Helena Klaus and Will Aitken audited nine sales tool categories live and named what to keep at each team size.

Helena Klaus, founder of Sales in DACH, surveys her members on stack adoption. They worked through CRM, sales engagement, contact data, intent, dialers, scheduling, conversation intelligence, deal execution and AI, and recommended no single stack.

When is Salesforce the wrong answer?

Will: teams buy on brand recognition. With no RevOps person or admin, Salesforce slows you down at roughly three times the price of a right-sized tool. His ladder runs spreadsheet, Pipedrive, HubSpot, Salesforce. Helena's real constraint is adoption, because a young team finds excuses when the UX is bad. Will's warning on all-in-one: HubSpot's built-in sequences will usually cost you deliverability.

What separates intent from timing?

Helena: people confuse intent and signals with relevance and timing. She is getting a dog and searching for a leash she does not need for three months. Intent sorts a list. It does not mean someone is ready to buy.

How do you pick a data provider?

Will keeps ZoomInfo, Prospeo and FullEnrich open at once. Sometimes one has the mobile number, sometimes all three, sometimes none. Test across a large sample, because accuracy swings by geography and job title. Helena reads the logos on a vendor's site and calls those customers. For DACH prospecting, check GDPR compliance first.

Where does AI stop?

Helena will not hand forecasting to a tool, because she sat in the room and read the body language. Will will not run autonomous prospecting, since anything sent in his name can be screenshotted. He uses AI for research, list building, call prep, drafts and recaps. On build versus buy, he prices a seller's hour against quota at $200 to $300, making nine hours of building a false saving against a $50 tool.

Resources mentioned

• Tario's AI cold calling report

The Speakers:

• Will Aitken, Host, Sell Better
• Helena Klaus, Founder, Sales in DACH

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Thank you to our sponsors: Tario, Aligned, Prospeo

What is up, beautiful people? Welcome to the Daily Sales Show, hosted by Sell Better. My name is Will, I'm going to be today's host of the show, and sharing a few of my questionable opinions as well, and today we're going to be focusing on tech. Technology. Tekiche. Tekosh. We're going to be talking about your tech stack as a sales team, both outbound tools, tools that your sales might be using every single day. If you're an individual seller, you might hear about a couple tools and things you should be looking out for. And we're not going to come in here and say, these are the tools you should be using, because that would be hella biased, and I think that would be a dangerous approach to take, because there is not one-size-fits-all. A lot of the tools and categories we'll be looking for today have use cases, they all have customers, that's for sure. It's about figuring out what tech is the best fit for you and your team at your current growth stage, based on what you're doing. And to help me break down this topic, I'm joined by the wonderful Helena, who is the founder of Sales in DACH. Did I get that right, Helena?

Yes, yeah, very, very good job, Will. Hi guys, I'm super, super excited to be here today and share a little bit about the analysis that I have done with our members from Sales in DACH. We did quite a lot of surveys on what's the best sales tech stack, and I'm very, very, very excited to bring just a little color to today's webinar, and hope to see you all Later on on LinkedIn.

For those of you who don't know, by the way, Sales in DACH community for German-speaking sales reps, am I correct in thinking that?

Yes. Yeah, exactly. The funny ways, just for those who don't know me, I'm Helena Klaus. I started as an actor, and I'm still working as an actress here and there, but mainly focusing on sales. And with the pandemic, I started as an SDR, Sales Development Representative, and I very quickly realized that the DACH market, the German-speaking market, is very much under-supported. And that's when I co-founded my first company, which was a sales community for German speakers, and then exited that end of 2024 and started Sales in DACH, which is now a platform for sellers in the DACH market to learn and grow together.

Beautiful. So, if there's any, German, or heck, even I know Dutch has some crossover with the German language speakers in the chat today, then one, Guten Tag, two, go check out Sales in DACH if you haven't already. Let's jump into the content, though. Before we do, a couple piece of housekeeping. Number one. Let us know where in the world you're coming in from. Go into the chat, switch it to everyone, say hi, let us know what city you're coming from, I'll shout a couple of people out as we go. Number two, the first thing, and I think we will continue to get asked throughout the entire show today, is, is this show recorded? Yes, of course it is. You'll be able to come back to this anytime you want. All you need to do is scan that QR code on your screen right now, or head over to sellbetter.xyz. You'll both be able to see all of our past up, past recorded shows, so you can search through those if there's something specific that you want to learn more about, and you can see all of our upcoming shows, of which we have many fabulous ones in the pipeline. Now, you can see the name of the show is The Daily Sales Show. We just wouldn't be able to do that every single day. If we didn't have wonderful partners and sponsors supporting us. So, today we're brought… the show is brought to you by Tario, Prospeo, and Aligned.

