September 18, 2024 • 20 mins
This week's show is entitled, "Sales Strategies that Unleash the Power of AI" and my guest is Jeb Blount, CEO of Sales Gravy, Inc and the co-author of a new, best-selling book: "The AI Edge" Tune in to:
- Discover how AI is revolutionizing B2B marketing and sales.
- Learn why AI-generated emails could harm your brand.
- Find out how to leverage AI for smarter prospecting.
- Understand why the human touch still matters in sales.
- Get tips on increasing your active selling time.
Watch the video HERE | Read the Transcript on the Heinz Marketing blog.
Matt interviews the best and brightest minds in sales and Marketing. If you would like to be a guest on Sales Pipeline Radio send an email to Sheena@heinzmarketing.com.
Sales Pipeline Radio was recently listed as a 30 Best Sales Management Podcasts
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Matt (00:16):
Welcome everybody to another episode of Sales Pipeline Radio.
I'm your host, Matt Heinz.
Super excited to have you all here.
Thank you for joining us.
If you are here live, in the middle ofyour work day, work week, we're super
excited that you're a part of this.
If you are watching or listening ondemand, thank you so much for downloading
and subscribing to Sales Pipeline Radio.
If you found us somehow onaccident, on purpose, I would
(00:36):
love to have you stick around.
You can find every episode of SalesPipeline Radio, past, present,
future at salespipelineradio.com.
Always trying to feature some ofthe best and brightest minds in
B2B marketing to help you thinkbetter, market better, sell better.
Very excited to have back on theshow, Jeb Blount, CEO of Sales Gravy.
Jeb, how you doing, man?
Jeb (00:54):
I'm doing pretty good, man.
It's been a long time.
Matt (00:57):
It's been way too long.
Since you're in your studio,I assume it means you're home,
which means that is a rare event.
Because I feel like every time likeI see or hear from you, you're an
airport or in a boardroom somewhere.
For the half of a person who doesn'tknow Jeb Blount is, just quickly
gives an introduction yourself.
Jeb (01:11):
I'm the CEO and founder of Sales Gravy.
We're an international sales trainingand Go-To-Markets consulting company.
We work with sales teams truly allover the globe, everywhere except for
Antarctica, but I'm working on that.
And you're right.
I do travel a lot.
I think I've spent 154 nightsso far this year on the road.
I've had a couple of months whereI've been able to focus and write, but
(01:33):
next week, all the way to Christmas,I'm going to be pretty much gone.
Matt (01:38):
I'm a lifelong marketer.
I didn't carry a bag until 16 yearsago when I started a business.
And then once you have your ownbusiness, you very much are in sales.
And as a lifelong marketer, I tryto spend as much time as I can
learning about sales and learningfrom people that are sales experts.
And when those people ask me, like,who are the people you read and listen
to the most, of the top five people,two are on that book right there.
You and Anthony Iannarino, whoI've just learned a ton from.
(02:00):
I have no idea how you, with allthat schedule, have time to churn
out the volume and quality of thebooks that you do, you've written
a number of amazing books aroundprospecting, selling strategy.
You had a book aroundselling in the pandemic.
And not surprisingly, the new book isfocused on how to leverage AI in sales.
There's so much noise around AI overallin business and especially around sales.
(02:24):
I was told a year and a half agothat by now physical sellers,
inside sales, BDRs would be gone.
Hasn't happened.
Those that aren't using AI, I thinkare quickly at a disadvantage.
Tell me a little bit about yourperspective and what you're
seeing in sales relative to AI.
Jeb (02:39):
Yeah, it's true.
Let's maybe back up.
We'll talk about marketing and salesand AI and how it all fits together.
So when we think about AI currently atthe pipeline side, so from marketing
all the way through sales, and as youare clearly aware, and you talk about
with your audience all the time, salesand marketing from a merger standpoint
is way different than it was say, 25,30 years ago, where these were two
(03:01):
separate entities and separate silos.
These days, there's a mash where Marketingflows into sales because you're so
responsible for leads and lead generation.
And then salespeople, they own alittle bit of that inbound lead
generation themselves through theirwork through personal branding
and getting out in social andsupporting the marketing function.
And when you get those two things workingtogether really well, it's powerful.
(03:24):
When my marketing team, my sales teamare all working in the same direction
and we're looking at the world as onefunnel or, one path for prospects.
It works great.
I think AI right now, from an impactstandpoint, is having a greater impact
on marketing than it is on sales.
And the reason is that with, withmarketing in particular, when it
(03:45):
comes to lead generation, you've gotcontent creation, which is something
that AI is pretty good at withsome human help, human shepherding.
So you're able to create a lot of reallygood content with fewer human beings
because AI picks up a lot of the heavylifting and the humans are able then to
use their creativity to further craftthat content to make it more powerful.
(04:07):
I think AI is doing a really goodjob in terms of signaling intent and
helping us understand where to targetand micro target prospects that are
moving into buying windows that theymay not even know they're moving into
the buying window but their breadcrumbsthat they're leaving online or giving
those clues and smart marketers are ableto grab that information and they'll
build marketing campaigns around that.
