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The world's best conversations about B2B selling happen here. This exciting new podcast from Andy Paul, the creator and host of the Sales Enablement Podcast (with 1200+ episodes and millions of downloads) is focused on the mission of helping increase your win rates by winning a bigger percentage of the deals in your pipeline. In this unique round table format, Andy and his panel of guest experts share the critical sales insights, sales perspectives and selling skills that you can use to elevate your sales effectiveness and create the buying experiences that influence decision-makers to buy from you. Host Andy Paul is the expert on modern B2B selling and author of three best-selling, award-winning sales books, including his latest Sell Without Selling Out. Visit andypaul.com to subscribe to his newsletter for even more strategies and tips to accelerate your win rate!
Hi friends. Welcome to the win rate podcast. I'm your host, Andy Paul. That was Gabe Lillo. And Gabe is one of my guests on this episode of the win rate podcast. Gabe is the CEO at alleyoop. io and my other guest today for our discussion about sales effectiveness, the buyer experience and improving your win rates are Colin Mitchell.
Collin is the host of the sales transformation podcast. Excellent podcast. You should be listening to also join me as John Manuel is array. John Manuel is the global leader of the marketing sales and pricing practice at BCG, the Boston consulting group. So one listener note before we jump into today's discussion, as always, I want to remind you to subscribe to my newsletter.
If you haven't done so already. Join the more than 60, 000 sellers and sales leaders who subscribe to receive win rate Wednesday, each week on Wednesday, you'll receive one actionable tip to accelerate your win rates and you'll get a bunch of other great sales advice as well. So you can subscribe by visiting andypaul.
com. That's my website, or I subscribe on YouTube. On my LinkedIn profile. All right. If you're ready, let's jump into today's discussion.
Okay, friends. That's it for this episode of the win rate podcast. First of all, I want to thank you for taking for, I think my guests, actually Colin Mitchell, Gabe Lolo and John Manuel is array for sharing their insights with us today. And one, thank you for taking the time with me today, investing your time with me.
So until next time, I'm your host, Andy Paul, good selling everyone.
Welcome everyone to this episode of the win rate podcast. Gosh, another outstanding group of panelists here today. , just a few seconds, introduce themselves. John Mount, John Manuel. I'll start with you as I butcher your name. Sorry
so Jean Manuel but I've been in the U. S. for 23, 24 years now. So people call me by the initials. I'm consultants. I work for the Boston Consulting Group and I lead our growth practice, marketing, sales, pricing, all these topics. And I must say I moved to the Bay Area in order to never work on cost.
And so work only on the upside. So working only for mostly technology companies and mostly on topics about how to get them grow. So excited to be on this podcast.
Perfect. Thank you for joining us Colin,
I am. My name is Colin Mitchell and I'm the managing partner at Lydian where we help B2B companies, mostly tech and SAS solve their top funnel challenges. I've also had a couple of exits myself and also run a podcast called sales transformation.
which I've been honored to be a guest on at least once. Yeah.
And it might be, I think you're overdue to come back by the
Okay. Anytime. And Gabe
Yeah, my name is Gabe. I'm trying to be as cool as you professional podcasters with the microphone. So I'm testing it out today, but,
looks good. It looks good. Sounds good.
Thank you. I'm the CEO of Alleyoop similarly to Colin, we're a B2B sales development agency. Not only on SaaS and tech we will look at other industries and verticals as well, focusing on the U S and doing it for about 15 years.
And before that I had a recruiting and staffing and you know, sales training company for 10 years prior to that,
And you've braved the cold of Buffalo to join us today.
I'm in Buffalo locked in my house for a week and trying to hibernate through it.
Yeah. I saw the photos for the game on Monday, I guess, where the people, they invite people to the football stadium in Buffalo to shovel. The stands which I
Invite's a good word. They volunteer, actually. They don't get paid to do it. But it's, when you postpone a Bills game, you know something's up. Usually they never have done that. And so it has definitely was a great game, by the way. Glad we won, but it was a cold game.
Yeah, exactly. For sure.
I was, you know, I was reading like Something on X or something, a couple hours for the game and still showed like people are gonna be sitting on the snow in their seats. So it's like, not only cold, you're sitting on the snow. It's like, those are diehard fans.
Right. So, all right. Well, I want to start with this it's a really interesting stats. I saw on a post this week on LinkedIn posted from Santosh Sharon, who's CEO of retention and he'd gone on G2 and he had looked up the number of companies in these various categories. And so conversational intelligence, 156 companies email marketing software, 561 companies in marketing automation, 390 sales intelligence, 246.
Dialer companies, 147 CRM companies, 290. And so, I mean, you have to make assumption to some degree that maybe there's a competitive product. They're offering competitive products, a competitive pricing, but yeah, in that type of scenario how does a company differentiate themselves in this scenario?
