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There's a lot of things you couldn't scale - until today. In this episode we discuss how AI can remove some of your limiting beliefs and let you scale things that you couldn't before.
***
- (00:00) - Introduction
- (04:27) - It's all focused on output
- (08:01) - Quality increase for SDRs
- (13:37) - Faster ramp
- (20:04) - AEs: Ramp, training & research
- (28:59) - What will happen to marketing?
***
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: Hey everyone. This is Toni Holbein. You are listening to the revenue formula. In today's episode, Mikkel and I discussing that scaling volume is the wrong way to use AI in your go to market and what you should be doing instead.
[00:00:14] Enjoy.
[00:00:18] So I guess your wife and you I mean, you already have 3 kids.
[00:00:23] Mikkel: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:00:24] Toni: And then
[00:00:25] there a conversation to maybe get more?
[00:00:28] Mikkel: We're pretty clear on no more, but I see where going with this.
[00:00:33] Toni: And I'm I'm pretty sure reason was what was the reason?
[00:00:38] Mikkel: Limits of scale, unit unit economies of scale, all that stuff didn't work out. Like, we only have so many bedrooms. That's you know, but the funny thing is, so we were talking about it because we get the question, like, oh, we have 1 kid.
[00:00:51] how hard is it getting the second kid? Or go, like, that's the hardest 1. Like, 3, easy. That will take care of you, him or herself. Yeah.
[00:00:58] No problem. number 2 is the hottest by far. Yeah. Don't get me wrong.
[00:01:03] It's is it harder to have 3 than 2? Sure. But not as hard, you know, stepwise to go from 1 to 2 versus 2 to
[00:01:10] Toni: But but according to that logic, the worst step must be 0 to 1.
[00:01:15] Mikkel: 0, yeah.
[00:01:16] Toni: Yeah. Yeah. Right?
[00:01:19] Mikkel: 0 to 1 is the hardest by
[00:01:21] Toni: far. It's the it's the, I don't wanna do this anymore. just wanna give up and roll over and die. Yeah.
[00:01:27] Mikkel: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:01:27] That's true. And I think a lot of folks, when they look at this AI stuff, they are going like, how do we take this thing from 10 to 10000 instead of, you know, maybe how do we take things from 0 to 1 or just, you know, improve other things. I kind of really messed with the segue there, didn't I? That's fine.
[00:01:48] Toni: I think it's
[00:01:48] Mikkel: That's fine.
[00:01:49] We'll cut it out and then we're not gonna do it
[00:01:51] Toni: Oh, we're forgetting cut
[00:01:52] it
[00:01:53] Mikkel: Yeah. we always say it. We always say, oh, we gotta cut this part
[00:01:56] Toni: we're doing a lot post
[00:01:58] Mikkel: yeah.
[00:01:58] then I'm to it. It's do I wanna cut
[00:02:00] Toni: out? Yeah. No.
[00:02:02] Mikkel: No. I have final cut, by the way.
[00:02:04] So, uh, we're gonna talk a bit about the things that won't scale and how to make them scale and
[00:02:10] Toni: Or are they maybe
[00:02:11] Mikkel: Or are they maybe scalable. That's some of the things we're gonna hop into today because, you know, the advent of AI, which is what I wanna say a year old, year into this by now.
[00:02:21] I mean, it's been there before, but when it really started taking up with off with OpenAI, probably about a
[00:02:26] Toni: Yeah. Now, what is it? 1 or 2 days ago, the, um, they released Sora.
[00:02:31] Mikkel: Oh, yeah. The video.
[00:02:34] Crazy. Crazy indeed. And it's like I always had this with the copywriting tools. You can always you can always kind of tell it's written by AI.
[00:02:44] It gets a bit repetitive, a bit dull, a bit blah. With the video 1, it was really difficult. I had to I so I read an article saying, you know, with an expert, it was like, yeah. It's obvious. It's AI.
[00:02:54] If you look at, like, stuff like the hands or the fact that it's ultra 4 k HD, and I was like, I didn't think about any of that
[00:03:01] Toni: No. But also no. No. No. So I watch, um, um, this this this guy on YouTube that reviews, like, tech stuff.
[00:03:07] Right? I forgot his name. Fantastic. Follow him.
[00:03:12] Mikkel: Call him Bob.
[00:03:13] Toni: uh, and he was basically comparing it to just a year ago, and I didn't know this meme, but basically kind of there was an AI generated meme, Will Smith eating spaghetti.
[00:03:23] Mikkel: And he showed those like terrible, like alien stuff
[00:03:28] Toni: could see it's Will Smith. You could see it's spaghetti, but everything else was just,
[00:03:31] like, really kind of messed up. Um, and then, you know, he placed that. Then he placed 1 of those example videos, and then he looks at the camera, and he's like, this is 1
[00:03:40] year. Yeah.
