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The secret sauce to your sales success? It’s what happens before the sale. It’s the planning, the strategy, the leadership. And it’s more than demo automation. It’s the thoughtful work that connects people, processes, and performance. If you want strong revenue, high retention, and shorter sales cycles, the pre-work—centered around the human—still makes the dream work. But you already know that.
The Unexpected Lever is your partner in growing revenue by doing what great sales leaders do best. Combining vision with execution. Brought to you by Vivun, this show highlights the people and peers behind the brands who understand what it takes to build and lead high-performing sales teams. You’re not just preparing for the sale—you’re unlocking potential.
Join us as we share stories of sales leaders who make a difference, their challenges, their wins, and the human connections that drive results, one solution at a time.
Jarod Greene [00:00:00]:
Hey everybody. Welcome to V5 where we spend exactly five minutes getting on our soapbox some of the hottest topics in all of B2B SaaS and sales. This is going to be a fun one. I have the one, the only, the man, the myth, the legend, Mr. Kyle Coleman, CMO Copy.ai. How you doing Kyle?
Kyle Coleman [00:00:18]:
I'm living the dream, my friend. It's great to be here.
Jarod Greene [00:00:21]:
Great to have you. Good to see. Kyle would not tell me to hot take. So I'm going to hear that same time you guys here. So that's how we play. Kyle, five minutes. Fire off, hot spicy take.
Kyle Coleman [00:00:30]:
We got hot take is learning how to prompt is a waste of your time. Everybody's hearing about all the rage is ChatGPT. And to get real value out of AI, I need to learn these really in-depth prompt engineering skills. I need to be able to manipulate these models on and on and on like this is what you're hearing. And that may be true to get some value out of AI today. But if you're a sales leader, if you're a go-to-market leader and you expect to realize the transformational value of AI by expecting all of your sales reps, all of your marketing team to learn how to prompt, you are going to be sorely disappointed. And the parallel I draw on is if you're going to go build a website today, you're not going to go learn how to write HTML, you're going to go get Squarespace, you're going to create a website in a day. And it's the same thing for how to get real value out of AI tools.
Kyle Coleman [00:01:18]:
Forget about the prompting. The best AI solution should do that for you so that you can integrate it into your systems and everybody can really realize the full value without needing all the change management of learning a new language, which is what prompting is. So there you go. What do you think?
Jarod Greene [00:01:33]:
That's a good one. That's what we aim to do. Where have you seen this play out really well? Because I'd imagine, you know, we've seen this for the last, I'd say two years. It's been like in our hands, pretty transformative and we've seen a lot of takes on this. One thing I've seen, it moves really, really fast. And so what got you to that epiphany of like the waste of time on prompt engineering is time I could have spent somewhere else. What got you to this, to this thing?
Kyle Coleman [00:01:55]:
Yeah, it was mostly dry, it was hearing how people are disappointed with AI and they don't believe in the value of AI because their experience with it was going into ChatGPT and being like, write me a blog post. And then the blog post sucks because your prompting sucks. And then they say, ah, no, AI is just a fad, it's never going to be valuable. I've heard that, or a story similar to that for SDRs and salespeople and sales engineers and on and on and on, like same sort of thing. Upload a transcript from a sales call and say, "give me the medic information" and it doesn't work. And so the flip side of that is you have the one salesperson that's going crazy inside your organization and they're spending 20 hours a week learning how to prompt and now they're not doing their day job.
Kyle Coleman [00:02:36]:
So it's like I've seen both sides of this spectrum. Now I understand the enthusiasm because it's exciting, that this new technology is exciting. But you're totally right that the market has moved very fast and the best products are abstracting or eliminating that need for you to do the prompting. They're eliminating that and they're delivering the value that you're gonna get out of these LLMs in a different sort of way. So skate toward that different sort of way. Again, otherwise the change management inside your organization is gonna be immense and you're gonna be disappointed.
Jarod Greene [00:03:06]:
And then Kyle, you've seen the full gamut, I think of all kind of use cases. Where have you seen kind of AI transformation, kind of your top-of-funnel sales development set based on prompt engineering skills or not? Where have you just kind of tell the people what you've seen?
Kyle Coleman [00:03:20]:
I'll give you the high-level answer which is, what is AI really good at? It's really good at synthesizing huge amounts of unstructured data. In the past that took humans to do. We need a human analyst that we're going to read the reports, read the 10ks, read the earnings calls, do the research on the Internet, whatever it is like it took humans to do that synthesis of unstructured data. Generative AI is way better, way faster, way cheaper than humans are at doing that. So that's step number one. Let's get and shrink or collapse the time to insight. From there you need to execute, okay, you've done the research on the account, you have it all. AI has done that for you.
Kyle Coleman [00:03:56]:
Now you need to do something like you need to write the outbound emails or do the ABM campaign or create the custom content or something like that. And AI is very good at this as well. So now you can collapse the time to insight, you collapse the time to execution and now your go--to-market team can start running with real sustainable velocity. And it's across everything. Content creation, campaign execution, account-based marketing, deal coaching, outbound, inbound, lead-processing. Everywhere. It's everywhere. You just have to look for it and you have to understand and have the best practices that you can train the AI on so that it's doing the things that you uniquely need to do for your company.
Jarod Greene [00:04:31]:
Amen. Love it;
Jarod Greene [00:04:32]:
Speak gospel, Kyle. It was funny because we had Blue Bowen on a couple weeks ago and I asked Blue what his hot take was and he said, hey, AI SDRs are the future, but for processing inbound, he went specifically to that use case and I said, I got Kyle out in a couple weeks, I'm going to ask him his take there. So Blue said, yeah, it's going to change the game broadly. But he talked specifically for AI SDRs to process inbound leads and I just wanted to get your take there.
Kyle Coleman [00:04:57]:
I see no problem with AI SDRs taking an inbound lead, you know, a demo request lead, doing research on that lead, doing lead scoring, writing the follow-up and sending automated email. But you and I both know, Jarod, like you're not going to get everybody to convert by sending them an email. There still is human in the loop. That's really important. You're like, you need to make the phone calls, you need to do the LinkedIn work, you need to prove that you care about the people that are raising their hand. If you don't do that and you outsource everything to AI, your buyer is going to feel like you don't care about them. And like it or not, that's still a huge component of sales and marketing. So, I'm bullish on AI.
Kyle Coleman [00:05:33]:
I'm not so bullish on the fully automate everything, we don't need humans anymore.
Jarod Greene [00:05:39]:
Love it. Love to hear and seeing the ads. These are really clever and I really appreciate what you do for if I've been injured by an AI SDR, who do I call?
Kyle Coleman [00:05:46]:
Call copy.ai/injured. We got you.
Jarod Greene [00:05:50]:
All right, if you've been injured or hurt in a bit of an accident, please call her. You got it. Kyle, thanks for joining us for V5. No, we really appreciate it.
Kyle Coleman [00:05:56]:
Likewise, my friend, Always a pleasure.
Jarod Greene [00:05:58]:
Hey everybody, I just wrapped V5 recording with Kyle Coleman and this was a fun one. Kyle, tell the people why they will want it to hear this one.
Kyle Coleman [00:06:07]:
Because you've been let down by AI and you need to understand, we get real value out of it.
Jarod Greene [00:06:12]:
There you go. To the point. See you guys on the V5.