In this episode, we delve into the evolving role of technical sales professionals over the next decade. Join us as we discuss the impact of AI, the importance of balancing technical expertise with strategic leadership, and the nuances of managing high-performance teams.
Our special guest, Ray Schloss, shares his extensive experience from his 17-year career at Microsoft, offering insights into effective leadership, the significance of meditation and hypnosis in achieving high performance, and the future of AI in technical sales.
We also explore fascinating personal stories, including Matt's intense training in Thailand and Ray's journey into hypnotherapy. This episode is packed with valuable lessons for anyone looking to stay ahead in the rapidly changing tech landscape.
Don't miss this engaging and informative conversation that blends professional insights with personal growth strategies. Tune in now!
If you would like to chat to Ray about demo skilling and technical presentations https://www.2winglobal.com/contact-us-ray
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Hi, everyone. Welcome to the Power Time Show with Matt and Scott.
And on today's show, he said, hey, what do you think the role of a technical
salesperson is going to be in the next five years, the next 10 years?
You're scared. I'm worried I'm going to get hypnotized to go and sell Salesforce
or something. So yeah, we'll see.
(00:23):
Yeah, I come back with a black eye. It's probably likely. But anyway,
Anyway, I'm looking forward to getting over there and giving myself a bit of a personal challenge.
You know, Matt, if you come back with a black eye and that's it,
that's a win. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Get ready, let's go. Unlocking secrets leaders should know.
(00:46):
Music.
Hi, everyone. Welcome to Power Time. I am Scott Meddings from Microsoft,
joined here by my good friend, Matt. Do you want to do a quick intro, Matt?
(01:06):
Hi, my name is Matt from NCS. Yeah, really looking forward to today's show.
We have a really special guest, Scott.
So I might hand over to you because you got this guest on the show to maybe
do a bit of an introduction on who they are.
Yeah, before we get into the guest, Matt, I've got to talk about,
so we filmed, we recorded the podcast a couple of weeks ago and at the end of
(01:27):
it, we'll talk briefly about what you've been doing for the last two weeks.
I've had a crazy couple of weeks as well, which I'm going to talk about now,
but I'm really keen to hear about your adventures over in Thailand and you keep boxing.
But for me, while you've been going and do that, I actually did a boxing class
as well last week, which I was pretty proud of. I inspired you already.
That's the first one I've done in a long time.
You did. You've inspired. You've done two things this week. You've inspired
(01:50):
me to follow Bulldogs and you've also inspired me to do boxing.
So just definitely thinking outside the box now.
But we had a great couple of weeks. So, you know, a couple of times a year,
I think it might be every quarter at Microsoft, we do this Australian Leadership Forum.
So it's really Steve Worrell, who's our general manager.
(02:10):
He brings the entire leadership team together and we talk about a whole bunch
of things around the business and Microsoft and have a lot of inspiring people
come in and talk to us about various things.
And a big highlight, we did that. So we did that a week ago and we had the Finding Mastery team in.
And for those who are listening into the podcast, the Finding Mastery team is led by Dr.
(02:35):
Gervais. He led the Seattle Seahawks for a little bit. He was doing mind coaching
Coaching for the coach that coached this year, Seahawks. Pete Carroll is his
name. I'm a big NFL fan, so there you go.
There you go. Yeah. So he's done, he's very core to Microsoft and how we can
(02:55):
tune our mind to really be high performance. And this is a bit of a high performance podcast.
We're talking a lot about this stuff and what we're doing. And Ray,
who's on a bit later, he'll explain why he's come on to the podcast today.
But the Finding Mastery team consisted of two young ladies who are both Olympic
athletes and they spoke about their journey and it was very inspiring.
(03:17):
So that was amazing i was really happy with that and
at the same time we had build drop as well super exciting
with build apple release their
worldwide developer conference as well so there's
a whole bunch of stuff announcements with apple going on and google had theirs
as well so in the world of ai right now it's been incredible with all the news
(03:38):
that's gone through and you know i can't help but use chat gpt's new ai voice
assistant which i thought was amazing i really got stuck Stuck into that last
week with my team and having a heap of fun with that.
So anyway, that's kind of my last couple of weeks and what I've been doing.
Matt, let's tell our listeners what you've actually been doing because that's pretty amazing as well.
Before I do that, did you see Elon Musk's tweet about Apple and the iPhone and
(04:03):
how they might be banned from anything to do with Tesla? I saw that.
He wants a Faraday cage for every Apple device because they're signed up with OpenAI.
How ridiculous is that, right? So of course Apple's going to sign up with OpenAI.
Who else are they going to sign up with right now? I think they're kind of late to the game.
I actually found their developer conference a little underwhelming, to be honest.
(04:24):
I think it's great the work they've done on the devices and the operating system,
and there's some cool features there, emojis and things that you can design
and put on your messages.
It's all cool stuff, but I didn't see anything that's really going to impact
the enterprise at all or the way we work.
I think it might be the segue. way i think x might release a
phone it might be a bit of an ellen bit of a payback coming
(04:47):
so maybe watch this space and see what he does yeah with devices and all that
kind of stuff because if anyone wants to check his twitter out read it he wasn't
a very happy chappy at all when when that sort of partnership came out and obviously
with ellen he's quite vocal on his social media so yeah very interesting read
and a bit of a popcorn moment when i was sitting back in in Thailand,
(05:07):
having a look at that. But anyway, about Thailand.
So for those who don't know, I'm a bit of all or nothing kind of guy.
So if I'm going to do something, I'm going to do it properly and probably to the hundredth degree.
So I decided, and I've always wanted to do this, I went and trained at Tiger
MMA, which is the biggest martial arts or fight camp in the world.
(05:29):
So I trained there for two weeks. I trained three times a day.
Obviously in the 32 degree hey you know ridiculous humidity
all of that kind of stuff so i pushed myself to the edge
and the boundaries so i trained with you know peter yan
who's a ufc fighter i train with his boxing coach i
train with alexander volkanovsky's brazilian jiu-jitsu
coach i had one-on-one that is strength and conditioning i
(05:51):
ran up mount called the buddha run which is a ridiculously difficult
run so if you want to have a look at that but i stayed at a place called which
is all about fitness and healthy and lifestyle
and a lot of the people that went there wasn't your typical thailand
trip like bangladesh everyone's you know going to
the pubs and all that kind of stuff it was completely different vibe it
was all about you know getting away it was all about wellness it
(06:13):
was all about you know ice baths and all that kind of
stuff so for me in a really sort of high pressure job
and all that kind of stuff i loved it i loved the fact
i could get away you know to really switch off really you
know discover some things that i wanted to do set some goals for myself set
some goals for my team but really have that time to reset set and reflect and
yeah for me it was a really really positive thing and
(06:34):
I'll definitely be going back it was definitely difficult of
course training three times a day in that
heat I was basically getting my body pieced back together by the local massage
therapist every night so I could go train but it was amazing honestly it was
amazing and yeah gonna pick up a lot of that stuff that I've done and take it
back over here in Australia so a lot of the jiu-jitsu a lot of the sort of boxing,
(06:57):
I'm definitely picking that up again and going to give it a red hot crack while
I'm here. So very exciting, very cool.
So yeah, that was it. So you've got any questions to ask me about my trip?
I do have one trip. So the end of the podcast will be recorded with Ray.
We made a comment not to injure yourself and Ray made a comment around a black eye.
(07:18):
No black eyes. Yeah, yeah. So I believe you did get an injury.
Do you want to tell me what happened?
Yes, and I was completely sober for this, which makes it
even more embarrassing so i went to like a
local mutai stadium like fight um to
watch some of the people that we've been obviously training with uh fighting
a mutai and mixed master martial arts and because of some dodgy tire stadium
(07:41):
up some you know real crappy stairs basically climbing up to the stairs to get
my seat i was wearing some thongs and i got caught i got my thongs caught in
the stairs and basically twisted my ankle turned into a human bowling ball and
rolled down the stairs and took out two Thai ladies.
So I've been hobbling around since. I don't know how the two Thai ladies are.
I did apologize to them profusely and offered them all amounts of Thai bar because
(08:04):
I did roll and hit them pretty hard.
But that was the only injury I had the whole time. So I sparred with like crazy
Russian people, crazy Thai people.
Stairs got me out of the whole trip. So yeah, that was what finally did it.
Mate, I don't know what to say about that because you've done two weeks of hard
training and you hurt yourself because of, you know, a pair of thongs.
(08:27):
I just got stuck in this little bent or gap and I just literally twisted,
fell over and I started rolling like a rate of knots and I just couldn't stop myself.
So quite a funny story. I'm probably about a week away from being able to get
back to training. I actually did quite a number on my ankle, to be honest.
And luckily, I managed to upgrade myself home to business class,
(08:50):
which was something that I wanted to do.
So that was a nice trip home. Very good. Yeah, very good. I was hobbling around.
So yeah, got a lot of conscious points. so shout out to Quonset,
thank you. They might have to sponsor the podcast.
No, that's awesome, mate. And look, I think, you know, when we're thinking about
high-performance people, training, I mean, Dr. Gervais talks a lot about sleep.
I think that's probably number one, making sure that you're getting your seven or eight hours.
(09:13):
And, you know, the athletes spoke a lot about this as well on their training
because, you know, they went straight into full-time training,
which is really interesting.
So that's all they do, as you would expect.
And they were talking about the importance of rest and sleep and exercise and
looking after your mind and things like that.
It's really interesting. I've got the book here actually. I'll flip this up
(09:35):
on the screen for those listeners who have seen it.
It's Stop Worrying About What
People Think of You, The First Rule of Mastery by Dr. Michael Gervais.
So if anyone wants to get into that, I think there's an audio book as well.
I haven't checked. His last book was an audio book too.
But it's definitely, I think, you know, I think between him Him and Simon Sinek
are the two people that I watch a lot and listen to their podcasts and TikToks
(09:58):
and things like this as well, just to get as much information as I can and.
Yeah, it was an amazing session. Sounds like you had a great time for two weeks.
And here we are reconvening.
So our guest today is someone that I've worked with for quite a long time.
They'd already been working at Microsoft when I started.
(10:19):
And Ray is someone that is based out of Seattle and spends a lot of time really
understanding people, the role of meditation.
Hypnosis, all of these things and how they can impact the way we work and what we do.
And from a BizApps point of view, so business applications, which is the team that I'm in,
(10:43):
he was the person that kind of led a lot of the managers for a long time around that voice in Seattle.
