Daniel Bartels: 0:11

Welcome to the growth pulse podcast, where we take a deep dive in the world of business to business sales. We talk to some of the world's leading salespeople, sales leaders, experts in sales, technology and thought leaders in today's best sales skills and techniques. In this episode, we're talking to Chris Thomas. Chris is one of the world's leading experts in virtual reality, and in particular, its application to the work and training space. Chris started his career in sales working for consumer brands such as Audi, Harvey, Norman and Telstra. He then joined the SAS powerhouse Salesforce, where he held numerous roles across Australia, the UK and New Zealand. This led him to a career in the VR space, where Chris has been at the forefront of reimagining how organisations use technologies such as via conversational UI, and natural language processing to take learning and enablement to the next level. From the growth pulse team. Please welcome your host, Daniel Bartels and Simon Peter. Hey, Simon, how are you guys? Are very well. Thanks, David. How are you?

Simon Peterson: 1:14

Good. Happy Friday. Yeah, absolutely. It's been a busy week. It has. Yeah, I'm really excited about today's conversation. Yeah,

Daniel Bartels: 1:25

absolutely. I think

Simon Peterson: 1:26

they are excellent.

Daniel Bartels: 1:28

Yeah, I think the you know, what's happening in the sort of the AR space and VR, I think it's actually on the precipice of changing kind of how people go about learning and thinking about their roles. And I have no idea about that space at all. It is so foreign to how I grew up and how I learned but this is what you know, look at my daughter is who's just turned 11 in year six, and how they're going to experience learning in the next kind of 2030 years is going to be completely different to what what we've done.

Simon Peterson: 2:01

Absolutely, I you know, I guess my fear of it is people will be closed in their virtual reality cocoon. So I wonder how that's gonna play out in terms of people relating to each other in the real world. In the real world.

Daniel Bartels: 2:16

Yeah. Very different. So, anyway, well, let's bring let's bring Chris in. And and have that just have that discussion. So Chris, Luke, welcome to the podcast, mate. It's great. Great to talk to you again. You know, you and I were together for a long time. And it's good to good to be together in this format.

Chris Thomas: 2:32

Yeah. Great to be here. Thank you for thank you for having me.

Daniel Bartels: 2:36

So, mate, look, we certainly welcome Chris Yeah, welcome. We start off sort of most of these podcasts, getting a bit of understanding of kind of your journey and how you got to where you are today, mate. And as per the intro, you know, you've done a bunch of different things. You know, what, what was your journey on sort of getting into sales and working through and particularly like a stellar career at Salesforce? You know, what are the things that you kind of sort of highlight out of that journey and how you got to where you are today?

Chris Thomas: 3:04

Yeah, for sure. I think I think I like a lot of people, a lot of salespeople can, can relate to this as well, right? Like if you if you choose as a career in sales, it's a bumpy road. Like you, you've got to learn Kelowna valid, valuable lessons, the hard lessons. And I, I think, I realised that a knack for it, like at a relatively early stage as a, as a, like, it might just work in having on selling computers, which is a lot harder than you think. But then from there sort of realising potential. And just understanding that the world has a lot more for me and people like me, it just just sort of, I sort of naturally was drawn to like, more, more more of the things I like. And it's Yeah, and I feel like you're always learning as well, like, like, I feel like I've learned just as much in the last couple years as I have, sort of in the last 20 years. separately as well. So yeah, there's there's a lot of

Daniel Bartels: 4:18

my you and I started in a very, in a very similar scenario, and I started my sales career In, in mobile phone sales of all things. What do you think's the biggest difference between kind of that retail sales engagement and working in b2b sales? Because I my personal thing, I think it's lots of similarities. What's your experience?

Chris Thomas: 4:40

I think it's like it's that there's at the end of the day, you're just dealing with people. And it was I feel like when I got into b2b sales, like a hurdle to overcome personally was was especially working for a large organisation. There's a lot of other systems and there's a lot of right the right ways to do it. But At the end of the day, you've just got to show up and be yourself. And people appreciate that. And that's what sort of generates the, the the next conversation or whatever. And then you line that up with all the, the consistency and the, the high level of detail and, and that sort of stuff that makes you professional. But at the end of the day, it's just been just been a good sort and show that with a smile on your face and just being yourself.

Daniel Bartels: 5:25

Yeah, for sure.

Simon Peterson: 5:26

Absolutely. And I think in your intro, Chris said, your early days, you know, you're selling computers in Harvey Norman, harder than you would think I completely agree with you. But you said something interesting there that I picked up on. You said, as you started your sales career, people liked you. That's always lovely to hear. Why is that important for you? In building a sales career?

