28. Agentic Sales Explained: Digital Colleagues, Dead Inbound, and the Return of Cold Calling

Sales have always rewarded the people who do the hard work. The problem? For the last five years, the "hard work" has been clicking buttons, running sequences, and updating a CRM that nobody loves. AI didn't just change that; it exposed it.

Sindre, SalesScreen's CEO, sits down with JB, founder of Evergrowth and a 20-year B2B sales veteran who helped scale Trustpilot from 50 to 5,000 customers as one of their first four sales hires. Today, JB builds AI agents for sales teams and has strong opinions about where the profession is headed.

They cover:

• Why the phone is the new blue ocean in outbound sales
• Why inbound sales for humans is effectively over (agentic buyers are coming)
• What "agentic sales" actually means and why a Claude license isn't it
• The one AI agent JB would keep if he could only keep one
• How to run a morning coffee briefing that replaces three hours of manual prep
• Why AI hasn't changed the fundamentals, it's just removed your excuses

If your team has been "getting ready to do AI" for the last two years, this one's for you.

About JB: Founder of Evergrowth, a customer-centric sales consultancy turned AI-native sales agent platform. Based in Europe. Former early-stage salesperson at Trustpilot.

Creators and Guests

Host

Brittney Moseley

Go-To-Market Director

Producer

Ellen Young

Marketing Campaign Manager

What is From Pain Point to On Point: Transforming Sales Challenges into Wins?

'From Pain Point to On Point: Transforming Sales Challenges into Wins with Gamification' is the podcast where we dive deep into the common challenges sales managers face and explore innovative gamification solutions to overcome them. Hosted by SalesScreen’s Go-to-Market Director Brittney, every two weeks, we'll bring you expert insights, real-world stories, and actionable tips to help you turn your sales pain points into on-point victories.

Sindre Haaland (00:19.793)
I guess you could introduce JB and myself and kick it off like the team of the podcast, which is a conversation about you know sales in these days, and then you can ask a question and we can take it from there and we can just carry it on for I don't know, how long do you want us to talk?

Sindre Haaland (01:05.443)
Okay. Sounds good.

Sindre Haaland (01:29.989)
Yeah, it's it's great to be here and speaking to you, JB. I we we joked a bit before we're getting on this, but you you mentioned you know I mentioned I was a bit slow to to connect given the fact that I'm a dinosaur in this industry and then you timely pointed out that I had a printer behind me, which I guess it's a it's a fair shot. but I've been around for a while, but you you have too, right? So sh

Yeah, really quickly, like what's your background in sales? Where did you come from before you started Evergrowth?

JB (02:05.033)
Yeah, so th yeah, first of all thank you for having me. It's great to be here. And yeah, I've been in sales for I guess almost, B2B sales, for almost twenty years. I actually before jumping in the software industry with Trustpilot, I I was actually selling shop equipment and funny story about your printer in the background. back in the days all DocuSign was fax machines. Right. So yeah, yeah, you probably remember like

Sindre Haaland (02:31.812)
Really?

JB (02:35.009)
When the, well, on the sales floor, where where I was with the shop equipment, company, when the fax machine would start shaking, people will run because they will think that's their contract coming back signed, right? So So, you know, I'm that old that I remember yes, exactly. But then really, really learn everything I know about, you know, B2B SaaS on, you know, the the typical

Sindre Haaland (02:47.021)
Exactly.

That was really nice.

JB (02:59.435)
growth machine and whatnot at at Trustpilot. I was the fourth sales hire they had on the on their sales floors, but so very early days after the first round that they had. And we basically in two years, period where I was there, we grew the customer base from 50 to 5,000 in just two years. And in that period of time I brought 600 customer myself. And and that was really

Sindre Haaland (03:24.26)
Amazing.

JB (03:26.763)
Actually like it you have to look back into a thirteen, fourteen years ago, and the main tool was the phone. And that's pretty much how we did it. Like there was a receptionist, the gatekeeper, and you had to learn how to pa pass the gatekeeper, people walk from the office. so get to the to the right person you need to connect and you know, that's kind of how I learned everything I know about B2P cells basically. When we were doing demo, we didn't have a Google Meet.

We used to ask people if they're in front of their computer and I will know the demo environment by heart and kind of walk around the sales floor, basically walking them around the demo, right?

Sindre Haaland (04:01.358)
Yeah, I mean I I do vividly remember and I felt the thrill of being around human beings all the time. and I kinda like missed that to some extent. And you know, later on you've you've clearly done your mark in the sales world, but you also started a company called Evergrowth. So you know, very quickly, what's the background on Evergrowth?

JB (04:23.819)
Yeah, so it it's kind of all connected, like why I was really successful at Trustpilot was because I was genuinely fascinated about the e commerce space back then. I mean it was you know really booming, that was the you know the next big thing at that time. And I had failed an e commerce startup myself. So when I will talk to those very successful e-commerce marketer or or entrepreneurs, I I will very quickly have a peer to peer conversation with them instead of a sales buyer kind of dynamic.