And more importantly, how do sellers when they're working for companies like that? I might just really, I knew the numbers were big. I used to say, oh gosh, there's about 50 conversational intelligence companies, under 56 you know, is it at this point? So commoditize, it's just price? I mean, JMI, you're the pricing expert.
We'll start with you.
Well, my intuition and having seen this market a little bit is that you have different generations of companies that are doing these things and not all of the 160 are in the same place. And so you, you have some that have mature products. For whom the key issue is, how do you adapt to the latest technologies that are coming up and the gen AI things and so on?
And but they're, they have an install base. They have a set of customers, have a set of relationships, and that's one side. And you're going to have in the spectrum, and I'm going straight to the end, a set of guys, you know, that left, you know, some Google or any other Silicon Valley company and just started something, thought it was gen AI was really cool.
And they're trying to do conversational commerce and they have, you know, in the last year and a half, they've got 12 customers, but they have a really cool product that I have some demos that are really awesome. And when you discover them so, and you have it, everything In between and all will have different price point if I go to market and so on.
But I think that market is not a homogeneous market. It's most of these markets from what I see are very heterogeneous. And so once you, you understand that landscape, it's the keys for every one of the of the players. As you play that to figure out what's your mission, how are you indeed gonna.
Have competitive advantage versus others. Don't try to take the whole world. If you're just starting, you know, all of the traditional things you need to think about what's the stage about where you are and who are you trying to take over?
Yeah, I could jump in. I mean, I think a lot of the companies that, you know, I'm not saying the numbers aren't right, but I think more and more companies are trying to do all in one, right? Do everything. And they may blend into all of these different segments when that's actually not their sweet spot.
And we're seeing that a lot right now with our company where we know we're working with tech companies that are saying, Hey, they're a great dialer, but reality is they're not, and they are good at all these other things. And so we're trying to find companies that are just really good at what is their bread and butter.
And, but they fall into all these other categories because they may be adding that to their portfolio of features,
So is it just about, as JMI was alluding to, just finding your niche within that? Because
think from a buyer.
My concern is based on what I'm reading about buyer research, is buyers maybe don't discern the differences as much as we might from a, you know, analytical standpoint.
Yeah, I think, I mean, right now, in regards to what the buyers need to know is they need to know what is actually they're looking for versus what is out there. I think right now, companies are trying to do everything for everyone and they're lacking on what actually brought them to the dance. And I'm seeing that a lot with data providers and others that are just watering down what got them to the dance and it's because they're trying to do other things.
And I think that's really what buyers are really having a hard time right now with.
Colin, are you seeing that? Because I, I'm interested because that's sort of speaks to me as sort of a top of funnel issue and that people are feeling panicked about pipeline or so on. And so what they're saying is, look, we're going to, we're going to leak from our ICP and our focus because, Hey, this is what we need to do.
Yeah. I mean, I think there's two things that come to mind for me. Right. And one, if you're mostly getting inbound, right. You kind of get what you get, right. And that could be several different segments, different sizes of companies and can be. Kind of be difficult to discern, like, where do we serve best?
And obviously can impact when rate negatively, because it's like, maybe we win more with enterprise or mid market or S and B, but we're getting what we get through inbound outbound, you know, you get what you want.
Well, before you go through, is there anybody that's living off inbound these days?
There is there is, because, you know, I mean, part of something that's grown for us at leadium is inbound lead management because people are getting a healthy amount, you know, they're investing more in advertising, content, marketing, thought leadership, or whatever, that's driving inbound.
But they don't necessarily have the resources in house to. Work all of that inbound and get to the ones, the 10, 20 percent that are actually super qualified and should be, you know, spending time with the sales rep. So that's a part of our business has grown. So we see it a lot on that end. And then on the other side of it, without Ben, you get what you want.
Right. And the problem is what you want and that where you actually serve best might be different. And you know, typically. Companies want to go too broad with their targeting. Or they want to target who they think their ICP is when in reality, it's like, well, why is that your ICP? And it's like, well, but because that's who we want to sell to, but they don't have any past success selling in that particular segment or in the enterprise and with companies, you know, I think to, to Gabe's point is, You know, a lot of technologies we're seeing like convergence of technology, right?
Sales engagements, platforms are in data and conversational intelligence or in, you know, sales engagement platforms. And I think a lot of that started to happen as say, you know, COVID and budgets and VC world landscape changing because you needed to add a lot of value as a tech company, if you weren't going to get axed out of the budget and the easiest way to do that was, well, Hey, you keep.
You know, keep us on the P and L, but you can cut these two or three other vendors because we're not providing that for you.
So yeah. Part of what you're talking about sounds like sort of a market maturity issue as well, right? I mean, that JM I had raised before is companies these trying to I like to phrase this, trying to scale before they learn how to solve what they have, which to me seems like a fairly common problem in the SaaS world.
