Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Hala Taha: AI-Powered Sales, How to Automate, Optimize, and Close More Deals | Sales
Fri, 14 Mar
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Hala Taha built an eight-figure media company using data-driven sales strategies and activity-based selling to close high-value deals. As a successful entrepreneur, she knows that sales success isn’t about luck. It comes from mastering the right tools, prospecting strategically, and developing a resilient mindset. In this episode, Hala breaks down how to scale smarter, optimize your funnel, and boost conversions. She also shares insights on leveraging AI in business, tracking your pipeline effectively, and managing deals seamlessly with CRM tools like Pipedrive. In this episode, Hala will discuss: (00:00) Introduction (01:30) Webinar Overview (05:27) Understanding Bottoms Up Sales Strategy (07:48) Activity-Based Selling Explained (10:02) Driver Trees and Performance Metrics (19:39) Becoming a Sales Psychopath with Shelby Sapp (28:40) Pipedrive Demo and Features (34:44) Introduction to Pipedrive (35:48) Optimizing Sales Funnels with Sean Cannell (36:27) Improving Conversion Rates with Russell Brunson (43:13) Analyzing Competitor Funnels (46:44) Prioritizing Sales Calls (50:41) Identifying Fool or Favorite Clients (58:27) Leveraging AI in Sales Hala Taha is the host of Young and Profiting, the number one entrepreneurship and business podcast. She is the Founder and CEO of YAP Media, an award-winning social media and podcast production agency. She also founded YAP Media Podcast Network, a top business and self-improvement podcast network, where she helps business podcasters like Jenna Kutcher, Amy Porterfield, Neil Patel, and Russell Brunson grow and monetize their platforms. Resources Mentioned: Get a free 14-day trial and 20% off your membership with Pipedrive: youngandprofiting.co/sales Pipedrive Slides: youngandprofiting.co/PipedriveSlides Sponsored By: Shopify - youngandprofiting.co/shopify Airbnb - airbnb.com/host Rocket Money - rocketmoney.com/profiting Indeed - indeed.com/profiting RobinHood - robinhood.com/gold Factor - factormeals.com/factorpodcast Rakuten - rakuten.com Microsoft Teams - aka.ms/profiting Active Deals - youngandprofiting.com/deals Key YAP Links Reviews - ratethispodcast.com/yap Youtube - youtube.com/c/YoungandProfiting LinkedIn - linkedin.com/in/htaha/ Instagram - instagram.com/yapwithhala/ Social + Podcast Services: yapmedia.com Transcripts - youngandprofiting.com/episodes-new Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneurship Podcast, Business, Business Podcast, Self Improvement, Self-Improvement, Personal Development, Starting a Business, Strategy, Investing, Sales, Selling, Psychology, Productivity, Entrepreneurs, AI, Artificial Intelligence, Technology, Marketing, Negotiation, Money, Finance, Side Hustle, Mental Health, Career, Leadership, Mindset, Health, Growth Mindset, Online Selling, Economics, E-Commerce, Ecommerce, Negotiation, Persuasion, Inbound, Value Selling, Account Management, Scale, Sales Podcast.
Chapter 1: What are the essentials of selling as an entrepreneur?
Hey, Yap gang. I always say that knowing how to sell is the most important skill that an entrepreneur can have. Selling is at the core of every business. It's how you connect with your customers, build your brand, and grow your business. And today I'm going to be giving you a mini masterclass on how to sell.
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I recently partnered with Pipedrive, which is a CRM platform, to host a webinar about how you can crush your sales goals. And we're going to be replaying it right now on the podcast for anybody who missed it. You're going to hear all about the benefits of activity selling, how to hit your sales goals, optimize your funnels, boost conversions, leverage AI, and more.
I'll also go into how to visualize your sales pipeline with Pipedrive. Now, this is a webinar where I presented a fancy slide deck with it. So if you want to follow along with the presentation and demo, go check out the show notes and you can get the link to the presentation.
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If you enjoyed this webinar and you're ready to step up your game, I highly recommend that you get a free 14-day trial with Pipedrive. It's 100% risk-free, no credit card required. You can just go to youngandprofiting.co slash sales for a free 14-day trial and 20% off your membership. That's youngandprofiting.co slash sales for a free 14-day trial of Pipedrive.