[00:03:41] This is 1 year. Every single flaw, everything you're seeing right now is the worst that this technology will ever be. Yeah. You know. And, um, where are we gonna be from a year from now?
[00:03:53] Because that's such such a massive jump Yeah. From that video to kind of this new stuff. And and and and the main problem actually is, and maybe going off topic here, but the main problem is it's, you know, it's on the OpenAI website. There's lots of test, uh, text around it saying like, hey, this is AI generated. And now, you know, once you kind of seen a couple of those clips from that website, you kind of recognize them also on your feed.
[00:04:17] And it's like, oh, this is AI AI stuff. But if you watch that stuff without knowing that it's AI generated, I you know, you you wouldn't be able to
[00:04:26] Mikkel: tell.
[00:04:26] Yeah.
[00:04:27] I think 1 of the things that kind of so I said this to you before we started recording. What a lot of folks they focus on, when you see all the cases on LinkedIn.
[00:04:36] So we spend, obviously, way too much time on that social media channel. So way too much time. All of it is about, hey. I produced 10000 thousand articles in 1 week and got, you know, 500 visitors. It's like easy AI.
[00:04:49] Yeah. It's all about the volume. Yeah. That's that's all it is.
[00:04:54] Toni: No. But it's also when we had Jacco on the on the show, he was also talking about AI is gonna ruin everything because it's, uh, you know, more emails, more content, everything on LinkedIn is gonna be AI generated. Basically, kind of, you can't trust all the content generation anymore. The only thing you can trust now, and I think this is way sounds a little bit like a grandpa.
[00:05:11] Great guy and also older than we are, but, you know, in that sense, also, less hair also, but, uh, uh, basically kind of the only thing you can do is go meet people in person. Um, and I think and I think, you know, there's first of all, that's probably not how it's gonna end up being anyway. Uh, but number 2, I think they're starting to emerge a little bit of a different path here potentially. Right? Kind of that isn't focusing on, the sheer volume part.
[00:05:40] Right? And I think to a degree, uh, to a degree it's a little bit this jump from faster horses to cars moment, where managers, especially with SDRs, let's just take that example because that's specifically towards, um, also what Jocko said. Um, we're basically kind of seeing, okay, you do 50 activities a day and you're able to book x many meetings. So if you do a hundred activity every
[00:06:07] Mikkel: Yeah. Every
[00:06:09] Toni: you'll book, you know, x more meetings.
[00:06:11] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:06:11] Yeah.
[00:06:11] Toni: that was very much volume focused. Kind of, let's kind of give them more stuff to do more volume. and that has actually already stopped working. AI or not, that's kind of over to degree. Right?
[00:06:22] Or maybe in some pockets it works. Maybe with some personas it works, I think, as as much more as you're selling to more educated folks, uh, around that topic, not in general, but around that topic. I think it kinda stops working there. Right?
[00:06:36] Mikkel: I think actually what's really important before we dive really into the the subject as well is, like, we we talked about previously you're slowly losing PMF at any point in time because things outside of your control changes. And this is actually 1 of those moments where what might, let's say, you build an inbound machine that relies on content. You gotta realize that that game is fundamentally changing just like with SDRs and everything else. And so kind of what we wanted to do a bit more free flowing in this episode is, you know, focus on how do you not just build, like, a robo SDR dialer thing, you
[00:07:09] Toni: So exactly. So this is where I was actually trying to go with this.
[00:07:12] Right, which maybe was difficult to follow in this sense. But, the first thing everyone was doing, you know, seeing this new AI thing is like, oh, okay. Cool. Now instead of a hundred activities, because everything is AI generated, maybe we can get to 300 activities. I'm kind of that was that was the first reaction of everyone.
[00:07:30] Um, but that doesn't seem to be the solution here, right. So and I think the, um, you know, 1 of the 1 of the topics we're probably gonna dive into is really around the well, maybe it's gonna be a hundred activities,
[00:07:43] but maybe each of these 100 things that the SDR is doing is now gonna be as high quality as, you know, when he or she was doing 50,
[00:07:53] for example. Right? Can can you, increase the quality of the stuff that you're doing in order to get the actual outcome you wanna get.
[00:08:01] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:08:02] And I think you have a very real scenario now where you can challenge some of those limiting beliefs. If you've been booking, on average, 12 meetings per month per SDR for, let's just say, 4 years. And someone came and said, I think you can do 24. It's like, for, I mean, maybe 12 and a half if we're lucky, if we get a really good person in. But now you can fundamentally change the process.