brief piece on each of them. Number one, Tario is an AI platform which is designed to kind of cover almost everything we're speaking about today, and we'll touch on this a little bit later, about how you can best use AI, how you know when you should be using AI. But they've actually got a wonderful resource where they've got a, one, an AI cold calling report based on cold calling stats and benchmarks in 2026. There's gonna be a link to that in the chat, and that link will also give you a free 30-day trial to try out Tario yourself and use some of the AI features, it comes down to list building, actually writing the outreach for you, and of course, we'll talk about some best practices of how you can make sure those outputs are actually good as well. Prospeo. Prospeo's an awesome company, which provides contact data, but they've recently had access to their kind of V2 of their platform, and a lot of the things that you've previously had to use some very technical tools to do, like website scraping, keyword searches. looking for specific information on someone's profile to identify the best fit targets, they can do that just in their search tool. You can say, I want to reach out to dentists, dental offices with

less than 10 employees based in the state of Michigan, who offer dental implants, let's just say. That's just an example. It will then go and find those by scraping websites and providing the list of leads right there and then. Of course, it also does all the stuff that you know and love from a data tool, like sitting on top of LinkedIn, just being able to give you someone's phone number and email address. I've done some testing recently of a few of these different tools, and Prospeo's been pretty consistent in finding me numbers when others haven't, so be sure to check that one out as well. Link in the chat. Finally, Aligned, we'll touch on this again later while we go through some of the categories that people should be using these days, but Aligned's a great tool for sharing resources, documents, and collaborating with your buyers. It's this idea of buyer enablement, where we're constantly sending PDFs, proposals, timelines, next steps. It's one place where you can collaborate with your buyers and share everything, from proposals, slide decks, to cool recordings, so that whenever people get stuck involved in your deals.

There's one place you can point them to, versus having a million different email threads, which isn't a great buyer experience. And of course, that also means you can see when they're accessing it, which gives you a good read on how hot or not your deals might be. Link in the chat to check that one out as well. We'll touch on all of these more as we go through the different categories today. Want to start, though. Helena. generally theme, trend-wise… Oh, by the way, one last thing. If you have any questions as we go today, which I'm certain people will, if you want specific tool recommendations or opinions or anything, use the Q&A tab, which makes it a little bit easier to spot those questions as we go. But I've wanted to chat to you, Helena, just seeing what you're seeing in terms of buying trends, and there's a lot of hype right now, a lot of companies that, like, saying you need to be using a tool like this. What are you seeing work best? What do you think…Has changed in the past couple of years when it comes to sales technology?

Yeah, very, very good question. And I feel like, having built two companies now, I definitely have seen the industry from a different perspective, because I started looking into it from a decision-making point of view, and one of the big things that I have seen change over the last couple of years is Less is more, and it's all about integration. So, I definitely have done the mistake myself when I was like, oh, great, we have a new tool on the market, I will definitely get it, I'll try it, and maybe it'll make me more efficient, and I found that it didn't make me more efficient because it changed my focus, and it was wasting… not wasting my time, but it has used my time that I could have used on the tools that I

may have even had before, and then by the end, it was more trial and error than actual expertise and efficiency. And seeing as I'm German, I bloody love efficiency. Efficiency is my second name. So, that's the biggest thing over the last couple of years that I see companies are changing, because they say, I don't want to have a huge tech stack that I want to be able to integrate it all, and have it all talk to each other.

I think that's the name of the game. I've definitely felt this as a solo founder, working on a small team as well. More can be less sometimes. And the problem is you get shiny object syndrome. There's people talking about things all over the place. Here's a clue, guys. One, a lot of that is marketing copy. Two, a lot of influencers get paid to promote tools, myself included, frankly. And not necessarily meaning that it'll be a great fit or a great improvement to your life. I also think tech can sometimes get in the way of us doing the job, right? We can do these great tools that can go scrape, do all the research, but ultimately, the only thing that starts happening is when we start picking up the phone or sending actual emails to people. So, all the preparation, all the tech in the world won't change the fact you need to do that, and you need to do it well, and if you don't know how to do it well, and you go straight to tech and scale and all that, you're just gonna scale what doesn't work anyway. So I think that's a great shout-out. We put together some rules, Helena and I, about what you should even be asking yourself before you buy any sales tool, whether you're an individual, a leader, someone in RevOps. And we said, okay, before you even do anything, it's not about, I want this.

It's about reflecting and saying, do I even have a problem with this today? I think a lot of people go, like, this, aspirational thing where, oh, there's now this tool that can do this thing, but it's never something your team even did to begin with, or you did. I think starting things from scratch, just because tech can enable you to, is a bad move. It's about finding things that you're already doing, but would like to do more of, or are having roadblocks with, and then solving that problem, versus going, I could be doing this, because there's no proof that that works yet. Number one you mentioned was… Integrations as well. I know the pain of using a tool that means you have to switch tabs a million times a day just to get something done. And that's just a consideration from the get-go as well. What are some mistakes you see people making when they buy tech?

I think one of the… that's, what I just wrote down as well while you were talking, I was like, okay, actually, one of the biggest things that I don't think a lot of people talk about, but…Everyone feels it, is it's not only what solves your problem, it's what solves your prospect's problem, and how it's easier to get in touch with them. So, for instance, today I had a conversation with someone who's like, oh, God, Helena, you have no idea how many times I receive an email that says, I just saw your website, I have a few best practices on how to improve your website, why don't we jump on a call? That might have worked really well 5 years ago, but right now, it is a lot about talking about outbound, it's about looking at our prospects, and looking at how our prospects have changed over time. So using tools that offer voicemail, that offer video integration, etc, etc, helps us a lot, because our prospects are getting younger, and the younger generations, they grew up with social media.

So they want that personal touch as well. So, one of the problems… I wouldn't call it a problem, it's just a…A change that we live in is that we cannot only look at our internal processes, but when it comes to prospecting, we have to look at the features that allow us to address the personas and the prospects that we're addressing in the right way. That is one thing that I was just… how have you seen that, Will?

