebody else can fill the enablement role, which I do have, Kate, on my team. So Working Genius helps you uncover these genius gaps, helps you work better with your team, helps you reduce friction, helps you collaborate better, understand why people are the way that they are. It's helped me restructure my team, put people in the spots that they're going to really excel. And it's also helped me in hiring. Working Genius is absolutely amazing.

34:02I'm obsessed with this model. So if you guys want to take the Working Genius assessment and get 20 % off, you can use code profiting. Go to workinggenius.com. Again, that's workinggenius.com. Stop guessing. Start working in your genius.

34:18What's up, young and profiterers? I remember when I first started Yap, I used to dread missing important calls. I remember I lost a huge potential partnership because the follow-up thread got completely lost in my messy communication system. Well, this year, I'm focused on not missing any opportunities. And that starts with your business communications. A missed call is money and growth out the door. That's why today's episode is brought to you by Quo, spelled Q-U-O, the smarter way to run your business communications. Quo is the number one rated business phone system on G2, and it works right from an app on your phone or computer.

34:50The way Quo works is magic for team alignment. Your whole team can handle calls and texts from one shared number, and everyone sees the full conversation. It's like having access to a shared email inbox, but on a phone. And also Quo's AI can even qualify leads or respond after hours, ensuring your business stays responsive even when you've finally logged off. It makes doing business so much easier. Make this the year where no opportunity and no customer slips away. Try Quo for free plus get 20 % off your first six months when you go to Quo.com slash profiting. That's Q-U-O dot com slash profiting.

35:24Quo. No missed calls. No missed customers. Okay. All right. So if you guys want to sign in and follow along the demo, you can. If you want to just pay attention and play with it later, go for it. It's up to you. But if you have access, you can actually follow along during the demo. And now I have Eamon from my sales team going over a demo account of Pipedrive to just show you guys specifically how you can use Pipedrive for activity-based selling. We're not going to go into too much of the contact stuff that is traditional CRM. We're really focused on how this is related to activity-based selling.

36:00Hello everyone, I'm Eamon and today I'm going to walk you through how our sales team uses the core features at Pipedrive to crush sales every year. Let's get started. So the first step in Pipedrive is to set up your pipeline stages. Think of your pipeline as a visual representation of every step a deal goes through before it closes. Pipedrive allows you to fully customize these stages so they match your specific sales process. Here is how to do it. Click on the pipeline button in the right corner of your dashboard. Create or rename your stages to reflect your steps you typically take, such as prospecting, qualifying leads, closing the deal, signing the contract, and so on.

36:41As you can see, Pipedrive already gives you a template that you can use. So once you set up your stages, you can start adding deals into the appropriate stage right away. The visual approach keeps your team aligned and ensures nothing slips through the cracks. Next, let's talk about focusing on actions that move the deal forward. It's easy to get caught up in the final outcome causing the deal, but really the day-to-day activities are what makes the difference in the sales process. So a sales activity in Pipedrive can be anything from a phone call, an email, or a scheduled meeting to a lunch maybe, for example, with a potential client.

37:22Whatever you need to do to nurture that deal, you can log it in and schedule it in Pipedrive. Here's a quick example. Let's say you have a new lead. You might schedule a discovery call, then follow it up with an email and confirm the next steps. Pipedrive will book these times in your calendar and remind you of these activities, so you're always on top of your tasks and never miss an opportunity to connect. As you work on deals and complete activities, Pipedrive will provide you with real-time tracking and insights to help you crush your sales and refine your approach. if you need to adjust course.

38:03Let's say you notice a conversion rate drops when moving the deal to a qualified stage. With Pipedrive Reports, you can spot these trends early and take correctional actions, maybe offering a more compelling proposal, dedicating more time to customer needs in that stage. This kind of visibility ensures that you and your team can pivot quickly and keep hitting your goals. Finally, when you have your pipeline set up, you're focusing on the right actions and your tracking progress, it's time to optimize and grow. Pipedrives automations help you scale your sales process and achieve even bigger goals.