[00:08:24] Right? So let's hop into the, uh, maybe the SDRs and some of the fractions we had there where it's not just about, hey. You know? Yes. Volume can be affected, but also the quality as
[00:08:35] Toni: Yeah. So on the on the SDR side, right, I think everyone when they're hearing AI in in your in your go to market, I think the first thing everyone is jumping to is the the robocalling SDR.
[00:08:47] I think so. are a couple of examples out there where, chatGPT hooked up to some voice thing and
[00:08:54] And
[00:08:54] Mikkel: It's like the Simpsons episode. He gets this dialer that just dials the entire city.
[00:08:58] Toni: And then and it works out and and stuff.
[00:09:00] Right? But, that is likely not going to be,
[00:09:04] you know, it's really difficult to make any kind of predictions here. But right now, I don't see that that is going to be the future, actually. and, uh, some folks are like, uh, you know, it's gonna be outlawed anyway. It's like, no.
[00:09:16] I don't think it will be outlawed. I think, uh, I think it will be outlawed towards consumers.
[00:09:22] Mikkel: Yes.
[00:09:23] Toni: But not towards businesses. GDPR kinda doesn't work towards businesses, kind of in the outreach strategy.
[00:09:29] We had this email thing with Yahoo and Google and what have you. It's
[00:09:33] like, uh, only for consumers, I think that will be the same thing here. Right? So kind of the the protections that that the government puts in place are predominantly for consumers, not so for people running businesses. Right?
[00:09:46] I don't think legalization will be an issue, but I think it's just not gonna work that well. Uh, I think that's that's more the problem. Right? So what might happen instead? I think what might happen is if you are an SDR and you wanna, uh, place a really strong outbound call, What will help you to make it an extremely strong case is let's just say not not necessarily personalization, but additional things of knowledge around that company.
[00:10:18] Right? And, um, number 1, that could be simply about, you know, which account to call first. Think about it as a an account prioritization. Right? And instead of saying, oh, this account is more than 50 employees, let's call it or 250 employees or whatever, um, you might now be able to add some more automations to it.
[00:10:40] So there's, like, all kinds of workflows you can set up these days with, you know, does that does that company have, a free trial on the website. Maybe you're selling kind of a product to into PLG or something like that. You can set up a workflow that, you know, crawls the website, you know, scans for a trial or whatever, but in a smarter way than just the keyword, and then can return, hey, this this account actually has that. Right? Um, and, uh, the next step there is then maybe trying to include some kind of intent data in here.
[00:11:10] Whatever that might mean, by the way. So I'm not I'm not so super sure about this, but basically doing smarter account prioritization,
[00:11:16] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:11:18] Toni: that is kind of a big battle already there. Right? Instead of you sitting down doing the research, and then after half an hour research being like, uh, no. Not
[00:11:25] that
[00:11:26] Mikkel: account. Yeah.
[00:11:27] So
[00:11:28] Toni: know? So that's that's 1 problem. Then the next problem is, well, now that you have an account, uh, that maybe is relevant to be called on right now or to work on right now, uh, what about the person? Because at the end of the day, it's, you know, it's not b to b. It's human to you know, what do you say to, uh, you know, be able to reach into that person's brain in 30 seconds, 20 seconds, whatever it might be. And again, you need to do some research. The problem is,
[00:11:56] if you wanna do this by hand,
[00:11:58] Mikkel: Yeah. It takes forever.
[00:11:59] Toni: it basically won't happen. And we we had this happen, um, in in our upon operation, previously where, hey, it would be better to have all of that research done, but at the same time, if you spent I don't I don't want don't wanna say an hour, but let's just say an hour researching. You could have also called, um, 20 of those companies
[00:12:17] Mikkel: Could download volume,
[00:12:18] Toni: With no. But without the insight and then just got lucky. Maybe 1 of them is like, oh, you know what? Actually, I have the problem right now. Great.
[00:12:25] You know? Um, and what has previously been unscalable, like forget about it. Just dial. Just, you know, blow the what is it? Blow the horn?
[00:12:37] Yeah. Pick up the blower.
[00:12:38] Mikkel: Yeah. Pick up the horn.
[00:12:40] Toni: Blow the horn. No.
[00:12:41] It was there's some some kind of UK slang kind of thing.
[00:12:44] Mikkel: We'll cut this out. That's
[00:12:45] fine.
[00:12:46] Toni: I'm not sure. Now now yeah. Yeah. Now I think that's also the charm here.
[00:12:54] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:12:55] Toni: No. But, um, you know, that that that was the right strategy back then.
[00:13:01] And now that you have those automatic research capabilities might not be the right strategy anymore, actually. And these things that used to be completely unscalable, maybe they are scalable
[00:13:11] Mikkel: But I think it's like imagine you're targeting let's just say public companies. Every quarter, they do an earnings call. There's a transcript. It's, like, 50 pages formatted terribly. Who would wanna read that, let alone listen to the call?
