Dave Irwin (00:01)
Welcome to another episode of Selling What's Possible. I'm Dave Erwin, your host, and joining me today is Craig Nelson. Craig is a long-time revenue enablement professional, has spent time building companies extensively with venture capital and getting his hands dirty in all things related to driving growth for a wide range of organizations. And today's topic is going to be AI.
enablement of account planning and execution and how AI affects, you know, not just sales, but also the account planning motion. So Craig, welcome to Selling What's Possible. Why don't you give me a little bit, give our audience a little background on yourself and your passion for revenue enablement and all things AI.
Craig Nelson (00:48)
Thanks, Dave, first of all, for having me today. The things that I've been passionate about over the years is I actually started my career at an engineering company, 3M, here in the Twin Cities, Minneapolis, St. Paul area. And way back then, we had a way of doing business. And that way of doing business
once a vendor came into our organization and was selling to us, said, hey, why don't you join up with our vendor organization? And that was over two decades ago. Dave, I thought I was going to go into the vendor world for a period of a couple of years, go out, see a couple of hundred accounts, kind of learn about the world of business, not just from an individual company like a 3M, great company, but many companies. But I never looked back. And I think that the topic today's topic about account planning and strategy is partly why.
You know, every deal is different and it's guiding about learning about companies and then making them successful is something that's really engaging and something that I enjoy doing.
Dave Irwin (01:45)
Excellent. Well, it's going to be a great topic today to cover because AI is such a profound impact on everything.
What do you think it is that's driving the recent emergence and rapid acceleration of AI in the commercial sense, sales and account planning?
Craig Nelson (02:01)
You know, I kind of liken this to that favorite GarageBand that, you know, was sitting back behind the scenes, you know, writing their music, performing for eight years before anybody knew their name. And that's the same thing with like an OpenAI. You know, they came on the scenes back in 2015. So that's been a decade. So, which kind of leads to, why now? You know, it's when that GarageBand finally has a hit. In other words, the hardware is there. So let's take this to technology. The software is there.
The applicability is there and businesses looking at profitable revenue as being a big deal. And I have had a chance in the past to grow some companies that ended up going public. And that was always the big question, Is what innovation are we going to have to use? But then at the same time, what disciplines are going to have to be in place for us to go from five sellers to 50 sellers to over 500 sellers once we raise real money? And so that discipline is actually repeatable.
And although every sales opportunity is different, certainly in enterprise selling, that's true. You know, everything is different, politics, budgets, et cetera. But in the end, there's some core disciplines. So here we are now, the technology is for real. I don't think that the jury's out on that. Now the question is, is two companies, all the way down to the individuals, kind of have a foundation for how they intend to use it so that, you know, three months.
six months from today, it isn't just being used to generate blogs and checking emails. It's being used to gain insights. I know we're going to get into that today and then do selling and then be a coach day to day.
Dave Irwin (03:38)
Yeah, I think that's a great point.
companies need to take a step back and almost have an AI strategy around, we're gonna try to look at the bigger picture and then plug it in, right? Where and when it's...
you know, most appropriate based upon sort of a prioritization of use cases.
Craig Nelson (03:55)
Yeah. And I think that there does need to be a plan. And we brainstormed about this earlier, right? Random acts of anything doesn't work. And I love that term. And so when you look at companies today and the way in which they're looking to go to market in 2025, 26,
Dave Irwin (04:01)
Yeah, exactly.
Craig Nelson (04:10)
everything from the hiring of people to the onboarding of people to their success in the organization, and then in turn the organizational success, you've got to look at the whole thing holistically. Because if you look at just the part of that, the use cases are going to be incomplete. And if you want AI,
when can we take a look at the returns of this analyzing the way we do business and then it coming back and giving us examples of gaps and where to improve?
