Interview with Brian Sowards, Founder of Drivetrain Revenue

3 main takeaways

• Automating repetitive work to reduce burnout: Brian believes AI can take over a significant amount of repetitive, copy-paste work that humans currently do. This removes grunt work and burnout, freeing up humans to do more creative, strategic work.  
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• Making pipeline analysis more accurate: One of Brian's favorite workflows analyzes sales calls to extract key details like buyer personas mentioned and objections raised. This provides a clear, data-driven view of where each deal stands based on actual prospect conversations, making forecasting more accurate.
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• Identifying resonant messaging for content: Analyzing sales call transcripts surfaces common topics and pain points prospects discuss. This helps marketing identify the most resonant messaging to build content around, instead of guessing what prospects want.

Meet Brian 👋

Brian Sowards is the founder of Drivetrain Revenue, a sales and marketing consultancy focused on helping companies transform their go-to-market operations using AI.

Brian has been obsessed with entrepreneurship since starting his first product company as a teenager. He's worked across a variety of organizations including Microsoft's R&D lab, LinkedIn, NGOs, startups, and more.

This diverse experience allowed Brian to see similar challenge patterns that many companies face when trying to organize and get work done efficiently.

When Brian came across Copy.ai, he was excited by the workflow automation tool that lets users turn any AI process into a workflow across systems like CRM, email, and calendars. He sees this as a way to create a generalizable AI tool to solve many business problems.

Below, you'll find some of the key reasons why Brian is sold on implementing AI into his sales processes.

Why Brian Is Adopting AI in His Sales Stack

1. Better Writing from AI

Brian discussed how AI often writes better than humans due to time constraints.

He explained that the "dirty little secret behind writing is time" - everyone is trying to minimize the amount of time they spend writing. As a result, human writing can suffer because people don't dedicate enough time to thoughtful, high-quality messaging.

In contrast, AI tools like Copy can quickly generate thoughtful content.

As Brian noted, "I like it more. I connect with it more than I do with what people are sending every day."

AI takes time constraints out of the equation and surfaces messaging that resonates. For busy professionals without enough time to craft thoughtful emails or posts, AI writing can be game-changing. The thoughtful recommendations make it easy to connect with readers.

2. Automate Repetitive and Tedious Work

AI platforms like Copy.ai can take over a significant amount of the repetitive, copying and pasting work that humans currently do in many business roles. This removes the grunt work and burnout, freeing up people to focus on more creative, strategic tasks that require human judgment and expertise.

For example, Copy.ai has workflows that can analyze sales call transcripts and automatically log key details in the company's CRM.

This saves sales reps and account executives time from the manual work of taking notes during calls, and then having to log that information manually into each deal record in the CRM. The AI handles the repetitive data entry, while the salespeople can completely focus on the conversation and relationship-building during calls.

3. Make Pipeline Analysis More Accurate

One of Brian's favorite workflows analyzes sales calls to extract key details like buyer personas mentioned and objections raised.

Rather than relying on soft pipeline criteria or guesses, the workflow surfaces the real facts of who the buyers are, what pain points they have, and what objections were brought up. This makes forecasting and pipeline analysis far more accurate by removing the guesswork and manual effort required.

With the workflow automatically pulling this intel from call transcripts, sales managers gain visibility into the true health of each deal. They don't have to sweat reps on fuzzy pipeline categories or make guesses during forecasting calls.

Instead, the data is right there based on what buyers actually said, making it easy to diagnose exactly where any gaps or issues may be.

This level of accuracy is crucial in today's competitive selling environment. Having concrete insights into deals allows sales teams to tightly focus their efforts on the right areas to move opportunities forward and close more deals.

The workflow acts as an automatic deal coach, highlighting precisely what needs to happen next to progress based on the prospect's own words.

4. Remove Burnout with AI Workflows

One notable benefit Brian discussed is how AI workflows are removing burnout from repetitive, tedious tasks. This frees employees up for more creative, strategic work that humans do best.

