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This episode previews IEPS’ February 24 webinar with Zeev Wexler and Tom Snyder, exploring how sales teams can move beyond casual AI use to build repeatable workflows with Microsoft Copilot that improve prospecting, qualification, and selling effectiveness. The conversation emphasizes “human + AI” — using AI as a true sales assistant while keeping emotional intelligence, trust, and relationships at the center of closing deals.
Find Zeev on LinkedIn.
ZEEV’S TIP: “AI is not going to replace you but if you don’t learn how to use it, another salesperson who does will.”
THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE
Fred Diamond: On February 24th, we’re doing a special webinar with you and Tom Snyder from Funnel Clarity. Both you and Tom are participants of the IEPS Selling Essentials Marketplace. The webinar that we’re going to be doing, we’re going to be talking about using AI, uncovering AI, and then how to use AI in the prospecting and sales qualification processes. We have some very, very special offers that are going to be coming from that. We’re going to be dealing with an emphasis on Microsoft Copilot, because one thing that you’ve convinced me of is that a lot of companies have Copilot, they have access to it, but they are definitely not using it, not even to the fullest extent, hardly any extent. It’s quite fascinating and you’re going to go through some examples and reasons why. Then Tom’s going to compliment the webinar with some specific sales-related qualification strategies.
It’s interesting, lots of companies have bought Copilot licenses, Microsoft obviously, but they’re still stuck in either the curiosity phase or one day I’ll get around to it phase. Talk a little bit about what they’re missing by not utilizing Copilot and how do they start bridging the usage to consistent results?
Zeev Wexler: Guys, the world is changing right in front of us. I’ve been in business for quite a while. Fred, you’ve been in business for quite a while. There has never been a shift like this. What people need to understand in the sales industry is the new standard is human plus AI. AI is not going to replace you, but if you don’t figure out how to use it, another salesperson that does will replace you. It’s not a game of you’ll be replaced by AI, but now AI is your partner. For the first time ever, we have a technology that is our partner sitting on our desktops in our pockets, and now we’re talking about AI in general.
Let’s talk a little bit about Copilot. Most of the companies that you and I serve, and you and I work with, have Copilot. They have the licenses, they work in the amazing Microsoft ecosystem. Now they have this incredible AI, Copilot, which is named amazingly, to help them do things. Copilot is in the building. Most companies have some kind of a way to use it, but the adoption and the uses are very, very low.
Fred, I told you this in a conversation we had in the past, we go into organizations, great organizations that push AI. Even when we go in to train these amazing sales forces, it’s really an 80/20, 20% of people actually utilize AI and their outputs shows it, they’re getting better, and 80% of people either using it very, very abruptly or very mediocre, or not at all. I have been in a big company and just the other day last week, two people from a sales force told me, “I’ll be honest, yesterday was the first time I opened Copilot.”
Now, Copilot is just a tool for you to do more of the things that you already are good at. Copilot is not going to replace you. Copilot is there to help you do more of what you’re good at and less of what you know exactly how to do, but you don’t want to.
Fred Diamond: A lot of people are using AI, the tools, as search engines or for simple type of help me understand this or do some research for me on this. But you encourage sales teams to stop casually chatting with AI and to start running repeatable workflows. What’s the difference and which foundational workflows should a sales rep be implementing first?
Zeev Wexler: That really depends on what is most valuable for you and what will save the most time. There’s an elephant in the room, emails. There is a very easy way to build a process, a workflow that will help you answer email more professionally in less time. But if you just use a ChatGPT chat and say, “Hey, answer that email,” now you’re just basically landing in mediocrity. Even worse, you may be ruining a relationship, because the AI is going to answer in a way that you don’t. But you can actually customize and educate a process of how you deal with clients. Examples of how emails that work for you, emails that doesn’t work for you. Your tone, words you use, words you don’t use the, the big em dash thing, to never use that in an email, which half of the Copilot users do.
