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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):
Welcome back to The Unexpected Lever, the show where we dig into the levers that truly move revenue people, the processes and the platforms. I'm your host Jarod and we'll be exploring three dynamic shifts from AI and sales and go to market execution. None of the hype, none of the theory, but real practical insights from the leaders who are driving change.
(00:22):
Today, I'm excited to welcome someone who literally wrote the playbook on sales operations go-to-market strategy and AI driven transformation. This is Seth Marrs. Seth is the chief strategy officer at Sandler, where he leads strategic growth initiatives and alignment across sales, across marketing and customer success. And fun fact about Seth. Before Sandler spent years advising B2B leaders at Forrester, helping them harness data processes and technology to drive revenue performance. Seth, welcome to the Unexpected Lever. Before we dive into your AI journey and the AI journey, you've guided so many on, let's just ground the conversation into your strategic focus right now. For listeners who may not be familiar, what are you focused on in your role at Sandler?
Seth Marrs (01:06):
Biggest thing is how do you make the most out of enabling sellers? Everybody talks about that stat around how sellers spend 25% of their time selling. The more interesting stat to me that led me to Sandler was they spent almost 40% of their time preparing to sell, and with AI and a lot of things they're doing, I think there's a real opportunity in the market to use these technologies along with a really strong methodology to be able to help sellers be better prepared to sell and spend less time doing it. So that's the mission I have right now
Jarod Greene (01:39):
In a shameless plug, right, why does this work matter right now at this moment in time and Q1 of 2026? Why do you believe this is critical?
Seth Marrs (01:47):
The technology's there to do stuff you've never been able to do before with sales. Most of this stuff was basically considered black magic, right? The seller figured out how to do it, and you just kind of went with it. Now you've got technology reaching kind of a pinnacle where you can start using it to understand conversations, and then the market to be able to succeed in sales is so much higher. Now you're going to need this stuff and you're going to need this stuff fast. So it's a unique time that we want to harness and really be on the forefront and making a reality for our customers and those that are trying to really lever up with AI.
Jarod Greene (02:20):
Let's go. I love it. That's awesome. Yeah, sets the perfect stage. Understanding why you do it, especially around AI go-to-market really helps frame the rest of the conversation. All right. We like to begin every conversation after introduction with just a question that tells me a lot about someone's relationship with ai, and you can answer this how you want. What's the weirdest or most unexpected way you find yourself using AI personally or professionally?
Seth Marrs (02:48):
Oh, wow. I don't know if I have a weird way to use it. I think I'm pretty bland with it. I'll give you a story. I've been committed to trying to learn it and the thing that I've been trying to teach myself to do is to go find out when concerts or artists that I want to see are playing. So I'm like, that's a super easy use case, and I've just been messing with that, so I'm just making a super simple personal thing that I want to do and then just learning these tools by figuring out how to do it.
Jarod Greene (03:16):
Yeah, it is a wide range. I find some really interesting ones. And then just in the spirit of transparency, I'll give you my last weird one. Daughter's a softball player. So much of softball is just routine and the drills, and you can get overwhelmed, and so a lot of times when we're just in our quiet time, Hey, give me a set of drills. She's got 20 minutes. We've got this equipment ready to go, we've got this tee, we've got these sets. She's been struggling with this and this put together a routine. It does it and we follow it, and she can't get mad at it. This is what ChatGPT told me to do, so that that's my latest, and she, she's getting ready for high school softball now she's actually listening for what
Seth Marrs (03:57):
College kicked off last week. That's in softball, season's in play now
Jarod Greene (04:02):
It's upon us. And so yeah, it is getting hyped. All right, good stuff. So thanks for that. Always again, gives us those use cases where AI can add value in unexpected ways, not just the buzz around where unquote should. And again, is that something with the concerts you set out to do or was it just exploration? Hey, I wonder if it could actually solve this?
Seth Marrs (04:22):
Yeah, it's been a problem. I'd have to go look all that stuff up. I actually look for apps that can do it, and there's none. There's none that can do it in the way that I want it to be done, so I'm like, okay, we got all this technology and I want to learn it, so I'll just take this remedial ish use case and use it to solve a problem that nobody else seems to have solved.
Jarod Greene (04:41):
There you go. Well, you solved them. People can look to you. They had a similar one. Or if they have an app that they can show you, so you might be honest. So let's go back to the AI origin story, and again, I always love talking to you because you can give it from a perspective of a practitioner, things that you're doing internally within Sandler, but again, you talk to so many folks, where do you find most people have that moment, right? That bottleneck, that frustration, that breakthrough where they say, we can't keep doing it the old way anymore. Where do you find that trigger to present itself most often, whether that's for you or for organizations you work and talk to?
Seth Marrs (05:14):
Yeah, I mean for the most part a lot of that stuff's on the efficiency side, and I would say as apoplectic as people have been around, AI is changing the world. You still have people that are still trying to do the basic stuff of using it. So you're starting to see it used every day. Now people are using it for prospect identification and some research, which they didn't use it before. Now most people will manage their summaries and use that as follow up, so you're starting to see it in the simplest ways that are really valuable. I'm still not seeing people that are consistently really pushing use cases forward. I think you have people in companies that are trying to do that, but you're seeing slow adoption in the things that probably everyone thought people were doing two years ago. So people listening to this are probably like, I thought you were going to say something about an agent doing something for me.
