EP222: Q12024 – Top Insights on AI, Authentic Conversations, and Data-Driven Strategy

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Below:

#10: EP215: Sales Artisans: Thriving Alongside Smart Bots

The economy always gets reshaped around new capabilities in ways that surprise everybody who is thinking about it. So it’s never like that. This is going up and this is going down and it crosses or whatever. It goes along as it goes along with increasing efficiencies in certain areas until somebody innovates a flip and the flip turns it on its head and now it’s new, whatever the new thing is, and now you have the old way competing with the new way and the new way since it’s enabled by new material science. By that I mean a new capability that does tricks you couldn’t do before. It always wins, but it always starts where it has the obvious advantage. The skyscrapers are not out in the desert, they’re in Manhattan. It depends where you look, but once you get ’em going in Manhattan, I pretty much guarantee you the little three story building that you used to have that you had some offices in or whatever. First the offices go, then the condos and it’s all skyscrapers. Take a look at New York. It’s all up, right? Take a look at Des Moines. It’s a little up. Take a look at Scottsdale or Tenny. It’s just how it goes.

Shane Mahi (01:09:35):

You can even see in Dubai, Dubai was what? Flatland desert. DJ Khalifa Burj Khallifa  is the biggest one up. And now, I don’t know if you guys are familiar with the line in Saudi Arabia, same kind of concept, complete desert. Now there’s what, a quarter mile long, two pieces of glass inside a metropolis that is going to be heavily tech-orientated, flying cars, all kinds of weirdness. So if Saudi’s doing stuff like that, at what point do the outbound agencies or even tech companies realize we’ve got to kind of adopt the same kind of thing?

Chris Beall (01:10:08):

For sure.

Shane Mahi (01:10:08):

Who is that going to be? Chris, Chris and Corey. Who do you guys have your eyes out on in those markets who are going to be those game changers, those market shapers for AI and tech in our space?

Chris Beall (01:10:22):

Who I don’t know. I don’t know and I don’t care. I don’t know and I don’t care. I know who the big early winner is going to be with ai. This is actually fairly simple. Microsoft pulled off a trick that nobody even thought of and that trick was to invest 10 billion to get an unlimited royalty free forever license to not only the tech, but all the learning that goes into it, all the training. That was a very good trick because they’ve always been in the business of helping folks build new things. And the most obvious thing about all this gen AI stuff isn’t what it does to sales, which is trivial. It’s what it does to what used to be called software development. Software development essentially is in the same state right now as a sugar cube is in a hot cup of tea. You can be pretty sure that game is over right now.

#9: EP216: Conversations, The Kryptonite of MarTech?

Yeah. Is there a natural aversion to that or is it just Occam’s razor where it’s too simple? Or they’re going about a complex formula, methodology, and technology pathway. When you forget to dance with who you are, what are my prospects? What are my people in my TAM saying, what are the people in my ICP? What do they want? What pain do I solve? And gosh, if I could just have a conversation, not send them a survey, not send them an email, but actually have a conversation that can open up these veins of trust that that’s the key versus carpet bombing them with content, with white papers, with Gartner magic quadrants, and there’s no dialogue there. That’s monologue,

Chris Beall (15:20):

Right? This is kind of the awkwardness that I noticed in the entire thing. I’d asked this question, what if you could just talk to people? It’s like, oh, well, you can’t just tell Chris spiel that you can’t talk to people. That one doesn’t work. You can’t go down that road. I’m sorry. No, you can’t talk to people. Then it’s like, well, but you’d still need, and then they’d tell me that you’d still need, and I tend to agree. I mean, my thing I was telling folks is, look, I think all the digital stuff is fantastic, but why not cheat by starting with the conversation? You can’t get enough conversations for it to be worth cheating. And I said, well, isn’t go to a SDR or BDR world if you had 40 conversations a day with targets, that’s the equivalent of 40 targeted Google ads that caused somebody to go to your website. So that’s pretty good right there. What would 40 targeted Google ads to a vice president or whatever you’re trying to reach that actually caused them to go to your website, what would that cost? And they generally go like 30, 40 bucks each. Well, that’s $1,600 a day without any meetings of value that you’re getting from the advertising of just having conversations. Surely you’re not paying your BDRs $1,600 a day. There’s margin in there.