I think that's such a good point, and I'm just going to quickly launch a poll question here, because I'm really curious about who we've got in the room. It might take a second to pop up, because I always like to ask.

who we.

we're talking to on these shows. But to your point, sometimes we see tools that can do these new things, like you said, I saw your website, and I saw this and saw that, right? We think, wow, that's amazing, it would have taken me hours to do that in the past, right? But we don't see that buyers are getting 20 of these a day, so it really doesn't actually make a difference to them whether we have scraped their website with an AI tool or not. What matters is, ultimately, is the message good and is it relevant to them right now? So I think without that understanding of what a buyer gets, and what they see, and why it matters, I think a lot of this could be amiss, which is why so many of our shows focus on the best practices that are out there long before we start recommending technology that's going to do it for you.

Yes, very, very, very true.

Let's start with the most boring category of all, because we're going to go through each category that's kind of historically there, and there's a lot of these that are changing and, as you said, being consolidated these days. There might be some crossover. But the first chat area that we talked about talking about was the CRM, probably one of the most detested tools in the tech stack. And I'm curious as to what you're seeing most teams go to these days. And for each slide, by the way, we've kind of got a bare minimum. This is if you're by yourself, you don't have a team, maybe you're a consultant, or sales is only a small part of your job. Then there's the level up, most teams, and there's going to be a specialty box as well. We'll make some vendor recommendations as we go through here today. Again, these are guidelines, and we'll kind of talk about each of those as we go. So… CRMs, what are you seeing there?

So, first of all, I see the chat, and I just love that there are so many different locations as well. I lived in London for a long time, one of my favorite cities, so sharing, great to have you here. And all of those beautiful other places, I love it. So, the CRM. I think the biggest part, and you said it at the beginning as well, which I 100% agree, it's not about saying, this is the one CRM that everyone should have. It is about personal preference, it's about what you guys actually need, it's about what other tools are using, integration, etc, as we said before. when we look at, like, different companies, like HubSpot, Pipedrive already on the slide, I always recommend, if it's a one-man show, or one-woman show.

then you can also start with a Excel and see how it goes in terms of volume, because you might not have to use any money if you actually have 5 customers, and you… that's how you make the most of your money. That's perfectly fine. And as soon as you have more deals, that's when I feel like Pipedrive is the next level, because Pipedrive…has a lot of great features, and it's great for the, like, the next level from, oof, now it's a bit more… and I can kind of handle it, but it makes my life easier. And then afterwards, I see teams use… go from Pipedrive to HubSpot, because HubSpot is a bit more expensive, HubSpot has a few more features, it's a bit more tech-heavy, and then, obviously, Salesforce is the OG for memory. It's like OG for the biggest.

corporate companies who just need a solid system to reflect the millions of deals that they need to use, and the different features, etc, etc. But I feel like, in the end, it's a lot about cost versus time. So, how much cost is it for you, and how much time does it cost you to set it up? Salesforce, for instance. Takes a long time to integrate, set up, etc, etc. Will I see you want to say something.

Well, this is also something that… it kind of frustrates me. I think Salesforce is a great tool, it's been around for ages, but teams know… teams, I think, buy a lot of tech on brand recognition, and Salesforce is obviously the biggest brand, and then HubSpot's probably closely followed behind in terms of just, like, ones that aren't the big, old legacy players, like the SAPs and the IBMs and whatnot. But…you… if you jump to that tool too soon, it's actually gonna be more of a pain in the butt than if you had just gone with something that's more appropriate for your size, like a Pipedrive or a HubSpot, and it's also way more expensive as well. I'm not saying that discounting the fact that, let's be honest, Salesforce is super customizable, you can get very technical with it, but if you don't have a sales ops person, or a dedicated RevOps person, or a Salesforce admin yet. then Salesforce is probably going to slow you down more than it's actually going to help you if you jump in too soon, and you're going to be paying three times the price for it as well. So that's kind of, like, the biggest mistake I see with CRMs, people just kind of go for the one they know best. Oh, Salesforce, I've heard of that, it's got a big tower in San Francisco, let's go get that one. But really.

There's also a direction, the other way, where you go down, like, the route of, like, using…a lesser-known CRM, but then you're limited in integration, so you're gonna have to switch out of that a year if you intend on growing any further than this point as well. So I think there's a happy middle ground with those Pipedrive and the HubSpots and whatnot of the world. Which is probably the in-between of…doing things manually, or in a spreadsheet, or in a very basic system, or a system that does several things, like a project management software, and going straight to an enterprise-grade CRM like Salesforce.

Yeah, I feel like one big part about the CRM as well, in terms of buying signal, is, not only about we can't find the answers, we can't find the basic answers for our deal, I think it's a lot about adoption. Because you can have the best tech stack in the whole world if no one is using it, it's a big problem. So, I find the… one of the biggest problems in sales teams when I talk to sales leaders is they are not updating their CRM. Why are they not updating the CRM? And the world, which comes back to the… we need to look at how we are going through your regeneration, Gen Z, wants it to be, like, an app, easy to use, fancy, like, like, design style. The UX is actually quite important if you have a very young sales team, because otherwise they will just Find excuses not to do it.

Yeah, I currently use Salesforce as part of the sales growth team, and I miss the days when I worked for myself and just had HubSpot when it was a little bit more simple. Even HubSpot was a bit…painful sometimes, there were, like, features I needed that were locked behind certain paywalls, I had to upgrade to, like, an enterprise license just to get the access to sequences. But there's something to be said there. A lot of these tools offer all-in-one, but still to this day, I would be very careful of anything that has so many of its own features and doesn't integrate with other tools that you want to use, because Those features are often limited. For example, if you're using HubSpot's email sequences and automations, you're probably going to have deliverability issues. But luckily, they integrate with some of the tools that we're going to talk about next, which is more focused on the engagement side of things, like email sending and task management as well. So I'll quickly pass the torch to you, Helena. I think this is a space that…

a lot… this is where a lot of consolidation has happened, with Gong Engage coming out, a lot of tools trying to bring in sequencing into the CRM, so that there's less going on, but there's still dedicated tools out there for this, with some of which we've listed in the slides, so…to start off, you're probably going to be using email, LinkedIn, copy-pasting templates into Gmail. There is going to be a point where both technically you shouldn't do that, and time-wise you shouldn't do that as well.