Yes.
And many of the times through acquisition, right? Mergers and acquisitions to scale that way, and then not realizing that they have no idea how to do what it is they just purchased.
well, there's that, but then I was even afraid to more basic as I've, I always did the opposite when I was running startup teams, which was, yeah, oftentimes I was brought in as sort of a turnaround person. And my goal is always, well, how can I double and triple revenue without adding headcount?
Because generally the issue is we didn't know how to sell what we had.
Right.
I see that with the prevailing motivated way of operating in, in SAS companies was we're going to see what we get something and serve, you know, I'll call it very preliminary product market fit, and then we're just going to scale the hell out of it.
But we only know how to win, you know, 20, 30 percent of the time.
That's being generous,
Yeah. But then.
30%.
But then we rely on, you know, top of funnel at that point, but now we've hit this, you know, sassacre as people have been calling it the last year and top of funnel, supposedly harder to come by and, oh my gosh, they have to learn how to sell
Yeah. And I think,
JMI. Go ahead.
ahead. No, there's no doubt that what has happened over the past 12 to 18 months. Is a lot of companies have tightened up the budget, right? And so if you came in and have a little bit of a budget somewhere, it's only trying to keep and say, you need to keep me as we said, because I have more than the thing I used to have and therefore keep me in the budget.
But that's a very, like the new thing you try to add, or if you try to present yourself as a platform, when you have very powerful solutions in one area, it's, you are not really credible and suddenly you put your place in a competition with. With a few others that the CIO is going to say, well, I'm comparing that.
And then you're not as good here. And often you better off you know, think about the origins of SaaS, which is, I just want to have a few people sign up with their credit cards for the product, but it's going to be really cool for that. Well, like, who are these people that you serve really well?
How are you serving them really well? Reinforce your strength. And in the top of the funnel. If it was really easy to sell that three years ago when everybody knew that the growth was going to come from online and you were an enabler of that, and so you could write and serve that wave suddenly that the headwind is in your face and the wave is not behind you focus on really what you're good for me.
That's the main advice. And so don't think about expanding the funnel too much. If your funnel dries up is because you didn't pick the customer here, that are really good for it. Yeah.
I mean, to that end, I mean, talk to companies that, you know, complain about, you know, pipeline so difficult and are, you know, and I'm saying, well, let's start with win rates. What are your win rates still today? You know, in this environment, you know, still 20, 30 percent range. So my response is always, well, you've got more than enough prospects, right?
And that's not the issue. The issue is, I mean, yes, you still have to generate pipeline, but the issue is what are you doing at the pipeline you've got? And.
are you hearing that Andy, because we're not hearing that right now, you know, companies are coming, the win rates are that high, you know, that, you know, where companies are coming to us saying, Hey, you know, we need more meetings, we more, we need more demos and then we fix that problem for them and then they come to realize that wasn't the problem.
That was part of the problem that they're not closing the deals, right? And now we kind of take that excuse away. And so what we're realizing that companies, their AE teams are so junior because they were relying on low hanging fruit for many years. And now they're not anymore. Right. And so they are, their skillset is, Subpar and their abilities are subpar because they didn't need them and now they need them.
And so we are exposing that situation by taking the I don't have any meetings excuse off the table. And so we're seeing that a lot.
Yeah. We're seeing it
smiling. So I don't know if I'm ringing a bell over
Well, we'll jump to Columbus, but we're seeing it for sort of different angles. I've been diving deep with a number of companies this past year on win rates and by segment and lead source and so on and so forth. And yeah, one client that fired their entire SDR team, because, What happened is earlier in their life is itself sourced all the leads and they had win rates are like, you know, low forties.
And then they turned on the spigot with SDRs over a dozen SDRs in a relatively short period of time. And it's like, to your point, Gabe, it's like the AEs forgot how to sell because suddenly the may, they got fat and lazy with all the leads coming in and the win rates plummeted by half. Yeah. In most cases, in one company's case, it dropped under 20%.
I was like,
It's going to move it
Yeah, Colin.
I'm also seeing the opposite where they're firing all the all the AEs and they're promoting their SDRs as well that way and getting them to be full sellers. And that's another bad thing because they're very much, you know, not mature enough to do that.
I haven't heard that interesting, but we'll talk about that offline. I think I want to hear more about that because that's, that seems counterintuitive to fire your, I mean, your A's aren't performing, but it makes you think your SDRs who are your least experienced sellers are going to be able to step in and, Yeah. Curious. Interesting. Colin, you're about to say something,
the same, you know, stuff is Gabe here where it's the typical, we need more leads. Right. And. To Andy's point, it's like, no, you don't necessarily need more leads. You need to work the right ones and work the ones that you have more effectively. And I think that, you know, part of the problem is sometimes people have too many leads or not enough of the right leads.
