Latest / Scrappy but Successful [Consultant's Personalities When No One's Watching] / 62. AI Can't Close Your Deals: Selling Into the Trust Gap with Gus Byleveld

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62. AI Can't Close Your Deals: Selling Into the Trust Gap with Gus Byleveld · Scrappy but Successful [Consultant's Personalities When No One's Watching]

• 0:03
  What's happening, everybody? Welcome to Scrappy But Successful. It's a show where I sit down
• 0:07
  with your favorite consultants and we find out if they're successful today because they're sophisticated
• 0:12
  or because they're a little bit scrappy. I'm your host, Jack Tompkins, CEO of Pineapple
• 0:17
  Consulting Firm and Pineapple Analyst AI, always helping small businesses become more data driven. Fun
• 0:22
  fact of the day, South Africa fun fact for our guest, the and I'm gonna
• 0:27
  butcher this pronunciation, the Vre Vrevedorf, Vredfort Dome. Something like that in South Africa is
• 0:32
  the largest and oldest visible meteorite impact creator on Earth. It was formed over two
• 0:36
  billion years ago. But that's neither here nor there. Today I'm joined by my friend
• 0:41
  Gus Byleveld. He's the founder of The Wondering. So he's a former CEO, he's a
• 0:46
  revenue operator, 25 plus experience, 25 plus years experience, excuse me, building and leading B2B
• 0:51
  tech companies. Today, though, through The Wondering, he helps CEOs of growth stage tech companies.
• 0:56
  Understand where the growth gets harder than it should be, helping them get under the
• 1:01
  symptoms and understand what's really happening before deciding to make a change. So Gus, I
• 1:06
  we've had so many nerdy conversations. I'm super excited to talk with you. We know
• 1:10
  that you are successful today, but the question we have for you, do you think
• 1:15
  you fall more on the sophisticated side or more on the scrappy side?
• 1:20
  Thank you for having me, Jack. And yeah, great question. you actually mentioned a note
• 1:24
  about South Africa that I don't know that I knew. So I'm gonna have to
• 1:28
  go Google that
• 1:29
  Really?
• 1:30
  afterwards.
• 1:32
  Okay.
• 1:33
  but here's the here's the best answer I can come up with, right? I I
• 1:38
  wanna pretend that I'm super sophisticated, right? very polished. I've sold into large enterprises before,
• 1:43
  you know, wearing the suit and Doing all that kind of stuff. But the reality
• 1:49
  is that the entrepreneur in me does have a certain sense of scrappiness to it.
• 1:54
  There's a there's a a level of learning that one has to be open to.
• 2:00
  There's the ability to say, my experiment failed, and we have to try something new,
• 2:05
  or change your mind every second hour. Now, of course, as businesses grow, it becomes
• 2:11
  harder for CEOs to to do that, but I always like an element of of
• 2:16
  scrappiness in in in business and and how you approach things because I believe it's
• 2:21
  there where the magic happens, as opposed to following processes and and being the clinical
• 2:27
  executor. so maybe a bit of both. if you asked me earlier in my career,
• 2:32
  I would have said, no, no, no, it's all polish. It's it's definitely, you know,
• 2:38
  no scrappiness.
• 2:39
  Yeah.
• 2:41
  But as time will gone on through a a number of startups. I guess there's
• 2:46
  a big element of scrappiness in there.
• 2:49
  Very nice. Yeah, there has to be an entrepreneurial world to some extent, right? It's
• 2:50
  yeah,
• 2:51
  Of course, yeah.
• 2:53
  there there kind of has to be. Take us back to the beginning. from South
• 2:56
  Africa, where you know, where in South Africa did you grow up? Did you have
• 2:59
  entrepreneurs in the family? Take us back to the beginning.
• 3:02
  I actually don't have entrepreneurs in my family. And in fact, when I started this
• 3:06
  journey, everybody stared at me funny. and
• 3:09
  Yeah.
• 3:10
  asked me whether I was feeling well. so
• 3:12
  Right.