[00:13:23] But if you're prospecting into that account, guess what? You can just get an AI to summarize the key takeaways. What are the challenges? What are the things they're prioritizing? Oh, they're prioritizing growth.
[00:13:32] We help with that and this and that way. Right? All of a sudden, you can start getting those insights
[00:13:37] Toni: yes. And then funny story on this, uh, another SDR application potentially. So there is I forgot what the company is.
[00:13:45] Terrible. That'd be that I
[00:13:46] Mikkel: We don't forget we don't remember anything.
[00:13:49] Toni: um, uh, and this was we had like a little bit of a kickoff party, and then, you know, most of the people left already, and there was, uh, um, Olaf and myself, and then David, our go to market lead. And he pulled up a product where there's basically a prospect. It's an AI prospect, and you can call her.
[00:14:09] Mhmm. cold call her, basically. And, uh, Ola and I both kind of, you know, took turns trying to con convince her to to book a meeting. Didn't work out. but again, this is another thing where you can just practice.
[00:14:22] It goes a little bit back to, KD basically saying like, hey, you know, if if you wanna play a sport, it's not like you're only playing Sundays when the game is. Yeah. You're practicing and then playing it. Right? And kind of in our world, yes, it's not only Sunday that we have, like, an important call coming up, but you can actually practice now Yeah.
[00:14:41] Without burning accounts. You can practice now on the side in order to get
[00:14:45] Mikkel: better. Yeah.
[00:14:46] Toni: So there there are all kinds of cool ways of improving you, um, as a human being until that's obsolete also. I next year or something like that.
[00:14:54] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:14:55] Toni: Um, but I think that for the SDR side is probably better. So why does that matter though? Well, right now, if you're really good, you get like 10 meetings per SDR per month. That's like good.
[00:15:07] Then there are outliers in both directions. Right? Um, but the thing is, if you have better account prioritization, if you have better personalization, if the SDR is better trained, um, etcetera, etcetera,
[00:15:18] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:15:19] Toni: etcetera, will you be able to get your, uh, connect rate, uh, to go up? Maybe. Will you be able to, you know, convert some of those connects into actual meetings?
[00:15:28] Maybe yes also. And then the question almost becomes, well, uh, is 10 the right benchmark? Should it be different? Should it be 20? Should it be 30?
[00:15:38] What actually here then is starting to be, you know, the piece that's holding you back from placing more of the high value, activity, so to speak, that actually convert. And all of this other stuff that you need in order to get to that high value activity, if that can be automated away,
[00:15:55] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:15:56] know,
[00:15:56] Toni: what's what's stopping you actually? That's that becomes a new question.
[00:15:59] Mikkel: think it's also just to say, like, a lot of the beliefs we had of what you know, how we could run things has changed. Right? Think about even the email email side of the Outreach. Used to be yeah.
[00:16:10] We set up a mail merge. We have the same email, um, we send out. We personalize it quotation mark with dear first name, title, company, whatever. Right? Those those strict fields.
[00:16:22] You know what? Now you could customize the emails fully if you wanted to, um, at less work almost. Right? So I think, I agree. Yeah.
[00:16:30] It it you know, the goal post kinda moves a bit, and and what you can achieve fundamentally changes. And I also believe that over the next 6 to 12 months, certain companies are gonna figure out a path to nail some of these elements, whether it's the training enablement outreach. And then the word is gonna get out. And what happens is and everybody starts doing the same, and the ones who's slowest to adapt, they're gonna kind of be left.
[00:16:52] Toni: No. I think the main switch that needs to happen and, um, this is again, I think the first thing everyone is gonna go towards is like more volume, more volume. That's gonna be the first thing and and you know what, I don't think we can fault anyone for this because it's to a degree this is, you know, we pulled up this, um, industrial revolution example where and I think I think it was called the Jenny. I'm not sure. Some people might be laughing now, but, you know, who know that what the actual name is. But there's basically kind of this tool, this weaving thing, uh, to make, um, fabric. Right? Uh, from cotton to fabric,
[00:17:33] Mikkel: Or whatever. Yeah.
[00:17:34] Toni: Um, and basically kind of, uh, someone figured out the Jenny. So this was 1 person that now could do the same job that 10 10 weavers previously would have done, uh, she could kind of do that just with a machine. Right? And the whole idea there was about driving down cost because this cloth was so super expensive that no 1 could really afford it, so the market wasn't there.
[00:17:52] So then you 10 x the whole thing, you 10 minus 10 x the price, and wonderful. Right? Kind of that that was the, uh, the idea of that evolutionary revolutionary step. Right? In our world, actually right now, it's actually it's a revolution of quality.
