Your sales team shouldn't be spending their time updating CRMs, building quotes, or chasing down information.
In this episode of Entry & Exit, Stephen Olmon and Collin Trimble break down the AI tools they're using at Alarm Masters to help their sales team do more with less. From automated quoting and proposal generation to meeting transcription, sales coaching, and CRM automation, they share practical ways operators can eliminate busywork and give salespeople more time to sell.
In this episode:
→ Building AI-powered quoting and proposal workflows
→ Using Claude and custom GPTs to save hours on estimates
→ Recording meetings and capturing action items automatically
→ Creating sales playbooks with Notion AI
→ AI-powered onboarding and training opportunities
→ Real-time sales coaching with Dialpad
→ Automating CRM updates and reducing admin work
→ How operators can improve sales productivity today
Connect:
Stephen Olmon — https://x.com/stephenolmon
Collin Trimble — https://x.com/TXAlarmGuy
Owned and Operated
New Episodes Every Wednesday!
Subscribe For More
Your sales team shouldn't be spending their time updating CRMs, building quotes, or chasing down information.
In this episode of Entry & Exit, Stephen Olmon and Collin Trimble break down the AI tools they're using at Alarm Masters to help their sales team do more with less. From automated quoting and proposal generation to meeting transcription, sales coaching, and CRM automation, they share practical ways operators can eliminate busywork and give salespeople more time to sell.
In this episode:
→ Building AI-powered quoting and proposal workflows
→ Using Claude and custom GPTs to save hours on estimates
→ Recording meetings and capturing action items automatically
→ Creating sales playbooks with Notion AI
→ AI-powered onboarding and training opportunities
→ Real-time sales coaching with Dialpad
→ Automating CRM updates and reducing admin work
→ How operators can improve sales productivity today
Connect:
Stephen Olmon — https://x.com/stephenolmon
Collin Trimble — https://x.com/TXAlarmGuy
Owned and Operated
New Episodes Every Wednesday!
Subscribe For More
M-E-S. I think that's the Greek god of something. I don't know. Something awesome. Something thick. You can build a custom GPT in ChatGPT, or you can build a Claude project, and you can basically do this yourself. That is an AI tool we use today. And it can save you a tremendous amount of time. You can take that same idea and apply it to different little needs and areas that you're still thinking about. And I think Claude is a great first tool for that. Welcome to Entry and Exit. My name is Steven Ullman, and I have Colin Trimble with me, who is my co-host and my business partner at Alarm Masters, which is a security and fire business that we run based out of Houston, Texas. We bought it three years ago and we've been scaling it ever since. And today we're talking about AI tools that can help your sales team do more with less. That was that was good. Listeners, I don't think you understand how hard that no ums, just dialed, no filler words. No, just dialed. My guy is dialed for a podcast. Yeah. Absolutely. Let him cook. You know what I'm saying? Let him cook. Anyway, all right, we're done. We're done with that. Um, all right. So we've talked a lot about different AI tools. Uh we talk a lot about sales. So we're gonna converge these two things together and how are we gonna do more with less? So um we're we're gonna spend time not talking about customer engagement tools for finding leads, but we're gonna spend time on what can you do to like take stuff off of your salespeople or sales team's plate so you can get them to be more efficient and allow them to do the thing they do best. I'm always looking at things through the lens of how do I get my sales team to do to be the most efficient possible. Yeah, and um there are a lot of ways you can do this. I I think one really big one in our industry is quoting. And uh and and I would say quoting is an all-encapsulating word for estimating and designing, doing takeoffs, um, quoting it out, putting the proposal together. That whole cycle is um takes time. And so we have an uh an awesome employee, shout out Felix, who does all of our quoting and design for us, and he but he's just one guy, and we've got three field sales reps, and we are doing 10 coffee drops a week. So there's a lot of pipe generation that's happening, and so there's a lot on his plate. And so for us, this this whole um this whole process looks like this. Like in an ideal world, it doesn't happen like this every time. You get a drawing set or a uh, you know, like an evac plan, like a plan that shows the building. And then the salesperson could mark that up with various devices. That's a door, we're gonna put a reader and a lock on, that's where a camera's gonna go, that's where a motion sensor's gonna go, that's a fire pole station, whatever. And that's at takeoff, right? So that doesn't define what type of camera, that doesn't define the technology or the cabling required, it just says camera goes here. And ideally, they're gonna define some head end area where all the stuff is gonna be run to, right? And so you do that design, and that really can't that is harder to have AI like interact on. There is a way you can do it. Uh, there are tools out there where you can actually, if you have to scale drawing, like scale drawings, you can upload an architectural plan and it will actually put symbols on there based on fire code. Those are highly specialized. Um, we don't use them today just simply because we're not doing the scale on that, where we're doing so much upgrade and retrofit where it doesn't, and we're using existing plans that it just doesn't necessitate that for us. But we do um do that a lot for security jobs. So a lot of times what we'll do is we'll take those plans that are pictures generally or digital, and we'll upload