Latest / Sales Pipeline Radio / Building Sales Relationships in the Age of AI

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Building Sales Relationships in the Age of AI · Sales Pipeline Radio

• 0:16
  Matt Heinz: All right.
• 0:17
  Welcome to another episode of Sales Pipeline Radio.
• 0:19
  I'm your host, Matt Heinz.
• 0:20
  So excited to have you all here, for another episode as we
• 0:24
  record this today, it is now Q4.
• 0:27
  There's good news and bad news, Sarika.
• 0:29
  The good news is you're back to zero.
• 0:31
  The bad news is you're back to zero and you gotta sort of build from here.
• 0:34
  But, we're here to help you.
• 0:36
  So, if you are joining us live on Sales Pipeline Radio today, if you're
• 0:39
  joining us live on LinkedIn or YouTube, thank you so much, for making us part
• 0:43
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• 0:44
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• 0:46
  guest, if you've got a rebuttal.
• 0:47
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• 0:48
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• 0:50
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• 0:53
  you part of the show if you're listening or watching on demand.
• 0:56
  Thank you so much.
• 0:57
  Over 250,000 people are downloading Sales Pipeline Radio.
• 1:00
  So, so excited to have you joining in that group and every episode
• 1:04
  past, present, and future available at Sales Pipeline Radio dot com.
• 1:07
  Really excited to have our guest today, Sarika Garg.
• 1:10
  She is the GM at HubSpot.
• 1:13
  And, I missed you a couple weeks ago at Inbound and I feel really bad about that.
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  I wasn't there for the entire conference, but boy, there was a buzz
• 1:21
  at Moscone Center for a good three days.
• 1:24
  Maybe just as we, as we kick off, just talk a little bit about sort
• 1:27
  of your reflections on Inbound 25.
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  Sarika Garg: So, Matt, I am so sorry to have missed you too.
• 1:34
  Inbound was amazing and it was amazing for me for two reasons.
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  One is, it was my first Inbound.
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  Okay.
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  So, I can maybe tell you a little bit about that.
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  And then I'd love to maybe reflect on, on Inbound as well.
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  So it was my first Inbound because I actually joined HubSpot
• 1:51
  nine months ago through the acquisition of my company Cashflow.
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  And, and so, in the last 11 months, all we did was put our heads down and build
• 2:01
  a product and launch it at Inbound.
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  So Inbound was amazing because we launched a net new product, which is
• 2:07
  a CPQ product For HubSpot, it was also really special because, I think it was,
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  it was really like, you know, HubSpot coming into its own on the AI story, on
• 2:20
  how AI can actually help businesses and having products to show that, right?
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  So there was a smart CRM, which is sort of like the baseline.
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  There is a data hub, which allows you to bring all your data in because AI only
• 2:35
  works well when it has context and data.
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  And then all the wonderful, agents and the AI enabled hubs that we have.
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  Matt Heinz: Yeah, it was
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  Sarika Garg: fabulous.
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  Matt Heinz: You know, and, and another thing I like about, you know, about
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  Inbound is, you know, there's, there's a lot of user conferences that feel like a
• 2:54
  product showcase and there was plenty of HubSpot showcased, but I feel like Inbound
• 2:59
  has, has always been and continues to be just a great event for marketers, right?
• 3:04
  Yeah.
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  Even if you don't, even if you didn't attend the sessions, the networking,
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  the quality of the people there, the learnings that you get in line for
• 3:11
  lunch, the learnings you get just waiting to get into a packed breakout room.
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  I love that.
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  And so congrats on, on an amazing, on an amazing show.
• 3:19
  I wanna talk about relationship building and sales relationships in the age
• 3:24
  of AI, because I think we're seeing a lot more AI generated messages.
• 3:29
  We're seeing a lot more automation.
• 3:31
  There's pros and cons to that, but I'm curious for you, like, how do you define
• 3:35
  a real sales relationship in 2025?
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  Like what are some of the signals and best practices to make sure
• 3:42
  that as we're selling, we're still bringing the human into it?
• 3:46
  Sarika Garg: So I think we are gonna see a lot of bad usage of AI, but
• 3:50
  actually AI can really make things so much better for our relationships.
• 3:56
  And specifically, I love the sort of message that we have as HubSpot,
• 4:02
  which is, it is all about hybrid teams.
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  Right?
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  AI is actually your team member that's helping you to become better
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  and, and so you know, whether it is like helping you to go do research on
• 4:15
  a customer or whether it's to reach to, to reach out mass, it actually
• 4:20
  should enable you to then free you up from all the sort of busy work that.
• 4:25
  Both marketers and sellers have to do today to actually do meaningful work.
