What if you could have your own sales assistant running in the background 24/7, helping you identify who to reach out to, what to offer them or how to prepare for a sales call?
Thanks to AI, you can have one.
Whether you prefer to use Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini or some other tool, AI can help you find lost opportunities and improve your firm’s sales strategies.
Here’s how.
How to Use Claude as Your 24/7 Sales Assistant
1. Identify Stale Opportunities in Your Inbox
One powerful way Claude can work as your sales assistant is to find stale opportunities hidden in old conversations.
What I want you to do is hook up Claude (I’ll say Claude as an example, but know you can use your AI tool of choice) to your inbox and ask it to find:
- Prospects who never emailed you back
- Proposals that you sent and just fell through the cracks
- People you had calls with that then never went anywhere
How long should it look back? The timeframe you want to give it is completely up to you, but you a good starting point is the past 12 months.
For the vast majority of you, there are people sitting in your inbox who are ready and in need of your services. Maybe the timing wasn’t right when you had that initial conversation or call, but now, the timing is just right.
Now, not only can Claude identify these people, but it can also tell you who to prioritize and even help you with the conversation starter to re-engage that person.
If you really want to take this to the next level, you can go beyond your email and check anywhere you have conversations with people, such as your:
- CRM
- Notetaker app
- Social media inboxes
- Etc.
Once you’ve revisited these old conversations, the next step is to focus on outbound.
2. Go Outbound
When it comes to outbound, Claude can help you do a couple of things really well.
- Put together a list of people you want to reach out to based on a criteria
- Help you deliver something personalized to these people
I’m going to share a few examples of how we use this strategy.
The first example is something we did here at Leaders Online.
We told Claude who our best fit clients are, and we had it go out and create something we knew would be of value to them.
And for our clients with 11 to 50 employees, one of the places we start with is their website. Why? Because people seem to always end up back on a firm’s website.
What we did was use Claude to identify firms that fit a certain criteria and had outdated websites. Then, we put together a custom report based on what should be changed on their website to date and some ongoing ways we could drive demand.
These reports were super custom. We gave examples of mock-ups of the website and content and copy changes. We gave examples of where forms should go.
Sure, Claude helped us put these reports together, but we went through them line by line and worked on them individually to ensure we were providing something of real, significant value.
Now, the second example is something we helped an accounting firm client do. This particular firm wanted to target more companies getting ready to do their Series A and help them through the process.
We had Claude look at companies that had a seed round within the last 18-24 months that were:
- Actively hiring
- Participating in an accelerator or demo day
- Had job postings mentioning investor reporting, financial modeling or fundraising
In other words, these were companies with signals that their operations are growing.
Claude used criteria to make a list of potential high-quality prospects for the firm, and then we reached out to these people with something of value.
I can’t give too many details away, but it was an assessment. And it sparked a lot of conversations and generated a lot of demand.
You can use Claude to do something similar. Figure out who your ideal clients are and something that is personalized and of value to offer.
3. Create Inbound Demand
You can also use AI to create inbound demand through your content. Every week, you can feed Claude your conversations and have it pull out what you should be creating content about.
Claude can even help you create the initial drafts of that content that you can edit to make your own.
4. Improve Sales Calls
Along with outbound and inbound demand, you can use Claude to improve your sales calls.
Start by having it help you research the companies before your conversation. Give it context from the conversations you’ve been having and any deliverables you’ve provided. Share as much as you can about your relationship so far.
Then, have Claude generate a script for you.
After you’ve had the call, give Claude a recording or a transcript of the call and ask it to coach you. Ask for feedback on where you can improve.
5. Follow Up
Once you’ve had calls with prospects, you start wondering when you should follow up. Claude can help you here, too. You may even be able to integrate it with your CRM and create a task in, say, ClickUp (if you use it) to reach out. Ask it to help you with this process so that those leads don’t slip through the cracks or go stale.
Final Thoughts
Claude can be a powerful sales assistant, and it’s available 24/7 to help you. There are countless ways you can use it to help grow your firm, even if you only use it for 20 minutes a day. Start with the strategy I’ve shared here today and experiment to find new ways to leverage this tool as your sales assistant.
