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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.
Trevor Jett [00:00:00]:
Know what an agent is. The agents are where the value is. Understand what an agent is versus general AI and understand how to use that agent to personify someone on your sales team and create a teammate that's going to make the rest of your team better.
Jarod Greene [00:00:15]:
You're listening to The Unexpected Lever your partner in growing revenue by doing what you already do best, combining your technical skills with your strategic insights. This episode was taken from a LinkedIn Live series about sales engineering with our CEO Matt Darrow. We hope you enjoy.
Matt Darrow [00:00:32]:
Hey everyone, thanks for joining us today. I'm Matt Darrow, Co-Founder, CEO of Vivun. I started Vivun after a career running global SE teams at private and publicly traded companies. And here with Trevor, Trevor Jett. Trevor, give the audience a bit of background about yourself that isn't about classic cars in 1983 computers. Who are you?
Trevor Jett [00:00:48]:
That's my preferred topic. So I'm the CRO here at Vivun. I've spent the last we'll truncate it to 20 plus years in software sales, but I've been through all of the big ups and downs of big data to even like when the Internet first came out, back to some of the first deals that I sold. When you finished the deal, the whole thing was to put it in a CD and ship it off to them because nobody downloaded anything. So I've been through a lot of the ups and downs. Started my career as an SE actually. So I'm a recovering smart person and then I moved to the dark side and then the darker side into sales leadership.
Matt Darrow [00:01:23]:
Awesome. And I actually appreciate as we work together, in your background you've seen companies of different size and scopes as well, from startups to large publicly traded enterprises running sales teams of different shapes and sizes and different breadths. Not just a CRO by elevated sales title, but actually different groups around SDR, customer success, sales engineering along the way. So a lot of breadth in that experience too, which is why it's the perfect background for today's discussion and the topic that we want to hit which is all around AI for sales teams and specifically as a sales leader. How are you going to empower your team with AI that's going to drive results that's not going to create yet even more tool sprawl. So if you're in sales or presales and you're trying to keep up with AI's increasing impact on your role, you are definitely in the right place. So Trevor, kind of a little bit of a softball to start with, but it's a Good one. It seems CROs like yourself are already hitting peak exhaustion around AI product pitches, vendors coming to you and your team.
Matt Darrow [00:02:20]:
Bring us all into the noise machine. What are you getting hit with?
Trevor Jett [00:02:25]:
It's almost as if all of the emails that I would get before are just augmented with AI and so just every bit of AI this, AI that, that you can imagine. The, the thing that's most in common is that it doesn't seem like anybody that's pitching me or writing these emails truly understands what AI is and appreciates the problem. That AI just two letters encapsulates a whole bunch of things. We need some more words and then we need some better definitions for those, those words. But for sure it's a, it's, it's a broad brush they're trying to paint some very specific use cases with. And it's, it's difficult as a sales leader to figure out what I should click on, what I shouldn't.
Matt Darrow [00:03:04]:
Well, let's sort of pull that thread on the confusion and the overwhelm here. So CROs in general, there's a lot of top down pressure from CEOs and boards to say, hey, we gotta be invested in AI. Then you've got this bottoms up pressure around sort of all this noise that's coming at you from things that you probably thought you bought 10 years ago that just has AI appended to it. And it's really hard to make heads or tails of where to even start. So when you talk to your CRO peers, what are the misconceptions that you're hearing about AI from them?
Trevor Jett [00:03:32]:
Yeah, I think the biggest is again definitional, but just understanding what is an agent and what is personal productivity feature, everything in between. Everyone thinks everything is AI, but when it comes down to the specific things that have the most impact for, for me as a sales leader to go use within my organization, those are the agents. And it seems like agent is being assigned to everything and in between, including workflows. I think a lot of my peers, we just had a dinner recently where we discussed this with a bunch of sales leaders and it seemed like agent was understood to be an agent in a workflow, as in like a worker that was getting something done rather than a personification of a person or some other part of your team. I found that to be really interesting.
