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AI tools to help you sell smarter
Published about 9 hours ago • 5 min read
🧰 Smart tools. Useful tips. Weekly.
Hola friend 👋,
I’m Josep. Each week, I hunt down practical tools and productivity hacks to help digital doers like you do more with less effort.
This week: AI-powered sales tools that keep your pipeline moving (without giving up control).
For small B2B teams, AI is most useful when it surfaces key signals before opportunities slip through the cracks. So today, I’m sharing three tools to help you prepare, spot interest from potential clients, and reduce recurring admin.
Plus: Surfer SEO for serious SEO work, a Google Tasks trick for recurring chores, and the strange story of an AI security test that escaped its sandbox.
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Sales calls are useful; the admin - and the Friday-afternoon scramble to remember what was agreed - are not. Pipedrive’s meeting intelligence is built for that awkward gap.
As Pipedrive CRM’s brand-new, built-in meeting intelligence tool, Nova is designed to help sales teams be fully prepared going into their next sales call. It pulls together a pre-call brief from CRM activity, captures meeting transcripts, creates summaries and action items, then suggests CRM updates. Importantly, these are only suggestions: nothing is updated automatically. Your team reviews and approves each change, so the final decision always stays with a human.
Pipedrive is already one of our highest-rated CRMs at EmailTooltester.com, and the launch of Nova makes it an even more practical addition for small B2B teams. The great news is that it’s included with every plan at no extra cost. If you’re choosing a CRM and want practical AI support for managing sales, Pipedrive is a strong option to consider.
🛠️ Alternative to: HubSpot CRM, Salesforce Sales Cloud
Your website may be full of buying signals your sales team never sees. RB2B identifies some of the companies and visitors behind anonymous traffic, then flags activity on key pages such as pricing or demos so your team has a clear reason to follow up.
Just be aware: RB2B will not identify every visitor, particularly those from smaller companies, and it appears to be more effective with U.S. traffic than in other regions. Its native CRM integrations are limited, so connecting it to tools such as Pipedrive currently requires Zapier.
It’s not the most affordable tool, but you can test it with up to 150 free identifications per month. Paid plans start at $79/month.
It’s easy for small bits of admin to quickly add up - and before you know it, take over a whole week. Lindy is an AI teammate for keeping your inbox, calendar, meetings and follow-ups moving without adding more complexity to your week.
It can brief you before meetings, coordinate scheduling, capture notes, and turn action items into follow-up drafts or CRM updates. You set the approval rules, but expect to spend some time building workflows that fit your process.
Be aware of the costs as busy inboxes, frequent meetings, and multi-step workflows can burn through credits quickly. You’ll still need to review customer-facing drafts and set up each workflow carefully before relying on it. Lindy can access a lot of your tools and data (if you allow it), so start with one low-risk, repeatable task.
SEO gets expensive when every article starts with a guess and no research. Surfer gives you a more structured way to decide what to write, and keep refining your published content.
Its Content Editor offers live optimization guidance, while audits flag pages worth refreshing. Keyword research and topical planning help turn a vague content backlog into clearer priorities.
It also tracks AI visibility, showing how your brand appears beyond traditional Google results. I’ve used it extensively and found it useful (to an extent). However, it’s easy to get lost in the data, so approach it with clear priorities.
Credits can run out quickly with regular use, while some features require a higher-tier plan. Before committing, consider whether it will make a meaningful difference to your SEO.
If you haven’t used Google Tasks, it’s Google’s simple to-do list app, built into Gmail, Google Calendar, and other Workspace tools. You can add due dates and repeating schedules, so routine work resurfaces when it needs attention. I use it all the time.
Recently I discovered one trick: put those repeatable chores into Google Tasks once, then let them recur. Try this:
1. Create a task: “Check unpaid invoices.”
2. Give it a date and choose “Repeat” every Friday.
3. Add monthly tasks for reporting, content refreshes, CRM follow-ups, and website backups.
It’s cool they can appear in Google Calendar, alongside your meetings, rather than disappearing into a note you never reopen. Keep each task small and concrete: “Review three old articles,” not “Improve SEO.”
🍿 Plot Twist of the Week
An AI agent was sent to ace a security test and, like an overenthusiastic intern with too much coffee, took the assignment a little too literally.
During a controlled evaluation, it chained together security weaknesses and reached parts of Hugging Face, a website where people share AI models and tools.
In other words: it did not just complete the exam, it found the answers in the teacher’s desk drawer (read more).
The agent was meant to stay boxed in and play by the rules, but it broke out, searched for clues, and pushed into places it was never supposed to reach. What happened?
Escaped its limits: It escaped the sandbox that contained it.
Built a secret channel: 1,200 agents secretly shared over 70,000 messages and files.
Went where they shouldn’t. They hacked the restricted Hugging Face.
Cheated on the test. They looked for answers instead of solving the challenge themselves.
That is scary if you ask me. And I am not surprised many are starting to question what legal limits should AI have. The good news is that no customer data was exposed, services stayed online, and public models or datasets were not affected, according to OpenAI and Hugging Face.
That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading! Next time, we’ll look at how to make your website do more than look polished: earn trust, capture leads, and get visitors to take action.
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