GrowthPulse - The B2B Sales Podcast
We dive deep into the world of Business-to-Business (B2B) Sales and how businesses can get the most out of their investment in Sales people, Sales Systems & processes - the lifeblood of any thriving business. We explore a range of Sales topics as well as speak to some of the industry's thought leaders, vendors, success stories and people just like you who have won and failed on their journey in business & sales.
GrowthPulse - The B2B Sales Podcast
AI: The New Frontier in Sales Leadership with Dan and Simon
And, I think, client and even more in the sales process. So often we've all had, no matter what industry you're in, you've all had an account we call them red accounts in software where you sold it to a customer and during the process or afterwards the customer comes back and says that isn't what I bought. Welcome to Growth Pulse, the B2B sales podcast. You might be a salesperson, you could lead a sales team, maybe run a business or you're a battle-tested entrepreneur. Then we built this podcast for you.
Speaker 1:Great salespeople are built, not born. We learn so much from the deals we win, but we learn even more from the deals we lose. In each episode, we bring you some of the world's leading salespeople, sales leaders and experts in sales tech to share their best lessons from both their wins and their losses. Before we start, please check out the screen of your phone or laptop and, if you're watching on YouTube, make sure you've clicked subscribe and press that like button down below. If you're listening on Spotify or Apple, click the plus sign to follow so we can let you know when we publish each new episode. If you liked the episode, drop us a comment with any questions about the show. We'd love to get to know our audience. Great businesses always feature world-class salespeople, and the best salespeople are always learning, so let's jump in. Salespeople are always learning, so let's jump in. Welcome back everybody to another episode of Growth Pulse, the B2B sales podcast. I'm Dan Bartels here with Simon Peterson. Mate, good to talk to you again, buddy.
Speaker 2:Hey, dan, great to talk to you too on a very wet Friday afternoon in Sydney.
Speaker 1:Mate, it is my backyard's almost flooded mate.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. I had another pool put in the backyard yesterday, not on purpose and I've got.
Speaker 1:I've got a little tiny pool. I've got to remember every year, when it rains heavily, to go and let the water out quick. Come on, let the water out of the pool. Anyway, it's a challenge. Oh good mate.
Speaker 2:Look, apart from all the rain, we were going to talk about ai today I know it seems to be fairly topical and and I was looking back at the episodes that we've done in the recent past and we've never mentioned AI. It's dominating headlines, it's dominating business. We're all in software and we're all releasing AI to our customers. It might just be really interesting to have a chat about how we use it in the sales cycle. Is AI applicable to us, not just for us?
Speaker 1:to sell, look, 100%. I actually saw a video yesterday of the CEO of NVIDIA talking about some of their chips and what they've released and some spines of how they're tying these chips together and the power of what they're doing. Yeah, and he's holding in his hand and it's a big chip right, it's the size of a desk. But he said they're tying together sort of eight, nine, ten of these chips together, which, singularly, these chips were more powerful than the Sierra supercomputer. Yeah, and when you look at that, and they're tying them together in AI server farms, it's not just for us to sell, it's for us to use 100%, it's just. This is a bigger evolution than what we saw when cloud computing joined.
Speaker 2:It's an interesting one, Dan, because I probably saw the same presentation and they were also talking about something you might plug into your PC at home. That's the AI engine. That's interesting the cloud away from the cloud, the AI engine? Yep, that's interesting.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the cloud away from the cloud. Well, yeah, is it your private cloud, is it? This is one of the things that I suppose we've all experienced, whether you're in a big or a small company that question of I've got a personal subscription to ChatGPT and that's my chosen AI of choice. But I've got Gemini sitting in my Gmail and my company provides me another one again, but then every other tool you go to I'm a big Notion user has got another AI. I'm sure they're recording on Riverside. I'm sure there's some AI kicking around the back.
Speaker 1:In fact, I know there's some AI kicking around the back of that. Now. Everything is being touched by AI now because of what it is and which one do you use, how much of it do you use, et cetera.
Speaker 2:So I think it's a big topic, right? Absolutely, I'm not. Look, I think back on my career and starting in software in the early 90s, the big news were moving from mainframes to client service and that was really exciting and no more dumb terminals. The guys I used to talk to used to laugh at me as a young person in the business that I'd never had to deal with punch cards, thinking punch cards to ai.
Speaker 2:We've moved on a little bit, just in the space of just in my career anyway, and for me the journey, the next journey of that after client-server was that funny thing called the internet got invented and we discovered e-commerce and you know that was early 2000s. And then application service providers, ASPs, moved to, became topical. Then it was it's all about cloud. So I think this is probably the next evolution and when I first looked at this I thought I've been here before. I've seen each of these major steps in the evolution of computing and B2B software over 30 odd years. How could this AI thing be? You know, what everybody was hyping is different to everything else we've ever seen and, interestingly, the more I've dug into it, I'm moving more towards the. This kind of changes everything.
Speaker 1:Well, if you think, just to give people some statistics right so people who've been in IT for a while and others might have heard of Moore's Law, and moore's law is basically that the total ability of storage data is doubling every year, where and basically, again referring back to the ceo of nvidia, he was saying the storage of the capacity of the nvidia chips are growing a thousand xx compared to Moore's Law, on an annual basis. Exponential Moore's Law. It's exponential right now. And the issue and I apologise to anybody if I've got those statistics wrong, but it's multiple figures, multiples, larger, not three or four multiples, and it just means things like and, as it had it to us as salespeople, the expectations of everybody of what you can analyze, look at, develop in a speed is just changing like never before.