And so that can come down to targeting, you know, if they're mostly relying on inbound, that creates a problem. But to Gabe's point, it's like, yeah, you fix the, we don't have enough demos problem but then close rates, you know, don't necessarily go up. And, you know, it's just like, well, is there a problem with the sales process?
Or sometimes the AEs are going to say, well, the meetings weren't that great. They weren't good meetings. And that'll only last for so long. Where you got to look at, well, you know, what is the sales process here? What's broken? Cause you know, more meetings, more demos is clearly not the problem.
And to think that, Hey, if we're only closing 20%, meaning we're losing 80 percent of the time, why in the heck would you think more demos is going to solve that? Why wouldn't you say, Hey, why, how do we get to 40 percent win rate? How do we get to 50 percent right? At least when. More than we lose.
Yeah, well, yeah, I had a sort of a discussion with somebody on LinkedIn about this a couple of weeks ago where he was pushing back on something. I said, he said, well, yeah, I'm always very suspicious of, you know, win rates over 50 percent because that means the sellers aren't being aggressive enough.
I said, well, what do you mean they're not being aggressive enough? He says, well, they're not having enough conversations. I said, well, if you have product market fit, you've dialed in on your ICP and product market fit, I don't want my sellers until we've dominated that market. I don't want them selling in adjacent markets or exploring opportunities in adjacent markets.
I want them to be focused on that because that's where the highest probability of success is. And, but there seems to be some strat and I think it also comes from investors is like, Oh no, we're a little suspicious of high win rates because, you know, we're obviously not having enough conversations and that's really not the point at all.
And I think partially the investor world wants a large, you know, Tam. Right. Which, you know, I think is not necessarily a good thing. It's especially like early, like working as niche as possible and dominating that is, is what's going to help you, you know, have success, but
and I think clearly you, we went through the spectrum of there's a night, there's a band of wind rates, which is pretty good. And there's on both sides where you are out of the optimal where you should be, if you get to the 70, 80 percent wind rate, like you're not enough in the market that's the, your VC point that you were making.
If you're in the top 20 percent win rate, it's like you're squandering a bunch of opportunities and calls with clients that may not be your ideal clients and so on. Right. And so you need to find that spectrum. I think you know, what I see many people in the smaller SAS world being these days is indeed more in the lower end of the win rates rather than higher end of the win rates.
And so the situation is indeed, it's not a problem of, do I have enough top of the funnel? It's a problem of, am I precise enough in how I'm targeting the people I'm trying to talk to? And very often like just to plug in one, one point in that people think about is just like, Oh, very often they think I'm, my win rate is too low because my pricing is too high.
Yeah.
and well, usually no. In fact, if you focus on the clients that are really in the heart of your target. And that really value your product and you train all the AEs and everybody to talk about the values, the value story, the, how do you deliver, how do you get the impact that suddenly the price point goes away and your win rate goes up simultaneously.
I mean, I think Gartner substantiated that, you know, the report earlier in 2023 with, you know, buyer survey is, you know, the nine most important factors in determining vendor selection. As given by the B2B enterprise buyers. And yeah, price wasn't even on the list. I mean,
Yeah. Depends on how you desegregate, but prices, you know, sellers tend to make it as their, Second or third thing that prevents them from getting stuff done. And when you ask customers, is the number six to the number 12?
oh yeah. Yeah. I mean, there was another outfit out of Australia Trinity perspectives that stunned substantial wind loss analysis, you know, thousands of interviews with enterprise buyers and they, over a dozen years and a year and a half or two years ago, they summarized their findings into nine reasons why you win nine reasons why you lose.
And. Price wasn't on it. It's like, oh, in fact,
that was a shocker for a lot of people.
Yeah. Price actually price prices on it only in why you lose. And it was because you were seen as too cheap. That's interesting. Right.
You send the signal about your solution being too cheap. That's
Yep. Yep. So yeah, very as, and as a result, you seem to risking as a result of being too cheap. So, yeah. So I want to segue a little bit, cause you know, I'm going to talk about I want to talk about the big fix for all this and I'm putting the air quotes. A big fix is AI. So does anybody have an opinion on AI and sales?
We'll get into that. So, I want to talk about AI and top of the funnel. Cause I saw this one of numerous posts on LinkedIn and it's all about the prompts you can use to write a compelling email. And you look at it, I thought, well, that's really, it is pretty cool. Right. I mean, a lot of thought went into it, but then when you think about it, it's like, yeah, so what, right?
I mean, the problem is too much crap is being sent to buyers, too much noise. Yeah. And in the channel, I mean, is a nicely, you know, competently written AI generate email, really going to make a difference?
No, I'm sorry. I said it first.
saying no.
does.