(04:28):
We've even seen it just in your abilityto work in social, which is again,
inbounds for content creation but youknow I've got one person doing the
job that I would have had to have 10people doing even three years ago in
order to create the volume of, say,video content that we're able to build.
Now, humans built the video contentto begin with, but AI does a
very good job of mashing it up.
(04:49):
And there's a great deal more, interms of the way that AI is able
to look at the entire marketing andinbound top of the funnel landscape.
When it comes to sales it's alittle bit of a different animal.
This idea that AI is going to take oversales, or you're going to need fewer
salespeople because of what AI can do.
It's absolutely ludicrousand we've already proven it.
(05:09):
So you recall thatChatGPT hit my radar hard.
It was already out there, but January of2023, we all woke up and we essentially
had let AI out of Pandora's box.
It had opened.
And we started seeing what it could doand I would never forget this because
I was laying in bed (I talk about thisin the book) with my wife we're about
(05:32):
to go to bed, but we're on our phoneswhich is what couples do when you're
when you've been married for 30 years,and I just I I typed in to chat gpt.
I'd read an article about itin Wall Street Journal I typed
in "hey write a story about Mr.
Wilson's foxhounds and the swamp cat,Bobcat" or whatever and this thing
pumped out this story and I showedto my wife and she's go, there's
(05:54):
no way even a robot wrote that.
I mean, she was like completely,there's no way robot wrote this.
I knew at that momentthat things had changed.
We'll flip forward a couple ofmonths and what do you have?
You've got tech entrepreneurs whoare going out to sales teams and
saying, AI will handle all yourprospecting for you, which essentially
meant that we are going to deployspam bots to send email to people.
Well, AI didn't sleep.
(06:16):
So it can do this relentlessly.
And within nine months that groupof people essentially has killed
one to one prospecting via email.
It's almost dead.
It sells teams everywhere.
No matter where you go, theywill tell you that it's dead.
Now, bulk email, the type of emailthat marketers typically do that
are built around newsletters or ine-commerce, they're built around
(06:37):
particular products, that hasn'tnecessarily yielded less results.
Our bulk email that we'd use as amarketing channel is doing just as
well as it's always done before.
But prospecting emails, you're luckyif any executive opens them anywhere
because of the way we look at AI.
When we know a robot didsomething, everything else that
looks like that becomes suspect.
(06:58):
So we just ignore it all.
I've had people tell me that we're goingto get rid of all the BDRs, that all the
outbound prospecting is going to be BDR.
Now we're talking about the robots aregoing to call people up and they're
going to have conversations with them.
There's a couple of companies out theredoing that, that will end badly too.
There's another company that isduplicating their sellers voices
and then using that to sendvoicemail-- that will end badly too.
(07:21):
Because the robot will overdo everything.
And I'm going to give you a really goodexample of this, Matt, that if you're a
marketer and you're listening to this,this should shock you because it will
break your brand with executives like me.
So I get this email, and I'm very verysuspect of of AI generated emails.
I usually know when they are,and I just delete and block them.
(07:43):
And I want you to hear what I'm saying.
I delete and I block.
So in the old days you would just delete.
Now I delete and block, because I don'twant to get hit by AI generated emails.
So, I get the subject line in.
I opened it because thesubject line was intriguing.
I turned around, was talking to Yuliwho is our producer and I'm having
a conversation with them, I turnedback, I got six additional emails
(08:05):
with the exact same subject linefrom six different companies who
were all using this AI bot from sometech company to do their prospecting.
And suddenly I realized, oh crap, itwas an AI that sent me this email.
So everybody else got deleted and blocked.
If you're a marketer, pay attention.
I blocked you.
(08:26):
I blocked your URL.
So you no longer have the abilityto do any marketing to me via
email because you're done forever.
And I would have never donethat before the age of AI.
I would have just deleted asalesperson's email and they
would have gone away eventually.
And maybe they would have come back tome down the road when the buying cycle
was better, but I would just, I wouldsignal my disinterest by the delete.
(08:48):
But because you're a robot, and Iknow that you are relentless and
I know that it is disingenuousbecause you're not a real person.
And I know that no oneactually invested in it.
In fact, I don't even know ifyou are a real salesperson.
And that's one of the things that'sbegun to emerge-- we'll grab an
email that we're interested in and westart trying to find the salesperson
on LinkedIn and they don't exist.
(09:10):
Or if we find them, we knowthat it's a fake profile.
Those type of things foryour brand kill your brand.
And that tells an executive, I'm notgoing to do business with you anymore.
But imagine how many timesyour top line URL gets blocked.
And you can even do those funny thingswhere you create another URL that you're
sending an email from, but even that'sgoing to end up getting blocked and you're
going to be chasing that whack a mole.
(09:31):
So this idea that you're going toreplace your sales team with a robot
is being proven out again and again.
It's absolutely ludicrous.
It's not going to work.