There’s a way to build a very simple process that will take you maybe 20 minutes once, but now you have literally a professional assistant answering emails the way that you would answer the emails, but with more attention to details and without being lazy. I’m not saying everybody’s lazy, I’m just saying we’re trying to do things really quickly. You can educate a process to do it for you quickly, but with high quality and high attention to detail. That’s one thing.
Now, it depends. Each sales team, each sales person have a different thing. Let’s say responding to RFP is one thing, you have a territory and you’re going into somewhere, that is really, really crucial to know other places to be more efficient. Those are workflows you can create, a workflow that we’re going to talk about that I think is crucial, and I’m so happy that we have the great Tom Snyder joining us, is how to qualify sales. How do you qualify sales in the best way? Qualification of sales is an art. Not every opportunity is really an opportunity. You can build the whole sales flow based on what Tom Snyder teaches for years and helped organizations to put that into your AI.
When you just talk to a chat, you’re basically looking at a huge lens. Huge, huge lens. You want to narrow that lens. When you work with a Notebook, you call it project and other things, you can actually give instructions of exactly how you want something to be dealt with and narrow down the AI to do the right job, and not to just do things quickly.
Fred Diamond: You started the conversation with the human plus AI. One thing that we’ve spent a lot of time talking about and discovering is that the sales professional can be better using AI. You’ve talked about some things already. Of course, they got to use it the right way, and they have to think about it as it relates to workflow and process like we talked about. You’ve told me that AI increases speed, but EQ, emotional quotient, closes the deal. Where do you draw the line in practice? What should AI handle end to end? Where does the human step in to own the relationship?
That’s a word that is drifting away. People think that relationship is dying, but it’s more and more important than ever before for the particular reason that the customer can use AI to find all the information that they need. What’s the value that you as a sales professional are bringing? Part of it is by developing a trusted relationship that is helping the customer discover things that they weren’t able to do on their own. Talk about that trust line, if you will.
Zeev Wexler: EQ is what closes the deal. AI is not going to read the room for you. AI is not going to close the deal for you, but AI can do all of the things that you Know would lead you to there, inefficiency that we just don’t have a way to do. AI works for you. AI is almost your junior sales person. You’ve got to look at AI the same way you would look at an assistant, a really good assistant, but an assistant.
I just had a meeting with four founders of one of my biggest clients, and we needed to talk. I would never put anybody else but me in that conversation. But to lead that conversation, AI and my assistants had a huge part in. AI, Copilot for this example, is now your assistant, even your army of assistants. But at the end of the day, you close the deal, you read the room, you are the emotional intelligence. An AI, you can educate it on what works for you to get you to that meeting, what works for you to make the client feel that you’re there for them. But it does not replace you. It just enhances you. You have more of those opportunities to close, more of those opportunities to bring your EQ, to bring who you are as a salesperson. AI is not changing sales, it’s just an assistant to be able to do more.
Fred Diamond: That’s a great way to think about it, as an assistant. I like the way that you described it there. When you and I first started doing this podcast, we talked a lot about governance. One of the big challenges that we saw was the concept that it was the Wild West, was the term you frequently used. People are out there doing whatever it is they want to do. I’ve spoken with a lot of sales leaders at the Institute for Effective Professional Selling who worry about there are people using AI in ways that they can’t see. What are some of your thoughts on how sales leadership can set clear guidelines or guardrails so the teams stop guessing what’s allowed and start using AI confidently and more safely?
Zeev Wexler: I will tell you a truth that I’ve seen in every organization. If you are not going to make it easy and clear for your sales team to use AI properly, they will use it improperly, 100% of the time, if you don’t give them the education, the workflow. Let’s talk about a little tactical stuff. Copilot, you can use just a chat or you can develop agents on Copilot. Sales leaders can develop agents for their sales team to use that act in a way in accordance to what leadership wants and to the guardrails and guidelines of the company. You can develop Notebooks that do certain things really well based on what the company does. If you do this, and it’s easy for the salespeople to use, and it actually creates results, the salespeople won’t go out there and use a ChatGPT, or won’t put your secrets into a tool they don’t need to. But if you won’t allow that, they will.