Yeah, I couldn't agree more with what…with the CRM as well. I think…In German, there's a word for it. It says the egg-laying, full-milk pig, which is like an animal that covers all of the things that a farm animal has to cover. It doesn't exist. It doesn't exist in the sense of you will not get the quality of what you want to have. If you have it all in one, because there are so much like, there's so much depth, and there are so many features in there that are helping you so, so much, that you want to work with someone who's an expert on that specific thing. You want to have someone who's an expert in being a CRM, and you want to have someone who's an expert in sending emails and having cadences, sequences, etc, etc. I think… I use Lemlist, for instance. I love Lemlist. I'm a big, big…

I've used in the past.

Yes, it's great, it's… yeah, big, big fan. You have the cadences, you have email, you have cold calling, options, you… but the biggest part that I like is the voicemails that you can set up and send as well. So, that's one tool that I always recommend, but also, SalesLoft, I see the names on there, the more you grow, the more you might need different different tools. Lemlist is, we're a small startup, we're not a big team, it works perfect for us, and I know the bigger teams and more enterprise-wise, they're going for outreach at SalesLoft. I used SalesLoft before as well, also a big fan of that, but that was more in a corporate setting. I think the biggest part when it comes to cadencing and sequencing is to make sure that you get the data and the analysis of the sequence, because that's a big, big reason why I see sales teams fail, because I ask, well, how is your conversion from step one to step two? And they're like, yeah, I don't know. And you're like,

But that's what we need. We need to understand, like, what's the open rate? Like, is it… does it not go to the next step because it didn't get opened, or because it did get open and didn't respond? That's a whole different problem. So…Looking into the tools means looking into what's the analysis you can get out of the tools so you can consistently grow. That is definitely one of my key takeaways that no one told me before when I started buying softwares. What about you, Will?

I'm someone who came from the world of a larger sales team as well. We were using SalesLoft, and then we turned and went to Outreach at the time. Both tools worked at the time, but there are certain considerations that change over time as well, like. For example, now, I wouldn't personally choose those tools, especially not for my size of operation, where I'm pretty much the only outbounder at the company, so I use Instantly for my emails, because I like some of the deliverability features and domain rotations they have in there, and then I use a separate dialer to do my calls, so I'm, like, trying to…I'm optimizing for individual things to do it better, because I'm seeing a lot more challenges with getting delivered, like, the dialers in those weren't fitting my needs as well. But again, this is a space where we see a lot of consolidation. Like, a lot of the data tools. You mentioned Lemlist there, they offer data, email addresses, phone numbers, they have a dialer built in there, they have email sequences. A lot of tools do that now. Apollo is another one that has both the sequencing features and the data built into one place. But you've got to be really careful and look into the actual…Specifics of it, to make sure that you're not

sacrificing something to have it all in one place. Lemlist, I know, are pretty good at this. example, SalesLoft and Outreach, they're auto… the settings they have set up automatically for most people when they onboard them are often set up where your emails won't go delivered, because they've got pixels in there, and they're sending from a shared IP, and your domain's not warmed up, right? So there's certain considerations you have to think there, which we've done tons of shows on, by the way. If you go to sellbetter.xyz, look at our show recordings, and type in deliverability, you'll find a lot of best practice there. I think the biggest mistake people make here is they go, oh, well, there's this tool that can help us scale and send a million emails. that doesn't matter if the email's trash, as well, right? So again, it's about finding something that works, doing that manually, and then looking at ways you can scale that without watering down the quality so much that it's actually gonna not work anymore, right? We'll definitely come back to this part again later on in the show. We talk about other things, but you're gonna need something at bare minimum to track your tasks, and if you want to go down the automation route, you're gonna need a tool like that as well.

Let's talk, though, about the one that we have a sponsor for today, Prospeo. Contact data. I think this one is…probably one of the oldest categories out there for sales teams, because ultimately, you can probably do everything else, but if you don't have the email and phone number of someone you want to reach out to for outbound at least, it's very difficult to get in touch with them, unless they're already in your CRM, which most people, when they're starting up a company or growing a team, they don't have a huge database to back, to use on the back end, so they're going to have to use a data provider in some way. Some people might do LinkedIn, or just do manual research. At the very low end, I think you can just plug on top of LinkedIn and scrape the information back off there, but then there's other tools, like the ones we mentioned earlier, Prospeo, Apollo, Lusha's another one, where you can actually search for the leads within the tool itself. The level up beyond that, I think, is where people jump to way too soon again, where you start to go into, like, this waterfall enrichment, like, these really complex environments where you're doing all this, like, insight and…

categorizing and scoring. Doing that as a single rep or with a small team is really hard, and I think people get there before they should. You really need someone, either a consultant, an agency, someone on your team, like a RevOps person, to make something like… I put Clay there, I also put ZoomInfo and Cognism there, because they're… Cognism there, because they're more enterprise-grade tools. That are better for larger teams, but maybe you shouldn't jump too straight away if you're a smaller operation as well. Quality is another side of things as well. You obviously want the best contact data, because otherwise you waste half your time sending emails that are gonna bounce, and making calls to numbers that don't pick up. Helena, what have you seen there? I know you said you're already using Lemlist for your data, but…The big question we get on the show often is European contact data is harder, or there's more restrictions around it? What have you seen in that space?