38:41For example, the automations can take care of administrative tasks like sending follow-up emails, you can schedule the follow-ups beforehand, or updating deal stages, saving you time and effort. As you refine your winning formula, you can set even bigger sales goals and continue to push your team to new heights. All right, this is Pipedrive in a nutshell. Hope you got some insights and back to the webinar. Yeah, so as you can see, super effective, especially those of you who are not using a CRM yet, even if you are using a CRM, one that is designed specifically around your sales process is super helpful so that you can do activity-based selling, not have to work in spreadsheets and be able to see your dashboard to evaluate how things are going.

39:34Hello, everyone. I'm Eamon. Yeah, I think Pipedrive would definitely be good for a recruitment agency. It would work for any sales funnel. And the beauty of Pipedrive compared to other CRMs is that you can totally customize your steps in the process. But like I said, you need to just outline what your sales steps are first. So if you guys aren't using Pipedrive right now, are you excited to give it a try? You've got a 14 free day free trial. Are you excited to give it a try and see if it will work for you guys? Okay, we see a lot of yeses. What about forecasting? Yes, PipeDrive has forecasting abilities.

40:10PipeDrive is one of the most reputable CRMs in the industry. So anything that like HubSpot would have or any other CRMs, PipeDrive has. And it's more of like a nimble tool. And I'd also say that it's really great for small teams. It's more affordable. HubSpot's very expensive. But yeah, so I feel like it's just a really, really great option for smaller businesses and sales teams. Okay, so if you guys want to sign up to PipeDrive, you can click that link. If you already haven't yet, you already get the 20 % off your annual if you end up signing up. and right now you have a free 14-day trial to give it a spin.

40:54That's how we started with Pipedrive before they were even a sponsor or a partner. We just used it for 14 days and we loved it and we just moved all our sales ops to Pipedrive. So give it a try. You don't really have anything to lose. You don't have to put your credit card. I would just set up some sales funnels, try to see if you like the ease of use. It's a really intuitive tool. It's very easy to use. Okay, let's move on to optimizing our funnels. So here is Sean Cannell. So now we're going to move on into how do we actually improve our conversions? How do we improve all the different activities that we're doing and continue to get better?

41:35Because it's not only about taking more actions, it's also about stepping back and figuring out what is broken, how can I improve so that I can ultimately get more conversions and better results? and this is what you do once the period of sales is over when you're analyzing everything that you've done in the past. So here's Sean Cannell on your funnels being broken. And then it's kind of like online marketing best practices. I think the naming of whatever you're giving away free, the desire of what you're giving away free, alignment on the entire thing and congruency. Congruency is that when they land on the page, they're on the right page.

42:12People have horrible landing pages, navigation above. It doesn't even seem like it's them. There's not authority there. It doesn't load. It's like malware notification. There's all kinds. I mean, it's kind of stressful. Someone's like, man, there's so many things. You just want to remove friction. Sometimes the biggest mistake is like you're making a video that have people thinking one way and giving a call to action that's not related. Think about what video would attract the ideal person for your opt-in. what opt-in would attract the ideal person for your offer. And those things are broken all the time in people's businesses.

42:52Like someone opts in, but they're not the right psychology, psychographics, demographics, because it was a cool free thing, but did it really align? And then the YouTube videos, if you were talking about how to hire team members in a video, and then you were like, and by the way, if you want to download my 21 tax savings guide, like not horrible, because maybe some people are like, that does sound interesting. The reason they're there, the better guide would be a freebie that's like, you know, and if you want to get my scripts, my job interview scripts for how to really filter out the wrong candidates and lock in the right candidates, just go to think filter, or thinkhiringscripts.com or click the link in the description.

43:38So that would be my biggest thing is like, I think the strategy of the content that attracts the right people, then the opt-in that ties together, concurrency and the whole thing. And then again, a good sales process and funnels, you know, you probably have endless episodes in your own library of some good stuff on making great funnels. But what's powerful about that is it is a psychology. Everybody listening to this needs to know. thinking about their whole, you could call it sales journey, the whole customer journey, thinking about the entire thing start to finish. And that is a never ending process of tweaking.

