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How AI Will Improve Your Sales Prospecting · Sales Pipeline Radio

• 0:01
  Matt Heinz: All right.
• 0:02
  Welcome everyone to another episode of Sales Pipeline Radio.
• 0:05
  I'm your host, Matt Heinz.
• 0:06
  Excited to have y'all here today.
• 0:08
  We have a really exciting topic conversation and guest today
• 0:11
  talking about the impact of sales, assuming the impact of AI on sales
• 0:15
  and the evolution of tech in sales.
• 0:16
  So we'll get into that here shortly.
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  If you are watching, participating, listening live on LinkedIn or YouTube,
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  thanks so much for joining us in the middle of your work day and work week.
• 0:26
  If you are listening and watching on demand, thanks very much for checking us
• 0:29
  out, for listening, for subscribing, for downloading, if you like what you hear
• 0:33
  today, every episode of Sales Pipeline Radio past, present, future, always
• 0:37
  available at SalesPipelineRadio.Com.
• 0:40
  Very excited for our topic today.
• 0:42
  I was I was at the marketing artificial intelligence
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  conference last week in Cleveland.
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  It was two days of discussion on the impact AI is already having on marketing
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  in particular, which is just scratching the surface of what is to come.
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  And inherently we started talking about some of the broader go
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  to market motions as well.
• 1:00
  The impact on sales, marketing, customer success, account management.
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  So very excited to have with us today, Matt Millen.
• 1:06
  He's the CEO of regie.Ai.
• 1:09
  Matt Millen: So first of all, Matt, thanks very much for
• 1:11
  taking the time joining us today.
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  Great to be here with you, Matt.
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  And great to see you again, my friend.
• 1:16
  Matt Heinz: Absolutely.
• 1:17
  Well, you have had a front seat to the evolution of technology and sales given
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  your role at Outreach and elsewhere.
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  So maybe start with a little bit of your background.
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  Kind of where you've been, what you've seen.
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  And let's talk about that evolution of how technology has
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  supported enhanced, accelerated the sales function and impact.
• 1:35
  Matt Millen: Yeah.
• 1:35
  Maybe it goes back too far, Matt.
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  I started in 1987.
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  So this is before corporate email.
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  This is before the internet and I've had a front row seat to the infusion
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  of technology into the selling process.
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  And what do you start to see is you start to see the
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  problems that technology solves.
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  You also start to see some of the problems technology creates.
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  As you mentioned, I was at Outreach leading revenue there.
• 2:02
  And Matt, for the first time in my career at Outreach, content was a
• 2:06
  problem for the modern sales rep.
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  And what I mean by that, a few things were happening at the same time.
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  One, sales was getting reliant on these template email sequences to go out.
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  So somebody had to figure out how to write them to drive engagement.
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  And at the same time, personalization was slowing down because we templates.
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  That's when we figured out there had to be a better way to engage
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  our prospects and customers.
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  Matt Heinz: Well, you've been a part of that for a long time.
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  I remember spending a lot of time with you at Outreach.
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  And now excited to see what you guys are doing here today.
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  I love the idea of the problems that tech solves as well as
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  the problems that tech creates.
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  It could similarly be said for artificial intelligence as we start to grapple with
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  what that means in sales and marketing.
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  Obviously what I see it as a huge opportunity, very exciting.
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  A lot of people are pretty scared about what AI is, what it's going to do.
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  Talk a little bit about that.
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  Let's talk about that up front and address some of those fears and how you
• 3:05
  are addressing and managing that with the work you do and with your customers.
• 3:09
  Matt Millen: Yeah, I think to give that context is like to look at the the
• 3:12
  evolution of selling, you know, at the earliest stage, most reps did everything.
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  Most reps were full cycle.
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  We didn't have any technology.
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  You rely on habits and bias in terms of what to do.
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  You know, 10 years ago, software automation came for sales.
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  And this was like an amplification of activity.
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  Good activity got amplified.
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  Bad activity got amplified, but it allowed us to do more.
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  And it also, from a team perspective, you started seeing role specialization
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  and teams where you had teams like sales development reps, focusing on
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  top of funnel, account executives, or closers, post sale and success.
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  We started seeing that then all of this automation started
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  giving us insights and data.
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  So it wasn't just do more.
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  We can start figuring out what was working and how can we get better.
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  And now we're in a completely different world now in the new world is this we're
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  going from simple automation and simple automation is really where the human
• 4:13
  makes the decision and the technology helps us execute, and that's the world
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  of sales engagement as we know it.
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  Or, you can have some automation in your CRM helping you here, but
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  where we're going is AI automation.
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  And the difference is like the machines are going to make the decisions.
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  And humans will help execute the tasks and so the major shift is like, who
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  can make the better decision based on the data very quickly and help guide
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  us into optimizing the actions and the activities that we're taking to
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  drive the results and the outcomes?