Look. There's I just I just had Ryan Staley on my podcast and he's like gone deep down the AI rabbit hole and has a bunch of template libraries that he's built out. And we've tested it here. Hey, here's what I believe AI is great for. Research great for research if you want to prepare for a meeting and you want to do it, you know, and save some time and get all the information from the 10 K without having to actually read it.
And understand what some of their, you Strategic priorities are a eyes. Great. It's not great at writing messaging. We've tested it, right? And because it lacks that business context and experience that a real human being has. Part of sales is kind of that human to human connection relationship.
And it's like, it kind of makes me think of, you know, we all used to know people's phone numbers and how to get from point a to point B. And then now we rely mostly on our smartphones to do a lot of that stuff for us. And it's like, do you want to have a sales team that just has the easy button to try to do their job or actually know how to do their job?
Yeah. Yeah. We're going to dig into that game.
I mean, I didn't know we were going to talk about this and not to be self serving, but seven hours ago I posted on my LinkedIn poll and saying, is AI going to replace SDRs specifically 8 percent said replace 5 percent said, I don't know, and 88 percent said, they're just going to help that And I think that's spot on and I can see the votes and I actually looked at them.
And some of the people who said just help are actually CEOs of AI companies. So it's kind of interesting, but I think, I mean, I just double exactly what Colin said, but from our perspective, maybe more so than just research is that personalization, right? So just personalizing your ability to, when you're researching and talking to that buyer specifically, AI can help you with that.
But. You know, if I see the words, you know, unwavering one more time in an email, I know it was written by chat GPT. And so,
Yeah. Yeah.
I think, but in reality it's definitely going to help, you know, you know, our sellers be, you know, more, Have been more bad, maybe better business acumen, especially in the SDR world when you're coming into this business and into this industry is a new person sometimes, but it's, is it going to replace it?
No, I've seen and heard all the things that are saying that it's going to do. And I wouldn't trust it. I think it's the trust thing that kills right out of the gates. And our SDRs are getting, our SDRs are getting questions on it. Like our prospects literally ask them, Hey, you know, Where are you living?
You know, what was the sword of the bills game? Like what, like literally asking
I talking to a bot?
me. Right? Like they're actually saying questions because they don't want to, they don't want to talk to someone, unfortunately, that doesn't, you know, know that's a real person on the other end as of right now,
So what you're sort of saying, and I'll put a spin on your words is that AI is going to save the SDR job.
I
I mean, there's a lot of it written said SDRs are heading pre AI saying SDRs are headed on the path of obsolescence because, you know, So little value perceived to be added by them that buyers could do all that on their own.
Which thing is, this is maybe a route to help
yeah, I think it's going to accelerate the SDR job dramatically and allow founder led sales companies to bring in SDRs versus these overpaid, high paid salespeople day one, week one, and help them accelerate their company. I think that's a really good piece for it.
Interesting. JMI?
think there is also something about what can you do today? What can you do tomorrow and what might AI be able to do five years from now? And all these things are quite different. So today AI is pretty good at, like, we, we run it in, in a call center summarizing the million calls we had last.
You know, six months and tell us what are the key pain points and things that customers are asking about and what are the, and what are the themes that are coming out of that? There's no human that could go through this. The way you go through this, you have to have anecdotes and so on. And it's really hard to go through that.
And so AI well orchestrated can do that pretty well and can do the research as we were. We were talking about, and that's in contrast to what will, what may be able to do later on. And I, I don't exclude that some AIs may play some roles in, for instance, enabling customers to have deep conversations with an AI agent about the number of products.
If you could do something like I promise the AI will not hallucinate. And I promise it will tell you the truth. You come back to your trust items, right? So you first trust a human, but we also know that he's in sales. People will have a tendency to embellish all the abilities that, that the software can deliver.
If you have an AI that, that, that is pretty smart and you can guarantee is going to tell you some facts, you're going to have some buyers before they talk to a human to make a decision about whether to buy or not. You know, spend some time with potentially an AI to talk to and tell me exactly how this thing works and I can spend more time.
And so you could have a richer interface before the buying process that allows the customer to know more about the offer. In ways that today with self, you don't have enough time and bandwidth from salespeople to spend all that time to do that. Right. So, but that is not available today, but now we have the technology that is coming.
You could see how that could come about, but that's not today. That's not tomorrow. That's three years, five years from now. And everybody's talking about AGI in, you know, Q4. Yeah. Sure, it's just like, we're not there. It's going to
I think Google came out just right before Christmas, didn't they? With a study that said Oh, this AGI thing. Yeah, it's going to take a little bit longer than that. Yeah. Yeah.
It needs to be multimodal. Like the experience, like we will have, there's a number of things that need to get in there before we can have AIs that, that are of general capabilities. I personally think, yeah, both things, it will happen. And not to,
Yeah. Okay.
so that's my take, you know, and it's good. Like we could debate that and so on. It's just like, but that's my take is, you know, you get models that get more data, multi modal more computing power, and then you keep increasing that we are smarter today than, you know, the tools are smarter today than they were five years ago and 10 years ago and 20 years ago.