44:12All of us could improve it. Ours is probably a six out of 10 and we've done pretty well. Like there's so many, you know, things that small tweaks lead to giant peaks. And so just being willing to be like, can I change my opt-in in the future? Can I change my offer page? As I'm just my offer page, the checkout page and the thank you page. and then follow up and what do I want to do next? And is that all aligned? And usually when things are not working, it's just because a piece is broken and there's some kind of like cognitive dissonance that happens or something. Sometimes from YouTube to your landing page, it's not quite what it looked like and all these little details like that.

44:51So hopefully that gets you in the mindset of being willing to analyze your entire funnel. So not only the activities you do, but what is the language on the page? What does it look like? Is anything broken, right? So that should be helpful. And then it's kind of like online. And Russell is going to talk about actual strategies for optimizing these content pages. I love that. And I can just hear all the passion in your voice. And I teach marketing too. And something that I always tell my students is like, it's all about the nuance, right? It's like these little tiny tweaks that get people to make the decisions that you want them to make.

45:32So can you talk about subtle nuances that people can do within their funnels that can make or break their funnels? Yeah. So first off, it comes back to what I mentioned earlier. So there's always three things in every page of a funnel. So hook, a story, a offer. And I always tell people like, if you were to hire me, I do console days for a hundred grand a day. People fly out here. Like I always tell them like, all the thing I'm going to do is I'm going to look at every page of the funnel and it's either going to be a hook, a story, or the offer. Like one of those things is always off, right? So a good example, I have someone that's in my inner circle, and they had a webinar that was teaching people how to make money with local reviews or something like that.

46:05And they had this webinar, and they had a webinar that was really good. They had a landing page, everything was there. But it was costing them, I think on average, it cost them like$25 per lead to get someone to register for a webinar. And then from that, it was like, I think they're like 12 % of the people who registered actually showed up. So it's costing them like$150 for every person to show up on this webinar. And then the webinar was actually converted to really good. They're teaching the process. They sold a really good offer and they did really well, but it was just, the conversions were bad.

46:32And so they wanted me to help them rebuild the entire funnel and the webinar and everything. And I was like, I don't think it's that big. I think you're just missing one thing. I said, when I look at the registration page, their headline was something like, learn how to make money with helping local businesses with local reviews. I was like, the problem with that is there's no curiosity. When I see that, I'm like, oh, this is a webinar. Teach people how to make, you know, they're going to teach me how to make money with local reviews. And if you think, you know, the answer already, then first off, you're not going to register.

46:57And if you do register, you may or may not show up, but you're like, I think I know this is about register. And if I'm, you know, if I'm bored, maybe I'll show up. Right. And so all we did is we took that. I was like, let's just change the hook and make it more like, let's make more curiosity in the hook. And so we changed it from how to make money, teaching people how to do local reviews or whatever to like, um, it's something like this is the loophole we found to help, uh, make extra money, uh, helping local businesses. And this is not, and we talked about all the things it wasn't. This is not doing Facebook ads.

47:24This is not doing Instagram, whatever. all the things that people might think it was. We talked about what it was not. Instead, register to find out exactly what this new thing is. And then we'll show you how to use it inside your business. So we just made it more curiosity-based. That's all we changed on the registration page. And it went from like$25 per registrant. And I started getting registrants at$5 a piece. So it dropped the cost down to one-fifth. And then because people didn't know what it was unless they showed up, their show up rate went from like 12 % to like 26%. Wow. So between those two things, all of a sudden, the metrics of the business changed.

47:54And this funnel went on to make them millions of dollars just by changing a hook on a page, right? So that's how, like you talk about, it's just like simple psychology that these little tiny tweaks, these little tiny changes have huge impact across the funnel, right? And so for me, like that's what I'm always looking for. That's why I look at so many people's funnels just to get ideas of like, oh, look how they did that. Look how they did this. And the more I see people buying ads, like the telltale sign of like, people always ask me, how do you know a funnel is working? Like if the company is spending a lot of money on ads, you keep seeing it over and over and over again, they're probably are doing something right.

48:24And so I'll click on it. I'll go look at it. Like, oh, look how they did that. Look how they framed that. Look how they made this offer. Look what, you know, and we're just looking at those little things and they'll come back and test them on our pages. And like I said, a little tweak like that can dramatically change the metrics of a business. So it's like searching for buried treasure and then applying it back to your business, which is so much fun. So I love what Russell said, especially at the end of analyzing your competitor funnels. Who is your competitor? What are their funnels looking like?