For example, Brian found his team struggled with adoption at first when bringing in a new AI tool like Copy. But after the "magic moment" of seeing how much time a workflow can save, they never looked back because it made their day-to-day role so much easier.

As Brian explained, the adoption effort takes a few weeks as people get used to a new tool.

But once they try a workflow and realize it takes just minutes versus hours of manual work, they ask themselves why they didn't start using AI sooner.

According to Brian, this is removing the grind of copy-paste work that burns people out. With AI automating repetitive tasks, employees have more energy and focus for high-level creative thinking.

This makes work more engaging and fun.

Brian is now building his team's internal systems around Copy's workflows. By quickly creating AI apps from workflows, they can reduce grunt work company-wide. Ultimately this benefits employee satisfaction by removing drudgery and fatigue.

AI adoption is surging as people realize the time and energy it gives back. Brian predicts a future where humans can spend more time on what makes us uniquely human - expertise, creativity, and judgment. This is the true promise of AI.

5. Identifying Resonant Messaging for Content

Analyzing a corpus of sales call transcripts surfaces common topics and pain points prospects discuss. This helps marketing identify the most resonant messaging to build content around. Instead of guessing, they can see exactly what prospects are talking about each month or quarter.

There's no longer a need to intuit what prospects want to hear about.

The data reveals the precise concerns and questions coming up in initial sales conversations. This empowers marketers to build content they know will resonate because prospects themselves have voiced their interest.

Having direct insight into prospect dialogues ensures marketing content aligns with what the sales team is hearing daily. Misalignment between marketing campaigns and prospect needs is eliminated. Content better complements ongoing sales conversations instead of feeling disconnected or speculative.

6. Marketing Use Cases

Analyzing sales call transcripts provides marketers with a treasure trove of insights into what prospects and customers actually want to talk about. This helps identify the most resonant messaging to build content around, saving marketers from guessing what will interest their audience.

Rather than surveying sales reps or trying to make assumptions, marketers can use AI to surface the key topics coming up in prospect conversations each month or quarter.

For instance, the tool could analyze 500 sales call transcripts in a month and reveal the top 3 issues prospects kept bringing up that marketing has no content for yet.

This eliminates guesswork and focuses content efforts around what prospects are actually discussing with sales reps in real conversations. The AI is like a fly on the wall for every sales call, able to aggregate key details marketers would never have time to gather manually. It turns sales reps into market research assistants feeding back the voice of the customer.

7. Turn Any AI into an Automated Workflow

Brian was excited by Copy.ai's workflow builder, which lets users turn any AI process into an automated workflow. Workflows can then run automatically across business systems like CRM, email, calendars, etc.

This makes Copy.ai a flexible, generalizable AI tool to solve many business problems.

Just imagine an AI-generated sales call analysis that could automatically update the right fields in CRM after each call. The workflow builder bridges the gap between one-off AI interactions and company-wide automation.

With this capability, AI can be seamlessly integrated across divisions like sales, marketing, support without expensive dev work. The no-code workflow builder democratizes AI, letting any employee turn insights into scalable workflows. This represents a huge opportunity to leverage AI more deeply.

Final Thoughts

The conversation with Brian Sowards revealed several key insights around how AI is transforming go-to-market operations for modern companies.

First, AI can automate repetitive, administrative work to free up employees to focus on more strategic, creative tasks. Copy.ai workflows that analyze sales calls and auto-log data can save sales reps substantial manual effort.

Second, AI delivers more accurate pipeline analysis by removing subjective guesswork about deal stages. Workflows that extract insights like buyer personas and objections provide concrete intel on where deals stand based on actual prospect conversations.  

Finally, AI uncovers the most resonant messaging for content creation by identifying common topics and pain points across prospect discussions. This gives marketers data-backed guidance on the topics and messaging that will truly resonate each month or quarter.

The key is that Copy.ai allows users to turn any AI capability into a workflow that runs automatically across business systems. This makes AI actionable and integrated into daily operations. To learn more about how Drivetrain Revenue helps companies transform go-to-market with AI, visit their website by clicking here.

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