Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
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 The Unexpected Lever, this show where we talk to some of the best B2B minds in the world. We're talking about levers that move revenue across people, across process, and across platforms. This season, we're exploring one of the biggest shifts happening in all three, the rise of AI in sales. Not the hype, not the abstract theory, not the pie in the sky stuff. No, we're focused on real life, practical advice from leaders who are already on the journey.
Jarod Greene (00:29):
All right, Terry, tell us a little bit about yourself and your current company.
Terence Falk (00:33):
Okay. So I'm Terry. I'm the VP of software sales at 8:00 AM. 8:00 AM is a professional business platform. Our customers are people who make the most use of their time on behalf of their clients. They use us to run their business and get paid while doing it. I'm a lawyer by trade. I graduated from law school in 2014. I started my career in corporate law and was doing kind of this niche service that used a ton of technology, which 10 years ago, even in the big law corporate legal world was accidentally ahead of its time. I did a lot of business development for the firm and I didn't know it at the time, but every time I brought on a new client, I was operating a channel partnership because my technology partner got a deal out of it. One thing led to another and I ended up in tech sales and I haven't turned back.
(1:20):
I've got a team of 50. We are in a very fast-paced kind of frenetic sales environment. It's a lot of one call closes. It's a lot of two, three day sales cycles. It's a lot of urgency and you have to be really, really good and kind of insane in order to be successful on my team, but it's a lot of fun. That's me in a nutshell.
Jarod Greene (01:38):
I bet. I bet it's a lot of fun. Thanks for sharing that. You talk about technologies and what's important. With the arrival of AI, what responsibilities have you or the team or you and the team felt accountable towards learning?
Terence Falk (01:52):
8AM's internal strategy across the company has really wowed me. We've made it a centerpiece of every conversation we are having. And granted, I am spending a lot of my day with cross-functional partners and marketing and product and engineering on the people team. We are all kind of trying to find our way to make the most out of what generative AI has to offer. I am owning the sales strategy towards generative AI and I've learned a lot along that journey. I imagine we're high volume, high velocity sales team. So you could be tricked into thinking that a lot of that could be done by AI in and of itself. The question is always asked, why is one seat being sold by a human being? Well, it's because there's a human being on the other side buying it. And so where we deploy AI is kind of all around not replacing the soft human sales skills that my team works every day on, but on taking away the things that detract from that. And that's kind of our starting our first principle. Everything after that is just a lot of trial, error, try again, error again, get a little bit better every single time.
Jarod Greene (03:09):
Speaking of trial success or trial and error, where have you seen success? What's kind of use cases or areas where have you guys been successful with that?
Terence Falk (03:17):
I'm kind of obsessed with using it to make pipeline generation easier. When I look at how our funnel operates, our win rate is really, really high because we do lots and lots of small deals. The alpha comes in adding volume and an increasing conversion at the top of the funnel. And so what that means is we've deployed an AI SDR to qualify inbound leads, to get people who are maybe not inbound leads to support or to answer questions like to route effectively, which when you do that 500 times a day and it's a five minute task that a salesperson would do, that's an enormous amount of time and capacity spent towards qualifying the really good stuff and increasing that conversion rate from MQL to SQL, which is a really big, that's a big leaver for us. The other thing, and we're still in very early days here, but our prospect base is not very online.
(04:13):
I used to, my past life sell to AmLaw 100 big time law firms that are on TV or do big deals and have a big online presence and are contacting ZoomInfo or Clay or whatever else. Our prospects are on Main Street. And maybe they're on a website, maybe they don't have a website, but they're very hard to find at scale. And so what we're starting to do is using various, even just the commonplace AI tools that everyone has access to to tell us, okay, who are the two to four person law firms that do personal injury in Bucks County, Pennsylvania? And what are the names of all of the partners and put it in a spreadsheet so that I can drop it into Salesforce and clean it up. What I've found about it in experimenting with this stuff is everyone thinks about AI as like a shortcut or as a way to increase scale.
(05:06):
I've actually found less scale using it and just higher quality. It is solving a problem that I can't use a scaled out technology to do automated. I have to think through myself and Gemini can just search the entire internet for me. That's the interesting recipe that we're working with. And we've started to get a little bit of traction with it. It's going to be an ongoing iterative thing that we probably perfect forever.
Jarod Greene (05:32):
That's awesome. We did a third party study with our friends at G2, and we asked about some of the common use cases of AI. What surprised me is a little bit of what you shared, which is it wasn't about like, oh, making everything kind of faster and just doing everything that would require massive scale. Number one use case for a lot of people is like, "Makes my email sound more professional."
(05:54):
Copy editing, making something longer, shorter, punchier, more aggressive. Those are the use cases I see a lot of sales folks dabble in, which is like, yeah, it's not going to move the needle dramatically, but if I don't spell well, if I have a learning efficiency in some capacity, there's ways that AI helps me that I might never talk about that we, especially technology sales, don't see, but adds a ton of value to a rep's day. So it reminded me when you shared the notion of, yeah, it can help do some things that are amazing, but the small wins matter and stack up.