(16:39):

And the idea that, oh, talking to people could be a form of marketing that is, I think where the edge is. It’s almost like, but talking to that’s

Corey Frank (16:48):

Interesting

Chris Beall (16:49):

Light or something. If marketing can’t include talking to people nowadays,

Corey Frank (16:55):

It’s like bottled water. Hey, we’re out of water, we’re out of bottled water. We’re going to die of thirst. Well, what about this little thing called the tap? I tell my kids all the time. It’s like, Hey, dad, the ro, and we’re awa. It’s Arizona. You got springs all over the place. So sometimes I suppose we’re trying to overly complicate something where there’s conversations all around, but what do you say to that rebuttal if you can’t have enough conversations to make the math work? I think you and I would disagree on that, right? But is that where fundamentally the mindset is? Is that Chris? That’s cute. You can talk with a couple people, but I’m talking about sending out mass emails and segmentation, and I do more before 7:00 AM than you do all day with a conversation.

Chris Beall (17:37):

Well, I would say that that level of confidence is not what I was seeing at the conference. It was more like this, which is really, that seems unlikely. And I sometimes have my phone with our current statistics just for the day. I could go look at it right now and probably find how many conversations did we connect yesterday? So we have this thing that’s called daily dials, and  if I were to look at daily dials, here we go, daily dials, I can probably find some numbers. And this is one of the things that I tend to do is just look at the numbers every morning when I get up. Actually, I’m kind of lazy, so I lie in bed and I reach over for my phone, and here I am looking at the Daily Dials report, and it said that ConnectAndSell customers had 19,352 conversations yesterday.

(18:35):

Not over some vague period of time, but literally yesterday. And out of those, say that they only set 1,679 meetings, and one of our customers sets lots of meetings. They set 983 with just one of their groups. Really, really kind of a good brand. So if I bring this up and I go, well see here, there’s this group of folks and it’s 242 companies, and they had 19,352 targeted conversations. It’s like, yeah, that’s them, but not everybody can afford that. And I’m thinking, well, wait. So I talked to somebody who does advertising, saying we wanted to send an ad or have an ad associated with all the online activity, the phone, particularly activity of everybody we talked to. So that’d be 19,432 people a day of everybody our customers talk to. Is that doable? Oh, yeah. And how would that work? Well, it costs you $20,000 a year minimum.

(19:32):

You have to sign up, you have to commit. It’s like, well, why? Well, I mean, for $20,000, you’d have a lot of conversations. Yeah. Well, it’s just like, it’s almost like I’m trying to come up with a good analogy. I love your bottled water analogy.

#8: EP213: Ethical AI Selling – Reality vs Hype

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 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

#7: EP208: Balancing Relationships and Efficiency in AI Sales

(8) If there’s skepticism or resistance from sales teams or clients towards AI tools like ChatGPT, how do you recommend addressing these concerns?

Well, a couple of different ways. There will always be skepticism about new technology. There should be. New technology means new, it’s unproven. We’re not sure what it does. Really, really cool technology that makes you think something that’s not actually true. Like, hey, ChatGPT is a person who’s talking to me. That’s not actually true. Hey, ChatGPT is thinking about this. That’s not actually true. It’s the next engine. It knows a lot of stuff that it’s read so to speak, and it knows how to spit out the next token, think token word, very similar concepts. And so when ChatGPT is talking to us so to speak, it’s really just going next, next, next. Now maybe our minds work like this too, and our voices work like this.

Chris Beall (18:52):

I have a feeling we do a lot of next, next, next, ourselves. It’s just the way the world is. We love to think that we’re really brilliant, having deep, deep thoughts and all that. Probably not. We’re probably just spitting out the next word that comes to mind. That’s why we call it. And so its natural skepticism is natural. The way skepticism is overcome is through two things. One is transparency, it let’s be open about things. And the other is track record. So if the track record is good, and we note that over time some particular function, and I’ll go back to those conversations where you take a discovery meeting, and the AI compresses it down to 10 points. Well, the first time I read one I might think maybe it’s missing some things. By the time I’ve read a hundred of them, which only takes me a hundred minutes that I might’ve spread over a couple of weeks, I’m starting to go, Hey, I think this is pretty good.

Chris Beall (19:47):

I don’t have any big misses yet. But it just takes time. It takes time, and it takes experience. This is why the most skeptical people who are really, really smart plunge in and start experiencing what I call in anger or with an intent for a meaningful outcome, a new technology that is clearly as powerful as ChatGPT and all the things that are like it. So if you haven’t gotten in there and put your hands on it, so to speak, and made some mistakes, try writing some prompts and seeing what happens. Don’t just do the same thing over and over. Your skepticism only will go away appropriately and correctly with experience that leads to a track record because now you kind of know where the landmines are.