• 3:13
  so no, it's I don't know, maybe I was born with it. I grew up
• 3:19
  in a little town just outside of Cape Town on the southern tip of of
• 3:25
  South Africa. and I my first career was actually being an architect. So I designed
• 3:31
  high-rise buildings and assisted living spaces is my first career and I won't bore the
• 3:37
  audience but the transition to technology and the business side of technology came through working
• 3:43
  for a company outside of Philadelphia in the US and they actually reprogrammed me completely
• 3:49
  and created my interest in technology, technology sales the fact that it can make a
• 3:55
  difference if if done well and and I've had the privilege of working for large
• 4:01
  companies globally. also working in different global territories, understanding different cultures and how people are
• 4:07
  wired, etc. so that's kind of the that was the second phase of the career.
• 4:13
  And after a while, probably around the turn of the century, I'm giving my age
• 4:19
  away, but I I got a bit, you know I had enough of the the
• 4:25
  corporates and all that kind of stuff and started trying my hand at startups. made
• 4:31
  a lot of mistakes, of course, because you you have this corporate thinking when you
• 4:37
  go in the startup world, and that's exactly what you shouldn't have. but I had
• 4:43
  a wonderful journey in which is now building my fifth startup outside of the wandering,
• 4:49
  actually. learned so much, met wonderful people. I've got a I can write a book
• 4:55
  of what not to do.
• 4:57
  Yeah.
• 4:58
  but it's actually the the third startup that brought me to the US. So we
• 5:03
  found a wonderful investor out of Sandil Road, more commonly known as Silicon Valley. And
• 5:09
  yeah, so we immigrated my family and I to the US in fact last month,
• 5:15
  a decade ago. And we became proud US citizens last year, and so this is
• 5:21
  home, and we're very blessed and enjoying it a lot. So It's been a very
• 5:27
  colourful journey, but in essence it's always been at the cold face of how do
• 5:33
  we present what we have to technology buyers and how do we make sure they
• 5:39
  get value from it. And all the fancy titles really just means they have to
• 5:45
  trust you. and if they do, you can you can help them. So
• 5:51
  Okay. All right. So we we got a lot to unpack there. So this is
• 5:54
  not
• 5:55
  Yeah.
• 5:56
  that wondering, but we've got five startups, we've got some corporate stuff, we have a
• 5:59
  a transformational mindset happening around Philadelphia, which most people have a very different transformational mindset
• 6:03
  when they go to Philadelphia. Yours was a very
• 6:06
  Yeah.
• 6:07
  positive one. were you entrepreneurial as a kid? Like were you doing lemonade stands? Like
• 6:13
  were you were you building anything like architecturally sound for neighbors or selling it? Anything?
• 6:20
  I was not. I was a weird kid. I I've
• 6:26
  Nice, me too.
• 6:27
  always had contrarian thinking. I think that is that's the best way I can describe
• 6:33
  it and got me in a lot of trouble growing up. you know, especially when
• 6:39
  you're questioning adults, you know, opinions. when when your teachers tell you something and you
• 6:45
  ask why. But I guess through through sports I was relatively good at it, you
• 6:51
  know. So I was kind of accepted as the nerdy jock, I guess is a
• 6:57
  good term for it, right? Yeah. Yeah. And
• 7:01
  Okay. What were the sports?
• 7:03
  but no, I wasn't I was an entrepreneurial. But I I did always have a
• 7:07
  sense that there's more. and I guess I was blessed with the curse of what
• 7:12
  if I do this or what if I do that. I keep on telling my
• 7:17
  friends and colleagues that. If I just kept the job and did my thing and
• 7:22
  got my four and one K then life would be very easy and I could
• 7:27
  have the picket fences and everything would be fine. But no, I decided to walk
• 7:32
  the the entrepreneurial road and it is immensely rewarding but it's sometimes also an extremely
• 7:37
  hard road to walk. So yeah it's but to answer your question in short, no.
• 7:42
  I I don't think I was always entrepreneurial, although I think there was always something
• 7:47
  wrong with me, so I needed to to to
• 7:50
  Ha ha ha.
• 7:52
  find a way to live that, you know, to live that out. So yeah.
• 7:56
  Well, if that's something wrong with you, then it turned out all right, I would
• 7:58
  say. Yeah. All right, give
• 7:59
  It turned out all right. Yeah, exactly.
• 8:02
  me give me like thirty seconds on the wandering today, and then we'll build the
• 8:08
  bridge from the nerdy jock to today.
• 8:11
  Yeah, I I'm probably gonna be crucified for that for that term. But you
• 8:14
  Yeah.
