AI-Powered Seller

AI in Sales, Pt 1: How to Build an AI Powered Sales Day

• Jake Dunlap

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In this episode of The AI Powered Seller, host Jake Dunlap, CEO of Skaled and co-founder of Meet Journey and Rev Optics, takes you inside the daily workflow of a modern AI powered sales professional.

Jake breaks down how today’s top reps are transforming their routines using assistants, agents, and automation to reclaim hours of lost productivity and focus on what really matters: high quality conversations that close deals.

From pre-call research to follow-up emails and social selling, Jake walks through a tactical, play-by-play guide of how AI is changing every step of the sales day. You’ll learn:

  • What an AI powered day really looks like and how it differs from the old Google and LinkedIn grind
  • How to use tools like RepGPT, Journey, and Outbound Meeting Co-Pilot to prep faster and sell smarter
  • Why automations and assistants, not just prompts, are the real edge in modern sales
  • The small daily habits that separate traditional sellers from their AI enabled peers

If you’ve ever felt buried under research, logging, and admin work, this episode will show you how to turn those hours into impact.

SPEAKER_00:

The AI powered stellar on her or his website says, hey, here's how my meetings went. Here's a transcript of my call. Write me a really good targeted email for this meeting based on these four things and give me three versions. I want to send a different recap to the CFO, the COO, and then the director of operations. So you just save transcript and generate three targeted follow-up emails that I can send each of them. They do that. AI Powered Seller. What is going on, everyone? Welcome to another episode of The AI Powered Seller. I'm your host, Jake Dunlap, CEO of Scaled, co-founder of Meet Journey and Rev Optics. And I want all my sellers to picture this. You just spent two hours yesterday, you know, researching prospects. You Googled their company, you stocked them on LinkedIn, you prepared for your next sales meeting. Uh, and the competition did all of that in literally 25 seconds, right? The competition, instead of going and Googling and looking things up, are using things like assistants, they're using agents to do the work for them. And so if you're still operating like, I mean, candidly, like I did in 2015, 16, 2020, et cetera, wow, are you losing out on a lot of time? I saw this crazy stat by McKenzie, who is something like 60% roughly of a seller's day-to-day has the ability to be able to be automated or optimized. And that to me is a wake-up call. I mean, you're talking about saving, I think they said 11 to 12 hours every single day. And in today's episode of AI Powered Seller, I'm gonna walk you through what I think is, I'm gonna call it like the new day in the life. What is the day in the life of an AI-powered seller? What makes an AI-powered seller so different? What are they doing in their day-to-day? Like, what are your peers actually doing? So, this is gonna be a multi-part series where what I'm gonna do is break down today where I'm gonna call it the Google LinkedIn seller is now, the seller that has to go meet and have a one-on-one with her boss. And what are the four things that a seller who is truly AI powered doing in their day-to-day, and what that does from a productivity impact standpoint. First, let's paint the picture here, right? You wake up, you look at your calendar. Maybe you looked at it the day before, but then you forgot you went to sleep, right? You see you've got, you know, maybe you've got your calendar block for a call block, maybe you don't, or email block, uh, but you've got your meetings uh blocked out, you got your one-on-one with your leader, right? You've got that pit in your stomach because you're like, oh crap, I know I didn't do enough research as much as I maybe should have, but I need to do more research. Uh, you start Googling their website, you go to the person's LinkedIn, you copy and paste in some notes to Salesforce so your boss doesn't yell at yell at you. Uh the call begins, then you're like, oh yeah, tell me a little bit more about your business. And then the seller is immediately annoyed. Or sorry. You then start your first call, you say something like, Oh, tell me about your business. And then the buyer's like, oh my gosh, this person did no research. Like, why am I on this call in the first place? Right? You're taking notes, then you finish the call, you've got to go log the notes this CRM, you got to go write your follow-up. Maybe you're getting some type of AI drafted follow-up. Most people are at this point. So you took 30 minutes, you didn't have enough time to prep like you'd like. You took 30, 45 minutes on a call. Then you spend another, I don't know, 15, 20 minutes in follow-up activities. And by lunch, you're exhausted and you've barely had any selling conversations. You've had, you know, your one sales meeting, maybe you've like put out some blanket emails, uh, but you're already feeling like, okay, I am not prepared for these calls. And then the afternoon comes along, more calls, more research, more logging. 