How about question number nine, future trends.

#6: EP209: Your Only Product Is the Meeting

(Not this one – it’s another short compilation episode)

#5: EP214: The Future of Sales: Balancing AI and Authenticity

We picked the most lovely industry to go into, and that’s telemarketing and cold prospecting. And what was it? And the only reason that I was able to get to the truth faster was because read about Daniel Disney when the pandemic hit found, cog found ConnectAndSell, bought Cog, bought ConnectAndSell, spoke with Gerry, did Flight Scool, had seven meetings in six hours, and that’s where it started. It was the ability to have your script, be honest, open, and just get into those conversations. And by doing that fast, quickly, efficiently, and at scale, we were able to progress our business much faster, I think, than a lot of people. We actually had 444% growth from year one to year two from using ConnectAndSell and implementing a system called the Entrepreneurial Operating System™ by Gino Wickman.

(00:35:15):

Now the authenticity of our brand, and even what is happening right now, came from all of the mistakes we made. And those are typically our storytelling, selling mechanisms, the mistakes we made and the path we took got us to a place where we made all those mistakes, learned everything, and served customers. I obviously lost my business because of some bad decisions I had to let go of my business, A lot of bad decisions. But I’ve recreated my business. That took me three years in three months with the use of ChatGPT. And why is it because I prompted all of my problems, all of my stakes helped me build a business plan that bypasses these mistakes and gives me the outcomes I’m looking for in half the time. And in that now, my marketing, my messaging, emails, prospecting, research, everything that, again, like you said, rightfully so, anything in the future is anxiety.

(00:36:12):

Anything in the past is regret. The only thing that matters is right, right now. And what’s happening right, right now is yes, you better get on board because AI is happening. As much as you are worried about what can happen 5, 10, 15 years in the future, that shit is going to happen whether you like it or not. So it’s either get ahead of the curve or get with the curve, or you are going to be that. They’re just bums, bums who want to stay behind and complain and say, this is going to ruin me. This is going to take my job. Get with the program, dude, get with the program. Start using it. I was a novice, an absolute novice using ChatGPT when it first came out. The only thing that drew my attention was a hundred million users in one week for that alone. I was like, all right, let me see what this is about. I’m a novice still to this day, but the amount of times I’ve set up till three in the morning, six, seven hours, prompting, prompting, prompting to the point, the only reason I went to bed is because it said, you’ve maxed out your attempts. You can’t use us anymore.

Corey Frank (00:37:13):

You finished the internet, you exhausted ChatGPT.

Shane Mahi (00:37:18):

That’s right, and that happened multiple times. And my knowledge comes, which is why I believe podcasts, even to the education of AI and ethics and sales and marketing, everything behind it has come from listening and watching podcasts. That’s the only reason I was able to learn.

#4: EP212: Reps Dread It, Managers Avoid It: Coaching

CLIP 1:

So that’s really key to getting coaching to work. The coaching has got to be immediate. Most coaching is way, way, way, way too late. Coaching somebody on Friday I about a performance they had on Monday, don’t bother. It’s just not going to get anything done. This is where I think managers often confuse what I’ll call deal work with coaching. They think that they’re coaching, they’re actually talking through how a deal might go, what some tactics and techniques might be, and they get an agreement from the rep to do something better, different whatever in the next interaction that they have with the prospect. And that feels like coaching, that’s more like advising and it’s nice and it’s important unless it’s just war stories. But coaching is really to improve performance and you need to have the performance and the coaching and the performance and the coaching be very close to each other in time.

Chris Beall (16:28):

Minutes are okay, not very many minutes, hours are too long and a week may as well be forever.

CLIP 2:

got to have a chance of listening for the same thing over and over. So it’s really, really important to do it. But most of what’s called coaching isn’t really coaching, it’s kind of advising it’s too far after the fact.

So if you can figure out ways, be listening behind the scenes, coming in and whispering to somebody immediately after a conversation and helping them perform that little bit better on first failure, you’ll find over time that and fairly short amount of time that what you’re hoping for in the bottom line, which is conversion rates, small number of conversations, leads to a bigger number of meetings, and a larger number of meetings are being set per rep hour, which is the key number. You’ll find that stuff improves on its own. So start from the beginning, you’ll get to the end. Eventually, you’ll get some great results

#3: EP211: Conversations Convert to Pipeline Power

Because let me tell you, if you think you know, you’re fooling yourself, you’re fooling yourself. If you aren’t getting feedback from the market through conversations at a short enough cycle time and a high enough frequency, you’re just guessing and your problem is competitively, somebody else might choose not to guess. And I think Helen’s going to help her clients choose not to guess.