So what we have to start thinking aboutwhen it comes to AI for salespeople is
how are we leveraging AI for salespeopleto take a burden off of their plate so
that they can go spend more time in frontof customers having real life synchronous
(09:57):
conversations, which is what we do bestand is where you as an organization are
going to get a true competitive edge?
That's what we need tostart thinking about.
Matt (10:06):
Yeah, until robots sell to robots, which, hell, might
be down the road somewhere.
Until that happens, we stillwant to talk to each other.
We're still social animals thatwant to engage with each other.
The volume of stuff going out right now.
It is a hundred percent true,and someone last week described
it to me as The Great Ignore.
We have created this problem where we haveconditioned every decision maker to ignore
virtually all of what we're sending them.
(10:27):
You may have an authentic, good storyto tell, but you're not starting from
scratch building that reputation.
You're starting from a negative positionthat other people have put you in
that you still have to dig out of.
Your book, "The AI Edge", and thisconcept of save time, sell more.
When I think of that, I think of theold days when someone would spend
30 minutes researching a prospectto leave a 45 second voicemail.
That doesn't scale well.
(10:49):
That 30 minutes of research needsto now be almost instantaneous.
You think about the jobs to bedone to be a successful seller.
How do I increase my active selling time?
How do I get on the phonein live conversations with
more prospects more often?
The job to be done to get me there-- theprospect research, the intent signals, the
reason to call today versus yesterday-- tome, those are some of the key components
(11:11):
of how me as a sales rep, whether I'm anenterprise AE or a BDR, this is how I can
think about AI to really, juice my impact.
Jeb (11:19):
And I think that's where we start looking at the holy grail of AI for
salespeople is you come in in the morningand AI has done a beautiful job of
scouring intent data, taking a look atthe signals coming off your own website,
looking at even just your responses.
Like marketing does an emailblast, bulk email, and you
(11:41):
look at the responses to that.
What are the click throughs on that?
And you're looking at social, you'relooking at all these pieces and you're
looking inside the CRM and you comein as a salesperson and it says, here
are the 25 prospects that have thegreatest probability of moving into a
buying window with you now, call them.
And there's companiesthat are doing this today.
I've got a couple of clients that aredoing it, but they're, they're doing
(12:02):
it through a lot of mechanics thataren't capable of pulling together
all that disparate information.
To me, that's the holy grail, becausefrom a modern selling standpoint in the
United States, at least, we've been doingthis since 1900, industrial type selling.
But for 125 years, we havesucked at building lists.
We're terrible at it.
And we're still terrible at it.
(12:23):
So AI can do that.
That's something that yoursalesperson comes in the morning,
they're not doing research, they'regetting in front of the customer.
The thing you can do, and we have a coupleof prompts in the book is, okay, let's
just say that I need to go out and andbuild a message for a particular segment.
So I could take staffing, forexample, and say to my AI...
And your AI is going tobe built more and more.
I just had to do a really wonderfultour of SalesLoft and they've built
(12:46):
AI into their sequencing platform.
If I go in and I say.
I'm calling on mid sized staffingcompanies between 25 million and
100 million and I'm making coldcalls to them, and I'm looking for
some ideas for the challenges thatthe CEOs are [put in your role] are
(13:10):
experiencing in these type of companies.
Can you give me five?
In 15 seconds, maybe evenless, you'll have five.
Then now this is what's important,and this is where salespeople
fail and this is where marketerscome into play, because marketers
have to guide this and teach this.
It has to be part of your entiredevelopment process to teach
your salespeople how to use theirintuition and be thoughtful about
(13:31):
how they take a message like that.
Once you get those messages, now in ourworld, the fanatical prospecting world,
we're going to build because statements.
You should meet with me because.
So we would look at that and say,okay, we've got five of these things.
How do we mix this up and match thisup, stepping into the prospect's shoes,
using our human intuition, our humanadvantage to say, this is what we want
(13:51):
this message to say, because we thinkthis is going to have the greatest
impact on getting them to engage.
This is going to evoke theemotions that we're looking for
to get them to respond to us.
ChatGPT or Perplexity, Gemini, Copilotany of these large language models that
are kind of built in the same thing cangive you that information just like that.
Salespeople, we have to use our ability tothen go through that and build messaging.
(14:17):
Somebody explained this the other day.
it's the difference between comingin and staring at a blank page or
coming in and someone is givingyou all the words that you need.
And you just need to put thatpuzzle together that speeds us up.
And even from a marketing standpoint,I use this type of thing now when I'm
building course descriptions, like I go inand I use Claude most often for that cause
it's really good at course descriptions.
(14:38):
And I'll go, give me acourse description for this.
It's never cut and paste.
It's always take the coursedescription and then make it better.
Lean into what we know as humansand lean into that intuition.
But it shaves off an hour.
Think about it, you're buildinga 200 word course description.
It takes an hour to two hoursto build that right if you're
(14:59):
starting from a blank page.
