EP213: Ethical AI Selling – Reality vs Hype
Artificial intelligence is transforming sales, whether we’re ready or not. In this episode, we dive deep on questions sales leaders have about leveraging AI amidst the hype and uncertainty. What’s driving adoption? Where can bots add value now vs. someday? We debate ethical considerations and the threat of/or replacing human jobs.
Our guides, Chris and Corey, are joined by Shane Mahi, now Chief Partnership Officer at AI startup mega.ai. Shane shares insights from the AI frontlines on what’s realistic today and the autonomous sales agent vision of tomorrow. Shane shares the hard-won insights he’s gained through making over 650,000 sales calls and landing more than 30 major clients. In this 3-part series, we’ll cover Shane’s journey along with the role of AI in sales.
Join us for episode 213: Ethical AI Selling – Reality vs Hype
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Chris Beall (00:08:41):
Great. So I just finished a book I can recommend to everybody called Molecular Storms. If you want to understand how quantum physics actually derives from or is consistent with the second law of thermodynamics and why we are we are, what we are, where we are, and how it all works. Read that and Stephen Hawking has mentioned it in that book, so go for it.
Corey Frank (00:09:07):
The original Hawking and you are the Hawking of Hawking. Alright, I will add that to my children’s book list. Yes, it’s recorded, but we have a guest, we have a repeat guest from what, almost three years ago. We have Shane Mahi from Points undetermined Morocco, the UK, Maryland. So Shane, great to have you back on the Market Dominance Guys, after an extended disappearance and as you’ve built up your companies and built up your rotation and how many hundreds of thousands of phone calls you’ve had since the two and a half years that you’ve arrived, ready to share the information, not only on all what you’ve learned in those two and a half years since you’ve made the last appearance, but also we’re going to talk today, Chris and Shane Wright is about something I know nothing about, which is the I in ai, and we’re going to talk specifically about AI in sales and in outbound sales. So Shane, great to have you back on the Market Dominance. Guys.
Shane Mahi (00:10:05):
Thank you very much Corey, and thank you, Chris. It has been, I think, almost four years now. We’re in 2024. And from what I know, Chris, our episode was one of the most popular, most listened to episodes of that year. And in that time, I am thankful to Chris and the ConnectAndSell team, I was able to grow my company to a million dollars in sales revenue. I won’t say pounds because it doesn’t sound as cool, but we hit a million dollars in sales revenue. We made over 650,000 calls. We landed about 32, 32 major clients that had an A CV of about 76,000 pounds each. They ran for about seven, eight months and we were on our way to becoming a very dominant player in the market as a boutique firm. But the normal peaks and troughs of startup life happened. Me, I neglected my marriage and my family and I focused a lot on my business.
(00:11:07):
And that ended up breaking down what that relationship was. I also made a few mistakes in that process, which I’m glad I made because it helped me figure out how to increase the value of my business, what I’m doing, profit margins and all of these peaks and troughs. Letting go of my entire team at one point has led me down a path to where I am today where I have an abundance, an abundance of knowledge, I have an abundance of experience, the types of conversations I sit in, the people in people’s room and just really repeat what Chris has said, what Jerry has said, what all the CEOs that I’ve ever spoke to have said, and they’re just thinking, who is this young kid? And I’m 37 years old. I’m proud of everything I’ve done to this date right now. I don’t even know what my company name is.
(00:11:55):
I’ve changed it so many times, but where I am today, I’m the chief partnership officer of a company called mega.ai. I was brought into that company to build the strongest relationships in the industry. Chris, I believe is going to be one of, if not the strongest relationship I’ve ever had in my entire life because of this, Corey, hopefully you too. And the next journey in the next 11, 12 months is to build the next generation of autonomous agents that are going to be booking meetings 24 7, instant ramp up time, a thousand dollars an agent, 2070 5% cheaper than a human rep. And more importantly, your business can scale exponentially without the need for human labor. The only reason I’ve been able to build this type of narrative is because I ran 27 seconds, 650,000 times. So that to me, in a nutshell,
Corey Frank (00:12:47):
27 seconds, that actually works. Wow.