In fact, my experience, I did have a chance to start a SaaS company in 2003, Dave, so a long time ago. And people thought it was cool because you could turn it on tomorrow. But then they realized there's still work, right? There's still discipline that needs to be put into it. So flash forward to today for those that look at this on a more holistic basis and look at it just like I mentioned a minute ago, or just look at the buyer journey or the sales process, but look at all the moving parts in the different groups that are involved.
and then get a better understanding of how you're gonna automate that, but in turn, again, start to learn from the work you're doing. And this is not gonna be the feed the beast kind of scenario anymore, right? We're gonna be tracking these things as we're doing our work.
Dave Irwin (05:21)
Well, I think, you it's a great point because I don't know who it is in the organization. Maybe it's RevOps revenue enablement, but there's some central sort of organizer of use case and applications because it fuses into other areas of workflow. mean, there's the CRM systems, obviously, but there's the whole area of just research and planning. And then you get into engagement with clients and outreach. And there's so many dimensions of
the commercial process where you could apply this,
But these enterprise accounts are so vast and so big. And then you think about account teams themselves and how many people are on an account team and how complex the processes of managing a large scale relationship over time. as we get into AI use cases, sales use cases, I'd love to get your point of view on what you see as in the world of account selling,
cross-sell, up-sell, are there separate AI enabled use
cases?
Craig Nelson (06:22)
hanging fruit? There's certain things that AI just does better. And it's actually not at the front end, but it's at the back end. It's in the realm of supporting a current customer. But the spin I'd put on that is that, all right, use this to interact with the clients and give them more information about your product, how to use your product, use cases, stories, you name it. You could use that literally starting tomorrow. But then also factor in selling.
it is a service oriented world, right? Land and expand isn't something new. You anybody who has run a SaaS company knows that if you land, that's a good deal. If you expand, that's a great deal. That's a profitable deal. So you know that if you can fix your service problem right from the start, the service problem being they bought it, how long between when they buy it to when they're a success story, you need that. But then they expand their business. You truly need that. So I think the low hanging fruit is there. I think you look at more the back end.
but just remember selling, especially if you're in account selling, right? That's something where once you've landed into an account, it might take you 12 months to land. But if you can expand in three to six months, So I think today AI changes this and that.
less capital, less resources, you can do some of the same things that I'm talking about. So everything from building awareness in the marketing, the front end, to doing solution selling, strategic kind of selling in the middle, then ultimately to land and expand on the end. Value realization, I like that term. Tom Pacella always uses that term, so I stole that from him. And so these things that kind of go the gamut, pick an area, make it a success, the quicker it's a win.
Dave Irwin (07:53)
hehe
Craig Nelson (08:01)
Use the wind to promote the AI usage in your company, It's the disciplines behind it, really, that you got to start at.
Dave Irwin (08:08)
Well, there's so much low hanging fruit for AI in terms of account team worlds. One of the areas obviously is just mining all of the research. Google searches, looking up information, reading the news, synthesizing this information, tracking it over time. That's all done manually and expected by clients, expected by...
management to be done by salespeople. when you apply AI to it, it really has an effect because it's bringing a lot of insights and it can summarize those insights. It can basically synthesize the insights quickly, summarize the key points, and then even link it to solutions and value propositions and provide a very quick synthesis of a situation and a client happening. What would you talk to them about in terms of a value alignment?
So those kinds of things, AI is very good at that, it seems to me. It seems to really summarize critical information into Soundbite and Cliff Notes, if you will, for sales conversations. But there's so much more, right?
adding onto sort of that use case scenario, a lot of this has to do with the data, right? Like what data is it running on? What data is the AI accessing?
Craig Nelson (09:30)
Yeah, and pick up on the data part, know, what's truly interesting about the way in which AI ingests this content, Dave, is amazing, right?
AI ingest the content and then somehow someway rationalize it with context. You still get to ask good questions, right? And then they see the contract come out the other end. And I'm not saying it's 100 % right, but let's say it's 80. That would go for 80 % over 0 % any day. And templates, you know, I don't always know where I put all my templates. So I think what's going to happen is once individuals start using this, and my bet is within companies, they're using it, but they're not saying anything.
early SaaS customers, they'd say that whatever you do, don't tell IT I'm using this. And we say, you know, if it's helping you do business, my bet is you'd be able to get through that, you know, discussion where they say, why are you using this? And sure enough, and then suddenly it became an IT play and the organization was buying it. Maybe that happens with AI, right? People that are in the field, they're infamous for finding the latest and the greatest, but only if it works for them and works right now. So that'll happen.