5:30 rolls around and you think, I worked my butt off today, but what did I actually accomplish? I feel like I spent most of the time staring at my screen or in meetings or in one-to-ones, right? Let's be honest, there's a lot of one-to-ones today. So let's walk through how your world can be different, literally starting today. And for any of those of you who are like, Jake, this is the way that I know this has been my day-to-day. I'm telling you right now, I can relate. That was my day-to-day for a long time. You know, when I was in sales, like that's just that's all you could do. And just so you know, your leaders right now, they're feeling this big time as well. In their minds, they're like, well, what else should we be doing? And there's also this culture, let's just be, let's just call it what it is. There is a little bit of this culture of like pay your dues in sales, where you know, sales leaders a little bit are like, yeah, you know, you gotta pay your dues. You gotta, you know, you can't automate this stuff. You gotta go and do it. And I'm like, do you really? Like, is there really, is that, is there really that much value where I'm like, oh, my sales team, if they don't do the research and it's themselves, then they're not, you know, walking to school in, you know, eight miles in the snow with no shoes or whatever. And the reality is what I want my sellers doing in 2026 and beyond is I want my sellers having more conversations. I want my sellers getting really educated on customers. So when they show up for that call, customers are excited. They show that they've done the research, they put in the work. You know, when they're doing outbound, they're customizing the content. Look, I've put out posts, right, about AIs taking over for SDRs. And I'm gonna tell you right now, do I think that an AI bot or somebody can beat a good SDR? No, not even close. But the problem is, you know, what I see a lot of, you know, sales refs and teams doing is they're putting in the motions. They're just putting in the the, you know, going through the motions, putting you know in like the basic work. I'm getting out my activity, template send, I'm making my calls, nobody's connecting, etc. And so today I'm gonna talk through the different, you know, I'm gonna call it elements of what goes into a truly, you know, AI-powered seller. You know, what goes uh what goes into somebody who's out there making it happen every single day uh in their day-to-day. So let's talk about the old way. I'm gonna talk about four parts of the sales process today. I'm gonna talk about the day before, the morning, the afternoon, and wrapping up the afternoon for your next day. So the old way, let's talk about what would happen. It's the day before you look at your calendar and you just start going to Google or LinkedIn and you start doing your research. This is if you're a good seller. Good sellers, by the way, you should be prepping maybe two days before, but don't get me started with that, right? The reality is if you've got more than a few meetings, you're like, I'll just do some prep before the meetings. How many of you can relate? Raise your hands virtually or raise your hands, you know, if you're sitting, you know, not in front of somebody else. A lot of you go, Yeah, yeah, I think I know what this business does. And you just wing it, right? Ideally, the day before, um, you know, you're doing at least the Google, the LinkedIn, the maybe jotting down some notes. Maybe you're gonna go look for a few companies that you already work with that could be um, you know, a good fit for you as well, too. Somebody that you might want to mention on the call. It's like, hey, I already work with these other people. That's the best of the best, okay? The V1 AI powered seller, this is what they do instead. What they do is they have their list of two meetings, three meetings for the next day. They have an AI assistant, you know, at Journey. And if you all haven't signed up for your free trial journey, we actually literally just extended the trial to two weeks. So please sign up. It has been amazing. We've been getting amazing inbound lately from teams like, oh my gosh, thank you. Because there's no prompting, there's no anything. And they go to a tool you can build a custom GPT and ChatGPT or a gym and Gemini, whatever. And it's called deep account research. It already knows what your products are, it knows uh, it knows uh your market, who you sell to, and it just says, give me a link. You copy and paste in scale.com. Here's our mission and values, this is what the company does, da da da. Then it says, Great, do you want me to take a look at the person's LinkedIn? It says, Yep, I'll go scrape their LinkedIn. It's Jake Dunlap, boom. And literally within about two minutes, I know everything the company does, how they make money, their values, their competitive landscape, their ICP. I know who I'm meeting with, where they fit in, things that that might be good talking points for them. I know that in two minutes. I'm able to do better prep right now than it used to take me. I could only do this for enterprise accounts back in the day. And so now, you know, today's seller, the day before, is using assistance. And again, you could be already using automations, but I think most of you aren't there. So I'll talk about that in the Day in the Life 2.0. Um, but the step one is you need to be using assistance to do this for you, right? And so the day before you're going, you're using deep account research, um, or rep GPT is what another one of the assistants that I know Journey