EP181: Unleash the Sales Kraken: Fearless, Innovative, and AI-slaying!
Chris Beall is on the road in Seattle, attending the annual Microsoft Build conference. Amidst thousands of software developers learning about the latest advancements, Chris and Susan discuss the impact of AI on sales and address common concerns about its effects on job security. Drawing an analogy of material science advancements to the evolution of building materials, Chris explains how new technology creates opportunities for salespeople rather than making them obsolete. He predicts an explosion of new products and businesses as companies leverage the power of AI to enhance their offerings. With an optimistic outlook, Chris emphasizes that salespeople should embrace the possibilities brought by material science advancements and look forward to a world of new products and increased sales opportunities. Join them as they explore the exciting potential of AI in sales on this episode, “Unleash the Sales Kraken: Fearless, Innovative, and AI-slaying!”
Full episode transcript below:
Susan Finch:
Welcome to another session with the Market Dominance Guys, a program exploring all the high-stakes, speed bumps and off ramps of driving to the top of your market. With our host Chris Beall from ConnectAndSell, and Corey Frank from Branch 49.
Chris is on the road in Seattle, attending the annual Microsoft Build Conference. Amidst thousands of software developers learning about the latest advancements, Chris and I discuss the impact of AI on sales and address common concerns about its effect on job security. Drawing an analogy of material science advancements to the evolution of building materials, Chris explains how new technology creates opportunities for salespeople rather than making them obsolete. He predicts an explosion of new products and businesses as companies leverage the power of AI to enhance their offerings. With an optimistic outlook, Chris emphasizes that salespeople should embrace the possibilities brought by material science advancements, and look forward to a world of new products and increase sales opportunities. Join us as we explore the exciting potential of AI in sales on this episode of Market Dominance Guys. Unleash the Sales Kraken: Fearless, Innovative, and AI-slaying.
Hey, Chris, you are on the road with a whole bunch of people. Can you tell us where you are and what’s going on?
Chris Beall:
Yeah, so I’m in Seattle, not very far from my wife’s condo. Everybody knows Helen, the author of Love Your Team, A Survival Guide for Sales Managers in a Hybrid world. A Amazon bestseller, by the way, in four categories. Anyway, she has a condo here. Now, she has been known to call it our condo now that we’re married. But I always say, “Helen, read the prenup.” Right? I’m kind of a stickler for these things. And so anyway, we came over here to Seattle to go to Microsoft Build. Build is their big annual conference for developers. Now, you might wonder…
Susan Finch:
You froze.
Chris Beall:
And that Helen Fanucci doing here at this conference. Well, that’s what I wanted to talk about today, is why would a couple of senior people who don’t write a bunch of code… Now I used to, but I don’t anymore. Why would we come and hang out with thousands of software developers learning about the latest and greatest that Microsoft has to offer for building software?
That’s where we are. So we’re at the Summit Center. It’s a big beautiful convention center. And one of my favorite things about it is, it has not only escalators and elevators, but it has stairs going all the way up to the top level. And of course, the young people, they take the escalators and the elevators. But us older folk, we’re wise enough to take the stairs. So that’s been part of the day so far. It was a brilliant kickoff this morning. Satya Nadella started it off and kind of took us through a little bit of the history of all the stuff that’s going on with AI. I myself built my first AI system in 1992, which is going back a little ways, so I’m kind of familiar with it. Basically laid out sort of a revolution in two hours, with a number of very senior speakers and topics, many of which are important to our company.
And it made me think about something. Because I’ve been reading tons of articles about sales and AI, especially ChatGPT. And some of them say, ChatGPT will make sales go away, or salespeople unneeded. And some of them say it makes your job easier. And some say, “Well, you could just send spam like five times faster than you could before. And it’s even personalized spam.” And, “Wow, that’ll work really well.” Which I think everybody knows my opinion on that. But what struck me was, this is very natural for human beings. And I’m not criticizing, I’m just pointing it out, that when people think about AI, they think, “What’s it going to do to me? What’s it going to do to my job?”
Susan Finch:
Right.
Chris Beall:
Right? And they think about it, I’ll call it first order. So they think, “Well, I do X, Y, and Z. I send emails and I talk to people. What if some AI could send emails and talk to people? Oh my God, they won’t need me anymore.” That’s sort of the first reaction.