Chris Thomas: 5:54

People People like me, is that what you said? I said, yeah, yeah. So I just cut out a little bit. But yeah, I think that's it's just, it just comes down to human nature at the end of the day, and people, like, people, by people, and if people like sort of what you're representing, and just who you are as a person. That's really like the sort of, that's the fundamentals of what will take the conversation to the next stage. Right. Like, if you don't have internet. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, but lose a lot in my career, especially with interest. But building trust is a big thing. Yeah. Building trust is a big thing.

Daniel Bartels: 6:37

So So what do you think is the as you kind of worked through and again, I know in your career at Salesforce, Christina, you, you've worked through a number of really different roles. You know, you and I both started in, in radiant radiant six way back in the day, call out to call out to, to our friends, the woods, who we own that own that organisation locally. But you know, you kind of started in the in the BDR space, and then you work your way through the partner space, and then obviously ended up as an account exec, click a bunch of different things. What do you think of the real differences between those key roles, if you think about, you know, the partner, and even when you were looking at the agency space as well, like, what do you think's the key differences in engaging, you know, one on one to a customer versus sort of one to many at the agency space? How did you approach it differently?

Chris Thomas: 7:31

I gotta say, from the time that I started Salesforce, so for for kiwi, out of the middle of nowhere, in the middle of New Zealand to sort of come to Sydney and get a job with Salesforce in 2012, without realising sort of what that company would become. With, there's just, there's just like, the chances that they're happening are very slim. So I've got to say, I'm very grateful for that experience, because it sort of opened my eyes to the likes of working with you, Dan, where, and a whole other bunch of, you know, friends and colleagues throughout that time period, like, you, that sort of comes back to realising potential again, and, and when, when you're when you're exposed to that level of innovation. Like, like, I didn't even know really what an acquisition was before I started Salesforce. And then like, next thing, you know, you've got the exact title blah, blah, blah. Yeah. Like, it's like, just like opening your sort of mind and in your world to that sort of experience that Sydney and London I found hugely tremendous. So just just before I answer your question, like, if I could give any advice to like young Kiwis young Aziz, you know, put yourself in a position where you are exposed to like just just awesome experiences and in a way that you sort of see how the rest of the world works because that was hugely valuable to me but if ABR we used to call it API's wasn't ABI You're right. And that was because I think I started just like maybe a few weeks before you but on my first day, I was packing it right. Like it was. It was it was nerve racking. Right and and then after a while, like I'm really thankful for the woods and their guidance and the rest of that team because you know, that that type of cohesiveness and support and, and sort of shared values are really sort of what propelled me into into my professional career and like EBR like that was all about contacting people at scale. Like even today, like, I don't want to brag but when I send out a cold email Oh, I have like, I'm the man, I'm pretty good. And

Daniel Bartels: 10:06

I remember you from not really having a good understanding of what to say to being the master. Absolutely.

Chris Thomas: 10:13

Yeah. And then partnerships was like that that was really cool as well, because you don't, although it's not like your traditional sales, sort of carry the bag type role, you do get a lot of exposure to founders, your all your relationships are like, people that run sort of multimillion dollar companies, and evokes sort of bonds and relationships with these people. And these people give you advice and, and sort of insight into the world that, you know, it was really hard to get. So like, there was there was value in that. Partnerships in itself, like business planning, like the value of like, understanding joint goals is valuable for anything, I haven't used it with my muscles might be why having that that sort of joint approaches was really, really important. I hope that answered your question. I know there's a bit of

Daniel Bartels: 11:10

it's, I think it's an important piece, I think, you know, Simon and I talked a lot about that planning side of things, whether it's at a, you know, between partnerships between between organisations, we're having to build it, we're having to build a some sort of plan to run this podcast, right. And, and the sort of the businesses we're trying to launch. But even down to, you know, I've taught for a long time around even inside a deal. You know, how do you how do you build a plan on a deal, and I've got a sort of a phraseology I've used with teams for a long time now, which, if you want everyone on the same page, the better down will be a page. A simple concept, right? But it's amazing how many people don't think about it. And, you know, they'll, they'll, I want to talk you through my plan. That's not a plan. That's some ideas, you've got, like, build a plan with people that they can collaborate on with you. Something it's interesting. So we might we might pivot along. And I know you've you've moved your career into this space of VR, which is cutting edge technology. I mean, there's matters probably leading the world in that charge at the moment. But there's, like all these types of technologies, and they're often a bit of a laggard in actually what's really happening in this space, versus being the cutting edge. You know, what, where do you kind of see the VR space? And also how, like, how did you get into this?

