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Will AI replace your sales team? Can it? Should it? What is AI even? This and much more, we talk with Kyle Coleman about.
He's CMO at copy.ai, so he knows a thing or two about AI.
***
He's CMO at copy.ai, so he knows a thing or two about AI.
- (00:00) - Introduction
- (02:38) - AI in Sales: Initial Thoughts
- (03:26) - What's AI changing right now?
- (04:30) - Challenges with AI SDRs
- (07:24) - Future of AI in Sales
- (14:07) - Account strategy plans with AI
- (17:34) - Systematic Sales Process
- (24:20) - Maximizing Sales Efficiency with AI
- (24:59) - Getting Started with AI in Sales
- (25:44) - Crafting Effective Emails with AI
- (28:11) - Leveraging AI for Account Executives
- (31:32) - AI in Customer Success
- (36:09) - Pitfalls
- (40:11) - The Role of Revenue Operations in AI Adoption
- (42:12) - "This AI thing is not for me"
***
This episode is brought to you by Growblocks. Finding and fixing problems in your GTM shouldn't take weeks. It should happen instantly.
That's why Growblocks built the first RevOps platform that shows you your entire funnel, split by motions, segments and more - so you can find problems, the root-cause and identify solutions fast, all in the same platform.
***
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Creators & Guests
What is The Revenue Formula?
This podcast is about scaling tech startups.
Hosted by Toni Hohlbein & Mikkel Plaehn, together they look at the full funnel.
With a combined 20 years of experience in B2B SaaS and 3 exits, they discuss growing pains, challenges and opportunities they’ve faced. Whether you're working in RevOps, sales, operations, finance or marketing - if you care about revenue, you'll care about this podcast.
If there’s one thing they hate, it’s talk. We know, it’s a bit of an oxymoron. But execution and focus is the key - that’s why each episode is designed to give 1-2 very concrete takeaways.
[00:00:00] Toni: You should fire your sales team. AI has finally come for their jobs. Or has it?
[00:00:06] Kyle: The problem though, is that it doesn't work the receipts are in. We've seen it now for the last six or nine months that these AI SDRs or AI AEs are creating more headaches than they're solving.
[00:00:16] Toni: That's Kyle Coleman,
[00:00:18] Toni: the CMO at CopyAI.
[00:00:21] Toni: He knows first hand
[00:00:22] Toni: how difficult it is
[00:00:24] Toni: to build an AI solution
[00:00:26] Toni: for sales.
[00:00:27] Toni: So, believe him
[00:00:29] Toni: when he says
[00:00:30] Toni: AI SDRs
[00:00:31] Toni: aren't replacing
[00:00:32] Toni: your reps
[00:00:33] Toni: anytime soon.
[00:00:35] Kyle: They think that it's sending emails. They think that it's booking meetings, sending out calendar links, and that is a fundamental misunderstanding. Frankly, it's a technical founder product person's understanding of what sales is. I don't see an outright replacement.
[00:00:48] Kyle: For the human element in sales, because that's not what buyers want. What buyer is out there telling you, man, I wish my, seller could be more robotic, zero, 0%.
[00:00:59] Toni: In today's episode of the Revenue Formula, We're talking with Kyle about the capabilities of AI in the sales process today, what it can actually do for you and the pitfalls to watch out for along the way. Enjoy.
[00:01:14] Mikkel: So the good thing is I put this in the notes. You also have kids. We all have kids, and this is usually the go to in our intro. I was just telling Toni before that my son started having random playdates with a kid across the street.
[00:01:27] Mikkel: And one day all of a sudden, he was just in there. We didn't even, he didn't even come say hi, the, the kid called August. He just came in, and they started playing, and five minutes later, they have like a big what's called Schaefer the dog. German Shepard, German Shepard, and all of a sudden that massive dog just, it had just jumped the fence over from the neighbor and run over and inside our house and just sprinting through us.
[00:01:54] Mikkel: Madness, madness indeed.
[00:01:56] Kyle: Well, my son's named August and I have two dogs underneath my desk, so the formula may repeat itself here.
[00:02:04] Toni: Actually, you know, my, my oldest son, second name. Is Augustus, actually. Isn't that fucking crazy? Look at that! Unbelievable. Cosmic. Cosmic. No, we really chose unique names, you know.
[00:02:20] Mikkel: No, it's like when we screen candidates for the show, it's always like, check on Facebook or Instagram, are there any kids there? Otherwise, it's just, it's not gonna work out. It's not gonna work out. Yeah,
[00:02:29] Kyle: exactly. Sounds exciting.
[00:02:30] Mikkel: No, it has to be some entertainment in there. That's the only thing we know. That's, that's the only thing we can do.
[00:02:35] Mikkel: That's it. So that was the introduction actually there. That was the introduction.
[00:02:38] Mikkel: And I, and I just wanna say, let's segue into AI here. Yes. Because I thought about this, it's always, this is like you think about how do you segue now into the bow tie and compound interest to ai? That's totally clear to me.
[00:02:48] Mikkel: You're gonna do that. It's so difficult. But I saw I don't, I, I'm not gonna be able to nail the quote, but I saw someone say about ai, I don't want it to do like my. job that I love. I wanted to do like my laundry and clean up my dishes so I can do the job that I can spend time with my kids. And then I thought about yesterday when I picked them up, I was like, yeah, I'm not sure yesterday to spend more time with my kids.
[00:03:13] Mikkel: So we're going to talk about AI today specifically within the realm of sales. And we have Kyle Coleman with us. You talk a lot about this on LinkedIn. So thanks so much for joining and sharing a bunch with us and the listeners today.
[00:03:24] Kyle: It's my pleasure. I'm excited.
[00:03:26] Mikkel: AI has been around for a while now, but it's really been picking up in pace these last couple of years.