So he had a global lead role and he was the one that would be fighting the
battle for us if we needed anything done that real
advocate and voice and obviously he flew
out to australia quite a few times as well spent a lot
(11:05):
of time training myself and the team around pre-sales so
a lot of knowledge on on the topic of business applications a lot of global
knowledge around that as well and and really just after 17 years a lot of knowledge
on microsoft as well so yeah just just someone that i've got a lot of respect
for and you know sometimes when we talk
(11:25):
about these things where we talk about high performance and you know
really understanding what drives people and and
and why you do the things you do it can be uncomfortable it can be awkward and
it can also be something that people might not believe in as well so sometimes
just changing your mindset can make a big impact and i think ray kind of pushes
the boundaries with a few of the topics he's talking about particularly around
(11:47):
hypnosis somewhere what role that might play but
it was an interesting conversation, wasn't it?
I love all that stuff. I'm a unique character. It was the first time talking
to Ray. I thought he was fantastic.
Yeah, and I thought, like you said, Scott, he's a really good listener.
He's really good at articulating things.
And I can imagine he was a great leader for Microsoft and obviously for the
(12:07):
team that you work with as well. I really, really enjoyed the conversation.
I can see why he's been so successful and I'm definitely going to get hypnotized by Ray soon.
So Ray, when you hear this, I will be reaching out to you very shortly to attempt
that promise that I said on the podcast.
Just be careful about that. But anyway, I'll be in Seattle in two or three weeks.
(12:29):
So I'll catch up with him in person and deliver a pack of Tim Tams to him and
maybe some Vegemite as well and just say thank you from the Aussies down under
for jumping onto our podcast.
So with that, I think we should bring Ray on, take a quick break.
Music.
(12:55):
Back, everyone. We've got a good friend of mine joining the show today, Mr. Ray Schloss.
I've known Ray for a very long time now, for quite a few years,
and I'm very pleased to welcome him to the show to really talk about technical
leadership, his experience, his new gig after Microsoft.
I'm 17 years at Microsoft, so a long time, but maybe, Ray, do you want to kick
(13:15):
into a few minutes just about yourself and how you've been, I guess,
how long you've been in the industry and the involvement you have with the industry
because it's fairly extensive.
Yeah, hey, Scott. Great to see you again, mate, always.
Man, much love to you and the whole
Aussie team. And Matt, it's a pleasure being on here with you as well.
And so I did, like as you said, I spent 17 years at Microsoft, just left in April.
(13:39):
And of those 17, 15, I was in BizApps, which really it was Dynamics.
And we were just this little tiny part of Microsoft when we started.
And so much of the challenge for years of that time was attempting to get the
rest of the company to actually care about who we are and what we do,
which was a real challenge until Satya became CEO.
(14:01):
And since he incubated Dynamics, he really cared and he got it.
And he was kind of like, wait a minute, if we get people to land enterprise
applications, we're going to take care of the stack underneath it too,
which seems like any reasonable person would fully understand that.
But apparently, Apparently, the leadership prior to Satya didn't quite get it, right?
(14:23):
So anyway, so yeah, the last couple of years, I was in something called Cross
Solutions, which was more of a one Microsoft go-to-market attempt.
But prior to that, I...
Worked with a couple other large companies, including Xerox.
I was a digital systems color analyst for them doing, at first, technical sales.
(14:43):
And then it evolved into a partner that I worked for doing technical sales enablement
through both them and Xerox.
And I also worked for Lawson Software as a technical, what we would consider
a technical solutions consultant, technical pre-sales at Lawson.
They're a mid-market ERP vendor that has now been owned by Infor for many years at this point.
(15:09):
But then I did some work with a consulting group and stuff as well.
I like to play guitar and do yoga, Scott. That's what I do, man.
And meditate. And it's also, yeah, I live in the greater Seattle area.
And one thing that I've been working on for probably the last two years is doing
meditation production.
(15:30):
Production so i produce for a company called brain tap and then also individual
clients so not only do i produce the music but you know i make these custom
affirmation and meditation tracks and i'm also a certified hypnotherapist so
i really enjoy being able to help people,
transform their lives through hypnotherapy because i saw the impact it had in
(15:52):
my own life and and i really i love doing it guys you know it's something where
you just like Like, Scott, Matt, there's a gentle breeze blowing.
I can feel myself selling salads for us right now. Yeah, it's coming.
Are you fading off? Are you just getting ready to hit your subconscious?
(16:15):
So that's right. You know, man, it's a balance of now post-Microsoft doing some,
like sales enablement consulting very had
a great experience just last week speaking at
a conference in vegas with the sales enablement collective
which was fantastic and doing the the meditation hypnotherapy side of things
(16:37):
too yeah now that's amazing there's so many things that we need to drill into
on what you've just said but one of the things that really stood out for me
with your career at microsoft was your leadership amongst the technical community
the involvement with our I mean,
you come out to Australia multiple times, a good half a dozen times,
I think we were chatting about earlier, and the impact on the team and how they
should really support customers and the passion that you've had over the years
(17:02):
has been really tremendous.
So, if we think about, you know, some of our listeners are leaders that might
be standing up technical teams and really,
I guess, trying to figure out in this new world of AI what they need to go and
do around training, education,
and getting these people ready to be able to have conversations with their customers.
(17:24):
What are your thoughts around that? I mean, you're on the speaking circuit now,
Ray, which is awesome, but what are your thoughts around how they should think
about leading technical people?
Well, you mentioned AI in this, Scott, and that is going to be a super hot topic
because let's go back maybe….
(17:44):
I guess maybe seven years ago
or so so i spent i spent seven years
as the global technical sales director for
for biz apps for microsoft right which it about the time that i i up until i
moved roles towards the end of the time at microsoft we had about 1200 people
(18:04):
between our technical solutions professionals and their managers which is what
you are scotty here one of our fantastic
tsm's right and there was a gentleman at corp he's still at microsoft fantastic
guy carson shoyman who was responsible for for the tsm's across all the commercial solution areas,
(18:27):
and when we were really just getting to know each other a while back again this
is a guy at least seven years ago eight years ago he he pulled me aside one
day and we were just chatting and then And he said,
hey, what do you think the role of a technical salesperson is going to be in
the next five years, the next 10 years?
(18:47):
And I hadn't really thought about it, right?
And as we were discussing it, and AI was like, you know, it was basically Terminator.
That's the only thing we were thinking about AI.
Cortana, maybe. Cortana. Clippy. Clippy. Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, Clippy. It really was clippy, Matt. I think it was still a little early
(19:10):
for maybe Cortana was part of Halo at that point.
But the thought of practicality in sales teams was a pipe dream at that point or some future thing.
But Karsten started talking about how, well, how long do you think it's going to be before they're...
(19:32):
Are artificial intelligence applications that are going to be able to look at
a company's infrastructure against a set of predetermined goals,
or that it may even be suggesting the goals, and that it's going to be able
to generate a solution and demonstrate that solution in seconds,
(19:54):
versus what we have to go through and setting up demo environments and trying
to recreate demo data and all of that kind of stuff.
How long do you think it's going to be before there is an AI-generated interface
that is going to be so human-like that the role of a technical sales professional
is going to become obsolete?
And I stood there for a second because I'm realizing he's describing the obsolescence
(20:17):
of both his and my roles at Microsoft.
It's like, who needs a global role owner for a role that is now completely AI-driven, right? Right.
So I think I took a little bit of a deep breath and a sigh of relief that it
wasn't going to happen that fiscal year.
But to answer your question, we are really close now.
(20:38):
There are some companies out there. There's one that pops up on LinkedIn all the time.
In fact, when I was in Vegas, someone said, oh, hey, have you seen this?
And so we're kind of gathering around her laptop and she's showing us her version
of their AI generated enablement software.
And like, look, I'm going to change the accent. said, look, I'm going to change the avatar.
Like, look how, you know, human and we're all like, yeah, that is, it's still AI.
(21:01):
And you can tell, but give it two years and no, it's not right.
You're going to be able to have a Scott Meddings demo for anything that you want to do AI generated.
And we can already, you know, AI is already amazing at being able to do language
replacement and multiple versions based on,
(21:21):
you know, changing your lighting and all these other kind of things and deep
faking things which is scary and so when i think about,
AI and enablement. The one quote I heard a while back from a guy who started doing fractional,
CAIO work, which is a really fantastic idea if you know what you're doing,
(21:47):
was that you're not going to lose your role to someone.
You're not going to lose your role to AI, but you
will lose your role to someone who knows how to use ai and
so hence why like prompting
and being able to prompt effectively is massive
so it's like i mean i mean i remember you know before leaving and anytime i
(22:12):
open up linkedin all you see from microsoft people is oh look what we're doing
with copilot oh look copilot oh it's copilot this so it's copilot that you know
i almost want to put a filter on linkedin say hey if there's more than three
notifications about posting about.
Co-pilot in one day just skip the other 12 okay i'm
good at three right but obviously it is
(22:32):
the biggest directional push
that microsoft has done in in as long as i've known you know like 18 years or
whatever of the experience and that and and and and they're not the only one
everyone is chasing embracing that hard because everybody knows that if they're late to the game,
(22:54):
they're going to be shut out of the market in some way.
So everybody's like, we got to do it. We got to do it.
And I think that what the thing that we can do to help enable our sales professionals
is to have them truly understand how to use it.
And I know that Microsoft has really been trying to do that.
We had a lot of internal things of like training, training, training options
(23:14):
are available, Learn how to do this, learn how to use it.
And I think that's the best thing that we can do at this point,
is to one, help people to fully understand the depth and breadth of what's available
and possible in the technology.
But the other side of that coin is, and at least this is just for me until I
fully surrender into the metaverse somewhere, that the human side of it is still
(23:40):
equally important, still.
Still, we may have a recap of this podcast two years from now,
guys, and we may be like, hey, Ray, remember what you said back in 2024?
Well, not so much anymore because we've all been doing external personal sales
consulting because none of us have jobs. We've all been replaced by AI.
(24:04):
Simulated, Ray. Simulated experiences. Look, I agree 100% with a lot of things
you've been saying there. And, look, I talk to my team all the time around the
role and how it will evolve over years. And I think if you think about it,
how people consume enterprise software right now. People still buy off people.
I don't think that'll ever change.
(24:25):
But, you know, do I want my team, you know, really getting deep in the weeds
on technical stuff or demoing at a really deep level in the future if we can
just have like a demo co-pilot that does that.
But they'll still need to translate that technology to the business and then
map that to an outcome that the customer's trying to achieve.
(24:47):
So i think we kind of all move up the stack a little bit
and go let's oh you know the point you made about it's
you won't lose your job but you will to people to know how to use ai
i think everyone's aligned it's like the third
time we've heard that on this podcast now from various different people
yeah coming yeah yeah so it's
like yeah it is it is the consensus the consensus
(25:08):
now three times is a consensus so that is now the
fact that we think that that's that's where it's going to go and
people just need to do some deep learning and
really understand the benefit of the technology and
you know it's hard i think we're dealing with a lot of ambiguity as
well like and you brought up the point about training we don't even know what's
coming next month to train on let alone what's coming in six months so you have
(25:30):
to kind of you have to get used to deal i'm trying to think of that brené brown
quote you have to rumble in the arena you've got to get into the arena and really
start looking at the technology the anger to really understand,
what we need to do moving forward.