• 8:16
  know, the wondering came about through through I mean I've been thinking about for a
• 8:21
  long time and and when I exited my last startup October last year, I I
• 8:26
  realized that you know I had something to give. And and the wondering, the name
• 8:32
  of the company, W-O-N-D-E-R-N-G. is a play on both that and WAN the E R
• 8:37
  I N G and and you know for me it's the road we walk when
• 8:43
  we're entrepreneurs, we need to be inquisitive. We need to be ready to to to
• 8:48
  take a turn off or do something different and it's really where the the what
• 8:54
  the A comes from. It's a meandering road. But but I think the wondering is
• 8:59
  is about being inquisitive. Why is something happening? way it's happening. And in revenue today,
• 9:05
  it's more important than ever. Why is my customer buying from me? Why do I
• 9:10
  have a right to sell it in the next one? Why will they come back?
• 9:16
  You know, I I often speak to founders and leaders, you know, they're following processes.
• 9:21
  That's what we've been trained to do. Get sales force and create a process. Get
• 9:26
  a sales team and sell. And I've got the scars on the back of trying
• 9:32
  that getting wrong. Because salespeople are good when you find the good ones. Right? They
• 9:37
  will sell anything to anybody, but should they? And is it scalable? And you know,
• 9:43
  that scrappy nature of revenue generation today, we we we just cannot accept the rules
• 9:48
  we've been given anymore. our buyers are on a different journey. Our buyers have got
• 9:54
  AI. They arrive at our doorstep probably more informed than we've ever had a buyer
• 9:59
  before. and so the wondering exists really to to unlock that. Fundamental question. When somebody
• 10:05
  comes to me and say, I appoint more salespeople and we can't sell more. Or
• 10:10
  90% of the sales still dependent on the founder, you know. Or my deals keep
• 10:16
  slipping. People are ghosting me. Those are the that's the language they're using. But in
• 10:21
  essence, it really comes back to a very thorough understanding of your buyer journey, not
• 10:26
  your sales process. Because people normally reach for the sales process, but The buyer journey
• 10:32
  and why would they buy from you? What makes you uniquely qualified to give what
• 10:37
  you have to them and why would they want it tomorrow? Isn't that the Steve
• 10:43
  Blank and Eric Reese's definition of go to product market fit, right? why would they
• 10:48
  buy what you have tomorrow or today? and why are you un uniquely positioned for
• 10:54
  it? I think those seminal books everybody's read it, but it it It really is
• 10:59
  still with us from a thinking perspective. So that's really why the wondering exists. and
• 11:05
  I'm offering those services on a fractional basis. And even that is genuine. I think
• 11:10
  you and I briefly spoke about that, Jack. But I think our our clients, the
• 11:16
  people we help, want to consume us in the way that they want to consume
• 11:21
  us. They want to reduce the risk. They maybe don't want W-2s anymore. Maybe they
• 11:26
  want a project first to to learn a little bit, etc. And and for us
• 11:32
  revenue operators, I feel the journey at the moment is to understand how should we
• 11:37
  present ourselves so that what we know can be consumed that way. Not our skills.
• 11:43
  A yeah I can do that now. But what we know, our experience, our integrity,
• 11:48
  our way of working with clients. that's human and we need to package that. And
• 11:54
  we need to allow our clients, future clients, to consume it in the way they
• 11:59
  want to, as opposed to forcing it down their throat. And I guess that's a
• 12:05
  challenge for all of us now. It's super uncomfortable. but it is the ri the
• 12:10
  way to go. So
• 12:12
  It is. And I think to your point early on, it's if you have a
• 12:15
  sales process, it some sales processes are great, right? I don't think that you're anti-sales
• 12:18
  process, but it has to be built around the right thing, is kind of
• 12:21
  no. Yeah.
• 12:23
  what you're saying, right? It has to be built around that customer desire first, right?
• 12:27
  Right. And how do you get a sales process? You
• 12:30
  Yeah.
• 12:31
  map it from a buyer journey. You know, the the days that we get a
• 12:35
  Salesforce consultant tell us that these are your stages of your sales. That's long gone.
• 12:40
  Product like sales even change that for us. Because you might go up and down
• 12:45
  in your sales process. And tool like Salesforce doesn't understand that. Neither does your board.
• 12:50
  You know, how can how can you have 20 opportunities at 80% last quarter, and
• 12:54
  now you tell me you only have 10, but none of them closed, right? There's
• 12:59
  a whole education going on here because this thing is a journey, right? But your
• 13:04
  process comes from your bio journey. So if you haven't done the work, and the
• 13:09
  one thing I've realized the hard way is that once you have the bio journey,
• 13:13
  it may not be the bio journey next month. So so you need to be
• 13:18
  inquisitive
• 13:19
  Yeah.
