Jarod Greene [00:00:00]:
Hey, welcome to V5 where we spend exactly five minutes on our soapbox with some of the hottest takes in all of B2B SaaS, B2B sales, the entire sales engineering realm. I'm excited because I am joined by Mr. Toby Penn, who is an experienced global presales leader. I don't know Toby's take, so let's ask him. Toby, what's your take? What do you got?
Toby Penn [00:00:22]:
What's my take? Well, I'm looking at AI and how it helps presales is what I want to take on. When I first started playing around with AI and specifically with AVA, I was looking at it from the stance of how does this help me? How do we get there? How do we, you know, improve, do more with less. And immediately it went to onboarding and how do I get people off the ground and effective faster than we do today? At a previous location we had about an eight week onboarding and it took about people six months to be independent. How do you compress that timeline? How do you make them independent? And we always had a buddy system, so it's not like they didn't have people to call. The team was always really good. Everybody's willing to help, but you have to get a hold of somebody. When I started training Ava with our own documentation, all of a sudden I could ask it questions like what should I do next? Based on my previous calls, what are the next steps and what should I focus on? So onboarding typically is technical and technical training is great. I can teach you the product, but it doesn't teach you how to interact with the product or with the customer or what to do next.
Toby Penn [00:01:31]:
And that's always the trick to get people in that six month train, that six month span, how do I compress that and make them more effective? And then if you change something like a demo script, like a process or anything of that nature, how do I continuously get people up to speed and make them impactful and effective? So when I first started training it, that was what I immediately drew my attention wasn't, you know, how many more essays or SEs does this replace? It's how do I make them better, faster? Because you're always growing, you're always expanding, you're always onboarding, you always have new people. So looking at that, you know, especially with a gong integration or things that already collect information for you, coupled with your process documentation, coupled with your architecture, coupled with your website information. So all of that stuff together. You know, it's funny, when I first started asking it questions, I would send answers off to the subject matter experts and the immediate response was where did you get that answer? Like oh great, is this really wrong? Is it that far off he goes, no, it's actually more perfect than the email I was about to write you. It gets to the point where you have that ability to ask intelligent questions and you know, with the prevalence of AI today, most people are pretty decent at prompting and getting what they need back out of it.
Jarod Greene [00:02:53]:
Totally. Yeah, we see that. We see that every day. One of the things I think is really interesting, we just did our state of sales engineering and we asked respondents how long does it take to onboard a sales engineer? And the highest concentration is in that 4 to 6 and 6 to 12 month range, right. This isn't just the easiest job in the world and you know, living customers better than anybody. These are some complex product portfolios, some complex go-to-markets. And so yeah, I think going from you know, four to six or six to twelve to two to three months is a much faster time.
Jarod Greene [00:03:28]:
The value for these organizations and couldn't said it better myself from the standpoint of primary value properties things isn't just making the SC better, but it is making the new SES more effective, faster.
Toby Penn [00:03:41]:
And not to offend any of my sales counterparts, but if you put it in the hands of salespeople as well, I'll call it easy. Questions are less sent to the SE. So we're working on high value tasks rather than, you know, the repetitive stuff where ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer type of thing and you get the intelligent questions back. That's the only thing I saw with Ava as well is hey, this easily extends beyond the presales team. This is to the sales team and how do we onboard them? They don't know what they should do next all the time. And some of the questions I asked it were hey, based on my last three calls, what value prop should I focus on the most? What were the notes that made the most impact during that call or had the thing that hit the home the most and nine times out of ten it was coming back with pretty dang good answers of where I should take it and what that process is and what that follow up email should be and how to stay engaged without being pushy or obtuse about your answers with just generic marketing information.
Jarod Greene [00:04:45]:
Guilty of providing the generic market information and it can scale pretty easily but it doesn't have the nuance that presales leader or presales IC or even a very technical AE would have. And so I believe context is going to win this thing. Whoever has the most context is going to be the thing that people trust. Whatever people trust is the thing that they'll use.
Toby Penn [00:05:07]:
It's context and knowledge about your environment. But if you couple it with training on your own process, your own marketing, your own capabilities or product value, well, now that context really rises up into value, into what you're going to present them, rather than just regurgitating what you heard on the call. Yes, let me summarize, but let me now put that in context of what we do, how we do it and what the next steps are with engaging with us.
Jarod Greene [00:05:37]:
Makes a big difference. You talked about AE independence and we were talking about an anecdote internally where, you know, we've all worked with AEs from all walks of life and someone made the comment that you can ask Ava a question at 3am for a 7am call. We've all worked with SEs on the other side of that. So you talk about asking an intelligent question. We, we saw the value of being able to ask whenever you want. Sometimes it's during the call you're on.
Toby Penn [00:06:01]:
And it's all about scale, right? The more independent you make a sales rep or an AE, the more high value activity an SE can do. Which means if they're doing fewer of the low value, they can do more of the high value and scale across more reps.
Jarod Greene [00:06:20]:
See, I knew five minutes would go super quick. You and I could probably talk about this for, for 500 minutes. But back to scale. I know we got things to do as well as our audience, so I'll leave it at this. Toby's take the AI isn't here just to help you be more productive. It's here to help you be more productive quicker and provide independence not just for the SE team, but for everyone in go-to-market. Toby, if folks want to talk to you more about this, folks just want to get in touch. Where can they find you?
Toby Penn [00:06:46]:
They can find me on LinkedIn Messenger. Toby, T O B Y P E N N.
Jarod Greene [00:06:50]:
Toby, we'll see you around the way and thanks for joining V5 with us.
Toby Penn [00:06:54]:
Awesome. Thank you.
Jarod Greene [00:06:55]:
Appreciate you.