Because I would have researched their company very deeply. And that's kind of how I managed to close almost the deal a day. And then essentially ev Evergrowth is really a continuation of this because after Trustpilot I work with some investors but also started to do some consulting and help companies implement what we call that customer centric sales process, where the goal is to help salespeople articulate their customer problem better than their customer.

And I strongly believe that if you can do this, people will believe you have their solution because you can you you have the solution if you can explain the problem that well. And so Evergrowth for many, many years was a consulting business that helped companies to do that. A big part of our business was also to outsource the research part because typically when you sell a complex product and you need to explain your customer problem, you cannot just build lists of problems with job filters and you know industry and company size filter.

You need to do a lot of research. So a big part of our business was to outsource the research piece. And then when AI came out, like we started to build our very first version of AI agents in November 23. And we by accident created an agent that replaced our entire research team. And that's kind of how the first part of the product started to build. And today, you know, fast forward, now we have thirteen different types of agents that can support sales team with all the manual process of the top of the funnel. So

Typically salespeople they will work with a team of agents to kind of automate the research part.

Sindre Haaland (06:20.846)
Alright. So you're pretty much the brain, I guess, and that's where we are, perhaps the will. so that's a good good combination. but you're truly like AI native in the sense that you've built a technology in the day and age of AI and it's agent first and you're seeing you know some crazy success these days and I guess that kinda leads us to the first question, like what what has changed with sales today?

That wasn't the case, you know, when you were selling copiers or, you know, were working in e-commerce.

JB (06:54.261)
Yeah. Yeah. I think like a few things. Like I feel like back in the days when I started selling, salespeople were the information holder. So when I used to call you know, companies where I sold, you know, shop equipment or when I s was selling trust pilot, even if they were not interested in my services, they didn't have access to the information I have about, you know, their competitors or

what are the trends in the market, so they will still be keen on listening to, you know, what's what's going on. Nowadays, of course, salespeople are definitely not information holder anymore. Like there is way too much information for the buyers to have access to. So that's one thing that changed. Also I think back in the days, if you had some kind of scrappy way to generate leads or data that your competitor didn't have, you had an edge. It's a hundred percent not the case anymore. There is a cheaper Zoominfo every single week, right?

And that's probably probably why you know the Zoominfo stock is not doing so well. for like the data is basically commoditized. So that changed. What changed as well, and you probably s remember that during COVID, this was not our greatest era as salespeople. We kind of doubled down on email on LinkedIn, and that also gave birth to all this generation of tools in stack that turned salespeople into button clickers. Yep.

Sindre Haaland (08:15.885)
yeah, sequencing tools and other things for sure.

JB (08:19.326)
Exactly. And then you put AI on top of all of this. I think what made the sales profession harder is that all the sales technology has been focused on improving salespeople productivity, but did not kind of forgot that sales is a two-way street and you have buyers on the other side of the street. And I think the buyer experience got worse. Because I've never met a buyer that told me I love sequencing. It just helps me so much to remember those salespeople chasing me.

With my first name and my job title in this sequence.

Sindre Haaland (08:51.386)
Yeah, it's but but I think the the the the funny part is that it actually used to work. and that was interesting, like in that you know, let's say you had the the day and age of sales where sales was a real art and it was like Wolf of Wall Street "sell me this pen," and then, as you say, transition more and more over to you know just automation of sequences, but still like if you had a little bit of an

JB (08:59.267)
Yes.

JB (09:11.852)
Yeah.

Sindre Haaland (09:21.6)
you know, other data set or you did some personalization, you still had still had enough conversion that it actually had a positive outcome. And with AI, you know, all of that is gone. So the whole email, inbox, everything's flooded. LinkedIn is just AI slop. I don't understand who's actually real and who's not anymore. And it's like you turn that off. That's noise. So are we going back to how sales used to be or is sales something new?

JB (09:45.251)
Yes.

JB (09:51.183)
I think it's you know, I always I kind of like to say like sales channels are like fashion, you know, it always come back, right? So so so to me I I see it it's kind of super clear there is this blue ocean and terms of channel is the phone. And for a few reasons, like we have the new generation of salespeople that we also need to motivate to kind of take that channel because they actually didn't grow up with a land line. You know, you look very

young, Sindre, and you have a printer, but I'm pretty sure you remember how a landline looks like. And exactly. So I mean and so then we have this new generation. I'm I'm 38 years old and my youngest brother, we have 11 years difference. He doesn't have the you know the green call button on his phone. He doesn't call his friends. Like they just text on I don't know how many platforms. But then my youngest brother is the next generation of salespeople and he's calling

Sindre Haaland (10:25.121)
I I do.

Sindre Haaland (10:39.09)
no.