has. You're saying, This is what I'm trying to do, or this is the meeting, this is the company I'm meeting with. It already knows your personas, it automatically rips it all for you. You scan it, you say, Oh, okay, cool. Oh, this company's kind of interesting. And you can keep querying too if you want to go further. Uh, we had a leader who's like, hey, can you then have it create like a five question trivia game after it depulls the research so the reps actually learn it? I was like, that's not a bad idea, uh, as a part of that. So, you know, that's what a rep does the day before. Your AI-powered seller rep has their prep done, and it's not this BS, like, I don't know, pulling in firmographic data from clay tables. Like this is deep account research, looking at their blog, LinkedIn profiles, etc. Um, some of that stuff you can't do in Chat GPT. Uh, so that's number one. So the day before, they're staying prepared, they're excited, etc. So let's talk about the morning, right? Then in the morning, what they do is they grab their coffee, uh, they open up their preps, right? Or they can add them to their calendar, right? Again, I think the the level 1.5 rep maybe has also built out some type of automation that can see a new link uh show up in your calendar from a uh domain. It then can say, hey, do you want me to run this assistant? Run the assistant and then automatically add it to the invite where only you see it too. So imagine a world where you know rep rep and one and one point five are having all this amazing insights, either automatically put in their calendar or pulling it up. The next thing that your your uh 1.0 rep does that's AI powered, is they actually have the time to do a little bit of extra deep dive. So they say, okay, you're meeting with this company, tell me about their trends. You know, they're using rep GPT, they're using new account plan builder, you know, other assistants saying, Hey, teach me more about this, right? Go ahead and find me any other relevant news that might be applicable, uh, specific to, I think they use this competitor of ours, ABC, and it'll just keep going. And so by the time their morning meetings come around, you know, they're prepared for their day, and they've spent between the night before and that morning, they've spent 15, 20 minutes. No more manual research, no more Googling, no more LinkedIn searching. They are using assistance, custom GPTs, and gems all day long. No prompting. And that's the key. I really want to go. Maybe one thing you haven't heard me talk about is like, Jake, what's the prompt? And you know, guys, we were building prompt libraries two years ago. And now there's no point in building out a prompt library where I can take those same prompts, put them behind at a custom assistant or again, use meet journey, and then be able to not have to worry about knowing how to prompt. Like assistants prompt me, right? And so, you know, if you want to be that AI-powered seller, that is the new world of getting ready for your meetings for the day. You know, you're going in, you're making sure that you're finding like these new kind of really cool insights as a part of it, and you know, you're really ready to have a very strategic conversation. So, um, and that's all, you know, morning, that's how you're prepping for your sales meeting coupled with the night before. Uh, so hopefully, if you're getting value out of this so far, we've got a lot more to go. Make sure to like the video, subscribe to the channel. You know, we're all we're always about putting out more tactical AI information. If you're enjoying the podcast, make sure to sign up to get downloads when the latest episodes come out uh as well. So uh what else am I doing in the morning, right? So if I am a morning rep, and let's say I've got to do some prospecting. Well, guess what? I'm doing the same thing, right? So we've got one called Outbound Meeting Copilot, um, scaled. We've got another one called Sales Meetings Made Easy. And what they do is we call it the triangle, is these assistants know that in order to cut through today, you've got to do a few things really, really well, and that's be relevant. And the things you need to be able to do is say, what's the job title? And again, these assistants already know that. Jake sells to VPs of operations. Great. It knows what's the sub-industry. It says, give me the link to the company. It says, Oh, these they're in a consumer package goods company that sells into this, this, and this buyer. Then it says, here are the trends that that job title and this sub-industry are facing that you solve for. These are the three things you should use in your email. And so literally, this isn't about someone's personality type. This isn't about like Jake prefers direct communication, like news flash. Everybody uh who's an executive prefers direct communication. So, just in case you're wondering, uh, as a part of that. So, you know, it's pulling out industry insights. So again, I see my prospect list, I've got a company that pulls up, I pop open uh outbound meeting co-pilot assistant. That's what they call it in journey. It says, hey, give me the domain, tell me the job title. If you've already told it the job title, you don't need to do that. It immediately says these are the three things based on industry trends from recent news of why they should take a meeting with you. And then you're