#106: 6 AI Sales Workflows

Slides and video included

Author

Harrison Waid
October 26, 2025

Read time: 3 minutes

Welcome to the Succession newsletter where 1,000+ life science sales reps improve their skills in 5 minutes per week. If you’re getting value from these newsletters, we'd love it if you could forward it along to your sales colleagues. If you’re new here, subscribe below.

This week I gave a talk at ELRIG about how AI is transforming commercial operations in life sciences.

We had a great turnout of reps and commercial leaders! All curious about how AI can actually make their jobs easier right now, not five years from now.

If you missed it, we’re sharing the full video, audio, and slides, but I also wanted to break it down here as a written summary of the six workflows we covered.

The RAPID AI Framework

Before diving in, here’s how to actually get results from AI.

We call it the RAPID framework:

  1. Recognize the goal — What are you trying to achieve? (Don’t skip this step.)

  2. Articulate what good looks like — Show AI examples of strong outputs.

  3. Provide context — Feed it everything it needs to know. The more the better.

  4. Improve the output — Edit, fact-check, and humanize it.

  5. Deploy and document — Save what works so your whole team benefits.

1. Prospecting & Messaging

This is where most people start and where most people go wrong.

They drop a LinkedIn profile into ChatGPT, ask for a cold email, and get back something robotic that is clearly written by AI.

Good messaging requires three layers of context:

  • Your company: your products, services, differentiators, personas, and proof points.

  • The prospect: their role, company, news, publications, hiring signals, etc.

  • How to Write: examples of strong emails, tone, rules, bad examples, and frameworks.

At Succession, we actually feed a 27-page document into AI to train it on how to write prospecting messages that sound human.

If you skip this step, you’ll get generic outreach.

If you include all three layers, you’ll get messaging that feels real and actually converts.

2. Meeting Follow-Up

Most people spend 30 minutes after a call writing follow-up notes, but you don’t have to anymore.

By using AI call recording tools (Fathom, Fireflies, Otter, etc.), you can automatically:

  • Generate notes and action points from every meeting

  • Ask for a summary of what was discussed

  • Even query a past call before your next meeting (“What did we agree to last time?”)

The key is: record every call (with permission).

You’ll follow up faster, stay consistent, and improve your own performance by reviewing recordings. In the same way athletes watch game film, you can watch back your own calls to improve. (Most won’t do this because it takes work, but you’re reading this newsletter so you aren’t like “most” reps, right???).

3. Account Research

Account research used to take 10–15 minutes per company.

Now you can automate that research in seconds.

Here’s how to do it:

  • Write down everything you normally look for (workflows, news, leadership, therapeutic areas, pipeline, etc.)

  • Then ask AI to write a prompt that automates that process for any company you input.

  • Save that prompt as a reusable “agent” or “skill” in ChatGPT, Claude, or Copilot.

Now, anytime you need a quick account summary, you just drop in a company name and get back structured intelligence in seconds.

4. Data Enrichment & List Building

If you’ve ever built or cleaned a prospect list manually, you know how tedious it can be.

AI can do this at scale.

Tools like Clay can enrich spreadsheets with company domains, emails, LinkedIn URLs, job titles, and even scrape websites for things like modalities or therapeutic areas.

For hyper-targeted lists, Exa.ai can build lists based on specific behaviors like scientists who’ve published papers mentioning a certain technique or company.

Used together:

  • Clay enriches and personalizes at scale

  • Exa finds the niche people who match your ICP exactly

That’s how you build high-quality lists and write high-quality messaging.

5. Inbound Lead Follow-Up

This is the eternal battle between marketing and sales:
- Marketing says “You’re not following up with our leads.”
- Sales says “Your leads are garbage.”

Nobody wins, and the pipeline suffers. It’s a tale as old as time and happens at every company.

So how do we solve it?

Automate inbound follow-up so every lead gets a touch within five minutes.

If someone checks “Talk to sales,” route it straight to the rep.

If not, enrich their data, write a tailored email, and drop them into an automated sequence.

When they respond positively, then send them to sales.

Marketing knows every lead is being worked.

Sales only focuses on qualified replies.

Everyone wins.

And speed to lead matters: Harvard Business Review found that conversion rates drop dramatically after five minutes. So every minute you delay your follow-up is an opportunity walking away!

Automating this process can double your lead-to-opportunity rate and is low hanging fruit that can be done right now and generate more results than more leads or more cold outreach.

I wrote about this recently in this newsletter article: https://blog.succession.bio/p/follow-up-with-every-lead-in-minutes

If you want help implementing this, reach out.

6. Creative Ways to Stand Out

This one’s fun. AI isn’t just about productivity — it’s about creativity too.

A few examples we’ve tried (and you can too):

  • AI songs: Use tools like Suno to make custom songs for prospects. It’s funny, memorable, and guaranteed to get a response.

  • AI avatars: Record personalized video messages using AI-generated avatars. (Make it obvious it’s AI, it’s more fun that way.) HeyGen is good for this.

  • Mini apps: Use Replit or Lovable to build interactive lead magnets — like our Insights Tool, Email Finder, and Email Grader.

  • AI images: Create visual assets using Gemini Nano Banana or Midjourney to make your outreach more distinctive.

These creative workflows are how you break through crowded inboxes and make people actually want to engage.

The Slides and Stuff

Here is the recorded version of the presentation:

Episode 72: [Sales] Early career learnings in sales with Aimée Egglesfield

  1. Lead Generation: We’ll build target lists, write scientifically relevant messaging, and send messages on your behalf to book qualified sales meetings with biotech and pharma companies.

  2. Training for Reps: A skill development platform for life science sales reps who want to improve their sales skills, exceed their quota, and take the next step in their career.

  3. Training for Teams: If you want to upskill your team around prospecting, driving to close, key account management, AI, or any other topic, we can put together a training plan specific to your organization’s needs.

  4. Strategy Call: Need more than training? Want help implementing and executing your sales strategy? In a 30-minute call, we will assess your company’s current situation and identify growth opportunities.

Reply

or to participate.