I direct this to marketers because Ireally believe marketing has got to own
a lot of this getting into the salesorganization, but we have to teach our
sales people how to use these modelsthat way in order to get that time, even
through pre call planning, but we have tohelp them get that rhythm down, or they'll
spend all their time with a robot and notime with their clients, which are doing
(15:20):
right now already with your technology.
They're spending all their time ontechnology and no time with clients.
So we just got the sameproblem in a different format.
Matt (15:27):
You just a couple more minutes here with our guests today on
Sales Pipeline Radio, Jeb Blount,prolific author speaker, trainer,
and author of the new book, The AIEdge which you can find on Amazon
and all other fine retail bookstoresonline, bricks and mortar, et cetera.
Earlier you were talking about what I'dinterpret it as the difference between
lists and relationships-- the differencebetween own land and rented land.
(15:48):
The fact that if we are trying to trickprospects into engaging with us, then you
might get a few people that convert onthat, but that's not a long term strategy.
If Google goes and changestheir algorithm all of a sudden
your search is screwed, right?
I mean, there's so many places whereeven on LinkedIn, so many people in our
industry, flock to LinkedIn and spendtime there that could go away tomorrow.
So what are you doing to buildrelationships and credibility as an
(16:12):
individual sales rep, as a company foryour brand so that if Google went away
tomorrow, if LinkedIn went away tomorrow,the relationships, the brand you have
built, the reputation and trust you havewith that customer, it continues to exist.
So tactically you can say,well, build your list.
You've been a proponent on thatforever-- BUILD YOUR LIST so that
you have the direct relationship, butthere's still a difference between
(16:33):
a mailing list and a relationship.
Talk a little about that.
Jeb (16:36):
Yeah, that's the ultimate message of this particular book is that salespeople
are not going to go away because whenpeople are trying to make complex
buying decisions, they need your help.
And a robot can't do that.
A robot's not going to helpthem make that final decision.
So our job is to go outand build relationships.
Our job is to havesynchronous conversations.
(16:59):
And everything that we're doing aroundAI should increase the number of
synchronous real time conversationswe're able to have with people.
And there's really a coupleof mechanisms for that.
We have the phone, we havevideo, and we have in person.
And that's how we're goingto have those conversations.
So as a seller, your human advantageis your ability to have empathy.
(17:20):
It's your ability to, as you say,build the relationship versus the list.
It's your ability to demonstratethat you are a consultant.
I mean, essentially, that'swhat we're trying to do.
We're trying to move them from a placewhere we're selling them something
to we're an advisor that allowsthem to step into making a decision.
We have to understand that in everyinteraction with another human being,
(17:42):
they're making five core decisionson their buying journey about us.
And that is, do I like you?
Do you listen to me?
Do you make me feel important?
Do you understand me?
Do you get me and my problems?
And do I trust and believe you?
And you have to answer all five ofthose questions in order to get people
to either advocate for you on a buyingcommittee or to buy directly from you.
(18:02):
And the whole promise of AI is that itallows you to flip the switch and really
change the current balance, which is,and Matt, you can catch me if I've got my
number wrong, but I think that salespeopleare spending somewhere between 60 and 70
percent of their day doing things thatare non sales work activity and you can
(18:23):
start spending 60 to 70 percent of yourday doing things that are sales activity.
That is having conversationswith other human beings.
That's what we're good at.
And by the way, people are starvingfor it, even though sometimes it
doesn't feel like they are becausethey keep you at arm's length.
But the more that we do that,the better it's going to get.
And I'll leave you with one thing.
If you are a purely inside salesorganization you better by God, get
(18:46):
good at the phone quickly, because asyou said, and I love what you said,
The Great Ignore, I'm stealing that.
It was great.
But they're ignoring allof your other channels.
You're you've got that.
If you're in field sales, as much asI'm not a big fan of prospecting by
foot, because it's so inefficient,suddenly they can't ignore you if
you're standing in their lobby.
They can't ignore you if youwalk up on the back dock and
(19:07):
you start talking with people.
So you've got to get out thereand get face to face with
your, with your customers.
That's back.
Matt (19:13):
Yeah, I 100 percent agree with you.
I know Anthony Innarino agreeswith you on this as well.
I will tell you this year I createda quarterly goal of a number of
calls to chief marketing officers.
And for me, doing a regular habit ofoutbound prospecting is a new muscle.
It's not cold calling.
These are people that have been followingour content, people in our CMO community.
It's still an outbound call.
(19:34):
It's still an an unplanned call.
It's my second best sourceof pipeline this year.
[yes].
Right?
It's literally the phone, notzoom, not video-- phone calls.
So for anyone that thinks like the phoneis dead for anyone that says that people
aren't working, they're working fromhome, they're not answering their phone.
I'm here to tell you, even thechief marketing officers, it works.
So, that's I think going to bea huge differentiator for people
(19:56):
that are not just looking for theshortcut, not just looking for
how do I do more faster, cheaper?
How do you do more better?
And I think that's ahuge theme of your book.
So folks check out Jeb.
You can find him on LinkedIn,find him at salesgravy.com.
He mentioned courses.
He is a fount of content and resourcesand advice and best practices.