48:53Like what activities do they do for top of funnel, for mid funnel? What are their landing pages look like? What is the language that they're using? And you can take the things that you think are working well for them and apply it to your own business. And so not only optimizing your funnels, but optimizing your competitors' funnels. I love that. So an example of this is something that we do at YAP and that we've tried to fix, which is our attendance rate. Our attendance rate is great for webinars. We get a 50 % average attendance rate. However, I interviewed Kat Norton, and she told me that for webinar registrants, she gets a drastic increase in her attendance rate by collecting people's phone numbers and then texting them.

49:44So an example of optimizing a funnel for us would be to start testing text. And so if we were to just not change anything, so if I just had the team continue doing 10 ,000 DMs, but we implemented text reminders, which can be automated, and we're able to jump from 50 % attendance rate to 80 % attendance rate, I can hit my 35K-ish goal with that change. and not necessarily sending out more DMs. So it can really have big impacts and you wanna see like what part of your funnel can you actually improve? Is there a way that you can improve the click-through rate? Is there a way that you can improve the conversion rate on the actual event, right?

50:29So you always wanna look at that and try to optimize. So based on everything you just heard, are you inspired to start optimizing your funnels? And if so, like what's one idea that you will do after this call. Well, thank you guys. You can listen to all those episodes. Kate, maybe you can drop the episode links in the chat. That Russell Brunson episode was epic. I have so many sales episodes, guys. I've interviewed every single human behavior and sales person in the world. Okay, so benchmarks for conversion rates. they're going to be different by industry but that's something you can go on chat gbt and check out that's going to be totally different for every single activity it's going to be totally different for every single type of event so for example like webinar events are going to have different conversion rates than a sales call but you can find that information online and you can also use your own past results as your benchmark and just keep improving from there working backwards, figuring out how to automate, laying out the funnel.

51:43Yeah, the hook story offer is brilliant. That entire episode with Russell is amazing. Also, if you guys want more webinar content, I'll write this in the chat. I have a two-part series with Jason Fladline. And we go over how to create the best webinar ever for like two hours. So if you guys want to get into webinars, check that out.

52:09Hello, Yap gang. I know my young and profiting listeners want bigger businesses and a better life. And the new year is the perfect moment to reset and commit to your growth. But let's be real, you can't build an empire if your finances are all over the place. That's why getting into it QuickBooks is one of the best first moves you can make this year. They've got powerful money management tools built right into their platform and they have them for every stage of your business, whether you're a solopreneur or a small business. And I love that QuickBooks helps you get paid faster, pay bills smarter, and even gives you access to funding when opportunity pops up.

52:44So QuickBooks can help you with bookkeeping, can help you with getting paid, can even help you with projections and understanding where your business is at financially. Plus, QuickBooks Money Solutions reduces manual work by half and keeps your money and your books perfectly synced. That means less time staring at spreadsheets and more time actually building the vision that you started with. That's the upgrade that every profiting entrepreneur needs. Start the new year strong, take control of your cashflow with QuickBooks money tools. Learn more at quickbooks.com slash money. Again, that's quickbooks.com slash money.

53:15Terms apply. Money movement services are provided by Intuit Payments Incorporated, licensed as a money transmitter by the New York State Department of Financial Services.

53:26Hello, young and profiters. Running my own business has been one of the most rewarding things I've ever done, but I won't lie to you. In those early days of setting it up, I feel like I was jumping on a cliff with no parachute. I'm not really good at that kind of stuff. I'm really good at marketing, sales, growing a business, offers, but I had so many questions and zero idea where to find the answers when it came to starting an official business. I wish I had known about Northwest Registered Agent back when I was starting Yap Media. And if you're an entrepreneur, you need to know what Northwest Registered Agent is.

53:57They've been helping small business owners launch and grow businesses for nearly 30 years. They literally make life easy for entrepreneurs. They don't just help you form your business. They give you the free tools you need after you form it, like operating agreements and thousands of how-to guides that explain the complicated ins and outs of running a business. And guys, it can get really complicated, but Northwest Registered Agent just makes it all easy and breaks it down for you. So when you want more for your business, more privacy, more guidance, more free resources, Northwest Registered Agent is where you should go.