I guess one of the things is how do you balance that technical aspect of your
role with sort of the managerial and strategic ones?
(25:52):
Maybe you can talk a bit about that, all this new technology coming,
but how do you manage that and being up to speed with all this great tech,
but also being able to lead and have a really strategic conversation with your
technical sales team? So, yeah.
And a lot of this has to do, Matt, great question, failures that I've seen in the past.
And having spent eight years in the field at Microsoft, plus at Xerox and Lawson and other places.
(26:20):
And then having the corporate experience for nine years.
I just want everybody to know that I started when I was 15, just so we get that out of the way.
We all just assume that, right? We just assume that.
Yeah. I'm retiring at 36. No, I'm just kidding.
(26:43):
But anyways, the conveyance of confidence that I would say that people's roles
are secure. We can never guarantee it.
But I know that Microsoft, and not just Microsoft, remember the industry went
through huge layoffs post-COVID.
(27:05):
Because they had ramped up all of this stuff. And then finally,
it's like, oh, wait a minute, we're kind of going back to some more sense of normal.
We have all these roles, we don't really need anymore. And then the layoffs
started piling up. And I know that we had the significant ones at Microsoft.
And one of the most important things was, how do we deal with people's anxiety about job security?
(27:26):
And so I think it's really important for managers to have a strong sense of
the pulse of the potential of AI in interdicting their team members'
daily roles and responsibilities and what are the expectations of their roles going forward.
Word so like scotty said like people will
(27:48):
always buy from people and i'm going
to disagree i think that in two
or three years man there's going to be
a scott meddings vr agent that
is going to be so good and doesn't need a health care plan that you know you
know this is like this is in all seriousness y'all this is what both the management
(28:10):
and the frontline workers dealt with in detroit in the auto industry in the
US in the 70s or whatever, when they started bringing in robotics.
And there was just this huge uproar. And it was like, you can't mess with us. We're, you know...
It's powerful unions and everything. And they're like, wow, we're bringing these robots in anyways.
(28:31):
And yeah, the first year, we may not get an ROI on it for two years,
but this thing doesn't need a pension.
And this thing doesn't need healthcare benefits. And this thing,
we can repurpose it. We can replace it.
It's easy to fix. And I think that what is going to drive the replacement of
(28:52):
roles is going to be the ROI that companies get for repurposing human-facing roles with AI in time.
And again, so let's just go back to Karsten and I having that conversation like
eight years ago or whatever it was.
And where we are now, we are, you know, we're almost there.
(29:12):
Where are we going to be eight years from now? So, Scotty, I'm going to disagree
with you that maybe this isn't going to happen.
But in the short term, Matt, I really do think it's management understanding
the goals, what we would typically refer to as the role excellence components within those roles.
Like what are the critical indicators
of success and what confidence can a manager give their team that,
(29:37):
hey, you're still vital and important to our mission objective and you're not
going to get laid off three months from now because, hey, surprise.
The company has been working on this virtual TS agent and yeah,
they're going to start rolling them out in selected markets and in the next
three years, you're gone, right? Or something.
(29:58):
I mean, and there's, again, there's no way to guarantee that,
but I think that's the thing that I've heard is the anxiety of like, are we replaceable?
Like, how easily is it going to be that we're replaced by AI?
And I think that's a broader question, not just for the technical sales roles,
but, you know, if we look at the contact center and we talk about all this all the time, right? So...
(30:20):
The average contact center today, the experience is pretty bad for a customer.
You know, there's long waits. Some people get it right. A lot of companies don't.
It's bad for the employee experience because, you know, it's usually your first
or second job and you want to move on. A lot of people are not nice when they call in.
And there's a lot of training. It's regulated industry a lot of the time.
So, you know, AI is really well suited to kind of coming into the contact center,
(30:44):
delivering a human-like experience that's, you know, to your point,
you know, never sleeps, can can speak any language, can translate any accent.
And really be relatable but deliver regulated content back to the customer.
But from the customer's point of view, they get a result instantly and they're
very happy because they didn't have to wait 45 minutes to find out if their
(31:04):
assurance policy's expired or, you know, how much money they got left on their
payment plan for something.
So I think there are some jobs it's really ideally suited for.
But if you look at on the other side of the fence, investments like things
like what they're doing with figure you know one of the robotics and
things that are going on right now there should be an influx and
(31:24):
generation of all these new jobs that come through because of
ai so i think there'll be a fair bit of backwards and forwards i i think matt
and i went and saw steve bartlett not long ago and he was talking a lot about
you know that that technology curve if you look back when cars were introduced
you know people just wanted an an extra two horses. They didn't want to buy a car.
(31:45):
And then the car industry boomed and just generated way more jobs than the horse industry ever did.
And then he said, if you map that to every single tech curve over the years,
there's always been an acceleration.
We just end up doing different things. So I think we're really at that impasse
right now. But to your point, it took kind of eight years to get there,
which is really interesting.
So Ray, what do you... So you've had a stellar career at Microsoft,
(32:08):
there's no doubt. Huge impact on
a lot of... Well, there'll be people who disagree with you on that, Scott.
There's a slice of people who are going to be like no but but
to your point dude i'm very grateful that no one
listened to this podcast right yeah it doesn't matter but that's when
the hypnosis kicks in and ray can just hypnotize them and hey the experience
is great and all that kind of stuff i'll tell you man i wasn't certified at
(32:32):
the time some of those things went down but damn i wish i would have been because
i would have been i'm going to take you up on a hypnosis one day right hypnosis
and a beer in our Seattle one day. So I'll do a bit of a follow-up post-ap.
We can do it virtually. Actually, Matt, you know what? It's extremely effective virtually.
So, and one of the, although I didn't do it virtually, most people go for hypnosis,
(32:57):
due to an anxiety-related problem.
Like, I'm having an issue with this and I don't know how to handle it.
And whether that, you know, when you get down to it, it's fear-based in some way.
I, the first time I went, it was for a much more esoteric reason.
It was for learning. I'd read this book about life between life hypnosis,
(33:20):
and it goes beyond past life aggression,
which at the point, given the face system that I'd been in for like 25 years,
I didn't even think that was viable, but I was coming out of that face system
and broadening my horizons greatly.
And so I went to a hypnotherapist who was very experienced in doing what happens
(33:40):
to you in between incarnations, because I do believe in reincarnation now.
And the things that happened to me in that hypnotherapy session absolutely blew
my mind and changed my life for the better.
But the interesting follow-up to it was, I was like, oh, this works, right?
So the biggest challenge I'd had had been with racquetball.
(34:01):
I'd been just addicted to playing racquetball for, at that point, probably 30 years.
And it's kind of like, since most people don't and play racquetball,
but if you think about golf, a much more popular thing, if there was something
wrong with your swing that you just couldn't correct,
and you went to hypnosis and you did some work on it and you went back to playing
(34:22):
golf and within a week that problem was almost gone.
And I, that's what happened to me with racquetball. I would,
I would not let the ball drop the extra three or four inches necessary to have
the difference between a kill shot at the front wall and it bouncing high enough
that my opponent could make a return on it.
And that hypnosis changed it. So that, I'm not even sure how we got on this
(34:46):
subject, but how I got on it, I wouldn't even believe you. Oh yeah, that's right.
So I like to railroad things, right? Yeah, no, that was great.
Right. And in all seriousness, it's something that, like, you know,
you want your team to do better.
You don't have to hypnotize people, but addressing subconscious blockage is huge.
(35:10):
And so creating affirmation, like a meditation affirmation, like,
hey, we're going to do a meditation journey that you can listen to.
You know, if you're really into it once a day or once a week or whatever,
but you've got a team of nine people and we've got a sales goal.
And we're setting a goal.
We're going to finish 117% of quota this year.
And that means we need X percentage of win rate and Y percentage deal size,
(35:36):
and actually taking people into something where they're getting a subconscious
confidence in being able to accomplish those goals can make a huge difference,
just like my racquetball game did.
When I got rid of that fear that, oh my God, it's going to hit the floor,
it's going to hit the floor, hit it now, it's going to hit the floor.
I may not have been thinking that in my executive decision-making frontal lobe
(36:00):
area, but the back of the brain was all about fear.
No, you're going to lose. You're going to lose. Hit it. Hit it. Hit it.
And so we can change those things. So it's a neat way to look at how bringing
a different aspect of the human development component of sales.
It's interesting because all of us are really interested in high-performing
(36:21):
teams and what does it mean to be a high performer and how we can just achieve that little bit more.
And, you know, one thing that I've come to realise with high-performing people,
a lot of people are dealing with trauma and that can be the driving force behind
them. It's not monetary.
It could be something that they're dealing with.
And addressing that, counselling, meditation, all of those things,
(36:45):
it can really help. It really can.
And as a manager, understanding those people and what motivates them and drives
them, I think, again, Again, Brené Brown's training is very good for addressing
that or really delving into what motivated you.
I did three days' worth of that last year, I think, and, you know,
(37:05):
it was fantastic for really opening my eyes to really how why people do things
and including for myself as well,
you know, and what motivates me to change and things like that.
So this sounds like another excellent tool to really have in the kit bag if
people are open to it to maybe address things that might be holding the background
in life. You know, Scott, that's a beautiful example.
(37:28):
And to your point on if people are open to it, that is 100% what's necessary for success.
Because when you're not open to it, when your conscious mind,
and there's a subconscious reason.
The only people I've ever met who weren't able to be hypnotized is because they
(37:50):
may consciously, some people are just like, no, I'm not going to do it.
It's literally a control factor that they're consciously thinking about.
There's still a subconscious reason that's driving that conscious thing.
There's something they're afraid of, of the letting go.
And so it's interesting that framing hypnosis, some people are very afraid of
it because they think it's some kind of woo-woo thing.
(38:13):
But any time we're driving a car and we're not literally going,
stop sign, wait, turn right, okay, now, stop, turn left. Like,
if you're doing things on your way to work.
That isn't giving you 100% of focus to what you're actually doing because it's
repetitive, you're in a hypnotic state, right?
(38:35):
It's all about where your focus of attention is.
It's just hypnosis gives you a very specific focus of attention.
And it's the exact same thing as when we're watching TV or we're at the movies, right?
So you're watching TV and you're experiencing it as if the screen's a mile wide
(38:57):
and everything until somebody comes and taps you on the shoulder, hey, Matt,
and then you go, oh, wait, oh, I'm in my living room, and oh,
look, the TV's that small, but that was really in there for a while,
right? Same thing at the movies.