Definitely go to Amazon, get The AI Edge.
Jeb, I know you're super busy.
(20:17):
Thank you for grabbing a coupleof minutes and doing this with us.
Jeb (20:20):
Thank you so much.
I'm so grateful.
I appreciate it.
Matt (20:22):
Absolutely.
Well, thanks everyone forwatching and listening.
We'll see you next timeon Sales Pipeline Radio.
Take care.
Welcome everybody to another episode of Sales Pipeline Radio.
I'm your host, Matt Heinz.
Super excited to have you all here.
Thank you for joining us.
If you are here live, in the middle ofyour work day, work week, we're super
excited that you're a part of this.
If you are watching or listening ondemand, thank you so much for downloading
and subscribing to Sales Pipeline Radio.
If you found us somehow onaccident, on purpose, I would
(00:36):
love to have you stick around.
You can find every episode of SalesPipeline Radio, past, present,
future at salespipelineradio.com.
Always trying to feature some ofthe best and brightest minds in
B2B marketing to help you thinkbetter, market better, sell better.
Very excited to have back on theshow, Jeb Blount, CEO of Sales Gravy.
Jeb, how you doing, man?
Jeb (00:54):
I'm doing pretty good, man.
It's been a long time.
Matt (00:57):
It's been way too long.
Since you're in your studio,I assume it means you're home,
which means that is a rare event.
Because I feel like every time likeI see or hear from you, you're an
airport or in a boardroom somewhere.
For the half of a person who doesn'tknow Jeb Blount is, just quickly
gives an introduction yourself.
Jeb (01:11):
I'm the CEO and founder of Sales Gravy.
We're an international sales trainingand Go-To-Markets consulting company.
We work with sales teams truly allover the globe, everywhere except for
Antarctica, but I'm working on that.
And you're right.
I do travel a lot.
I think I've spent 154 nightsso far this year on the road.
I've had a couple of months whereI've been able to focus and write, but
(01:33):
next week, all the way to Christmas,I'm going to be pretty much gone.
Matt (01:38):
I'm a lifelong marketer.
I didn't carry a bag until 16 yearsago when I started a business.
And then once you have your ownbusiness, you very much are in sales.
And as a lifelong marketer, I tryto spend as much time as I can
learning about sales and learningfrom people that are sales experts.
And when those people ask me, like,who are the people you read and listen
to the most, of the top five people,two are on that book right there.
You and Anthony Iannarino, whoI've just learned a ton from.
(02:00):
I have no idea how you, with allthat schedule, have time to churn
out the volume and quality of thebooks that you do, you've written
a number of amazing books aroundprospecting, selling strategy.
You had a book aroundselling in the pandemic.
And not surprisingly, the new book isfocused on how to leverage AI in sales.
There's so much noise around AI overallin business and especially around sales.
(02:24):
I was told a year and a half agothat by now physical sellers,
inside sales, BDRs would be gone.
Hasn't happened.
Those that aren't using AI, I thinkare quickly at a disadvantage.
Tell me a little bit about yourperspective and what you're
seeing in sales relative to AI.
Jeb (02:39):
Yeah, it's true.
Let's maybe back up.
We'll talk about marketing and salesand AI and how it all fits together.
So when we think about AI currently atthe pipeline side, so from marketing
all the way through sales, and as youare clearly aware, and you talk about
with your audience all the time, salesand marketing from a merger standpoint
is way different than it was say, 25,30 years ago, where these were two
(03:01):
separate entities and separate silos.
These days, there's a mash where Marketingflows into sales because you're so
responsible for leads and lead generation.
And then salespeople, they own alittle bit of that inbound lead
generation themselves through theirwork through personal branding
and getting out in social andsupporting the marketing function.
And when you get those two things workingtogether really well, it's powerful.
(03:24):
When my marketing team, my sales teamare all working in the same direction
and we're looking at the world as onefunnel or, one path for prospects.
It works great.
I think AI right now, from an impactstandpoint, is having a greater impact
on marketing than it is on sales.
And the reason is that with, withmarketing in particular, when it
(03:45):
comes to lead generation, you've gotcontent creation, which is something
that AI is pretty good at withsome human help, human shepherding.
So you're able to create a lot of reallygood content with fewer human beings
because AI picks up a lot of the heavylifting and the humans are able then to
use their creativity to further craftthat content to make it more powerful.
(04:07):
I think AI is doing a really goodjob in terms of signaling intent and
helping us understand where to targetand micro target prospects that are
moving into buying windows that theymay not even know they're moving into
the buying window but their breadcrumbsthat they're leaving online or giving
those clues and smart marketers are ableto grab that information and they'll
build marketing campaigns around that.
(04:28):
We've even seen it just in your abilityto work in social, which is again,
inbounds for content creation but youknow I've got one person doing the
job that I would have had to have 10people doing even three years ago in
order to create the volume of, say,video content that we're able to build.
Now, humans built the video contentto begin with, but AI does a
very good job of mashing it up.