[00:18:07] That's actually what's gonna happen. And, um, and I think the last one's latching onto that, realizing that, I think they will be kind of aft, Actually, that's I think what's gonna happen. And, um, you know, almost sounds like closing remarks. We have, like, 2, 3 other things, actually. But, um, again, now that I'm in the rant, think about who in the organization is actually gonna install all of that stuff.
[00:18:28] Who's gonna piece all of these things together? It's not gonna be the VP sales. Um, it's it's probably gonna be revenue operations through, you know, in some degree thinking, uh, both number 1, what is the newest tech out there? And, you know, RevOps people, for some reason, they're like always so interested in, you know, what what cool stuff could you do, but then also bringing back and building an actual business reason out of this. gonna be, you know, predominantly on revenue operations.
[00:18:56] I think what's gonna be difficult for,
[00:18:59] uh, the
[00:18:59] organization though is with all of that new tech and we've kind of forgotten about this, you will then actually also require new results to come out of the team.
[00:19:10] Mikkel: Mhmm.
[00:19:11] Toni: It can't just be we're buying all of this tech, everything's easier, everything's getting higher quality. It can't just be that the SDR spending the rest of the time on the beach. No. Right?
[00:19:20] Kind of there needs to be kind of a business, uh, impact coming out of this. And I think for the longest time, whenever we bought tools, we never actually change targets because of it.
[00:19:30] Mikkel: No. No.
[00:19:30] No. No. We
[00:19:31] Toni: And I know this painfully. I think this will be an opportunity where we can actually do
[00:19:36] Mikkel: that. Yeah.
[00:19:37] Yeah. And I think, also, 1 of the reflections I have is you don't wanna just go and buy it, roll it out everywhere and say go crazy. Have fun.
[00:19:43] Right? That, you know, I think maybe it was you who said it at one point in time that, um, there was a SDR team specifically focused on testing. Yeah. That's all they did to figure out how to do a better outreach or follow-up or whatever it is. And you kinda wanna be a bit methodical as well about it here.
[00:20:00] So since we're in the sales realm, should we talk a bit about Yes. The next?
[00:20:04] Toni: So then let's let's just go to the account executive. So we're SDR, now do the account executive. I think you you mentioned one piece already, which is more of an AE realm thing. It's, it's this public company quarterly earnings call.
[00:20:20] First of all, I don't know so many of you that actually can legitimately, you know, read or listen to this thing and get anything out of it. So that's what AI is gonna help with immediately. Right? And then they sum it up, obviously, and just spit you out kind of those are 3 things they're focusing on. Those are 3 challenges they have.
[00:20:36] I was like,
[00:20:37] That
[00:20:37] Mikkel: one
[00:20:38] Bad
[00:20:39] Toni: kinda works for
[00:20:40] Mikkel: for me. Yeah.
[00:20:41] I
[00:20:41] Toni: I can kind of tailor my message to that one down there. Um, super helpful. Right? Because you don't need to do all the discovery of, like, so what's important for you and what's the pain metric and so forth.
[00:20:53] You can jump ahead kind of to something like this already. I think so this is research again, and some of the research tools that you're gonna use for the SDRs, I think gonna be the same for the AEs actually. know, 1 thing that I think is pretty cool is this whole, live prompting in demos. Yeah. So basically, you have a demo assistant that might prompt you with, um, battle cards for, oh, there's an objection.
[00:21:20] Here are the 3 best ways to reply to this. or hey, here's a piece of content you could be sharing after the call. Or hey, here's a piece of content that you maybe might wanna show right now. So this is a really good slide that works for this problem,
[00:21:34] etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Right?
[00:21:35] Or gives you other indications for where the call is going, what it could be potentially be doing about this. and if you think about it. Right? So I think in the beginning, it's gonna be clunky and weird. I just I just see it's gonna be difficult to rule this out in a small organization.
[00:21:52] But but ultimately,
[00:21:55] the impact of something like that could be that your ramp up time goes down.
[00:22:00] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:22:00] True.
[00:22:01] Toni: Instead of having 9 months of training and and all kinds of things that need to be doing, uh, and and enablement ongoing and spending lots of time on that, you might just bake it into the AI that then almost learning by doing basically trains the AE in order to, you know, get the right prompts. And I'm not saying that they should be reading out loud what the AI is saying, but giving them a hint like, hey, have you thought about this thing over here? Very similar to, and I don't see this so super often, but live coaching. Yeah.
[00:22:33] There are, um, and I think you can do this with, you know, Gong and you know, whatever, but there are ways where your manager can listen into, uh, your call and they can say something which only you as a caller gonna hear. Yeah. and, uh, you then can, you know, take this in and and use this in order to, you know, work through the process. Right? And I think that would be a similar thing.