Speaker 2:It's an interesting one. I think of it interestingly. The data has always been fairly centrally important and I think with AI that doesn't change. In fact, that becomes more and more important. Centrally important and I think with AI, that doesn't change. In fact, that becomes more and more important. The data set that you want to analyze or you want to use. Regardless of what role you're doing, so data is critically important.
Speaker 2:But one of the big things I see now is I don't have to be an expert to interact with the data. I don't have the simple Excel spreadsheet with VLOOKUPs and HLOOKUPs and figuring out how you're going to build a graph, and that's simple. Or you've got a data lake and you want to ask it questions. You have to put an SQL query together and write code to actually pull a report out. And I think fundamentally what's different is I don't need to be a technology expert to have great questions and query data and get meaningful, rapid answers to my questions, and I think that it's almost a democratization of how I leverage data.
Speaker 2:It's an interesting one because it leaves me with two thoughts. One is you give a seven-year-old a calculator and she's a mathematician because she can type in numbers and get a result, but does she really know what she's done or why? And I think that's that's where we are with with ai, and I think it forces us to be, rather than technology coders, critical thinkers. You've got to ask the right questions. Ai is not mature enough to always give us the right answer, and you've got to, you've got to really think about the answer. You're back. Is it logical, does it make sense? And I think I've seen you've probably seen a few as well resumes that you get and they're beautifully. They're both with words that I'm really impressed with, and the only interesting thing is I read it. And then I speak to the person I'm interviewing and I know they didn't write that and do I attribute their resume to them or do I attribute it to a machine that wrote some fancy words?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think it's a. I'll give you another analogy as a practical challenge, which I think is relevant. I've spent a bunch of nights in the last couple of weeks assisting my 12 year old daughter, who's in year eight, with her maths a preparation for a maths exam and, comparative to when I was at school, they've been allowed calculators in their exam and helping us study. We had to say look, let's take the calculator away, because if you can't, she was really battling with reading the questions and understanding how to go and solve it, which is the same issue we're talking about here, and she kept joking to me saying taking the calculator away.
Speaker 1:Dad, it's a calculator exam, which is this example of your experience with a customer or your resume. I can have chat GPT, it's part of. I can have AI help me. It's part of the existence today and it's an expectation that you know how to use it. Same as for my daughter, it's an expectation that she's got in her pocket all the time on her watch, a calculator. So it's not relevant that she can do all of that. Not that it's not relevant, but she can always rely that there's something else there that will do the calculation for her. But understanding how to look at it and go. Is that right? Did I enter incorrectly into the calculator to make a mistake?
Speaker 2:Have I asked the right questions.
Speaker 1:Have I asked the right questions? The same for us as salespeople? The ability now for me to and if anyone's not doing this madness, how do you ingest into an ai engine the last eight years of someone's annual reports or their competitors annual reports and give you some sort of analysis as to what the problems of this company are? If you're not doing that's table stakes. Bdr can do that today. It used to be. You had to be a strat AE with 40 years experience to even get close to that type of analysis. Now everybody's got it. Everybody's turning up to the RFP or the first call meeting with that insight.
Speaker 2:And if you're not, you're left behind.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the customer expects you've done that. So if you're not walking into that, hey, do the research, do the work.
Speaker 2:Yep, and this makes the research a lot faster. I think I look at this as massive productivity tools, but not a work replacement tools. If you follow the logic there, if we think about the sales cycle, when you start in marketing, demand gen leads et cetera, starts in marketing, demand gen leads et cetera. Understanding sentiment of your market can be done with an external analyst taking weeks to understand what's going on. You pull the data together and you get a really good sense of what sort of sentiment, what sort of messages work in markets. It streamlines the demand gen process and I think we want to obviously focus a little bit more as we move into a sales cycle. But a traditional marketing handover to sales is typically a BDR or an SDR. I was lucky enough to be in KL last week and I had a generative AI SDR demonstration.
Speaker 2:So we're, going to start moving some of those initial customer conversations to gen-tive AI and agents are obviously buzzword at the moment. But if you think about it, we had an example where the person was in the room, called up on their phone, called into the Gentive AI, the SDR bot, and it was a very polite conversation. It was a very informative conversation. We obviously trained it on our products and what we do and the messaging. So they got all the marketing messaging, all the product detail, all the value propositions, examples of customers that we've used and had success with before as referenceable examples.
Speaker 2:And I've got to say we you get halfway into it. You actually don't know that you're talking to a bot. You do, but the kind of answers you're getting are fast, rapid, they're what you want to hear. And we run an example where that bot then booked a meeting with the account executive as a follow-up and the account executive gets a transcript of the call. Ai assesses the areas and the sentiment that the prospect had, whether they're interested or not interested. Did they mention a customer? I saw a competitor. All of that is then prepared for the salesperson to then have an incredibly meaningful first call, which I thought was outstanding. And Danny and I have done capacity plans for sales teams before and you're always finding out that you want to go hire another two or three sales reps. You need another two or three sdrs.