[00:03:30] Mikkel: And obviously with it comes a lot of change. What change have you seen this bring to the, to the realm of sales? What, what do you think is happening at the moment in the market?
[00:03:40] Kyle: What's happening in the moment is the AI capabilities have gotten exponentially better 18 months. And it's given a lot of people the idea that AI is now capable of fully replacing a salesperson.
[00:03:53] Kyle: I happen to completely disagree with that, but the rate of change has been such that it's sparked some thinking that, Oh, okay, well now this little chat agent can replace everything that an SDR does or everything that an AE does or everything that some other person in the sales cycle does. And so that's, that's the thinking and it's understandable, like the leaps in the technology are pretty impressive and it's understandable from a venture capital standpoint.
[00:04:17] Kyle: Venture capital people are looking for the next disruptive idea. So of course they're going to place their chips on the wholly different way of approaching this in a way that you can really remove a lot of costs from the business. If it works.
[00:04:30] Kyle: The problem though, gentlemen, as I'm sure we'll discuss is that it doesn't work like the receipts are in.
[00:04:35] Kyle: We've seen it now for the last six or nine months that these AI SDRs or AI AEs or whatever you want to call them. are creating more headaches than they're solving. And so I'm sure we'll dig into that. But that's the reason why the rate of change has been wild.
[00:04:48] Mikkel: Yeah. I think I saw Alina, Alina.
[00:04:50] Mikkel: I saw Alina here on LinkedIn. I believe it was her at one point. There was an AI SDR trying to book a meeting with her, and she was just like, This is completely uninteresting to us, and the AI persisted to say, No, no, it's interesting, here's like the case, and just kept going back and forth, right? So, do you think it's more is there more, almost, I want to say, abuse of the technology than great use happening at the moment?
[00:05:14] Kyle: The problem, in my opinion, Mikkel, is that the people who are designing the AI SDRs do not have an understanding of the complexity of being an SDR. They think that it's sending emails. They think that it's booking meetings, sending out calendar links. And that is a fundamental misunderstanding. Frankly, it's a technical founder product person's understanding of what sales is.
[00:05:35] Kyle: You know what I mean? Like, it's a, it's a disservice. To the complexity, to the nuance, to the creativity, to the strategy, the thoughtfulness that is not just SDR, but sales in general. And that's the problem is that the AI SDR is being architected around what a product person or technology person's vision is of sales or top of funnel or sales outreach, and that is one pillar.
[00:06:00] Kyle: In the, you know, sales strategy coliseum here, it's way more than just sending emails. That's the problem, is that these AISDRs are incapable of codifying or replicating everything that a human does. And so, of course, they're going to leave you wanting.
[00:06:16] Toni: I think, I mean, And I don't think any of us is like a big AI, LLM, technical expert or something like this.
[00:06:23] Toni: So kind of, let's, let's see all that for yourself. Let's see how that question lands. But I, I, I guess a couple of people out there would say like, well, well, well, it might not be working right now. Right. Maybe right now it's kind of an email gun, basically just a bit smarter. But you know, what we've seen over the last 18 months, this was pretty crazy.
[00:06:41] Toni: This was magic. I actually believe for everyone that's not super technical you know, and kind of looking at this AI thing, they, they think it's magic because it's so hard to, you know, explain basically, so hard to understand. And once you lose the, you know, the connection to like, well, I can't explain how we got here.
[00:06:58] Toni: You also then very quickly go into the, well, that also means I can't explain how quickly this might evolve and suddenly we have that. AI, SDR that kind of does all of the things that, that are currently missing. Do you think this is where we're going? And, and is it, is it, is it mostly like a, we're not there yet kind of argument or do you think, you know, the, no, fundamentally this, this, there's a main blocker here that, that this generative AI technology is actually not going to be able to cross.
[00:07:24] Kyle: Yeah, it's a good question, Toni. And the answer is, I don't know. I mean, none of us really know. The rate of change, like we said, has been exponential. It's been crazy. But for the next few years, at the very least, I view it very similarly to what we saw with the rise of sales engagement solutions. You could have very easily made the case then that sales engagement solutions were going to, quote unquote, replace SDRs.
[00:07:42] Kyle: An SDR, if all that SDR work is, is sending emails, then why not have outreach or sales off just send emails and we're on our merry way. Well, because if you crowd out one channel, then it's going to become ineffective and seller or buyers will be skeptical and it's not going to work. Same thing is here, same thing's happening here.
[00:07:59] Kyle: And so, yes, the SDR role is evolving. Yes, sales is evolving. SDR management is evolving, but it's always been. It's always been for the last 50 years, sales has been evolving. It's been tech enabled, and this is a continuation of that. Now it may be a difference, like a step change difference as opposed to, you know, a more delicate evolution, but that's all it is.
[00:08:22] Kyle: And so the role that I see for a top of funnel seller, I actually think it's a way better role for SDRs because what happens, let's look back, trace the history of the last 10 years of SDR. They are responsible, unfortunately, at many companies for just setting meetings. And so you have this whole class of early in career people who are not trained to develop business acumen, are not trained to develop any real sales acumen, and when they go to try and get that closing role, what are they told by the hiring manager?
[00:08:49] Kyle: Oh, sorry, you don't have sales experience. That happens over and over and over again. It's like chicken and egg problem. Now with AI, how about we replace the menial, mundane, rote, responsibilities that the SDR has and deliver them really high quality research on accounts, really high quality research on contacts so that The SDR, the human, can be thoughtful, strategic, creative in the way they do outreach, in the way they execute, the way they think about the strategic initiatives inside that account and attach their value prop to it so that they build real business acumen, so that they can take meaningful discovery calls, so they can talk to a chief financial officer and have a real conversation.