Chris Thomas: 12:32

Yeah, I think it's always new after, like I was, I was just a bit over nine years at Salesforce. And I knew I needed to get my hands on some on sort of some sort of grassroots sort of business development stuff, where we are not sort of supported by as many sort of processes and systems, I just knew my fingertips were a little bit soft, so to speak. So I purposely decided to go into startup world. And I ended up working with this really innovative VR company. And that sort of just opened my, my eyes, and I put like it as like a value stream, like, personally. Like, I'm a big, big advocate of learning, you know, I don't get getting a bit personal here. But the reason why I got into VR specifically is around learning. You know, like, I left school quite early, I know, for a lot of people like learning is very difficult. And I saw this as a channel to sort of help people. Really, what comes back to that, like realising your potential, right, like through experience, because I can, I can tell, like, I can tell you all about, like, a certain topic, but like, you don't really understand it, you've experienced that it's like, it's like sales, like I can tell you how to sell without, unless you go out there and count your tape and, and sort of the bumpy stuff you're not, you're not going to figure it out until until you until you actually do it. So that that's sort of why I was sort of about that, that's sort of what it was. But that's why I sort of followed that, that path. And then like at that point, I just, you know, I knew, like, I wanted to start a business, it was just, it's just part of who I am. I'm just that type of person. And I just have to like do it, do it at some point and, and and then luckily, I met a couple of CEOs that were just once again just like became good mates and that they sort of guided me through through the process and just helping me helping me figure it out step by step week by week. And it's it's been fun I'm doing what I what I what I enjoy.

Daniel Bartels: 14:54

Yeah, I mean, I think stuff running in sales is really difficult I was talking to to a colleague only yesterday that unlike most other careers that you can follow, there's no formal certification that you can go and do, there's no degree that will make you an enterprise salesperson or a top level VP like that. It is, it is experiential. You know, you can go and do someone's poor son better to Alma II, or someone calls on how you deal with handling, but one on one, they're not the same. And there's nothing that replaces the experience of it. And you know, you mentioned before, you see people who have strong experiences in sales, like they join a great team, they learn from some great people. They learn how to learn along that sales journey as well, I think that's a really critical piece as well. You know, Simon, I mean, you've been in so many different teams, with different leaders in different processes. What have been the key methods in which you've kind of learned over time before we get into the technical technology that Chris is taking us down? Like, what are the really important processes for salespeople learning that you've experienced?

Simon Peterson: 16:11

I doubled down on Chris's comment about experience and experiencing how other people operate and how are other people sell. I've said it before, you know, some of the best leaders I've ever worked for, and some of the worst leaders I've ever worked for, have shaped who I am right now. And that's my back in my SAP days watching. Other people grow and enterprise salespeople do their thing. You see what works and what doesn't work. And I think, you know, I've got some horror stories that I probably won't share on this podcast or watching salespeople do the unthinkable. But I've also

Daniel Bartels: 16:48

seen set on that

Simon Peterson: 16:51

probably should Yeah, well, I'll put that put one of those down to make sure you've hung up on the phone from your prospect before you start rambling on about how terrible they are at buying your software. That want to Yeah, some silly things like that. And, you know, you actually learn, I think one of the My biggest learnings out of that is, you never got to sell anything if you don't respect the person you're trying to sell to. So each extra little thing that you say along the way teaches you something. And you know, I'm intrigued. I think traditionally, you know, I started working the 90s and went through a whole process of sitting in rooms, with 20 other people listening to somebody prattle on about sales techniques. And there's a parallel, when I started, it was an overhead projector, believe it or not, but then we got into PowerPoint, and I just had to sit there and watch PowerPoints with 300 words on them for you know, four or five hours a day. You don't retain much. All right. And, and it's morphed a little bit, I think there's a lot more emphasis on mentoring and learning by doing these days, which I think you know, that's absolutely how I learned, you know, I can't sit down for four hours, some peddling on telling me about the best way to sell, I need to have the nuggets and the tip bits, but I got to go out there and do it. And you know, when you start doing it, I think you probably felt this a bit too, Chris, you do feel like an imposter. You see everybody else around you that pretends how good a salesperson they are. And you kind of go home at night going, Oh, can I really do that? Look, you know, Dan botellas, he's got the gift of the gab, you know, how am I gonna sell? Yeah. Well, you know, Chris, you send out amazing emails and messages when you're a BDR, or BDR, you obviously didn't come out of Christchurch, knowing how to do that. You wandered into Salesforce, and you saw other people doing it. And he said, I'm not going to repeat that one. But that's a really good idea. And then you build a, you know, a whole bunch of tools in your own mental kitbag to actually get better at it. But the core of it, you've got to trust and respect the person you're selling to. And as you said, Chris, it's a person. So there's a lot of psychology involved. So I guess as you understand sales is a lot about psychology and, and getting into the empathy for the person you're selling to. You can't just do that sitting in front of the PowerPoint. And I guess that's a it's an interesting segue for you, Chris, because you're obviously taking that experience learning to the next level, right? It's, if I if I physically can't be out selling every day of the week, how do I emulate that process? How do I teach the brain what works and what doesn't work? And obviously, clever use of technology is taking a step forwards.