That is literally a hypnotic state, so getting people to understand that you're
not surrendering your will, although the scary part is you see stage hypnosis,
(39:20):
and there is a component of ethics to it, right, And there's a debate within
the hypnosis community that no one has ever done anything hypnotized they didn't really want to do.
So when it's like, oh, you told me I was a washing machine and I rolled around
on the floor going, you know, most people who are into hypnotherapy avoid doing
that kind of stuff because it's counterproductive.
(39:44):
It's really about allowing your subconscious to come forward very much like
in our dream time so that you can get to the root causes of things and then
quickly adapt and change for the better,
it's a classic isn't it like when you think about jaws the movie the the creators
of jaws regret it now because it really alienated people from sharks right everyone
(40:07):
just got scared of sharks because of those movies quitting myself growing up
and if we look at Terminator.
That really destroyed our perception of AI right now.
And Cortana itself, right? I mean, if you play Halo, you'll know that Cortana
takes over and goes crazy.
So, you know, I think, but if you look at the progress, particularly last month,
so last month there was an announcement that the new Microsoft quantum models
(40:30):
have been able to replicate error correction at a new rate against quantum.
And of course, when quantum meets AI, that's when we solve a huge amount of
problems or create a huge amount.
Out so every i think everyone goes straight to straight to
terminator and then you know then the announcement with
microsoft this week about neural neural processors and
(40:51):
also apple as well going into every single laptop
on the planet you kind of think oh we're rolling out are
we rolling out you know the terminator operating system
as well it's easy to go to that because we've been trained
for you know my entire life i love sci-fi and
every sci-fi movie has an evil ai and we get you're trained down this
path and i guess that now we have to re-recorrect
(41:13):
redirect and kind of figure out well actually what is
ai what is the technology and how does it how does it solve problems because
it's certainly going to solve more problems that it's going to create over the
years if we control it right and govern it right and i heard a quote the other
day where someone was talking about the likelihood of ai and quantum coming
together will probably be a lot like like nuclear bombs.
(41:34):
Where it's controlled by a government or a group of like a UN controls that
technology and you can't just go and stand up quantum and AI together because
if we don't do that, that could be bad.
So I think it's an interesting topic, but we're all facing into that and that
drives that ambiguity for our technical people to go, what do I focus on and
(41:57):
what does my career look like for the next five years?
Well, Scott, did you ever watch the, it's the 2000, I think it started in 2007.
Version of battlestar galactica yeah everyone into it's saying that okay you
know my favorite quote shouldn't it be a question right is,
you know all of this has happened before and
(42:19):
it will surely happen again yeah and the the concept that you know they're the
you know the planet's been here billions of years and we're finding more and
more archaeological evidence that there were or technologies available to ancient
civilizations that we weren't aware of before and everything.
And for anyone who didn't watch Battlestar Galactica, the premise of it is that AI,
(42:46):
kind of like Skynet, became very
self-aware and aided in the construction of human bodies to move out of the
robotics and into what is robotic but is literally an organic shell that was
indecipherable from a real human.
(43:09):
And things go wrong there.
Another good example of that is Fallout. If you look at Fallout,
that's another movie that's kind of educating people that AI will just slowly take humans.
So it's really easy to fall into that kind of talk track around,
you know, how we think, you know, this technology will last.
(43:35):
It's going to be an interesting ride. It's a super exciting time,
I think, to be in technology.
And I, for one, I'm loving it. Every day there's something new and there's always a new.
Scott will send me a new YouTube video or a news article every morning to watch up and catch up on.
Again, I think we're very lucky and privileged to be in this time and really
helping organizations adopt this technology,
(43:55):
something that's going to be, you know, really powerful fork in the next couple of years but
cool so ray you've had this amazing career and i
for one i'm really enjoying the conversation with you today talk to
me about your career highlights what's that one career highlight that you look back
on really fondly and go wow this is amazing i i achieved that so yeah i'd say
there's really two things and one of them in fact let me see if it's right here
(44:17):
and now i'm not gonna be able to read it because i'm if you're on this list
scotty but but it was about an onboarding class. No. Okay.
So two things really come to mind. Creating the technical onboarding program
for our technical specialist for BizApps.
And all the classes went through that.
(44:38):
And that was really empowered by my amazing boss at the time,
Nicole Collette, who, well, actually, whenever we started, she wasn't my boss.
We were working on the same team, but she was responsible as time went on to
really develop that program out including the the TSM summits that I used to hold.
(45:02):
Once or twice a year that those were amazing times and just having both the
enablement that came through the technical boot camps for people and how tight
the ts's got through that and then,
being able to do a similar thing with the managers i really enjoyed it but if there's one moment,
i'd say that you know we used to have these bi-annual large
(45:23):
training event things it was for a while it was
tech ready which anyone who was at microsoft from back
in the day remembers members tech ready it was a gathering of
all technical roles at microsoft and
it was the greatest thing ever i mean we all love
tech ready it would be at the washington state convention
center in downtown seattle and they're just like when i joined microsoft and
(45:46):
got to go and hear these thousands and thousands of people in these huge rooms
and these you know main stage presentations it was just like oh my gosh and
then fast forward eight years when i'm now you know, the global technical sales director, right?
And wanting to really, as we were building out our TS and TSM communities for biz apps.
I would have some kind of an event or be speaking or doing panel discussions
(46:11):
and things at these events twice a year.
And we had fought so long and hard to try to get dedicated CRM demo environments for people.
There was one year that a gentleman named Parham Colon and myself.
(46:32):
He was in engineering and he was an incredible partner. And he really helped
us get dedicated CRM environments available to every TS.
And we announced it at TechReady during one of... He and I would do a fireside
chat as one of the sessions.
And there were probably, at that point, I don't know,
(46:53):
250 people plus in the room between our Microsoft consulting services,
is people who did all the implementations for a lot of our customers with our
partners and the internal pre-sales sides with the TSs and TSMs that I was responsible for.
And we made the announcement that everybody was going to be getting these dedicated
(47:15):
CRM environments finally.
And it was like standing ovation. Like people were cheering.
And it was just something that it felt like, hey, we've been listening.
We've been trying. trying it has been pushing a boulder up
a mountain but we got it and
you're going to get it and they start getting released next week or whatever
and just you know in the after party that we had
(47:37):
for the ts's and tsm's you know just having a great time and people were just
like literally just like thank you thank you we gotta thank you you know and
just getting to be a part of that was was a key moment matt that was a really
good and from the other end i was a ts receiving those demo environments was amazing.
It was. What we did before that was not so good.
(47:59):
And if you think, well, seven years ago, I mean, CRM and Microsoft wasn't really mainstream.
So living through the last sort of seven years watching biz apps grow has been an incredible journey.
Awesome. All right, Ray, closing words. Again, thank you for coming on the podcast.
Maybe a bit of a plug for what you're doing now.
(48:21):
What's next for Ray for the next few years? and how can people get in contact with you?
Well, I am working slowly on getting my...
200 hour yoga teacher training certification. I'm actually doing it online because
it's not the right time to just go off to Hawaii for two weeks or whatever to
get it. But I'm working on that.
(48:43):
Obviously, the meditation and everything. But I'm also doing some work with
our good friends at 2Win.
So Scott, you certainly remember doing demo. Fantastic group.
Discovery to win everything that we did yeah so and i've enjoyed you know we
had such a great partnership with them throughout the years in biz apps and
(49:03):
everything that we did and i you know so it's been interesting as far as we
were talking about still the human factor in all this,
now helping facilitate for multiple companies through to win like doing demo
to win and people's presentation skills.
Since we're not at the perfect AI virtual Scott Meddings demo yet.
(49:26):
There are people who still really need a lot of help with their presentation skills.
So if anybody is interested in having just, we do master classes where you may
not have enough people like we used to do on our Accelerated Selling Tour,
Scott, where it was our entire teams that were going through it.
Maybe a company only has one or three or nine employees or something.
(49:46):
We do masterclasses where we'll have multiple people from multiple companies
in them. So it's a much more cost-effective way for people to do it.
But we also still do it for dedicated companies like we used to do within BizApps.
So people can hit me up on that.
LinkedIn is, and maybe we can even do something special. They heard about it
(50:07):
through the podcast with T-Win, so we'll see, maybe.
But LinkedIn is the best way to get a hold of me. I avoid social media outside
of LinkedIn as much as humanly possible.
And you can just go to rayschloss.com. But the company that I do outside of
anything that's really core consulting related is through Thriving 24-7,
(50:30):
which is something I set up last year to really focus on the meditation and
affirmation and hypnotherapy side of things.
So the meditation content that I produce for BrainTap and other people and clients
is really through Thriving 24-7.
So there's a contact form on thriving247.com. That's all just thriving247.com.
(50:51):
But LinkedIn, LinkedIn is the best way to do it.
So Ray Schloss, and maybe we'll have the link in the podcast to that,
Scott. We will, 100%. Thanks again for coming on.
And I'm looking forward to catching up with you in about four or five weeks
in Seattle. I'm a little scared, Scott, to get the band back together.
There's legends. There are legends.
(51:12):
You're scared. I'm worried I'm going to get hypnotized to go and sell Star Wars to someone else.
All right, Matt. Sounds good. Perfect.
And Matt, you're heading off for two weeks to Thailand to go and do MMA kickboxing with a cold.
So good luck. We'll catch you on the flip side.
(51:34):
Yeah, yeah. So flying out literally very soon. So yeah, two-week camp.
So training three times a day, lots of ice baths, all of that kind of stuff.
But yeah, a bit of a mental challenge. I'm a bit of an all-or-nothing kind of guy.
So I'm like, stuff it. Let's just go do it. it so i think
valentina shevchenko might be over there at the moment for any usc fighters
and tim zoo was over there as well for any australian boxing fans so
(51:55):
yeah if i come back with a black eye it's probably likely but anyway i'm looking
forward to getting over there and giving myself well matt if you come back with
a black eye and that's it that's a win yeah just saying the other guy you don't
do the anderson stilba or something horrible like that like you know that yeah Yeah,
triangle choke like this. Yeah, just like latch onto them.
(52:17):
Yeah, that'll be good. So looking forward to it. It's got to be a good break. Yeah, awesome.
All right. Thanks, Jens. We'll catch up, Ray, not eight years from now.
We'll catch up soon again.
Yeah. Yeah. Thank you so much, guys. It was a total blast getting to talk through
all this with you and all the very best and namaste.
Music.
(52:40):
Hey, that's a wrap for today. Thanks so much for everyone for listening to our podcast.
Just a few reminders. So we've set up a LinkedIn page. So we'll endeavour to
put some updates on that LinkedIn page. So go on there and click follow for us.
Also, don't forget to go to powertime.au and subscribe to our newsletter.