54:29Don't wait and protect your privacy. Build your brand and get your complete business identity in just 10 clicks and 10 minutes. Visit NorthwestRegisteredAgent.com slash yapfree and start building something amazing. Get more with Northwest Registered Agent at NorthwestRegisteredAgent.com slash yapfree.

54:50Happy New Year, Yap Gang. I just love the unique energy of the new year. It's all about fresh starts. and fresh starts not only feel possible, but also feel encouraged. And if you've been thinking about starting a business, this is your sign. There's no better time than right now. 2026 can be the year that you build something that is truly yours, the year where you take control over your career. And it starts with Shopify. I've built plenty of my own businesses on Shopify, including my LinkedIn Secrets Masterclass. So it's a two-day workshop. People buy their tickets on Shopify. And then my Mastermind subscription is also on Shopify.

55:25I built my site quickly in just a couple of days. Payments were set up super easily. And none of the technical stuff slowed me down like it usually does because Shopify is just so intuitive. And this choice of using Shopify helped me scale my masterclass to over$500 ,000 in revenue in our first year. And I'm launching some new podcast courses and can't wait to launch them on Shopify. Shopify gives you everything you need to sell online and in person, just like the millions of entrepreneurs that they power. You can build your dream story using hundreds of beautiful templates and set up as fast with built-in AI tools that help you write product descriptions and edit photos.

56:01Plus, marketing is built in so you can create email and social campaigns easily. And as you grow, Shopify can scale right along with your business. In 2026, stop waiting and start selling with Shopify. Sign up for your$1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com slash profiting. Go to shopify.com slash profiting. That's shopify.com slash profiting. Yeah, fam, hear your first. This new year with Shopify by your side. So let's talk about prioritizing your time. Now, a lot of us seem like we're selling services. It also sounded like you guys are taking a lot of sales calls. I saw discovery calls a lot in the chat when I was asking what your different activities were.

56:47So when you're not selling one-to-many, you really have to be careful with your time. You've got to make sure that you're taking the right calls, that you're focused on the right thing, because time is the most precious asset that we have. And Chris Voss told me once, it's not a sin to lose business, but it's a sin to take a long time losing business. So you want to make sure when you're on these sales calls, you're trying to disqualify whoever you're talking to as soon as possible so that you can focus your time on the people who are actually going to buy from you. You don't want to just be a busy bee taking calls that have very low probability.

57:26You want to focus your time on your best case scenarios with your sales. So you want to think about, are you the fool or the favorite? Okay. So as soon as you get on a sales call, your number one goal is to figure out, are you the fool or the favorite? Because when somebody gets on a sales call with you, they're 70 % made up before they even get on the call. They know if they're going to work with you or not. And oftentimes they're just using you as a reference, like doing their due diligence. They may not actually be like intentionally like trying to waste their time. They might think they should be getting three bids or whatever it is, but their mind is already made up and you need to decide like, are you the fool or the favorite?

58:12So you're the fool if they're asking you for free information. They just keep asking you for stuff. They're really unresponsive. They keep you waiting. They miss the first call. They're late. They don't respect you. They don't respect your time. They're all about price, right? They're asking for the lowest price early on, or they won't introduce you to any decision makers. So they're just wasting your time, okay? Your favorite, on the other hand, is they're treating you like an insider. They're sharing exclusive details. They're talking about how they're going to work with you, not if you can do something for them.

58:51They treat you with respect. They're seeking out your input. They're treating you like a trusted advisor. They're bringing the key decision maker on the call. They're negotiating what they're going to get in the deal, not necessarily the price. They respect your prices. They respect your work. And so you need to find out if you're the fool or favorite early on. And part of that is just paying attention, right? Paying attention to what's happening, what happened before the call. And you can take a 15-minute call to like 100 % solidify if you're the fool or the favorite. If you're the fool, you want to disqualify your weak leads early.