Speaker 1:What I saw was an infinite sdr no, but I think it becomes a problematic issue that will happen next, which is now I'm going to and there are already tools doing this today. Now I'm going to put my AI receptionist or personal assistant in between myself and the world. And what am I doing? What are my focuses on? Hey, internally, as an executive, this is what my strategy looks like. And if, what these people coming through, if these bots talking over here are not relevant, they don't get through that, they don't get through the gate. So I think these things will evolve by their own nature. So I'm not. There's been a lot of talk. Hey, does AI replace the salesperson?
Speaker 2:I don't think AI in any of these functions ever replaces people altogether, but fundamentally, it probably replaces people that leverage AI I would say, but I think it changes how we operate.
Speaker 1:It probably replaces people that leverage AI, I would say, but I think it changes how we operate. I do think to your point, it evens the playing field significantly. It used to be that you had to be a Salesforce, an Oracle, an SAP, to have an army of 100 SDRs to get through the doors to sell your wares. You needed to have 100 coders to try and build software. I can have AI do a lot of that stuff and do it better than a lot of people can do and manage.
Speaker 1:I'm doing some stuff privately on the side at the moment and I'm leveraging AI, like you wouldn't believe, to help me build business plans and use cases and re-prosecute the business plan and go about, go to market concepts and all this type of stuff, which would have taken me months and months of work. But what it does facilitate me to do is a lot of deep thinking, and this is where I do think, for salespeople in particular, we look at AI is to do more, and my personal take on this is I think that's the wrong take on this. I agree it's to do deeper. There's probably a better terminology than this Go deeper, be more informed, be more insightful, be more engaged.
Speaker 2:I'll give you a great example of that, dan. Just this last week I was sitting on a discovery call with a client and we use Clary Copilot, which is basically a recording Forecasting tool. Yeah, no, it's not a forecast. They've introduced something called Clary Copilot, which is basically you attach it to your Teams or your Zoom meeting and it records the call for you, transcribes it. But what's interesting about that is I ran a discovery call and the typical discovery call. What you want to do is you want to be engaged and focused and asking incisive questions. But if you're writing notes the whole time, you get distracted, you miss things you don't quite, you're just really leaning in. So with this particular tool, recorded the meeting for me, which is great Any Zoom teams will do that. But what it meant was I could run the discovery call and not have a single thought about taking notes. Yeah, um, then what I did was I looked into clary copilot and what it does. It summarizes a call, gives me a view on sentiment, so that's initial ai scan on positive, negative. It talks about the main bullets. It also gives me a list of all of the actions. So if anybody on the call said they're going to do something, it records it as an action, so I've got the actions. So if anybody on the call said they're going to do something, it records it as an action. So I've got the actions. I felt fantastic. That's pretty cool.
Speaker 2:Then what's really interesting is from a pre-sales perspective or implementation professional service perspective. How many times in your career have you been frustrated that your sales rep didn't actually take that discovery call and put it into a discovery document so that everybody on the deal was on the same page? Yeah, and I thought to myself look, how about I take that copilot transcript, the full transcript of the call? What I did then was I dropped in the PDF, which is our discovery document form, and then I dropped in the transcript of the call afterwards and said could you please format this call into the PDF document using the headings and all the way that we've defined, that we want discovery done?
Speaker 2:And in about a minute and a half I had a well-formatted, well-documented discovery document that I then spent probably 15, 20 minutes really reading and thinking about rather than creating, and I sent that off to the team and the feedback I got from professional services and the pre-sales team I didn't tell them, by the way, I'd done this. They said it was one of the best discovery documents they'd ever worked with. Could I please get the rest of my sales team to start producing this level of quality document? I then went to one of my heads of sales and said so, when you do a discovery document after the call, how long does it take you? Oh, maybe an hour, two hours, and I'm thinking about a sales team that might do 100 deals a year. For each of those one deals, there are probably three other deals that they're doing demos for.
Speaker 2:So let's call 300 or 400 deals four hours each. The productivity gain of just that simple process is outstanding.
Speaker 2:Now you've got to go read the discovery document that AI builds you, because you've got to actually understand whether it's come out with insight or rubbish. I've done it now maybe five, six times rubbish in my. I've done it now maybe five, six times. Yep, every time I did a few little bits of tweaks. But reading the document, I was really happy after this discovery call that it captured everything. What an amazing way to use technology I think this is a an evolution.
Speaker 1:This leads to something that I've been working on myself and really thinking deeply about over the last kind of 18 months when I first started in my in owning a company. For those who don't know, I've been working on myself and really thinking deeply about over the last kind of 18 months when I first started in owning a company. For those who don't know, I ran a company 15 odd years ago and that's how I got into tech, because I had to bootstrap a Salesforce org at the beginning and building the objects for a company took a lot of thinking. How do we run our sales process and how do we send a service case out to a, a customer, and how do we run our invoicing and call notes and all this type of stuff and as you go and work for somebody else, typically you walk into a company and that gets delivered to you. But I think as salespeople I've always thought we are mercenaries. I'm not a subject matter expert in. I can be a subject matter expert in lots of things, but typically I'm a subject matter expert in sales as a process. I can be a subject matter expert in lots of things, but typically I'm a subject matter expert in sales as a process, and I think that's what our employers buy from us the subject matter expertise in running the sales process. So for me, I've been building out for myself over time that internal process of how I run as a salesperson, to your point how do I run my meeting, how does my AI convert for what I want my notes to look like and how does that thing get pushed back into my company's crm, not having to redo it all the time and I'm still working on this on a continual basis. But I think that there's an evolution here as well, which is just relying on your company to do these things for you. So you've gone out and how do I do this and how do I format it, but then delving into things like so you're talking about just generative AI today, but how do I look at an agentic AI model for myself? And I'll give you an example of kind of an agent model AI that I'm building out for myself.