JB (10:48.392)
our generation that are buying you know software or whatever kind of solutions that they are selling. And the problem is like I hear so many VP of sales telling like, you know, this generation doesn't want to pick up the phone. I was like, they are not trained. They literally never call to order a pizza or book a table. They do everything through the apps. So they just need to be trained on how to use that channel and be comfortable and be confident on that channel. I think that's that's the next blue ocean.

that you know will basically deliver results and we see it as well across all our customers. Now, why it's harder than ever is because before, again, because I had the I w I had the information and people had to listen to me, people were way more forgiving. If my research was sloppy, if I was following a script, they would still listen to me and you know give me some attention. Now I guess people are just expecting that because of AI and also because of

how bombarded they are on the other channel. If you call me and you are not you haven't done your research, I'm just gonna hang up on you. So you basically have twenty seconds to show that this is a qualified an an a research call basically. And if you cannot do this

Sindre Haaland (11:56.892)
Yeah, would would you even get past the automated gatekeeper we have these days, in Apple intelligence and if you don't have a good angle?

JB (12:03.768)
That's a really good one. Exactly, exactly. I think you're done and I I actually love it. People ask like, what do I think about this AI gatekeeper? Like, you know, when Siri asks for the reason of the call or or or whatever. I think it's it's like if you compare it to subject line or you know, the first two line of emails when we used to improve that, it's kind of the same, right? And I guess right, and i if you haven't done your research, that's where you get burned basically.

Sindre Haaland (12:23.919)
Mm. It is.

Sindre Haaland (12:31.205)
Yeah, that's the hook. And the the beautiful thing is that you have more space then the email subject line in a way. So no, but it's I I completely agree on that statement. I I think an you know a rep that hasn't made a cold call isn't necessarily lazy. They've just never been rewarded for doing the hard things. And it's it's kind of like that's that's what I feel with the newer generations. I haven't really thought about the fact that they they hadn't they didn't need to call

JB (12:36.339)
That's that's true. Yeah.

JB (12:49.314)
Exactly.

Sindre Haaland (13:00.077)
a friend's house and have that awkward conversation with their mom or their dad, asking where they are. and in a way that helped train us very early on for like cold calling and having gatekeepers in a sense. But it's like at the same time I feel like there's such a big opportunity now. but do you think like is that is that passing? will the AI voices and AI outbound take over? How do you see that?

JB (13:11.512)
Yep.

JB (13:25.742)
So two things on the AI outbound. As far as I know, it's illegal to do AI call calling unless you introduce yourself as an agent. And then I guess that's the first twin second way it's gonna get blocked basically. So you know, it even in the US it's actually illegal. So that's a big deal, right? so and definitely not gonna happen in Europe. However, and here I'm gonna be a little bit like back to the future kind of thing.

Sindre Haaland (13:46.053)
Yeah, it is.

JB (13:54.407)
I believe that this is the future for inbound. because like obviously you can have people accepting in terms and conditions that an AI agents will call you and whatnot, and I think the technology is actually very, very developed if you have a huge inbound volume to do proper qualification on the phone. but I also believe that this is the future for inbound for another reason. sales is a two way street. And if you think about the buyer needs to procure, it's really simple agentic use case.

They want to buy a certain I mean, they have a certain problem, they want to procure a certain solution, they have a budget and some specs. If you think about it, you can easily build an AI agent that will go and scan the web, do demo request, show up in a demo and be like, I'm an AI agent, I wanna procure, tell me this and this and this and and that's I think where AI will basically do AI discovery and AI disqualification d qualification on on both sides and then the humans will come after. So

Sindre Haaland (14:54.255)
I think you're onto something here. So in a sense, if you're taking on your CEO lens lenses and and kinda looking at the future, you would go as far as to say that inbound sales is dead, for humans at least.

JB (15:10.26)
I think as soon as the agentic buyer volume comes in, if you don't have an agentic way to qualify the inbound, you are dead. Because how can you handle so much volumes and how can you also not handle it? Because you might miss out on the good leads. But it's gonna be way more because the AI agentic buyer they can do demo requests with two hundred companies at the same time.

Sindre Haaland (15:33.711)
Yeah. No, I agree. So that leaves a lot of humans done. what do you think about, you know, outbound sales? And is outbound sales gonna also be saturated and noise in the end? Like are we gonna get too many cold calls or what's happening there?

JB (15:48.951)
Look, I think it's all so for sure, I think people are gonna double down on calling, but at the end I think we're gonna work with a leaner, more performing sales team. Because at the end, like sales is, you know, it's still a num like a performance game, right? And if you are not hitting your quota and if you look at the pavilion numbers, like last year I think it was seventy-eight or seventy-nine percent of the reps that didn't need their quota. So I think we're gonna have leaner sales team, but way more I I like to call them augmented. so

It's kind of gonna regulate itself and and and basically, you know, make make only the good reps are basically gonna call the good leads. I mean, this is a lala land, but hopefully that's where we're gonna end up and it's gonna help the sales profession, right?

Sindre Haaland (16:32.517)
Yeah. No, I I think I think in a way like the future of sales is gonna filter out a lot of the people that was able to skate by in sales but can't anymore because in a way AI is is making, as you say, all the knowledge of the world, the personalization, it it ties all the connections to the strategy and your product and

JB (16:47.704)
Mm-hmm.