So they got to get smarter and smarter at some point. Will it pass humans? I think so. Okay. Is it in the next five years or in the next 30 years? I have no clue. Suspect the next 30 years it will happen before I die. But just like, you know, so that that's the hype. That's the way I see things, but you know, everybody in prediction business tends to be wrong.
So
Yeah. I think it was Nils Bohr, the famous Danish physicists for the Manhattan project said, yeah, we've got something about, you know, predictions are difficult, especially about the future. And so it sums it up very well. Yeah, that's sort of interesting. It is because it plays in this whole idea about, at least in my mind, is Now moving from SDRs to AEs, this is how AEs are using AI today.
We'll just focus on CERT today, what we see CERT coming. And the focus right now is always on sort of, ah, we're going to save time. All right. Which call preparation, Colin, you talked about before, you know, call prep. Amplified significantly by it. But there's always an assumption that built in as well.
If you give a seller more time, the incident will become a better seller. Right. They're going to close more deals. And it's like, yeah, I don't think the logic works. Right. If you're a 20 percent win rate seller and we give you 10 extra hours, you're still going to be a 20 percent win rate seller because nothing's magically going to change about that.
So what I haven't seen a lot about. And, you know, I play with this all the time and use it as well in the businesses is how is it going to actually help the EEs become more effective in that time they have with the buyers to enable the buyers to make their decisions. And it seems like I haven't seen much about that.
I just wondering if anybody else has and what their opinions are on that.
hmm.
That
Well, yeah, but
you, you have a little bit, I don't think like, look, My take is during the, when doing the sales meeting, I don't think you're going to see that much Delta in terms of how effective you are doing during that meeting on the saving time.
I know everybody's makes calculation. If I say of 10%, you know, of time to to raise, then I'm going to have 10 percent more sales on the other side. It's like, I don't believe that, but I think you could increase your win rate. And we've seen this in a number of tests. If the A's are better prepared for the meeting and have the right info and it's easier for them to have it.
They may spend the same time preparing, but the quality input and what they have and what they know to cross sell or to bring up are things that are going to be more relevant to the customers. I think you could get some incremental there, but I don't think the AIs are good enough for that incremental to be super measurable in the short term.
Yeah. I think the trust and credibility would, Oh, sorry. Go ahead.
Well, I was going to say, have we trained out of sellers though, the ability to be in the moment and synthesize data that comes in into an insight or a great question, that's, you know, something that's uniquely human, as opposed to just being so robotic and scripted that, you know, they don't take advantage of what JMI talked about. Go ahead, Gabe,
No, I was going to say a similar thing actually, is that, you know, we can prepare the seller to be more relevant, having that information, save time and go into it, and I think it will help to JMI's point, I think it will help win rates because you can build trust quicker, right? Cause you know more about them.
They'll have credibility with you immediately. Cause you spent the time to know what's going on. I feel like I go into demos when things are being sold to us and. AEs are just going back to back to back to back to zoom calls. And they have no idea who they're talking to or why they're talking to them.
So I think that will definitely help and increase win rates. But to your point, and I think we talked about in the beginning of shows, like, I think they're just not skilled as much anymore, and that is being very much exposed. And I think we need to get back to what we actually have to do to close deals and not just being super prepared.
Colin, go ahead.
Well, yeah, well, there's, I mean, there's products now that are AI driven, that are, you know, specifically around coaching and training and helping frontline, you know, and I'm not talking about like the big, Usual suspects that we all probably know of that are more in the conversational intelligence space, but there's a I tools that are, you know, helping specifically identify where there's gaps in the sales process and where, you know, reps specific reps need help with specific things and doing a lot of that heavy lifting so that you know, Frontline managers can be a little bit more proactive about, okay, you know, this rep is missing crucial things in discovery.
This rep is, you know, having a hard time getting commitments and next steps are getting from stage one to stage two and so on. So there is tools that are AI powered that are out there in the marketplace today that are going to help reps be more effective and ultimately you know, increase win rates.
Well, but it seems like to that point though, is it sort of the, you know, the fantasy of the makers of many of these tools and send their marketing. It is, you know, substitute for the judgment of the salesperson. Right. And the assumption is, look, this, we don't have to rely on those unreliable salespeople that don't know nothing anymore.
This thing is so smart. This is gonna, you know, take care of that. I just don't see that. Right. I mean, I still think the judgment of the salesperson to a point, somebody brought up earlier in the moment is still decisive. It's part of the reason. Why are buyers talking to sellers? Right. I mean, we've got all these surveys that say that, you know, buyers no longer want to talk to sellers.