But you're not going to realize the benefit of, for example, selling before, during, and after the call can be fully automated with agents.
I think what's going to happen is that individuals in these companies are going to figure these things out on their own. But then all of sudden there's going to be questions around ethics and security and in various guidelines, like the wealth management company I'm working with right now. My first meeting was with the person that does.
right? Their governance. And you know, so these companies have broker dealers and all these people that they know will benefit from this. But hold on, we got to have the foundation in place first. So so the warning to any companies is we'll get the data in a moment is put a stake in the ground, knowing that the data that you're gathering for the next three quarters, by the fall of 2025, is going to be the big deal. You're going to gather it through loading it, ingesting it, doing deals through it.
You're going to do deals and then you're going to have service deals and realize value for these clients through deals.
But if you don't put the stake in the ground now, and then at the same time, the foundation has to respect some of these governance points, because what you wouldn't want to do is what you would call poison the well. Let's say you start using this and the governance person steps in and says, look, we're not allowed to record sales calls, whether it be with clients or prospective clients. You can't do this.
Dave Irwin (11:56)
Right. That's a point.
Craig Nelson (11:59)
Let's find that out upfront, because that day will come.
But I'm to come back to the data because people are already using it. You don't want to have any false starts, especially those that are going to cause it to be derailed for a period. And then you've got, I know, six months you can't use any AI
tools. So you want to be careful up front, but know that they're using it in the field. And then know that you could probably go to them and learn. And in other words, find those people that make their number every year.
Find the service person that's always thinking about not just servicing, but servicing and selling. Find those people. Get a sense for their not just way of doing business, but the technologies they may be using on their own. And then take a look at it more holistically from a company standpoint. Our best clients over the years have been somebody in the organization gets revenue enablement and they don't look at it as sales training. I'm picking on sales training just because that's where it ended up, unfortunately. You know, look at it broader. Look at this as
Dave Irwin (12:53)
Yeah.
Craig Nelson (12:56)
That salesperson in the field is going to become an advisor and we're going to help them to that end. So you better think broader. So let's say you get the right start, you've got the governance in place, and then come fall of this year, you can look across 50 deals you've done, 500 deals you didn't do, your wins, your losses, and then match that up against your messaging, match that up against the deployment approach you took.
You know, these are all things that you don't have to build some fancy database, you know, data warehouse kind of database to go do. AI is going to be able to adjust that and do something with.
Dave Irwin (13:33)
Yeah, I think that's an excellent point because there's sort of rogue uses of AI by individual salespeople, which could create more problems than it solves. But if you look at the current, what's working well and what's the workflow that people go through, what's producing the outcomes that you want, and then you sort of look at AI from instead of a tool, right, as a teammate, technology as a teammate, but coming in and accelerating.
that workflow, making it better, making it faster, making it easier, more accessible to more people to do like the best, you know, the best teams or the top 10%. But replicating what's going well is a great idea because what that does is it's kind of a safe use of AI, right? It's you're basically taking things that already work well and, and automating or further infusing insights or capabilities and speeding things up. And that's really.
I think at the end of the day, one of the best applications of AI is obviously improved efficiency for sales, particularly given, I would say sales is fairly inefficient, right? There's a lot of cooks in the kitchen. There's a lot of people involved. So there's just a lot of room to improve workflows.
Craig, how inefficient some of the current processes are today. That's the huge opportunity, right?
Craig Nelson (14:57)
And that's the shame is that we've put in all this automation, you know, over the years, and is it truly making them more efficient or giving them one more thing to update? And of course, I'm picking on certain ones that, you know, the Feed the Beast came right away where finally people in the field said, look, I don't care what you bring me, I don't want it, you know, and even if it had real value, they just didn't want it because there was just too much. So I think they went away from the shiny object some time ago, and that's a challenge.