And lastly, if you could please click follow on this podcast so you get the
(53:02):
latest episodes as they come out.
We're trying to get the podcasts out every two to three weeks.
So there should be a good cadence with a whole bunch of new guests coming on.
Now, lastly, don't forget that the views on this podcast are not the views of
NCS on Microsoft, but they're the views of Matt and I and our guests.
Thanks again. See you. I can't wait to see you on the next podcast.
(53:25):
Music.
Hi, everyone. Welcome to the Power Time Show with Matt and Scott.
And on today's show, he said, hey, what do you think the role of a technical
salesperson is going to be in the next five years, the next 10 years?
You're scared. I'm worried I'm going to get hypnotized to go and sell Salesforce
or something. So yeah, we'll see.
(00:23):
Yeah, I come back with a black eye. It's probably likely. But anyway,
Anyway, I'm looking forward to getting over there and giving myself a bit of a personal challenge.
You know, Matt, if you come back with a black eye and that's it,
that's a win. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Get ready, let's go. Unlocking secrets leaders should know.
(00:46):
Music.
Hi, everyone. Welcome to Power Time. I am Scott Meddings from Microsoft,
joined here by my good friend, Matt. Do you want to do a quick intro, Matt?
(01:06):
Hi, my name is Matt from NCS. Yeah, really looking forward to today's show.
We have a really special guest, Scott.
So I might hand over to you because you got this guest on the show to maybe
do a bit of an introduction on who they are.
Yeah, before we get into the guest, Matt, I've got to talk about,
so we filmed, we recorded the podcast a couple of weeks ago and at the end of
(01:27):
it, we'll talk briefly about what you've been doing for the last two weeks.
I've had a crazy couple of weeks as well, which I'm going to talk about now,
but I'm really keen to hear about your adventures over in Thailand and you keep boxing.
But for me, while you've been going and do that, I actually did a boxing class
as well last week, which I was pretty proud of. I inspired you already.
That's the first one I've done in a long time.
You did. You've inspired. You've done two things this week. You've inspired
(01:50):
me to follow Bulldogs and you've also inspired me to do boxing.
So just definitely thinking outside the box now.
But we had a great couple of weeks. So, you know, a couple of times a year,
I think it might be every quarter at Microsoft, we do this Australian Leadership Forum.
So it's really Steve Worrell, who's our general manager.
(02:10):
He brings the entire leadership team together and we talk about a whole bunch
of things around the business and Microsoft and have a lot of inspiring people
come in and talk to us about various things.
And a big highlight, we did that. So we did that a week ago and we had the Finding Mastery team in.
And for those who are listening into the podcast, the Finding Mastery team is led by Dr.
(02:35):
Gervais. He led the Seattle Seahawks for a little bit. He was doing mind coaching
Coaching for the coach that coached this year, Seahawks. Pete Carroll is his
name. I'm a big NFL fan, so there you go.
There you go. Yeah. So he's done, he's very core to Microsoft and how we can
(02:55):
tune our mind to really be high performance. And this is a bit of a high performance podcast.
We're talking a lot about this stuff and what we're doing. And Ray,
who's on a bit later, he'll explain why he's come on to the podcast today.
But the Finding Mastery team consisted of two young ladies who are both Olympic
athletes and they spoke about their journey and it was very inspiring.
(03:17):
So that was amazing i was really happy with that and
at the same time we had build drop as well super exciting
with build apple release their
worldwide developer conference as well so there's
a whole bunch of stuff announcements with apple going on and google had theirs
as well so in the world of ai right now it's been incredible with all the news
(03:38):
that's gone through and you know i can't help but use chat gpt's new ai voice
assistant which i thought was amazing i really got stuck Stuck into that last
week with my team and having a heap of fun with that.
So anyway, that's kind of my last couple of weeks and what I've been doing.
Matt, let's tell our listeners what you've actually been doing because that's pretty amazing as well.
Before I do that, did you see Elon Musk's tweet about Apple and the iPhone and
(04:03):
how they might be banned from anything to do with Tesla? I saw that.
He wants a Faraday cage for every Apple device because they're signed up with OpenAI.
How ridiculous is that, right? So of course Apple's going to sign up with OpenAI.
Who else are they going to sign up with right now? I think they're kind of late to the game.
I actually found their developer conference a little underwhelming, to be honest.
(04:24):
I think it's great the work they've done on the devices and the operating system,
and there's some cool features there, emojis and things that you can design
and put on your messages.
It's all cool stuff, but I didn't see anything that's really going to impact
the enterprise at all or the way we work.
I think it might be the segue. way i think x might release a
phone it might be a bit of an ellen bit of a payback coming
(04:47):
so maybe watch this space and see what he does yeah with devices and all that
kind of stuff because if anyone wants to check his twitter out read it he wasn't
a very happy chappy at all when when that sort of partnership came out and obviously
with ellen he's quite vocal on his social media so yeah very interesting read
and a bit of a popcorn moment when i was sitting back in in Thailand,
(05:07):
having a look at that. But anyway, about Thailand.
So for those who don't know, I'm a bit of all or nothing kind of guy.
So if I'm going to do something, I'm going to do it properly and probably to the hundredth degree.
So I decided, and I've always wanted to do this, I went and trained at Tiger
MMA, which is the biggest martial arts or fight camp in the world.
(05:29):
So I trained there for two weeks. I trained three times a day.
Obviously in the 32 degree hey you know ridiculous humidity
all of that kind of stuff so i pushed myself to the edge
and the boundaries so i trained with you know peter yan
who's a ufc fighter i train with his boxing coach i
train with alexander volkanovsky's brazilian jiu-jitsu
coach i had one-on-one that is strength and conditioning i
(05:51):
ran up mount called the buddha run which is a ridiculously difficult
run so if you want to have a look at that but i stayed at a place called which
is all about fitness and healthy and lifestyle
and a lot of the people that went there wasn't your typical thailand
trip like bangladesh everyone's you know going to
the pubs and all that kind of stuff it was completely different vibe it
was all about you know getting away it was all about wellness it
(06:13):
was all about you know ice baths and all that kind of
stuff so for me in a really sort of high pressure job
and all that kind of stuff i loved it i loved the fact
i could get away you know to really switch off really you
know discover some things that i wanted to do set some goals for myself set
some goals for my team but really have that time to reset set and reflect and
yeah for me it was a really really positive thing and
(06:34):
I'll definitely be going back it was definitely difficult of
course training three times a day in that
heat I was basically getting my body pieced back together by the local massage
therapist every night so I could go train but it was amazing honestly it was
amazing and yeah gonna pick up a lot of that stuff that I've done and take it
back over here in Australia so a lot of the jiu-jitsu a lot of the sort of boxing,
(06:57):
I'm definitely picking that up again and going to give it a red hot crack while
I'm here. So very exciting, very cool.
So yeah, that was it. So you've got any questions to ask me about my trip?
I do have one trip. So the end of the podcast will be recorded with Ray.
We made a comment not to injure yourself and Ray made a comment around a black eye.
(07:18):
No black eyes. Yeah, yeah. So I believe you did get an injury.
Do you want to tell me what happened?
Yes, and I was completely sober for this, which makes it
even more embarrassing so i went to like a
local mutai stadium like fight um to
watch some of the people that we've been obviously training with uh fighting
a mutai and mixed master martial arts and because of some dodgy tire stadium
(07:41):
up some you know real crappy stairs basically climbing up to the stairs to get
my seat i was wearing some thongs and i got caught i got my thongs caught in
the stairs and basically twisted my ankle turned into a human bowling ball and
rolled down the stairs and took out two Thai ladies.
So I've been hobbling around since. I don't know how the two Thai ladies are.
I did apologize to them profusely and offered them all amounts of Thai bar because
(08:04):
I did roll and hit them pretty hard.
But that was the only injury I had the whole time. So I sparred with like crazy
Russian people, crazy Thai people.
Stairs got me out of the whole trip. So yeah, that was what finally did it.
Mate, I don't know what to say about that because you've done two weeks of hard
training and you hurt yourself because of, you know, a pair of thongs.
(08:27):
I just got stuck in this little bent or gap and I just literally twisted,
fell over and I started rolling like a rate of knots and I just couldn't stop myself.
So quite a funny story. I'm probably about a week away from being able to get
back to training. I actually did quite a number on my ankle, to be honest.
And luckily, I managed to upgrade myself home to business class,
(08:50):
which was something that I wanted to do.
So that was a nice trip home. Very good. Yeah, very good. I was hobbling around.
So yeah, got a lot of conscious points. so shout out to Quonset,
thank you. They might have to sponsor the podcast.
No, that's awesome, mate. And look, I think, you know, when we're thinking about
high-performance people, training, I mean, Dr. Gervais talks a lot about sleep.
I think that's probably number one, making sure that you're getting your seven or eight hours.
(09:13):
And, you know, the athletes spoke a lot about this as well on their training
because, you know, they went straight into full-time training,
which is really interesting.
So that's all they do, as you would expect.
And they were talking about the importance of rest and sleep and exercise and
looking after your mind and things like that.
It's really interesting. I've got the book here actually. I'll flip this up
(09:35):
on the screen for those listeners who have seen it.
It's Stop Worrying About What
People Think of You, The First Rule of Mastery by Dr. Michael Gervais.
So if anyone wants to get into that, I think there's an audio book as well.
I haven't checked. His last book was an audio book too.
But it's definitely, I think, you know, I think between him Him and Simon Sinek
are the two people that I watch a lot and listen to their podcasts and TikToks
(09:58):
and things like this as well, just to get as much information as I can and.
Yeah, it was an amazing session. Sounds like you had a great time for two weeks.
And here we are reconvening.
So our guest today is someone that I've worked with for quite a long time.
They'd already been working at Microsoft when I started.
(10:19):
And Ray is someone that is based out of Seattle and spends a lot of time really
understanding people, the role of meditation.
Hypnosis, all of these things and how they can impact the way we work and what we do.
And from a BizApps point of view, so business applications, which is the team that I'm in,
(10:43):
he was the person that kind of led a lot of the managers for a long time around that voice in Seattle.
So he had a global lead role and he was the one that would be fighting the
battle for us if we needed anything done that real
advocate and voice and obviously he flew
out to australia quite a few times as well spent a lot
(11:05):
of time training myself and the team around pre-sales so
a lot of knowledge on on the topic of business applications a lot of global
knowledge around that as well and and really just after 17 years a lot of knowledge
on microsoft as well so yeah just just someone that i've got a lot of respect
for and you know sometimes when we talk
(11:25):
about these things where we talk about high performance and you know
really understanding what drives people and and
and why you do the things you do it can be uncomfortable it can be awkward and
it can also be something that people might not believe in as well so sometimes
just changing your mindset can make a big impact and i think ray kind of pushes
the boundaries with a few of the topics he's talking about particularly around
(11:47):
hypnosis somewhere what role that might play but
it was an interesting conversation, wasn't it?
