Use Zapier to Build a Daily Sales Call Briefing Automation

Full video transcript

Quick demo that I think you’ll find useful if you use Zapier, if you take sales calls, if you want to be better prepared for meetings that you host on a day-to-day basis.

I’m going to share a quick Zapier workflow demonstration that I think anybody can benefit from if you do any sort of preparation for any sort of meetings or sales calls throughout the days of the week, because stuff moves so fast with AI. The speed of change is continuing to rapidly accelerate. While innovation isn’t going to stop, it’s also important for us to take a quick pause and realize that there are a few practical workflows that we can highlight that you can take and hopefully go and translate into action on your end.

But I’m curious who’s using Zapier for building out automations and workflows beyond ChatGPT. Yeah, give me a thumbs up. Is anyone here like a super fan of Zapier? Zapier is a lot more user-friendly that I found for people that are just getting into AI and workflow automation. And so I wanted to share a Zapier example of a really practical workflow for anybody doing some form of sales call or discovery consultations with prospective new clients. And if you’re having these calls on a regular, consistent basis, this may be a useful workflow for you to be aware of.

If you go to agents.zapier.com — Zapier’s been around for a long time in the world of automation, and they came out with a thing called agents. I remember it coming onto my radar earlier this year, and what I thought was really cool about this: I can see and visualize people being able to build practical agents, create agents that execute specific tasks on a regular or recurring basis, or like an event-based basis. So like somebody sends you a Slack message, it monitors the Slack channel, and then if a message comes through, it goes and takes an action, as just one example. Or say you have a Google form that people fill out and then it updates a row in a Google sheet. Then it could scan that Google row and then take another subsequent action from there.

The example I want to show today is for daily sales call briefings. And so I’m going to show you how to quickly — I’ll share this prompt too for you, so you can literally just copy and paste it and update it yourself. These instructions and this agent with Zapier was scheduled to go every day to scan a Google calendar for days, events, and meetings. And I’ll show you how to set this up, literally start to finish, in just a second.

These steps — I spoke them out, and then Zapier helped me organize what I spoke out in the form of a prompt, and then added my Google calendar and then added my Slack channel. So there’s the instruction for how you do this in Zapier. And this is a demonstration as well to show how you can go about building your own agents in a super simplified way.

Let’s say you have a bunch of sales calls coming up, and I say, “Wow, I wish that I just could prep for my meetings.” And I’ll use today as an example because I got a lot of calls going on today. It’s 9:00. I don’t have time to go and research everybody that I have a call with, but I need to know who I’m talking to. Well, when you click new agent, upper right-hand corner in Zapier, they have a bunch of templates that you can use. And so there’s a lot that you can already get to work and start with, and if you select it, it’s going to have it like pre-made, that type of thing. But you can also prompt it.

I use a tool now called Whisper Flow, which is super helpful for speaking and dictating your words that AI can then go and run with. I say, “I’m going to be creating an AI calendar sales call workflow.” I just show you that I can just dictate what prompt I want. Let your creativity shine here, specifically to like what do you want to automate in your business. Right now, I want to automate my daily sales calls. I take those instructions that I gave it — there’s a couple key things that I’m going to need to do. I’m going to need to set up my Google calendar. I’m going to need to set up my Slack. That’s fine. I want to do it at 7:00 a.m.

I already gave it this prompt and it made it structured, so I’ll just save you guys some time in setting it up. But once I have this prompt and I tell it what I want it to do — I want it to go and do something, I wanted to research something — it’s like vibe coding for building AI agents. Give it a prompt, and now it’s like doing all of this stuff. You can see it working in action right now. If you were building automations years ago with Zapier, you’d have to go into a canvas type of thing and you’d have to plug this stuff together, and there’s still a time and a place for a lot of that, and this isn’t replacing the entire platform. This is an addition to their platform. But boy, is it nice to be able to just say what you want and then let Zapier’s AI just go to work for you.

So the question then becomes, what do I want? What am I actually spending time automating in my business? I know I had a bunch of calls coming up today, and I know that I didn’t have an hour to prep for them all because I was hosting a workshop this morning, because I was hosting a live show last night, because I’ve been at Austin Tech Week all week preparing for the show. I said, “Man, if only there were more hours in the day to do all this stuff, or if only there was an AI agent workflow that could help me do all this stuff.” In this case, there is, because Zapier can connect to basically every tool that you would ever need to connect to. If you use any kind of CRM that is like a legit CRM, they probably connect with Zapier. And if you use Google Calendar, which most people do, at least I do anyway, Zapier connects right to it.

And so when you’re setting up your Zapier agents account, you can actually sync it with the main login that you’re using already. So once you do that, it’ll automatically sync with your calendar. But now check this out — you can see the work that it’s done. It found the trigger action. It added the instructions. Did all of this stuff. Workflow overview: daily at 7:00 a.m., scan my calendar, send me a Slack message. What’s configured? What’s it going to do? It’s going to trigger every day at 7:00. It’s going to scan my calendar for today’s events. It’s going to extract the company names or meeting details. It’s going to visit the company website to research relevant information. It’s going to compile a comprehensive summary, and then it’s going to send me a briefing specifically in a Slack channel that I designate it to.