Sindre Haaland (17:00.047)
There's no way to differentiate in in knowledge anymore, like to take it to the extreme. So like what is it that actually what are you left with? And it's the ability to build trust and to be human and and stand out. And in that sense, you know, obviously all of this is kind of like assuming that you have all of these superpowers as a modern sales rep. Like

JB (17:27.076)
Yeah.

Sindre Haaland (17:27.237)
Would you say that we are there now, or are we in like this golden age where a few, select few, is starting to adopt this new way of let let's say amplifying your own skills with AI and having it, you know, a really good time.

JB (17:44.247)
I think we're at the very, very, very beginning. And I think so there is, you know, according to which report you look at, you know, people say salespeople spend forty, fifty or up to seventy percent of their time not selling. And and then now what organizations are doing, they're like, here is a license to chat GPT, here is a license to cloud and this think it's gonna solve that problem. But then what happens is that now you have s reps spending fifty percent of their time talking to cloud, still not selling. Right? So

it it like if we keep AI as a chat interface, this is not truly agentics. You didn't give a digital colleague or digital team to your team that makes them more productive. So I think we're still at the very, very beginning, which is exciting and also scary I guess for some people, that you know, AI is gonna augment and the the team and then if it augments the team, who do you keep, right? Do you keep the your A players or do you keep your B players?

Sindre Haaland (18:40.111)
Mhmm What is Agentic sales? You mentioned that.

JB (18:44.226)
Yeah, so that's a good question. I think agenc a a keyword that you see everywhere and there is no common definition, right? In in our world, agentic means that you have digital colleagues. So and I truly believe that very, very soon, not just in sales, we are gonna introduce your team as a hybrid. Like you are gonna say, we are ten salespeople, eighty two agents. And that's gonna be very, very common to literally count the agents as part of your team.

So let's say if you use cloud, you're not agentic. You have an AI assistant, which is a the probably the most intelligent assistant you ever work with, but it's not a digital colleague, right?

Sindre Haaland (19:23.119)
What is what is a typical digital colleague in your company today?

JB (19:28.728)
So to me a digital colleague is an agent that you can give a task either on one to one and it can go and complete the task and tell you when it's done. Or it's an agent that you can schedule to run multiple tasks, or it's an agent that you can schedule to run a task with another agent. And you know, on a one to one basis, right? So you can make them work together and they're specialized at doing something very specific.

Sindre Haaland (19:52.527)
What's your favorite sales agent?

JB (19:56.655)
That's a that's a great question. I I think I if I could only keep one I will a hundred percent only keep the one that helped me find the right companies. Because no matter like if you remove completely AI from the picture and when I used to have the consulting cap, every single time we will do an audit on what's not working, like why you don't generate pipeline, it's only five reasons. The quality of your list, the quality of your outreach, the timing

Sindre Haaland (20:00.422)
If you could only keep one.

JB (20:25.804)
the activities or you go to spam. And ninety-nine percent of the time it was a list issue. So if I could keep only one agent, that will be the one that disqualified the wrong companies because sales is a funnel, it's not a cube, and it starts from the qualification.

Sindre Haaland (20:40.943)
Yeah, I agreed. It's it's always been the main pain point when thinking about outbound in B to B sales. and especially if you're a company with a big TAM or like a you can sell to virtually anyone, like that becomes the the golden thing. Like if you're able to dissect your very big market into the few that is actually thinking about you right now and is relevant, you know, that's that's the superpower.

JB (20:49.261)
Yeah.

JB (20:54.786)
Yeah.

JB (21:04.716)
Exactly.

JB (21:08.96)
Exactly, exactly.

Sindre Haaland (21:10.277)
But it's we're talking about like the new way of selling and and you just mentioned a very real use case where AI can help tremendously in B2B sales, but it's like how would you say what is the new way of selling and what is the old way of selling?

JB (21:31.757)
Yeah, I I think I it it so I would put it into different aspects because you know sales has evolved so much, right? So if we kind of disregard that in some kind of ways sales has evolved into having people clicking buttons, which I don't qualify it as a way of selling. Like salespeople don't just click buttons, right? but I feel like the old way of selling used like to me, successful salespeople that sell a complex product.

They will deeply understand their customer and they will deeply research them in in order to have meaningful conversation. And I feel that now the best salespeople they are able to understand that all of that knowledge they have that require that manual research and manual preparation to kind of do the the proper outreach can be used to train agents. And that's kind of how they think like if I can do this manually and if I can take

screenshot on and train an intern to do it, I can actually train an agent to do it.

Sindre Haaland (22:34.341)
Yeah, you can. And what's the consequence of that in let's say a typical B2B SAS company, maybe making around ten million ARR? you know, what is the consequence of having something like that in your organs?

JB (22:50.88)
So the the consequences is actually quite simple is once you have trained the agents to truly reproduce what salespeople or your best salespeople will do manually to perform, you literally, according to again how complex that part was, increase their productivity from three to up to ten x. So you can essentially keep on growing with the same like by just improving the efficiency of your existing headcount. And so essentially your

cost of revenue, your margin, like ev like ev like cost to acquire customer, all of that becomes way more attractive.