• 4:29
  That's what really excites me.
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  And you know, in the CPQ launch that we did, we really focused on that too.
• 4:37
  Matt Heinz: Yeah, I mean, I think about all the way, all the things that you
• 4:41
  have to do as a seller to be successful.
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  And I think, I can't remember who did it a couple years ago, it might have been
• 4:47
  Google, it might have been Salesforce.
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  Someone did the math and said the typical seller spends about 25% of
• 4:52
  their day actually selling, right?
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  So literally two, the three quarters of their time is spent getting ready to sell.
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  It's writing proposal, it's researching prospects, it's figuring out
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  what, who to call and what to say.
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  And there's so much of that work that now with the right rules and governance can be
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  automated and being done for the sellers.
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  And I think it's gonna, it's gonna create the opportunity for us to be more human,
• 5:16
  more valuable in the process, and allow the sellers to be more successful as well.
• 5:22
  Sarika Garg: So, Matt, as a business owner, I actually had to market myself.
• 5:26
  I had to sell myself.
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  I had to do everything.
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  So I sort of like very inherently understand the pain of being, especially
• 5:35
  a seller, is really, really hard because so much of what you do is, is
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  the sort of 75% of the manual tasks.
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  And actually things are becoming also tougher, right?
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  And maybe, you know, I know you like stats.
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  So here's one stat, which is really interesting.
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  72% of B2B deals.
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  B2B sellers say that the buyer journey is becoming more complex.
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  That means there are more people on the buyer side that they need to convince.
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  There are more gates that they need to overcome.
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  And half the time the seller becomes a project manager, who's just trying to
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  manage all these strings of conversations and, and I think, I like to think of
• 6:16
  this as we are living in this weird paradox world where in some areas
• 6:21
  we have seen this being overcome.
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  So, I mean, you were in San Francisco, you probably rode a
• 6:26
  Waymo and we have self-driving cars now and it works and it's amazing.
• 6:31
  And yet when it, when you're buying some piece of software, it's
• 6:36
  all this email back and forth.
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  And sometimes you are using PDFs, and PDFs is not, automation.
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  PDFs is not agentic in any way.
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  And so you get these PDFs that go out of sync because you have
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  so many people on the other side.
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  I actually spent a lot of my time sitting in back rooms talking
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  to customers and partners.
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  I had this one customer, they pulled out, they said, do you
• 6:59
  wanna see what our codes look like?
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  And they opened up an Excel sheet and that line item, item line item.
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  And basically the seller literally uses that to share with the customer.
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  And, and it was, it was really, really difficult to watch some of this.
• 7:13
  Yeah,
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  Matt Heinz: It was a surprisingly short number of years ago, it, and this is, was
• 7:17
  in a sort of a mining and manufacturing company, when the head of sales said,
• 7:21
  would you like to see my, my database?
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  And I said, sure.
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  He went and brought me a shoebox.
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  So I mean, that, that's, I mean, so that's worse than what you just talked about,
• 7:30
  but I think like when we think about the systems we need to support us as sellers.
• 7:34
  Like you gave that great stat around sort of how complex
• 7:36
  the buying journey has become.
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  I hear a lot of sellers talk about the complexity of their own selling process,
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  the project management they have to do internally to get a proposal review, to
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  get legal involved in procurement and all the things it takes to orchestrate
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  the seller and the buyer side.
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  It just speaks to how important it is to have the systems that
• 7:54
  understand that complexity and can make it more powerful for the
• 7:58
  sellers to do what they need to do.
• 8:00
  Sarika Garg: True.
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  We need smarter systems, right?
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  So one of our thoughts is, you mentioned that sellers spend so
• 8:06
  much time writing a proposal.
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  Well, every seller I've ever met, they're not really great at creating proposals.
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  They're actually great at building relationships or solving for the customer.
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  So why?
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  Why do we expect them to create that proposal?
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  Why couldn't we actually, listen to, or, you know, have their call
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  recordings, like unstructured data or data that's been exchanged between
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  the seller and the buyer in emails actually help generate that proposal.
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  With AI, you can actually do that.
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  And, and so that's sort of one of the things that we, we talked about is
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  we actually have means now and the technology to shortcut a lot of the work.
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  The really difficult work that a seller has to do.
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  The second one is approvals, of course.
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  Right?
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  Like, how many times have you met a seller who is just, actually just
• 8:55
  chasing internal approvals versus like being able to focus on the, on
• 8:59
  the buyer and, and their problem.
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  And I think there are ways that we can actually be much smarter.
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  I think AI can make it much, much smarter by actually bubbling
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  up insights, to do better.
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  Matt Heinz: Talking today on Sales Pipeline Radio with Sarika Garg.