59:27You want to ask direct questions. You want to, instead of lowering price, shift the conversation to value differentiation. and you also could try to uncover gaps and ask like, you know, what would it take for us to be your first choice, right? And, you know, if you've got a lot of options, just sorry, we're not a fit. You know, they could come back to you and you can be the favorite because you put your foot down and stayed confident and assertive. Now, for the favorite, you want to stay confident, you want to stay assertive. You also don't want to give them time to think, to basically reconvince them that you're not the favorite.

1:00:08So you want to close quickly. You don't want to let them second guess. You want to push for the highest pricing, better terms. You definitely don't want to throw out free promotions if you're already the favorite, right? So once you know you're the favorite, offer stands as it is. There's no flexibility in price. Close quickly and you'll do well. So there's a magic question and we're going to hear about it from Chris Voss. So what questions should we ask ourselves to understand whether we're the fool or the favorite? Ask yourselves, how can I fearlessly find out early on without hurting anybody's feelings?

1:00:47Because I'm not going to ask legitimate questions. How do I allow myself to find out early on whether or not I'm the favorite or the fool? If you don't want to try, you're holding yourself hostage. I mean, release yourself because you're the one that's holding you back. And this scares the heck out of so many people. If they can get over this hurdle, if they can just put themselves in a mindset to find out, then they're going to be a long way towards using these skills because it's about releasing yourself in many ways. Steve, would you agree? Absolutely. And this is a concept that I really resonated with because in football, this is what we were trained to do.

1:01:29Read the situation. Read and react. Read and react. There's lots of clues. And you're looking for the clues. You just have to know what you're looking for. No one knew that there was a favorite and a fool. The moment you start looking for the clues, they're all over the place. It's not a sin to lose business. it's a sin to take a long time losing business. And the real reason why real estate agents work seven days a week is because they don't work five. If they actually work five days a week, actually work, rather than spending time chasing after business they're not going to get, they wouldn't have to work seven days a week.

1:02:10They wouldn't have to be on call 24-7. So I take sales calls all the time. They usually start with some sort of discovery call where you try to figure out what's the client's problems? Can I help them? Can I not help them? So what are the things that we can do in that conversation to know whether we're the fool or the favorites? What are the things that people do or say that will give us clues? Well, the first thing is to just ask what is the most horrifying question for everybody until they understand how good it is. And that's to say to the other person, you got a lot of options out there. I mean, I got solid competitors.

1:02:48You could go to them. They got great resumes. Why me?

1:02:55That is like the magic phrase. I mean, it's an emotional intelligence, surgical strike. Why does certain things to people that are vastly different than what is normally portrayed out there? Why is like this? It's an emotional intelligence, surgical strike. You should never ask why unless you want them to defend you because why always triggers defensiveness, which is the bad advice. Find out their why is good advice, but it doesn't tell you that you shouldn't ask them why. Except if the why is about you and you are going to get an unguarded, honest answer or you're not going to get an answer. And if you don't get an answer, why you, there ain't no why for you there at all.

1:03:47That's so interesting. So basically you're asking why me because you want to get a gauge of how much they respect you and if they've picked you already and how much research they're done. So if they say, if I say, why me? And they're like, Holly, you're the number one LinkedIn expert. Everybody knows you make all the influencers on LinkedIn. Then I know, okay, I am the favorite. But if they say, I Googled you and you popped up and I'm interviewing three other people then I might be the fool, right? That one or, you know, what a lot of people throw back on you, the person who either is taking advantage of you on purpose and a lot of people are doing it by accident.

1:04:23They don't mean to be, you know, they're taught that it's okay, get three bits. But they're going to say, well, it's up to you to convince me. And if they throw it back on you like that or in some fashion, you are the fool in the game. So good. Has that ever happened to anybody where they, like somebody said, you've got to convince me, show me what you can do.

1:04:53So what questions should we ask? Of course it's happening. So now you guys got this magic question in your pocket. The next time you hop on a discovery call, you can instantly find out if you're the fool or the favorite. You can say, hey, why me? Why did you want to work with me? And it also puts you in the power seat because it shows that you're not desperate, that you're asking such a vulnerable question to your sales lead. Okay? Exactly. And you don't really want to work with somebody who you have to prove yourself. You want to start the relationship, especially a lot of you guys mentioned that you're like a small team.