Sindre Haaland (23:25.891)
What becomes the bottleneck in that sense?

JB (23:29.196)
Yeah, that's a great question. I think the bottleneck is really the digital transformation that it requires. Because, you know, all of us in sales have been using software for the past twenty years to improve our productivity. And the promise of software was that if you update your system of record, you're gonna become more productive because you are yourself created a task to follow up on, you know, your stuff, right? And you know, some salespeople will adopt that, they will update their pipeline and it they will be more productive.

Sindre Haaland (23:51.259)
Nothing.

JB (23:58.38)
But the way you work with agents is very different. You need to give work to your digital colleagues, and no one has ever done this before. So I think the bottleneck is really to have a champion in organization that kind of embrace and for example, many teams they kind of work in an agile mode where you're like, okay, we have a focus for the next two weeks, we're gonna do this campaign, we're gonna do this focus, we're going after that vertical. And so how we do it as well, for example, us and how we encourage our customer to do it, is to include the agents on the sprint.

So to be like, hey, if we do this, what agents are we going to use to do this? Do we have the right agents to do that? How which workflow do we need to schedule? Which workflow do we need to create? Which one we don't have, right? thinking that your agents are basically part of your team and you actually talk about them when you plan whatever strategies, right?

Sindre Haaland (24:45.103)
Yeah. No, it's it's becoming a a big deal and I I almost feel like we're a slow to adopt this let's say new way of selling with agents. but at the same time, the more I talk to other CEOs and companies out there, it's it's clear to me that most people have not even understood what an agent is, and they're not leveraging these capabilities at all. So

If you're you know, let's say a CEO, a head of sales, a founder, and you're listening to this and and thinking like oof we need to get going with this let's say new AI toolkits or or way of selling, like where do you start?

JB (25:33.76)
It's a great question. So I will actually I have this quadrant that I use to help our customer answer this question because like there is a few problems that every single sales team has is that in order to increase sales team productivity for the past you know twenty years they have been adding a lot of softwares that overlap a lot with one another. So I typically ask them to s look at what are the multi user data driven software.

what are the single user data driven or AI automation software, what are the context driven, which is like AI assistant, and then the quadrants that's gonna be left on the top right hand corner is gonna be where they're gonna basically build the agents that they need that can replace part of that stack and help them you know transform their team.

Sindre Haaland (26:23.565)
Okay, so like for a a typical client then like what what kind of work are we talking about like they should replace first? Is it list building or is is it something easier?

JB (26:25.387)
We we should let

JB (26:34.891)
Yeah. Yeah, a hundred percent. Like typically again, like if you think about the zoom info of this world or or you know, the typical databases or the LinkedIn sales navigator, like they had a really good value proposition before AI where they give you access to a curated database that salespeople will filter. That's typically what agents can do very, very well and even better. Because instead of filtering with keywords, like the example I always take about

limitation of databases is the CPO job title because CPO means chief people, chief procurement, and chief product officer. And if you target CPO, it's a really big problem for you because of all this different background that a CPO can have. And that's why the AI will be far superior, because it will be able to tell like, well, because that person has HR background, it's not the CPU you look for if you target product people, right? and typically again that's the type of example that we

When salespeople do this work, they don't add value. They really just clean the list. And that's you know, that's one part where you see like, okay, this is my multi user data driven stack that I can replace with AI.

Sindre Haaland (27:47.484)
That makes a ton of sense, especially if you're thinking about like the revenue operation side of selling in the new time and era. But let's say you're just a regular Joe, you know, you're working with insurance sales, your real estate agent, something like that, and obviously the sales is a big part of your day to day. Like how does AI augment and how does it change your schedule?

JB (28:07.402)
Yeah.

JB (28:12.075)
Yeah. That that's a good point. So if you are more like yeah, exactly on this high velocity where you have RevOps kind of as the power user prepping the list, you typically target a huge pool of potential accounts. And and before, like the only way we could kind of push the accounts was based on typical features like industry, company size and whatnot, and just give it to the reps and maybe sometime they'll get lucky and they'd get a really good leads and sometime

They won't and they cannot really interfere. So now what you can do is you can use agents to research those accounts and based on the amount of research that come back positive, and just to give you an I an idea, like you could research if a company is having a job ads that mention a specific initiative, or you could see if a company is expanding, or if a company had some fine recently or whatever is relevant for you, and then prioritize the accounts based on the amount of research that came back positive. So then your reps will have a higher

chances to hit the right company at the right time with the right context.

Sindre Haaland (29:15.323)
Hm. Okay. Yeah. I I I'm completely on board with that. And it's like if if I have to think about like a thing or two yet that you could go back and and implement today. let's say you're working at an enterprise. That enterprise has you know, they're pretty slow, so they haven't even bought Claude or anything like that yet. They're they're still working with Microsoft.

co-pilot and things that really is incredible how much you can get help to rewrite your emails. And it's like if that's your day to day, like is there any let's say superpowers that they could get because of AI even though they work in an enterprise? Is there a cheat code?