Speaker 1:Outside this, I hate doing my tax return Every year. I get it in late. I tell my accountant I'm going to be on time this year and he messages me about March. And he goes mate, you're later than last year and so I've actually now built into my email model. As emails come in, it picks up the emails with the receipt and it starts to automatically file them and put them into a database and tag them and collate the numbers so that in theory, when I get to the next, it's building out my financial model so I can actually manage these things on a day-by-day, week-by-week same as it would for a CRM or an ERP, but it's for me. But I'm also doing the same in my sales delivery process. So when I run a meeting and I'm still working iterating on this I take my notes for me, because my notes that I have you as the CEO or the VP of wherever you move, 10 jobs over our career We've all sold to that same person multiple times.
Speaker 1:Good old Michael Rood sold to one of our customers four times in a row at different companies, like good on you. That's what networks are about. That's what you buy from someone who's been at a company for a while or been in sales for a while. You buy their network, right, but my contacts are mine and I take that network with me. But where's my notes that I've kept? And I know that employment law and company IP will say but hold on, that's the company's IP, but hold on, my notes are the things that you care about, that you're a family man and you got six months ago and now you're better, and so I want to understand that I can send you a note, no matter the fact that we work together or not, the fact that I'm really happy that you got.
Speaker 1:Well, all those things my sales process and my evolution of when I did a deal like this five years ago how do I go back into my toolkit and go, how did I solve that problem and how do I talk to a customer about that? So to me, I'm building that out. How do I own that process? But I'm building agentic AI around how I do that. So, to your point, I have a call recording and the output document for my call recording is different to my manager, to my BDR, to my marketing partner, different again to my SE, is different back again to the customer. I don't want to do that six times, I want to do it once. And then how do I take all the meetings for the last six, seven times and pull them back into a document and give my boss or my overseas VP an update or a deal.
Speaker 1:Review and setting up the systems that we're talking about is what I did when I started my company. Now I'm setting up the systems for me as a salesperson and how I bring this value to my current company and I won't beat this company for my entire career no one ever will be and so how do I bring that into the next role that I'm going to and the role after that? And I continue to evolve what I'm going to do. I think that's the challenge for us as salespeople. We're selling this stuff as AI on a constant basis, particularly those who live in tech, and I think in most other markets. You're selling some form of AI today as well. But how do we start to own it and use it for ourselves?
Speaker 2:I look exactly, mate, and I guess what's fascinating about the conversation you and I are just having. 18 months ago, half the words we used didn't exist in my vocabulary. I mean, if you said agentic AI to me 18 months ago, I'd ask if I could have another beer. I wouldn't know what you're talking about. It's bizarre. And if you think about it, when was ChatGPT released? October 23?, was that?
Speaker 1:Oh, even that as a concept. I don't use Google to search anymore, I use ChatGPT.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think Google's feeling the pain as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's where they're all trying to compete. Right here you go. When was ChatGPT released? Chatgpt is going to tell me again it's gone and searched the web which is a new feature for chat gpt 2018.
Speaker 2:June 11th 2018 was its first launch, okay, but it didn't.
Speaker 1:I think it was more like 22, 2022, yeah, I think it really took off when you got to gpt two and three.
Speaker 2:So like, yeah, may 2020 was gpt3 yep, okay, so may 2020, we're in lockdown, I think from Marie Yep. And just the concept of agentic AI, generative AI, just how I would apply that to my day's work, just didn't occur to me. And the point I'm trying to make is this time, in 12 months, I'll probably have an appliance I plug into my home laptop that turns my home computer into a life's language model that I can then feed my own stuff and, to your point, my personal assistant.
Speaker 1:Oh, and I think all of that is coming. And again, as I say, you've already got models today that have been talked about for a long time around how we change the fundamental ownership of. We talked to a customer five, six years ago now talking about how we changed the ownership of cars, the fact that they're predicting that in seven, eight years, we won't own cars, we'll just subscribe to a car service. But that's driven by the fact that the AI will tell you from a finance company you're better off just paying for this. Because of your travel pattern analyzed over the last period, I spend a lot of my time on the train going to and from the city. What do I really want to get? My car that I overpay for drives me from my house to the station 95% of the time. Do you need it? For the rest of the couple of times that I want to get to the city, jump in an Uber. It's probably cheaper, yeah. Yet I'm so used to wanting to have a vehicle because that's how I grew up. My phone and my latest update of my Android has baked AI into almost every function. My Android Samsung Galaxy offers transcription of a call native on the handset. That's cool, but there's a whole bunch of privacy issues that go along with it. Oh yeah, but on that side of Siri can't do that. Yeah, siri can't do that yet, but it's. This is because it's plugging in gemini, right, it's one thing that probably doesn't have. But the query that I've got, though, there was always.