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  She is the GM and VP of Commerce Hub at HubSpot.
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  Talk a little bit about Inbound, talking about systems and needing smarter
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  systems, and I do feel like we're this, I've had a couple CMOs tell me this,
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  that they feel like there's, we're in a bit of this trough of disillusionment.
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  AI adoption, and it's no fault of the tools.
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  It's just the fact that the tools are moving very quickly.
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  We've gone from, well, let's experiment with AIs to random acts of AI, to some
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  people using it, some people not using it.
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  So there's this gap we need really need to help people with.
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  That goes from the opportunity to real, repeatable, sticky use of AI.
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  And this isn't to me use, I mean, I think you gotta stop thinking about
• 9:57
  AI as a tool and start thinking about it as infrastructure that
• 10:00
  mostly is working on your behalf to help you decide what to do next.
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  Are you seeing any evidence of that gap as well?
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  And sort of what are some of your best practices and advice for companies
• 10:11
  and leaders to sort of bridge that and to better leverage the tools?
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  Sarika Garg: I think it's very difficult right now to be, a seller or a marketer
• 10:19
  or even, even like, even any human being because things are changing so fast and
• 10:24
  it's really hard to keep up with it.
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  And I think what we are trying to do is make sure we can be really good
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  partners in explaining how to leverage AI to be your partner, to be better.
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  Right.
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  And there are parts where it's more of an assistant.
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  There are parts where it can actually take over whole jobs.
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  Right.
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  And, if I really take the example of, of the context that I live in, you
• 10:51
  know, I talked about this creation of a proposal without you having to have a cold
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  start problem of starting from scratch.
• 10:58
  Right.
• 10:58
  Or actually being able to manipulate that proposal with an assistant on the side.
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  That's a typical example of an assistant, but we also build something
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  which was much more agentic in nature, which is basically like freeform.
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  It can sort of work on its own and is almost doing the job of a, of like a mini
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  helper, or a person that can work for you.
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  And the example of that that I can give you is when, when we share
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  the proposal or the code with the customer, we actually have an agent
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  that's attached to that, to that code.
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  So, every customer has many, many questions, right?
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  Some of these questions are, how are you a best fit for my, problem that I have?
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  But then there are other questions like, what are the
• 11:42
  terms, what is the renewal terms?
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  What are, you know, what is your, your payment policies.
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  These are what are, what is, give me some more descriptions of your product.
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  These are very repeatable questions.
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  Which oftentimes the seller actually is not very good at because they
• 11:57
  actually are not experts in that.
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  And, and this is where, I feel this is a very good example of where AI can actually
• 12:04
  help to answer some of those questions.
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  Right.
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  And, and it can actually work 24 hours, which the seller does not work 24 hours.
• 12:13
  Right.
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  So, to me that this is a way to think about AI, how can it help you on things
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  that you are not actually the best at.
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  Right.
• 12:21
  Matt Heinz: Well, when I think about how much time it takes to coordinate
• 12:24
  a seller, having that technical conversation, finding a sales engineer,
• 12:28
  getting them involved in the conversation to answer those technical questions.
• 12:31
  I mean, I think about the role of agents in that, where you talked
• 12:34
  about procurement, you talked about legal review, you talked about sort
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  of the, we talked about the technical questions in the sales engineer side.
• 12:41
  I mean, these are all opportunities to have agents.
• 12:43
  Those are, to your point, that are 24 7.
• 12:45
  That are at the prospects and the seller's disposal.
• 12:49
  And that gets to be a pretty exciting thing.
• 12:50
  Like I think, I think we're pretty far away in enterprise from having robots sell
• 12:54
  to robots, but having robots intimately involved in parts of the process to
• 12:58
  give greater confidence to the buyer and the seller feels, feels not only
• 13:04
  achievable, but feels like that could be a sooner versus later opportunity.
• 13:08
  Sarika Garg: Yeah.
• 13:08
  So, you know, in my role I try to spend as much time as I can
• 13:12
  with sellers and sales leaders.
• 13:14
  So I was actually talking to Matt Stone, who actually runs our whole mid-market,
• 13:20
  sales team, and I asked him, do you think we could actually have an agent for
• 13:25
  smaller deals as well as larger deals?
• 13:27
  Like, think of like a million dollar deal, a $500k, $100k deal, $30k deal,
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  or you know, a thousand dollars.
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  And he said, there is no reason for the seller to not have an
• 13:38
  agent that can actually help answer repeatable questions that actually
• 13:44
  are in some knowledge base, right.
• 13:46
  Or is in terms or something like that.
• 13:48
  So we are seeing this sort of a pull now from sellers saying, Hey, we actually
• 13:55
  could use these tools because it will help us to focus on the relationship
• 13:59
  and the on the problem solving.