JB (30:04.17)
Mm, it's a good question. Let me think a little bit like if you only have access to co pilot and you want to increase your productivity, right? That's that's your question.

JB (30:17.515)
Yeah, I'm not a power y like I don't know if what kind of capability as co-pilot. Like I'm a power user of cloud. I think cloud is amazing. So I'll give you the example for cloud. Luckily some enterprise now start to have access to it. I think people don't know but you can download the desktop version of cloud and use cloud core work. I mean some some people know, but some people don't know about that features. And the cloud core work can actually do a lot. So you can it your computer needs to be running for it to work.

Sindre Haaland (30:29.803)
Well.

JB (30:47.179)
But typically what it can do is you can give it access to your CRM, you can give it access to your mailbox, and you can give it access to your Google Drive or whatever other system you use. And what you can do is you can create a simple prompt that created templates that I call the morning coffee. And so it will look at your mailbox, it will look at your CRM and the activities about your it will look at your deals. And every morning it's gonna tell you, you know, these are the deals that are important, this is like

You didn't and get an answer from this. You have an important meeting today with these two guys. Make sure that you'd mentioned this and this that was present in your last transcript. You could automate this type of morning coffee and customize the template the way you want by using cloud core work and connecting it to your different you know, system where you have all of the information. Maybe you can do this in co pilot, I don't know.

Sindre Haaland (31:36.336)
No, it's it's a good example. And in some enterprises, all of those sources are already connected to the copilot and if they use Dynamics or, you know, Office three sixty five. So I think it's a really relevant and timely like take home if if you're at that very beginning of getting on the AI train and start to educating yourself to it. But

JB (31:43.062)
Yeah.

Sindre Haaland (31:58.99)
If we if we again, you know, let's think about moving into the future of sales and like where we are in like two to three years, like one of the things that I'm thinking about is like I believe that all of the manual tasks, the research, the list building, you know, the updating of the CRM and yeah, all of this is gonna be automated with AI that has flawless memory, great context, it's

JB (32:03.372)
Yep.

JB (32:25.517)
Mm.

Sindre Haaland (32:27.375)
trained by the best, so you get really good and insightful, you know, angles and bridges and ways to overcome objections. So, you know, let's say you have all of that, like what is left then? Is it like the human a aspect? Is it our ability to to connect with others? And you know what what makes a great sales threp really freaking awesome when everyone has all of these superpowers?

JB (32:55.553)
I think it's that and I think exactly like people will still wanna buy from human but they will want to buy from human that have access to you know, all the context. Like people will be shocked if you show up to a meeting a meeting and you kind of ask like, so you know, who is in charge of what in the room? Like people are like what do you mean? Like what like it it will feel like I don't know, like if we ask yeah, do you have access to internet a few years back, right? Like it would be like

How come you are not briefed before coming to that meeting?

Sindre Haaland (33:28.559)
Yeah, that's a good point. So you you your expectations is gonna be very high and standing out is your ability to actually prepare, which everyone can, but not only prepare, but like actually, you know compartmentalize that and and remember it and leverage it in in real time then.

JB (33:32.684)
Yeah.

JB (33:49.44)
Exactly. And having you know, i i you just have this, let's say, almost cheat code every time on how you can guide the conversation in many different directions. Again, a according to how complex your product is, how complex the buyer buying committee is, and how you can ask or frame the right questions to end up in a point where you are talking value very quickly. And and I think also for the buyer it's good experience, right?

Sindre Haaland (34:12.207)
Yeah. So it's

It it will be a superior experience and I I'm not always sure whether this experience is gonna, you know, play itself out in a conference room or over a video, because obviously if you're sitting remotely or doing a video demo or something like that, you can have all of this AI feeding you this type of information in real time based on your notes and transcripts. I'm unsure if you know

JB (34:34.615)
Mm.

Sindre Haaland (34:45.327)
what happens when you're sitting offline. and I think that's definitely like a huge advantage or a skill if you're able to be human and show up and meet at the office and connect like a real person, but at the same time be able to have good preparation and connect the dots. I think that th those are the people that's gonna stand out. And and things like discovery work and, you know

JB (35:08.393)
sure.

Sindre Haaland (35:11.247)
Building trust and rapport, is it's gonna be as important as it has always been.

JB (35:17.131)
I totally agree and I also feel like note takers makes me a better listener, for example. Because like before, you know, you'll be in a meeting and you'll be, you know, listening but you also take some notes and there are these microseconds because you are taking the notes that you're not fully aware of what's going on. And now because I know my note taker is kind of supporting me in the background, I'm able to better listen and engage in the conversation. And I think like it will really reward the reps.

That are good listener, even more than before.

Sindre Haaland (35:48.144)
Yeah. So when we we're talking about like outbound changing and the fact that you can have perfect lists, well research with talking points that connects the dot on a personal level with the business to their pinpoints, you know, phone is gonna be increasingly important. But how does that work like in in a day and age where a lot of us has been kind of, you know, fat and becoming a bit fat and lazy, let's just say it.

straight out after COVID, like when there was an influx of cash and you know, we many, many of sales roles turned into order taking more than actual sales work, honestly. Like you know, w what does that look like in in the day and age of of a sales team, if you're a manager, like what should you be doing?