[00:09:27] Kyle: What a concept! Like, we're actually going to be training our earlier in career people to have better Conversations to create more meaningful relationships with their buyers. That's what's been missing. We haven't been missing the spam cannon part of sales. Like we have that we've had that for 15 years, we've been missing the human element, and I know it sounds kind of trite to say this, but I genuinely do think if AI can replace the robotic components of the SDR role, then what's left the human components of the SDR role.
[00:09:58] Kyle: And that's what's going to happen. So there may be fewer jobs. Because SDRs will be able to have a larger span of control, but those jobs will be way better just in the current role and allow for much more smooth glide paths into some sort of graduation.
[00:10:14] Mikkel: Do you, do you kind of think that this will open up the path for more self prospecting, like them becoming almost full cycle because it will take away some of that grunt work?
[00:10:23] Mikkel: Because I can see the benefit of, you book the meeting so you believe in it, You already have the relationship and can then proceed the deal. And I get that if it's a junior, it's a different story, Baba, but I'm just wondering if it opens, if you're seeing that that could open up for more of that stuff.
[00:10:38] Kyle: This is exactly the role that we're designing internally at Copy. ai is I want my SDR role, quote unquote SDR. I don't know if I'm going to call them that. I probably won't. It'll probably be enterprise inside sales or something like that. They're going to have two job functions. One, generate demand for our enterprise sellers.
[00:10:54] Kyle: So the traditional outbound role inbound lead processing for our enterprise high value named accounts. Awesome. And then to process the inbound demand from SMB accounts. I don't want my enterprise seller with a 300 K OTE selling a 5, 000 run rate deal. Like what are we doing? That makes no sense. But if I can take these relatively low risk deals and give them to my SDR inside sales rep combo, then guess what?
[00:11:20] Kyle: They're going to be generating pipeline for the AEs. For the right accounts, right people, right time, and they're going to be sharpening their axe on the actual sales skills of running these deals and getting them across the line. And that to me is the right combo. That to me is the right evolution. And not to mention that actually makes your CAC make sense.
[00:11:39] Kyle: Cause a lot of the problem with the existing kind of structures for companies is they would look and say, well, Salesforce has, you know, SDRs and BDRs and AEs and AMs and CSMs and Implementation Managers and PS and all the rest. So we should too. It's like, well, should you? Do you really need that? Do you have the same business model as Salesforce?
[00:11:58] Kyle: And so companies end up hiring these SDRs when they have, you know, an 8K ACV. And it's like, I don't know if that really makes a ton of sense, like financially speaking. And so now if you fast forward and you can increase the span of control, as I said, for this, let's just keep using SDRs moniker. If you increase the span of control for them, you're getting more out of them, more productivity, more results.
[00:12:20] Kyle: And that's going to fundamentally change the financial profile of your company. So whether you say, Hey, we went from having a one to one ratio of SDR to AE. But now with AI, we can go one to four, huge difference there from a financial profile standpoint. Or you say we went from one to one, a SDR to AE, we're going to maintain that ratio, but we're going to give the SDR, the inside sales, closing responsibilities to fundamentally changes your financial profile.
[00:12:43] Kyle: And that to me is what's going to happen in the next two to five years with AI. I don't see an outright replacement. For the human element in sales, because that's not what buyers want. What buyer is out there telling you, man, I wish my, my seller could be more robotic, zero, 0 percent like when was the last time you guys were on a customer service line, you're trying to talk to your bank or something like that.
[00:13:06] Kyle: And you just can not, I've been like holding the phone screaming, like talk to human, just for the love of God, talk to human. And it's like, that's where we are right now. That's what buyers want.
[00:13:18] Mikkel: I think what's so great is it even also happened in, I remember with chat, I was so elated when people started putting chat on their websites.
[00:13:25] Mikkel: I could just ask a quick question and then it's like everyone has it. It's all bots and automations and you just can't get in touch with anyone. It's really, really frustrating. Really
[00:13:35] Toni: fast. So what happened to me is that I did the same thing. Like I want to talk to a human and turn out it was already human.
[00:13:44] Mikkel: So, I want to double back though, to to something you said, because you talked a bit about maybe some of the ratios between SDR and AE, they're going to change. So you're really hitting at some of the efficiency, meaning the output of the SDRs are going to change. So what I'm hearing, simply put is, They're going to be able to book more meetings, because then you need fewer SDRs, right?
[00:14:04] Mikkel: How do we get there? Let's start getting a bit practical.
[00:14:07] Mikkel: How will this technology, how are you seeing it being used to drive some of those outcomes?
[00:14:12] Kyle: Let me somewhat push back on the framing. Which is, it's not just about booking more meetings. I think that's a mindset that has caused some issues with sales leadership.
[00:14:23] Kyle: Well, it looks good in a spreadsheet. Let's just triple the amount of meetings we have. Triple the headcount we have, and our work here is done. I'm the best CRO on the planet. Like that's not exactly the formula that makes sense now. The formula that makes sense is booking the right meetings at the right time.
[00:14:37] Kyle: With the right messaging and with the right people. And so what I see happening with AI and certainly the way that our customers are using copy AI is they're able to build much more meaningful account strategy plans. This is not an account plan that tells us how many employees they have and where they're headquartered.
[00:14:54] Kyle: Like, Come on, that's useless. What an account strategy plan is, is it does the research looking through earnings calls and scouring the internet for company relevant company news, analyzing job openings, and then it takes your company's value prop and compares it against all that research and spits out eight to 12 sales angles for how you should approach this account.
[00:15:13] Kyle: Then it does the same thing for contacts. And then it gives that information to a rep to say, here's what's going on inside the account. Here are some suggested ways for you to frame your value prop. Here are the contacts that matter the most. Here's some suggested ways for you to contact them. Now go execute.
[00:15:26] Kyle: And now what the SDR is able to do is they're able to maybe yes, create more meetings and we see that. But importantly, the meetings that they do create, convert. And that's what matters the most. You talk about customer acquisition cost reframe or reset. It should be, what's our win rate? For some reason, the down funnel metrics get completely ignored in a lot of the calculus that, that sales teams use.