[00:22:56] It's not that you're saying exactly the same things that your VP is saying, you know, whispering to you in the ear. it's it's just, hey, kind of go in this direction or double click on this 1. Why is this a problem and so forth. Um, so I think this is how that would actually kind of
[00:23:10] Mikkel: work. So I actually think, again, the natural place people would look would be, can they carry more quota? Can they have more ops?
[00:23:17] Can they have a higher win rate? But cutting down the ramp time, that's gonna be instant gain pretty quickly. And, you know, it's it's a very hidden efficiency driver you're gonna have in terms of how maybe more so on SDR side
[00:23:29] than
[00:23:30] Toni: But also think about it. So we had KD on the call and, you know, after afterwards, basically kind of referred to him as a as a human engineer.
[00:23:37] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:23:37] Toni: We have Dave Boyce who's who's thinking about, like, uh, code and engineering products. Um, and then we have KD, who's basically, uh, trying to make change stick and and and find the best things to to implement, and that's for me is almost a human engine. How many organizations actually have a KD that does that stuff? And the answer is kind of no-one.
[00:23:59] Alright? So that's why it's interesting to listen to.
[00:24:02] Mikkel: he works there. So
[00:24:04] Toni: I forgot.
[00:24:06] And, um, I think what AI could actually kind of be doing here is they could see what works across
[00:24:12] Mikkel: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:24:13] Toni: and then make sure that, you know, what works gets copied across all the time. Right? So and I think this is not just an enablement thing. I think this is a conversion rate thing as well. I think this is an ACV thing.
[00:24:23] I think it's an across the fucking board thing. But
[00:24:25] Mikkel: I was like I was gonna say as a also as a follow-up on the the ramp time, like, most organization, they will give opportunities to those new AEs. But having that AI, you can actually spend maybe a coaching against
[00:24:37] where the manager could hop in and listen and actually then give you feed like, there are a couple of things there where this is actually a pretty big gain at end of the day. And I think the other side that people might ignore is also the enablement piece, which is very close to the training. Right? So, you know, building business cases is a thing. Yeah.
[00:24:54] It's actually, you know, again, a lot of research, but also how do you write it out and all those elements. You can
[00:25:01] Toni: Custom decks and so forth.
[00:25:02] I mean, there's there's so much other other stuff. Right? And then again, when you think about it and and some of that stuff already exist, kind of the the call summaries, the follow-up notes, and so forth. Right? If you can cut all of that stuff down, and at the same time, you maybe make them better and improve conversion rates and so forth, then the question almost becomes like, okay, you know, is it is it 4 to 5 times OTE?
[00:25:26] Mikkel: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:25:27] Toni: Or is it should it be should it be higher? Should it be maybe 10 x?
[00:25:31] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:25:31] Toni: Also and this is now scary, but how how skilled do you as an AE need to be? how valuable are you as as as a person? Do you still need 250 k a year or whatever the number is? or because all of the differentiating skills that kind of already build up in the organization in that AI, whatever. We're going a little bit further
[00:25:53] Mikkel: A little bit off
[00:25:53] Toni: but, you know, then ultimately, it almost becomes like, well, you know, maybe the marketplace doesn't need to be so super hot for the best AEs anymore. Maybe kind of you can go with a little bit less of a skill.
[00:26:03] Right? And that's that's kind of interesting for, you know, several reasons. Right? So 1, it might be improving your efficiency in a current organization, but again also it might enable you to have a, you know, mid market grade rep Yeah. That's running in the SMB and kind of closing deals using some MEDDIC spiels and whatever.
[00:26:25] And, um, there's a lot of these things where you think, like, that doesn't scale for me. It might now actually scale for you.
[00:26:32] Mikkel: I think you're totally right. Like, we've talked about think about ACVs by motion. Like, classic, what is called the, uh, the graveyard of SaaS or something, right, where it's you you need the unit economics to work out. Yeah. And you might have said, well, we can't do SMB because it doesn't work out, like, our win rates and the cost and all that stuff.
[00:26:53] But to your point, actually, maybe now there's some things enabling you where it could it could work out. And I think that's that's the other piece where it's like, yeah, it wouldn't scale before, like, period. But now, potentially, it could.
[00:27:04] Toni: Yeah. And and that's that's I think that's the big reshuffle that's probably gonna unravel the next couple of years is all of those rules of thumb that we super comfortable with, that we're building all these organizations around, that kind of need to be challenged and questioned.
[00:27:20] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:27:20] yeah
[00:27:20] Toni: um, and I think this will hit hard for a lot of seasoned operators.
[00:27:26] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:27:27] Toni: A lot of the, know, basically what is the Gen x before before millennials or something like that, Gen x and boomers. Kind of, I think that whole it will be difficult.