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  Matt Heinz: I think that's a really important distinction between the
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  jobs and the tasks, because at the same time, I hear some salespeople and
• 5:00
  even people throughout go to market marketing sales, other roles worry about
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  what AI is and what it's going to do.
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  They concurrently complain about some of the tedious, repetitious
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  tasks that they're asked to do.
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  And if you look at frontline salespeople like, Oh, we need you to prospect.
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  We need you to create this email.
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  We need you to mark all this in CRM, like all these things, the salespeople have
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  complained about forever, rightly, right?
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  Because this isn't an act of selling motion.
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  Like this seems like this is a godsend.
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  If we now have robots and machines that can take those tasks off of our plates and
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  let our craftsmen, like our specialists who can master the art of sales and do
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  what they do best with more of their time.
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  Matt Millen: Yeah, I would agree.
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  And you might also want to like deconstruct those tasks.
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  So there's elements of those tasks that we can better leverage
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  technology, better leverage AI.
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  So think about personalizing an email for a moment.
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  You know, you can't personalize without doing research and research takes time.
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  So I would go out to Matt Heinz's linkedIn profile.
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  I would look at your company website.
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  I would search news on you.
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  I check your Twitter feed.
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  I have to open up multiple tabs, go to multiple places.
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  And then I've got to extract something that's contextually
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  relevant to why I want to reach out.
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  And then I've got that daunting task of how do I take what I've learned about you,
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  combine that with why I want to talk to you and compose an email worth reading
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  that's going to get your attention.
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  So the average rep that's going to take 17 to 22 minutes to do , with
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  some pretty poor engagement.
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  My product will do this in 37 seconds and the engagement is significantly higher.
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  It can be depending on whose stats you're looking at it with 250 to much
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  higher, you know, it's going to depend.
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  But the point is.
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  You're doing two things at the same time here, Matt.
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  One is you're increasing your ability to drive productivity.
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  So what used to take 17 minutes now takes 37 seconds.
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  So you're doing more.
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  And in most cases, you're doing better.
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  Because the contextual nature of the email, how it's written using industry
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  best practices is typically better constructed and designed to stand out
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  in the mailbox and drive engagement.
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  So we're going further faster with AI.
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  That's what the net result is.
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  So we don't want to be scared of this.
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  What we want to figure out is how do we incorporate this into our workflow
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  to allow us to go further faster?
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  And that's available today, right now.
• 7:35
  Matt Heinz: It certainly is.
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  Talking today on Sales Pipeline Radio with Matt Millen.
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  He's the Co-Founder and President of regie.ai.
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  To your point, what's available right now, I think it's just scratching the
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  surface of what we're going to see if we have this conversation in a year.
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  If by default ask AI to do whatever you're starting to do next, a lot of
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  things it's not going to do, but if it can't do it today, put that question
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  on a shelf and wait for chat GPT 4.
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  5, wait for Deep Mind from Google early next year.
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  Like the capabilities are going to go crazy.
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  I want to address this from a perspective of change management.
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  Right.
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  So we can talk all day long about prospecting lead response,
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  mid funnel triggers, customer success, impact, all the things.
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  We are asking sales reps to change their behavior.
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  We did this when we asked them to use CRM.
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  We did this when we asked them to start using outreach, new tools, new
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  processes, changing my behavior, even if it is to my benefit, sometimes it
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  starts with a response of trepidation.
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  So how, from your experience, having done this so many times, how do you
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  manage through the change management to get adoption of these new tools?
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  Matt Millen: So, first of all, it's a very good question and
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  it's for some teams more than others, it's a very real problem.
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  Number one, you talk about like adoption, there's historically
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  low adoption on your CRM.
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  It's not easy to use.
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  It's not fun to use.
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  It's not naturally positioned in your workflow.
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  It's something you have to go do.
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  What Outreach and Sales Loft and others did was it supported your main workflow
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  and it updated the CRM for you, right?
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  So you sat on it for workflows.
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  So one of the things that you see different engagement rates with
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  different software, based on how naturally it sits in your workflow.
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  So AI adoption can be hard or easy.
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  Here's four things that we've done to drive engagement because,
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  you know, you said, hey, run out to chat and do something.
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  We don't think you should run out anywhere.
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  So regie.ai is integrated with your sales engagement platform, your CRM,
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  LinkedIn, LinkedIn navigator, your email inbox, wherever you as a sales rep are
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  working, you don't have to go anywhere, regie's is right there as your co pilot.
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  It's right there.
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  Number two, it actually knows what you're doing.
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  So it's going to serve up content relevant to the step.
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  You don't have to go prompt it, tell it what you need, like regie intuitively
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  knows what you need right where you are.
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  Third, is the output then doesn't need any editing or trying
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  to figure out what you got.
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  It's sales ready content that you can just use.
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  You can edit it, but you don't need to.
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  And then fourth, like to support it, your manager needs visibility.
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  Your manager needs to be able to coach you and manage you.
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  So we provide a manager dashboard that shows all the personalization
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  engagement and what's going on.
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  So you, you got great content for your Monday morning sales meeting.