(06:03):
It's like, well, depending on the company, they may call that an agent. That's kind of the utility, but I think it's a good thing because you start using it at these ways now you're getting comfortable with it, and the more people get comfortable with these tools now they start using 'em, and I think you're going to see the same thing when you talk on the agent side of things. Sellers that are starting to get value from this are going to start being really comfortable having an agent coworker that starts doing stuff for them, and it's just evolving actually kind of nicely in the real world,
Jarod Greene (06:33):
Not the old analyst world. I can think we struggled with that for a while of just how far advanced to be with the message and the offer in a market where people just weren't ready. It sounds like you're seeing folks are trying to solve the scale efficiency thing, not so much seeing the performance kind of effective side, but everybody's doing something and that wasn't the case you'd say year and a half, two years ago.
Seth Marrs (07:01):
Totally. And everybody's using, you can't have a discussion to say, have you or have you not adopted AI because everybody's adopted it. So you're seeing that experimentation. People think back that wasn't there a year ago. It was spotty, and it is kind of hard. I mean, you deal with this. I mean, the competitors in your space are as crazy as they come around. Overpromising stuff. To be a sane voice in that world has got to be hard because the death of everything seems to come out of a lot of these companies solve a useful problem and let people expand from there.
Jarod Greene (07:34):
Absolutely. We were at a conference last year and I remember we doing a round table and going around the horn and figuring out, hey, who's doing what level? And a guy in a safe space raises his hand. It's just like, you guys are using this thing to write your emails to people, and some of 'em are like, yeah, absolutely. I turn it on, I tell 'em about the person I'm sending an email to and maybe I'll put in their LinkedIn profile or something else and it'll come up with a personalized message with no typos and I can look at it and like it or adjust it and tweak it. And the guy, you could tell his mind was blown that that was a use case. He thought it was all about creating weird memes or doing some of the things you might see on social media.
(08:16):
He never thought about something as practical as writing an outbound email, not a sequence, Seth, just an email period, and you kind of see the wheel start to turn from there. That was a whole year ago. That's really interesting. Continuing on the journey, this is where I think most people kind of skip the parts of the discussion that I think I relevant. When you think about integrating AI in the go-to market strategies, how would you advise folks to sequence this? Is it a get the people in the culture? Is it look at the process and the workflow? Is it go buy a tool? I'm tapping into your analyst history here, but where would you invite someone who's just starting to think about this to sequence it in a way that makes sense
Seth Marrs (08:59):
To me? What's the value you're going to get and then work backwards from the process to fix, to attain the value. So if the value I need to do is to grow 10%, then figure the levers out that you need to be able to achieve that growth or that you believe you could achieve that growth and then apply AI in places that will lever that up. If I need to make more calls with quality emails, you got tools for that, right? If I need more workflow and guidance to be able to get through these things. So to me it always starts with value and then you work backwards. Nobody knows what that is, right? I want to grow by 10%. Okay, what is that? But you'll probably have five or six ideas on how you do it. You break those ideas into how you're trying to execute it, and then you start applying these tools to be able to give you what you need to achieve those. That foundational structure has not changed. The thing that's changed is you've got fricking awesome tools that you didn't have before that you could apply to it that really can deliver not just more time, but more quality. I think that's the piece people miss, and I think that's coming to the fore in 2026. AI can deliver more quality. That is the true value of these tools is getting more quality for your customers to win more.
Jarod Greene (10:11):
It certainly has moved in a place where, I remember we did a lot of just experiments early to see what it would be, and I call 'em like back office experiments. To your point on getting in front of the customer, you do things to make you look better, sound more professionally. I always, I'm, I was terrible with typos and AI's helped me with that, but you're right, I am starting to see more use cases that are about getting things in front with a level of quality that you trust. Now that you're almost confident and unashamed to share that it was AI help. What do you think has driven sort of that bar being right? Is it just the vendors have gotten smarter that the people have trusted more? We've got a wider range of use cases to play with. What do you think are some of the catalysts in getting us here?
Seth Marrs (10:55):
I mean, the baseline models have taken a leap forward. I mean, that's tangible. Claude's latest release took a massive leap forward, so you're seeing the model and get better where the tools can do more of the things that they promised early on that they couldn't do. The comfort level piece, the biggest limiter to this stuff is going to be your willingness to adopt it and your comfort level with it, and you're starting to see that go up. That's why I focus when you talk about the mundane stuff of everyone starting to use it in little places, the fact that that's happening is making people comfortable with this stuff. So now when you're comfortable looking at a snippet or a summary on Gemini, when you do a search, then all of a sudden you're comfortable when you're building a snippet in your workplace that you're going to send to a customer around a summary of the conversation.
Jarod Greene (11:38):
Is there a success that you've seen or you are personally particularly proud of? Somewhere where AI has genuinely moved the needle on performance or strategy, internal or on behalf of another great organization you work with.