Speaker 1:There was a concept in philosophy that talked about the object of the object of observing. The process of observing an event fundamentally changed the event? Yep, so even if you're just, and the concept is as simple as a branch falling out of a tree, you watching the branch falling out of a tree, the first question is did the tree fall over if you weren't there or not? Or it did, but it didn't, but no one observed it, so it didn't happen. But the object of watching the tree fall over changed. The tree falling over? Yep, so does the object of observing and recording the meeting and the call that we have change what people are doing? My experience is it doesn't Interesting. I think when we first started doing it, people you could genuinely tell on a video call back in the day, or even better, back in the day when I walked into a sales meeting which was all face-to-face if you put a tape recorder on a table, people would go oh come on, mate, what are you doing? This is not how we operate Today. It's par for the course, yeah.
Speaker 2:You ask permission, can I record this meeting?
Speaker 1:People could be okay, but everyone expects it to be there. Yeah, in fact, my experience is people get the shits when you haven't recorded it.
Speaker 2:I especially discovery calls because I like to record the call and share it back with the client especially discovery calls because I like to record the call and share it back with the client. So we're setting expectations from the get-go. They can go, which I love. Oh, on the discovery call, we forgot to talk about abc.
Speaker 1:The last thing you want to do is get to the beginning of an implementation and find that was an expectation that you hadn't discussed and the assumption was it wasn't there yeah, and I think, client once, you and even more in the sales process, so often, and we've all had, no matter what industry you're in, you've all had an account we call them red accounts in software where you sold it to a customer and during the process afterwards the customer comes back and says that isn't what I bought. And people are madly going through notes. And what do we present? Where was the brochure to say hold on your expectations versus what we told you? Those two things aren't aligned. Hey, hold on, buyer beware. And the buyer then comes back with but this is the email or this is the conversation, or this is the meeting where someone said it bakes bread yeah, good old side letter that's right.
Speaker 1:But not only that. It's the question that they ask the sales person or the se during the process and saying I want to do this, is that possible? And the person says yes, but they don't clarify the asterisks in that response. That says but it can bake bread when you plug in the toaster into the cigarette lighter in the car. Then the car can bake bread.
Speaker 1:Hey, and when you think about it, it, depending on if I'm buying a two-door bmw versus if I'm buying a camper trailer, you expect the camper trailer to be allow you to bake bread. Right, because it's a camper trailer. They're both vehicles. So it's a legitimate question from a customer based on what their problem is. Right, I want to live in the car. Therefore I need to be able to bake bread. I'm just driving in my bm. It's not an expectation for BMW that this thing ever bakes bread. They're both cars. So understanding the client problem becomes critical. But underneath that, the clients are now expecting that's there. Afterwards, when you're servicing, when you're delivering, I think it's now table stakes. You're recording this, we're transcribing it. We're accountable for the actions. We're running the point, transcribing it. We're accountable for the actions, we're running the point. And when you walk in as an executive, a salesperson, a support person.
Speaker 2:You are up to speed, yep agree, Dan, let's have a think about we've talked about some good examples of using a generative and a gentoo value on various parts of the sales cycle. As a sales leader, I had an interesting experience a couple of weeks ago. We're coming up to the end of June, which to me is end of fiscal year Yep.
Speaker 2:And all the shenanigans that involves in terms of getting stuff done. But one of the big things it means is we're in business planning for the next fiscal year and one of the things we do is we pull together the capacity plans how many reps have I got? What's my total quota? What products have I got to sell? He's going to sell what? When's it going to happen? The linearity across the year. And it typically turns out to be a relatively sophisticated spreadsheet. Yeah, some of it's fact based on historical sales, some of it's based on market assessment, others based on you can have three headcount or you can't have more pre-sales, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 2:I built this out and I was pretty proud of the plan. I'd done it a few times before and then my boss said look, I thought about just popping it into. We use Anthropic. Pop it in there, see what it comes back with. And this was just the beginning of a mind shift. This was probably a month or so ago and I popped it in there and I said so is my plan good?
Speaker 2:Some commentary around how you ask questions of a generative model, and I think the more you use it, the better your questions are. You give it guardrails, you give it personality, et cetera. And I started doing that and I think the first lesson I learned is you have to use it to learn how to use it, yes. The second one is, once you've been using it for a little while, your questions become quite strategic. Why you're asking that question now?
Speaker 2:After about probably an hour of playing with my detailed spreadsheet that I'd uploaded, asking it questions, and I got to a point where I could say talk to me about which part of the year do I have a risk of hitting my number? Tell me about where are the weaknesses in my plan? And one of them popped up and said, with this number, with the person starting in that month, with the assumed onboarding period, the next period of time, you're going to be about 30% below your quota for that part of the business. Yeah, and that's stuff that you know and you do know and a good leader does that right. But it turned probably a couple of weeks' work into a couple of hours' work and it pointed me where it didn't solve my problem. But it pointed to me where the problem was so I could actually expend my energy and thought right, I've got a problem with when that person starts. How am I going to actually rejig this? And, more importantly, how am I going to go back to the business and say by the way, the hiring plan you have over these period of months, we need to tweak it?