JB (36:20.677)
yeah.

JB (36:27.084)
Mm.

JB (36:41.909)
Yeah, that's a great question. I mean I think the basic don't really change, right? you have this let's say way more scalable and reliable way to scale or to delegate or augment your team no matter how you want to kind of label it the top of the funnel, right? So you kind of check that the more let's say mature your source processes, the easier it's gonna be to kind of check that box. then the outreach again is

it's something you can always improve with the context and so on and so forth. But the basic will always be the same. It's it's activity based, right? If your people are not picking up the phone, if they are not, you know, reaching out with personalization on different channel, they are not gonna achieve their target, right? and no matter the place on the sales funnel, right? So I think activities is never gonna change. Like people n need like no matter if you give them the ro the best list, the best contextualized outreach, if they don't pick up the phone and do the activities,

Sindre Haaland (37:16.795)
Mm.

JB (37:38.569)
nothing is gonna happen. So as a sales manager, I will obviously learn how to use the new agentic way, but I will still rely a lot on activities.

Sindre Haaland (37:49.082)
Yeah. I the obviously that's why we exist as well. Like we we firmly believe in that at the at the end of this, let's say, mini revolution that we're experiencing right now, which is taking quite a lot of attention, even for our own business, but I'm I'm sure most of our clients and everyone else is thinking this is top of mind for them. How how can you orchestrate and become that modern sales story? But like once you've completed that, it's gonna be similar to what we saw during COVID.

JB (38:03.755)
Yeah.

JB (38:16.77)
Mm-hmm.

Sindre Haaland (38:16.837)
When everyone was focused on, I need to get Zoom or I need to get Teams, like there was like this void in time where nothing else mattered. And I'm feeling that's what we're experiencing right now with AI. You you need to jump on that. You need to to to start to learn, adopt, and work agentic. But once that does is settled, you still need to have that baseline of activity. You still need to do the actual hard work and perhaps

You can't even hide anymore. That's the difference I feel with AI now infusing sales. It's like you can't hide yourself and be busy because AI has taken all of that away. So you should be going out there and doing the hard work which you will constantly be faced with rejections, with you know, pushbacks and and really tough days. So

I'm I'm excited for that day and age, but I still think like activity Indiana is is still extremely top of mind.

JB (39:19.403)
Yeah, hundred percent. And you know, I'm a salesperson, like obviously I'm you know, I I build my own company and whatnot, but always categorize myself as a salesperson. I still do cold calls. I love you know, like I think it's important to show to the team that you can still do it on and and so on. Like and I I love you know using the playbook that my team is creating and I feel like they are really, really smart. so I just wanted to say that I'm still a s salesperson, but I also think that salespeople

us are the best at having excuses. Right? excuses for not picking up the phone. Excusing for excuses for I forgot to follow up because I had to, you know, do this research or I was too busy preparing that meeting or whatever. And I understand why, because I'm still doing sales as well. But like you said, AI is gonna remove all of these excuses. Because AI will build a list for you. AI will build a the script for you when you call and or the talk track or

Sindre Haaland (39:52.419)
Mm-hmm.

Sindre Haaland (40:01.558)
yeah, of course.

JB (40:17.407)
AI will tell you who to follow up on and what to follow up with. So all of these excuses are gonna be gone and people that love executing, like myself and you know, all the top performers, they'll just love it. They'll be like, Let's go, like that's it. I I just need to go and pick up the phone.

Sindre Haaland (40:30.169)
Yeah.

I still haven't met a top sales rep who loves to update their CRM and spend lots of time on that. It's like that never happens. But there is some commonalities and they they will stay the same forever. And I think like that feeling, the euphorism of actually figuring out true conversations with people that you can come in here and help and like really truly help and you can position yourself.

JB (40:37.552)
no.

Sindre Haaland (41:02.019)
as that expert that can help them get to their their next stage in their growth journey. you know, that is that's the passion I I think most top salespeople like tap into every day.

JB (41:08.193)
Exactly.

JB (41:16.683)
No, I agree. I think that's what you call delivering in sales, like you deliver not when you reach your target, but when your champion that I mean, that both the product and work with you kind of reach their goal that you promised they're gonna reach, right? And

Sindre Haaland (41:30.415)
How how do you think though, you know, let's say if you have AI monitoring your every single movement, like how is that gonna take a toll on people? Are are we gonna see more burnouts, more people kinda like you know, getting exhausted by this or?

JB (41:46.102)
I don't know, like it's a good question. And I think at in sales we are just at the very beginning, right? but I've heard from another CEO that this is starting to happen in engineering. Where for example in our company, like we ship ninety five percent of our code with AI. And you know, we have agents that do the QA on the code, like all this kind of stuff, and we always try to improve it. And our like one of our our engineers I love the way he thinks is like I cannot go to sleep if my agents are not coding. I'm like

Sindre Haaland (42:15.747)
Yeah. That's good. Yeah.