[00:27:36] Right? You have like 20, 30, 40 years of experience, basically. And now this thing comes around, and maybe it's gonna hit us as well. I don't know. Um,
[00:27:43] Mikkel: mean, it took us forever to do an episode on
[00:27:45] Toni: we also like app, it's just a it's just a
[00:27:49] Mikkel: fail.
[00:27:49] Yeah.
[00:27:50] Toni: fade. And, think that's gonna challenge a lot of leaders,
[00:27:54] Mikkel: honestly. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:27:55] Toni: Right? Kind of because the the the tried and tested things that have been true for decades, maybe they aren't so true anymore.
[00:28:01] And I think that's I think this is the first time where technology is actually doing that versus, okay. Now it's not in my spreadsheet. Now it's organized in a in a
[00:28:10] Mikkel: Yeah. Or
[00:28:10] Toni: something like that.
[00:28:11] Mikkel: I think the other thing also, like, when you think about all this stuff with software and we talked about it with Dave Boyse. Software is great at ad adhering to a process and follow it to the to the t. Humans, they're great at violating the process Yeah. Especially when you need to. Right?
[00:28:26] So it might be that there's a prompt that fires off that says, hey. You should mention this case study, But you might know that that's not gonna work because they hate that company or what you know, there could be a couple of things there. So I think the creativity, that will still be there. It's kind of like the equivalent of you know, I've I've experienced this. You go by car, you follow the GPS, and then you can see it tells you to go straight, and you could clearly see that, yeah, we should not go straight because there's a roadblock or Yeah.
[00:28:52] Road's closed or whatever. Right? So we no. We're taking a ride, and I think that that will still always be there as well.
[00:28:59] Toni: So marketing. What's gonna happen to marketing?
[00:29:01] Marketing. Yeah. Is marketing gonna exist? Yeah. Exactly.
[00:29:05] Mikkel: As I told you this
[00:29:06] Toni: Finally. Finally, some tech that solves that problem,
[00:29:09] Mikkel: The I told you this before. I think still a lot of folks treat it as a volume game just like any other function. And I did a search for revenue operations, show me the latest things that have been indexed. And it and it was just clear from all the results, this is all AI garbage.
[00:29:24] It's literally like, why would I even read it? And I think it's like I said in the beginning, you have to realize that things are changing. So when we discuss creating content with, uh, with AI support, it's also like, well, this thing we are creating, is it just gonna be replaced by a prompt any minute? Because, you know, all the factual stuff, do you really or definitions of things, do you really need that anymore? Um, I think it's the original thought.
[00:29:46] And that's where it gets really interesting that you can you can quickly draft up a piece of content based on original thought. Right? That that's actually a bit difficult in the beginning because you need to kinda figure out how I'm gonna tell that
[00:29:57] Toni: The the blank page
[00:29:58] Mikkel: Yeah. The blank page problem. Basically, you get that start. Um, and and I think that's gonna be super helpful. The other area, again, is also the research.
[00:30:05] It's a massive thing. If you need to go and create content and you want it to be novel and stand out, it really helps to have a lot of knowledge. Like, if you if you think about David Ogilvy, you know, uh, so if you see Mad Men, that's the guy. Drinking all the martinis and smoking all the time. 1 of the things he would do is
[00:30:22] Toni: He's, by the way, the the the grand godfather of
[00:30:25] Mikkel: marketing.
[00:30:25] Exactly.
[00:30:26] Toni: His name on marketing is 1 of the books you should be
[00:30:28] Mikkel: And and he basically said, you need to go and collect the facts. So he did an ad for, uh, an airline company. And he went, you know, to the airplane and got a walk through of everything.
[00:30:36] How does it work? It's like, oh, you have, uh, like, this crazy filter on the air that's, you know, so insane that you can use it, uh, if if there's, like, an outbreak or something. Right? It filters everything, basically. And the more he walked through, it was like, okay.
[00:30:52] So there's a lot of safety features. We're gonna do an ad on safety. By the way, all the other companies had the exact same feature because it was FAA required, but no 1 was advertising it. Right? So and I think that's where, you know, doing that research that you might not have done before gets more accessible.
[00:31:09] Um, and I think on the other other side of the coin, also gonna be a lot of change on rich media. Yeah. So so if you look at, uh, Mark Zuckerberg did an ad recently. Wow. and it was, uh, very scrappy.
[00:31:22] It was recorded with a phone, uh, from the
[00:31:24] Toni: It was with the, uh, with
[00:31:26] Mikkel: Maybe. Yeah. Okay. Then then I didn't get it.
[00:31:27] But it it looked like a phone, but it's just to say it was very basic, but it was very authentic. all of a sudden, if you think about having to create an article about whatever subject, writing the text is not the hard part. But now you have the time to maybe have those creative piece, whether it's a video or a graph or something else. And I think my hope is a lot of people gonna realize that, again, that's where you can shift the quality all of a sudden rather than just going mass volume. Um, I think we have enough blog posts out there by now.