That is one big part that I did want to touch upon, so perfect that you ask about it. Before you reach out to someone, and you know your main prospects are, let's say, in the DACH market, just double-check the GDPR, compliance, just because some people are a bit strong in wording when you reach out to them via cold call, and they ask, where did you have the number from? And you don't have an answer. Like, some people are not happy with it. Others are chill, but, you know, just to decrease the risk. So, one of the tools that I see often used, especially in the DACH market, is Cognism. That's one thing that has been… has been there for a long time, I think it will be there for a long time. And then I do see all of those little…

let's say, not, like, smaller companies like Lemlist come there, grow there as well, but also because I think they're scraping a lot from LinkedIn, too. So, there is… even if there is a problem with the data, you can always say, well, you kind of gave the data first, right? Like, you first, like, started a profile on LinkedIn. So, that's one big thing that I've, Notice there, and the other thing with the data provider, just in combination with the sequencing and the data. I…don't… I feel like we're coming back to a very, very old-school sales, where sending letters are quite effective as well. So not just emails and cold calls, and just have a 30-step sequence where every day you send an email, and you have a cold call, and you send 300 mails every day, but instead you are making… you're standing out more in creating something that

they have forgotten about, like sending a postcard, or sending a letter, or sending a video in an email, or a voicemail that I see work pretty much the best. The voicemail in my, like, what I've seen in the market, what I've tried myself, I'm always trying new things, and that's why, like, in sequencing and in data, looking, depending on how you want to do your outreach. That's… On which you should base your decision on what tool you should go for.

I think for large teams, you're often going to end up using something that's going to have to have some level of extra compliance, like a ZoomInfo or a Cognism as well. That's where I see most teams go. As an individual, you might not need to get to that level, and that's why you might use a Lemlist or Apollo, or something of that nature as well. What I will say is don't get trapped in by the low cost of some of these things, because they will offer you data, but if it's all incorrect, you're gonna end up wasting all your time in there as well. Do some testing. Like, all of these tools have free trials, other than some of those enterprise-grade tools. Do some testing, see which gives you the most consistent, not only gives you the most emails, but how accurate those emails end up being when you actually start reaching out to them as well. Based that off your judgment, because that… it will vary wildly by geography, and by, what's the word? Industry as well. So one tool might have every VP of sales's mobile number, but if you sell to, let's say. CTOs, or let's just say CISOs, they might have no data for that, so definitely do some testing, open up a spreadsheet, make the calls, and see which ones get you the best connects there as well.

There's also a layer above this, which kind of gets into the intent space. I think, personally, intent can be a very…it can be a very iffy topic, because some people go, intent data rocks, some people go, intent data doesn't work for me. I think this is an entire category that you probably want to wait till you have a really strong back-end marketing and sales collaboration going across the board, to track website visitors, to track who's searching into things, because otherwise, if you put intent in too soon, it sounds like a silver bullet. Oh, you can see who's buying right now, but oftentimes it doesn't end up being that. It can just be a way to prioritize if you've got a huge amount of leads you can reach out to. What do you see on the intent side?

The intent… just one more thing with the, contact data, or in general, maybe, with sales tools as well. If you're not sure about if that is the right tool, just check on their website which logos they're working with, and then reach out to their customer sales team. Because they will know, right? They are actually using it in the day-to-day. So that is usually a good approach, if you're not 100% sure, to really get a proper reference and a true testimonial of how good the data can be. With the intent. So…The intent is an interesting thing, because I feel like we are living… I'm very much with you, only because someone shows intent doesn't mean it's the timing, you know, it's not the right timing. Sometimes I'm googling for, you know, I'm getting a dog soon, and I'm currently Googling for a leash, but I don't need a leash for the next 3 months, so if someone is now cold calling me every day for a leash, I'm like.

I'm gonna buy it myself when I'm ready. So this is one big, big, big thing, and I think people confuse intent and signals with relevance and timing. only because there is an intent doesn't mean it is currently relevant, because the timing is wrong. So that's why I usually, you know, not to go too much into detail, but rather than going in and saying something like, oh, you looked at my website, you can do one quick research on, okay, they recently became a new head of sales, let's say. Usually, a head of sales has this specific pain point. And then you can reach out to them on LinkedIn with a voice.

Go up for a moment there, Helena? Just a heads up. hopefully it's not my end. Just give me a thumbs up if you can hear me in the chat, and if Helena is frozen right now for anyone else. Just give me a Y, if you don't want to get the thumbs up. Okay, cool. I'll wait till the lane comes back.

Yay, yay, yay!

Now you're back, you're back. But yeah, to your point, intent does… it's how about you use it as well. I think the problem with that is that a lot of intent providers market it that way, as this, like, oh my god, they're gonna be buying right now, you should… and then people get excited and send them, like, want to buy? When really, it's probably a…a factor. I'd rather… I'm going to prioritize someone who's showing intent or been on my website, but I'm not going to use that as the main reason I'm reaching out to them as well, and assume that means they're ready to buy or want to enter a sales cycle at all. Be careful with that side of things, especially if you're a large sales team, these tools. can… can oversell what the actual meaning of the intent is as well. Don't make any assumptions there.