those into an agent. And that agent can say, Oh, okay, it looks like you've got 14 cameras, three readers, and one place you want to put a head in. It looks like the whole building is, you know, 50,000 square feet, and you know, we you're probably gonna need X amount of cabling. Then you can say, Yeah, I want to use an Eagle Eye system, a Brivo system, a DMP system, a Bosch system, a Vigilon Vicato, whatever I want. And now you can have a system that will literally, you put your price book in, it will build you the entire bill of material plus all of the associated pricing, and then you can dictate markup and tweak to get to the price that you really want to come in for the customer. And then, even cooler, is you can push that all into your CRM where it will generate the proposal for you, and you can present that to the customer. That is an AI tool we use today. We built this tool using a tool called uh Hermes Agent, E-H-E-R-M-E-S. I think that's the Greek god of something. I don't know. Something awesome. Yeah, yeah, something sick. And we built a custom kind of it's an open source uh uh product that does that, but honestly, you can build a custom GPT and Chat GPT, or you can build a Claude project and you can basically do this yourself. As long as it has your price book and uh you can connect it to your CRM. There's a way to do this super easy. In fact, if I were starting out right now, if you have a proposal generation software, I would download all the you know your costs or your price, however you like to do that. I would take that as a file, put it in Claude, go to projects, click add project, and add those files in there. And then I would type in some instructions like, hey, I always like to mark up to you know 50% markup, 100% markup, 20% markup. And then you can start taking pictures and say, I've got 30 cameras, one recording device, I want to store it for 30 days, and it will literally have the intelligence to build you the entire bill of material. And if you can connect it to your CRM, great. If you can't, you can just take an Excel spreadsheet and dump that into your CRM. That is a tool that is available today through Claude, and there's many other like AI tools that have put their own wrapper on that same concept, and it can save you a tremendous amount of time. Taking it that far all the way down to the proposal, too. Like one thing on my mind that just can be helpful for salespeople is to establish a brand guide. And anytime I feel like we have scenarios where we have some sort of piece of sales collateral, but we need it slightly contextualized for a certain industry, or we want to show a different case study on you know where that would be plugged in. Like you can create a brand guide that's consistent with your brand that would be used ideally on those proposals that we were just talking about, but also can be leveraged for any other piece of sales material. And instead of a salesperson having to talk to your marketing person, or if you use an agency, or they're like probably not making a great one themselves and you know, Google Slides or something, um, that can all be done really well, pretty quickly, efficiently, where they don't have to depend on anyone else likely. And so you can take that same idea and apply it to different little needs and areas that your self-team might have. Yeah, 100% agree. Um, and I think Cloud is a great first tool for that. Um another one is another internal tool that you may use a lot is um, and this is this is this is a tool that's like they've been out for a long time, like five years. And so there's a tool called Otter that you can use that records all your conversations. So you should be using this to record every site walk, every customer meeting, everything that you have, so that it can record that information and distill it down and attach it into your CRM, and it will actually give you the key takeaways. So you're sitting in a design meeting, it records everything, gives you the action items, it plugs in. It's a super slick tool, very easy, kind of expensive, worth it. Um, that's an AI tool that is out of the box, ready to go, super easy. Um, another great tool that you may use for your sales team and to build your sales playbook is Notion, right? So this is another cheap, uh, well, relatively cheap if you're trying to do an AI tool. You can build uh articles. So, like you could use in plain language, like talk like you normally talk. It will create an SOP. So you're like, hey, this is my sales process, here's how I want it to look, here's some discovery questions, here's the things they need to do on a site walk, here's how they do it. It will create a full playbook for you. You can review, approve, change. Then you can layer an agent on top that your sales team can text, they can message, they can whatever, and say, hey, what are what are the discovery questions I need to ask? And it'll pop up that sales playbook, and all your questions are right there. So, what's really cool about that is it takes tribal knowledge out of the owner's brain, who is typically the first salesperson, and they're trying to duplicate themselves into another salesperson. And getting all that knowledge is really hard. And so I would say using Notion to offload that knowledge, build knowledge articles, and then put an agent on top is gonna speed up that timeline as fast as possible. Another thing that I think is super cool is um you can actually do, and you actually, I think you sent me something on this, Steven. There is now like you can do like natural language e-learning. So you could basically say, here's the things I want to train on. I want you to create an e-learning course that will train employees on that. This is something we have not done yet, untested, would be really slick. It's something I thought about, like we should we should really think about doing for onboarding international