You added AI. The pipeline looks the same. 🐯

Maybe it even looks worse.. more emails out, fewer real conversations back.

Neil Farrimond and I sat down on The Sales Show to talk about exactly this. Neil is a video production consultant. His opening line: AI makes it really easy to find leads, but if your pipeline is broken, you might be using AI in the wrong way.

A Jarvis, not a chatbot

The teams moving fastest don't use AI for one-off questions. They have a Jarvis: an assistant that knows what matters to them and what's going on in the business. Everybody can have one now. 🐬

The trap: buying leads and pointing AI at them

"If it's so easy to buy leads, that means that eight million people are also buying those leads."

Those inboxes are already full. They don't want another sloppy email. And a bought list has no context.. nobody filtered it for who you actually serve. AI on top of a bought list just sends more stale email, faster.

What comes first: your own data

I call it YODA. Your own data.

Two brains:

• A personal brain: what really matters to you. Who are the right people to talk to? When is the right moment? For which reasons?
• A team brain: the status of everything. Which projects are running, which tasks, and are they 65% done or 99% done? We use Google Workspace and Notion for that.

Put Claude on top of both and it becomes your Jarvis, because now it knows what matters and where everything stands.

Most companies have it the other way around. They start with ChatGPT and have unconnected data underneath. So the AI doesn't know what matters, and gives you generic answers. 🌴

Write your ICP and your anti-ICP

Now you can send an agent to find buyers. It will search the internet, LinkedIn and databases. But only if you're very clear.

Write a long list of ideal client criteria. Then a long list of anti-ICP criteria: who you never want.

One of ours: I want ideal clients to have a Strava account. Our agent came back: Strava doesn't give me the data. Fine.. keep the direction and get creative. A Polar or Garmin account. The list of the fastest 500 at the New York Marathon.

"That's the first step before you use AI. Otherwise, you're scaling chaos."

Trust AI like you trust a new hire

Neil raised the question every founder asks: do I really want to give AI access to all that data?

Ten years ago we had the same conversation about executive assistants. Should she get the CRM? A corporate card? My LinkedIn account? Could she do damage? Yes.

The answer was never "no assistant." The answer was guardrails, and a process to go from "I don't trust her" to "I trust her a lot," because she showed me reasons to.

Same with agents. Today we run 8-9 quality checks per task. Some agents we had to fire. And every Monday we set the week, every Friday we review it. 🐯

What it looks like when it works

Here's our sales chain today. One agent finds buyers. It hands over to the next one, who starts the conversation. The next one keeps it going and gets the meeting on the calendar. A prep agent emails the closer: who you're meeting, what they clicked, what they answered, questions worth asking.

After the call, an agent reads the Granola notes, drafts a statement of work and a Gmail draft. So the offer goes out in the exact words the buyer used on the call. A human is still in the loop everywhere.. but around 80% of the boring part is done before the human shows up.

A year ago that was 5 full-time people, and me putting out fires. Ten emails every morning: "Simon, we need a decision." "Simon, this went south." Now it's 2 people and a ton of agents. Faster. Higher quality. Buyers read the offer and go, "Holy cow, they really get me." 🐬

The part you keep

People buy from people. They don't buy from AI.

So give the boring stuff to your Jarvis. Keep the conversations with buyers and partners. That's your highest leverage activity. You show up briefed, present, relaxed, with a question so good the buyer has to grab a sip of coffee before answering.

That's Sprintlife: control in your sales conversations, and the time to have them. 🌴

Your move this week

Before you add one more AI tool, write two lists. Who is your ideal client (10 criteria)? Who is your anti-ICP (10 criteria)? Then ask your AI to find 20 people on the first list.. and watch what it ignores.

Watch the full episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfPCssgdL_Y

Want the 8 Steps of the Repeatable Sale, plus the tools and the people who push you through your current sales wall? Start your 7-day free trial of the Sprint Club: https://www.strategysprints.com

Ready to accelerate now? Book a Discovery Call: https://calendly.com/strategysprint/discovery-call

Happy hunting.

Simon & The Sprinters 🐬⚡️🐆