I love all that stuff. I'm a unique character. It was the first time talking
to Ray. I thought he was fantastic.
Yeah, and I thought, like you said, Scott, he's a really good listener.
He's really good at articulating things.
And I can imagine he was a great leader for Microsoft and obviously for the
(12:07):
team that you work with as well. I really, really enjoyed the conversation.
I can see why he's been so successful and I'm definitely going to get hypnotized by Ray soon.
So Ray, when you hear this, I will be reaching out to you very shortly to attempt
that promise that I said on the podcast.
Just be careful about that. But anyway, I'll be in Seattle in two or three weeks.
(12:29):
So I'll catch up with him in person and deliver a pack of Tim Tams to him and
maybe some Vegemite as well and just say thank you from the Aussies down under
for jumping onto our podcast.
So with that, I think we should bring Ray on, take a quick break.
Music.
(12:55):
Back, everyone. We've got a good friend of mine joining the show today, Mr. Ray Schloss.
I've known Ray for a very long time now, for quite a few years,
and I'm very pleased to welcome him to the show to really talk about technical
leadership, his experience, his new gig after Microsoft.
I'm 17 years at Microsoft, so a long time, but maybe, Ray, do you want to kick
(13:15):
into a few minutes just about yourself and how you've been, I guess,
how long you've been in the industry and the involvement you have with the industry
because it's fairly extensive.
Yeah, hey, Scott. Great to see you again, mate, always.
Man, much love to you and the whole
Aussie team. And Matt, it's a pleasure being on here with you as well.
And so I did, like as you said, I spent 17 years at Microsoft, just left in April.
(13:39):
And of those 17, 15, I was in BizApps, which really it was Dynamics.
And we were just this little tiny part of Microsoft when we started.
And so much of the challenge for years of that time was attempting to get the
rest of the company to actually care about who we are and what we do,
which was a real challenge until Satya became CEO.
(14:01):
And since he incubated Dynamics, he really cared and he got it.
And he was kind of like, wait a minute, if we get people to land enterprise
applications, we're going to take care of the stack underneath it too,
which seems like any reasonable person would fully understand that.
But apparently, Apparently, the leadership prior to Satya didn't quite get it, right?
(14:23):
So anyway, so yeah, the last couple of years, I was in something called Cross
Solutions, which was more of a one Microsoft go-to-market attempt.
But prior to that, I...
Worked with a couple other large companies, including Xerox.
I was a digital systems color analyst for them doing, at first, technical sales.
(14:43):
And then it evolved into a partner that I worked for doing technical sales enablement
through both them and Xerox.
And I also worked for Lawson Software as a technical, what we would consider
a technical solutions consultant, technical pre-sales at Lawson.
They're a mid-market ERP vendor that has now been owned by Infor for many years at this point.
(15:09):
But then I did some work with a consulting group and stuff as well.
I like to play guitar and do yoga, Scott. That's what I do, man.
And meditate. And it's also, yeah, I live in the greater Seattle area.
And one thing that I've been working on for probably the last two years is doing
meditation production.
(15:30):
Production so i produce for a company called brain tap and then also individual
clients so not only do i produce the music but you know i make these custom
affirmation and meditation tracks and i'm also a certified hypnotherapist so
i really enjoy being able to help people,
transform their lives through hypnotherapy because i saw the impact it had in
(15:52):
my own life and and i really i love doing it guys you know it's something where
you just like Like, Scott, Matt, there's a gentle breeze blowing.
I can feel myself selling salads for us right now. Yeah, it's coming.
Are you fading off? Are you just getting ready to hit your subconscious?
(16:15):
So that's right. You know, man, it's a balance of now post-Microsoft doing some,
like sales enablement consulting very had
a great experience just last week speaking at
a conference in vegas with the sales enablement collective
which was fantastic and doing the the meditation hypnotherapy side of things
(16:37):
too yeah now that's amazing there's so many things that we need to drill into
on what you've just said but one of the things that really stood out for me
with your career at microsoft was your leadership amongst the technical community
the involvement with our I mean,
you come out to Australia multiple times, a good half a dozen times,
I think we were chatting about earlier, and the impact on the team and how they
should really support customers and the passion that you've had over the years
(17:02):
has been really tremendous.
So, if we think about, you know, some of our listeners are leaders that might
be standing up technical teams and really,
I guess, trying to figure out in this new world of AI what they need to go and
do around training, education,
and getting these people ready to be able to have conversations with their customers.
(17:24):
What are your thoughts around that? I mean, you're on the speaking circuit now,
Ray, which is awesome, but what are your thoughts around how they should think
about leading technical people?
Well, you mentioned AI in this, Scott, and that is going to be a super hot topic
because let's go back maybe….
(17:44):
I guess maybe seven years ago
or so so i spent i spent seven years
as the global technical sales director for
for biz apps for microsoft right which it about the time that i i up until i
moved roles towards the end of the time at microsoft we had about 1200 people
(18:04):
between our technical solutions professionals and their managers which is what
you are scotty here one of our fantastic
tsm's right and there was a gentleman at corp he's still at microsoft fantastic
guy carson shoyman who was responsible for for the tsm's across all the commercial solution areas,
(18:27):
and when we were really just getting to know each other a while back again this
is a guy at least seven years ago eight years ago he he pulled me aside one
day and we were just chatting and then And he said,
hey, what do you think the role of a technical salesperson is going to be in
the next five years, the next 10 years?
(18:47):
And I hadn't really thought about it, right?
And as we were discussing it, and AI was like, you know, it was basically Terminator.
That's the only thing we were thinking about AI.
Cortana, maybe. Cortana. Clippy. Clippy. Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, Clippy. It really was clippy, Matt. I think it was still a little early
(19:10):
for maybe Cortana was part of Halo at that point.
But the thought of practicality in sales teams was a pipe dream at that point or some future thing.
But Karsten started talking about how, well, how long do you think it's going to be before they're...
(19:32):
Are artificial intelligence applications that are going to be able to look at
a company's infrastructure against a set of predetermined goals,
or that it may even be suggesting the goals, and that it's going to be able
to generate a solution and demonstrate that solution in seconds,
(19:54):
versus what we have to go through and setting up demo environments and trying
to recreate demo data and all of that kind of stuff.
How long do you think it's going to be before there is an AI-generated interface
that is going to be so human-like that the role of a technical sales professional
is going to become obsolete?
And I stood there for a second because I'm realizing he's describing the obsolescence
(20:17):
of both his and my roles at Microsoft.
It's like, who needs a global role owner for a role that is now completely AI-driven, right? Right.
So I think I took a little bit of a deep breath and a sigh of relief that it
wasn't going to happen that fiscal year.
But to answer your question, we are really close now.
(20:38):
There are some companies out there. There's one that pops up on LinkedIn all the time.
In fact, when I was in Vegas, someone said, oh, hey, have you seen this?
And so we're kind of gathering around her laptop and she's showing us her version
of their AI generated enablement software.
And like, look, I'm going to change the accent. said, look, I'm going to change the avatar.
Like, look how, you know, human and we're all like, yeah, that is, it's still AI.
(21:01):
And you can tell, but give it two years and no, it's not right.
You're going to be able to have a Scott Meddings demo for anything that you want to do AI generated.
And we can already, you know, AI is already amazing at being able to do language
replacement and multiple versions based on,
(21:21):
you know, changing your lighting and all these other kind of things and deep
faking things which is scary and so when i think about,
AI and enablement. The one quote I heard a while back from a guy who started doing fractional,
CAIO work, which is a really fantastic idea if you know what you're doing,
(21:47):
was that you're not going to lose your role to someone.
You're not going to lose your role to AI, but you
will lose your role to someone who knows how to use ai and
so hence why like prompting
and being able to prompt effectively is massive
so it's like i mean i mean i remember you know before leaving and anytime i
(22:12):
open up linkedin all you see from microsoft people is oh look what we're doing
with copilot oh look copilot oh it's copilot this so it's copilot that you know
i almost want to put a filter on linkedin say hey if there's more than three
notifications about posting about.
Co-pilot in one day just skip the other 12 okay i'm
good at three right but obviously it is
(22:32):
the biggest directional push
that microsoft has done in in as long as i've known you know like 18 years or
whatever of the experience and that and and and and they're not the only one
everyone is chasing embracing that hard because everybody knows that if they're late to the game,
(22:54):
they're going to be shut out of the market in some way.
So everybody's like, we got to do it. We got to do it.
And I think that what the thing that we can do to help enable our sales professionals
is to have them truly understand how to use it.
And I know that Microsoft has really been trying to do that.
We had a lot of internal things of like training, training, training options
(23:14):
are available, Learn how to do this, learn how to use it.
And I think that's the best thing that we can do at this point,
is to one, help people to fully understand the depth and breadth of what's available
and possible in the technology.
But the other side of that coin is, and at least this is just for me until I
fully surrender into the metaverse somewhere, that the human side of it is still
(23:40):
equally important, still.
Still, we may have a recap of this podcast two years from now,
guys, and we may be like, hey, Ray, remember what you said back in 2024?
Well, not so much anymore because we've all been doing external personal sales
consulting because none of us have jobs. We've all been replaced by AI.
(24:04):
Simulated, Ray. Simulated experiences. Look, I agree 100% with a lot of things
you've been saying there. And, look, I talk to my team all the time around the
role and how it will evolve over years. And I think if you think about it,
how people consume enterprise software right now. People still buy off people.
I don't think that'll ever change.
(24:25):
But, you know, do I want my team, you know, really getting deep in the weeds
on technical stuff or demoing at a really deep level in the future if we can
just have like a demo co-pilot that does that.
But they'll still need to translate that technology to the business and then
map that to an outcome that the customer's trying to achieve.
(24:47):
So i think we kind of all move up the stack a little bit
and go let's oh you know the point you made about it's
you won't lose your job but you will to people to know how to use ai
i think everyone's aligned it's like the third
time we've heard that on this podcast now from various different people
yeah coming yeah yeah so it's
like yeah it is it is the consensus the consensus
(25:08):
now three times is a consensus so that is now the
fact that we think that that's that's where it's going to go and
people just need to do some deep learning and
really understand the benefit of the technology and
you know it's hard i think we're dealing with a lot of ambiguity as
well like and you brought up the point about training we don't even know what's
coming next month to train on let alone what's coming in six months so you have
(25:30):
to kind of you have to get used to deal i'm trying to think of that brené brown
quote you have to rumble in the arena you've got to get into the arena and really
start looking at the technology the anger to really understand,
what we need to do moving forward.
I guess one of the things is how do you balance that technical aspect of your
role with sort of the managerial and strategic ones?