You know, so flash forward to today, people in the field or for that matter, people at corporate launching these products, they don't care if it's stored in a CMS or a reg system. They don't care if it's a data set or relational database. I'm just throwing those terms out because the things I just mentioned, they could give a damn about it. But what they do want to know is, is this going to make my life not necessarily easier, but eliminate, well, let's go with reduce, right? You can update and make some of these apps headless where they just...
get updated by the agent, right? You're doing your meeting, you're executing your meeting, and it's updating your CRM. You know, it can do that right now. And then companies like Zapier and some of these others have done some really amazing things already. But keep in mind, there's a trillion dollars behind this over the next five years with the biggest investors and the biggest titans are behind this. This is not going to be the slow grow of SaaS. This is going to be, it's happening now. And the competition is, but coming back to, how am I going to lead with selling this to somebody in the field?
I'm going to let them know they can do scheduling and deal execution and automate all those administrative parts to it. And then also, they don't have to take the playbook and the presentation and adapt it. It's going to be done for them. But there's work to make that happen. And that comes back to the context and the experience. But once you do the work once, that's kind of the fun part that this kind of brings you, Dave. In the past, you had to take that discipline one person at a time.
Now you can train one of these AI models in your own workspace protected for your company. You can actually train that model on what works, right? For your HVAC construction company in Massachusetts. And I use that example because, you know, I knew nothing about that business, but I used AI to learn about it. And I learned a, or I should say, and then I used AI to understand the value to them, but before I pitched it to them. And that's kind of strategy, the things that your company does, right? But I use that as the gopher, if you will.
the actual work, know, the time on the calls, the time in the meetings, the time with partners that can help that same opportunity, you know, that's going to be increased. And the admin part should be reduced, if not eliminated by 2026. That should be the goal.
Dave Irwin (17:39)
Yeah, I think that's great.
That's where I see there's just going to be so many applications there. But if you do it thoughtfully, you you set yourself up for success for the long-term so you don't have to shut something down or switch directions or change things out. What about the people side of it though, Craig? Like, you know, so now you've got sort of this incredible, powerful thing. You know, think of it as insights at the speed of light, right? I can know more about my customer in an hour than I could learn in a year last year.
pre-AI and so now how do I as a human sort of ups, it's almost like changing your mindset to be just much more insight driven or informed or faster paced. mean, it changes the pace of selling, it changes the pace of planning, engagement, everything really.
Craig Nelson (18:31)
They always say.
you've got to give it the context. And it's got to have some structure to it. Otherwise, it's just automating random acts. So that's the model that I lead with Dave is let's get to foundational. Let's do guided. And as a byproduct, be doing my work. And then let's ultimately get to optimized. If the company's not going to do it, individuals are going to do it anyway. I've seen that 20 years ago with SAS. They're going to use it anyway. At some point, the company is going to catch up. But I think there's going to be a time not in the new.
Dave Irwin (18:39)
Exactly.
Craig Nelson (19:00)
a distant future where someone will come into a company and they'll ask, you know, not just do you have enablement, but they're going to ask, you know, are you using AI to enable my success? You know, I'm already using it, you know, are you? So I think this is not going to be a push. I think this is going to be a, you know, I'd like to see it and evidence of it in these companies that I'm doing business with and the companies I work
Dave Irwin (19:12)
Yeah.
That type of structured approach you're recommending is excellent guidance, I think.
you know, it's something new that you just got to get comfortable with. And then of course there's different tools out there. But, you know, so much of it just is structured applications, I think, within the context of what the job is and what people are doing every day together. I did have one final question before we wrap up, which is just can, you know, the world of account,
teams, right? I mean, we're always talking about sellers and salespeople, but there's this broader team, you know, in my experience, there's about 10 % of an account team is the actual selling resources. And then there's the service team, there's the success team, there's technical resources or project management. There's a lot of other players that come into the full, particularly management wanting to know what's going on and reporting and accounting and finance and legal.