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All right, if you're ready to make it rain, let's get started. Welcome to our Crush Your Sales Goals webinar presented by Pipedrive. This is the first sales webinar that we've had for the year. If you just joined, I was mentioning that I totally updated all the content. So lots of new ideas and hopefully going to set you up for success at the top of the year here.
As always, you can find all of our incredible deals in the show notes or at youngandprofiting.com slash deals.
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Chapter 2: How can activity-based selling transform your sales strategy?
And then most recently, a couple years ago, I founded the Yap Media Podcast Network, which is my main focus now. So essentially, I grow and monetize other top business podcasters like Jenna Kutcher, Amy Porterfield, Neil Patel, Russell Brunson. I've got a lot of legendary podcasters in my network, and we're the number one business and self-improvement podcast network. So I do a lot of sales.
Write your commitment in the chat. Well, you guys are going to something new that we're doing is I'm pulling like the best content that I have from my podcast to make these a little bit more interactive, engaging. And so you're going to hear from Chris Voss. You're going to hear from Shelby Sapp and a few others in this webinar. So it should be fun. Okay.
My main job at Yap is I'm the spokesperson of the company. And I really am taking most of the major like brand sales calls, agency sales calls. A lot of our agency retainer deals are like 10K minimum a month. Most of them are like closer to 20 to 30K are brand deals. You know, I'm closing million dollar deals sometimes. So I've got a ton of experience with sales.
So before we are jumping into the content, we're going to have about 30 minutes of content. We're going to do a demo, another 30 or 40 minutes of content. So before we do that, so I don't have to interrupt in the middle of the session, since we've got a lot of the folks on already, is to sign up to the demo.
I would say that's like one of my main skill sets aside from marketing. So I love sales. I know a lot about it. I've interviewed every sales expert in the world that you could imagine. And so a lot of this learning is just things that I've come across on my podcast and my own personal experience. And so I'm excited to share with you. So today we're going to talk about bottoms-up sales strategy.
So Kate, if you can drop this link in here, youngandprofiting.co slash Crush Your Sales, I would join it on your computer because we're going to do a demo that you can follow along with. So Kate will drop that link in the chat. Make sure you guys sign up. It's no credit card. There's no gotchas. Just sign up so that you can try it for 14 days. Okay, we're going to move on.
We're going to talk about driver trees, becoming a sales psychopath. We'll go through pipeline management with Pipedrive. We'll talk about funnel optimization. We'll talk about the concept of the favorite and the fool and halves and else, which is just something that can help you identify your leads better.
So in case you don't know a little bit about me, I am the host of Young and Profiting Podcast. It's the number one entrepreneurship and business podcast. I've been doing it for over six years. I'm the founder and CEO of Yap Media. It's an award-winning social media and podcast production agency.
And then we'll talk about AI in the future and how AI is going to impact sales in the future and what you can do to prepare. All right. So starting with bottoms up sales strategy and guys, I've got your chat up. So let's make this interactive. So if you have questions after I'm done with this section, I'll pause and kind of take a look and see if I can help answer anything.
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Chapter 3: What is a bottoms-up sales strategy and how can it be implemented?
And you've got to figure out what are the different sales funnels that I have and what are the actions that I take in these different sales funnels and which one of my sales funnels works best that I want to lean into. And so sales is really a volume game. How many clicks, calls, conversions do you need to hit your sales targets?
So you want to go from results-based selling to activity-based selling. So a lot of people's go-to-market strategy are falling flat because they're doing it backwards. They have top-down approaches. And it could be from the executive team, from the finance team. Maybe you are the executive in the finance team and you've got some goals. You have industry standards of growth percentages.
And then you're gonna wanna track your data and figure out how many actions you need to complete each part of your sales process to hit your goals. Once you do that, you can set a stretch goal And I'll go over an example. So if this is feeling cloudy, I'll go over an example in a second. Once you do that, you can hit your stretch goal and make sure that your number is right.