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  You can coach your reps one on one.
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  So first is you need a product that supports adoption.
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  So it needs to be enterprise grade.
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  It needs to understand.
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  And then quite frankly, it needs to be three things.
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  It needs to be easy.
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  It needs to be fun.
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  And it needs to work.
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  It needs to do what the promise is.
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  And that's how we think about it.
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  So we sit in the workflow, and quite frankly, if the manager is saying, Matt, I
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  need you to, personalize 17 emails a day, the average email takes you 20 minutes,
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  there's no way and now you can do it.
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  So, it's training.
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  Now, there are situations where teams still don't want to adopt the technology.
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  We've got the ability to basically do the personalization that the
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  reps, whether they want to do it or not, we serve it up, and then we can
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  just send them out automatically.
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  So, we've got the ability now to be a co pilot with a rep
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  or an autopilot for the rep.
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  Matt Heinz: We tend to think about technology, especially frontline tech
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  tools like this as primarily impacting your BDRs, your sales reps, your AEs.
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  Can you talk about why this is so beneficial to sales managers, right?
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  Not just in terms of sort of the visibility into what's happening, but
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  one of the biggest complaints I hear from sales managers is they spend too
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  much time in spreadsheets and reports and not enough time coaching, right?
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  Not enough time provide serving as a coach to their reps into their teams.
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  It seems to me that with the automation of more of these tasks, it allows
• 11:49
  the managers to do a better job of coaching performance and skill
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  sets among their teams as well.
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  Matt Millen: You're 100% right.
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  The managers want to be better, better managers.
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  They want to be better coaches.
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  But I think managers have these fundamental challenges in sales.
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  And I would say all of us do.
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  Challenge number one, you want your reps to be busier.
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  That means doing the right things more often.
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  Number two, managers want more of their team winning.
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  You want better participation, more reps actually contributing to the success.
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  And three managers want to know what's going on.
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  Those are the three things that most managers and sales are looking for.
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  Be busier, hit your number and I need visibility so I know
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  where to dive in and help you.
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  And AI can help.
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  AI can help the activity levels.
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  Doing more of the right things quickly, by that more reps will ultimately be
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  effective and successful in their role and better instrumentation of the process
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  allows them to understand very quickly what's going well and what isn't so they
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  know where to go in and where to be a great coach, where to be a great manager.
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  Matt Heinz: I've been told that the role of the BDR is going extinct.
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  The function of the BDR is becoming irrelevant in the sales process and
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  that AI is going to take over that job and do it on behalf of humans-- GO!
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  Matt Millen: So first of all, it's one of the best debates on LinkedIn.
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  I think role specialization makes sense on certain sales cycles with
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  certain products that have enough value to justify the way that they're
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  creating that division of labor.
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  Other sales cycles are maybe better tuned for a full cycle in the
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  rapidity of the actual sales process.
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  So I don't think there'll be one or the other.
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  I think not one will dominate.
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  It'll depend.
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  That being said, AI can help regardless of how you've structured
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  your team, how you've structured your buyer's experience with you.
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  Matt Heinz: It's an interesting debate on LinkedIn and other places.
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  I've had this discussion last week the marketing context and, separating
• 14:01
  the idea of sort of jobs and tasks.
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  If you ask a marketer what they did in the 1960s, that would be a very
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  different looking job than what they did 40 years later when the internet
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  showed up, let alone what has been happening now, 20 plus years later.
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  Right.
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  I remember, my dad did marketing for caterpillar tractor.
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  And I literally one day said, like, I can't imagine doing
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  my job without a computer.
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  How did you do your job?
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  He said, there was no concept of a computer.
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  We did it differently.
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  The job and need and the role persists.
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  And I think that we continue to see technology for years, right?
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  Having an improving our ability has been giving us tools to do our job.
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  But tools and tasks are different than the job at hand.
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  Maybe someday robots are going to sell the robots, but we are social people
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  that like talking to other humans.
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  And I think that human touch that art, that craftsmanship that goes along
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  with that, that can be enhanced with technology that can be supported and
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  augmented with the right tools to let people do what people do best.
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  I think other people respond to that well.
• 15:00
  Matt Millen: 100%.
• 15:01
  Matt Heinz: All right.
• 15:02
  Well that's about all the time we have today.
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  Matt Millen, President of regie.ai.
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  Thank you very much.
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  It's great to see you again.
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  Great to hear that you guys are doing well.
• 15:09
  Hi to Nina and the whole team over there.
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  You guys have built a real dream team on your exec team as well.
• 15:13
  So glad to hear you're doing well and good to see you.
• 15:16
  Matt Millen: Cheers, my friend.
• 15:17
  Matt Heinz: Awesome.
• 15:17
  Thanks so much to Matt.
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  Thank you to everyone for joining us today.
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  We'll be back here next week, every week, 11:30 am Pacific.
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  Thanks for watching.
• 15:24
  This has been another episode of Sales Pipeline Radio.
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  Take care.