(04:49):
And there's a great deal more, interms of the way that AI is able
to look at the entire marketing andinbound top of the funnel landscape.
When it comes to sales it's alittle bit of a different animal.
This idea that AI is going to take oversales, or you're going to need fewer
salespeople because of what AI can do.
It's absolutely ludicrousand we've already proven it.
(05:09):
So you recall thatChatGPT hit my radar hard.
It was already out there, but January of2023, we all woke up and we essentially
had let AI out of Pandora's box.
It had opened.
And we started seeing what it could doand I would never forget this because
I was laying in bed (I talk about thisin the book) with my wife we're about
(05:32):
to go to bed, but we're on our phoneswhich is what couples do when you're
when you've been married for 30 years,and I just I I typed in to chat gpt.
I'd read an article about itin Wall Street Journal I typed
in "hey write a story about Mr.
Wilson's foxhounds and the swamp cat,Bobcat" or whatever and this thing
pumped out this story and I showedto my wife and she's go, there's
(05:54):
no way even a robot wrote that.
I mean, she was like completely,there's no way robot wrote this.
I knew at that momentthat things had changed.
We'll flip forward a couple ofmonths and what do you have?
You've got tech entrepreneurs whoare going out to sales teams and
saying, AI will handle all yourprospecting for you, which essentially
meant that we are going to deployspam bots to send email to people.
Well, AI didn't sleep.
(06:16):
So it can do this relentlessly.
And within nine months that groupof people essentially has killed
one to one prospecting via email.
It's almost dead.
It sells teams everywhere.
No matter where you go, theywill tell you that it's dead.
Now, bulk email, the type of emailthat marketers typically do that
are built around newsletters or ine-commerce, they're built around
(06:37):
particular products, that hasn'tnecessarily yielded less results.
Our bulk email that we'd use as amarketing channel is doing just as
well as it's always done before.
But prospecting emails, you're luckyif any executive opens them anywhere
because of the way we look at AI.
When we know a robot didsomething, everything else that
looks like that becomes suspect.
(06:58):
So we just ignore it all.
I've had people tell me that we're goingto get rid of all the BDRs, that all the
outbound prospecting is going to be BDR.
Now we're talking about the robots aregoing to call people up and they're
going to have conversations with them.
There's a couple of companies out theredoing that, that will end badly too.
There's another company that isduplicating their sellers voices
and then using that to sendvoicemail-- that will end badly too.
(07:21):
Because the robot will overdo everything.
And I'm going to give you a really goodexample of this, Matt, that if you're a
marketer and you're listening to this,this should shock you because it will
break your brand with executives like me.
So I get this email, and I'm very verysuspect of of AI generated emails.
I usually know when they are,and I just delete and block them.
(07:43):
And I want you to hear what I'm saying.
I delete and I block.
So in the old days you would just delete.
Now I delete and block, because I don'twant to get hit by AI generated emails.
So, I get the subject line in.
I opened it because thesubject line was intriguing.
I turned around, was talking to Yuliwho is our producer and I'm having
a conversation with them, I turnedback, I got six additional emails
(08:05):
with the exact same subject linefrom six different companies who
were all using this AI bot from sometech company to do their prospecting.
And suddenly I realized, oh crap, itwas an AI that sent me this email.
So everybody else got deleted and blocked.
If you're a marketer, pay attention.
I blocked you.
(08:26):
I blocked your URL.
So you no longer have the abilityto do any marketing to me via
email because you're done forever.
And I would have never donethat before the age of AI.
I would have just deleted asalesperson's email and they
would have gone away eventually.
And maybe they would have come back tome down the road when the buying cycle
was better, but I would just, I wouldsignal my disinterest by the delete.
(08:48):
But because you're a robot, and Iknow that you are relentless and
I know that it is disingenuousbecause you're not a real person.
And I know that no oneactually invested in it.
In fact, I don't even know ifyou are a real salesperson.
And that's one of the things that'sbegun to emerge-- we'll grab an
email that we're interested in and westart trying to find the salesperson
on LinkedIn and they don't exist.
(09:10):
Or if we find them, we knowthat it's a fake profile.
Those type of things foryour brand kill your brand.
And that tells an executive, I'm notgoing to do business with you anymore.
But imagine how many timesyour top line URL gets blocked.
And you can even do those funny thingswhere you create another URL that you're
sending an email from, but even that'sgoing to end up getting blocked and you're
going to be chasing that whack a mole.
(09:31):
So this idea that you're going toreplace your sales team with a robot
is being proven out again and again.
It's absolutely ludicrous.
It's not going to work.
So what we have to start thinking aboutwhen it comes to AI for salespeople is
how are we leveraging AI for salespeopleto take a burden off of their plate so
that they can go spend more time in frontof customers having real life synchronous
(09:57):
conversations, which is what we do bestand is where you as an organization are
going to get a true competitive edge?
That's what we need tostart thinking about.
Matt (10:06):
Yeah, until robots sell to robots, which, hell, might
be down the road somewhere.
Until that happens, we stillwant to talk to each other.