Shane Mahi (00:12:51):
Seven seconds and 20
Corey Frank (00:12:52):
Baby. So wild. Wow. So no, that is an incredible story. Of course, Shane, as impressive as that is, right, you’re also a very prolific contributor, never with your handout, but just contributor and thought leader into the space of B2B sales. And I know your reputation speaks for yourself. You take calls at all hours of the night. People use you as the sounding board for so many of us in the industry. So that’s also a testament, I think, to your great reputation. So great to have you. So let’s jump into it, Chris, on this AI and sales, what chain is talking about, certainly with mega, we want to hear a little bit more about, but let me pose it to both of you guys. How are folks using AI today that really has changed from maybe even since the last time you were on the show, Shane, a couple of years ago. You have sales copilot, I think from Microsoft, you have Einstein from Salesforce, I believe, and certainly the ubiquitous ChatGTP that folks have been trying to write screenplays. But maybe you can talk a little bit about Chris, what you’ve seen certainly in the private equity side of other burgeoning businesses inside of ConnectAndSell, and then Shane, kind of what you’re seeing as well. So Chris, what do you see as just the seismic tectonic plates that have shifted just in the last handful of years here now? Well,
Chris Beall (00:14:20):
The big shift was just in the end of 2022 actually when ChatGTP came on the market, it did something that was totally unexpected with regard to ai. Suddenly you had a popular, like everybody wanted it, everybody could figure out how to use it, AI friend, so to speak, that you could ask questions of. And it showed a couple of things. One is that vast general knowledge gained from just everything that’s ever been out on the internet put into a relatively simple, but really, really big neural network that’s organized in a very clever way can provide value to regular people that exceeds what they can get from going out and Googling. Because as the internet got more and more populated with websites that tell you everything, if you’re being told everything, then you’re kind of being told nothing. And so who do you trust?
(00:15:26):
To tell you the truth, well, Google came up with an idea a long time ago who has the most backlinks, and then they expanded on that with various levels of authority oriented algorithms and then somehow tried to make that work in a world that was fundamentally corrupt because they were taking ad revenue and they figured out how to square that circle. And then chat, GPT came along and said, eh, who really needs that? Just ask me a question and I’ll tell you something. And then if that doesn’t quite work out, ask me another question. And so instead of getting a bunch of stuff on the screen, including a bunch of ads, what you actually got was this sort of friendly, authoritative voice. And it took about, I would say, 362 milliseconds before somebody figured out how to use chat GBT in sales just by asking it to write an email for them.
(00:16:18):
And then they’d copy and paste it. It’s a better writer than any of us as long as you accept whatever the style is and write in different styles. So you can ask it as you and I know Corey, we wrote a book in two days, and actually I just did it by copying and pasting stuff out of chat g pt, there’s the book, right? Market Dominance book, a conversation with ChatGTP, and did that with no instruction, no nothing. And it actually walked me through the process of publishing it on Amazon. So end to end between six o’clock on a Saturday morning and 11 o’clock on Sunday night. That book was created from podcast episodes and it wrote everything except for the how we did it part. So that was already being used in marketing anyway. But the use in sales is pretty clear.
(00:17:08):
Most salespeople are not exactly readers and writers, shall we say, male colorblind, left-handed a DD. Dyslexics generally didn’t grow up getting like you did a degree in Elizabethan poetry, which often does require a certain amount of reading. I’m sure you regret taking that path with the amount of reading it took, but actually Corey is a prolific reader, but sales is populated with folks who didn’t raise their hand in class saying, oh yeah, teacher, I got the answer to that, right? It was folks who knew how to talk their way from a D to a C in order to graduate. So that was the immediate first use. And all the copilots are just that. That’s where we’ve come, yeah, that’s where we’ve come. I’ll write something for you, right? What’s happening now is much more interesting, which is, and this is what we’ll have Shane talk about it.
