Pete Bowen's site

Using AI to extract information from sales leads

Getting all your leads into some kind of CRM system is crucial if you want to make as many sales to those leads as possible. It's best if this happens automatically - rather than having someone type them in. But this can be tricky, especially if you get leads from more than one source.

A client of mine in the motor trade gets thousands of leads every month from:-

None of these sources add leads directly to their CRM system, instead they deliver them by email.

Until now, I've relied on Zapier's email parser to extract contact information like first name, last name, email address and phone number from the lead delivery email and put it into the CRM.

Here's how it works:-

  1. We give each lead source a unique @zapier email address to deliver leads to.
  2. We set up a template that shows Zapier how to extract the lead's name, number etc from the message.
  3. Zapier sends the extracted contact information to the CRM every time a new leads arrives.

We've handled about 100 000 leads this way. It has generally worked ok - but there have been some frustrations:-

Enter AI...

It turns out that ChatGPT (an AI-based language processing tool) is really good at extracting data from emails. It took a little tweaking to get the instructions right, but after that the AI scored 100% on a test of 1 000 lead delivery emails in various formats.

Here's the non-technical explanation of how it works:-

  1. A lead source delivers the lead by email.
  2. We send the message to ChatGPT using an API. (An API is a way for 2 computers to talk to each other.)
  3. ChatGPT extracts the contact information and sends it back in a standard format and the lead gets added to the CRM.

I was so excited about this technology that I just had to write about it. I hope it's as interesting to you as it is to me.

Need some help with this?

I offer 1-to-1 mentoring and consulting. You’ll get help, advice, support and answers without having to commit to a long-term contract. Details here.

95% of leads never turn into customers. Want to fix that?

Over the last few years I've done deep work with a handful of clients to increase the number of sales they made from their Google and Facebook leads. I've put what I've learned into a 9-lesson email course.

You’ll learn:-

  • How to identify opportunities for improvement.
  • How to generate more than enough ideas for improvement using the 2-magnets concept.
  • How to apply those ideas in your business.
  • How to measure the results of your work (so you can do more of what's working and less of what's not).

My experience has been that it will deliver more sales if:-

  • Your business receives leads from online advertising like Google or Facebook.
  • Your sales process happens offline. A lead arrives and there is a quote, assessment, demonstration etc before the sale happens.
  • You have the capacity to handle a few more sales in the short term without having to hire or invest in new equipment.
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