The Agents Are Here Mr. Anderson

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With the year winding down and everyone focused on closing (not training), it’s the rare time of year when I actually have some downtime and can catch up on all those non-priority projects and admin clean-ups that I’ve been putting off all year.

I’m not sure about you but I have a Google ‘bookmark’ folder filled with tech and tools I want to check out but never have the time to get to.

After doom scrolling through Instagram one night I was reminded of HeyGen, the AI video generator.

So one night this week I poured myself a glass of my favorite whiskey (Yellow Spot), added a few rocks and started playing around with it and all I can say is - holy shit……

TACTICAL TIPS: Start Using Agents Now

SALES RESOURCES: Scraping Podcasts for Quotes

SALES FROM THE STREETS: Holy Shit HeyGen

TACTICAL TIPS:

Start Using Agents Now

Agents are taking over.

If you followed me at Dreamforce and after, you’ll know that I walked away from the event feeling very uneasy for the vast majority of Sales reps out there.

What I saw the Salesforce Agents do, specifically at the front end of the funnel (research, autonomous emails, immediate responses to inbound, etc), was better than a large portion of the Sales reps I know who do those jobs.

Don’t get me wrong, I think the good/great sales reps will leverage these Agents to become insanely effective and valuable to both the company and the client.

However, the vast majority of Sales reps who are going through the motions (sending templated emails, making generic calls, droning through demos, etc) will absolutely get replaced by these agents and reps who learn how to use them.

If you don’t believe me that Agents are going to take over, remember that Salesforce is hiring 1000 sales reps to focus on selling their Agents.

If you know anything about Salesforce you know they like to be first to market which is why I think their plan is to blitz the market to get as much coverage as soon as possible.

My prediction is that once they do, they’ll be laying off far more than the 1000 sales reps they hired but that’s for another post.

Another data point to consider is the article I read this week about how Outreach.io launched its AI prospecting agents.

The article says:

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How quickly do you think “or” in that quote is going to become a “will” when these autonomous agents show they can get better results than reps, at a way cheaper price, 24 hours a day, without any HR issues to deal with?

If you’re fortunate enough to work at a company who has a solid tech stack and is integrating AI Agents then I encourage you to go all in and learn as much as you can about how to leverage them.

Regardless, you need to at least start exploring what they can do.

I came across this website, which contains a large list of Agents broken down into different categories.

The obvious place to start is with the Sales AI gents but there are Agents for everything on this list.

I know some of you are probably sick of hearing about AI and trust me, I get it.

I stopped taking calls from AI companies who wanted my feedback on their tools about a month ago because it was getting overwhelming.

However, this isn’t something we can hide from.

SALES RESOURCE:

Scraping Podcasts for Quotes

The Agent list and info on HeyGen were going to be the Sales Resources I shared this week but I wanted to add one more.

You should know by now that I’m a huge fan of Clay.com and they’re also a sponsor of mine.

They created a new Clay Table where you can add any YouTube video link and it will automatically transcribe it and pull out key quotes you can use as “trigger events” in your prospecting emails which is awesome!

I did a Linkedin post for them this week that showed exactly how I use it to prospect into my Tier1 accounts.

I thought it was a pretty legit post but I f-ed it up because when I went to schedule the post, I chose 11pm instead of 11am so it went out at night when no one saw it so it got almost no reach.

(It was probably because I had a few too many glasses of whiskey at that point)

I’m adding it here to help spread the word a little more. Check out the Linkedin post and try it out today. I promise you won’t be disappointed.

SALES FROM THE STREETS:

Holy Shit HeyGen

As I wrote about in my last newsletter, I spent the past two months rewriting all my content and then went into the studio for two full days of reading off a teleprompter to record all my new content to prep for the launch of my new Membership site in the New Year.

Now that my part of the project is done and the year is winding down I have some time to catch up on projects, admin and some of the tech I’ve been meaning to look into.

I had heard about HeyGen a while ago and put it on my list of new tech to review but it went into the pile just like the rest of them.

With some extra downtime, and a reminder from a video I saw on Instagram, I decided to start playing around with it this week.

My video production team (MainstageMedia) is second to none in my opinion. The production quality of the content they create for me is off the charts.

However, with all the hype around OpenAI’s release of their text to video platform Sora, I was curious what type of quality video someone like me could put together with almost no experience in video editing or production.

Since HeyGen was on the list before Sora, I decided to see what I could do.

When I first signed up for an account on HeyGen it asked me to upload a picture so it could show me how it could create an AI video from an image.

It was an easy intro to the platform but…well….the initial results were not exactly impressive and downright hysterical if you ask me.

​https://app.heygen.com/share/706d6c9bd429475dac896cb0b164caa5

If I didn’t have some extra time that night I probably would have given up and stopped right there but I decided to continue on.

And boy am I glad I did.

I paid for the Team version where I could create my own avatar so I uploaded a few videos and played around with a few options until I got it to the point where I liked it.

Then, I uploaded the content I wrote for the Welcome Video to my new Membership and…ummm…holy…shit.

Check this out: https://app.heygen.com/share/6213b8a05a94492b9777711c7273e616​

For those of you who know me and know my voice you’ll notice the voice is a little off but if you didn’t know me you would have no idea that wasn’t me.

Oh, and by the way, it can translate it into any language and even have different dialects of certain languages like the 10 different versions of Spanish.

Here’s one that makes it sound like I’m from Spain: https://app.heygen.com/share/5e4149fc05df4220b07f48d3164842fc​

This all took me about an hour to figure out (along with three glasses of whiskey).

This opens up a world of possibilities for me and anyone else who wants to create learning content and more.

With this, I’ll be able to translate all my high end production video content into any language for less than $1000 and a few more nights/drinks.

JB Sales is going international baby!:)

It’s time for all of us to level up.

Keep learning, keep getting better.

ADDITIONAL WAYS YOU CAN LEVEL UP YOUR SALES GAME ​
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• The JB Sales Membership is where you’ll get access to my live training, workshops, AMAs and OnDemand catalog so you can level up your sales skills every day! 3000+ Sales pros have already joined. Are you next?
• The industry-leading Make it Happen Monday Podcast where you’ll get insights and inspiration from some of the most interesting and influential people in the world of Sales and business. (this is where you’ll hear the Guy Kawasaki episode on May XYZ)
• The JB Sales YouTube channel with practical tips that you can apply immediately to drive results along with interviews and content that is guaranteed to get you to think differently.