Consultant Al Simon Explains How Peachtree Corners Businesses Can Leverage AI

Al Simon has a simple message for business owners: if you’re not using AI, you’re about as far behind technology as if you’re using candlelight instead of electricity.

This was the core message of his talk at the January Peachtree Corners Business Association’s After-Hours Speaker Series. As a consultant for sales management with Sandler by Neuberger, Simon focuses on small to medium businesses with sales teams of 35 members or less and revenues up to $200 million.

He works with management teams and trains salespeople to improve sales revenue, gross profit margins, and other business metrics.

“Overall, it helps people thrive in their sales and sales management roles,” he said.

His topic, artificial intelligence for selling, involves teaching managers how to use AI to gather and interpret data. A simple Google search uses artificial intelligence, he said, but he also teaches salespeople how to use that information to improve their skills and processes.

Boosting sales enablement

Simon explained that AI could be used for pre-call planning. It’s not difficult to prompt a generative AI program to give you what you need.

A sample query for ChatGPT could be: “I’m a sales rep in the plastics manufacturing industry, and my prospect is an injection molding manufacturer. What are the three best questions I can ask their plant manager?

He emphasized that when prompting the AI, it’s vital to include the role you’re playing, the role of the people you’ll be meeting with and the challenge at hand.

“A prompt that has those components in it will be very effective in terms of coming back with three specific questions to ask,” he said. “It’s pretty cool.”

The biggest advantage of using AI is saving time, he said.

Even though the pre-call planning questioning strategies are important for sales reps, they should also gather information that they can use based on the prospect organization itself.

“I did one for a client of mine, a nonprofit, and … I asked the prompter how this organization can get revenue?” Simon said. “I got a great response —five or six bullet points on exactly how they get the revenue stream.”

He explained that the information is available in other ways, but by using AI, you can save the time it would take to weed through hundreds of pages of documents and reference materials.

“It’s a great way to quickly and efficiently and in a usable way get pretty complex information,” he said. “Back in the day, I hated searching through all those public documents trying to find information.”

Sales management uses for AI

On the sales management or even executive leadership side, Simon said there are many tools that gather metrics and interpret data. He mentioned a platform called Gong that uncovers what’s happening in customer conversations so revenue teams can do more of what’s working and set themselves apart from the competition.

“It analyzes a sales call by looking at how many questions you asked, how much talking you did and how much talking the client did,” said Simon. “You then start to build a database of your sales calls. You’ll be able to see trends.”

The manager can then help the employee ask enough questions or ask the right questions that are important to the sales call.

“Those kinds of things come out of a tool like that,” he said.

He also recommends utilizing a platform that measures close rates for salespeople.

“How often you win deals when you’re not talking to the main decision maker is important data,” he said. “If you’ve got someone who is consistently not calling high enough, so they’re always presenting proposals to a recommender who then has to take the proposal to their boss, it will decrease your close rate.”

Management can review the data and give the salesperson tips on connecting with people higher in the company.

At the end of the day, Simon said those who embrace AI technology will have a leg up on the competition because they are saving time and making better use of resources.

“The whole reason for these management tools is to coach the reps to be more effective,” said Simon.

One of the most valuable investments a business has is in its people, and making them better – even incrementally – can have a significant impact on business, he added. Even if the business is so small that the owner is the primary salesperson, there’s a lot to learn from AI.