Well, if they don't want to, why are they? Because they need something from them, right? I don't want to, I don't want to go to the dentist, but I do it because I need to go. Right. I mean, this is what sellers with buyers, they don't want, I've always had great relationships with my buyers over the years, but none of them woke up one morning and said, God, I sure hope Andy calls me today.
Right. But so if they're in a conversation with those sellers, it's because they need the help. And, but
And we all know that they've done a whole heck of a lot of research by the time they're ready to finally even talk to a salesperson,
Yes.
They possibly can as a buyer to find answers on their own because of the lack of trust with salespeople and. In that initial conversation, which most buyers are probably talking to minimum three, possibly five different, you know, providers of that can solve this problem.
They're looking for things that conflict with the research that they've done to determine whether they're gonna trust this seller or not.
Yeah. I mean, to Kyle's point, it's the opposite is true, right? We're saying that AEs are using AI to do all this research before a call, but so are the buyers. And so when it comes down to the conversation itself, not only is the AE more prepared based on the research, but so is the buyer because they're using the same technology probably to research that exact product.
It's like going to the mall. Like I go into the mall, the guy comes up to me and asked me if I want help. I say, no, but when I can't find the shirt in my size, I'm going to go look for him to ask him for help. Right. So it's like, when I'm in a need, I need that scenario. So those conversations are more valuable because they're both coming to the table with information powered by AI.
Yeah, my point is, this gets back to the idea of the effectiveness that I talk about so often is the seller not prepared to really help the buyer understand what the requirements are in terms of the information they need to make a decision. JMI.
Mhm. No. So I agree with you. I think that where we're getting here with what gave you saying is I can potentially ads and I think it will be more true a few years from now than it is actually true today for the buyers to have conversations with the box. But what does the product do? What's the value proposition and so on?
AI will, if these conversations happen in a very, in a way that is very natural, like with a human, you can ask any questions you want. You can trust the answer as a company being able to synthesize this conversation and feed them back to the AE when he's in the meeting will make the AE much more effective about how to sell at that point in time, will that bot who you can talk to, to talk about the product, will it replace a salesperson?
No, it won't because you still have a set of questions about trust and That, that the human interactions will still go there. So you'll have the two things in parallel. People will be more and more prepared as buyers because they're going to continue to aggregate information. And part of their info is gonna, it came from web search and a bunch of, you know, discussions with other customers potentially about what happened and so on, and it's going to be more and more mediated by some of the AI chatbots and other tools are going to come after that at the same time, that will not replace.
The traditional sales process with a human to human interaction,
Yeah, I mean, there's this emotional element, which we all know is part and parcel of any decisions that are made about struck by that quote. I'd seen this week again interview. I think it was a New Yorker magazine interview with the screenwriter. Scott Frank is one of the. Highest paid screeners, like, you know, 800 K a week or something like that.
But he was served saying, yeah, not really worried about, you know, AI and writing scripts, cause he said that he said the result may be schematically sound, but getting an audience to really care about what happens requires a different sort of magic. And I, to me, it was like, that's really what we're talking about.
Right. This is, you know, the technology we'll do so much, but it, at the end of the day, it's still, unless we get rid of. You know, human buyers and there's still this element of emotion that's really required.
emotions and with the emotions for me, you need city, which is like, so I finished a book last year and at some point I tried to have Chad GPT write some of the part of the chapters that were really generic about some of the pricing process and the economics and so on. And I found out what the bot was writing was true and factual.
But it was not aligned with the, what I was trying to communicate, how I was trying to communicate it and so on. And that's my bias towards the topic. That's my bias towards what I'm trying to convey here. And that bias is completely absent. And this is the same way for that author. And everybody, we all as individuals have a line of what we're trying to convey and how we're trying to convey that.
There's no generically trained bot that is going to be able to do that.
back to a comment you made before about sellers embellishing, and that's just, you know, human way of hallucinating. Right. So, well, so it's about the last question. So I want to dig into is. Is there, I know we've, just because I was interested as I was preparing for this, but is, are we danger looking forward? Cause I'm seeing, we certainly saw this, you know, sales engagement tools and so on. It's this sort of AI dependency, right?
Where, yeah, my concern is always, and I see this in sellers all the time, companies I work with as sellers are so. Everything's so prescribed, right? The playbooks and the motions are so prescriptive and, you know, people sort of in the moment, not really thinking. And then, you know, the results are so, you know, we got this sort of so so results.
And I, are we sort of, you know, locked into sort of the same thing? I mean, there's always been always some, again, another article I'd read recently about this study, actually JMI with a consulting firm. I don't forget which one off the top of my head, but saying that studies being reviewed a scientific journal, they said, but indicated sharply mixed results and consultants work chat GPT greatly improved the speed and quality of work on a brainstorming task, but it led many consultants astray when doing more analytical work.
So that's actually, so we did that work. Right.