Speaker 2:Question back, simon why do you say that it looks fine to me and what my answer is not Anthropic? Told me it was wrong. The answer is I've done the analysis. Here's the points of failure on the plan. Here's why I think we should tweak it. Here's the structured thought process of why we should move the headcount plan and to me, that improved the chances of me exceeding my target next year. It also proved to my business that I know what I'm doing, which is always a new job, but what I think the important thing there is I didn't just press a button and the AI went and solved the problem for me. I had a good interaction with what I would see as a business consultant in this context, so that was a pretty cool use case. I like it. So when I go, do the business plan again.
Speaker 2:I've got all of that thinking already in my head. I've learned some, so I think that's the other piece right. People often think you plug it in, get an answer and you move along. What I've learned I learn from the mistakes I make, from the questions I ask et cetera. It's an interesting process.
Speaker 1:Here's another live use case similar to that that I had to do in the last week. We got a bunch of execs out this week from North America. I had to build the exec briefing docs which, and look, it takes time and I'll say it still took me a number of hours to get them to the level that I want them to be at, because it took me to be. Really, how do I take all the things that we are doing with this client? That's why I'm bringing a senior, a C-level exec, in to meet these large clients. What are their problems? What can we do in an hour? So there's lots of levers being moved forward and they've been moved forward and backwards. But building the detail that would typically have taken me a week, two weeks to pull in corporate overviews of a customer was so much faster by leveraging generative ai. Yeah, hey, look for this customer. And and in all fairness, they were both listed companies so the information was a lot more ready. But again, if you're a good salesperson, you've collated that information in your notes over time so you can feed those notes in and then have it run. So you can do this both ways you can feed industry notes in or segment notes in if you're in a small business, to do this as well. And hey look, give me a summary that's relevant for a C-level executive talking about these problems. And we're going to. This is the topic. This is what we want to try and resolve. Give me those stats. Here's an analysis of the company. Give me competitor analyses of these five companies so that I can also provide them.
Speaker 1:And the exec walks in fully. As an Australian company, I'm fully aware of the dynamics of the market for this customer. That stuff I never would have got to in a normal briefing document five, six years ago Now. Does the agenda, the information that I provided you, give you enough insight if you were a C-level executive, to have a? No, it doesn't. We need to delve into these areas. Would you like me to help you? Would you like me to help you on that? Yes, I would. And actually having a conversation with this ai around what information do you need? How do we do this? What's the objectives? I've ended up uploading some of the key slides to say, hey look, do you think these topics, like these pieces of information we're going to present, solve this problem? No, I don't. What about finding information like this and so having it as your co-pilot in this process. I think you've got to get skilled at it what's?
Speaker 2:what's interesting is, I agree with you and I think that if we move beyond the sales cycle, right kind of their operation you're talking about that now in terms of building, briefing documents, clients already on board, they need to know what's going on, etc.
Speaker 2:I guess to that is, I guess, the customer success function yeah as a customer success person, you're out building a relationship with the client. You're doing health checks. Are they adopting the software? What's the caseload? Are they having issues? Really making sure in the world, right, if you're not adopting it, you're not going to be renewing it, basically, and that's what customer success is all about.
Speaker 2:What's really interesting there is, as a salesperson. You typically then need to spend quite a lot of time with your customer success people to then understand the temperature of the client. Are they happy, et cetera, because any good sales guy knows that upsell, cross-sell, is way easier than any business. So you want to be engaged and you want to be seeing what else you can sell to that client. And what I've found is all of the notes. As long as it's systematized, that a CSM does, people that use Salesforce typically put it into Salesforce some way, but it could be HubSpot, it could be anywhere. You pull that into an assessment of the last three years of customer success interactions. How? What's the sentiment done over time? What is the executives changed over time? Yeah, what's the adoption like? What are the top three things I should be talking to them about to get them excited about my business and where it's going? Yeah, yeah. The other one that I've thought through there is customer success.
Speaker 2:Typically they have premium plans, standard plans all of those sorts of things and as a sales guy and I'll be really honest to you I read those and I think I sometimes struggle to sell the value of it, because a lot of companies if it's $100 for the software, it's another $20 for a customer success plan. What is involved and how do I actually explain to my customer that the extra $20 they're paying is they're getting value for money? That always happens, right. So I had an example the other week where I had mountains of PowerPoints that the business had developed on the value proposition. No one document was perfect. Everybody had their two cents worth.
Speaker 2:And then I had a whole bunch of customer success presentations that had been successful. I loaded them all in and I said give me the top things that a client would see value out of these 20, 30 documents. So what it did is it just rapidly went through it and it gave me two or three that I was absolutely already knew. Then it gave me another three or four that I just wouldn't have thought of. Yeah, and I was able to then work it around, tweak it, change it, et cetera, and then I was able to put together one page summary for a client on the value of a premium customer success and they loved it yeah for sure, and it was kind of interesting.