That’s great. Now these are the exact instructions that it’s going to be following. When I click the little gear icon next to the Google calendar, you can see it’s already got my darby@theaiuniversity.com. You can see it’s got the calendar set up. That’s fine, I don’t need to touch anything there. You can see here it’s got my Slack account. It’s going to select the channel — the channel let agent select the specific value. When I did this in the last workshop, it picked another intake form channel and I was like, okay fine, whatever, it’s not a big deal for this demonstration, but if I want to select a specific channel, you can go select a specific channel, and you can see I have a lot of channels in my Slack, probably too many channels. So I select my Slack channel — you could set a daily sales call channel and make a Slack channel dedicated to this.

Now, once I click agent preview, it takes me to this screen where — cool stuff here, like a Google doc — you can edit the prompt and I can add on additional layers here. If I realize that I wanted to add a Google sheet, if I wanted to add a Gmail, send me an email, you could do that here, just the same way, by adding tools. Visit website, search, do all this stuff. I can add a tool, I can select Gmail, find email, send email, create draft. I can do all that stuff. But I need to make sure that the actual automation is working before I get too far ahead of myself. Sometimes I tend to get excited — these tools can do so much. Let’s put it into action right now.

So I’m running a test on this. It’s going out and researching everybody that’s on my calendar from today’s summit, because I sent every single speaker on the summit an invite. The speakers had their business email, so it has their business website associated with that speaker, which is usually going to be the case. If you’re doing sales calls with people that have a company, they’re using their business email — AI will take that email as the context for this. So we’re researching sarahabaker.com. Right now, I’m sitting back right now. I got more important things to do — drink my cold brew, then go and run all this research manually. Now we got Tracy, who’s going to be speaking after Sarah, lensonluxury.com.

And bear in mind, once this is running and I know that this is going to work, I set it to do this every day at 7:00 a.m. So I’m not showing up to my work and clicking a button and then watching this happen every day. No — this is happening while I’m making my coffee in the morning, before I even open up my Slack, right? The AI is going to trigger at a certain time to then compile this information, to then send it to me in a way that I want to consume it. I would be willing to bet there’s a way that I could take this and turn it into a micro podcast for the day and do a 5-minute audio blurb with ElevenLabs. I just made this up off the top of my head, but if you really like to consume content in an audio way, there’s a way to figure it out and make that work.

Okay, but let’s take a quick look, because now we got the first run of this workflow in. I need to make sure that this thing is even on the right track. So let’s go back up — daily sales briefing: “Good morning, Darby, here’s your comprehensive briefing for today’s call.” Thank you, thank you, Zapier. So this is what happened today before the call — this is what I was doing the hour and a half before. We had an AI sales engine workshop. This is my day, literally, you guys can see it right now. The workshop, company research — this is all true, this is their website, talking points. Nathaniel, PickAxe Code Platforms. Sarah Baker, AI technology and automation coach for entrepreneurs, here with us right now — this is like what it’s finding from what the AI is assessing off your website for the high-level overview, right? We have Lens on Luxury. Got Gamma — these are all the people on Gamma that are going to be joining us today, AI design partner. This is a true quote, this is true numbers, opportunities, partner ecosystem, content, collaboration, tech. It’s why we do these summits, right? It’s a great way to collaborate, to learn, to grow together, and have a fantastic day.

And so I’m saying, cool, does this look like something that’s going to be useful for me on a daily, on a every kind of basis? If yes, great, and how can we build on top of this? I’m like, “Oh, now I have an idea, it’d be good if I had this or that, or I want it to send me their LinkedIn also, or I want it to do this, or I want it to tie in my CRM.” We can get so much more robust with this. But for now, look, I got 5 minutes to put this together. I just want to get a wrap of it. I realized that I needed a quick schedule of what I was doing today. Actually, I thought today was Tuesday, and it’s actually Thursday — oh crap, I got the summit going on, right? I’m just kidding, I knew it was Thursday, but it’s been a really busy week.

And so now I click approve, and I have my entire day briefed out for me right here. Now look, boom, every morning, 7 a.m. sharp, I got my day lined up for me. If I wanted it to email it to me, I could. If I wanted to have it create a podcast and talk through ElevenLabs and do something like that, I could probably figure that out if I had a little bit more time. For me, I want a snapshot, I want to see what’s going on. The possibilities are limitless. I just think that what Zapier is doing with their agents and workflows is really cool, making it super accessible for literally anybody to just go and speak — “I want this, this is the idea I have, this is the workflow that I want to do.” Get creative, let your imagination go a little bit and think through what are the outcomes that you’re looking to achieve anyways with AI tools. Talk to your Zapier agent about it, just tell it, literally prompt it, “This is what I want to make,” and then it’ll help structure your prompt in a way that it’ll identify the tools that you need. And then ultimately you can create your own little mini AI agent army that all do these little things. You can add new tools, and when I mean you can add any tool you want — 7,000-plus apps — you can connect it with your Salesforce, HubSpot, Notion, knowledge bases, and more.