And one can go down some very deep rabbit holes by following that reaction. Because now you’re in the world of, frankly, I’ll call it abject speculation. What’s going to happen? Who knows? Whenever there are new capabilities, jobs change. If you were a milkman at one point, and you had a horse, and you had a nice cart with four wheels. Maybe a wagon. And you went, took the milk from the farm, and you went around and delivered it to people’s houses. And then this internal combustion thing happened. And somebody else said, “Well, I’m going to deliver milk in something that doesn’t involve a horse.” If you said, “Oh well, that doesn’t affect me, I’m just going to keep using the horse.” At some point, the horsepower is going to overwhelm your horse, because the other person’s going to deliver faster, cheaper, whatever. And you can complain about it all you want. But you’re going to have to adapt, or you’re going to have to go into another line of work.
Susan Finch:
Exactly.
Chris Beall:
So this is kind of the obsession, but what I’d like to talk about is exactly the opposite. Precisely the opposite. Having nothing to do with how you do your job, but having to do with why you do your job.
Susan Finch:
Oh, okay. I love it.
Chris Beall:
Yeah, so like, hold forth, Chris. Go for it, dude.
Susan Finch:
Well, I’m curious because I’m constantly defending AI to friends that are paranoid. To friends that are scared. To people that don’t really try and think of the better applications, and “Oh, no, no, no, this makes me way more effective. This makes me way more necessary.” So I want to hear what you’re going to say, because this is a conversation I have all week long.
Chris Beall:
Well, I’m going to throw out an analogy here, and it’s one that I’ve used many times in other contexts. So for anybody who feels like it’s worn out, I’m telling you it’s not. It’s a great analogy. This may be the best analogy of all time. So here’s my analogy. You know, one point in the history of the world, in cities, we built big buildings with bricks. They can only be so big. You can only go so high with bricks. First, they can only go so high because how many flights of stairs can you go up? And then this guy, Otis or whatever, invented the break on the elevator. So the passive break, that meant that you could have a little room that goes up and down on a rope. Or cable as the case may be. And if the rope breaks, it won’t take you all the way to the ground at an ever-accelerating rate.
It’ll act with a passive mechanism that goes “cunk”, and stops it where it is. Now, you still need to be rescued and stuff. But much better than being a little crumpled mass, oozing blood out the doors and stuff like that at the bottom of the elevator, with a plume of smoke coming off your ashes, so to speak. So that was great. We could make some bigger buildings, but at some point you kind of get to the limit of brick. Brick building are made by stacking bricks on top of bricks. And then somebody came up with a really clever idea, “Let’s use steel in order to make buildings.” Now, there were a lot of arguments against steel. “Oh, it’s horrible. It rusts after all. Do you know it has iron in it? You ever seen it after a while? We don’t want rusty buildings. We got all the brick buildings. They stand forever and they’re fireproof.”
Hey, steel is pretty fireproof too. Yes, you can light steel on fire, but you kind of have to powder it first and get yourself a lot of oxygen around each little, tiny, tiny bit of powdered steel. And don’t ever do this at home, by the way. Don’t anybody take and say, “Oh, Chris said I should go powder some steel and light it on fire.” Do not do that in your house. Thank you. So steel changed everything. Cities look like they look. The building I’ve been in all day today is not a buildable building without steel. And so when you think about that, it’s like, well, what changed? Everything. So if you were a bricklayer, you might say, “Oh, they’ve invented a way of making buildings with steel. What’s going to happen to us bricklayers?” Well, you’re probably going to either become more decorative in what you do.
So now your bricks are to make things look like bricks, not to be bricks. Or for smaller buildings, hey, they need them too, right. But your five-story brick walkup kind of became a thing of the past because you could make it out of a steel skeleton and hang some glass off of it. And it looks like all the condos over in West Seattle. That’s what they make them out of. They pile bricks up, make them things. So this is my point is, when material science changes, when we can make new things, two things happen. One of them turns out always to be alarming and small in retrospect. Who sits around and talks about, “Oh, and the bricklaying jobs to make the big buildings, they just aren’t around anymore.”
What they do instead is go, “Oh, look at the vibrant cities we’ve created with these big buildings that can have 20 times as many people and businesses in them. And allow a greater concentration of value. And it’s hyperefficient.” Yes, they come with their little problems. Every once in a while you’ll have a global pandemic and nobody can work together in them. But, if you wait a few years, you kind of get that back together. The people do adapt. But it’s not about bricklayers, it’s about the city. It’s about everything else. It’s about all the other businesses that thrived. Because we used material science, there was an advance that led us work with steel. And we could make buildings primarily out of steel and glass. And that’s pretty stunning. Concrete, by the way, played a certain role as well.