Chris Thomas: 19:52

Yeah, absolutely. I've got to just say, because because many of my mates listening to this will one province, I lived in Christchurch for a short short period of time. I'm a what you call a Jeff. Or blue span of a private one at that. So I just

Daniel Bartels: 20:14

realised that once you have an environment, because we said you're from Christchurch my friend, I can't afford it. That's like saying,

Simon Peterson: 20:27

Hey, Daniel, from Europe from Adelaide, don't you man?

Daniel Bartels: 20:32

It's like, it's like saying I support that I support the Marines mate. Now Oh, good.

Simon Peterson: 20:41

I just got a sense that all that Queensland viewers has turned off.

Daniel Bartels: 20:46

Look, they're enjoying their success rates at the moment. It's it's been a long time since I've enjoyed watching started preaching. Anyway, and look underneath all that I'm a West Tigers fan. So what are we second from the bottom of the of the ladder? So anyway? So the Chris, you know, pivoting into kind of what you're doing from a from a technology perspective, right. So, learning is learning is hard. And I know, you know, when we get when we work together, we spent so much time as a team talking to each other and trying to recreate the scenarios or the stories around what went well, what didn't go so well? Or how do I rethink about, you know, an objection or conversation or a meeting that I had. And there was always an aspect of that missing. You know, we've all sat in long enablement sessions, where somebody's trying to translate into 42, PowerPoint slides and blank slide for you turn it off. Or you look up and, you know, someone's on their mobile phone already, you know, scrolling through tick tock or back in the day, it was through Facebook or whatever, right? But, you know, so how, how is the VR space? Kind of reimagining that, and sort of what are you guys addressing in that kind of experience?

Chris Thomas: 22:02

Cool. So I think if the way we see it, is that the life of VR is a new medium, like, it's like, like, think of it back in the days when we were celebrating sex, right? social analytics. There are a lot of people that got it. There are a lot of there were more people that didn't realise, like, what a necessity that would become, or how big social would get. And there are a lot of people that didn't believe it, or just like, like, I can't perceive it. So that was also

Daniel Bartels: 22:39

just the noise for them. Yeah.

Chris Thomas: 22:41

Yeah. Which is, which is fear because there's a lot of there's a lot of noise. I'm not I'm not dismissing any anyone's sort of opinions, but they like we could see that there was something significant growing there, right. And it's definitely the same way I feel about VR. And a customer gave us gave me a an analogy the other day, I liked it so much, I put it on the website. And it's, it's if you think of VR, and when I say VR should really say immersive learning, AR VR, XR, like it's all sort of good at amalgamate into the same things. You if you think about immersive learning, I'm just gonna call it VR because it's easier to words. If you think about VR, as it is today, it's similar to motion picture was in the 1800s. Back then, all everyone everyone's mates, you sort of go with your friends, your missus whatever to, to the pitcher theatres, to see someone to see a film that someone had shot of a train leaving the station, there was nothing to it apart from a big old locomotive sort of leaving the station, that was the novelty of the picture moving that blew people's minds. And it wasn't for years after until the producers of this type of content started to develop plot structure, like narrative, character development and, and, and all the stuff we saw sort of see today when we're, when we're watching when we're watching TV on Netflix, or whatever, right, like it's come a long way. And the way the way that we feel that that VR is perceived today is very much through the lens of elearning. Elearning is awesome, and there's some awesome content out there. But we haven't really we don't we haven't really harnessed away this medium. We haven't really had a since medium for its full potential and it'll be a long time before we really do so. So we're all about helping our customers identify find meaningful ways of, like utilising this medium and with all the cool stuff you can do. So yeah.

Daniel Bartels: 25:09

Yeah, I mean, just just talking

Simon Peterson: 25:16

Yeah, I was gonna say, that is, like I get, I get the idea of continual learning. And, you know, obviously content is very specific to the organisations you're talking to. But I'm thinking to myself, people listening to this you put on you put on a pair of goggles, how does that actually inherently improve the learning experience? Other than the novelty of putting on some goggles? Because I think, you know, you're talking to businesses all the time, right. And we all love gadgets. So you know, I've got a, I've got a mirror goggles set that I've had for a couple of years. And you know, I enjoy that. But I can't. In my own mind, I'm still at watching the train leaves the station. I remember my first experience was sitting on a roller coaster with these goggles on. That was that was I guess that was my train leaving the station moment with with VR, but you're talking to organisations that, you know, typically they need to make profit. And they need to enable the teams if they do it poorly. They go out of business. So how do you take the novelty of a goggle, mix it with education and provide value? What's what's different about it?