copying and pasting in snippets and making it your own. So instead of me doing research and fumbling around for 10, 15 minutes, by 10 minutes, I'm on email number two and it's hyper, hyper, hyper personalized. Right? Then I'm making sure I save those notes into Salesforce, et cetera. And so in my morning, I'm getting through my call blocks faster. I'm more prepared for my meetings than ever before, and the quality of my outbound is better as well. Maybe in the morning I've got a meeting uh with my boss coming up. Okay, no problem. I say, I go to rep GPT, um, or you know, we've got some other ones in scale. I think we've got like sales manager one that you can reverse engineer. And you go and you say, Hey, I got a one-on-one with my boss. Here are the top three things that I want to talk about. Here are some concerns I have based on my performance or based on like their attitude. Help me to put together a quick agenda for our one-to-one so I can show that I'm prepared and ready to go. So in my morning, I'm having better quality conversations, and that's what this is all about. Having better conversations. I'm booking more meetings, I'm preparing for the rest of my day. So that is the V1 AI-powered seller, how they're running their day-to-day. What happens in the afternoon? All right, so let's talk about the third phase here. So we've prepped the night before, we've prepped again, maybe went a little deeper the morning of. We're doing really high quality targeted outbound throughout the day. We're preparing for meetings internally in the morning by using Gen AI and prompting it or using different assistants as a part of it. So, what about the afternoon? Okay, and again, obviously more of the same, right? So I'm gonna continue to use these assistants over and over and over again. And like I said, if you have not checked out meetjourney.ai, there's a free link below. Sign up for it. Um, you can do a lot of the things we're talking about in other tools. You can't scrape LinkedIn, there's some other things you can't do. Um, but if you just want to get ahead, it's probably the best tool out there in terms of just out of the box, ready to rock and roll. So make sure to go check that out. So let's talk about the afternoon. Right? Your brain is fried, you're fading. You know, it's been it's lunchtime, you're like, I need I need a nap. Okay, we got more calls, more emails. My prep is probably getting worse. I'm not doing as much uh as well either. Uh whereas let's talk about the morning transition to the afternoon of the AI-powered seller, V1. The AI powered seller on it on her or his lunch break says, Hey, here's how my meetings went. Here's a transcript of my call. Write me a really good targeted email for this meeting based on these four things, and give me three versions. I want to send a different recap to the CFO, the COO, and then the director of operations. So use the same transcript and generate three targeted follow-up emails that I can send each of them. They do that. They use RepGPT is probably the best, best one I've seen. Um use RepGPT, it does it, creates three emails from one transcript in about a minute and a half. Uh, you copy and paste in the emails, you then tweak each one. So in about 10 minutes, five, 10 minutes, you send out three hyper personalized emails. You add probably a couple meetings in the morning, so you spend about 20, 30 minutes sending out the best targeted recaps you've probably ever sent out in your life. Um you also then say, hey, from each one of these transcripts, I want you to synthesize my notes so I can put them into Salesforce. No problem, done. Copy and paste it in. Again, the 1.5 rep is building automations around this, where I'll give you an example of an automation we built for a client. Automatic Zoom API pulls into our uh workflow automation tool, automatically slacks them. Hey, here's kind of what I heard clarifying question, person answers, automatically generates notes, pushes them to Salesforce, right? And obviously, you can continue to take it that way. So, um, what else does this AI-powered rep do? Well, they probably are doing more social selling. They're saying, hey, here's my list from sales nav. Please go, here are the people, please go look at any relevant post that they have, or it's you're you're looking in your feed throughout the day, you're copying and pasting in. Um, you're going to, we've got one called social media writer. You're saying, hey, all right, I want to put a post. John Henderson wrote a post about this, copy paste. Help me to write a post that other VPs would would resonate around this operations topic that can help to make me be thought of as more of a sales uh thought leader, more of a thought leader, not a sales thought leader, but a thought leader within my target market, VPs of operations, whoever it is, right? And so it's gonna help to craft a post. I'll then make it my own. Again, I'm spending a grand total of probably 15 minutes on this. I'm continuing to connect with people, right, throughout the day. Right. So it says, hey, Jake, um, you know, based on people, you know, that John connected with, I can then go to, we've got one called Lookalike Lead Finder. I can say, hey, go find me three other people that are posting on LinkedIn. I go to lookalike finder, copy and paste in John's post. I say, can you find me any other VPs of operations? And