Matt Darrow [00:04:22]:
Well, even, even that, that loose definition that's thrown around about agent, I ran into that even a couple of weeks ago. I was doing this, you know, CRM forum and the moderator asked eight panelists, there were eight of us. By the way, this is a divine agent. You know, like every person had a very, very different definition to that. And I had to laugh because it should be quite simple. And the way that I would always see it is an agent is a domain expert who's capable of doing real work unprompted. So if it can't do work without you telling it what to do, it is not an agent. But also, by the way, to your point is there's a whole bunch of other AI tools out there that are not agents in that regard, right? They don't have domain expertise, they're not doing work for you when you're not asking them to do it. This is just this rest of this ecosystem of AI things that you can go ahead and use. So what's your framework for making sense of maybe the whole universe of what you might want to be invested in or helping your sales team use? How do other CROs, how can they start to think about it?
Trevor Jett [00:05:17]:
Yeah, breaking down into, into buckets, I think, and doing no more than three. I think if you looked at what everybody knows, sales leaders really keep it simple. Like the open AIs and the Claudes, the, the LLMs, the, the foundational level, like that's one thing, that's what, what things are built upon and that's what most people are, are aware of, but those are not agents. That, that foundational level is important and a lot of people use them and they provide a lot of utility for a lot of people. That's one thing. So the foundational level, then AI as it shows up in different tools, as it shows up in point solutions. When I'm in a Google email now, I can swipe right and it'll rewrite an email in a way that sounds nothing like me, but probably better. That personal productivity level is important.
Trevor Jett [00:06:03]:
And then where I think the focus should be, where the return is and the opportunity to really drive massive value, is in the true agents, which I look at as teammates to my team that they can go in and work with to draw out the best of what they know and what they do and allow them as individuals, as human workers to go do the things that they do best as well. So those true agents being the sort of the top of the list.
Matt Darrow [00:06:32]:
Well, I even like that hierarchy. Super clear, right? Cool. So we've got foundational models, productivity point, solution, agent. At least now we have a framework to think about and talk about it because even Vivun over here we have these. In different regards to your point, like everybody, we have an enterprise wide license for OpenAI. It's great because everybody has very, very different use cases that you might use across marketing and finance and sales. It's a great, just general purpose powerhouse tool.
Matt Darrow [00:06:57]:
Phenomenal. And then also I love the Gmail Gemini reference. That was spot on, right? That's just embedded into SaaS products that we already pay for. LinkedIn does that for us too, right? If you're on LinkedIn trying to connect with somebody, it kind of gives you intent signals, account research signals, right? That's embedded in that workflow. And then the agentic side for us, not only do we supply a true agent as sales engineer that just works alongside your reps, but we've made the cut where we've basically decommissioned inbound SDRs in different levels of the SDR function and turn them into true agents that soup to nuts do their whole process. It sounds like it can be a lot of new tech though. And in talking with a lot of Crosby, everyone's really conscious about having way too many tools. I was meeting a couple of weeks ago and you know, the CRO basically said, hey look, my reps spend over 50% of their time just wrangling all the SaaS crap that I bought them over the last decade. So how do we avoid that? Or what's your take on that?
Trevor Jett [00:07:50]:
It sounds like the procurement people I deal with and they're discussing reduction of stack. That's absolutely going to happen Again with, with AI tools. It's the trouble with Tribbles, if you know that Star Trek episode, they're all over the place. There's a, there's an agent for everything and there's a cost associated with it as well. So when you add them all up it's almost like your, your subscriptions to all your different Netflix and so forth. And I think the lens that you have to look at it through is that they can be anti productive in terms of having too many that people work with and they're not mission critical. Like I really don't want to invest in something that's going to do for my team that which they should already know how to do. You know, I don't want to reach speed through personal productivity.
Trevor Jett [00:08:38]:
So I'm really looking for mission critical tools that are out there. I don't want to buy 10, I want to buy a handful and make sure that they have a huge impact.