You know, there's a lot of players and a lot of this information on accounts is fragmented by department, strewn all over the place. There's no central view. does AI help those teams organize and be more effective together? You know, I noticed over the years, right, what happens when you're disorganized, right? We have meetings, lots and lots of meetings.
to try to share information, but then everybody just goes back to their silo and then they come back together again. So what are your thoughts on how AI sort of changes or transforms account teams and how they do things?
Craig Nelson (20:54)
I think this is a great, great question to end on because in the end silos will do away with any initiative. I don't care what it is you're deploying. If the silos are in place, that initiative is suddenly going to be known to be that department. And, by the way, that department isn't producing or whatever it might be. did a survey and I shared this with you just before today's call of AI maturity within companies. And part of that was, you know, what is the business support for this?
And as you can imagine, executives, less than half support this in a strategic way right now. They're really just going to conferences, coming back and saying, you got to do this. But they're not really jumping in and doing this in great detail. You need them on board with breaking down these silos. Deals are not being done in golf courses.
they're being done through advisory work. So how do we make people be advisors? Well, you begin with some executive in that company who says, all right, product group, marketing group, sales group, services group, let's look at this more holistically and let's look at that whole experience. And we're not going to tackle this overnight. Part of the survey was where's the data centralized? 25%, partially 43 % siloed 30 % big numbers around siloed data.
Well, AI is not going to like that. And without some kind of integration. Another thing that I found interesting in this survey we did, and I will share this with those that are on the podcast, just let me know if you want it. How many executives see this as core to their business strategy going forward? 29%. 29 % that AI was going to be core. AI will end up, because the technology is there.
So if you don't look at that as being strategic, I don't know what you are looking at strategic. So what does that mean? If you're going public and you've raised a couple of rounds, how are you going to scale if you're a siloed organization? If you don't know how to take feedback from the field and respond, right? Inflection points happen in the field.
Quite often, why aren't we gathering and acting on those things? So as I look through this survey to kind of net it out, what it comes down to is if a company looks at this strategically Look at it holistically. Say we're going to start with support, then we're going to add more selling, right? The expansion selling and support, then we're going to go upstream.
But I don't want to say you would do that sequentially. You'll do that in parallel. Have your sellers, have your marketeers sitting in a room and asking questions about, all right, we've got 1,000 pieces of content that we do manually today. How much of this can we generate? And then use AI to regenerate for deals. Good. So now we shifted from a slide deck that becomes, with 50 sellers, 500 slide decks.
Now you have one base slide deck, then you generate the ones you're going to be using for that one opportunity. I mean, I use that example with a client the other day who said, if you look at our CMS, it's just chock full of these PowerPoint slide decks. can't possibly find the one for that vertical, for that size company that's funded. You know, I want to be able to, with a prompt, ask what I just said there and then have it come back and assemble it on the fly.
Dave Irwin (23:48)
Yeah, that's a great example.
Craig Nelson (24:09)
And one final point about the sellers that I've worked with over the fields, the ones that make their numbers every year, no matter what, is that they are super engaged when they have an opportunity in front of them. At that very point, they want the content, they want to understand the content, they want to understand the business, you know, and it might be Sunday and the sales call is Monday. I'm not saying that's right, by the way, but, you know, they are super engaged with a real opportunity in front of them. So how do we capitalize that and use the AI innovation?
to address that use case. Do that with five sellers and then have them walk the halls and promote, right? How they're doing more deals and not any one of those deals get the generic deck. They all get a custom, particularly to that company. so AI is going to make, and this is what's fun about it, some of these big ideas we've had over the years, it's going to make it work.
Dave Irwin (24:53)
Right.
Craig Nelson (25:00)
So AI can actually do that for you. So as you can tell, I'm a believer. And for me, I'm a better critic than creator anyway. So if you can give me something to start with, I'll use that.