Speaker 2:So I think your imagination is what limits you in terms of how a salesperson can leverage this stuff. But I think, as you said, the fundamentals of the sales process aren't radically shifted, but the amount of time and effort goes to different places. So your thinking time becomes huge value add and your grunt work gets done for you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think the other piece that I'm seeing is problematic. There's probably an evolution in this stuff as well, and maybe companies like Salesforce and Oracle and SAP and others are really working on this and I've spent 15 years, for everyone's context, on the listening to us building CRM systems. Most companies do a pretty ordinary job of using them, and when I say pretty or not, like if it's beyond 10% utilized, I'm blown away, and particularly those who are in. If you look at a contact center, yeah, yeah, they're on the phone. All they're doing is typing the CRM, sure, and now we've gone to the point where all those calls are being recorded. They're added into the profile of that individual. Are they always added to the account? Probably not. Are they transcribed and added to the account? Probably not.
Speaker 1:But if you're outside that level of sales or interaction, even if you take it out of a sales context, is every phone call you have with a doctor and the medical receptionist at it and every meeting you have? What do the notes look like? That sits in your medical record. They're all there, right? And if you look inside a sales business, is every meeting that your CEO, vp, director, bdr, marketing person has with that customer? Are they all recorded and added into your CRM record?
Speaker 1:Guarantee they're not. I guarantee you're not recording all the meetings you have. I know I'm not, I'm just not doing it, and so we're missing all of this potential rich content that would give you the value you're talking about, which is, hey, this customer bought a 20%, 30% customer success add-on to their project, their product right. What value did they get last year? And the system should be able to say, oh, this is what you got. You had 475 phone calls and we resolved these 25 issues for you and you were able to materialize 27 points. And AI can give you all this information, not in the future, right now.
Speaker 2:I 100% agree with you. It's interesting. I have a team of 15 salespeople right and we've mandated that every customer call is recorded by AI. Yep, I have a dashboard that I look at and I can see all of the calls and one of the things I've got is a talk-listen ratio. Yep, that's a really interesting one. Yeah, especially on a discovery call. But I get maybe 10, 15, 20 interesting calls a day that I review, and previously you'd have to go in there, go into the recording, hit play, listen to it at 2x speed, slow it down.
Speaker 2:What I do now is I've got a summary and the summary is about two paragraphs long. Then I've got a summary of the sentiment uh, were there any competitors spoken about? What did they like? What didn't they like? List of actions I can bang through as a leader probably 20, 30 calls in less than an hour to understand does my salesperson need more coaching? Are they doing a great job? Have I got some ideas or some influence? Or, more importantly, do I just learn something that a sales guy did that I'd never thought of? That I should absolutely telegraph and make sure the rest of the team know about it.
Speaker 2:And it's changed my role as a sales leader radically, and I love it. It's. It makes it it. The way I describe it is when you're a sales leader, you know what good looks like, right, yeah, and you know what you're supposed to do. You're supposed to review, do deal reviews you. You do them, but do you do as many as you really want to do? You consistently do it. I personally find it goes up and down a little bit and there are periods of intense scrutiny and there's changes, right. What this has allowed me to do is be the best sales leader. A higher percentage of the time Because it's not a whole day I have to block out from my schedule to do it. I have a block of an hour and I'll review the last week's calls and then I'll message people. Great call, mate. Really like what you did there. How do you thought about ABC? And when you start having those interactions with sales people, they go.
Speaker 1:I've got a leader that actually listens to my calls and cares and giving me insight to what I should do differently. It's not telling me off, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I think coaching is another area that's fundamentally changed. It allows you to be a better coach, and it's not necessarily telling me what to say as a coach, but it's highlighting the areas that I need to actually use my brain and dig into. Well, that looks like something I should probably dig into a little bit more, and I'm learning a lot doing it too.
Speaker 1:I think as a sales rep as well, a massive opportunity for people to see is to leverage AI as a coach, like how are you not asking the AI? Or just in general. Hey, here's what I'm adding to this account. This deal had this last call. Can you listen to the transcript and tell me four things that I could have done differently?
Speaker 2:had this last call. Can you listen to the transcript and tell? Me four things that I could have done. Yeah, we do that and that's fabulous.
Speaker 1:Right, it's got to be part and parcel of where we evolve to over time as just what we expect people to be natural in doing. And again, I think the opportunity is. I'm doing some work with a couple small businesses at the moment and are they leveraging this stuff or not? I think that obviously everybody, to their scale and capacity of what they can afford and not, and even the time to do it. I think that's the other piece that really jumps out to me about the usage of AI.
Speaker 1:None of this stuff takes one minute to set up. None of it takes, and the training, I think, is you and the AI. When I talk about training the AI model, I think the model extends to how you leverage and how you use it, how you instruct it, how you prompt it, how you connect the systems in, how you give it the information and the data points and tagging that it needs to know what it's looking at and it's getting better and better and what it is today is not what it was in 2020. And it's going to be better again by 2028.
Speaker 2:Yeah fundamentally different this time next year.
Speaker 1:Eons beyond what it is? Yeah, and I think the challenge is if you don't, use it.
Speaker 2:You're behind. Yeah, you are, I agree, and I think it's probably worth a complete, separate podcast. But the idea of the dialogue you have with an AI to get value, not hallucination, is interesting. We went through a couple of days as leaders being trained on what we can do, what we should be doing. My business actually took us out of the business for a couple of days just to sit down and talk to us about A we want you to use it. B here are the tools we've got for you. C we've given you a tool where you can put in all of companies' IP and not be afraid of it.