Chris Thomas: 26:27

Yeah, so that's a really good question. Because that's a lot of, like, a lot of the reasons why VR is valuable for learning isn't exactly the same as why people buy. And I think this is the same for a lot of things. But there, it's like, it's, it's like, VR is like, I mean, there's a bunch of studies out here, it's sort of so very debatable. Like, I know, PwC did a study back in 2020. So people are 3.75%, more times more emotionally connected to the contents, they learn four times faster. In a classroom based stuff, they're more focused, which, which I get, it's really hard to quantify. And it's sort of a sort of a sort of come up for debate a few times where they're like, like, is this actually valuable? I say to anyone sort of questioning that go put on a headset, and use an application with like, well developed content, that actually, you know, not just with the novelty of VR, but with well developed content with a storyline and a narrative. And, and, and, like judge, judge, judge on that. As for, like, how organisations purchased this sort of stuff like that the hardware itself today, like, it's not really affordable at scale for for an organisation to adopt. So like a company like Dell play, isn't going to go into an organisation and sell, you know, 100 headsets would like this application development to solve a certain problem or to address a specific learning need. The reason why they're buying it today is more, if you put it down to value drivers, it's more competitive advantage, like to be seen as doing something different and reputation. That's, that's why people buy the when it gets to a stage where the masses start to adopt it. And you've got to take into consideration that anyone who is in school, these days are going to be exposed to to VR, like the education sector is one of the largest adopters of VR. And if you're going to school these days, you'll you'll have a headset on at some point, it's the number of VR headsets that are deployed into the market and 2025 will out number the amount of X Xbox consoles deployed into the market. And then you've just seen Apple released Apple vision Pro. And despite like, I mean, there's always going to be controversy about whether an Apple product will be successful or not. But the truth of the matter is as Apple they really, they very rarely sort of mess it up. So whether it's just an iteration or

Daniel Bartels: 29:39

the distribution.

Chris Thomas: 29:41

Yeah, it's actually so

Daniel Bartels: 29:42

it's the mass market

Chris Thomas: 29:44

that the undercurrent is coming by like it that's gonna happen. It's just sort of understanding and being prepared for it. And if you if you're going to do if you're going to engage in what we call PR VR, which is essentially just creating something for innovation to take to expose or, or to show your clients or even to sort of assess for future investment. You know, just just understand it's very, very feasible to do these days. And yeah, you can do some some cool stuff.

Daniel Bartels: 30:18

Yeah, cuz I think Chris, the

Simon Peterson: 30:20

think of what's

Daniel Bartels: 30:22

the logic behind, you know, immersive technology makes a lot of sense. You know, we've all experienced, all those of us who've got kids experience kind of locked down education over the last couple of years where your kids weren't immersed in education. And they had so many distractions around them. And the logic of them being back in a classroom, like my wife's a kindergarten teacher, so those kids get immersed in learning for for six hours a day when you take out lunch and other bits and pieces, right, but, and, you know, their classrooms are created in this immersive experience of how do you learn to read? And how do you learn to write and how do you learn, you know, basic numbers, and all these types of things. And so they spend so much time creating this environment, that is an immersive, immersive learning experience. Yet for us as adults. You know, when you're learning, it's in between two meetings that you're super stressed about in a blank room that you couldn't you don't want to be in it's cold or too hot or too noisy, or your chair squeaks or, like, all these things, just take away from your learning experience. And then we wonder why, because I've got my laptop, but I'm actually doing work while I'm trying to learn on the PowerPoint deck that you didn't build? Well, because you don't have a teacher and you haven't put a structure behind it. We're surprised at the end of all of that. People took in like 1% of what you're trying to educate them on. So I mean, like Simon, and you had a question there. But, you know, what are your thoughts on that?