[00:31:57] Toni: No. I think the I think the rich media thing, I think that's that's totally a piece. Um, so we're we're using it for, um, blog post, you know, hero images Yeah. For example, in some cases.
[00:32:11] and then I can totally see, and maybe that doesn't apply to us all that much, but this Sora thing that just came out that we kind of were referencing early on, it's like, why would you even need stock footage? I mean, it's you have those very specific needs sometimes as an organization, and then you go to, I don't know, these Shutterstock and so forth. You don't need that anymore. Like, 0. Right?
[00:32:31] You just say, like, well, I need this thing, um, and, uh, you know what? Actually, I need it a little bit changed.
[00:32:37] Mikkel: But I think what's gonna happen, a lot of the companies that are listening to this show, the marketing team will have a team of freelancers or someone on payroll just shelling out content. That that will be the case. And now they're looking at that and saying, can we just kill that cost and do AI instead?
[00:32:52] I think it's the wrong way to think about it. Honestly, I think, again, you know, it's just like with the emails. At some point, we can see that train is gonna hit that wall over there. And and so if I were in the listener's shoes, I would look at what competitive advantages can this technology give us that we can leverage if we shift around the process
[00:33:10] Toni: But again, right, it's it's again not volume, it's quality. Exactly. That's actually what it is. Right? Because the, uh, you can use more rich media, which always lights up every
[00:33:20] Mikkel: Mhmm.
[00:33:20] Toni: Post.
[00:33:21] Um, you can use a lot of research in order to kind of to make the blog post itself better. We are doing 1 thing. I mean, I'm just gonna mention this now. So we have basically trained 1, local GPT or whatever. I don't know what this is.
[00:33:34] Mikkel: Build our own model.
[00:33:35] Toni: sound like such a grandpa sometimes. Um, on our own content, basically, we've written. Right? Which is obviously, you know, influenced by myself. And, uh, Bart, you know, 1 of the guys on the on the marketing team is using that when he's writing stuff.
[00:33:48] He's using that to, like, hey, you know, what would what would Toni, so to What would what would he what would he insert here, basically? Right? And then, you know, because it's trained on all of our previous content, there's then kind of a mini subject matter expert expert kind of adding some stuff in there.
[00:34:04] Mikkel: I think the other piece is when you look at scaling so and I I've talked with Bart about this. There's a classic horizontal scaling versus vertical scaling. Right? So you can do, uh, let's say, more blog post. As 1 option.
[00:34:17] But what if you instead still do the original thought? You focus on really creating high quality content. Sure. There's some AI assist on the side, but it's the driving force is the work you are doing as a creative person, now you can translate it into French, German, and whatever. Right?
[00:34:34] So I I think there are you need to look out for those options, and I recall vividly those were some of the limitations. We wanted to be able to create our ads, quite frankly, in the local language because we knew in in Germany, that's way more common to do than in Denmark. It's like, well, you can do both. English works
[00:34:52] Toni: Everyone in America is like, what are they talking about? Are there
[00:34:56] Mikkel: Do it with an accent or what?
[00:34:58] Toni: yeah. that's, you
[00:35:03] Mikkel: uh, it it's opening up a lot of opportunities for what you can scale. Um, I think especially a lot of marketers, they're afraid for their jobs. I would not be.
[00:35:10] I think I would look at how you can use it to spend more time getting the creative angle. Right?
[00:35:13] Toni: think I
[00:35:14] think no 1 should be afraid of their jobs necessarily. But yeah, I think organizations will start to push to do more with less. I think that's gonna happen.
[00:35:24] And ultimately, that means, yes, we don't need as many marketers as we, uh, you know, had before. We don't need as many sales people as we before. let's see how that ends.
[00:35:32] Maybe there's a good end. Maybe there's a bad end to it. I
[00:35:34] don't
[00:35:34] Mikkel: knows? We're gonna see the first unicorn with 1 person employed.
[00:35:38] Toni: Yeah.
[00:35:41] Thank you everyone for listening. This was a great show, I think. So we're talking about, really this problem of what wasn't able to scale previously with some of the adaptations with AI might actually now be scalable. And instead of blasting more volume across sales marketing CS, we didn't talk much about CS actually.
[00:35:59] Mikkel: No. Forgotten child.
[00:36:00] Toni: Forgot child. Um, focus on increasing quality. And I think or we believe that's that's gonna be the, uh, the bigger gain for you, at least for 20 24. Let's let's see how they're gonna go beyond.
[00:36:13] That's it.
[00:36:13] Thanks, Mikkel. Thanks, everyone, for watching. Have a good 1. Bye
[00:36:15] Bye.