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The secret sauce to your sales success? It’s what happens before the sale. It’s the planning, the strategy, the leadership. And it’s more than demo automation. It’s the thoughtful work that connects people, processes, and performance. If you want strong revenue, high retention, and shorter sales cycles, the pre-work—centered around the human—still makes the dream work. But you already know that.
The Unexpected Lever is your partner in growing revenue by doing what great sales leaders do best. Combining vision with execution. Brought to you by Vivun, this show highlights the people and peers behind the brands who understand what it takes to build and lead high-performing sales teams. You’re not just preparing for the sale—you’re unlocking potential.
Join us as we share stories of sales leaders who make a difference, their challenges, their wins, and the human connections that drive results, one solution at a time.
Jarod Greene (00:00):
Hey, welcome to V5 where we spend exactly five minutes getting on our soapbox. Some of the hottest takes in all of B2B sales and B2B go-to-market. We got a fun one today. I got Mike Head, CRO of PartnerStack with not one, but two hot takes that I'm going to let him tell you. So Mike, hot take number one, what you got?
Mike Head (00:23):
AI is going to make the majority of reps mediocre. One of my beliefs and what I've seen is that preparation, understanding accounts, really digging into what your customers want, thinking through the follow up, close attention to details on those things are what sets you apart from your competition and with what's happening with AI. There's a lot of really interesting things where AI can go in, do follow up for you. They can do the account prep and research for you. They can prepare or they, whatever you want to call it, the briefs, the documents, everything you need to do. And what I believe is over time, because AI can do a lot of these things, you're going to see a lot of reps just showing up, believing exactly what the AI has told you, not doing that prep, not doing that extra research, not doing that extra work that puts you ahead, and that's why a majority of reps are going to be mediocre.
Jarod Greene (01:30):
Oh yeah. So it's one of those situations where, and we were talking at a pre-call before, it sounds like you got the tools or you got the best equipment, right? You have the best hockey stick, you have the best aluminum bat, you got all the gear, but it doesn't in itself make you a better athlete.
Mike Head (01:49):
Yeah, exactly. You kind of think about it as the proliferation of content that's out there right now and everyone's highlighting, here's the AI LinkedIn content, here's the AI blog content, all that stuff. You'll start to know that the reps are just regurgitating what the AI has told you or in real time is actually telling it to tell you, right? Because you know we're going to have agents that are sitting with the sales reps at time and you'll be able to see that most of them really are phoning it in, not doing that work. But I believe it presents an opportunity for the top talent where they are going to go above and beyond. They're going to continue to do that work. They're going to leverage the tools in the right way. They're going to deliver that wow experience for the customer. And you're going to see the separation between the top talent and the rest of the field even more so than what we see today.
Jarod Greene (02:44):
Yeah. So the AI arm rep, but only the AI arm rep who can put the work in, still be effective, still do the extra things, will rise to the top, not just the rep with AI within itself. 'Cause everybody's got it.
Mike Head (02:59):
And then over time, all those mediocre reps are just going to fade out and the AI is just going to do the work for them, and you'll only have the top of the top in the sales profession.
Jarod Greene (03:09):
Got it. No, love that take. So there's going to be someone who says, okay, well then we'll just stop hiring reps right now. Let's just start the book now. I already know who my top performers are. You got your rule of 40 here or your pyramid of a, I forget the equation, but you got a percentage of reps who are going to crush it no matter what they have. You got this kind of frozen middle of reps who want to become the top but just need a little kit and then there's a percent you just got to get rid of. Is it your point of view that yeah, in a few years we'll just get rid of those reps faster and then the guys and gals who sink or swim will either be pulled to the kind of top tier or will drown to the bottom faster and that's a good thing for CROs like you. Yeah?
Mike Head (03:51):
I think productivity per rep is going to go up because of this. Absolutely. The take though is it's not necessarily going to be the top reps from today. You have top reps from today who have methodology that they use that has been successful and not all of them will adapt to the new world. And so you will see some of your, maybe early in the career, maybe more hungry, whatever it may be, who are more willing to adapt and learn, they'll really rise to the top. And so you'll see a shakeout in the order of the performance of reps in your org.
Jarod Greene (04:24):
Got it. Got it. Love it, Mike. All right, so we promise not one, but two because that's how we roll. What else is on your mind?
Mike Head (04:31):
AI is finally going to bring sales teams and partnership teams together. And the rationale behind this, we all know everyone talks about partners and partners need to be a big part of your go-to-market motion for a number of different reasons, but there's many challenges in doing that. For a sales organization, it's hard enough to stay up to speed on your own internal value prop and how to sell that effectively, let alone knowing when to actually bring partners into a scenario. And I've seen it AEs, it overcomplicates things. It slows my deals down. I lose control over certain things. AI is going to mitigate and eliminate a number of those challenges. It's going to be the tool that actually understands the value prop of your partners. It's going to listen to the conversations, make recommendations when you should bring those in. It's going to automate the workflows behind the scenes so that you no longer have to worry about sending those referrals over. All of that stuff is going to be automated. So finally, AEs are going to have an easy button to bring partners into deals, which is going to increase AOV and win rates, and they're finally going to see the light and why they should bring partners into their deals.
Jarod Greene (05:53):
Awesome. I love this take because I think it's one of those of sales and AI and we've explored the widest range of use cases is personally the first time I've ever heard this, but I think it makes a ton of sense. You outlined some of the friction sales teams have had with the partner team clearly have solved for this. What advice would you give a company who's looking to start that right now? They look at you, they nod their head, they go, Mike, a hundred percent. I'm ready to go down that path. What are some pragmatic tips to get started in the realm of building a better bridge between the sales rep and the partner team?
Mike Head (06:28):
A couple of different things that you can do to start building the bridges between it. So one, use data. So usually you're sitting on a lot of data that shows that when you bring partners in, you're more effective and it's back to the win rates and the AOVs being higher with partner involved and partner source deals overall.
(06:47):
I think that using AI to listen to the calls and the transcripts and using those stories that you're actually hearing and seeing from customers and disseminating that amongst the entire organization so that they understand that as well.
(07:01):
And then rethinking your partner tech stack. You have to have the tools that can enable and empower the teams together to be able to do those things. I think if you nail those three things, that's where you can start to see more traction with the strategy.
Jarod Greene (07:17):
Awesome. Great pragmatic advice to get folks started. Mike, this is awesome, mate. If people want to connect with you, see what you guys are up to, where do they find you?
Mike Head (07:25):
Yeah, you're easy. Just mike@partnerstack.com. You can also find me on LinkedIn, not surprisingly.
Jarod Greene (07:30):
Awesome. Thank you, Mike. Appreciate you spending a few minutes with us today.
Mike Head (07:33):
Thank you. I appreciate it.