(00:18:08):
This is what Mega is all about, as we whipped right by the Turing test. The Turing test was a big deal. If you’re interacting with a bot and you can’t tell it’s a bot after a bunch of interactions by text, by the way, which is kind of a dumb way to do it. But if you’re doing that and you can’t tell if it’s a bot or a human, well, it’s passed the Turing test. And we’ve gone beyond some point in the evolution of computers and their relationship to society. We blew by the Turing test in one day and didn’t even notice it. Nobody cared, nobody noticed, except people said, oh my God, it’s going to take over the world. That, by the way, is ridiculous. Something typing to you is not going to take over the world and pictures don’t help. It is, oh, it made a picture of somebody, great, fantastic.
(00:18:58):
But in sales. Now the big question is can you make a selling bot? And that is a graded question. It starts with, in my mind, can you get a bot to get a gatekeeper to do a transfer that’s a sale. Can you do it? And that’s a really interesting question. That’s one that we’re going to be exploring with mega because we have a lot of gatekeeper interactions and it costs money. It’s human beings who are doing it. Maybe we can do it with a butt, I don’t know. But I like baby steps. I’m an old rock climber. You can stare at the summit all you want, but you actually have to make the first move and it comes off the ground. So sitting back across the valley going, oh, look at that. Doesn’t get the job done. So what’s the first step in making a selling bot?
(00:19:49):
Probably talking to a gatekeeper. Not really a regular gatekeeper, but maybe just an operator. So we suspect there’s things that can be done there. Now, can you go all the way to closing a deal? A real deal where somebody’s putting their butt in the line where their careers are on the line, where they’re risking everything, their family, their future on the advice of a vendor’s, but maybe not just because of the vendor’s. Butt is intrinsically at the moment on the wrong side of the uncanny valley or somewhere in it, and it’s like, well, we know the vendor’s but is clever. It was made by clever people. Hopefully their salespeople aren’t quite as clever, so maybe I can trust them. But that’s the continuum of questions. And yesterday, Shane asked me to be in a round table with a bunch of folks, and we were talking about the ethics, potential ethics, which I’d love to talk about here. But I think it’s really about the practicality, the ethical difference between AI and not AI and sales is like the ethical distinction between a knife and a gun. It’s like, okay, so with a knife, I got to get close to you in order to draw blood with a gun. I can do it from a little farther away. And if you’re a certain friend of mine, that might be about two miles.
(00:21:13):
So is there an ethical difference between those? Not really. There’s a practical difference between those. It’s still unethical to walk up to Shane in a bar and say, Shane, you son of a dog. I used to think you were a wonderful person. And now I don’t. And slip a shive into him that’s just as unethical as shooting him as he comes out of the bar. What’s the difference, right? So I believe this big ethics discussion tends to be a political discussion about computers, actually not about ai. And it has to do with who’s going to get more power at different points in different processes.
Corey Frank (00:21:54):
Well, Chris, Let’s talk about that just for a second with Shane and bring Shane in here. I see that ethical dilemma to me, it starts with authenticity. And if there is the sense chain that, hey, wait a minute, it’s as if you’re watching a Spider-Man Marvel movie, and you’re just engrossed in the experience of swinging from building to building, and then all of a sudden I see a string holding Spider-Man, or I see a boom mic in the corner that maybe the editor forgot to take out. The illusion just goes down immediately. And I said, wait a minute. I’m in a movie theater here and I’m eating bad popcorn. This is not me. The stakes all of a sudden go from being here where I care about the characters to now the stakes are just cruelly, artificial. And Shane, do you find that, or how do you bridge that?