Yeah, and one big thing…

Sure, go ahead.

I'm just going through the chat as well, and I'm with you, Cedric. Like, the data for Apollo ZoomInfo is not always accurate. The thing is, I have never had a data tool that has always had perfect contact details. So only because… and I'm not saying, Cedric, that this was, you know, you just having that one bad call. Maybe that is actually, you know, for Canadian business, bad, but in general, don't be…You know, don't expect it to be perfect every time you call someone, just because of the nature of having that tool.

I have access to ZoomInfo, Prospeo, and FullEnrich right now. And…there are some times where one of them will have the number correctly, sometimes where all three will have the number, sometimes where none of them have it. That doesn't mean…it's about… over a large sample, which is where you base your decision, basically, as to what you're going to use long-term. I would base off that. And frankly, there are times where I've used 10 tools to try and get one person's contact information, none of them have it, or all of them provided me the wrong information, right? That's just a factor you have to take into it. It's about getting, like, a higher percentage of accurate contact data in there as well. We're gonna speed around a few of these, because I want to make sure we have time to talk about AI in here, Helena. So we're gonna run through some of these. There are a bunch of cold calling tools out there.

I think the most basic is picking up your phone and making it cool from that, but I don't know many sellers, especially on a sales team, who are doing that. I still tend to do it, mainly because my name pops up on the screen sometimes, it says, Will Aitken calling you, and some people know my name, which helps me with a warm intro, you know, like, oh, Will? Really? Is that really… that helps me? I wouldn't personally recommend that. Most people can end up using a dial that's either built into your sales engagement platform, whether that's Apollo, Lemlist, SalesLoft, or Outreach, or even your CRM, HubSpot has a dialer built in. The level up from that, in my mind, is either a power dialer or a AI-assisted dialer, which is when it dials multiple people. Again, this sounds great, because you connect to a lot more people. But you can only really make use of these if you have a big, big list, right? So something like Orum, which I'm a big fan of. I can upload 100 numbers and call through them really quickly, and I'll get a lot of pickups, because it calls 5 people at once. But if I didn't have a list of 100 people, or I had a list of 10 people, well, I'd press go, I'd be going for 4 minutes, then I'd be done, right? And then I'd have to go find more people.

So it's about being prepared for that. There are also some downsides to using something like a parallel dialer, because there is a short time to connect before you actually get connected to the buyer, and if you're finding that's meaning that you're getting hung up on a lot, then you might want to revert back to a power dialing solution, or using the features built into these parallel dialers that allow you to do that. Big market. Parallel, try it out. Small market, power dial is my recommendation, just to make yourself a bit more efficient there as well.

Yeah, and make sure that it is integrated with your CRM, because when you have the call, you don't want to spend 20 minutes uploading, copy-pasting, summarizing, etc.

Add friction instead of removing, exactly.

Exactly. So, I think one of the biggest things in the world that we are currently living in, the age of AI, is efficiency. Things go faster, and only because it's faster doesn't mean it has to be better, as long as it's, like, set up properly.

That's a fantastic point as well. If you're uploading a CSV to a dialer, then you've already missed the point of why you want to be using one in the first place. Make sure it's connected to whatever CRM you're using, or sales engagement platform, whatever it might be. That way, you've got no friction when it comes time to call, and you can actually make those calls at a good speed as well. Small category, but worth noting on, meetings and scheduling. Most… even Google and Outlook these days have booking links available in their platform for someone to book on your calendar. I think the point where you need to look at upgrading to something, like, a bit more effective, or needed, like Calendly, Chili Piper, or even Lean Data, would be when you start to route things from your website to dedicated reps. I wanted to make sure that gets there accurately. I hate the idea of connect… putting a wall in front of a buyer, being able to get in touch with me, so I want them to be able to book directly with me, but I also want them to end up in the right rep if there's me and two other reps. I want them to get assigned to me if they're in my territory, or they're in my category or industry.

And adding a BDR in there creates tons of friction. I'd rather get it done by systems, that's where I look to stuff like Lean Data and Chili Piper to do that on the back end. Sometimes it could be called more of a marketing tool, but because you end up using the links in your sales cycle. I wouldn't recommend using them in cold outreach, but you might end up using them at some point. They also tend to flow into the tech stack of salespeople as well. Conversation intelligence. So, Helena, recording calls. What do you use these days? I think I saw your note-taker join our previous prep call.

Yeah, it's Kickscale. I use Kickscale, it's a DAC-based company as well. I know the founders, they're really, really, really good guys, and the tool is just growing. every day. It's incredible. So, when I started in sales, I was the only one, for the DACH market, for the German-speaking market, and I didn't have a recorder, and a part of me was like, oh, thank God.

Is it pumps.

roast me, you know, like, oh, I'm gonna… I'm gonna be sweet! And now, hindsight, like, a year later, I just thought. dang! I should have just insisted, I should have just… I would have learned so much more, I would have gotten proper feedback, etc, etc, etc. So, if you don't have a Kickscale, I'm using the free license, like, they… obviously, all of them have free licenses as well, or at least a lot of them, and, I heard great things of Gong as well, I don't need it just because I find Gong is…For bigger companies. especially price-wise, and Kickscale is great for the size that I'm at at the moment, and a lot of the other startups in that sector are using Kickscale, too.

I would argue Gong, Chorus, and all that are probably mainly built for larger teams, whereas, like, the Otter, the TLDVs, the, you know, Fireflies are probably built more for individuals or smaller teams. The point is, I would say if you're not recording your calls in 2026, you are…

What are you doing?