Terence Falk (06:29):
I think about that a lot as a sales leader too, which is a bit of a different use case. The example that you use is right in front of everybody's face. Make this email punchy or professionalize this thing. I happen to be a really good writer, so I never asked AI to write for me or copy edit for me because I went to school to learn how to write persuasively at a really high level. So whenever AI writes something for me, I'm like, "This sucks. I'm not using this. " You mentioned learning differences. I have virulent ADHD. If you gave me a spreadsheet, there's no way, and I have to do this a lot, there's no way I'm going to be able to sift through this thing by myself and divine any meaningful insights. ChatGPT could definitely do that or Claude could definitely do that, right?
(07:10):
But my counterpart in finance could do that himself because he's a human spreadsheet. That's not me. It's an aspect of my game that I am not very good at that I can augment with AI and save myself time and get a little bit better.
Jarod Greene (07:24):
That's awesome. So you're leading the kind of AI pursuit on the sales side there. What do you think is around the corner for you guys? You got some use cases under your belt. What are the ones you're kind of looking at and thinking about poking into? Because there's a lot out here. So if you had to think about the next one or two use cases to explore, what do you think those would be?
Terence Falk (07:43):
It's a really good question. I think the next use case is finding ways to surface information to a rep while they're in a call. There's a lot of stuff out there that boasts the ability to do that. My reps are in five or six demos a day. They've got to close four of them in order to hit their quota. And so doing that when you're in the trenches and someone's like, "Does this product do X, Y, Z thing?" Right now, the workflow is a rep goes to the Slack channel where all the support people are and goes, "I'm in a call. Please help. Answer this question for me. Anybody? Hello." This is something I know a use case that Vivint does, like something that an agent that shows up and is listening and says, "Here's the answer or here's an answer." There's probably versions of that that move the needle, kind of like what we've been talking about 5% further than what is happening today a hundred times a day, which is a real impact. So that's probably the next place that we look, the sort of various logistical aspects of sales enablement that AI could probably help with.
Jarod Greene (08:47):
Yeah, I come from enablement. I think a lot about the future of enablement in an AI world. And I don't think it's elimination. I don't think it's a function elimination or tool elimination. I just think we do it differently. I just think there's a world where AI helps every ... It helps the enabler, helps the enabled, it helps the discipline, and there's just ways to think about it. What makes you nervous about it? Is there any elements of AI to kind of give you pause, especially you come from a legal background. What are some of the implications you think about?
Terence Falk (09:18):
So there's a couple of things, and I'll talk about it first from the perspective of our customers in the world that I came from, which is legal, where this is a hot button issue. And I think there's a corollary to sales. There's a whole product category around the practice of law, legal research, deadlines for your court filings, writing and preparing briefs and various types of work product. And for most of our customers, I don't think that the practice of law in and of itself is really well enabled by AI for the very reason that I talked about earlier. Most lawyers, the thing that they bring to the table is their ability to communicate, to write, and to think at a level that most people cannot. And artificial intelligence can do some of that, but the moment a piece of work product has a hallucination in it, and it's already happened.
(10:13):
It's already pretty well covered. There's no way that you can entrust somebody's legal rights and responsibilities with a thing that could make an error, that could cite a case that doesn't exist. And I think about that in the same way with salespeople. The superpower that an extraordinary salesperson brings to the table is curiosity, it's communication, it's emotional intelligence. And so AI doesn't replace that. It augments it, it elevates it. But the moment you are using AI to write the same email over and over and over again, if that email sucks, I'm mad as our sales leader. And I've seen it happen before two and a half years ago when ChatGPT was suddenly available to everybody. I saw this happen. Sales reps would just ask ChatGPT, write an email sequence, write eight emails for me to send my prospects, and then they would drop that shit into outreach and it would go to customers and I would lose my mind.
(11:11):
And so that's what scares me is that whether you are a salesperson, whether you're an FP&A person, whether you're a really creative product designer, the things that make you individually great, we run the risk of sacrificing those things to scale and to AI if we don't think about it, if we're not thoughtful about how we deploy it. So, it got kind of Black Mirror. I'm sorry, that did get there.
Jarod Greene (11:33):
No, it's okay. I'm in the same boat for what it's worth. I think a lot about the marketing discipline and you talked about curiosity, creativity, pattern recognition. There's a lot of things we do as marketers that AI has absolutely helped augment and scale and do faster. And maybe even do with fewer people dare I say, but it can't be held accountable the same way. There's a world where I look at my team's ability to say, "Hey, something that would've taken a week can take a day now, but I can't sacrifice the quality of it. " Marketing's just ... The display is different. I like to say a rep can get away with sending a bad email because maybe only three or four people in the world see it. If I'm doing my job the right way, thousands of people see my website and if that's wrong, I'm getting called into the office.