I’ve seen it over and over again, and you can actually help them, “Hey, we brought somebody in, or we’ve developed an agent just for our company through Copilot, and everybody uses this agent to do this.” Now, there are off-the-shelf agents, like the research agent of Copilot, the analysis agent, but you can build your own agents, and you don’t want a salesperson to build their own agent. You want to build the agent and then give the salespeople to use it. Or there’s a feature on Copilot, it’s called Notebooks. As a feature, when you can actually give direct instructions to Copilot, exactly what to do, you can give reference documents of what is allowed, what is not allowed, what is the goal, and now you can let your salespeople use that. The goal of us leaders is to give salespeople a way to use Copilot or AI in a way that it’s good for them, easy for them, makes more results, but also good with the guardrails of the company.
There’s something I love to use when I talk to sales groups, is you used to play an instrument. Now with AI, you have an orchestra, but as long as each musical tool is guided the right way, is in tune, and that’s what you can do as a leader. You can make sure that everything that they use is in tune within the guidelines, within the guardrails, and then all the output goes way high. Fred, outputs can go up to a thousand percent better if you lay the foundation. Salespeople want to use AI that makes their lives easier and creates more results. But if you’re not going to make that possible, they’ll just use AI to do whatever they want.
Fred Diamond: Once again, the webinar is on February 24th. It’s at noon Eastern Time. It’ll be you, Zeev Wexler, and Tom Snyder. We’re bringing together the concepts of AI for selling effectiveness, and then implementation and using it for sales qualification, better prospecting. Just to wrap up, you and I were talking about what you call the continuity engine. One of the challenges with training is that it often fades, people are pumped up and excited, and then life kicks in and things fade and you have to focus on other things. Talk a little bit about that and reinforcement of some of the things that you help companies use when it comes to AI.
Zeev Wexler: You can’t teach somebody to dance waltz in an hour. You can teach them the first step maybe, you can get them excited about it, but you got to reinforce, you got to show them an easy way, and you got to give them more and more guidance and show them how using that will create the results that you want. You got to bring in the initial education, but then you actually need to continuously educate your salespeople with how to use it to create their results. What I love about what we’re doing with Tom Snyder is Tom is one of the biggest sales experts I have ever met, and I’ve learned so much from him. But now we can take the knowledge that Tom has and bring it into an AI process.
Now we can continuously reinforce that process and the education, but now the AI actually helps you with the continuity, because the actual process has all of the right tools. It’s human plus AI. It’s not just AI running wild. It’s AI doing the things you know you need to do, and it has to be continuously reinforced by leadership management and the salespeople themselves. When you do that, results compound. I’ve seen sales forces move from not using Copilot or AI at all, to not being able to imagine what will be a world that if they take AI from them, because they’re able to do so much more in the right way.
Fred Diamond: The tools are going to be there to help you with the process, but you still also, to be successful as a sales professional, you need to understand where the customer is and where the customer is going. We don’t want to lose sight of the fact that you still need to be really, really smart in what’s happening with the customer and what’s going to trigger them, and where do they need to go, and how do they make decisions. AI can help you understand a lot about that, but it also needs to be brought in.
Once again, February 24th at noon Eastern Time, Zeev Wexler, Tom Snyder, the Institute for Effective Professional Selling. Zeev, any final thoughts before we wrap up today?
Zeev Wexler: Last thing is, guys, AI is not there for you to increase your output. It’s not there to send a thousand emails nobody’s going to read. It’s there to increase your outcomes. It’s there to increase your revenue. That’s how we need to treat AI. It’s not just, “Hey, now I have a tool that can send 10 times more emails than I did before.” No. Now you have a tool to increase your output, and AI is your assistant. You are in control.
Fred Diamond: That’s a great point. It’s not about the output, it’s about the outcome. Everything is about results. Are you moving forward? It’s not just about the activity, it’s not just about using the tools to get things going. At the end of the day in sales, you get judged on how much you sell. How are you going to use these tools and the human process that Tom’s going to bring to the table to be more effective?
Everybody, thanks again for being a listener of the Sales Game Changers Podcast. We look forward to seeing everybody on February 24th.
Transcribed by Mariana Badillo