Matt Darrow [00:08:47]:
I think, you know what was so painful for an individual user or seller is that, well, if I need to go to 10 separate tools because I need to do one whole part of my workflow, right? That that's really, really tough on me versus, hey, things are done proactively for me. So I know from working with you, like you're invested in AI tools, you bought a whole variety here. How do you cut through the noise and figure out for yourself what's really going to help you? And maybe what's a mental model to say? Okay, we've talked about this. Foundational models, productivity point solutions, and agents. Okay, so we've got three big buckets for sales leaders to sort of hold in their mind here. And those are great because they're all sort of useful in different ways.
Matt Darrow [00:09:22]:
But then you're ultimately going to decide, well, what do you want to put in the hands of your sales reps and what's going to rise to the top of the stack? So how do you evaluate them?
Trevor Jett [00:09:30]:
Yeah, I think across a few different dimensions. What's nice about this is that they're the same dimensions as we've evaluated anything else in the past. So it's really not a new view of things. But when you're making that investment, it's just all the more important when we're confronted with something as new and confusing as AI can be, that it does one of three things. Hopefully two or three things, it's going to affect cost, speed, or quality. If I can get one, I'll have my favorite. But if I can do two of the three of those, that's important for me. Speed as a sales leader, as I'm scaling an organization is critical because if I can take some part of the process and speed it up or move this thing around so that I have this call earlier or I don't even have this other call that speed will show up.
Trevor Jett [00:10:18]:
In the final analysis, my team's going to be better and faster because the email got written automatically. Like, that's not going to add up. That's. That's not a thing for me. So really being able to manifest itself into speed and at the same time maintaining quality, I think is important. If I can have my team do things better and sooner in the sales cycle, which is speed, then that's going to allow me to change my sales process and it's going to allow me to have impact on things that I look at, which is cycle time, stage, conversion velocity, things like that.
Matt Darrow [00:10:51]:
Well, let's just riff on that for a second too, because I see a lot of messaging directed at sales leaders to say, don't hire these people or cut your cost out. You know, reduce your cost and My sense is CFO probably gets hyped up about that. But it's like, look, you give them a budget envelope to operate in. Your kind of cost profile is there. Like, I'm assuming you're not waking up every night in cold sluts trying to figure out how to know save a penny on the dollar, but when you are waking up in cold sluts of saying, well, why does it take so long for my rep to get enabled? How can they be productive faster? And how do I take a deal cycle that takes 10 meetings down to three meetings and then the whole system moves faster?
Trevor Jett [00:11:26]:
And I think when we look at AI, we think either in, in terms of we've overthought things and it's going to just, you know, we're going to have a, a human that we can go, you know, show up in qbrs and it's an avatar that sits at the table and has a beer with us. Or we've just underestimated like what the possibility is and it seems like the initial, like craziness of AI and like it's going to take over the world and, and all of that is over. And now we're really focused on what it can do. And I'm seeing a lot of underestimation of what's possible. What I really looking for is something that can go in there and help strategize and contemplate the best solution, the best answer, make all of those pieces better so that I can have an impact on my velocity.
Matt Darrow [00:12:08]:
Well, let's just take a concrete example of speed them. Enablement. It's always a struggle. You need to keep reps. Not only you need to bring new reps on board, but even when you have 10, 100, a thousand, 5,000 sellers, the product's always changing. So you need to keep them up to speed at the pace of development and at least from a founder's chair, what I can really appreciate in this world is Gen completely made every company rewrite their roadmap. Even the same thing with Salesforce last year saying we're all in on agent force, where that's really different than selling mulesoft or what they had in the past. So even though you might have an established sales team, people are always coming and going, products are always changing.
Matt Darrow [00:12:44]:
How can sort of this mindset shift here for a CRO and just a different way to approach speed, Especially when it comes to enablement.
Trevor Jett [00:12:53]:
I think ramping Is a huge part of that. Enablement's a very important thing because enablement writes down what the answer is, you know, here's the issue, this is what the company has deliberated on and said like here's what our response is generally to this, whether that's battle cards, overall general strategy, answers to specific questions, we do this, we don't do this, so forth. But when I, I look at any company I've worked for the, the top 1% of account executives, they're usually not in the enablement sessions. Like the enablement is there for the masses. The top 1% gets to work with the top 1% of the SEs or the top half percent or fewer of the SEs and they understand things that the masses don't because the masses are getting the company line. That's deliberated and there's a huge lag between what that shows up as and like what the teams out closing the big deals are, are doing. That typical process that could take months. So I think being able to put that in a place where the AEs can have access to the right information and they can do it faster and they can ramp faster and they don't have to wait three weeks to go to the, the enablement session like they can get access to that information as soon as possible.