Dave Irwin (25:13)
Yeah, I think you're talking about a world of hyper-personalization at scale, person to person, stakeholder to stakeholder. The world moves so fast and the changing conditions on the ground, think, Gardner, and I quoted this all the time, 83 % of sellers struggle to adapt to changing customer needs and expectations, which are changing every week. And their problems change and the situation changes and evolves. And so if you're not relevant and aligned in the context of what's happening at the customer,
It's very difficult to be successful. And what AI helps you do is sort of maintain that level of relevance. But you make a great point, which is, you you got to at the top, know, companies have to start to break down the silos and the fragmentation.
Then you got to infuse the right use cases into the workflows that people can actually use the right workflows with the right data. And boy, you can just achieve incredible, not only productivity gains, right? But just more results faster because you're just optimizing, as you said, at that top level, sort of the speed with which you're in market, in discussions. If you had five times more relevant sales conversations with an account,
in 2025 than you did in 2024, it's highly likely you're going to sell a lot more revenue and deals as a result of just being more efficient at doing that.
Craig Nelson (26:37)
Yeah, I think that I'm just going to come back to points I've already made. Look at the foundational part. Get this square for you and your business. Because if you're a rep and you have a $1.5 million quota, you're running a small business. So get it right for your business. Or if you're corporate and you've got a $500 million number and you get it right for that. But look at the foundation. Very rapidly then, pivot to a couple of use cases, which are a big deal for your company. In other words, if you can automate them.
The executive team will point to that and it'll become the poster child for the company. So foundation to these quick wins in 30 to 60 days, it can be done. This technology allows that. Then at that point, take a look at having a cross-functional team. And in that cross-functional team, it's no different than advice we gave years ago, is going to be understanding of AI, but more or less understanding of those best practices. Then you have guided.
People will then be doing more work faster, less effort. They'll get it. I mean, I'm pretty confident that if you do this right, but I always be pointing downstream to say by the end of 2025, we're going to have so much data, so much insight at 2026, certain disciplines are just going to be easier. And we've tackled now the low hanging fruit. Let's do the strategic stuff next year. But if you don't start with that foundation before guided,
that the optimized part will never happen, in my opinion, right? And I think some will say otherwise, but the technology is not gonna do it on its own.
Dave Irwin (28:10)
Yeah. Well, great, great advice. think avoiding random, you know, sort of independent uses of AI and trying to harness its power through a really structured approach. your, your, your recommendation is a great one. Pick, pick some really high value use cases and just hit those hard. And if you do that well, you know, you're to have those to point to as success and track records and point to the impacts that'll get people excited for the next series of
know, AI enabled capabilities and workflows, but it's an exciting time for sure in the commercial community, having AI suddenly catch traction, catch fire. Everybody's interested in deploying it. And so, you know, it'll be a really, it'll be really interesting to have this conversation at the end of the year and see what happened, you know, what use case is really.
came out of this across a broad swath of companies and industries that turned out to be the best.
So thanks for joining us, Craig. Really enjoyed the conversation. I look forward to having another one, a touch point periodically on this topic.
Craig Nelson (29:14)
Yeah, enjoy it.
Yeah, let's do it. Let's do it later this year. In fact, in the Q3 time period, I think we're going to have enough data to go on and see where we're at. Then we'll do it again for the next year.
Dave Irwin (29:27)
Excellent.
And by the way, if people want to get ahold of you, what's the best way to do that?
Craig Nelson (29:35)
Yeah, the email address is probably going to be the best way. cnelson at growth IQ. So it's a growth IQ dot AI. Appreciate you giving me a chance to give that up. The more companies I work with this next year, the more discussions we're going to have in the fall. Dave, it's a consulting organization, but it's a consulting organization based on having built companies in the past. So we're bringing together a lot of ideas, but guess what? The ideas change.
And I think I'm unlearning as much as I'm learning right now.
Dave Irwin (30:04)
Yeah.
Yeah, it's going to be really rapidly evolving. So, well, terrific to have you here. Thanks, Craig.
Craig Nelson (30:09)
It is.