(12:18):
So there's ways to scale that we want to be thoughtful and pragmatic about, but make no qualms about the fact that it has helped scale us in ways that I didn't think were possible two, three years ago.
Terence Falk (12:30):
On the flip side of that, going back to the legal example, the workflow right now for creating any legal work product that goes before a judge that gets sent to a client, whatever it is, usually in a lot of instances, a paralegal or an associate lawyer is preparing that stuff, handing it to a partner who reads it with a fine tooth comb, yells at you about it, makes edits and then sends it wherever it has to go is a very reductive level. Some of that workflow can be replaced by AI. Nonetheless, a human being will still have to read it. Any lawyer worth their salt wouldn't let something out of their hands that was written by a machine where there's that much risk. And the same goes for the work product of salespeople, marketers, coders, product people. It's not going to change. It's going to get a little bit, it's going to get incrementally faster and easier and more efficient. And those increments could add up really quickly in a short amount of time, but it will still just be a slight turn of the dial if we're doing it right.
Jarod Greene (13:26):
If we're doing it right, we've seen the same kind of, I don't say call check and balance, but I've seen the same from the data of, I'll let AI generate something and I'll do the final mile. So we have a big meeting tomorrow with a customer. Yeah, AI can probably create the deck we need for tomorrow. You better believe we're going to interrogate. You better believe we're going to look at it, make sure it's correct, make sure there's no errors, make sure we feel good about it before we show up. And I don't think it's any different whether it's a large deal in the quarter, whether it's a smaller deal. There's always going to be that check and balance of it. I use this analogy I got from grad school about when Betty Crocker came out with the instant cake mix, it was too easy. It was just add water. And feedback from a lot of the housewives at the time was like, "This feels like cheating." So they said, "You know what? Add an egg. Add some oil."
(14:12):
And then it feels a little bit more like cooking. And it's the same instant cake. It's just still like put it in a bowl, stir it around and put it in the oven and get a cake. But that ability to add the egg in the oil made people feel like they were still co-creating, even though the process had been kind of shrunk to a degree. I think about AI in that way. It's just like, all right, we're going to add an egg and oil, some salt to taste or sugar to taste if we want, but it actually creates a different world altogether. Instead of making what we thought was a bunt cake where we're making some incredible dessert that we had no facility or idea on how to do before it. Cooking is still fun. It just gets a little easier, at least this is.
(14:49):
That's my analogy. Final question for you. If you fast forward a couple years, what's this modern go to market look like? What's the dynamic between sales, marketing, technical sales, customer success? What's that all look like when you think about AI, AI distribution? What advice would you give folks to get to that journey in a way without breaking things?
Terence Falk (15:08):
Okay. So I have two questions to answer. One is, what does the world look like and what's my advice for people to be prepared for that world? I think what the world looks like, it goes back to what we've been talking about this entire time. The things that make you great, and I'll talk specifically to salespeople and sales leaders, it's likely that what makes you great is human intelligence. Emotional quotient, the ability to lead, manage, or persuade people, the ability to read the room and to be yourself and to modulate your personality such that you can make money. That's what sales is. So as long as you are constantly tripling down on those skills, you are irreplaceable. There isn't a machine that can replicate you. And I think practically how that plays out as it interacts with sales and marketing, sales and product, I don't think salespeople will be writing templated emails in the future.
(16:01):
I just don't think, because it's just not a skill they're going to need. That will be owned by one person, probably within marketing at a really good company who's just going to own the way that the company speaks in writing to its prospects and its customers. And then salespeople will be focused on having actual live remote phone conversations. And so right now, even at 8:00 AM, we're still very much an inside sales organ. I think we will be for a long time. We have a calendar full of demos all day every day that you could do from your living room. In the future, there's going to be a premium on people who can walk down Main Street in Newtown to the eight law firms that are here and move software in person because a lot of the inside stuff could probably be done, or at least very high percentage of it can be done by AI and made faster and better and more efficient.
(16:54):
That's kind of the world as I see it. My advice is if you have a job that is reactive, if you're an inbound SDR and your job is to respond to look at a piece of paper digitally or otherwise, summarize that information and say it back to somebody. I mean, we've already invested in AI to do most of that role. If that's your primary stock and trade, start being proactive, start picking up a list and calling through it because that's really hard to replace. It will be for a really long time. Human intelligence, emotional quotient, the stuff that makes salespeople great is going to win out. That's my prediction.
Jarod Greene (17:34):
Amen. All right. Well, Terry, thank you so much for your time today. We appreciate you. Thanks a lot. This was fun. Right. You got it. All right, cheers. You've been listening to The Unexpected Lever. This stuff gets you fired up and you want to talk about it with other leaders, join the Powerline Slack community. It's a modern, open access community for go- to-market professionals and AI enthusiasts alike. We're all ready to turn buzz into business outcomes. Join by going to vivun.com/community. We hope to see you there.