Oh, you did. Okay.
we did and is we let us, a set of folks work with ChatGPT and AI for three to four months, I don't remember exactly the details, but what we found is. People got better at the tasks they were already good at, and they became dumber at the things that they didn't know as much about. So, so, so you
makes a lot of sense.
It's just like when you when you know your way around, you know how to ask the questions, you know, the issues and so on, like changeability helps you like, Oh, I forgot that little details and so on, but that fits my, you know, the big picture. I know clearly, I know what I want to say.
I have most of my facts and I want to add a few bits of pieces. And it makes me more efficient to get that versus I don't know my way around it. What the fuck is happening on this topic? My boss asked me to do this, let me ask that GPT and then regurgitate what GPT told me and it's like, it's crap, man.
Like use your brain. It's better than GPT.
Well, but the server alluded to that in the article, cause it's saying that, yeah, one of the problems is that people sort of neglected to check their work because it looks so polished.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So it what comes out, he's right. We all know this by the way, right? Like we know British people because they sound British. Sometimes some more sophisticated, right? You have the same thing. Someone who's very articulate sounds like he's right. And he has really good thinking.
And sometimes it's true. And sometimes you scratch and it's a bit of emptiness behind, right? And that's why we call this bullshit. So, so, so, you know, yeah. And ChatGPT is very polished,
Yeah,
it's great, and it's a synthesis of everybody's, like, but then it doesn't have your soul, and
I feel like I can sense it. I'm maybe because I'm getting more, you know, sent to me and pushed at me that's generated by AI. And I started to think like, God, if I see one more. Weird mid journey generated image on somebody's LinkedIn post. I'm going to scream because they all look alike.
It's like, but you can, at least for me, I feel like I have no way of testing this, but anecdotally, to me, it feels like, yeah, I'm pretty good at recognizing what's been generated by AI. And I'm with you, Jim. I was doing some outlines for a book I'm working on next book I'm working on. And it's just like, eh, that's the best is like, eh.
Well. What do you think
I was.
I mean, I think that part of the easiest way to actually spot like, is this AI or is this actually written by human is even just the imperfections, right. Of how humans naturally speak, or maybe don't use perfect punctuation all of the time. Like the perfection and, you know, well polished and does it may be embellished convincing way that you know, Of what chat GPT will output is the thing that dead is the dead giveaway.
Yeah, I was going to say, my mom's an English teacher. So I was raised that every single thing has to be completely perfect. And so I just started on my LinkedIn when I DM people, I hated a cringe. Cause I feel like I'm going to get, you know, hit on the hand, but I just don't capitalize things anymore. I literally try to talk like I'm text messaging.
It's not wrong. It's not misspelled. It's not, you know, it doesn't look like I'm a moron, but I just don't capitalize, you know, anymore. They, people think that I'm texting on my iPhone, which. Most of the time I am, but I want them knowing that I'm doing that. Right. So those are things to Colin's point, you know, take something from chat, GPT, and actually mess it up a little bit.
Not a lot, but a little bit just to make sure people know it's coming from you, or at least it originated from you.
Or from e. Cummings.
Right. Exactly. I see what you did there.
Sorry. Yeah. Go
was
it's interesting. Cause I mean, especially for, you know, the world that Gabe and I live in, right. You almost have to do little adjustments to make it seem like it's not AI generated, right. Which are those sorts of things that Gabe's mentioning. And. Writing more naturally, more the way that you would speak rather than what, you know, a bot would generate.
Maybe one thing that is funny, at some point AI could also, you could imagine AI's really adapt to who you are, and read what you wrote, and read your style, and so on, and are able to imitate you in a pretty good way. It's not there but for instance, for the book we played and we have an AI bot that we call JMAI that basically is based on everything I've been writing in the book and before for the past 20 years on, on the pricing topic, for instance and I think that JMAI thing is better than, you know, 97 percent of my colleagues are answering a question on, on, on pricing but it doesn't but it still does it in the chat GPT style.
Yeah. That you will all will recognize and that I don't want to speak. I can't use it to answer my emails because it's going to sound generic but it's been trained on a lot of the content and is better and better on that con. So you can, right now you can embed content into these tools. You can't embed style yet.
You can't exclude that at some moment that could also improve at some point and then go to a better stage.
Assuming it will. Yeah. In the process, trying to train on my stuff and when I get back so far as. Yeah, not great, but working on it. So, all right. Well, Hey, I appreciate everybody taking the time to join me. That's great conversation. Normally I ask people where they can be found, but I'm just going to presume LinkedIn, I don't ask that question anymore unless there's some other place you want people to find you anywhere. No, good.
Perfect. Thank
right. Well, Gabe, I hope you get a chance to dig out from under your house sometime soon before you run out of groceries and yeah, appreciate everybody coming by and I look forward to talking again.