Unlocking 20x Time-Savings with AI-Driven Messaging

Introduction

Artificial intelligence (AI) can be a powerful tool for sales, increasing efficiency, improving customer engagement, and driving higher conversion rates. It can predict sales trends, help with lead scoring, analyze CRM data, automate repetitive tasks, and more. 

Recent statistics from WifiTalents showed that: “Businesses that use AI for sales were able to increase their leads by more than 50%, reduce call time by 60-70%, and realize cost reductions of 40-60%.”

For established businesses and startups alike, AI tools can help streamline operations, such as automating time-consuming tasks. This allows founders to work smarter, not harder—ultimately scaling faster. 

And that’s exactly what Mario Martinez, Jr. aimed to create. HubSpot for Startups spoke with the CEO & Co-founder of Vengreso, a Software as a Service (SaaS) company that specializes in text expansion, productivity management, and sales training about how the company’s suite of AI tools streamlines communication, and helps startups scale more efficiently. 

A conversation with Mario Martinez Jr.

Mario Martinez Jr. created an AI writer and productivity app, FlyMSG to help business owners increase productivity and give time back to sales and marketing. FlyMSG was first launched in 2020 to support the company’s sales prospecting training program. 

Before founding Vengreso, Mario spent 27 years and 108 consecutive quarters in B2B sales, marketing, and leadership roles. Among his many accolades, he was named to the #1 spot in the Top 10 Most Influential Business Leaders by Beyond Magazine in 2021. 

Martinez is also the host of the popular The Modern Selling Podcast, has been featured in Forbes, and was formerly a contributor to the Huffington Post. 

The motivation behind creating FlyMSG

HubSpot for Startups: How did you start FlyMSG and what was the motivation behind developing the product? 

Mario Martinez Jr.: When we first designed FlyMSG, it was due to our sales training program. We had over 60 different sales scripts that we would hand out to sellers, and that ended up being a 27-page playbook. Whether our sellers were business owners and entrepreneurs, or individual sellers as part of a corporation, we found that when they needed a message, they would remember that it was stored in a Word document, and then they would go find it. If they could remember it and if they found it, they would open it and scroll through to try to find that particular message. 

We also discovered that those organizations that were part of a corporation may have also stored their greatest hits of messages in a Google Doc, Word document, OneNote, Evernote, notepad, notebook templates, or any of those types of things that you would use as shortcuts. We learned that we were creating a productivity problem for individual sellers. That would then exacerbate an already challenging situation, which was writing messaging, and being able to deploy and scale up your prospecting efforts quickly. 

So we designed FlyMSG to solve that specific use case, which was to take all of our sales messages or templates and put them into the cloud so that an individual could quickly go out and deploy those messages anywhere online. But it turned out that it wasn't just for sellers. We also had digital pharmacists, mortgage brokers, real estate agents, accounts payable, college professors, homeschool moms, and virtually everyone utilizing it for sending out standard repeatable messaging over and over again.

Later, we started seeing Google developers utilize it for real snippets of code that they would use over and over again. So we said, “All right, if we were looking at the sales process in terms of what we teach about how to engage, whether you're an entrepreneur or a business owner, or a seller, one of the biggest challenges that exists is the engagement process in the prospecting side of the house.” 

Deploying messaging quickly with Fly Engage AI

HSFS: What prompted the later development of FlyEngage AI?

MMJ: What we were looking for were ways that we could help save time on prospecting activities, so we conducted a time-and-motion study on individuals, to gauge how long it took them to write an actual comment on a LinkedIn post of a potential prospect or target buyer. The timeframe that came in was about six to 12 minutes. So, imagine, I would go to your LinkedIn profile, look at all of your different posts, and read each one of them to try and determine which one I could write an insightful comment on. Then I would pick one and sit there and think about what I was going to say, that would bring value to the discussion. So with that six to 12-minute long process, if you engaged through LinkedIn with up to 50 prospects a day, that would equal spending 12.5 hours at the high end and 6.25 hours on the low end. That was just not scalable. 

We were teaching sellers through our training program how to go about creating messaging and how to write messaging. We'd give them a tool to be able to quickly deploy that messaging, which was the text expander part of FlyMSG. But we didn't have a tool to help them scale quickly.  So we launched Fly Engage AI, a tool that helps sellers and leaders draft AI-generated comments on buyers' LinkedIn posts. It also works on Sales Navigator or LinkedIn. The entire concept behind it is for us to help you as an individual prospector, seller, business owner, or entrepreneur, to scale your engagement with your target buyers—based upon whether you have 10 people you're calling on or 1000 people that you're calling on. 

