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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):
Hey everybody, welcome to V5, where we spent exactly five minutes on some of the hottest takes and topics in all of B2B sales. I say it every time, but this is going to be a good one. This is a lot of fun. This is my buddy, this is my OG. This is somebody I go way back with. This is Austin Hitchcock. This is Senior Director of Account Development at HighSpot, who's also like me, a girl dad, and someone who I know came up through the trenches doing a lot of great work for a company that is near and dear to my heart. Austin, how you doing today?
Austin Hitchcock (00:31):
Jarod, I'm doing fantastic. Thank you for having me today. I'm excited to jump in on this.
Jarod Greene (00:35):
Excited to have you here. All right, so let's get into it. What is your hot take? What is on your mind? What is the hill you're dying on right now?
Austin Hitchcock (00:43):
I'm hearing this a lot out there, and if you follow me on LinkedIn, I've been saying this a lot, but for B2B SaaS in the age of AI, outbound selling is not dead. It is more alive than ever before.
Jarod Greene (00:58):
And why do you feel that way?
Austin Hitchcock (00:59):
Outbound selling in general? It is more critical than ever before, and I think companies are, they've got leaner SDR headcounts now than ever before. That makes pipeline as a whole a go-to-market level job. Everybody's got to be all in on it. Sales, marketing, sales development partner. We're all in it together. It's a team sport now. And so a couple this with the explosion of AI and you've got everybody trying to do more with less. You've got everybody trying to be more efficient. And the problem with that is that very few companies are doing it well. And in some cases, AI is actually generating more prospecting noise, which drives this quality challenge.
(01:45):
But look, I mean, take a step back. Pipeline is the lifeblood of a business. You can't survive without it, but because it's harder to do now than ever before, and in many cases less resourced, it causes pipe gen to be a mission critical topic for the board. And so I think my second hot take here on top of this is that AI is not necessarily replacing the sales reps. It's widening that gap between the good and the great reps.
Jarod Greene (02:12):
Yeah, we've heard that, and I think you guys see it really closely, obviously being HighSpot, being enablement, where do you think AI helps these reps that are good and where does it hurt the ones who are on the cusp of being good, but maybe over-reliant on some of the capabilities and features that the AI brings to the table?
Austin Hitchcock (02:32):
Yeah, it's exactly that, Jarod. So top reps are using AI for researching personalized messaging, automating repetitive tasks. They use it as this co-pilot. You hear that word a lot. They use it as this assistant, essentially, is how I like to phrase it. But weaker SDRs are letting AI do the work for them, automate the outreach, adding fuel to the fire of the spam canons, if you will. That doesn't break through the noise. That actually enhances the noise.
(03:00):
And so the human element, the relationship building, the creativity, the empathy, that's still irreplaceable. And in fact, that's even more important now because there's so much more noise. And so you're seeing this world where AI is creating just a lot more prospecting energy and fluff out there. So to get through that, you've got to be human, you've got to be real. So it makes it harder. It makes it harder. It puts pressure on good reps to be great reps. Like I said earlier, pipeline is critical. You need it to be able to survive. You need it to be able to hit your revenue targets. So at the board, people are talking about how can we make this repeatable? How can we scale this? And I think that's still a huge question mark for a lot of organizations trying to use AI to help with that.
Jarod Greene (03:45):
Absolutely. So this is interesting. So as a market leader myself, I've looked at the AI SDRs out there on the market. I've piloted quite a few, and I think I always come back to a frame you and your team have set for me is what great ADRs do, which is highly personalized, break through the noise, super relevant information. But I always miss the human element of it because you'll remember his name, but you remember the guy we were working with who would do the songs in the videos, Dylan?
Austin Hitchcock (04:14):
Yeah.
Jarod Greene (04:15):
And then he was reaching out with these videos that cut through, took a long time to do, maybe not the most scalable approach, but can be effective when you see a human. That was years ago.
(04:26):
But I'd imagine a world now where if you are outbounding and you're outbounding effectively and you actually see a human being, you're almost shocked that the person on the other end is a real person. It's like we used to call the IVR system and an actual human would pick up the phone. That becomes the differentiator. How do you set up as a leader, a world where, yeah, AI is going to take on a lot of what you guys used to do, a lot of what you guys and gals used to do. It also sets you up to be great. How do you balance that? Because as a manager, your resources aren't infinite, the pressure's always on, but how do you set people up to be great in a world where they might be automating themselves out of a job?
Austin Hitchcock (05:04):
Yeah, exactly. Well, I think it's scaling what works, right? Cutting out what doesn't. You mentioned the videos. I mean, songs are great. That's even better. But LinkedIn video is probably the most successful channel that we use. It combines the personal aspect of LinkedIn where you have your history, your personality, even on LinkedIn to kind of back up and add credibility to your prospecting. And then, yeah, sending a video because it's differentiated, because it takes time. That's why it's likely to get a response because the prospect knows that you put energy towards that. So that's something that's really, really working for our team.
(05:43):
But to take a step back and to set them up for success at an org level, it's making sure that the SDR org is prioritizing ABM and cross-functional collaboration. It's really making them go from task doers to these ABM strategists, right? Their job is to kind of quarterback the account. They need to know the business inside and out. They got to work with the AE really effectively to kind of co-prospect. You've got to know what campaigns are going on with marketing. You've got to be in lockstep with them, leveraging partner, et cetera. So really it starts with that collaboration and knowing where you sit within the go-to-market.
(06:23):
And then as it pertains to applying AI, you've got to use that as an assistant, not a crutch. So automate the research, the data entry, the admin, but keep that personalization, keep creating those videos using the phones. People are still big on phones and it just depends on the prospect you're reaching out to, but that certainly is an important channel. And then just set guardrails on spam if you have to. Don't let AI tools that you're implementing encroach on your ability to drive successful conversations and convert those to the funnel and double down on those human channels, like I mentioned.
Jarod Greene (06:58):
Yeah, I think those human-to-human connections is so important. We're talking to our buddy Lucas a couple clicks ago and he had mentioned how events remain effective because it's one of the last places you're going to see an actual real human and have a real human-to-human connection. So it's the thing that breaks through, but they start with the tip of the spear that you and the teams you've led have always been phenomenal at. So keep going, man. Keep pushing the envelope, keep leveling up as we say, and keep doing great stuff in the world.
Austin Hitchcock (07:26):
I appreciate that. Yeah, events are huge. Probably more important now than they ever have been. Back to what we were saying earlier, it follows a common theme of breaking through the noise. Prospects are almost reinvigorated to be in person again. I mean, it's been a number of years since COVID, but we're still kind of feeling like those things are feeling new again. And so events are big and yeah, I think that that is something that we definitely want to be doubled down on.
Jarod Greene (07:50):
Yeah. Speaking of events, you guys got any coming up soon?
Austin Hitchcock (07:53):
Got a big one, Spark coming up a couple months away in October. Big customer event. We're looking forward to it here in Seattle.
Jarod Greene (08:01):
Alright, we'll drop the link on the chat here, but also appreciate your time. Thank you so much. If folks wanted to get engaged, have a different conversation with you, talk all things U-Dub football or anything else going on in the world, where did they find you?
Austin Hitchcock (08:12):
Find me on LinkedIn. Austin Hitchcock. Please do connect.
Jarod Greene (08:16):
Good stuff, man. Appreciate you. Thanks a lot, Austin.
Austin Hitchcock (08:18):
Thanks, Jarod.