And then you can break the targets into easier chunks so that you know what you need to do and what your team needs to do to achieve that result, okay? So driver trees is how you do this. This is how you determine what actions you need to take, all of your different rates and things like that. And there's three steps to create a driver tree. Number one, you determine your pipeline activities.
You have broad metrics like the marketing spend that you have. And it's essentially just not based in reality. You've got random goal-oriented metrics. They're set on different targets that you've created, but it's not actually based on tested outcomes. So that results in no realistic or actionable plans.
So you determine the measurable actions that drive results in your best performing sales funnels. So this is all the calls that you've made, your email sent, your direct messages sent, your follow-up sent. the lunches that you've taken clients to. It's just any sort of action that you take to close a deal.
So you actually, instead of wanting to take a top-down approach, you want to take a bottoms-up approach. And essentially what a bottoms up approach strategy is, is that you work backwards from the close. So you go from close to the first sale activity. Now, this requires you tracking your data.
And like I mentioned, you're going to want to think about all the different ways that you get clients because I'm sure it's not just one way. And you're going to want to figure out what are these separate funnels and map out the actions to each of these funnels.
So this means that if you haven't been tracking your actions, and a lot of you guys mentioned you've got a small team, you're solopreneurs, or you're just like a single entrepreneur, you've got to work backwards and start to track your data.
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Chapter 4: How do driver trees help in optimizing sales performance?
And you know that if you do all the right actions, that sales is a volume game and you'll end up getting a good result. And you can't worry about the results while you're taking these actions. You want to have a really strong, confident mindset while you're activity-based selling. And we all know that sales is very stressful, right?
for the month long period. And you don't only want to figure out how many first step actions you want. You want them to understand that their ultimate goal is that they need to get 117 webinar attendees and ultimately seven webinar conversions.
Sales is the type of activity where most of the time you're going to fail. There's other professions out there where like, for example, if you're an accountant, you learn the rules of accounting, you'll be a good accountant. If you're an electrician or a plumber, you learn the process of fixing something, you'll probably have a good result. But sales is based on other people's emotions.
And the other thing when you're doing a per rep analysis to think about is that you can then see like who's doing something differently that's working better. So you give two different reps the same goal. I need you to get 117 webinar attendees, seven webinar conversions, and somebody does better even though they sent the same amount of direct messages.
And you can control other people. You can do all the things you know will tend to have a good result. But at the end, you don't really know what's going to happen. And so you need to approach every single sale, every single interaction with a mindset of confidence and that you are going to close the deal.
For example, it could be that their message was better. Maybe they did better follow-ups. or something about their process is different, you want to figure out why is this person performing better and how can I then scale that to my team and keep improving what we're doing, right?
You need to have a high level of confidence and you need to be able to control your energy, control your emotions, right? And just do the actions that you know you need to do, even if you keep getting no's along the way. OK, so you need to replace your anxiety with confidence. And here we have Shelby Sapp, who is a young sales influencer entrepreneur who's generated millions of dollars in sales.
So it's really cool to start tracking team-wide, to track per person, and really start to evaluate all the actions people are doing, okay? So one thing to remember with activity-based selling is that you are really focused on your actions. You're focused on what you can control. You're focused on the process.
And she's going to talk about becoming a sales psychopath. So you're like blowing up on social media. You're doing really well on Instagram and TikTok. And I saw one of your videos and you were talking about how you need to be a sales psychopath.
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Chapter 5: Why is it important to become a 'sales psychopath'?
And being able to see like if there's anything going wrong, it actually has like AI that will tell you, you need to do more emails, you need to do more calls. And you just basically input that historical data so that Pipedrive knows how to guide you and your sales team along the way.
You can optimize a step that might not have like industry standard performance? Like, for example, let's say, you know, your conversion rate is 2%, but it should be 6%. So what do you need to do differently, right? So I think just evaluating what you're doing is always smart, slowing down, stepping back. Can you guys see yourself using a bottom-up strategy if you're not using one yet?