Corey Frank (08:33):

And so with that, the helping knuckleheads like me choose not to guess. Where do you start, Helen, right? I’m a small mid-size VP of sales. I have a decent patient board. I have a SaaS software product. I got some funding. I think I’m doing everything right. I have enough people, I get more people as soon as I start proving myself and go to the board. So I think I’m doing okay, but where would I start with something like this? With people’s power?

Helen Fanucci (09:05):

I would start by looking at the data that you currently have in your CRM system or whatever your system of record is to find out one, where you’re winning, who you’re winning with, what types of people are making the buying decisions as a business. You may or may not already know. That depends on how you have been crawling through your own data. So I’d start there to look at the current state and try to draw some conclusions or at least illuminate where resources are aligned and are they aligned to where you’re currently winning or are they misaligned? So I would start looking at the current state to build a hypothesis of what you could do more of to accelerate your revenue, and it might be repositioning some resources to an industry that you’re doing well at or trying to then going to find people. Let’s say you have some folks that make the decision, so you have some champions or economic buyers, what do they have in common across each other?

Helen Fanucci (10:24):

And I don’t just mean job titles, but the characteristics. You can look on LinkedIn and see what the characteristics of those and then go find some more like that within a defined addressable market or where you think you want to go. I think some of those things are places to start. This begins to get the closed loop feedback here. You have data, you have some results and dispositions from your go-to market, even if it’s closed loss or not now, not interested, what have you. So trying to apply current data to then make some recommendations of how to move forward. The other thing too is what information do you have or that you capture that’s proprietary to you? Because they can’t build a defendable market dominance position on publicly available information. So what is it that you’re collecting or that’s proprietary and how do you get more of that that’s relevant to your business? And I don’t know if that’s something in my experience anyway, that’s not really a deliberate thing that people put. Time sort of happens and some people have more insights into their customer set, but doing that in an organized fashion to build up insights that your competitors don’t have, or at least that’s proprietary to you, makes a lot of sense and differentiating yourself and defending your position in the market.

#2: EP210: Sales Targeting Beyond LinkedIn and Navigator

Helen Fanucci (22:01):

One of the things that was interesting is this idea of territory assignments, and we have a rep that has a locked in territory and people, I guess feel a comfort zone with that versus well, okay, here you have maybe 10 accounts, but all the other unnamed accounts are fair game and they go to whoever gets a meeting in those accounts. It’s so interesting to see how anxious or irritated people are by having an open territory concept. It’s like everyone wants to have their patch defined, locked down so they can pursue it as they wish. So is that going smaller and smaller? It probably is, and it was just fascinating to me to observe the dynamics around that and the discomfort with having all these accounts that were fair game for anyone to go after. I wonder if you have seen that much in what your thoughts are about that, but when you talked about the shrinking world or shrinking view, that’s kind of what I was thinking about is, yeah, you can zero in, but then you lose sight of what’s possible where you’re not looking.

Corey Frank (23:21):

Yeah, it’s funny. I think it’s probably the same reason why a lot of sales reps have the security of a bloated pipeline. They can’t disqualify folks in this particular quarter. Hope Springs eternal that this person will always close for this angst, this fear that if I keep sending them touch base emails, not picking up a call and having a conversation, not promoting something new, that I’m seeing what’s happening in the world from 40,000 feet that’s relevant or German to them. But if I simply do touch base emails, which is the equivalent of did you decide on choosing me and giving me your money yet? Or is there a better option that’s out there? But that’s why pipelines remain large. I can see that there is certainly from the team that all three of us collectively and Broaden knows we’re a sales organization. The bigger, the more states I have, and Chris, you and I have talked about this when it comes to people too, if you’re a sales manager, the more people I have under my purview, under my fiefdom, certainly the more prominent I am, I guess the more secure I feel. You probably saw this a lot at some of the larger companies you were with Helen, right? Is how many headcounts are under your particular p and l, and that somehow is a status thing.

Helen Fanucci (24:33):

Well, it’s power. You have more resources as a sales leader. You don’t have a budgeta compared to headcount. So headcount is more resources. It is a version of power to be able to get bigger revenue, bigger quotas, because headcount always comes with bigger quotas. The more headcount, the more quota. So if you’re willing to take that on, great. Why not?

#1: EP145: Building Trust Must Always Be Step One

(not this one – this was a small topic compilation episode that continues to be their top episode for over a year!)