1:05:33You might be working directly with a client. You're not only selling, you're probably executing the offer afterwards too. You want to work with somebody who already respects you. You don't want to work with somebody who wants you to keep proving yourself, right? They're going to be bad clients, which brings me to the next point. So also, when you're evaluating your clients, you want to think about, are they haves or elves? So half is a hard, annoying, lame, frustrating client. These are high maintenance, low profit clients or deals. They require a lot of effort. They drain your energy. They often don't pay well.

1:06:10They're haggling you. They cause stress, delays, endless negotiations. They might be like really unresponsive or too responsive. They always want your time. They think you work only for them and you have no other clients. Compared to Elfs, they're easy. They're lucrative. They're fun. These are your ideal clients that are profitable, enjoyable, efficient. They respect your time and expertise. They don't haggle over price and cause unnecessary headaches. So if you go and you try to convince the person that believes you're a fool, they're going to be hard, annoying, lame, frustrating clients anyway.

1:06:45So you want to drop them early. You know exactly when you get on a sales call if you're dealing with a half or an elf. Okay? So you want to be able to attract the elves. Not all good revenue. Not all revenue is good revenue. you. We are so picky with our clients at Yap Media. If somebody just gives me a tough time on a sales call and I'm like, this person's going to be a headache. I know that they're going to take away time from my elves and I want to retain my elf clients, right? You want to retain your good clients. You don't want to bring in people that are going to suck up all your time. You're going to work twice as hard for all your profit.

1:07:20So part of this is also just thinking about the fact that like not all clients are good clients. Okay. So one of the things that you could do in pipe drive related to making sure you're taking the right clients is that you can label all of your leads however you want. You could even label them full's favorites, half's else, right? You can have whatever titles that you want to help guide how you're going to spend time with these clients. And when you draw the line and when you drop them in the sales process, once you've identified if they're not a good fit for your company, a lot of people will waste their time, you know, bringing people all the way to the finish line only to discover that they're the fool.

1:08:04So you want to figure that out as early as possible. And you want to figure out how interested they're actually in your product before you spend so much time with them. The other thing with PipeDrive, and we're going to move on to our AI section of today, is that you can automate a lot of repetitive tasks. So you can trigger personalized emails. You can transfer ownership to another rep once a deal reaches a certain stage. They've got AI-powered prompts, and they've got a lot of new AI features that are coming soon, like deal summaries, where it will take all the conversations that you've had in the past and summarize what the current status of the deal is.

1:08:44It'll also summarize emails for you. So they're coming out with all these new beta AI. And that's one of my favorite things about Pipedrive is that they're always innovating, and they're really fast to innovate. they have an AI sales assistant. So like I had mentioned on your actual reporting, it will identify patterns. It will recommend high potential deals, next actions to prioritize. They've got an email generation, email deals, AI deal summaries, like I was saying. And they also are coming out with AI agents. So who here has heard of the concepts of AI agents? Okay. So some of you guys heard of it.

1:09:22Some of you haven't. I interviewed Reid Hoffman, who is the founder of LinkedIn. And he's also the co-founder of, I think it's OpenAI. And he talked to me about AI agents. It blew my mind. And it's important for everybody to hear this because this is going to be our future in the very near future. So when you say super agency, basically what you're saying is we have human agency with AI. They'll be helping us become better humans. And that's why we have super agency. And then AI itself is going to be able to do things on its own, right? So can you talk to us about how AI will have agency? And then how do we imagine humans actually interacting with AI?

1:10:02I talked to Mustafa Saliman, who I know is your colleague, and he told me like every human's gonna have an AI companion and it's gonna help them, you know, go on job interviews, start companies. So talk to us about those kinds of concepts. So part of what freaks people out a little bit is like, you know, we are going to this agentic universe where all of a sudden they're supposed to having phones and PCs, which we'll still have, we'll have agents. And by the way, we'll have more than one. We may have one that we're, you know, particularly the hollow or read, you know, ongoing companion, always, you know, always around us and helping us with things.