[00:15:47] Kyle: Like, that's the biggest trigger you have. The win rate that you have matters a hell of a lot more than the number of meetings that you're bringing in most of the time. You know, a 5 percent change in win rate is equal to something like a 50 percent change at the top of the funnel for most companies.
[00:16:01] Kyle: And so if you can figure out the right way to bring in the right accounts, get to power earlier in the sales cycle, and then of course run effective deals, and we can talk about AI's role in that if you'd like, that's the right formula. So it's not just about what I, what my, the reason I push back and I sound like something of a I'm a little aggressive on this front is because what I don't want to happen is exactly what happened with outreach and sales loft.
[00:16:24] Kyle: Well, we have the capability of sending more emails, so I guess we'll just send more emails like, no, that's not exactly what this is about. This is about replacing or streamlining the research you do. So that your people can be thoughtful and so that they can execute a very strategic omni channel approach.
[00:16:42] Kyle: Email, yes, but also phone, video, social, like be a human, connect with people however you can, create high velocity pipeline. That's really what the North Star metric should be.
[00:16:52] Toni: do you see this already maybe in in, in the customer base? That because of that change of the economics, basically, right?
[00:17:01] Toni: Kind of these, these unit economics, they're changing using that technology. Do you see that, you know, some of the rules of thumb that are out there, like, Hey, if you want to run an SDR setup, you need to, what, in the U S 25, 30 K upwards, otherwise you can't do it. In Europe, it's, you know, probably below that, but do you see that some of those rules of thumb are starting to crumble?
[00:17:24] Toni: I mean, we talked a little bit about. You know, the ratios of SDRs to AE, but this extends much further than that. Right. Do you see that happening?
[00:17:33] Kyle: I see that happening.
[00:17:34] Kyle: And what I'm seeing, Toni, is people are thinking a lot more systematically about what their sales process is, as opposed to thinking about it in a more siloed way.
[00:17:42] Kyle: And what I mean by that is, as we just mentioned, some people will say, well, we need to generate more revenue. Therefore we need to generate more meetings and they kind of ignore the rest of the funnel steps. It's like, well, there's more to it than that. Maybe we can think more strategically here and monitor a few more metrics to understand what exactly are our efforts.
[00:18:00] Kyle: Doing across the entire funnel and what should our process be across the entire funnel to drive those better metrics. And so what we're seeing from our customer base, as I mentioned before, is yes, increase the number of meetings that you're booking. And most companies see something like a, a doubling of their pipe gen per rep in, you know, six months of a deployment or three months of a deployment, actually.
[00:18:19] Kyle: But the most important thing to me is they're also leveraging AI throughout the sales cycle, not just for their sales team. But for their marketing team as well. So, Hey, we just delivered this really great account research plan, account, account strategy plan, and it got us the meeting. Awesome. But the buying group is 15 people.
[00:18:37] Kyle: We need to engage all these people over the three month sales cycle we have. So now let's leverage this account strategy that was all written back to the account record in our CRM. And let's go create a custom landing page and create a custom event and create custom ads with real insights about this account, serve it to all the members of the buying group.
[00:18:52] Kyle: And then let's do this for a cohort of our opportunities. See what happens. And sure enough, guess what happens. Conversion rate from stage one to stage two increases, stage two to three, stage three to four, and then your win rates ultimately increase on those cohort of opportunities that day. You're actually running effective sales and marketing together against with a real point of view on how you can help that account.
[00:19:13] Kyle: So that's what we're seeing. And that, that kind of more systematic go to market systems thinking is what's really going to change the profile of companies and allow you to make the decision about what specialist roles should we have and what should their spans of control be.
[00:19:29] Mikkel: I think it's also interesting because I've, I've reflected over this, that there are a bunch of things.
[00:19:35] Mikkel: You know you should be doing or been wanting to do, but never get around to it because it's just going to take forever. Like your example with, let's run through a earnings call. Yeah, that sounds like fun to spend time running through and all that stuff to figure out what's relevant. Another classic one I've seen is a sales rep asking, do we have a case study or a quote about blank?
[00:19:56] Mikkel: And they do it once because they get, then they get a no, and then they never ask again. So it doesn't happen, right? So I think those. Let's say even simple, small wins all of a sudden you can gain. And I think that that to me seems seems kind of powerful to be honest, that it unlocks a couple of new things.
[00:20:12] Mikkel: Have you seen some of that stuff happen as well, or?
[00:20:15] Kyle: It's incredibly powerful. And so I'll, I'll use your second example. First, one of our customers has their global company enterprise company. They have like 4, 000 customer stories or something like that. And what they found when they looked at it is that their team was using.
[00:20:28] Kyle: Six of them because they're spoiled for choice. You know, it's a paradox of choice. So I'm just going to save the ones I want to my desktop and forget about the other 3, 900. So what they did is they use AI. They threw all the customer stories into a little AI engine, and then they created basically this case study wizard where the rep comes in and says, I want to sell this product.
[00:20:46] Kyle: To this persona, in this region, in this buying stage. And then the AI goes and combs through the 4, 000 case studies, cobbles together a custom case study with six or eight different one paragraph examples, and there you go. There's your custom case study that's bespoke for your customer, the region, the industry, whatever it may be.
[00:21:02] Kyle: And that type of thing is hugely powerful, hugely powerful. And that's the type of thing that really moves the needle from a sales cycle standpoint.
[00:21:11] Toni: so a bunch of new cool tools and kind of ways of thinking about this, you're kind of, you know, uncovering here and presenting. Do you think that the role of, and the qualifications almost of the seller will change a little bit?