Seth Marrs (11:52):
The stuff that can be with turning a conversation into an insight is just gold, like pure gold. That foundational piece is going to make it so sellers never have to enter anything in CRM. Again, it's going to make it so sellers can continue to learn and get really targeted personalized feedback. It's going to make it so sales managers know where they can and can't improve. It's just like it's an unlock, and none of this would've been even remotely possible without this technology. Being able to take a conversation and turn it into value without having to listen to the whole fricking conversation is, yeah, gold
Jarod Greene (12:28):
And the value, not just one, but hundreds. It's been really powerful. So on the flip, any particular learning or misstep, something that maybe didn't go the way you had hoped or maybe taught you something more important?
Seth Marrs (12:42):
I had real hopes that having the C-suites like executives involved in these deals would actually allow for the enablement of the experts in these companies, like rev ops leaders, people who really know what's going on, that it would be an unlock to let them go, and it's turned into the shiny object show because the pressure from the board to the CEO has led to just give me something that I could put in front of 'em that says, I'm doing AI rather than let me give my team these powerful tools to go win more. We could be going so much faster if this was unlocked differently.
Jarod Greene (13:18):
Yeah, I've been working long enough. I'm long tenured enough to think of this last wave, and I don't remember that being the call to action when SaaS came out, when SaaS came out, it wasn't like I got to do SaaS to do SaaS sake. You had all these contributing factors to make SaaS a more affordable option to scale, to change the economic model to be a little faster and innovative. But there was no, I don't remember there being SaaS for SaaS sake. I certainly see AI for AI's sake to do it, and I agree. I think it is a little disheartening when folks are just doing it to check a box as opposed to doing something to really, truly transform
Seth Marrs (13:57):
And it slowed things down. They can't use a tool like yours to do some of the cool things because they're trying to use it to showcase it rather than to add value. But that's changing. It's starting to change,
Jarod Greene (14:06):
Yeah. Yeah. I was going to think how do we snap 'em out of it? Because so much we want to do with this platform is make the AI advice we give practical and usable for folks out there. So I always appreciate the way you break this down. You distill it into folks with practical steps and guidance, especially for the, I call it the middle, right? It's not always going to be the C-suite, and it's not always going to be the ic, but for the folks that are in the middle of this, we talked a lot about enablement. We talk about operations. Those are the folks who I think have the levers to move and shift. So from your experience on advising organizations, particularly these leaders in the middle, what advice would you give them on starting the journey? We talked about just what it means to take practical steps, but if it was just, I want to get started somewhere and not do it for AI's sake, what sage practical advice do you give?
Seth Marrs (14:54):
Pick a problem, a big problem in your organization and solve a piece of it with ai, and then solve the next one and solve the next one, and then all of a sudden you'll have a fleet of agents that are doing a bunch of things and you're actually going to be really winning. But these are tools. These are tools that are fantastic. Use them to solve problems in your business.
Jarod Greene (15:14):
Yeah, couldn't said about it myself. So looking ahead, where does your journey go from here, Sandler's journey, go from here over the next year? What are the big priorities, and aside from just revenue and what are you using to measure success?
Seth Marrs (15:26):
We got to bring this to life for our customers and for people who are trying to learn. That's the biggest thing. Our biggest challenge is be able to show ROI from the investment that you make in a company like Sandler, and to be able to make sure that what you learn when you take our training, that you keep simple as that. Two very hard problems that have never really been solved in enablement. Seriously. We want to seriously solve them. That's our challenge.
Jarod Greene (15:52):
Yeah, and you and I have talked about this offline, but AI friend or foe in that regard, why would I learn it if I can just AI it,
Seth Marrs (15:58):
Total friend, total friend? Because it's not about the AI piece of it. It's the data that you put behind it and the insights that you could use the methodology to understand what works and what doesn't, and then be able to put it back as a unique insight. AI is going to be an enabler on this. We'll use this to level up.
Jarod Greene (16:14):
Let's go. All right, well, one more. If you have it. Any book, podcasts, resources that has influenced your thinking about ai, revenue strategy or modern sales?
Seth Marrs (16:24):
Not necessarily about ai, but I saw this actually, I was with a customer today and they had it on their desk. Creativity, Inc. I think is just as relevant if you haven't read that book. Thinking in the way that you could use some of these tools and the way that those leaders kind of created that business just as relevant today. Just as cool in thinking about products and how you add value.
Jarod Greene (16:46):
Yeah, great read, great recommendation. All right. Final question. Where can folks connect with you if they want to follow you or learn
Seth Marrs (16:54):
More? LinkedIn? Yeah, just go to LinkedIn. Love to reach out.
Jarod Greene (16:58):
Fantastic. And thank you for sharing your insights, your perspective. For everyone listening, these are the conversations you want to have on unexpected Lever, bringing to life, practical battle tested approaches with folks and leaders who are shaping the future of revenue, not just talking about it. If you enjoyed this episode, follow the show, share it with your friends, and leave us a review. I'm Jarod. I'll see you next time. Thanks again, Seth.
(17:22):
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. Joined by going to vivun.com/community. We hope to see you there.