1:10:37But there's going to be a suite of them, you know, with kind of different specialties and different engagements. And by the way, you're, you know, your office is going to have one, your working group's going to have one, and, you know, probably your podcast is going to have one, you know, et cetera. And we hear fairly soon and people say, well, if they're agentic, does that take my agency away? And the answer is no. The same way that when you work with colleagues and you work with employees and everything else, that expands your agency. That doesn't take it away. And by the way, these agents will be making predictions off all the data, which is a lot more than any of us have, about what things will be really good for us.

1:11:13And agents are going to be the primary mode of navigation. What we describe and super agency is an informational GPS. So in this entire informational digital world, we'll do that. And there will be more agents than there are people. One of the things that I think people haven't really fully tracked yet, but I think what would be very interesting is how agents end up talking to each other. Because when we have that many agents, part of how you and I are gonna coordinate, like we say, hey, what should we talk about in the podcast? Well, one of our preps will be your agent, we'll talk to my agent.

1:11:49Oh my God. And they'll kind of go, well, you know, these topics will be really good. And, you know, hey, when you ask a question this way, it'll be great. And when you answer it this way, it'll be great. You know, and da-da-da-da. And, you know, that kind of thing. Or this could be a really new, interesting thing to try. And that will be part of the world we will be in. Yeah. Thinking about agents is so mind-blowing. And when I think about AI and all the talks that I've had, a lot of people talk about it as being like a great equalizer. Now, as I've thought about it more, I realize that it's like, you have to be the best trainer of the AI.

1:12:22Like I kind of imagine everybody being an entrepreneur, having agents that work at their personal company, you basically have to be the best at coordinating your agents and figuring out how to like mobilize all that AI and all your AI support. And so smart people are going to be smarter at that, right? And creative and innovative people are going to be more creative and innovative when it comes to their own agents. And so I just feel like a lot of people are probably worried that like, you know, there's not going to be any room for them to your point as humans, but I really think it's going to be how you manage your AI.

1:12:55In addition to training, it's also deploying, organizing, executing, you know, strategizing, all of the above. And that's part of the reason why, you know, kind of with super agency and the other kind of content that I've been trying to get out there and people say, it's like, start playing with it, start exploring, because you want to start building the muscles and getting engaged with it is really important. And that's the most central thing. And again, part of the reason I called it agency, because it's like, you know, own your agency and go do it. And part of the super agency is when millions of us all start doing that, it benefits all of us much more than just even the technology benefits each of us individually by ourselves.

1:13:37What are your thoughts around hearing that, especially if you haven't heard of this concept before. Even if you have heard of it, I'm sure Reid gave you a different perspective of how we're going to use AI in the future. What are your initial thoughts when you hear about AI agents and how they're going to help us with all these different activities? You might have an AI agent that helps you drive, an AI agent that helps you with your email, an AI agent that helps you with your calendar. Yeah. It's exciting, but we've got to get used to it now. And that means interacting with tools that also embrace AI.

1:14:15So if you're on a CRM that's not talking about AI and not giving you features and not constantly improving with the technology that we have today, you're going to be behind. If you're not leveraging AI to create your content and create the best content, I use AI, you know, for hours. I use AI, it's my chat GPT is open with me all day and it's saving me so much time. If you're not doing that, there's probably something wrong because you need to start working with it and getting used to working with AI. Right now, one of the best things to do is to just use chat GPT and use tools that are leveraging AI and open AI.

1:14:56So how are you gonna leverage AI for your sales strategy? What are some initial ideas that you guys have of how you're going to leverage AI? Well, that's great. Keep leaning into it. It's going to be a wild ride the next few years. And like I mentioned, you want to work with a sales tool that is embracing it. And PipeDrive is coming out with AI agents, which is really, really exciting. All right, guys. Well, that concludes our webinar on sales. I appreciate everybody showing up today. If you haven't yet, make sure you sign up for your 14-day trial on PipeDrive. You get 20 % off if you guys like it.

1:15:39Let me know how you like it. And I look forward to seeing you guys on the next webinars. I've got a lot of different webinars coming up. So I hope to see you guys there. Thank you that you guys like the session. I appreciate it. We will send out the recording. Awesome. So I appreciate you guys so much and looking forward to the next one. Awesome, guys. Have a great day. I'm glad you guys liked it. Bye, all.