[00:21:24] Toni: Because it's, we're almost introducing, you know, we went from, Typewriter and door to door to phone and, you know, typewriter to phone and, you know, laptop or something like this. And now kind of there's this new step. So, you know, it's more specifically when I'm thinking about this and less so about the AEs, but more so maybe about the SDRs do you believe that this is that folks are maybe going to become a little bit more like engineering like, you know, is, is an SDR going to be the same profile that we had previously?
[00:21:53] Toni: You know, energetic and, you know, not, not fearing the phone or whatever you want to kind of attach to that. Do you think that those folks or those profiles will change a little bit actually, in order to use all of those new tools that are out there? And do you think that there's going to be a change like this or?
[00:22:11] Toni: It's, I don't know, magic and suddenly everyone can just use it anyway.
[00:22:14] Kyle: It's magic. And people use it all the time. So we're, we're in this adolescence right now where a lot of companies feel somewhat disillusioned by chat GPT. You know, 18 months ago, CEO calls an emergency all hands meeting and says, we need an AI strategy.
[00:22:29] Kyle: And that AI strategy is you get chat GPT and you get chat GPT and go make it work. And people opened up chat GPT to get their enterprise license. They're all ready to go. And then they see the blinking cursor. And they're like, write me an email and email sucks. And they're like, Oh, AI is never going to be right.
[00:22:46] Kyle: And no fault to the people like prompting is hard. And we're in this adolescence right now where for many companies that are rolling out these quote unquote co pilot experiences to wring the value out of those co pilots, you have to know what questions to ask. That's not always easy. This has been kind of the constant problem with business intelligence, generally speaking, and the same is true with artificial intelligence.
[00:23:08] Kyle: To get value out of a BI tool, you need to know what questions to ask. To get value out of an AI tool, you need to know what questions to ask. But now think about what does a BI analyst do? They set up the dashboards, they set up the reports. They set up the cadence to automatically update people when things change.
[00:23:26] Kyle: Same thing is going to be true for AI. There will be systems that need to be engineered by someone, but not by everyone. And the AI needs to, that person that's that go to market AI architect, as we think about it, needs to have two things. They need to have AI expertise and they need to have domain expertise.
[00:23:43] Kyle: So I don't want somebody building the workflow that generates the account strategy plan, but You have no idea how to build an account plan. That doesn't make any sense. They need to sit with the VP of sales or the head of SDR, or the best person at the company to say, what do you do when you're building an account plan?
[00:24:00] Kyle: And let's go codify that. In our solution. And so, and then let's set this up inside of our CRM to trigger to run against whatever logical condition we want to trigger to run inside the CRM. So now the accounts are enriched automatically. The information is there automatically. And the other 99 percent of the SDRs were completely uninvolved in this process.
[00:24:20] Kyle: And they're on the receiving end of the value. That is the right way to do it. That is the way that's actually going to make it work because then your salespeople focus on selling again. Like what a concept right now, salespeople spend what 18 percent of their time selling or something like that. What if that were completely inverted?
[00:24:36] Kyle: What if they spent 80 percent of their time selling and 20 percent of their time on the other stuff, what could that do to your business? So that's the universe that we're getting to. And I'm really excited about it. And that's, again, I don't want to make this a copy commercial, but I will, that's what our customers are doing.
[00:24:51] Mikkel: So it's funny because it was all, my next question was going to be who should operate, but you kind of gave the answer around what competencies they should have.
[00:24:59] Mikkel: So what I'm wondering now is if there's a listener out there right now, they've maybe tried some AI, but they've not really made an effort that's turned into a success yet, right?
[00:25:09] Mikkel: And because we're so focused on SDRs. Maybe that's a good place to start for them. How do you recommend someone actually get, get going? If we have a ready operations pro or sales ops, someone, or a sales person, it's like, we, we actually need to, to try this out. Seriously. What, how, how would you recommend they go about it?
[00:25:26] Mikkel: Copy AI demo requests. Yeah. Obviously. WWW.
[00:25:30] Kyle: And use
[00:25:31] Mikkel: the discount code.
[00:25:34] Kyle: Reach out to me. I'm happy to help. I have to have these conversations. We also have a lot, like I published some, some thinking recently. It's not earth shattering thinking, but I think it's really important foundational thinking. Uh,
[00:25:44] Kyle: So let's keep using the SDR use case.
[00:25:46] Kyle: You have to build a great account plans as we just talked about, but also people are obsessed with writing great emails. So, okay, let's just scratch that itch for them. Let's write great emails. How do you write great emails? And I wrote a guide on this. You can find it on our blog. It's a 2024 cold email guide or something like that.
[00:26:01] Kyle: And. The great copywriting is at the intersection of four different things. And you need to architect your AI to be able to do all four of these things in order to create great emails. Number one, account research. We already beat that horse. We're not going to continue to beat it. Number two, persona research.
[00:26:17] Kyle: You have to really understand your personas, the value props, what they care about, jobs to be done, responsibilities, all the rest. Great. Number three, personal research. So persona and personal research. What is unique about that person? I don't mean that they fostered a husky and you want to talk to them about the experience of like, whatever.
[00:26:36] Kyle: That's not what I mean. I mean, what is their job experience, their work history, and how does that change the way that you should sell to them? For example, I became a CMO through SDR and demand gen. I did not become a CMO through product marketing and brand marketing. If you're going to come sell to me, focus on pipeline.
[00:26:54] Kyle: If you come selling to me about like. Brand stuff, it's going to be in one ear and out the other. I, I, it's not that I don't care. It's just not what's going to compel me to pay attention. So personal information is very important. Number four, your value prop. I know it sounds simple, but a lot of times copywriters don't totally understand the value props that they're selling.
[00:27:13] Kyle: So now you need your AI engine to be able to do all four of those things. And turn it into best practices emails with short subject lines and compelling first lines and a nice call to action and a PS line and abide by all the best practices. So that's what you need to do. And you can do this step by step by step sequence wise inside of chat.