Speaker 2:But, by the way, here's how you actually interact with one to get the best results. And they've actually. They said here's a 30-page document of best practice interaction with an AI, and they did this to us on purpose. And we looked and well, I'm not going to read that. And they said so we don't want you to read it. What you want to do is upload it and interact with it, and so we don't want you to read it. What you want to do is upload it and interact with it, and so it's just very circular, that one, and you load this document before you do deep analysis, and it automatically knows the guardrails. And it's, oh my God, fantastic.
Speaker 1:The only thing I would say on that idea, though, which is I think there's a problematic piece to this, which is when do we do deep thinking? I think there's a problematic piece to this, which is when do we do deep thinking? And I'm talking to my daughter a lot at the moment. She's at the age where she watches the news and sees a lot of stuff on social media, et cetera, and she's right into reading books, which is great to see, right, but she's also started to read, and she actually was forced at school to read a dystopian book, and I'd studied dystopia, utopia, four-unit English at high school. They've given her a half a dozen different books to go and read, to talk about. We're in a problematic timeframe at the moment, where a lot of these things are coming to pass, but if you haven't read the books, if you haven't fundamentally got into the detail of all the steps that occur, when you get the summary on ChatGPT that says this is a utopia, oh you lose it, you don't understand it.
Speaker 2:There's no journey. There's no journey, it's just a destination.
Speaker 1:There's no depth to your true understanding Spot on again.
Speaker 1:So I think this is an issue that, as salespeople and look, I'm battling this at the moment in all fairness, I'm in a new subset industry at the moment, the moment in all fairness, I'm in a new subset industry at the moment and I've had to express a couple of times look, I'm a, I'm a good expert in sales and now I've got a podcast, but I'm not a subject matter expert in this particular topic and I'm having to lean on others and having to call out a number of times. I'm not not seven months in, I'm not a subject matter expert and I and it takes time, it takes research, it takes education to really get below the detail, takes takes skin knees for you to truly get the experience of what it looks like agree.
Speaker 2:I think if you're in the industry and you're a trainer, you're probably going to move away from note-taking skills and move more towards critical thinking skills yes, yes, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Danielle Pearson, who we had on the podcast a couple of episodes back, is, as I know, spending a whole bunch of time focusing on that critical thinking space at the moment, and that's what she talks a whole lot about as well. I think that's absolutely correct.
Speaker 2:Yep, it's really interesting. So I guess we're almost at the end, but look, I think of us as we're at the Netscape phase of all of this.
Speaker 2:I'll never forget when I first joined SAP and the internet was this is 94. Netscape had just been really and I remember they gave us they all gave us all laptops. We were consultants and very exciting to have your own laptop and they said, but you're not allowed to use the internet because it's a waste of time. They gave us machines to work on and just can you imagine today if here's a laptop but you're not allowed to use the internet. It's just, it's an anathema. That was eventually changed. They realized the internet wasn't a waste of time. You weren't going to sit on Netscape browser and waste your day and not be productive. I think the not using AI to having AI in a business environment, even if it's not agentive, even if it's really very, very simple, I think most businesses, if they're not thinking about having their teams using this right now, should be. It's just a fundamental sales tool that I just don't think we can get away with not using. I'm just going to be fascinated and see how it evolves.
Speaker 1:I can't wait To that analogy. Simon, I'll give the lesson at the end of our session that we normally give. In the early 2000s, when I was first in my sales career, I was selling retail products to Aldi and when Aldi first launched in Australia, there was one email address for the whole of Aldi Australia, because the CEO at the time was a German bloke didn't believe in email. So we struggled to send across stuff like the updated price list and bits and pieces and there's an order form and we had to fax it. This was in the 2000s and we actually had to go and like, when we put the printer in, someone went we're not faxing enough, don't worry about it. We had to go and connect and get a line put in for the fax line to send stuff to Aldi. Now, 18 months later, that evolved and they rolled out email and it all went from there.
Speaker 1:But we're only talking kind of 20 years ago. Yeah, the evolution from a company that didn't believe fundamentally in and they had an internal internet email system but they didn't believe in talking. They wanted people to talk to customers and deal physically with people because they were selling physical products Get it In 20 years to evolve to a scenario where I'm confident Aldi will be using some form of AI to talk about ranging and price, competitiveness and rebates. All this type of stuff, they do it. I don't have to lift the lid to know theyiveness and rebates, of course, all this type of stuff, they do it. I don't have to lift the lids and know they're doing it right. Yep, this is the speed we're changing at. If you're not changing how you're approaching your role, what you do, what you think your industry is going to be at, if you're sitting back, you're going to be a victim to it, your competitor's doing it, yeah, and, to be honest, use it for good.
Speaker 2:It doesn't replace work, it just enhances the quality of your output and I think it improves your chance of winning a deal 100%.
Speaker 1:Mate great to chat as always, absolutely. For everyone listening, please click and subscribe. If you're watching on YouTube, hey, comment, share with your friends. If you're listening to us on Spotify or Apple, please click the plus sign so we can get to the next episode. But it's been fun, mate. Simon, I love these chats. I hope everyone's enjoyed it online and we'll talk to you guys all next time. Thank you, thanks, guys, thank you.