We're still social animals thatwant to engage with each other.
The volume of stuff going out right now.
It is a hundred percent true,and someone last week described
it to me as The Great Ignore.
We have created this problem where we haveconditioned every decision maker to ignore
virtually all of what we're sending them.
(10:27):
You may have an authentic, good storyto tell, but you're not starting from
scratch building that reputation.
You're starting from a negative positionthat other people have put you in
that you still have to dig out of.
Your book, "The AI Edge", and thisconcept of save time, sell more.
When I think of that, I think of theold days when someone would spend
30 minutes researching a prospectto leave a 45 second voicemail.
That doesn't scale well.
(10:49):
That 30 minutes of research needsto now be almost instantaneous.
You think about the jobs to bedone to be a successful seller.
How do I increase my active selling time?
How do I get on the phonein live conversations with
more prospects more often?
The job to be done to get me there-- theprospect research, the intent signals, the
reason to call today versus yesterday-- tome, those are some of the key components
(11:11):
of how me as a sales rep, whether I'm anenterprise AE or a BDR, this is how I can
think about AI to really, juice my impact.
Jeb (11:19):
And I think that's where we start looking at the holy grail of AI for
salespeople is you come in in the morningand AI has done a beautiful job of
scouring intent data, taking a look atthe signals coming off your own website,
looking at even just your responses.
Like marketing does an emailblast, bulk email, and you
(11:41):
look at the responses to that.
What are the click throughs on that?
And you're looking at social, you'relooking at all these pieces and you're
looking inside the CRM and you comein as a salesperson and it says, here
are the 25 prospects that have thegreatest probability of moving into a
buying window with you now, call them.
And there's companiesthat are doing this today.
I've got a couple of clients that aredoing it, but they're, they're doing
(12:02):
it through a lot of mechanics thataren't capable of pulling together
all that disparate information.
To me, that's the holy grail, becausefrom a modern selling standpoint in the
United States, at least, we've been doingthis since 1900, industrial type selling.
But for 125 years, we havesucked at building lists.
We're terrible at it.
And we're still terrible at it.
(12:23):
So AI can do that.
That's something that yoursalesperson comes in the morning,
they're not doing research, they'regetting in front of the customer.
The thing you can do, and we have a coupleof prompts in the book is, okay, let's
just say that I need to go out and andbuild a message for a particular segment.
So I could take staffing, forexample, and say to my AI...
And your AI is going tobe built more and more.
I just had to do a really wonderfultour of SalesLoft and they've built
(12:46):
AI into their sequencing platform.
If I go in and I say.
I'm calling on mid sized staffingcompanies between 25 million and
100 million and I'm making coldcalls to them, and I'm looking for
some ideas for the challenges thatthe CEOs are [put in your role] are
(13:10):
experiencing in these type of companies.
Can you give me five?
In 15 seconds, maybe evenless, you'll have five.
Then now this is what's important,and this is where salespeople
fail and this is where marketerscome into play, because marketers
have to guide this and teach this.
It has to be part of your entiredevelopment process to teach
your salespeople how to use theirintuition and be thoughtful about
(13:31):
how they take a message like that.
Once you get those messages, now in ourworld, the fanatical prospecting world,
we're going to build because statements.
You should meet with me because.
So we would look at that and say,okay, we've got five of these things.
How do we mix this up and match thisup, stepping into the prospect's shoes,
using our human intuition, our humanadvantage to say, this is what we want
(13:51):
this message to say, because we thinkthis is going to have the greatest
impact on getting them to engage.
This is going to evoke theemotions that we're looking for
to get them to respond to us.
ChatGPT or Perplexity, Gemini, Copilotany of these large language models that
are kind of built in the same thing cangive you that information just like that.
Salespeople, we have to use our ability tothen go through that and build messaging.
(14:17):
Somebody explained this the other day.
it's the difference between comingin and staring at a blank page or
coming in and someone is givingyou all the words that you need.
And you just need to put thatpuzzle together that speeds us up.
And even from a marketing standpoint,I use this type of thing now when I'm
building course descriptions, like I go inand I use Claude most often for that cause
it's really good at course descriptions.
(14:38):
And I'll go, give me acourse description for this.
It's never cut and paste.
It's always take the coursedescription and then make it better.
Lean into what we know as humansand lean into that intuition.
But it shaves off an hour.
Think about it, you're buildinga 200 word course description.
It takes an hour to two hoursto build that right if you're
(14:59):
starting from a blank page.
I direct this to marketers because Ireally believe marketing has got to own
a lot of this getting into the salesorganization, but we have to teach our
sales people how to use these modelsthat way in order to get that time, even
through pre call planning, but we have tohelp them get that rhythm down, or they'll
spend all their time with a robot and notime with their clients, which are doing
(15:20):
right now already with your technology.
They're spending all their time ontechnology and no time with clients.
So we just got the sameproblem in a different format.
