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Setting Up Your Sales Department

Build an AI-powered sales engine that generates leads and closes deals while you focus on high-value work.

Your sales department converts the leads generated by your marketing department into paying customers. When set up correctly, this operates largely on autopilot.

Overview

Your AI Sales Department covers:

  • Lead Generation — Finding and qualifying potential customers
  • Outreach — Automated email sequences
  • CRM — Tracking all deals and conversations
  • Follow-ups — Automated reminders and nurture sequences

Step 1: Define Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

Before building any tools, get crystal clear on who you're selling to:

  • Industry/niche
  • Company size (if B2B)
  • Job title of decision maker
  • Key pain points they experience
  • Budget range
  • How they make buying decisions

Write this down in your Notion sales playbook. Every automation should be built around this profile.

Step 2: Set Up Your CRM

Recommended options:

  • Airtable (free, highly customizable) — Best for < 500 leads
  • HubSpot Free — Better for larger volumes
  • Folk — Modern, AI-native CRM

Core CRM fields:

  • Contact name and email
  • Company and title
  • Lead source
  • Current stage (New → Contacted → Qualified → Proposal → Won/Lost)
  • Last interaction date
  • Notes

Step 3: Lead Generation System

Inbound (from marketing)

Set up automatic lead capture:

  1. Connect your email newsletter to your CRM
  2. Add a demo/consultation booking page (Calendly)
  3. Set up form submissions to trigger CRM entry

Outbound (proactive)

For B2B businesses:

  1. Apollo.io — Find qualified leads by ICP
  2. LinkedIn Sales Navigator — Manual research for high-value prospects
  3. Hunter.io — Verify email addresses

Lead Qualification

Use an AI-powered form or intake process to qualify leads before booking calls:

  • What's your biggest challenge with X?
  • What's your monthly budget for X?
  • What's your timeline?

Step 4: Email Outreach Sequences

Use Instantly.ai or Lemlist for automated outreach:

5-touch sequence:

  • Email 1 (Day 1): Problem + social proof
  • Email 2 (Day 3): Case study or result
  • Email 3 (Day 7): Value/resource offer
  • Email 4 (Day 14): Last check-in
  • Email 5 (Day 21): Break-up email

AI personalization: Use Clay or Apollo's AI features to personalize each email with specific details about the prospect's company.

Step 5: Proposal Automation

When a prospect is ready for a proposal:

  1. Use Better Proposals or Docusign for professional proposals
  2. Create a master template with AI-filled variables
  3. Set up automatic follow-up if the proposal isn't signed in 3 days

Step 6: Pipeline Management

Weekly sales review (30 minutes):

  1. Move all stale leads to the next stage or archive
  2. Send follow-ups to any lead you haven't heard from in 7+ days
  3. Review win/loss reasons for the week

Sales Metrics to Track

MetricTarget
Leads generated/week20-50
Email open rate>40%
Reply rate>8%
Qualified → Won rate>20%

Next up: Setting Up Your Support Department →

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Setting Up Your Marketing Department
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Setting Up Your Support Department