(00:22:48):
Certainly with your round table that you’ve talked with a lot of CEOs like Chris, but that authenticity, whereas as humans, we perceive those little subtleties and mood and those complex needs through a simple conversation. And when a tell happens from an ai, either Chris, to your point from a text or a bot, how do you combat that? Is that the racist to get to as authentic as possible or because that’s where I think the Delta ethics happened. Chris is, wait a minute, I thought you were a real person, but now you’re a machine. So Shane, what do you think about that and bridging that gap?
Shane Mahi (00:23:29):
So Chris mentioned it yesterday and it drove a lot of the discussion, which was it’s the ability to tell the truth and just being truthful about anything upfront. And I used it when I started, and it comes from the 27 seconds, is the point of inoculation. And it’s stating a fact before somebody has that objection. And if you are using any type of artificial intelligence, computer robot, I think the most authentic, genuine thing to do is to tell the truth. And that comes from, Hey, this is a robot, Corey, I’d like to have a conversation with you. If not, would you like to be speaking to a human? You’ll then say, sure. The robot then has the advantage of saying, Hey, Corey, it’s going to take about five to six minutes to patch you through. I can probably get your questions covered in the next 45 seconds.
(00:24:18):
Do you want to have a chat with me or do you want to have a chat with the next person? And for me, that makes all the difference because time for a ceo, for a business professional is absolutely everything. And the ability to cut out that wasted time is everything. I’ll give you a quick example. I called, I mentioned it yesterday, right, Chris? I called Pizza Hut the other day and it took me six minutes to remove onions from my pizza because the guy kept battling from me that I said, you can’t just pick the goddamn onions off the pizza. I don’t like onions. And it was a nightmare. Now, had a bot just been able to say, Hey, which toppings would you like to add or remove if any? Just remove onions. My pizza’s at the door in 10, 15 minutes. And for me, again, the truth allows that time to be shortened, which gives you more opportunity to take care of other things that are most important in your life.
(00:25:13):
And another thing that I think is really important, I just watched it the other day, and that point you made on authenticity and being genuine and the truth. Mackinac, I’m sure you both have seen that. I had no idea. I think Sam Altman is an ex Mackinac that’s swear God, because when that person, the robot locked the door, obviously it’s playing with the guy. I’m a sucker for women, absolute sucker for women. So if I was in one of those situations and they were manipulating me without knowing it and putting the love spot, well, were you really interested in me? He’s lying to you, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, to get out. That is where everything changes for me. And now after seeing that movie, I’m wondering, Chris is very smart, Cora, you are very smart. Are you going to start peeling off your skin one day and saying the same thing to me?
Corey Frank (00:26:11):
Well, but I think that’s part of it. It’s a brilliant point. I love the trust thing. Chris and Shane, by the way, the coming up front, front loading the fact that my AI interaction may be lumpy. You may call me out on it. You may see the wires, you may see the boom bike, but come on, it’s a movie. And so that authenticity can be front loaded by telling the truth. But Chris, do you see, and Shane, that a lot of these AI tools, the, is it Air ai, the one that has the demo for Apple? To me, that seems manipulative, and I think I’m not alone as a consumer, as a B2B consumer of say, they don’t front load that authenticity or that honesty at all. But Chris, do you see there’s a race towards making that seamless to the point where you don’t have to even admit that? Or how was it received in the round table yesterday when you said that, Hey, I think we got to lead with this honesty and trust upfront? Well,
Chris Beall (00:27:17):
I actually think that this is one of those rare cases where the ethics and the practicalities converge so tightly that you will not win in the marketplace with a bot that doesn’t say it’s a bot. I think there’s a lot of freaking out about this kind of stuff that just comes from how people kind of act like a bot. They sort of act like ChatGTP, and just start emitting the next words that come to mind, which is it’s a bot, therefore it’s not a person, therefore, it’s inauthentic because they’ve heard that string of words before. But if you really think about it, we do love to interact with bots as long as they’re responsive and we feel that they’re sufficiently neutral. That’s why chat GPT went nuts and became the fastest growing application in the history of applications because you perceive that it’s neutral, it’s on, if anything, it’s on your side.