JB (42:15.851)
Yes that's great idea. but some other CEO told me the other day that they had this engineer having exist existential crisis because we're like this is what I love to do and now I'm kind of outsourcing this part and you know and I feel yeah it's it's gonna be tough and I feel it's gonna happen in every profession, like in finance, in sales, in marketing, in you know, engineering and and yeah, I'm not too sure what's the best way to deal with it but

It's like every change, you know, I'm I'm a French person. We we go on strike at every single rumors of change, you know, like like yeah, every summer. Yeah, exactly. So yeah, I'm pretty sure it's gonna shake a lot of people and then as usual we'll just learn and adapt and just, you know, keep on growing, I guess.

Sindre Haaland (42:52.035)
And every summer, coincidentally.

Sindre Haaland (43:05.413)
What what kind of new roles do you think is gonna be critical in a modern sales team the next couple of years?

JB (43:12.907)
I don't know if it's like we love inventing roles, right? So, you know, SDRs like we used to call them inside like inside cells, and inside cells became different on whatever, right? No we have GTM engineers and whatnot. So I don't know if it's gonna be a new role per se or it's just gonna be the new function of RevOps or someone else on the team, but we will definitely need someone to manage the agents.

Sindre Haaland (43:33.839)
Yeah. And w what does managing agents look like in the sales team?

JB (43:38.774)
But the same way, like again if you treat them as digital colleagues or let's say your most intelligent interns on the team that you ever work with, like they need feedback, right? You train them and then maybe your f your playbook changes, right? So like you need to kind of adjust the training or you launch a new product or you rebrand some feature, like you need to update it and it it's not a lot of work, like I mean all of it is kind of connected, but you need someone that owns it, to kind of make sure the knowledge

of the agent stays up to date or improve or you sunset some of them, you create some new one and whatnot.

Sindre Haaland (44:13.605)
You mentioned the playbooks might be changing and one of the things that I've been thinking about with AI powered sales work is is the fact that you could in theory record everything. you have you know note takers these days even on your desk. And like when you're recording everything, like is it possible to feed that back into like a central intelligence that keep on refining the playbook and kind of like

The more you work, the more conversations you have, the better you are at overcoming, you know, whatever objections they have and and you're basically just becoming better as a sales team.

JB (44:53.783)
so techni like short answer is technically yes it's possible, but since very recently. Because we call it the the input basically. So in the input of whatever LLM you use, you have a certain number of tokens. And before it was limited, let's say to hundreds of thousands, and now we have models that allows you to push millions of tokens and and be able to work with that amount of token. Now the next question is the models that are able to do this

They are actually very expensive. The cost per token is crazy. So I feel like right now it is still more affordable to have people deciding what do they want to kind of update the agents on manually rather to have it run on autopilot because of the cost of consuming and updating all of those tokens is today with the technology. That being said, like the like the the frontier model today are so intelligent that the model

right below the frontier model are actually becoming more and more affordable and their context window is also increasing. So that's a very technical answer. So it's technically possible. I don't think it's economically feasible yet to really put it on yeah, yet on on autopilot.

Sindre Haaland (46:06.693)
But this is okay, let's let's be extremely technical for a second. and you know there is this surge now of open source models, especially from I would say China and also to some extent the US. And on top of that you also see you know not foundational models built for niches. So like you you have

Do you think there's gonna like exist either an open source or even like a prime foundational model that is just built around sales calls?

JB (46:44.362)
I think it makes total sense.

Sindre Haaland (46:47.151)
Yeah, me too. Maybe that's something to to build future company there, maybe so

JB (46:50.508)
Yeah, exactly. I think it makes total sense and it would be theoretically way more affordable, right?

Sindre Haaland (46:58.841)
Yeah, I I could definitely be. And if you switch between the models and you mainly use the open source foundational sales model and then you use the frontier for things that are new, it could be very viable. But we're not gonna scare people off just now. So I feel we can end on that note, unless Britt, you have something else you wanna throw at us.

JB (47:13.332)
Yeah. Yeah.

JB (47:33.898)
No, it's good conversation.

Sindre Haaland (47:37.199)
When are we gonna make a foundational sales model that's open source and European JB?

JB (47:43.104)
Yeah, let's let's I don't know, let's grab a beer and discuss this. Yeah.

Sindre Haaland (47:45.039)
next business. Yeah. That is it's definitely something that I think would kinda take off.

JB (47:55.946)
Yeah, definitely.

Sindre Haaland (47:59.065)
well. No, it was great chatting with you, JP. You're very knowledgeable and you definitely has has you know, have a very strong acumen and within the the space of everything's happening in in AI and agent tick sales. So I hope this can land well with our audience and many, many tidbits that we can pick from at least. Appreciate that.

JB (48:21.046)
No, I appreciate yeah, likewise I appreciate you guys having me and, you know, giving me the the space to to share that. So it was a good conversation. Yeah. Thank you.

Sindre Haaland (48:30.939)
I agree.