[00:27:34] Kyle: GPT. It's very hard and it's not repeatable. You need a workflow engine that allows you to codify the process once. So that you can deliver the value across your entire org in perpetuity. And that is what customers are using copy AI for. It's a really nice balance of automation, but also human strategy.
[00:27:51] Kyle: And that's kind of the key. We want humans setting the strategy, workflows, streamlining as much as possible, and then humans doing the QA last mile work on the backend. And that is how we're going to help create a really effective sales strategy.
[00:28:04] Mikkel: So I'm gonna take a liberty now and ask a question we did not prepare for because you also said something.
[00:28:09] Mikkel: Yeah, sorry. It's gonna be about the Huskies.
[00:28:11] Mikkel: No, you said something interesting about how to run effective deals, right? Because these SDRs, they're working to book meetings for account execs to close them at the end of the day, right? And that's a really important collaboration to have. What are you seeing on the AI side of front for account execs?
[00:28:28] Mikkel: And what's changing there?
[00:28:31] Kyle: Yeah. Great question. So we talked a little bit about the more account based marketing approach to middle of funnel and the custom content creation type things. That's huge. That's huge. Like, I can't tell you guys, I'm sure you've been on the receiving end as a buyer in different cycles where you're like, man, I wish I could have this information.
[00:28:47] Kyle: And my rep just keeps sending me stuff. That's just not quite right. It's not compelling. I'm not going to send that internally to their, to my CEO and tell them that like, it's just not right. And so marketing can really step up and help because marketing has a lot of information about the people and about the accounts, the same information you leverage for SDR.
[00:29:05] Kyle: Let's leverage that for marketing as well. So that's one side, the account research, the contact research, and the role of marketing in this, and now it's easier than ever to create a template for an ABM landing page, duplicate that template and copy paste information you have about the account and your work here is done.
[00:29:21] Kyle: Like it doesn't need to be this months long exercise to create a really bespoke campaign for every account. Let's just create a landing page that has the information about the use cases they care about and why they should care about it. It's not rocket science. That's one. The second though, is what can we do with sales transcripts?
[00:29:37] Kyle: We can do a whole hell of a lot with sales transcripts and I love Gong. We use Gong internally. I love Chorus. I've used it in the past. The problem with those solutions is that they are products. They deliver you call transcript analysis in the way that their product team engineers it. That's leaving something on the table in the age of generative AI, because every company is different.
[00:29:59] Kyle: I've worked with, I don't even know how many companies that use medic as a qualification criteria, and every single one of them uses medic differently. Like, the medic stands for something different. Sometimes it has two Ds, sometimes it has three Ds, sometimes there's a P and it's med pick. Like, people run things differently.
[00:30:15] Kyle: And so you need To have your workflow engine able to actually codify your bespoke process and pull the information out of the transcripts that actually makes sense for you. And so we have these workflows running for our customers that are doing exactly that qualification information, scanning to understand the use cases presented and scoring it, pulling out AI forecast dates based on the information and CRM history, just like augmenting the salesperson's role to help guide Their strategies identify and close deal gaps in a real meaningful way.
[00:30:46] Kyle: That's aligned with their bespoke process and then helping sales management understand, well, our human is calling this as the close date and the AI is calling this as the close date. Here's my dashboard that says, here's where my two stakeholders are butting heads. Let's drill into those deals in our forecast call.
[00:31:01] Kyle: And so you're just getting a lot higher fidelity information from transcripts. That's custom that you've never had before. So you get the support from marketing. You get the support from sales management and leadership, and you have therefore a really comprehensive strategy on the right approach for the right deals at the right time.
[00:31:18] Toni: So actually, so we've been going through a couple of different use cases here, which I think is super interesting, right? Because a lot of folks will like, Oh, this triggers an idea. And I know you guys focus a lot on sales and marketing because I'm sure this is also where just the money is, right?
[00:31:32] Toni: But do you have, do you have one or two examples for the CS side? Because usually folks that are listening here, they're trying to cover the whole revenue stream. And, and, and CS obviously like carries a lot of value, right? And a lot of, a lot of revenue coming from that side. And it's usually understaffed, right?
[00:31:48] Toni: So I can actually also see. Conceptually speaking, lots of lots of value, you know, that can, AI can deliver on that side of the bowtie. But do you have maybe a couple of examples to make this a bit more tangible for, for our listeners?
[00:32:02] Kyle: You're, you're totally right. CS. And it depends what you mean by CS. I assume we're talking, are we talking more commercially focused or are we talking more literal, like adoption?
[00:32:11] Toni: Great question. It could be either, like, let's just say the right hand side of the bow tie, so to speak, right?
[00:32:16] Kyle: Perfect. Okay. So we have use cases for both and we're seeing customers use both. And frankly, guys, it's more similar than it is different pre sales and post sales. You know, we try and wrap ourselves into these pretzels and say like, every customer is a special snowflake, but really like, There's a lot of similarities and we can run some, some plays here in a very similar way.
[00:32:32] Kyle: For example, call transcripts. When we're doing an implementation, when we're doing an executive business review, when we're doing a check in with our customer, that's spitting out a transcript more often than not in this virtual sales world. How are we leveraging that transcript to design the value journey?
[00:32:45] Kyle: And once we design that value journey, what is the custom content that we need to create? What are the customer references that we should broker, relationships we should broker to help people understand how to go from value one to value two to value three? Like it's the same sort of thing on the presale side.
[00:33:00] Kyle: It's just a different journey that you're architecting and there's more context because you have usage data. So that's the other thing that I would say is especially on the retention side, now we can pull in usage data. We can pull in transcript data and we can have a really good understanding of what is actually going on.
[00:33:16] Kyle: Inside of this account, what use cases, what product areas, what features, whatever are they using and why, and what do we need to do to course correct or double down? So again, it's just a matter of the way I think about the right solution to AI is you should be able to open up your sales, SDR, marketing, CS, account management playbooks.