(00:28:16):
And in fact, it uses language damn well it’s a bot, right? But it uses language that implies that it cares about you. When you correct it, I ask, Hey, tell me about Chris Beal. And it says, oh, Chris, he has a degree in mechanical engineering from Stanford, blah, blah, blah. And I say, no, no, no. I mean, Chris be the ceo, EO of ConnectAndSell co-host to market dominance guys. What about that guy that says, oh, yeah. And then it says some other bullshit about me. And I go, no, no. And it says, oh, I apologize. It apologizes to me. So it sees the world through my eyes, which is a bot that needs a little bit of help, kind of staying on the rails. But it does useful things for me, and it’s not against me. I think the big issue is going to be being the vendor’s bot.
(00:29:02):
We’re making an assumption that a selling bot has to be the vendor’s bot, but selling is a highly complex activity full of all sorts of interactions. One of the interactions is learning, do I need to learn one vendor at a time? James Thornberg would say, no, James Thornberg would say, and God knows, he knows more about it than any of us on this call. Being a neutral actually allows you to get better information and save time for the other party. You tell us your requirements once we’ll tell you which of three or four vendors that we work with is most appropriate, and those vendors are going to pay if one of them actually ends up doing business with you. Because for them, channel doesn’t mean manipulation. It just means being in the game, right? So we’re making a lot of assumptions about the bot filled future of sales that are simply knee jerk.
(00:29:57):
They’re simply, they’re not really even proper assumptions. They’re actually emotional reactions to the idea of being manipulated by something that might be smarter than us, and it’s very, very interesting. So the ethics and the practicality are going to merge just the same way they do in the 27th seconds. So Shane mentioned, how often has he opened with those two sentences? I know an interruption is the key. I didn’t say it right that time. Let me say it correctly. I know I’m an interruption now, why do I say that? Well, I say it because it’s the truth, and I’m telling you that I see the world through your eyes. So I say, Hey, Corey, I’m called Sam, but I’m actually a bot and I’m working for Joey over at company X, Y, Z. What I do is I reach out to folks like you to see whether you are interested in learning more about X.
(00:30:55):
You could go, well, I am, I’m not. And I could say, as the bot, Corey, I know, I mean talking to a bot who’s a vendor’s bot especially could be uncomfortable and affected, but you could think I’m manipulating you. If at any time you feel that, just call me out on it. If you want to talk to a human, let me know, right? I could say that as a bot. I could say it just like that. Modern bots can say stuff like that. I can work my way from acknowledging the truth, still following Chris VA’s advice, right? You’ve got to show the other person, you see the world through their eyes, then you need to demonstrate to them that you are competent to solve a problem they have right now. Those are two things. You have seven seconds to do it. Can a human do it? Most humans can’t. We train ’em, they fail. Why? They won’t throw themselves under the bus and they won’t make it sound fun when they offer to move forward. And people call it permission-based, which is utter baloney. There’s no permission involved here. It’s doing these two important things. I could do those things. It’s just cheaper. And by the way, it’ll actually do
Shane Mahi (00:32:03):
I agree. I agree fully. I think that’s a very, very, very important point. And anything that is scripted where it doesn’t require too much thinking involved, such as let’s just call it either an agent or the progression of an agent that becomes a bot or a bot in the future that has that four, five seconds of scripted behavior to get through the gatekeeper. Again, a human is going to cost five, six times more than that. Whatever kind of country you’re in, if you can use a robot to do that kind of stuff and just be authentic, be genuine, inoculate before you get to it, the market, what is it? The barrier to entry or that crossing the chasm becomes much easier. What was I going to say in the ethics piece? You jump in again and then I’m going to jump on that piece. I just wanted to catch that last piece.