Pipedrive is a CRM that enables you to customize your sales process based on your specific individualized sales funnels. It was specifically designed by salespeople for salespeople. It is both a sales tracking tool and a CRM. So there's lots of CRMs out there that are really focused on communications and contact management. Pipedrive is both a sales tracking, activity sales tracking tool and a
All right, so according to Pipe Drive, sales team use the following tracking, 4% pen and paper, 17% spreadsheets, 79% CRM software. What are you using today? Or are you not tracking at all? Let me know in the chat. Are you using pen and paper, spreadsheets, CRMs? Well, that's what Pipedrive is. Just so you guys know, Pipedrive literally was started to revolve around activity-based selling.
traditional CRM where you can see every single email you've sent, every single DM you've sent, save all your contact information. Pipedrive also has a lot of automations. They're really innovative and they've got lots of new AI tools that are really exciting that are coming out. You can do automated follow-ups. You can do AI-generated email templates. And then they have amazing reporting.
That's like their whole ethos is that sales is all about the actions you take and to be more activity-focused rather than results-focused. So pipeline management is an incredible way to visualize your sales process, to track all your activities. Having the right CRM is crucial for your sales success. And this is coming from Pipedrive's website.
I think my favorite part about Pipedrive is all the reporting that they have. And in our demo, we're going to show you what their reporting looks like. Pipedrive is also a very popular platform that's integrated with every single app that you can imagine. So you can check out their integrations during your free trial. So we have more content after this. about 45 minutes of educational content.
We believe that in sales and marketing, just like in life, you can't control the results, but you can control the actions that drive deals towards completion. So their whole thing is designed around helping you understand all the actions that you're taking, tracking that automatically,
But before we do that, we're going to start the demo. You guys already signed up to the demo. If you guys have not yet, please go ahead and do that. Drop that link in the chat, Kate. We're not going to spend a ton of time because I had everybody who was on earlier sign up. and I'm going to answer some questions while you guys do that. If you guys have not done it yet, please sign up.
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Chapter 6: How does Pipedrive facilitate activity-based selling?
So you're always on top of your tasks and never miss an opportunity to connect. As you work on deals and complete activities, Pipedrive will provide you with real-time tracking and insights to help you crush your sales and refine your approach.
We're not gonna go into like too much of like the contact stuff that is traditional CRM. We're really focused on how this is related to activity-based selling.
Hello everyone, I'm Ayman, and today I'm going to walk you through how our sales team uses the core features at Pipedrive to crush sales every year. Let's get started. So the first step in Pipedrive is to set up your pipeline stages. Think of your pipeline as a visual representation of every step a deal goes through before it closes.
If you need to adjust course, let's say you notice a conversion rate drops when moving the deals to qualified stage, with Pipedrive Reports, you can spot these trends early and take correctional actions, maybe offering a more compelling proposal, dedicating more time to customer needs in that stage,
Pipedrive allows you to fully customize these stages so they match your specific sales process. Here is how to do it. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
This kind of visibility ensures that you and your team can pivot quickly and keep hitting your goals. Finally, when you have your pipeline set up, you're focusing on the right actions and your tracking progress, it's time to optimize and grow. Pipedrive's automations help you scale your sales process and achieve even bigger goals.
For example, the automation can take care of administrative tasks like sending follow-up emails. You can schedule the follow-ups beforehand or updating deal stages, saving you time and effort. As you refine your winning formula, you can set even bigger sales goals and continue to push your team to new heights. All right, this is Pipetribe in a nutshell.
Hope you got some insights and back to the webinar.
Yeah. So as you can see, super effective, especially those of you who are not using a CRM yet, even if you are using a CRM, one that is designed specifically around your sales process is super helpful so that you can do activity-based selling, not have to work in spreadsheets and be able to just see your dashboard to evaluate how things are going.
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Chapter 7: What are the benefits of using Pipedrive for sales management?
Like someone opts in, but they're not the right psychology, psychographics, demographics, because it was a cool free thing, but did it really align? And then the YouTube videos, if you were talking about how to hire team members in a video, and then you were like, and by the way, if you want to download my 21 tax savings guide,
Like not horrible because maybe some people are like, that does sound interesting. The reason they're there, the better guide would be a freebie that's like, you know, and if you want to get my scripts, my job interview scripts for how to really filter out the wrong candidates and lock in the right candidates, just go to thinkfilter, thinkhiringscripts.com or click the link in the description.