(25:52):
Maybe you can talk a bit about that, all this new technology coming,
but how do you manage that and being up to speed with all this great tech,
but also being able to lead and have a really strategic conversation with your
technical sales team? So, yeah.
And a lot of this has to do, Matt, great question, failures that I've seen in the past.
And having spent eight years in the field at Microsoft, plus at Xerox and Lawson and other places.
(26:20):
And then having the corporate experience for nine years.
I just want everybody to know that I started when I was 15, just so we get that out of the way.
We all just assume that, right? We just assume that.
Yeah. I'm retiring at 36. No, I'm just kidding.
(26:43):
But anyways, the conveyance of confidence that I would say that people's roles
are secure. We can never guarantee it.
But I know that Microsoft, and not just Microsoft, remember the industry went
through huge layoffs post-COVID.
(27:05):
Because they had ramped up all of this stuff. And then finally,
it's like, oh, wait a minute, we're kind of going back to some more sense of normal.
We have all these roles, we don't really need anymore. And then the layoffs
started piling up. And I know that we had the significant ones at Microsoft.
And one of the most important things was, how do we deal with people's anxiety about job security?
(27:26):
And so I think it's really important for managers to have a strong sense of
the pulse of the potential of AI in interdicting their team members'
daily roles and responsibilities and what are the expectations of their roles going forward.
Word so like scotty said like people will
(27:48):
always buy from people and i'm going
to disagree i think that in two
or three years man there's going to be
a scott meddings vr agent that
is going to be so good and doesn't need a health care plan that you know you
know this is like this is in all seriousness y'all this is what both the management
(28:10):
and the frontline workers dealt with in detroit in the auto industry in the
US in the 70s or whatever, when they started bringing in robotics.
And there was just this huge uproar. And it was like, you can't mess with us. We're, you know...
It's powerful unions and everything. And they're like, wow, we're bringing these robots in anyways.
(28:31):
And yeah, the first year, we may not get an ROI on it for two years,
but this thing doesn't need a pension.
And this thing doesn't need healthcare benefits. And this thing,
we can repurpose it. We can replace it.
It's easy to fix. And I think that what is going to drive the replacement of
(28:52):
roles is going to be the ROI that companies get for repurposing human-facing roles with AI in time.
And again, so let's just go back to Karsten and I having that conversation like
eight years ago or whatever it was.
And where we are now, we are, you know, we're almost there.
(29:12):
Where are we going to be eight years from now? So, Scotty, I'm going to disagree
with you that maybe this isn't going to happen.
But in the short term, Matt, I really do think it's management understanding
the goals, what we would typically refer to as the role excellence components within those roles.
Like what are the critical indicators
of success and what confidence can a manager give their team that,
(29:37):
hey, you're still vital and important to our mission objective and you're not
going to get laid off three months from now because, hey, surprise.
The company has been working on this virtual TS agent and yeah,
they're going to start rolling them out in selected markets and in the next
three years, you're gone, right? Or something.
(29:58):
I mean, and there's, again, there's no way to guarantee that,
but I think that's the thing that I've heard is the anxiety of like, are we replaceable?
Like, how easily is it going to be that we're replaced by AI?
And I think that's a broader question, not just for the technical sales roles,
but, you know, if we look at the contact center and we talk about all this all the time, right? So...
(30:20):
The average contact center today, the experience is pretty bad for a customer.
You know, there's long waits. Some people get it right. A lot of companies don't.
It's bad for the employee experience because, you know, it's usually your first
or second job and you want to move on. A lot of people are not nice when they call in.
And there's a lot of training. It's regulated industry a lot of the time.
So, you know, AI is really well suited to kind of coming into the contact center,
(30:44):
delivering a human-like experience that's, you know, to your point,
you know, never sleeps, can can speak any language, can translate any accent.
And really be relatable but deliver regulated content back to the customer.
But from the customer's point of view, they get a result instantly and they're
very happy because they didn't have to wait 45 minutes to find out if their
(31:04):
assurance policy's expired or, you know, how much money they got left on their
payment plan for something.
So I think there are some jobs it's really ideally suited for.
But if you look at on the other side of the fence, investments like things
like what they're doing with figure you know one of the robotics and
things that are going on right now there should be an influx and
(31:24):
generation of all these new jobs that come through because of
ai so i think there'll be a fair bit of backwards and forwards i i think matt
and i went and saw steve bartlett not long ago and he was talking a lot about
you know that that technology curve if you look back when cars were introduced
you know people just wanted an an extra two horses. They didn't want to buy a car.
(31:45):
And then the car industry boomed and just generated way more jobs than the horse industry ever did.
And then he said, if you map that to every single tech curve over the years,
there's always been an acceleration.
We just end up doing different things. So I think we're really at that impasse
right now. But to your point, it took kind of eight years to get there,
which is really interesting.
So Ray, what do you... So you've had a stellar career at Microsoft,
(32:08):
there's no doubt. Huge impact on
a lot of... Well, there'll be people who disagree with you on that, Scott.
There's a slice of people who are going to be like no but but
to your point dude i'm very grateful that no one
listened to this podcast right yeah it doesn't matter but that's when
the hypnosis kicks in and ray can just hypnotize them and hey the experience
is great and all that kind of stuff i'll tell you man i wasn't certified at
(32:32):
the time some of those things went down but damn i wish i would have been because
i would have been i'm going to take you up on a hypnosis one day right hypnosis
and a beer in our Seattle one day. So I'll do a bit of a follow-up post-ap.
We can do it virtually. Actually, Matt, you know what? It's extremely effective virtually.
So, and one of the, although I didn't do it virtually, most people go for hypnosis,
(32:57):
due to an anxiety-related problem.
Like, I'm having an issue with this and I don't know how to handle it.
And whether that, you know, when you get down to it, it's fear-based in some way.
I, the first time I went, it was for a much more esoteric reason.
It was for learning. I'd read this book about life between life hypnosis,
(33:20):
and it goes beyond past life aggression,
which at the point, given the face system that I'd been in for like 25 years,
I didn't even think that was viable, but I was coming out of that face system
and broadening my horizons greatly.
And so I went to a hypnotherapist who was very experienced in doing what happens
(33:40):
to you in between incarnations, because I do believe in reincarnation now.
And the things that happened to me in that hypnotherapy session absolutely blew
my mind and changed my life for the better.
But the interesting follow-up to it was, I was like, oh, this works, right?
So the biggest challenge I'd had had been with racquetball.
(34:01):
I'd been just addicted to playing racquetball for, at that point, probably 30 years.
And it's kind of like, since most people don't and play racquetball,
but if you think about golf, a much more popular thing, if there was something
wrong with your swing that you just couldn't correct,
and you went to hypnosis and you did some work on it and you went back to playing
(34:22):
golf and within a week that problem was almost gone.
And I, that's what happened to me with racquetball. I would,
I would not let the ball drop the extra three or four inches necessary to have
the difference between a kill shot at the front wall and it bouncing high enough
that my opponent could make a return on it.
And that hypnosis changed it. So that, I'm not even sure how we got on this
(34:46):
subject, but how I got on it, I wouldn't even believe you. Oh yeah, that's right.
So I like to railroad things, right? Yeah, no, that was great.
Right. And in all seriousness, it's something that, like, you know,
you want your team to do better.
You don't have to hypnotize people, but addressing subconscious blockage is huge.
(35:10):
And so creating affirmation, like a meditation affirmation, like,
hey, we're going to do a meditation journey that you can listen to.
You know, if you're really into it once a day or once a week or whatever,
but you've got a team of nine people and we've got a sales goal.
And we're setting a goal.
We're going to finish 117% of quota this year.
And that means we need X percentage of win rate and Y percentage deal size,
(35:36):
and actually taking people into something where they're getting a subconscious
confidence in being able to accomplish those goals can make a huge difference,
just like my racquetball game did.
When I got rid of that fear that, oh my God, it's going to hit the floor,
it's going to hit the floor, hit it now, it's going to hit the floor.
I may not have been thinking that in my executive decision-making frontal lobe
(36:00):
area, but the back of the brain was all about fear.
No, you're going to lose. You're going to lose. Hit it. Hit it. Hit it.
And so we can change those things. So it's a neat way to look at how bringing
a different aspect of the human development component of sales.
It's interesting because all of us are really interested in high-performing
(36:21):
teams and what does it mean to be a high performer and how we can just achieve that little bit more.
And, you know, one thing that I've come to realise with high-performing people,
a lot of people are dealing with trauma and that can be the driving force behind
them. It's not monetary.
It could be something that they're dealing with.
And addressing that, counselling, meditation, all of those things,
(36:45):
it can really help. It really can.
And as a manager, understanding those people and what motivates them and drives
them, I think, again, Again, Brené Brown's training is very good for addressing
that or really delving into what motivated you.
I did three days' worth of that last year, I think, and, you know,
(37:05):
it was fantastic for really opening my eyes to really how why people do things
and including for myself as well,
you know, and what motivates me to change and things like that.
So this sounds like another excellent tool to really have in the kit bag if
people are open to it to maybe address things that might be holding the background
in life. You know, Scott, that's a beautiful example.
(37:28):
And to your point on if people are open to it, that is 100% what's necessary for success.
Because when you're not open to it, when your conscious mind,
and there's a subconscious reason.
The only people I've ever met who weren't able to be hypnotized is because they
(37:50):
may consciously, some people are just like, no, I'm not going to do it.
It's literally a control factor that they're consciously thinking about.
There's still a subconscious reason that's driving that conscious thing.
There's something they're afraid of, of the letting go.
And so it's interesting that framing hypnosis, some people are very afraid of
it because they think it's some kind of woo-woo thing.
(38:13):
But any time we're driving a car and we're not literally going,
stop sign, wait, turn right, okay, now, stop, turn left. Like,
if you're doing things on your way to work.
That isn't giving you 100% of focus to what you're actually doing because it's
repetitive, you're in a hypnotic state, right?
(38:35):
It's all about where your focus of attention is.
It's just hypnosis gives you a very specific focus of attention.
And it's the exact same thing as when we're watching TV or we're at the movies, right?
So you're watching TV and you're experiencing it as if the screen's a mile wide
(38:57):
and everything until somebody comes and taps you on the shoulder, hey, Matt,
and then you go, oh, wait, oh, I'm in my living room, and oh,
look, the TV's that small, but that was really in there for a while,
right? Same thing at the movies.
That is literally a hypnotic state, so getting people to understand that you're
not surrendering your will, although the scary part is you see stage hypnosis,
(39:20):
and there is a component of ethics to it, right, And there's a debate within
the hypnosis community that no one has ever done anything hypnotized they didn't really want to do.
So when it's like, oh, you told me I was a washing machine and I rolled around
on the floor going, you know, most people who are into hypnotherapy avoid doing
that kind of stuff because it's counterproductive.