Simon Peterson: 31:57

It's, it's an interesting one, I what I'm doing is I'm actually trying to think of you know, where it's going, Chris has vision. And I'm imagining myself as a brand new BDR. My job is to contact prospects and get meetings for my sales guys, and all that stuff. My first job in lead no 2026. So I'm giving us a couple of years. And the first thing I do when I joined a new big company, we've all been there, your first day, there's a laptop, back in the early 2000s, you turn up for your first day, there was a laptop, there was an iPad, a phone, and probably a water bottle branded, I'm imagining I turned up on my first day and 2026 and I've got my laptop, and they're not give me an iPad anymore. But there's a vision pro set of goggles sitting in a nice box next to my laptop. And that's that's how I'm going to learn. And I'm thinking to myself, Okay, so how am I going to learn so I put these goggles on and I imagined as a new BDR. I'm now immersed in a sales planning meeting, where I'm looking at the all the managers around me chatting about what I need to do and how I need to do it. And I'm imagining, hopefully, it's two way by that stage. I'm imagining also that, you know, the cold calls that I typically have to roleplay in a boring room. That's too cold, as dad mentioned, are out the window, right, I'm suddenly immersed in a real live cold call roleplay. So I'm actually talking, potentially, the AI is talking back to me. And I'm getting really good at having conversations with people I've never met before. And because the AI is recording my conversation, it's also understanding what I get right what I don't get right. And at the end of it, I can see a a scoreboard that says you now these parts of our value proposition, you started the bit here, you need to focus a little bit on that. So you know, and I think to that point of view, that's not passive learning. And from, from my perspective, when you're having a two way conversation, whether it be a real person or an AI, as you're learning, it's gonna stick in here, you're gonna come up to speed, way faster. So that's kind of my vision for the Ultimate Sales Enablement type of process. And I mentioned that the other thing is, you know, when I remember my first day as a sales leader, I didn't know what the hell I was doing, obviously pretended to the managers that had promoted me into that role that I knew exactly what I was doing, but I never clue you know, I remember my first forecast meeting, where I had 20 people in a room and I was leading a forecast meeting for the first time. It was I didn't want to show it but it was scary. You know, and I emulated previous managers in terms of asking the same questions, but I mentioned to have the ability to roleplay that whole size, I would have got much Better much faster. I don't know, Chris, you're nodding along there am I am on the right track here is this where it's going?

Chris Thomas: 35:05

Yeah. Like, it's so so interesting, like, like a lot of what we do. And you've got it, you've got to show like a like a, like a sort of tough calm face and continue on and then maintain your composure, and so important, but like, it's like everyone does it everyone, like jumps into, like, jumps directly into the fire. And that's the best way that that's the best way to work. I still am a big advocate of that. And you like I remember back in radio six days, doing like some some roleplay with with their bath towels. And if you're if you're ever in a roleplay situation with the silverback, you better come prepared because he's not he's not gonna be around. But that those types of those types of engagements are that those types of engagements are just just so just just so so valuable the ones that like get you out of your seat and like what, like your experience writing forecasts and cool like my experience first day at Salesforce like your that level of uncomfort like puts you in a position where you're you're alerting receptors are open and you're learning and neural pathways are going all you absorb a lot more.

Daniel Bartels: 36:30

Yeah, I think it's it's an interesting experience of as you as you move through your career in these types of roles, you moved from being inside sales to outside sales and moved from sales into leadership, you know, from first line to second line, there's always these points of the first time where you operate without a net. And there's you know, there's no one there to, to hold your hand or make sure you get this bit right. And all of a sudden, it's your meeting versus you watching somebody else in the meeting, or well all sudden that your forecast call. And if you don't ask the right questions of your team, you're now accountable to the forecast call that you give upstream? And do you not know the answers to these questions? Are you not across these deals? Your honest answer is God's are not. They're not. Right. But you're the leader and or you're the aim is deal. And the customer has just said, Hey, but listen, I I spoke to Chris my BDR. And on this deal, and and on this engagement, I gave them a whole bunch of discovery. Do you not have that? And I know for us working for a CRM CRM company back in the day, it was one of the worst worst faux pas you could make was, hold on, don't you guys have a CRM? Didn't you write this in the notes and as you're looking at the CRM screen, and there's no notes. And but that stuff happens. And so you learn from experience, then to be able to ask the people around you to say, Hey, listen, when you spend the extra 30 seconds reading those notes, they become critical for these reasons, then you go to the next level of what I want. And those notes are these things because the conversation I need to have with somebody more often than not ends up looking like this. And then as we build knowledge around one person, last one person, one because they had this information, therefore let's make that to make sure that in all of our engagements, these are the types of questions or how's the best way to phrase those questions. Here are 17 170 examples of the same question phrased in a different way. Five of them work. And the other 165 are examples of how to get to the five that work. And like all those things about how do you stand on the on the shoulders of giants, right? And those around you have to be more successful. And I think that's the that's the really interesting thing for me in this technology, the sort of spending time in and even when you then think about everybody's relying some dabbling, I wouldn't say they're relying yet on things like conversational AI. So that's chat GPT and the bits and pieces right. And it doesn't have this stuff nailed at all. It's a long way from it. Yet I can quickly see a lot of people becoming carbon copies of each other because they're relying on chat GPT to write their introduction email. Well, if I'm getting 12 introduction emails an hour that all look like they'll written by the same person because they were because they were written by a chat GPT you're not sending out I'm not watching him. It's only gonna be moments until the AI that's receiving and reading the email, because that's AI on the job. Yeah, it's gonna go straight to the junk mailbox, right? I mean, there's there's meant to be aI now, that takes what AI wrote and makes it not sound like aI but it Say oh there's no flavour. There's no, you know, there's no one, knowing how to drop a joke in about, you know, Queensland and New South Wales State of Origin in the right context, because they've read the fact that that person went to this particular school. And you know, that's a rugby league school, therefore, they're likely going to care. Or, you bothered to look at their long term LinkedIn posts. And you saw that last year, they went to the State of Origin, hey, they've likely going to care. This is a good joke. Give me a midway through a series, right? So like, all those things come out. And that's AI is never going to get to that level of humanity. It can't because it doesn't have our experiences.