• 14:02
  Yeah.
• 14:02
  Matt Heinz: All right.
• 14:03
  So we're getting close outta time.
• 14:04
  I've got two lightning round questions I wanna throw at you here.
• 14:06
  Have a little fun.
• 14:07
  The first one is around sales metrics.
• 14:11
  What is an overrated metric and what is an underrated metric?
• 14:17
  Sarika Garg: I'll give you my personal take.
• 14:20
  I love the, I love the code to close metric.
• 14:25
  Which I, I think is totally underrated.
• 14:27
  And I think it is actually really, really important because I can see how this is
• 14:32
  where deals stall and for no particular reason, you know, like my whole thing
• 14:37
  is time kills deals, move fast, right?
• 14:39
  Matt Heinz: Yep.
• 14:40
  Yep.
• 14:40
  Sarika Garg: Overrated.
• 14:42
  I'm not sure.
• 14:43
  I'm not sure.
• 14:43
  Yeah.
• 14:43
  What's yours?
• 14:44
  Matt Heinz: Mine is, mine is the marketing qualified lead.
• 14:47
  I mean, especially like in the traditional sort of lead based model.
• 14:50
  I mean, I think there's a lot of value in defining a consistent, like
• 14:53
  what is a qualified lead that's like the right person, right company.
• 14:57
  I just think it's become a vanity metric for so many companies, right?
• 14:59
  They just want it to be up until the night and it beco(mes), up until the right,
• 15:02
  and it becomes just not valuable at all.
• 15:05
  And so just beginning, you end up with, you know, you take those into a board
• 15:08
  meeting, it becomes success, theater, jazz, hands, look what we're doing.
• 15:12
  And it's not tied to revenue.
• 15:13
  So that's, I can get on, I can on a high horse on that one.
• 15:15
  Okay.
• 15:15
  Last question for you then.
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  We've been talking a lot about sort of AI's role in helping
• 15:20
  sellers build relationships.
• 15:23
  What's something like, it's the beginning of Q4, what's one process improvement
• 15:27
  or experiment that teams could try this quarter to start to make some progress?
• 15:33
  Sarika Garg: I think to me, doing something like cust-, using AI
• 15:38
  for customer research, yeah.
• 15:39
  This just such an obvious one for me and it's so, it's such a hard
• 15:43
  one, which takes so much time.
• 15:45
  And, and AI is so much better at this, right?
• 15:48
  To me, I would say every seller go and like, try doing that.
• 15:51
  You can just use deep research initially, right?
• 15:53
  Like just use deep research or then use whatever your company is using.
• 15:58
  But to me, like it's, you know, I think.
• 16:01
  Learning something new comes from experimenting.
• 16:04
  Matt Heinz: Absolutely.
• 16:04
  Sarika Garg: So go experiment something small, right?
• 16:06
  Matt Heinz: Yeah,
• 16:07
  I completely agree with that.
• 16:08
  I've got, we've, our team has gone through some sort of AI agent building workshops
• 16:12
  and, the gal we had to come in and help with that, she, she started by saying
• 16:16
  like, do something for your personal life.
• 16:18
  Like, do something that you are gonna be passionate about outside of work and it's
• 16:23
  not gonna help you at work right away, but it's gonna break the seal, right?
• 16:26
  It's gonna let you start to see the art of the possible, right?
• 16:29
  So that meal planning tool or that, you know, plant that gardening
• 16:34
  guide with remind whatever it is, you're like, wow, that's amazing.
• 16:37
  Like, then you start to think about it in context.
• 16:40
  Sarika Garg: Matt, I'm doing a whole house renovation using, because of ChatGPT.
• 16:44
  So yes,
• 16:45
  Matt Heinz: I love it.
• 16:45
  Sarika Garg: Very, very helpful.
• 16:47
  Matt Heinz: I love it.
• 16:48
  Well, I know you're super busy and you gotta go.
• 16:50
  Thank you so much for being part of this, and sharing your insights and, yeah.
• 16:55
  Thanks.
• 16:55
  Thanks for joining us today.
• 16:57
  Sarika Garg: Thank you for inviting me.
• 16:58
  Matt Heinz: Awesome.
• 16:59
  And, thank you to the HubSpot team, Mackenzie and everyone on the
• 17:02
  backend for making all this possible.
• 17:03
  Appreciate y'all very much.
• 17:05
  Thanks everyone for joining another episode of Sales Pipeline Radio.
• 17:07
  We'll be back next week with another great guest.
• 17:09
  Until then, have a great rest of your week.
• 17:11
  We'll see you soon.
• 17:12
  Take care.