employees too, is like speed that up. Is you can literally put describe the the course and the and the folks take it. Like I think that could be really cool. Yeah, I was also thinking on the recording side, like we do mock uh sales meetings, like recording those take learnings and then being able to query against those. Like, hey, you know, I uh had a mock sales conversation last month, and I don't remember the answer to this question or this issue. Can you remind me? Like just continuing to create your own internal uh knowledge center, you know, knowledge kind of center of excellence, yeah. Um is table stakes, I would say. Like it's it's not that cool. Like it you you should already be recording everything uh to ingest it if you're not time to catch up. Yeah, absolutely. The last thing I'll highlight is um your VoIP system. It doesn't have to, you don't actually have to use your VoIP system, but you whatever system you want your salespeople to make calls on. So we give all of our sales guys and gals a phone, and then we we don't actually allow them to use that number. We make them use dial pad, which is our VoIP system, and it gives them a number and it's an app on their phone that they can make calls out on, and it records it and will actually surface like coaching recommendations live like in the middle of the call. So to be like, hey, it's the customer's giving you this objection. Like y'all have talked about this in a sales meeting before. You need to ask, you know, to get a decision maker on this next call. And here's like the thing that you know, kind of a an objection handling technique you can use at like that's that's a alive today, and like it's it's super easy to use, and like especially it's your field salespeople will probably use the VoIP, but will probably not use the coaching as much because they're just kind of wheeling and dealing and moving just transparently. But SDRs that are setting appointments, they will. And uh it's great. Like you should absolutely uh use that to help speed up onboarding of inside sales folks to help set appointments. Um, so we've talked about a couple tools today. So we talked about quoting agent first, totally available to everybody. We talked about um an e-learning platform, we talked about recording meetings, we talked about a void platform. What other thing would you include that's out there uh today that you think is like helps the sales team? We've done some things related to them, like optimizing their their day or their weeks, their own calendars as well. Um so that's another one that I think again you don't have to get like too intellectual with it. Yeah. Like break down your sales team's days or weeks. What are the different things that are slowing them down, that are making them less efficient, that they need help with, that they that they get blocked by? Yeah, pretty much any of those different areas of their work life can be improved and improved pretty quickly. Yeah, like this isn't a six-month-long ordeal to take ground and like you know, to have like a a realized, you know, win. It it might be in June. Yeah, you know, if you start now. Yeah. Yeah, I totally agree. And there's and there's also we built a tool again on a Hermes agent that's really slick. We have a, you know, just like everybody else, salespeople don't want to update their CRM. And so this is kind of a nuanced thing that we're kind of building. It's not in production yet. Actually, our sales guys have not used it yet, but I have built it and it's it's working, but I'm kind of refining it, where it'll allow you to basically interact with your data in a custom environment. So, like we have a hub where all of our AI stuff is. You can say, Hey, show me all my open deals, and it'll give you a table of all of your open deals with all the like relevant fields like amount, next step, stage, whatever, right? Contact name. You can then go into that table and update those deals in line, like within that chat session, and it will push that back to your CRM and update it so you don't have to click into the opportunity. And so, like, you think, okay, well, that's what's saving you a couple for your salespeople, where they've got, you know, 28 deals and they need to update them multiple times a week and they got to click into each one, and each one takes a minute and a half. You know, you're talking an hour a week minimum, right? And so if you've got 40 hours in a week, do you want to pay them to do that hour of clicking around, or do you want to shrink that down to five minutes and get some of that time back? And so that's just another one where it's like salespeople perpetually hate updating their CRM. Make it as easy as freaking possible on them because it's really for you. You need the CRM data. That's really who needs it. It also there's some goodwill, like with your team. Yeah, it ingratiates people when you go build things, you take time, um, or you're working alongside alongside them to help make their work life easier, uh, more streamlined. Like that is uh there there's some other benefits to that relationally, kind of in the dynamics of working together that are really positive too. Yeah, and I think people feel cared for when you're trying to help take the like kind of painful, annoying stuff off their plate. I agree. Yeah, I totally agree. Um, there's a lot of different tools out there. We post about it a lot on LinkedIn. Um, if anybody has any questions, please leave us a comment or send us an email at info at entrineexit.co and we'll we'll answer. We answer every email we get uh or and we answer comments. So if you see something and you want to know more, like we would love to answer that. And if you like this content, follow along, subscribe, leave us a comment, let us know what you want to hear more about. We're doing a lot of AI across our business, and we're happy to share with you exactly how we're doing it.