(39:44):
It's really about allowing your subconscious to come forward very much like
in our dream time so that you can get to the root causes of things and then
quickly adapt and change for the better,
it's a classic isn't it like when you think about jaws the movie the the creators
of jaws regret it now because it really alienated people from sharks right everyone
(40:07):
just got scared of sharks because of those movies quitting myself growing up
and if we look at Terminator.
That really destroyed our perception of AI right now.
And Cortana itself, right? I mean, if you play Halo, you'll know that Cortana
takes over and goes crazy.
So, you know, I think, but if you look at the progress, particularly last month,
so last month there was an announcement that the new Microsoft quantum models
(40:30):
have been able to replicate error correction at a new rate against quantum.
And of course, when quantum meets AI, that's when we solve a huge amount of
problems or create a huge amount.
Out so every i think everyone goes straight to straight to
terminator and then you know then the announcement with
microsoft this week about neural neural processors and
(40:51):
also apple as well going into every single laptop
on the planet you kind of think oh we're rolling out are
we rolling out you know the terminator operating system
as well it's easy to go to that because we've been trained
for you know my entire life i love sci-fi and
every sci-fi movie has an evil ai and we get you're trained down this
path and i guess that now we have to re-recorrect
(41:13):
redirect and kind of figure out well actually what is
ai what is the technology and how does it how does it solve problems because
it's certainly going to solve more problems that it's going to create over the
years if we control it right and govern it right and i heard a quote the other
day where someone was talking about the likelihood of ai and quantum coming
together will probably be a lot like like nuclear bombs.
(41:34):
Where it's controlled by a government or a group of like a UN controls that
technology and you can't just go and stand up quantum and AI together because
if we don't do that, that could be bad.
So I think it's an interesting topic, but we're all facing into that and that
drives that ambiguity for our technical people to go, what do I focus on and
(41:57):
what does my career look like for the next five years?
Well, Scott, did you ever watch the, it's the 2000, I think it started in 2007.
Version of battlestar galactica yeah everyone into it's saying that okay you
know my favorite quote shouldn't it be a question right is,
you know all of this has happened before and
(42:19):
it will surely happen again yeah and the the concept that you know they're the
you know the planet's been here billions of years and we're finding more and
more archaeological evidence that there were or technologies available to ancient
civilizations that we weren't aware of before and everything.
And for anyone who didn't watch Battlestar Galactica, the premise of it is that AI,
(42:46):
kind of like Skynet, became very
self-aware and aided in the construction of human bodies to move out of the
robotics and into what is robotic but is literally an organic shell that was
indecipherable from a real human.
(43:09):
And things go wrong there.
Another good example of that is Fallout. If you look at Fallout,
that's another movie that's kind of educating people that AI will just slowly take humans.
So it's really easy to fall into that kind of talk track around,
you know, how we think, you know, this technology will last.
(43:35):
It's going to be an interesting ride. It's a super exciting time,
I think, to be in technology.
And I, for one, I'm loving it. Every day there's something new and there's always a new.
Scott will send me a new YouTube video or a news article every morning to watch up and catch up on.
Again, I think we're very lucky and privileged to be in this time and really
helping organizations adopt this technology,
(43:55):
something that's going to be, you know, really powerful fork in the next couple of years but
cool so ray you've had this amazing career and i
for one i'm really enjoying the conversation with you today talk to
me about your career highlights what's that one career highlight that you look back
on really fondly and go wow this is amazing i i achieved that so yeah i'd say
there's really two things and one of them in fact let me see if it's right here
(44:17):
and now i'm not gonna be able to read it because i'm if you're on this list
scotty but but it was about an onboarding class. No. Okay.
So two things really come to mind. Creating the technical onboarding program
for our technical specialist for BizApps.
And all the classes went through that.
(44:38):
And that was really empowered by my amazing boss at the time,
Nicole Collette, who, well, actually, whenever we started, she wasn't my boss.
We were working on the same team, but she was responsible as time went on to
really develop that program out including the the TSM summits that I used to hold.
(45:02):
Once or twice a year that those were amazing times and just having both the
enablement that came through the technical boot camps for people and how tight
the ts's got through that and then,
being able to do a similar thing with the managers i really enjoyed it but if there's one moment,
i'd say that you know we used to have these bi-annual large
(45:23):
training event things it was for a while it was
tech ready which anyone who was at microsoft from back
in the day remembers members tech ready it was a gathering of
all technical roles at microsoft and
it was the greatest thing ever i mean we all love
tech ready it would be at the washington state convention
center in downtown seattle and they're just like when i joined microsoft and
(45:46):
got to go and hear these thousands and thousands of people in these huge rooms
and these you know main stage presentations it was just like oh my gosh and
then fast forward eight years when i'm now you know, the global technical sales director, right?
And wanting to really, as we were building out our TS and TSM communities for biz apps.
I would have some kind of an event or be speaking or doing panel discussions
(46:11):
and things at these events twice a year.
And we had fought so long and hard to try to get dedicated CRM demo environments for people.
There was one year that a gentleman named Parham Colon and myself.
(46:32):
He was in engineering and he was an incredible partner. And he really helped
us get dedicated CRM environments available to every TS.
And we announced it at TechReady during one of... He and I would do a fireside
chat as one of the sessions.
And there were probably, at that point, I don't know,
(46:53):
250 people plus in the room between our Microsoft consulting services,
is people who did all the implementations for a lot of our customers with our
partners and the internal pre-sales sides with the TSs and TSMs that I was responsible for.
And we made the announcement that everybody was going to be getting these dedicated
(47:15):
CRM environments finally.
And it was like standing ovation. Like people were cheering.
And it was just something that it felt like, hey, we've been listening.
We've been trying. trying it has been pushing a boulder up
a mountain but we got it and
you're going to get it and they start getting released next week or whatever
and just you know in the after party that we had
(47:37):
for the ts's and tsm's you know just having a great time and people were just
like literally just like thank you thank you we gotta thank you you know and
just getting to be a part of that was was a key moment matt that was a really
good and from the other end i was a ts receiving those demo environments was amazing.
It was. What we did before that was not so good.
(47:59):
And if you think, well, seven years ago, I mean, CRM and Microsoft wasn't really mainstream.
So living through the last sort of seven years watching biz apps grow has been an incredible journey.
Awesome. All right, Ray, closing words. Again, thank you for coming on the podcast.
Maybe a bit of a plug for what you're doing now.
(48:21):
What's next for Ray for the next few years? and how can people get in contact with you?
Well, I am working slowly on getting my...
200 hour yoga teacher training certification. I'm actually doing it online because
it's not the right time to just go off to Hawaii for two weeks or whatever to
get it. But I'm working on that.
(48:43):
Obviously, the meditation and everything. But I'm also doing some work with
our good friends at 2Win.
So Scott, you certainly remember doing demo. Fantastic group.
Discovery to win everything that we did yeah so and i've enjoyed you know we
had such a great partnership with them throughout the years in biz apps and
(49:03):
everything that we did and i you know so it's been interesting as far as we
were talking about still the human factor in all this,
now helping facilitate for multiple companies through to win like doing demo
to win and people's presentation skills.
Since we're not at the perfect AI virtual Scott Meddings demo yet.
(49:26):
There are people who still really need a lot of help with their presentation skills.
So if anybody is interested in having just, we do master classes where you may
not have enough people like we used to do on our Accelerated Selling Tour,
Scott, where it was our entire teams that were going through it.
Maybe a company only has one or three or nine employees or something.
(49:46):
We do masterclasses where we'll have multiple people from multiple companies
in them. So it's a much more cost-effective way for people to do it.
But we also still do it for dedicated companies like we used to do within BizApps.
So people can hit me up on that.
LinkedIn is, and maybe we can even do something special. They heard about it
(50:07):
through the podcast with T-Win, so we'll see, maybe.
But LinkedIn is the best way to get a hold of me. I avoid social media outside
of LinkedIn as much as humanly possible.
And you can just go to rayschloss.com. But the company that I do outside of
anything that's really core consulting related is through Thriving 24-7,
(50:30):
which is something I set up last year to really focus on the meditation and
affirmation and hypnotherapy side of things.
So the meditation content that I produce for BrainTap and other people and clients
is really through Thriving 24-7.
So there's a contact form on thriving247.com. That's all just thriving247.com.
(50:51):
But LinkedIn, LinkedIn is the best way to do it.
So Ray Schloss, and maybe we'll have the link in the podcast to that,
Scott. We will, 100%. Thanks again for coming on.
And I'm looking forward to catching up with you in about four or five weeks
in Seattle. I'm a little scared, Scott, to get the band back together.
There's legends. There are legends.
(51:12):
You're scared. I'm worried I'm going to get hypnotized to go and sell Star Wars to someone else.
All right, Matt. Sounds good. Perfect.
And Matt, you're heading off for two weeks to Thailand to go and do MMA kickboxing with a cold.
So good luck. We'll catch you on the flip side.
(51:34):
Yeah, yeah. So flying out literally very soon. So yeah, two-week camp.
So training three times a day, lots of ice baths, all of that kind of stuff.
But yeah, a bit of a mental challenge. I'm a bit of an all-or-nothing kind of guy.
So I'm like, stuff it. Let's just go do it. it so i think
valentina shevchenko might be over there at the moment for any usc fighters
and tim zoo was over there as well for any australian boxing fans so
(51:55):
yeah if i come back with a black eye it's probably likely but anyway i'm looking
forward to getting over there and giving myself well matt if you come back with
a black eye and that's it that's a win yeah just saying the other guy you don't
do the anderson stilba or something horrible like that like you know that yeah Yeah,
triangle choke like this. Yeah, just like latch onto them.
(52:17):
Yeah, that'll be good. So looking forward to it. It's got to be a good break. Yeah, awesome.
All right. Thanks, Jens. We'll catch up, Ray, not eight years from now.
We'll catch up soon again.
Yeah. Yeah. Thank you so much, guys. It was a total blast getting to talk through
all this with you and all the very best and namaste.
Music.
(52:40):
Hey, that's a wrap for today. Thanks so much for everyone for listening to our podcast.
Just a few reminders. So we've set up a LinkedIn page. So we'll endeavour to
put some updates on that LinkedIn page. So go on there and click follow for us.
Also, don't forget to go to powertime.au and subscribe to our newsletter.
And lastly, if you could please click follow on this podcast so you get the
(53:02):
latest episodes as they come out.
We're trying to get the podcasts out every two to three weeks.
So there should be a good cadence with a whole bunch of new guests coming on.
Now, lastly, don't forget that the views on this podcast are not the views of
NCS on Microsoft, but they're the views of Matt and I and our guests.
Thanks again. See you. I can't wait to see you on the next podcast.
(53:25):
Music.
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