When we launched Fly Engage, we integrated it into LinkedIn where we're reading the LinkedIn post and then writing a reply. What makes this interesting is that there have been a few folks who've tried this. In our version, one of the AIs was essentially regurgitating the post, so we didn't like those results. So I took what was inside of “Mario's” head for seven years, teaching social selling engagement. I programmed the AI to write as if it was me. So essentially, sellers around the globe equal thousands upon thousands of people who now have Fly Engage sitting with them, and they've also got Mario right there. Like, “What would Mario say?” 

Then we said, “All right, if the idea is that we've got automation for sales emails, that could be a sales cadence program like HubSpot sales, sales sequences, or any of the other engagement tools that are out there. If that’s automated, then we essentially have dialers to help us scale our dialing. Then we've got Fly Engage to help us quickly engage and scale our commenting.” 

Attracting target buyers through thought leadership

HSFS: What kinds of things were you hearing from people at the time that they were looking for? 

MMJ: While tools like FlyMSG can quickly do connection request messages or template-based messaging, we thought, “What are the other areas that a seller and or entrepreneurs are having problems with and how do you develop thought leadership that attracts your target buyer and that leads to your solution and with your solution, right?” 

So we conducted another time-and-motion study, to analyze the time spent going through the different motions. We discovered that the number one reason why salespeople were not posting content on LinkedIn was because they didn't know what to write, and it took far too long. We then looked at the sales leader, and we said, “Why aren't you as a leader writing thought leadership content about your industry, your product, your service, and your competitors?” So the time-and-motion study was clocked in a 32-minute long process, which is essentially what it would take somebody to write a social media post.

The AI post generator for social media that flies 

HSFS: How did you solve the problem of the time it takes to come up with content and ideas? 

MMJ: So we were sitting there thinking, “What am I going to talk about, what am I going to say, and where am I going to lead them?” So we came out with an AI for social media, a post generator called Fly Posts AI. It was designed for the executive and seller, to help them create thought leadership posts right from within "start a post".

The mission of Fly Posts was to cut down the time of the writing process, but we didn't know what type of impact it would have until we launched the product. What we are seeing now is that it’s decreased from a 32-minute long process down to a less than nine-minute process. For the seller, whether you're a prospector, Sales Development Representative (SDR), Business Development Representative (BDR), full sales cycle rep, or business owner, the idea of spending 30 minutes plus on a social media post multiple times per week was daunting and overwhelming. But now, every two days or twice a week, I could spend nine minutes or less. I can easily go into Fly Posts right on LinkedIn, and put in the topic I want to write about. It produces a social media-ready post with hashtags, stories, color, etc. You can change, modify, and tweak as needed. 

The future of business with human-assisted AI

HSFS: How do you remain personalized in your posts while using an automation tool? 

MMJ: When you’re posting organic content on LinkedIn up to twice a week, now you can start attracting your target buyer. So when you think about the whole concept of AI, whether it's a business owner or a startup, or whether it's in the sales process, we've got to think about human-assisted AI, or assisted intelligence—and that’s exactly what Fly Posts and Fly Engage does. 

I could create Fly Engage to be a total 100% automation tool, looking at the posts and writing a response. It would automate the posts, and outside of being against LinkedIn terms and conditions for automating something, I could build that and eliminate the sales rep from the model. 

All someone has to do is mention someone’s name in a comment or on a thought leadership post. Since the process has shrunk to less than nine minutes that they’re spending on writing, it should be about “augmenting” the seller, not “replacing” the seller. 

The most important element that you have to have inside of here is the human brain. We need to think contextually. “Is this contextually relevant? Does it match the audience? Do I need to tweak it? Do I need to add in a story?” And that's what we need to be thinking about, as founders and sellers. “How do I utilize these technologies to help us scale my efforts so that I can spend more time focusing on the most important areas, which is preparing for a meeting or following up on that meeting?” 

Breaking down the barriers of content creation 

HSFS: How do you encourage people or teach people on your team to come up with the input or the initial idea? 

MMJ: There are a couple of things to think about. If you're a sales rep who works for an organization that has blog content, it's very easy. Don't think, just go to the blog, pick something from six months ago, turn around, grab the title of that blog, and drop it into the AI post generator. So it makes it easy when you have content that you can create thought leadership with. So that's the first thing; don't try to think of the topics, instead use marketing, because that's marketing's job—to develop topical topics that the buyers are looking for. And you can pull those topics from your blog. 

Soon enough, on LinkedIn, you will have the ability to insert the URL where you want it to go, summarize the article, and then write a social media thought leadership post on it. We're just not quite there yet, but that feature should be coming out in the next month or so. With that in mind, it's as easy as just grabbing the title of the blog, and the AI is smart enough to be able to figure out how to develop thought leadership posts from there. 