Trevor Jett [00:14:05]:
I think is, is pretty important that the goal should be to get the brains of our best people all of those answers and get them into the masses and not just the top AEs.
Matt Darrow [00:14:17]:
I think if we call spade a spade though, Nobody's reading the 40 page PDF inside of your enablement repository, they're just not doing it. And if they are good on them, they just, they didn't retain any more than 1% of it. And I can attest even during our time at Zuora on the IPO run, like building and running the SC team over there, like my team and my sales counterparts in the present that we'd work with, we were the tip of the spear figuring out how to position something in a deal or how to sell around particular capabilities or what is the right solution for this industry. Like we were the feedback into what would be then written in the 40 page PowerPoint presentation that nobody bothered reading. So it's a super interesting new world because rather than figuring out well, how do I centralize documents and pray that my reps are going to read it and stay up to date, the super big alternative is, well, if I just gave them an AI teammate who was always up to speed in learning in a different way, that's how you get a big leverage effect on something like speed that you're Talking about because you're not, you're not sort of enforcing the same old process.
Trevor Jett [00:15:16]:
I hearken back to when I was an search, when I was ramping up that the expectation for me to demo was like three or four months, which is a fairly long time. But what everyone would tell you anecdotally is that I wasn't going to be useful for a year. Like it was going to be a year before I was going to be a good se. And most of the learning that I did was like in the copy room when I'd find that the number one search, James Alexander, if you're out there and I'll be like, hey, how do I demo this? And then I'd get all that inside information. And that's what helped me ramp up as a sales leader. Now I think about that as like, I'm going to hire an SE and wait a year before they're really potent. I can't afford that. I can't afford that ramp, doesn't work.
Trevor Jett [00:16:02]:
Well, we'll think about a sales rep ramp because what are you training them on? Because every sales leader that's hiring a salesperson, you're going to make sure that they've been to Force Management training. Are they certified in BANT or MEDDIC, right? Can they fill out salesforce? Are they generally somebody that you want to travel with? All the things that they know. Can they open pipeline, close deals, build relationships, do the politics work on, work with procurement? Great. But so the thing that happens is all these reps move from company to company is what do they not know? They don't know about your customers, they don't know about your competition, they don't know about your products, right? That's what they don't know. So that's how you can do things with AI to completely collapse ramp time or really accelerate things or make things happen faster.
Matt Darrow [00:16:41]:
Is that's the missing piece that a great sales professional from company A to B, they still have the bones of being a great sales professional. They just don't own that mix. So speaking of agents though, I know that there's a lot of hesitation from folks out there that feel like, well, these agents are here just to take all the humans jobs. And that makes people a little bit leery about, well, how do I position an investment like this or how would I bring this on board? We've made a big shift. I'm not even going to talk about the SE front of what we've done there, but let's talk about the SDR front, right?
Matt Darrow [00:17:09]:
We said, you know, we used to have a big SDR team inbound and outbound and everything else. And we've kind of dismantled that. We're like, hey, we, we found ways with Agentix Solutions. We don't need inbound SDRs anymore. We're radically changing the outbound profile. We've done the same thing on the SE front, helping the reps. So what's your take on that? You know, a little bit of that hesitation that the agents are here to just make every company have one employee, the CEO.
Trevor Jett [00:17:32]:
I think if, if you have that perspective and you truly understand what's possible and what's likely with AI, then you should probably contemplate what you're doing for the company, because nobody's out here to replace humans. The idea is that we are going to take the best of what is available with humans and replicate that out so that everybody can have access to it. It's really just a democratization of the knowledge of the best of the best and being able to spread that faster. We're not trying to. In Vivun's case specifically, no one's coming after an SE's job. Nobody's trying to make fewer SES, we're just trying to make more effective and potent AEs. That's what the purpose is. The things that the SE does really well, we're going to free up more of that SE's time to do those things.