They're, like, hard. Right? Like, it makes my recaps easier, it makes my…follow-up email's easier, it helps me coach myself when I have time and fancy doing that. And if you're on a team, that's probably one of the main things that helped me improve as a sales rep, was listening to my own calls, but also have my manager listen to my calls, and that was mainly done through Chorus and Gong at the time as well. So that's probably where you'd want to look into more of a revenue or conversation intelligence tool like those. Because that's obviously, like, comes into the forecasting world of Clari and whatnot. Very quickly touching on content and deal execution. I don't think every team needs to be out there using Aligned. I do think it's very helpful if you're someone who is selling to a larger team, or there's a lot of, documentation that you share as part of your sales process. But the low end, you're probably using a bare minimum, like, an e-sign tool, or a PDF, or Google Docs, because there's gonna be something you share with them, even if it's at the very end, in the form of a proposal. But if you're getting to the point where lots of people are getting involved in your deals.

and you're sending a turnover, and it's all getting lost in the mix, and there's several versions of things, that's where I'd start using something like a deal room by a collaboration tool, or if it's legal documents, you might have to even look into a specialty, legal tool, like a Conga, or a DocuSign CLM as well. I think buyer experience is something that we can actually do the opposite when we try to use all these tools to help them. And we can actually make it a little more clunky. So, making sure you face the problem before you go and look into any tools like these as well.

Yeah, yeah. I also think it's a little bit about how you want to be perceived by the other person. So if you send… if you're, like, from a corporate company, and then you send them a PDF to sign, I think, especially when it's, like, a bigger contract, it's a little bit about the perception as well as the efficiency and usage. And the other thing that I really liked on the slide, that's, like, the common mistake, and that's the one mistake that I definitely did, over-engineering. If you have a small, deal, and you just, you know, if it's just a few hundred euros, and you don't really need a deal room for it, they have everything. The slide deck is enough. You don't have to build a whole demo room with, you know, testimonials and everything in it, because

you don't really need that, you don't need to spend 30 minutes of your life that you'll never get back on something that's not necessary. There are deals, obviously, when it is helpful, and it is necessary, just as you said, well, when there are more than one people, and, you know, you send them the whole… the link, and they can click through, they see everything, they can share it. Flowla is what I use there, also a big fan of that. But, yeah, I see you have a thought. Tell me.

I think that's a really good point, but it doesn't just apply to this content and deal execution side of things, but, like, literally everything that we've spoken about. Sometimes we use tech and we use process that gets in the way of us doing so quickly. If I see an inbound lead come in right now, I'm not gonna go and open up my Orum dialer. I'm just gonna type into my phone and buzz them, you know what I mean? Like, or if someone comes and sends me an email, I'm not gonna go, like, use AI to write up a response. I know what my response should be. We don't want to let these things get in the way of us doing things as well, right? So in your case, if you have a deal that doesn't need a bloomin' deal room and a mutual action plan, then don't rely on the mutual action plan. You don't need to go and build one for them, just because it worked somewhere else over here. There is also an element of, you're going to need to use some autonomy and make that decision as well, somewhere along the way. Which does bring us nicely onto the final topic I want to talk about today, which we've left ourselves

Not a huge amount of time to do, and I'm gonna reach, talk about, some of the Q&A as well while we go through this, but that's the topic of AI. So there are a lot of tools out there that are claiming to be AI tools, agentic, AI SDRs, there's obviously been a lot of movement in the LLM space with ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, grok, I guess, making a lot of noise as well. what's your role when it comes to AI? How much, like, how much has that changed how you work, and how you've seen sellers work?

The biggest part that I find is very important with AI to remember is that we are the master of AI. AI doesn't master us. So, as much as AI comes in and improves processes, and that's my biggest part when I'm like, okay, I have different data points that I need to talk to each other, AI is perfect for it. But there are things where I don't believe we should use AI, because our human instinct is much more important. One thing, for instance, would be the forecasting. Forecasting is a great thing, and there are great tools that you can use for it as a support. But don't just… I would not want to just rely on a tool telling me how probable it is that this deal will close, because I was in those deal… in those conversations, and I saw the body language, and I felt the vibe, and I've had the sixth sense, and all of this can… like, it's difficult to be measured.

but also because it's human, and in the end, we buy from people. So my rule with AI is look at the data points, sometimes I just write down all of the buckets. I, like, draw buckets of my data points, which one I have, email, etc, etc. How do I want them to connect? And then where is the human in this? What about you, Will? What's your rule?

Well, I put all of these up on the screen here, because these are kind of all the places I go to for it, and probably the one place I don't is at the end here, Autonomous Prospecting, because I have paranoia. as a sales trainer, as a voice in the sales space, I am worried that AI will misrepresent me and do something bad. Some will screenshot it and put it on LinkedIn and say, this guy wrote a book on prospecting, look at the shite he's sending out. Not to say that I won't help it draft me some of that stuff and get me halfway there. But that's one place where I'd be very careful of using AI when it's actually doing the sending for you, without anyone checking things over. What I love it for is research, what I love it for is list building, what I love it for is…bring me up to speed so I can prep for a call very quickly to know what's going on in their team. I love it for at least drafting me, or getting me halfway to a good email for a sequence, or for an individual prospect. I love it for recapping my… getting my transcript for my call and recapping that… I've got a skill and call for that, which is just every time I… no notes, you know, so I've perfected it.