[00:33:35] Kyle: To any page, the pages in those playbooks are processes. And nine times out of 10, you can significantly streamline, not fully automate, significantly streamline those processes using AI. So codify your playbook using the right. AI solution. And that's how you're going to get major lift. Now that requires you to have a playbook.
[00:33:56] Kyle: Like you can't outsource the strategy. You need to have an idea of how to run effective CS, how to run effective retention cycles, expansion cycles, upsell cycles, whatever it is. Codify that. And then you can deliver the value. So it's bespoke. It depends, but there are absolutely ways to do it. And again, more similar than different to our pre sales motion.
[00:34:17] Mikkel: So almost what you're saying, you need to have the process in place before you start embedding AI into anything, which, which kind of makes sense to be honest. And everyone is like, ah, dang. Yeah, I know. No, but it's like, we were. We were at an offsite, the team was pitching AI solution and it's like, well, how are you going to accomplish that part?
[00:34:34] Mikkel: Well, that's the AI. That was like always the rebuttal. Right. But it kind of makes sense. I mean,
[00:34:37] Kyle: it's the same thing guys for the previous generation of technology. If you thought that adopting outreach was just going to work for your company and you had no strategy around sequence design and what channels are we going to hit and how many calls and all these things, like it was dead on arrival.
[00:34:55] Mikkel: Yeah. And
[00:34:56] Kyle: so you have to have. A strategy, the difference with AI that I'm seeing go to market teams use, and I'm using that phrase very intentionally, go to market teams, is that there's way more interconnectedness than there was before. Because outreach, despite what they say, is just for SDRs. Nobody else friggin uses it.
[00:35:12] Kyle: Sorry. I'm sorry to break your hearts, Manny. I love you. You're an SDR tool, but now because the information is much more transmissible with generative AI, you're starting to see, as we mentioned before, that same account research plan that the SDR used to create the meeting is what marketing used for ABM, is what the CSM used for the value journey, is what the retention person used to close the renewal.
[00:35:35] Kyle: And there's this interconnectedness across the team that has never existed before. And so you get to think differently about how can each person, each Member of the go to market org actually affect and interact with one another in a way that's actually meaningful for the customer. And that's, I think what we've lost a lot of sight of a lot of the sales process, a lot of marketing processes have been what's best or easiest for us to execute.
[00:35:57] Kyle: That's not the right frame. The right frame is what's best for the customer. And that's what having this more connected mindset, this more systematic approach to a go to market engine can, can really deliver for your customers.
[00:36:09] Mikkel: But, and I think that kind of is a nice segue because I was also reflecting But what are some of the pitfalls as well, as people go and unleash this technology onto the commercial teams, like we've covered a lot of roles, and some are a bit more cheeky than others, right?
[00:36:23] Mikkel: Some take more liberties, some are a bit more let's say taking the safe route, right? So what are some of the things, the watchouts, basically, when, when starting to roll this out?
[00:36:33] Kyle: Yeah, thinking that an AI tool is going to be a silver bullet for you is very dangerous. And I know, I'm sorry, I'm sorry but you still have jobs, which is nice.
[00:36:45] Kyle: And what I mean by that, and I said it before, is you, you can't outsource strategy. And so let's go back to the AISDR. We're going to come in and we're going to plug in the AI SDR and our pipeline woes will be solved for perpetuity. Thank praise Jesus. Like, no, no, that's not going to work because you don't have a real SDR strategy that's being codified.
[00:37:05] Kyle: You are expecting somebody else to do that for you. How many times guys over the years have we seen the outsourced SDR shops fail? Like 90 percent of the time for most companies, it's for the same exact reason. Those outsourced shops don't understand your product, don't understand your personas, are disconnected from your sales team, don't create a good customer relationship.
[00:37:25] Kyle: Why do we expect anything to be different with now just outsourcing that to AI instead of outsourcing that to the Philippines? It's the same exact thing. And so you can't expect This to be a silver bullet, you can't outsource your strategy. You have to really lean in to codify your best practices and you have to find the right AI solutions that allow you to do that in a bespoke and custom way, or you're going to be perpetually disappointed.
[00:37:46] Kyle: And maybe more importantly, you're going to burn your TAM to the ground. If you implement this AISDR that goes off and sends 40, 000 emails this week, you could, you might have this little bump in meetings. But that is gonna fall off a cliff and we've seen I don't even know how many stories of that happening now and that's a major problem burning your TAM, burning relationships and Expecting some sort of everlasting result is just not the right way to approach it
[00:38:12] Mikkel: Yeah, I think I got really worried when I saw on LinkedIn people writing about, Hey, this is how to switch out your email domain.
[00:38:19] Mikkel: So you don't get, you know, trapped in. Then I was like, Oh no, this is not a good direction we're heading in folks. Stop it.
[00:38:27] Kyle: The thing that's been so encouraging for me and what I, I end up getting in this argument with CROs a lot where I'm like, Hey CRO, Nice to meet you. I'm Kyle. You need to send fewer emails and you're going to implement our solution.
[00:38:39] Kyle: And you're going to send a quarter of the emails that you're sending today. How's that sound? And they're like, are you trying to get me fired? Cause I'm already on thin ice here. Like growth is not coming easy. I'm like, no, no, this is better. I promise. Because they've been conditioned to think that more is more and more is not more.
[00:38:55] Kyle: More better is more. And so we need to make the better part of this. We need to emphasize that. And if you can put AI to work to do that. And again, like equip your team to be thoughtful, creative, and strategic in the way they run their deal cycles. That is the right way to use AI. And so I'm starting to see again, humanity being reintroduced to the sales process, and that makes me very happy.
[00:39:18] Toni: So, and, and just want to kind of go back one more time to maybe some of the pitfalls, right? Because. I think everyone understands, okay, the, the pitfalls with the AI SDR agent, that makes total sense. But I'm sure, I mean, like, there's, there's so much enthusiasm, there's so much energy around this, this AI piece.