Susan Finch:
Right.
Chris Beall:
That’s an old Roman invention. And their concrete’s better than our concrete, and we have them figured out why. But we think it has to do with, I don’t know, volcano. So here we have the same thing. So here you’re a salesperson and you’re going, “Oh, well, I’m so scared. I might not have a job sending emails that nobody answers. I mean its activity. They pay me for it. It’s good. And sometimes they do answer. And I think I’m a pretty good salesperson. And when I get somebody to answer, I’m great. I have a conversation with them. Or maybe I’m crazy and I use ConnectAndSell, and I push a button and talk to people. And what if some bot can talk to them or whatever?” Well, first of all, trust me, don’t worry about the bot thing. But I’m not going down that rabbit hole. If a bot could talk as well as you, it would have to fess up that it’s a bot.
It’s something that, actually, the nice Microsoft people have figured it out. They call them watermarks. So audio watermarks that are put in the generated content. Isn’t that great? So you can actually have another piece of code, look at it and go, “This was made by a bot.” And then John, the gatekeeper, who’s protecting Mary, the executive, can have it pop up on the phone and say, “Bot calling. Bot calling.” Because we’ll look at the watermark, listen to it and know it’s a bot. That’s not what I’m talking about. Here’s what’s going to really happen with salespeople. Here’s my confident prediction. I’m in a confident predictive mood. I’ve been hanging out with very confident people this morning. And I think they’re right in their confidence. And that is this. There will be an explosion of what? New products. How many new products? Well, I can tell you, they’re introducing 50 of them, today, in the morning, at this conference. This is just Microsoft. And they don’t make this stuff for themselves. They make it for others to build. Microsoft’s business has always been, “Here’s some code you use to build other code.”
Well, now they got some code. And a bunch of data. And a bunch of whatever it’s done in order to learn its tricks. Including its hallucinations, and its issues around security, and all the other stuff that comes with it. But all of that goes together so that this thousands and thousands of people I’m sitting with today can be unleashed to make tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of new products for you to sell. So in a market dominant sense, if you were already out there with the product and you’re not taking advantage of the latest material science to build a better version of your product. And that doesn’t mean just like, “Oh, here’s steel. Let’s just put a steel flagpole on the top of our brick building and call it AI.” No. It’s like you actually got to figure out how to use the new material AI to make something useful for your actual customers. Or hey, better yet, even for new customers you couldn’t reach otherwise, because they had no interest in your product.
Maybe now you can put some cool stuff in there that will make it more valuable for those customers that you don’t have. Or that you do have. In any case, as a salesperson, you should be going, “This is the best of all possible worlds.” Not only does my job get easier, but there’s new stuff to sell. And salespeople not only [inaudible 00:13:01] new stuff to sell, they also thrive on new businesses. And here’s the other thing that happens. With every advanced material science. I’m using material science loosely here, right?
Susan Finch:
Right. Right.
Chris Beall:
I mean something new you can use to build new stuff. That’s why it’s material science, not just like science science, right? Science is new that you can go, “Wow, that’s really interesting.” Material science is like something that’s used as a material to build new stuff. So for instance, a browser in the 90s was material you could use to build new stuff called applications that didn’t run on your computer. But they ran in a browser that ran on your computer, and therefore were more ubiquitous. Did that lead to more or less opportunity for salespeople? Well, I would say the entire internet economy’s been really good for salespeople. Because while there’s hundreds of thousands of millions of products out there that have been sold, and guess what else comes with products, the best thing of all? Money.
Susan Finch:
We’ll be back in a moment after a quick break.
ConnectAndSell. Welcome to the end of dialing as you know it. ConnectAndSell’s patented technology loads your best sales folks up with 8 to 10 times more live qualified conversations every day. And when we say qualified, we’re talking about really qualified. Like knowing what kind of cheese they like on their impossible Whopper kind of qualified. Learn more at connectandsell.com.
And we’re back.
Chris Beall:
Money’s the juice that goes around and goes, “Well, where’s their opportunity to make more money?” There’s nothing funny about money. Money is kind of biological in that sense. It’s always looking for an opportunity to make more of itself. But it uses a funny approach. We, human animals use one approach, which we kind of like. And build some, I don’t know, poetry, and industry, and art around, and sort of seek it out. Well, money seeks out the opportunity to turn money into money by being a more advantaged investment with a little bit of risk, or a lot of risk, and with no risk. That’s what people do with money. That’s what money does with money. Money says, “I’ll take a little risk if you will make me, more of me.” Right? That’s the money thing. And occasionally the risk gets into an overhang and you get a Silicon Valley bank or whatever.