HSFS: What are some of the ways that you've helped get founders or sales reps to come up with ideas?

MMJ: Let’s say you're a founder, and let's presume that you have no content or that you're self-generating the content. In that particular situation, “What do you do?” Well, this is what we tell everyone… “First, you need to write a list of 20, burning fiery, red-hot questions that your buyers are asking about in terms of problems or issues. Once you develop those 20 questions, then you're going to develop topics off of each one of those questions. Then you turn that question into a post.” 

In this case, it's like Fly Posts. If you’re in sales, that’s how you’ll get more meetings. Where it says “insert topic”, you double click and you say how to get more meetings, and then let the AI create some topics out of that. That gets you the ideas to expand - you're either going to expand on that or you're going to tell a story about that. Alternatively,  you may delete something and say, “You know what, I don't think this is applicable. Right now, it does not apply to the business audience or the consumer, or whoever it might be.” And that's how you drive content.

A shift to AI in the sales world

HSFS: So what kinds of things do you see as shifting in the sales world as a result of this additional AI? Specifically, what kinds of things do you see in sales or with smaller startup sales teams? 

MMJ: In terms of AI, we’re preparing right now to launch AI sales tools. There are over 500 sales tools on the market, all advertising AI. When you think about what's out there, and what you would end up using to be able to help yourself, you have to be very focused. That’s what's going to help me to drive engagement.

If you're a founder, the thing that you care most about is buyer engagement. Once you understand what's going to drive that, then you'll find and utilize the right tools that will help you get there. 

HSFS: What are the biggest changes that you anticipate seeing over the next six months or so?

MMJ: I think the power is going to rest when it comes to a product that does multiple things. There are a lot of point solutions that are out there, which makes it very difficult because as an individual seller, I want to have all the tools at my fingertips. So you've got to be thinking about which ones are the “super productivity” tools. 

We like to call FlyMSG a super productivity tool that does five things and 10 things right. I would probably say you want to be thinking about how to utilize the tools that allow you to do multiple things, and find AI that will help alleviate the administrative, mundane, repetitive tasks. 

Ultimately, make sure you're focused on leveraging tools and technology, whether it's AI or not, that are going to help you communicate and engage with your target buyers. Nothing happens until someone sells something. So you have to be focused on that.

The challenges with AI tools 

HSFS: What challenges have you seen in the space both internally with AI and with sales for the founder? 

MMJ: One of the biggest challenges is how overwhelming the number of tools there are. And so what I would argue is, “Don't be overwhelmed by the tools; look for a specific use case problem. Then ask your peers and others.” 

Join communities on Slack or Facebook, for growth hacking and sales, especially if you're a founder, and ask questions like, “Have you heard of any AI tools, and do you know of any tools that can do X, Y, or Z?” I think it can be super helpful to do those types of things because of the plethora of tools on the market. 

I love buying tools from AppSumo. The platform offers great technology tools that are knockoffs, usually from the mainstream ones. But these knockoffs work perfectly fine. I bought two tools from AppSumo and those tools drove our blog traffic from 3,000 organic visitors or clicks per month to 32,000 organic clicks per month, in just eight months. That's just those two tools alone in combination with a couple of the things that we were doing. 

HSFS: What is the feedback that you have gotten from your users and your audience about the tools you've created?  

MMJ: We used to be at an average savings of 21 hours per month. If we clock in the actual productivity time savings from someone typing or writing out messages, now we're up to an average of 30 hours per month. So in terms of time, it is a dramatic savings.

There are also hundreds of reviews out there from Chrome, G2, and Product Hunt. People are saying that our tools save them an enormous amount of time and increase productivity. When people look at what the AI is writing for them, the most common response (when someone sees the AI engage in commenting) is,” Oh, my God, that's exactly what I would have wanted to say!” So it is like having a mini Mario next to you, helping you write productive content. 

It’s also a tremendous value. We’ve seen a lot of folks save time, and time equals money. Our tools also allow you to remove some of the thought processes and ask yourself, “Does this comment match this post?”

Most people are saying they love the tools. If you look back to when we first launched, you'll see a dramatic shift in growth in the number of characters typed. Today, we’re over 1.1 point 2 billion characters typed for our target audience.

Conclusion

Whether you’re a small startup or an established business, AI tools can truly be a game changer when it comes to your sales efforts. AI can be utilized for lead generation and scoring, customer relationship management (CRM), sales forecasting, virtual assistants, training, and more. 

With tools like FlyMSG, you can scale your startup more efficiently by streamlining the communication process and automating routine tasks. You can even create personalized messaging for your customers. The time you’ll save will result in increased productivity, faster growth, and most importantly, smarter scaling.