AI for discovery prep, call analysis, meeting notes, follow-up emails, CRM updates, and deal admin

AI made me faster at sales.
That turned out to be the least interesting part.

I work in business development, and I use AI almost every day for:
• Researching accounts
• Preparing for calls
• Writing outreach
• Summarising conversations
• Following up with prospects

Sometimes it gives me something genuinely useful.
Other times, it gives me a perfectly written email that I would never send.

The difference is usually context.

AI on its own doesn’t know:
• Someone from our team spoke to the company six months ago
• What the prospect cared about
• Why the conversation stopped
• What has changed since then
• Whether there’s a genuine reason to reconnect now

But when I started using AI alongside HubSpot and the other tools in my workflow, the picture became much clearer.

AI helps me work faster.
The context helps me decide who is worth contacting, what might matter to them and whether I have something relevant to say.

That distinction matters because my manager, Joshua Mathew, is not measuring success by the number of emails AI helps me produce.

It's more about whether those emails lead to conversations, meetings and qualified opportunities.

That’s why the thinking behind HubSpot’s new Agentic Customer Platform clicked for me.

It isn’t simply about adding another AI tool.
It’s about bringing customer data, business context, people and AI agents together, so the AI working with me knows more than what I typed into a prompt.

I work at HubSpot, so of course I’m biased.

But from my view:
AI without context can make us look busier.
AI with context has a much better chance of making us useful.

Has AI improved actual outcomes for your team yet, or mainly increased output?

Also, with Spider-Man all over my personal feed lately, this meme felt pretty apt.

I use AI every day in pre-sales.
And the most useful part of my setup is not a tool. It is a habit.

AI saves me hours every week.
Discovery prep, demo storylines, RFP answers, follow-ups.

But speed is only half the story. The other half is judgement.

For me, every AI task runs through two gates.

Gate 1, before the prompt: Should this information go in?
- Data privacy matters, so I think before I paste.
- Customer data, personal data, anything identifiable: I ask myself if it really needs to be there.
- Most of the time it does not. "A retail company with 40,000 employees" works just as well as the real name.

Gate 2, before I use the result: Should this result go out?
- Is it factually right? AI sounds confident even when it is wrong.
- Would I say this to a client, in the room?
- And is it mine? Edited, in my voice, with my judgement.

AI is the tool. Judgement is the job.

How do you handle this in your daily work? I am curious.

#ProductivityTuesday #PreSales #AI

The more I use AI in sales, the less I worry about it replacing me.
Today I was doing my usual B2B work: looking for new clients, checking companies, updating CRM, writing emails. AI was there for most of it. Research, drafts, summaries, ideas. Things that used to take hours now take minutes.

And I love that. I have absolutely no nostalgia for spending three hours doing something AI can now do in ten minutes. 
After 20+ years in B2B sales, I’ve learned that people come back when they trust you and know they can rely on you. No perfect email or presentation can replace that.
Relationships are still built over a cup of coffee. Or, in Finland, sometimes in the sauna 😅
AI can make me faster, better prepared, and probably more organized than I naturally deserve to be.
But it can’t build 20 years of reputation for me!
And strangely enough, the more AI we have around us, the more I think we start to value something very old-fashioned: a real conversation with another human being.
So no, I’m not afraid of AI replacing me.

And you? Are you worried that AI might replace you one day?.

I use AI tools daily to find leads and capture meeting notes, but I never use them to mass generate emails or DMs.

These tools are great for almost every phase of the sales process.

But I think most people can spot AI slop miles away, which usually results in an instant lost of trust.

My strategy is to let AI help me with things like desk research, but when it comes to the actual human interaction, I just do it myself.

Perhaps AI will get better at copying my personal writing style and thinking, but until then, I’ll just do this part manually.

Agentforce Sales is now fully live in Slack.

Reps can sell directly in, and from, Slack. They get the data they need for every interaction, agents take action on their behalf and everything syncs back to Salesforce automatically.

When I began writing this edition, I wasn't trying to write another book about Artificial Intelligence. I wanted to answer a much more important question:

How can sales professionals use AI intentionally to become more effective at every stage of the sales process?

Over the past several years, AI has become one of the most talked-about technologies in business. Unfortunately, many organizations are still asking AI to replace selling rather than improve it.

My experience has been just the opposite.
AI doesn't replace Value Selling. It amplifies it.

The most successful sales professionals will use AI to:
•       Prepare more effectively before customer meetings.
•       Ask better questions during discovery.
•       Develop stronger value propositions.
•       Create more compelling proposals.
•       Coach more consistently.
•       Spend more time selling and less time on administrative work.

But AI only delivers its full potential when it supports a defined, repeatable sales process.

That philosophy is the foundation of this new edition. Throughout the book, I share practical AI prompts and real-world applications that help sales professionals improve productivity while strengthening—not replacing—the human skills that build trust and create customer value.

This book also serves as the foundation for the Value Selling Institute's Value Selling Fundamentals, Sales Process Workshop, AI Accelerator, and advanced commercial development curriculum.

My hope is that readers will finish this book with a simple realization:

AI will not replace salespeople. Salespeople using AI will replace salespeople who don't.

I'd love to hear your perspective.
How is AI changing the way you prepare for and execute customer sales calls?

#ArtificialIntelligence #Sales #ValueSelling #SalesLeadership #SalesTraining #B2BSales #CommercialExcellence #SalesEnablement #AI #ValueSellingInstitute

Meeting prep, deal follow up, outreach strategy, account rating, call feedback, day planning…

The list of things I use Breeze Assistant for as a sales rep daily goes on & on.

If you’re not using Breeze Assistant (lil breezy as I call her mentally) in your HubSpot account - I challenge you to make today the day.

> Marketers - ask what you can be doing better for email marketing campaigns based on your performance over the past month.

> Sales reps - ask which deals you need to prioritize today and why.

> Sales leaders - ask what the reps who closed the most deals (by volume & amount) last month are doing that’s helping them win.

> Service folks - ask the leading topics your customers needed support with this past month.

Lil Breezy doesn’t cost a thing extra on top of your HubSpot subscription and is insanely helpful.

And, pro tip, once you find a prompt you like - add it to your saved prompts for easy retrieval.

Custom and pre-generated templates are now available. Unique to Read AI, teams get both flexibility and consistency, while sales reps get reports that are immediately ready for qualification, follow-up, pipeline reviews, and internal alignment.

Two years ago I thought AI was overhyped. Now I work at Clay and use Claude daily as my thought partner. But I still don’t let our sales team automate anything we haven’t done ourselves first.

And the more I use AI, the more confident I am in this strategy.

There's a difference between pasting a Gong transcript into ChatGPT to analyze a call vs actually talking to someone about the nuances of that deal.

AI can't pattern match with all the experience you've built up over years of selling. It wasn't in the room when the prospect's tone shifted when you asked for the business, why that matters, or what to do next. AI can help you build the org map, but it can't discern who actually has power or influence in an organization.

The rule: we shouldn't automate something we haven't done ourselves, at least a handful of times. If we haven't done the thing well - and felt the pain of getting it wrong - we have no way of knowing if AI is steering us the right way.

You still need a human to find the ingenious, GTM alpha idea, read body language, tone, and build relationships.

The tools are there to assist, not do the job, and we can’t do great work if we don’t know what outcome we’re looking for.

Customer expectations have reset. Here’s how agentic AI across Microsoft 365 Copilot and Dynamics 365 helps sales and service teams meet the new standard—right in the flow of work.