That’s just natural. Risks pile up, and then risks fall down. But overall, money goes up and up and up. And what drives up and up over time? It’s actually material science. It’s actually always material science. It’s very rarely brilliance. It’s very rare that somebody’s so smart, they figure out something that nobody’d ever thought of before with the current materials. That happens for a brief period after a new material shows up. So here’s a new material, ChatGPT and it’s friends. So you get all of this large language model stuff. And you get all these wonderful tools that people can use to make new stuff that they couldn’t make before. And they never like to say that. It always sounds like improvements. But truly, you can’t make a hundred-story building out of bricks. It will lean and fall over.
Susan Finch:
Right.
Chris Beall:
You have to use steel that flexes and that you can anchor deeply in the ground, if that’s the way you do it. Unless you’re in Chicago, in which case you float your buildings. But let’s not talk about that. Because it makes people nervous when the building is floating. Who wants to know that kind of crap, right? So new material science drives investment at the margin, risk investment. And we’re not talking about a little bit of money. We’re talking about trillions of dollars, that sit there, on the sidelines or near the sidelines. The biggest change in the last 20 years, which is generative AI. Where you can make your own models, you can train your own models. Our company, for instance, one of the senior people over at Microsoft said to me, “Your company has the biggest and the best, as far as we can tell here at Microsoft, training set for business to business contact data. Because yours must be closed loop.”
After all, it’s used for calling people. And those people to actually either answer or don’t answer. And then they have things that provide more data. And then they have outcomes that provide more data. And then they’re linked to each other. Because you could have follow up conversations or other conversations at the same company. Then they’re tied to commerce. That’s more, “Oh my goodness, that’s a lot of data.” And yes, mind you, we know you only do it 200,000 times a day. But that’s still a lot of data. It builds up, right? Well, that’s a good point. But without the material science of all this AI, you can do something with it. But you can’t do something as cool as say, make an application where you can say to it as a human being, “Tell me, which of my sales reps would do best calling on a market that consists entirely of the CEOs of companies in industrial kind of sectors, that the company’s making more than a $100 million a year.”
That’s a cool thing to be able to ask. Imagine being able to ask that of a community of thousands of sales reps. You could say, “Who’s the best at this?” Well, that’s coming. How long’s it going to take?
Susan Finch:
Oh, I can’t wait.
Chris Beall:
Yeah, that’s like a week or so. Because this new material science, I’ll call it. Which is this ChatGPT and it’s friends. It lets you do stuff like that. And the folks over at Microsoft just dropped 10 billion with a B, dollars into OpenAI and then basically pivoted their whole company around it. And they’re pretty big. Think hundreds of thousands of people who are now organized around making this new material available to folks who develop products. Now, I don’t develop products anymore. Okay, maybe I do, but don’t tell anybody. So I reach out and look out the window and pontificate about sales. But these products are going to be built, they’re going to be built fast and money is going to chase them. Already this is the hottest new area for investment. It is the hottest sector for venture capital right now.
And so when venture capital comes into the marketplace, it does it for one, and only one reason. Or purpose. And the purpose is to buy salespeople. To buy go to market. Nobody invests in companies to build anything anymore. The stuff’s already built in the garage. It’s built in minutes. It’s built from whatever was there, but this is the new material science. It’s like, “I’m not going to pay you to glue this to that. You got super glue. You do that on your own time. Then you come to me as an investor.” I’m not an investor, so everybody, I’m playacting here. “So come to me as an investor and I’m going to go, ‘Ooh, you’re going to take that cool thing you built to market.’ That’s fabulous. I’ll give you your million, your 5 million, your 10 million, your 20 million, to go take that to market.” Well, where does that money go? Guess what? It goes to salespeople.
That’s where it goes. Yes. It also goes to marketing. So it goes to marketing people. Yes. It also goes to marketing companies. So that’s all I have to say on this. And I actually have to run right now, because some money wants to talk to me.
Susan Finch:
I love it. Thanks so much, Chris, for popping in and catching us up. Talk to you soon.
Chris Beall:
You bet, Susan. Thank you.