Simon Peterson: 40:48

Never Say Never down. Well, I asked the great Hey, hey, chatter, Govt look up this guy's LinkedIn profile. Tell me what he's been doing over the last year and he clued a joke about something or other he went and did that was sport related.

Daniel Bartels: 41:04

Bingo. Yeah, but I can't I can't see it having the experiential part of it. I can't see it, knowing how to drop in drop in what benefit? If that's where we get to? Then we're all doing different things, because AI is just going to talk to AI. Right? I mean, that's kind of where it's at. But, but you know, I just, I don't see it getting to that level, at least not in probably our working lifetimes. When Chris, you're the expert here, might you tell you tell me where you think this has gone? I think

Chris Thomas: 41:37

I think it's, I think it's gonna it's gonna reshape our lives in ways like, like we can't we just can't comprehend right now. Like, we don't know. But like, I think it will, it's going to shift that, that it's going to change the playing field a little bit in terms of lightning reach. Yeah, definitely. But if I if I receive an email from someone, like I can tell right away if it's a mass email, or if it's a personal personalised to me, and I can I can tell right away if this person is like, like a genuine person, are you contacting me because you want to talk to me, or you want to find someone on my profile. And the thing that I think we won't be able to cover is the, the fact that I understand that this person has something in common with me, and that's why I want comes back to just being like a normal, regular human, as like, it's like, I know, this person has some I have some common with this person. And that's the human connection piece, right? Yep.

Simon Peterson: 42:44

So Chris, Pitzer, that to the, you know, the, the education, learning through the goggles, etc. You know, obviously, he would stop human interaction is fundamental. If I'm training everybody in a bubble, with with goggles on, am I enabling them in how to talk person to person?

Chris Thomas: 43:09

I think I'm sorry, got the sniffles? Sorry, if that shows up on the podcast app, we've got we've got so it's a really important question. And I don't I don't have that. Like, I think, like, immersive experiences does have the potential to sort of push us away more. But I also think that humans tend to think worst case scenario. And if you look at it, I think I think if you if you if you look at what, like what sort of immersive environments are we involved in today, like, I know, on my phone, I can easily get stuck in sort of LinkedIn, just sort of doom scrolling for 30 minutes and not realise it right. Like, it's happened to everyone. This is this is immersive behaviour right here. Like the way the way I see it is that VR, and also mobile, you know, like, we can adjust how this like this immersive engagement operates. So I'm learning something bettering myself and I start to sort of care more about like, you know, spending time with the right people in my life, as opposed to just like the sole objective of getting impressions for some sort of social media company. So I see it as something to explore. We definitely need to understand it more because this is this is part of this is we're already immersed. We're already part of the matrix. You know what I mean? Like it, I think we just need to be more conscious of it and more intentional about how we how we look at content and how we interact with content and how content is designed and delivered.

Daniel Bartels: 44:59

Yeah, I think that called take delivery pace and design is, is a really interesting question. I think you mentioned this a bit earlier. And we're talking about this just pre pressing the record button, right. So a mate of mine has got a cool podcast we're talking about called podcasts before he joined on, it's actually about the, he was one of the lead investigators from the Australian Navy on the MH 370 disappearance. And, you know, back in the day, he would have had to go out and convince a television production company to do a big recording and, you know, run that whole process of it being a TV show. Instead, he spun up a podcast and said, episodes, you got yarn event involved, it's cool, have listened, it's pretty cool. But like, even now, us having this show today, the technology is lowered the barrier of entry. And it's meant that people can have a really different way of delivering content. So I can easily immerse my team in VR, without having to spend millions of dollars on technology to make it work, I can use technology that everybody is democratising across a whole bunch of different spaces. To try and work out how I make this work. I mean, you know, content creators now make significant amounts of money depends upon whether you keep your clothes on or off, we have to have, it's a reality of what the market is, that's always been there, it's not going to disappear anytime soon. I'm not talking about a school and being rude here. But that's just the reality of it. But even but even those who are just creating business content creator fortune intensive, getting good content, and it's beholden to mass networks to I mean, there's still space for the mass network. So we were just mentioning, you're talking about Marvel, I mean, you know, Marvel, as a company got up to$4 billion to me, but good content creators are worth hundreds of millions of dollars operating out of their bedroom. I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's flattening of, of how we create and sort of taking this content, right. So yeah, interesting.