here, maybe you could even get some target companies and whoever's posting, boom, done. Right? It can, you know, then let's say I want to take one of John's posts and I want to write him an email, a customized email. Oh, hey, I see these 10 people that posted today. Copy paste post into outbound meeting co-pilot. Hey, come up with three specific little data points. Oh, boom. Then I send out 10 to 15 additional personalized emails later in the day. So all day long, all I'm doing is I'm learning. I am being more customized than I ever could have imagined before. Right? I'm doing these recaps. And so at the end, you know, at the end of the day, I'm done. I'm done. Right? I've got my email recaps ready, right? I'm doing my prep right ahead of time as a part of it. I'm doing my recaps, I'm doing very targeted recaps, I'm doing my social engagement and all that type of selling. And what I actually think is really important about all of this is how much more exciting this is. Like, imagine if all you're doing is going really deep on every single like, you know, prospect. You're going deep on every single sales call. And like, all I'm doing is having really high quality conversations throughout the day. That's all I'm doing, right? I'm not having to go and spend time research and research, not having to spend time doing a whole bunch of other random stuff and copying and, you know, there's still some copying and pasting, but I'm not writing stuff from scratch as a part of it. And when I talk about kind of AI-powered seller 2.0, you know, I'll get I'll get kind of next level for us in a few weeks on um, you know, the automation world and how, again, we're not gonna automate everything, but we're gonna take some of this stuff to the next level. And so for all of you out there, again, hopefully if you found this video helpful, make sure to you know subscribe to the channel. Like I said, we're gonna be putting out part two. Another one you might want to go check out, another episode, is we just we I just did a few episodes on our AI maturity, kind of like where organizations fit in the maturity curve. But if you're somebody who's trying to get better as a rep, we also have a new article called AI Proficiency, and you can kind of see where you fit. We'll put a link to that in the show notes for everybody. So if you're checking this out on the podcast or on YouTube, you can uh you know make sure to check to get access to that link in that article as well. Um, again, we're always focused on trying to put out better and better tactical content for all my sellers out there, all my leaders, um, people leading organizations as well, too. So we can start to make the transition. What I'm laying out for you, my friends, is totally doable right now. And that's why sometimes I have these conversations with leaders. I'm like, guys, I must not be saying this right. Like, what am I doing? This, everything I talked about can be set up for your organization in a week, a week or two weeks. Like, we are moving to this brand new world where to be a V1 of AI-powered seller is becoming a reality faster and faster and faster. And so I really implore all of you, you know, to take heed in what I said. You know, make sure obviously DM if your you or your company needs help, but this playbook I'm giving you, you can run. You know, this isn't some like crazy proprietary, it's just thinking about the things that your your people do every day that aren't adding value in customer-facing situations or prospect-facing situations. We have to look to automate all of those things first and create assistants or agents that can pull in the insights, and then me as a rep or a leader can then turn on my brains. And so that's what I got for everybody. That is day in the life of an AI-powered seller uh V1. And pumped for the episode that I'll put together here in a few weeks. But like I said, if you're liking the content, I appreciate you and appreciate you listening to the end here. Please make sure to subscribe to the channel, uh, like the video, share it with your company and Slack or teams. Like, hey, you got to check this out. Like, how much cooler would this be, or how much better would this be for our day-to-day if we could just do this? You know, if we didn't have to go and do all this other stuff, you know, as usual, um, make sure to uh, you know, check out what we're doing. If you're watching the podcast now, check out what we're doing on YouTube. You can watch all the different, you know, interviews that we have and everything as well too. So check out what we're doing on YouTube. Um, if you're more of an audio, make sure to check it out on your favorite uh podcast platform. So that's what I got, everyone. Day in the life of AI Powered Seller. I hope this uh is super, super helpful for all of you. I hope you're immediately gonna go out and say, man, I love what Jake said about my the the the day before, and I'm gonna start to do that more and more. Maybe it's it's changing up your morning routine. So excited to hear about this. Make sure to drop a comment. You know, maybe something that you're doing already that someone else is gonna find value in. So that's what I got for you, everybody. Have a great rest of your week, and we'll see you on the next one.

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Jake Dunlap

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