So that would be my biggest thing is like, I think the strategy of the content that attracts the right people, then the opt-in that ties together, congruency in the whole thing. And then again, a good sales process and funnels, you know, you probably have endless episodes in your own library of some good stuff on making great funnels. But what's powerful about that is it is a psychology.
Everybody listening to this needs to know. thinking about their whole, you could call it sales journey, the whole customer journey, thinking about the entire thing start to finish. And that is a never ending process of tweaking. All of us could improve it. Ours is probably a six out of 10. And we've done pretty well. Like there's so many, you know, things that small tweaks lead to giant peaks.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
And so just being willing to be like, can I change my opt-in in the future? Can I change my offer page? As I'm in just my offer page, the checkout page and the thank you page and, and then follow up. And what do I want to do next? And is that all aligned?
And usually when, when things are not working, it's just because a piece is broken and there's some kind of like cognitive dissonance that happens or something. Sometimes from YouTube to your landing page, it's, it's not quite what it looked like. And, and you know, all these little details like that.
One of my favorites, So hopefully that gets you in the mindset of being willing to analyze your entire funnel. So not only the activities you do, but what is the language on the page? What does it look like? Is anything broken, right? So that should be helpful.
And then it's kind of like online.
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Chapter 8: How can Pipedrive's features be utilized in a real-world sales demo?
And so if we were to just not change anything, so if I just had the team continue doing 10,000 DMs, but we implemented text reminders, which can be automated, and we're able to jump from 50% attendance rate to 80% attendance rate, I can hit my 35K-ish goal with that change and not necessarily sending out more DMs.
So it can really have big impacts and you wanna see like what part of your funnel can you actually improve? Is there a way that you can improve the click-through rate? Is there a way that you can improve the conversion rate on the actual event, right? So you always wanna look at that and try to optimize. So based on everything you just heard, are you inspired to start optimizing your funnels?
And if so, like what's one idea that you will do after this call Well, thank you, guys. You can listen to all those episodes. Kate, maybe you can drop the episode links in the chat. That Russell Brunson episode was epic. I have so many sales episodes, guys. I've interviewed every single human behavior and sales person in the world. Okay, so benchmarks for conversion rates.
I love that. So an example of this is something that we do at YAP and that we've tried to fix, which is our attendance rate. Our attendance rate is great for webinars. We get a 50% average attendance rate. However, I interviewed Kat Norton and she told me that for webinar registrants, she gets a drastic increase in her attendance rate by collecting people's phone numbers and then texting them.
They're going to be different by industry, but that's something you can go on ChatGPT and check out. That's going to be totally different for every single activity. It's going to be totally different for every single type of event. So for example, like webinar events are going to have different conversion rates than a sales call. But you can find that information online.
And you can also use your own past results as your benchmark and just keep improving from there. working backwards, figuring out how to automate, laying out the funnel. Yeah, the hook story offer is brilliant. That entire episode with Russell is amazing. Also, if you guys want more webinar content, I'll write this in the chat. I have a two-part series with Jason Fladline.
So an example of optimizing a funnel for us would be to start testing text. And so if we were to just not change anything, so if I just had the team continue doing 10,000 DMs, but we implemented text reminders, which can be automated, and we're able to jump from 50% attendance rate to 80% attendance rate, I can hit my 35K-ish goal with that change and not necessarily sending out more DMs.
And we go over how to create the best webinar ever for like two hours. So if you guys want to get into webinars, check that out. We'll be right back after a quick break from our sponsors. Yeah, Pam, it's 2025 and a new year means new opportunities. For a lot of you out there, I know you've been thinking about one thing over the holidays and that's starting your own business or side hustle.
So it can really have big impacts and you wanna see like what part of your funnel can you actually improve? Is there a way that you can improve the click-through rate? Is there a way that you can improve the conversion rate on the actual event, right? So you always wanna look at that and try to optimize. So based on everything you just heard, are you inspired to start optimizing your funnels?
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