Chris Thomas: 47:08

I think I think a lot of it is, like, it's sort of, like it's creating, like, it's like, it's like a marketplace. It's like, it's like adding a competition to create innovation, right. And if you look at like, some of the content creators today, like what I like, about some of the stuff is like some of these topics like mental health, or like fitness, like these guys, like there's these guys and girls, creating content that's like, really thoughtful, because that's what you need to do to establish a, like a channel like that. There's some easy routes, but like, there is some section of the marketplace that are just creating really thoughtful, innovative, and really cool, cool stuff. Which makes sort of doom scrolling, not not too bad.

Daniel Bartels: 48:02

So Chris, we're getting kind of to the, to the top of the hour mate. And, you know, one of the things we took we kind of like to wrap up the podcast with is kind of a look back at the the lessons that we've seen, you know, great salespeople have in their careers, and, you know, things that wouldn't do again, or things I would definitely ensure that they do more of, you know, as you kind of look back through, you know, your your experiences, you know, your career, like what are the what are the couple of things that you suppose do do more of, and a couple of things you do less off?

Chris Thomas: 48:33

I think I definitely want to start a business earlier. And like, if there's, yeah, it's a tough thing to do, but definitely more of jumping directly into the fire. Like, people, people sort of discount their own their own value and their own competency. But if you if you put yourself in a tough situation, like a really tough situation way, you're more likely hunters figure it out somehow, and you'll it'll make you a better person. So So So jumping into the fires is a big one. And then as well as I think I think like one thing for me is just those those sort of personal connections. So if I'm feeling tired, or if I'm struggling, like spending time with my kids or spending time with my partner or spending time with like my brothers or family or whatever, just having like conversations sort of sort of is what brings me that brings me to life and we'll definitely do more of that.

Daniel Bartels: 49:39

What's What's something you do less off?

Chris Thomas: 49:42

Probably, I wouldn't need as much QFC I've done I've probably I've probably spent probably probably spent less time I probably spend less time just I'm not I'm struggling, I'll probably spend less time trying to do stuff for other people like for like, you're just trying to impress other people. That's it.

Simon Peterson: 50:21

That sounds self confidence, right?

Chris Thomas: 50:24

Yeah. Yeah.

Daniel Bartels: 50:25

Yeah, for sure. Well, Chris, my, that's been a, it's been amazing to talk to you, you know, you guys doing some phenomenal stuff in the VR space and technology space, you know, learning continues to be a, it's a huge part of what we're doing here. I mean, you know, Simon and I had a bit of a fire to share sort of our lessons and the lessons of all those around us to make sure that, that, you know, we can impart a bit of sort of our experience and knowledge. You know, I know, back to when to when we work together at at Salesforce and radiant six are a huge part of what we do and spend time doing as a team with individuals or as a group, just talking to deals and you know, drawing stuff on a whiteboard and people have given me stick for been doing on a whiteboard for years, right. But it's been so valuable. And I've always gravitated to finding people that a team that you can just have those constant conversations with and, and be self analytical and share your knowledge. And it's amazing to see that you're doing some some great stuff in that space as well. And can really continuing on that journey. So, Mike, thank you so much for joining us. You know, for all of our all of our listeners, etc. Look, please, wherever you have found this podcast, whether it's YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, any of the podcast, locations, please do like follow share all those different fancy things you need to do to make sure you help produce help push out content out there. Have any questions, please do chuck them in the comments. We will do our best to get back to you. And if you have an idea for a great podcast, you'd love to be on the podcast and tell your story. Please do reach out. We'd love to have you on so thank you, Chris. So much Simon. Thank you for your time as always. And Absolutely.

Simon Peterson: 52:11

Thanks, Chris.

Daniel Bartels: 52:13

Yeah, have a great day. Thanks, guys

Chris Thomas: 52:15

really enjoyed us. You guys are doing as well. I'll catch you later.

Simon Peterson: 52:20

Thanks, Chris. See you later.