Trevor Jett [00:18:20]:
And the things that the SC doesn't want to go discuss with 10 or 30, however many AEs they support, they're not going to have to. That's the point of it, is balancing it all out.
Matt Darrow [00:18:30]:
Let me bring this maybe back to the top of our conversation where you said about all the noise and sort of the overwhelming confusion around everything is AI, everything is an agent. That's not this case. So we tried to break down here as the definition of an agent. I evaluate on these different dimensions on cost, quality and speed. We sort of debunked this myth of if you bring an agent on, you know, your people aren't necessarily going to freak out. They're going to, they're going to welcome you for this. So a tangential topic. For years in Silicon Valley, there's always this big mantra around, buyers just want to be left alone.
Matt Darrow [00:19:00]:
I remember over a decade ago at Zora where we published, and it was sort of famous at the time as the quote, unquote, best sales deck ever made, even though none of us actually used it in the field, the proclamation was 80% of the buyer Decision was made up before they ever talk to you. So let's just let them subscribe to your service, right? That was our big mantra. We were doing subscription infrastructure. So great. What better way to help people out than they don't want to talk to you? They've already made up your mind, so just give them an easy way to go buy and get started. That doesn't seem to be true anymore. Like, I'm not talking to CROs who are coming to me and saying, hey, Matt, man, if only I could get out of this sales game and just make my buyers do 100% of everything on their own, then I'm going to absolutely crush it and my business will win.
Matt Darrow [00:19:42]:
What are you seeing on that front too? Because I think it's a radical change of where all the narrative was going for a very long time.
Trevor Jett [00:19:47]:
If that were the case, we'd have SaaS, vending machines for a long time. And I haven't seen one of those. The reason why our buyers spend their time to try to get 80% of the knowledge before they call us and they, they want to be left alone is because we're annoying and we don't know anything. We're not helping them. We're just trying to get them into a sales cycle. If we can take the front of that sales process and through AI, help them to actually provide some value back to a customer who's looking through an ever more confusing field of, of stuff. And this is irrespective of what you're selling, the sooner you can move that value up from the SE to the AE to even the bdr, where there's value, there's clarity that's being provided. They will want to talk to you.
Trevor Jett [00:20:36]:
They don't want to talk to you because you're not going to provide anything. All they want to do is close the call, move you into the process and collect their, their S0 or whatever it happens to be. But if on that call you can go have a conversation because you have had access to all of these things and now you are not an empty suit, as we used to say at SAP, but you're providing some value and some clarity, that's going to totally flip. That's going to be exactly the opposite.
Matt Darrow [00:20:59]:
I look at that as, you know, more power to the sales team, right? More power to sales. For them to go and say, buyers, they are confused. Like, think about all this and how all these tools and systems work and security concerns. Like, they left to their own devices. They're not going to be able to shepherd for the way that they want. So if we can give more power to sales and do that more upfront in the process, then you're going to be in a really different spot. So we're coming up top of the hour. If people remember only one thing from the convo today, what, what should it be? Trevor, what are you going to leave the audience with?
Trevor Jett [00:21:29]:
I'd say know what an agent is. The agents are where the value is. Understand what an agent is versus general AI and understand how to use that agent to personify someone on your sales team and create a teammate that's going to make the rest of your team better. There's one thing that's out there, like cut through all the noise and the personal productivity and focus on on that because that's where your return is going to be.
Matt Darrow [00:21:52]:
Thanks, Trevor. Well, hey audience members out there, if you enjoy the discussion, you want to learn more, you want to talk to us more, follow us on LinkedIn. Subscribe to Vivun's podcast, The Unexpected Lever, and we have these continued conversations every month with experts across a variety of topics in B2B sales. Thanks for joining us and we'll see everybody next time.
Jarod Greene [00:22:12]:
For additional resources, check out vivun.com and be sure to check out V5, our five minute soapbox series on YouTube. If there's a V5 you'd like us to talk about longer, let us know by messaging me Jarod Greene on LinkedIn.