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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):
Hey everybody. Welcome to V5, where we spend exactly five minutes getting on our soapbox for some of the hottest takes in all the B2B sales, B2B SaaS, all things go-to-market and all things AI. This is going to be a good one. I have Mark Niemiec, CRO at Salesloft, who's going to talk a little bit about... Mark, we talking about, what do we say? We're going to talk about fellow people and what's the take?
Mark Niemiec (00:23):
We're going to talk about AI. We're going to talk about the business of sales. We're going to talk about where the future's going, may make a prediction or two that no doubt will be wrong, but we'll have some fun.
Jarod Greene (00:31):
Let's do it. So Mark, what do you got top of mind? What is your hot, spicy take?
Mark Niemiec (00:35):
One of the things I think a lot about is the job of sales, and I talk a lot to folks about how I don't really think sales is a job. The job that we're all in as we engage with customers is helping them solve problems. Sales is just the measurement of that. And so did we solve a problem that had value? Did we connect that value back to a business problem that the customer really cares about? That's a priority. If you do, the byproduct of that is you're going to sell something, but the real job you did was you helped a customer solve a business problem that had business value, and you got that to the top of the priority list. And that's really what we're here to do is help customers solve problems that are impactful for their business.
Jarod Greene (01:09):
Mark, what would you say are some of the characteristics of the folks who best help people solve those problems?
Mark Niemiec (01:15):
Folks who are deeply, deeply concerned with listening to customers. So understanding what really, really is driving the customer, spending time doing your research, spending time meeting different folks inside of the company, getting different perspectives on what the challenges are and how those challenges can best be solved. So folks who do great discovery, who do it thoughtfully are the folks that tend to do really, really well. And then folks who are creative, who can understand, here's what my customer is challenged by, here's what my product does. How do I put those two things together in a way that's compelling, that gets the customer to think about this thing can really solve my problem, or I really do see the business impact of this. That requires discovery. It requires empathy, it requires creativity, it requires a business mind, somebody who can think about how to prioritize those really meaningful challenges and make them communicate in a compelling way.
Jarod Greene (02:04):
Mark, I think I know the answer to this, but so AI to help those people, friend or foe?
Mark Niemiec (02:11):
I think it's a big friend. We had a debate about nine months ago. One of our sales motions is developing a point of view and it takes our salespeople, our sales engineers, our value engineers, 8, 10, 12 hours each to do research and come up with that point of view. And so you got 36 hours and the high end of that per account. And that is really, really, that's a lot of time. And so we had a debate about whether or not we should let the reps use AI or encourage them to use AI in that process. And there was a group of folks who said, absolutely not. They have to do the work. They have to walk uphill both ways to school with no shoes on, and they got to do the work. AI is cheating.
(02:45):
There was another group of folks who said, no, no, no, this is the future. If we don't teach them how to use this AI in a way that's going to be a force multiplier for them, that's going to drive consistency. We are going to be left behind. And the two sides, they debated quite aggressively for a couple hours and in the end, the AI team was more compelling and convincing. And so what we provided their teams with was a series of really well thought out prompts, recommended AI tools that actually ended up becoming a product that is our Account Research Agent that we released in May. That product was birthed in our own process. The other components of that offering were a result of when we thought about how we actually figure out who the buyers are and who were the folks who should be the influencers, how do we build that power map? All that pre-sales work we were doing was the inspiration for the AI Agent Platform that we brought out to market just last month. And so we're really, really happy to see that.
Jarod Greene (03:37):
Congratulations. Yeah, I know launches are hard. There's a lot out there. We're working with sales teams every day who I think are on different spectrums. As you mentioned in your own team of where they are on their AI readiness journey, their ability to adopt it, the use of it in their personal life makes a difference. Were there any demographics between the two teams? Was it a mixed group? Was it, I got to be careful. Was it tenure? Was it kind of the tech-nativism of it all? What were some of the differences between the two groups?
Mark Niemiec (04:06):
We have a pretty low average employee age here. I think our average employee is about 29 or 30. The group was pretty well connected in terms of the generation. That wasn't the defining factor. It was a little bit of the jobs that people had come from doing. So the folks who came from jobs that were more research-oriented, that were more analytical, those folks were saying, Hey, no, we need to do this the old fashioned way. The folks that came from jobs that were more technical in orientation, which said, no, no, no, we need to use AI here. But more interestingly, I was at a CRO summit several months ago in Vegas and there was a debate in the room about the same topic and some of the customers had different points of view. And what you're pointing out I think is one of the things we found in the room.
(04:48):
Our customers told us. The folks that are typically embracing AI tend to fall on the earlier in career part of the spectrum. They tend to be a little bit more malleable. They tend not to have these behaviors and beliefs that may have been built up over time. And so what these customers describe almost to a team is that the folks that were earlier in career are embracing AI at a higher rate than the folks that are later in career. We are starting to see that a little bit in that environment. At Salesloft, we have a pretty young employee population, so everybody is super happy to dive into AI and learn and grow and all the things that are connected to this new platform we have. So everybody's diving in pretty aggressively here.
Jarod Greene (05:26):
Mark, that is all. Thank you for sharing. I told you these things go pretty quick. Mark, where can folks find you, folks who want to say, yeah, that's a really interesting conversation. I want to dig a little deeper. I just want to learn about Mark, want to learn about Salesloft. Where do folks engage?
Mark Niemiec (05:38):
On LinkedIn? Mark Niemiec at LinkedIn. I'm out there. I post content once a week, maybe a little bit more often, but I love to engage with folks on LinkedIn.
Jarod Greene (05:46):
You heard Mark. Like, follow, subscribe, get involved with Mark there. Mark, appreciate your time so much. Thank you for spending a little bit with us today.
Mark Niemiec (05:54):
Awesome. Thanks so much. Appreciate you.