Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Hala Taha: AI-Powered Sales, How to Automate, Optimize, and Close More Deals | Sales
Fri, 14 Mar 2025
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.
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.
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.
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.
So if you haven't yet, let me know how many people are on your sales team. So far, it seems like it's all a lot of small sales teams, which is perfect for what we're going to go over today. Now, if you guys have ever been to any of my webinars you know that it's real work, right? So this is not something, some fluff. We're gonna go over real concepts. You're gonna learn.
You're gonna wanna take notes. So what are you gonna do to make the most out of today's class? Are you gonna grab some tea or coffee? I've got tea. I've got water. My phone is on silent. I'm not checking my email. Get a snack. Make sure your kids are out of the way, your pets are out of the way. You're gonna focus. We're gonna be here for about... 75 minutes going through content.
So I want you guys to be focused. Let me know what you're going to do in the chat to make the most out of today's session. Drop your name and date to solidify your commitments in the comments. Yeah, you guys will get a replay of this. But I still would take notes because it helps you really remember things. So let me know what you're going to do to make the most out of today's session.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But let's make this interactive and as fun as possible. So starting with bottoms up sales strategy. So first off, how would you guys all define the word selling? How would you define the word selling? Don't look it up. Don't Google it. In your own words, what is selling? Okay, we got a lot of good answers.
So we've got giving value, being of service, selling words, presenting a product, exchanging a service for money, providing true value, helping somebody make a decision and change, convincing somebody what they need. creating value tied to client needs. Okay. So lots of good answers. Annoying for some people. Okay.
So you guys gave a lot of good answers, but in my opinion, and technically selling refers to the actions that you take throughout the sales process and the closing of the deal. So a lot of people refer to sales as making money, making a sale, right? Providing the value at the end of the sale. The value is really after the selling happens, right?
Selling is all about the actions you take throughout the process. There's a certain actions that you take that will cause a higher probability of getting more deals. So most people focus on the results rather than the actions and the process leading up to deals. And you need to do the opposite, okay? You need to focus on instead of results-based selling, activity-based selling, okay?
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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?
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.
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.
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.
And then you'll actually be able to see which funnel is working better and which funnel you want to spend more time with and what actions you want to spend more time on. Okay? Then you have to collect the results. So a spreadsheet or a CRM tools, a sales tracking tool, you want to collect all your past results.
And these can include things like clicks, webinar registrations, webinar attendees, emails opened, calls booked. Okay. Number three is you want to calculate your performance rate metrics. So that's analyzing your past data to collect all the key rates to help you forecast future performance. So that's conversion rates, click-through rates, average order value, attendance rate.
So let me know, do you guys understand the general concepts, steps one through two, three to create a driver trade? Okay, I'm gonna put it into, I'm gonna show you an example. So do you guys know what the different sales funnels that you have that currently you're using in your business? Let me know. Type it in the chat. What are the different types of sales? Are you doing webinars?
Are you doing discovery calls? Are you going to live events? Okay. And then do you know... out of all the different funnels that you have, do you know the best performing one? Or do you feel like you need to analyze your data and determine what the best performing sales funnel is?
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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?
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 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.
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.
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.
Oh, yes, you do. Talk to me about that. So I like to say you have to be a complete literal psychopath in sales because a lot of people think sales is super cool, the shiny thing, you can make a lot of money. It's like, yes, but you don't get paid to show up. You get paid to go the extra mile. And sales is something to where it's a direct reflection of your work ethic.
So if you really want to make it worth it and to be that top 1% cream of the crop, you have to be a little bit of a psycho, not only in your work ethic, but also emotionally. in your ability to just know how to regulate your emotions throughout the day. Like, for example, you're going to go call, call, call, door, door, door of no, no, no, no.
But you have to go into every single encounter thinking, this is the sale. This is the person that's going to buy from me. When maybe the last 10 people told you to yourself, you know? So to me, that's so psychotic because that's not normal. That's not normal human behavior.
You have to trick yourself into being this psychopathic mentality in order to really reap, in my opinion, the true benefits of sales. Because that really does come from the top of the top, the best of the best. Sure.
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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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Let me know down in the chat. If you've done that, Mark is asking if one only uses pipe drive, should that be the only tool to stay around to track your sales? Or would you recommend also tracking an Excel as well? I, I think that if you set up Pipedrive properly, you won't need to use Excel.
That's the whole point is that you want to get out of spreadsheets and move to Pipedrive to track all your sales. And Pipedrive on their blog has all this documentation of like how you can basically make that transition. So if you've been tracking in Sheets, that's great because you basically have the foundation to then, you know, upload that information into Pipedrive.
Let's hold that thought and take a quick break with our sponsors. Yeah, fam, when I first started this podcast, believe it or not, I had an all-volunteer team to help me out. But as my business took off, I needed to hire a lot of new people and fast. It soon became pretty overwhelming because I had to sort through piles and piles of resumes, conduct countless interviews, and you know how it goes.
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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.
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,
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.
Hello, everyone. I'm Eamon.
Yeah, I think Pipedrive would definitely be good for a recruitment agency. It would work for any sales funnel. And the beauty of Pipedrive compared to other CRMs is that you can totally customize your steps in the process. But like I said, you need to just outline what your sales steps are first. So if you guys aren't using Pipedrive right now, are you excited to give it a try?
You've got a 14-free day free trial. Are you excited to give it a try and see if it will work for you guys? Okay, we see a lot of yeses. What about forecasting? Yes, Pipedrive has... Forecasting abilities. Pipedrive is one of the most reputable CRMs in the industry. So anything that like HubSpot would have or any other CRMs, Pipedrive has. And it's more of like a nimble tool.
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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.
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.
And Russell is going to talk about actual strategies for optimizing these content pages.
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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.
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.
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.
But of course, you've got so many questions. How do I get started? How do I come up with a brand? How am I actually gonna sell things to people? Well, yeah, fam, I want you to take a deep breath because Shopify's got you. How do I know? Because I had the same questions when I first started selling online.
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