[00:39:34] Toni: Some of the workflows you kind of just mentioned are, like, mind blowing. Let's have that tomorrow. But I'm sure, you know, I'm not sure, you know, if you're, if you're willing to share that, but What are some of the roadblocks that, that you guys are seeing, you know, when rolling out copy AI to kind of a new customer that kind of differentiates the, Oh, this is going to be a great customer in perpetuity to like, Oh, maybe they don't get it.
[00:39:56] Toni: Maybe this is not going to work out. Maybe this is not going to stick. Do you see like a difference in, in those two courts? Is there something where like, so like, well, you know, that, that is what's happening with them. And that, that's why they're kind of actually kind of really adopting this extremely well.
[00:40:10] Kyle: Yeah.
[00:40:11] Kyle: Who, a little pop quiz for you guys, who, who do you think across the revenue engine has the most leverage provides the most leverage for the company?
[00:40:23] Mikkel: Ooh, for the company, I would actually say revenue operations who has the most leverage politically will be sales. But that will, I will probably say revenue operations, probably the, I don't know, maybe the CFO, you know,
[00:40:34] Toni: just going, going left field here.
[00:40:35] Toni: Right.
[00:40:36] Kyle: Yeah. Yeah. Good answers. Good answers. I from a literal like AI adoption or go to market AI tooling adoption. I agree with Mikkel on the rev ops. And so the answer now, I agree. I agree with both of you, like good answers. But from how are we going to like the difference back to the question that you asked, Toni, the difference of the customers who do great versus the customers that are a little bit slower out of the gate are ones who have very strong revenue operations teams.
[00:41:01] Kyle: Why? Because those RevOps teams are the ones that understand how the cake is baked. They understand the integrations between systems. They're a more systems level thinker, generally speaking. As long as RevOps at your organization isn't just like a ticket taking role, if it really is a strategic function, Then they're going to be the ones that have hands on keyboard to do the implementation.
[00:41:22] Kyle: They're going to be the ones that are able to say, we're going to, yes, we're going to use these AI workflows to do account research, but why, how, when, how are we going to trigger these to run? Well, okay. For public companies. We're going to trigger them to run every earning season. For private companies, we're using six cents and we're going to trigger them to run every time the six cent stage changes from decision to purchase.
[00:41:44] Kyle: Or we're going to trigger these account research workflows to run every time the account owner changes. Because what we've seen is when there's a new set of eyes on the account, there's some, there's some juice there and we can generate some revenue. So the operations team is the one that has the keys to the castle that can provide a ton of leverage.
[00:42:01] Kyle: And when they are empowered. To go and set the strategy and codify the playbook, the results at our customers are off the charts.
[00:42:12] Mikkel: So I'm almost wondering if I can ask a final question. Yeah, right. It would need to be the final question. It would need to be the final, because it was a really good end. I'm just thinking Kyle is so well spoken.
[00:42:21] Mikkel: Yeah, he never, he does never misspeak. You know what, I think it's an AI avatar. He just sits there writing and prompting GPT to do the answer. No, so I was gonna, I was actually gonna ask, because I've, we've looked at each other a couple of times, Toni and I, and said, are we too old for this technology? I think there might be some folks who are still a bit reluctant, right?
[00:42:41] Mikkel: The, the types of people who saw the iPhone and went like, I don't really need it. Like apps, I like buttons. What do I need? I like button buttons. Buttons. Yeah. I mean, I like the, my Blackberry. What will you say to those who are kind of a bit on the fence still? I don't think people are like, you know, not believing that this technology is gonna be a thing in our industry.
[00:42:57] Mikkel: Yeah. But there might be some who are still like, yeah, let's, I'm not sure I want to commit yet. What would you actually say to those folks?
[00:43:05] Kyle: Your domain expertise is extremely important to make AI work. So, you know, we see this a lot with, with content marketing people. Let's use them as an example.
[00:43:14] Kyle: They're under the gun, just like SDRs are under the gun right now. Oh, AI can go and write great articles. Like, no, it can't. It can with the right guidance though. And so if you're the content, the type of content marketing person who doesn't want to slave away on an S a 3000 word SEO piece, but rather Wants to codify your process.
[00:43:33] Kyle: Cause you know what good SEO looks like. Train an AI to do that. Great. Get a great first draft and spend 30 minutes editing instead of three hours writing. Awesome. What are you going to do with the next two and a half hours though? You're going to expect you better. Hopefully find another way to add leverage to the business, but spin up a podcast, manage your team's YouTube channel, Tik TOK, Instagram, Facebook, find some other content avenue for you to explore.
[00:43:55] Kyle: And the same is true for every function. Across the go to market engine. If you put your head in the sand and pretend that AI is not coming, you are going to get left behind. You do not need to be an AI expert though. You need to be a domain expert that's paired with an AI expert, and then you're going to start to find that you're going to have a lot of leverage.
[00:44:13] Toni: Kyle, that's Kyle Coleman for, for you. Thank you. Thank you so much for joining us. It was really insightful. Mm-Hmm, . I'm, I myself gonna take a couple of things away from this one, and I have a feeling folks that are listening will have the same thing and I mean, they know where, where to find you, obviously on LinkedIn.
[00:44:27] Toni: Probably everyone is gonna probably seen you at this point. But also, well, they have now and at the, at the same time I heard you're also closing deals for copy ai, so you know, they can just inbound directly to you as, as a DM or. Or if, if, you know, you don't get up and up the attribution, but they could also request a demo and copy, I'm sure.
[00:44:46] Kyle: Absolutely. Nothing would delight me more. And guys, thank you for having me. It's been a pleasure.
[00:44:50] Toni: Wonderful. Really nice. Have a good one, Kyle. Bye bye. Bye.