Coaching, yes, I also think that should be done by a human, because you should be aware of what your team are going to be doing anyway, but I've also asked all the tools for feedback on my own calls, or things I might have missed, and that's actually a really helpful exercise, giving you ideas of how you can improve in the future. And then, of course, the workflow side of things, which is, like, any data entry, anything that I have to do manually, that's where I want to plug in AI. But I don't want to… I want to take away the mind-numbingly the idiot tasks of my day, you know? The things… the things where I don't actually have to do much thought. If I have to do thought in it, which good outreach does require good thought, I don't want to take away too much of that, or at least want to be involved in that process so I can make sure it doesn't go haywire and do things like that. There are a ton of great AI tools out there, but I find myself tending to use Claude. That said, I did just sign up for a tool of our sponsor today, which we'll drop a link to in the chat again, which is Tario, because I love checking tools like these out, right? I like seeing what people are using, what's available out there, and I think that's also something you can do if you have time and that you've got a lot of interest in this.

Most of these tools these days have trials, unless they're enterprise-grade tools. Test them out, become them from a really, like. skeptical lens, and then use them for things that you're already doing, versus trying to accomplish things that you are not doing today. That's my biggest piece of advice for any kind of tool that you're using as well.

Yeah, and maybe before you try something, write down your daily tasks, Monday to Friday. What exactly do you do every day? And then you can see which manual task can you actually automate. So rather than coming from the magpie syndrome of shiny thing, you go into, wait a minute, what problem do I have that I actually want to solve?

That's… that's exactly it. And build… and then once you've found something that works, build a workflow for it, so you don't have to create it every time. If that's a skill, or a GPT, if you're using ChatGPT, or I think Gemini, they call them, like, gems or flashes or something, I can't remember what they refer to in there. So, for example, I have a skill for my…My recap emails, where I drop in the, I'm not going to show too much of that, because that's a real call. I drop in the transcript, it builds me a recap email, it's perfect almost every single time. In Claude, I'm also going to end up often doing…Here we go, I'll do one here. In Claude, I inserted a list of 100 of our accounts that we've worked in the past, and then it went and identified lookalike accounts. That's something that I would previously have done manually or through Google. So then it went through and found… we worked with, let's say, Embers or Nitro, and then went and found the biggest competitors to Nitro. That's a fast thing that AI can do much faster than I can. But then when it actually comes to writing the outreach to the leaders app.

Conga, let's say. I'm gonna get involved in that myself, I might get called to draft something based on the fact they're a lookalike account, but I'm gonna make sure I have hands on that process, not just let, you know, AI take the wheel on everything I do.

Yep.

Alright, we have a couple of questions. One, I think we only have time for really one. One person said, what point should a leader decide to buy a solution versus building in-house, which I think relates very much to the vibe coding AI conversation we're having right now. I have thoughts. Helena, what's yours?

Oh, I'm intrigued to hear your, your thoughts, because I, I, I did, I did both. I built, I built things before, I built, tools before for the team as well, because I always felt like, oh, I always hit the ceiling at some point, you know? You have a tool, you're like, sweet, that's great, and then, actually, I would like this, actually. And then we spent such a long time, and so much money, and so much focus to build the software, only to then find out that we needed something else. So, that's one thing, and the other thing is, obviously, you know, when you buy a solution that's out there, you might hit the ceiling. The biggest part here is…I would write down what's the goal, why are you not achieving it right now, and is it really a problem that you need to build yourself? Because one of the biggest things that we currently… that I see, the problem that we have, is a lack of focus.

We have so many things that comes all the time, like doomscrolling wasn't a word 5 years ago, and now we just want it fast, quick, et cetera, et cetera. So, I think before you build it yourself, just because you might not be an expert on that specific tool that you want to build, I would look into what exactly is it that you need to see, talk to the tool that's out there already, and see if they can actually build it for you while you get to do your job. That's one of my…

I get it, it feels good sometimes to go and build it yourself, oh, I'm saving money, but oftentimes you end up spending the same amount in tokens, it often tends to take 8 hours to build it, and then it's not perfect, and it's got all these silly issues. How unique is your use case is probably the question I'd be asking for that. And then even then, should you be the one building it? Right? Like, as a seller, your time, if you actually calculate it back against your quota, is probably actually worth $200, $300 an hour. So you have to spend 9 hours building something from scratch. well then, you're probably spending three grand in opportunity costs that you've missed out on, and although you'd have to end up then going for a pay for a tool, if the tool's $50 a month, you've actually lost money in that exchange. I think that could be another shiny object where it feels good, and it's distracting, and we feel like we're doing something, but we're not. What we want to do is do the job of selling, speaking to customers, and whatnot. We are a little bit over time now, Helena. Where can people find you if they want to learn more from you?

You can always reach out to me via LinkedIn. I think, Kevin just sent it in the chat as well. I am always open for questions. Reach out, connect with me. I'm sharing a lot on sales topics specifically for the DACH market. So, yeah, I'm your sparring partner when it comes to Dach.

That's it. And yeah, if you have any questions that we didn't get to today, feel free to reach out to either of us on LinkedIn. I will give you my personal recommendations for tools, but again. I work for… on a five-person team. a team of 50 people, it's probably going to be a better tool for you. That's just… it's not a one-size-fits-all, there's the best for everything, it's the best for what you are at right now. Folks, thanks so much for joining. Thanks so much for getting involved in the chat and the Q&A with those interesting questions. We're sending a follow-up with some research that Helena and the team have done on sales tech stacks as well in the follow-up email. Keep an eye out for that. If not, though, peace, love, keep it real. Sales.