Matt (15:27):
You just a couple more minutes here with our guests today on
Sales Pipeline Radio, Jeb Blount,prolific author speaker, trainer,
and author of the new book, The AIEdge which you can find on Amazon
and all other fine retail bookstoresonline, bricks and mortar, et cetera.
Earlier you were talking about what I'dinterpret it as the difference between
lists and relationships-- the differencebetween own land and rented land.
(15:48):
The fact that if we are trying to trickprospects into engaging with us, then you
might get a few people that convert onthat, but that's not a long term strategy.
If Google goes and changestheir algorithm all of a sudden
your search is screwed, right?
I mean, there's so many places whereeven on LinkedIn, so many people in our
industry, flock to LinkedIn and spendtime there that could go away tomorrow.
So what are you doing to buildrelationships and credibility as an
(16:12):
individual sales rep, as a company foryour brand so that if Google went away
tomorrow, if LinkedIn went away tomorrow,the relationships, the brand you have
built, the reputation and trust you havewith that customer, it continues to exist.
So tactically you can say,well, build your list.
You've been a proponent on thatforever-- BUILD YOUR LIST so that
you have the direct relationship, butthere's still a difference between
(16:33):
a mailing list and a relationship.
Talk a little about that.
Jeb (16:36):
Yeah, that's the ultimate message of this particular book is that salespeople
are not going to go away because whenpeople are trying to make complex
buying decisions, they need your help.
And a robot can't do that.
A robot's not going to helpthem make that final decision.
So our job is to go outand build relationships.
Our job is to havesynchronous conversations.
(16:59):
And everything that we're doing aroundAI should increase the number of
synchronous real time conversationswe're able to have with people.
And there's really a coupleof mechanisms for that.
We have the phone, we havevideo, and we have in person.
And that's how we're goingto have those conversations.
So as a seller, your human advantageis your ability to have empathy.
(17:20):
It's your ability to, as you say,build the relationship versus the list.
It's your ability to demonstratethat you are a consultant.
I mean, essentially, that'swhat we're trying to do.
We're trying to move them from a placewhere we're selling them something
to we're an advisor that allowsthem to step into making a decision.
We have to understand that in everyinteraction with another human being,
(17:42):
they're making five core decisionson their buying journey about us.
And that is, do I like you?
Do you listen to me?
Do you make me feel important?
Do you understand me?
Do you get me and my problems?
And do I trust and believe you?
And you have to answer all five ofthose questions in order to get people
to either advocate for you on a buyingcommittee or to buy directly from you.
(18:02):
And the whole promise of AI is that itallows you to flip the switch and really
change the current balance, which is,and Matt, you can catch me if I've got my
number wrong, but I think that salespeopleare spending somewhere between 60 and 70
percent of their day doing things thatare non sales work activity and you can
(18:23):
start spending 60 to 70 percent of yourday doing things that are sales activity.
That is having conversationswith other human beings.
That's what we're good at.
And by the way, people are starvingfor it, even though sometimes it
doesn't feel like they are becausethey keep you at arm's length.
But the more that we do that,the better it's going to get.
And I'll leave you with one thing.
If you are a purely inside salesorganization you better by God, get
(18:46):
good at the phone quickly, because asyou said, and I love what you said,
The Great Ignore, I'm stealing that.
It was great.
But they're ignoring allof your other channels.
You're you've got that.
If you're in field sales, as much asI'm not a big fan of prospecting by
foot, because it's so inefficient,suddenly they can't ignore you if
you're standing in their lobby.
They can't ignore you if youwalk up on the back dock and
(19:07):
you start talking with people.
So you've got to get out thereand get face to face with
your, with your customers.
That's back.
Matt (19:13):
Yeah, I 100 percent agree with you.
I know Anthony Innarino agreeswith you on this as well.
I will tell you this year I createda quarterly goal of a number of
calls to chief marketing officers.
And for me, doing a regular habit ofoutbound prospecting is a new muscle.
It's not cold calling.
These are people that have been followingour content, people in our CMO community.
It's still an outbound call.
(19:34):
It's still an an unplanned call.
It's my second best sourceof pipeline this year.
[yes].
Right?
It's literally the phone, notzoom, not video-- phone calls.
So for anyone that thinks like the phoneis dead for anyone that says that people
aren't working, they're working fromhome, they're not answering their phone.
I'm here to tell you, even thechief marketing officers, it works.
So, that's I think going to bea huge differentiator for people
(19:56):
that are not just looking for theshortcut, not just looking for
how do I do more faster, cheaper?
How do you do more better?
And I think that's ahuge theme of your book.
So folks check out Jeb.
You can find him on LinkedIn,find him at salesgravy.com.
He mentioned courses.
He is a fount of content and resourcesand advice and best practices.
Definitely go to Amazon, get The AI Edge.
Jeb, I know you're super busy.
(20:17):
Thank you for grabbing a coupleof minutes and doing this with us.
Jeb (20:20):
Thank you so much.
I'm so grateful.
I appreciate it.
Matt (20:22):
Absolutely.
Well, thanks everyone forwatching and listening.
We'll see you next timeon Sales Pipeline Radio.
Take care.
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