• 13:21
  enough to understand if that thing shifts. And today with AI it shifts all the
• 13:25
  time, right? So it's a kind of a moving target. But how does that affect
• 13:30
  our sales forces? So our revenue leaders, I think. You read Gardner and McKinsey and
• 13:35
  all these people, right? What is it, eighty, ninety, a hundred percent of salespeople and
• 13:40
  revenue leaders say they have too many tools to work.
• 13:44
  Yep. Classic.
• 13:46
  Yeah, and so CEOs are faced with an interesting challenge. Do we give them more
• 13:51
  tools? Or do we need do we give them space to think? You know, a
• 13:57
  classically trained salesperson that can think and that can operate, boy, they are immensely powerful.
• 14:02
  But if you bog them down with processing tools because you feel you have to,
• 14:08
  because it's a KPI, because they have to move things from one stage to the
• 14:13
  next in the process. You're taking away what makes them uniquely human and you're trying
• 14:19
  to be make them a robot. Use your AI tool, follow it. And I am
• 14:25
  an AI centrist, which kind of means I back the human, but I want to
• 14:30
  give powers. But this whole thing is is is on a knife edge. And I
• 14:36
  think as responsible leaders we have to consider those things.
• 14:40
  What was your first startup? Because you go from corporate, you kind of start this
• 14:43
  transformational
• 14:44
  Yeah.
• 14:45
  mindset, right? And then what actually made you make the jump into running your own
• 14:49
  business?
• 14:50
  Well I I was pretty much tired, literally literally. you know, politics, my goodness, you
• 14:54
  know, waking up every morning not thinking how I'm gonna add value, you rather have
• 14:58
  to think who's saying what about you and you have to counter that, right? And
• 15:03
  Right.
• 15:04
  that happens the higher you go into into corporate. It's it's it's a necessary evil
• 15:07
  of the system. But I didn't want to play that anymore. But what actually happened
• 15:12
  is a a good friend of mine came to me. I just w what also
• 15:17
  the the the straw that broke the camel's back, I think is the the way
• 15:21
  that that we say that. Although I don't know if we're allowed to talk about
• 15:26
  camels breaking backs anymore. But
• 15:28
  Ha ha ha.
• 15:31
  I was fresh off a stunt as a turnaround CEO group of investors asked me
• 15:36
  to turn around an alien technology company and they were losing a million a month
• 15:41
  and took me two years and refactored the business and I could sell it. So
• 15:46
  that's really also, you know, there was lawyers in there, labor lawyers, you know, all
• 15:51
  kinds of interesting people. and he came to me and he said, Look, his words
• 15:56
  to me was I remember it like yesterday, you can sell anything to anybody. So
• 16:01
  I want you to come and run the startup. Now if I know if I
• 16:06
  knew then what I know now, I would have told him creating a startup is
• 16:11
  not about selling anything to anyone. Creating a startup is about listening well enough so
• 16:16
  you understand whether you have a mind. However, I was very flattering. I was young,
• 16:21
  and he was telling
• 16:23
  Yeah.
• 16:26
  me I'm a good salesperson. I'm gonna take that, right?
• 16:28
  Sure, of course.
• 16:29
  And I went, okay, let's do this. And the startup was ahead of its time,
• 16:35
  we all knew it. it was after the turn of the century, and a great
• 16:41
  founder, a technical guy, he built a mobile trading card platform. So you know our
• 16:47
  kids they play with these. NFL cards or trade Iron Man for Spider-Man or whatever.
• 16:53
  Sure.
• 16:54
  We put all of that digital. And it ran on Nokia and Symbian. Yes, yes,
• 16:59
  I know. You know, looking back at it, what was I thinking? anyway, and that
• 17:04
  got me in there. and I very quickly realized how ill-equipped equ equipped I was
• 17:10
  for this thing because I was I was always operating with a playbook and When
• 17:15
  you're in enterprise company, they have a playbook and you have a brand. You know,
• 17:20
  it's you have to listen to me because I work for this brand, right?
• 17:26
  Right.
• 17:27
  All of a sudden it's nothing. And we went through a couple of iterations. We
• 17:32
  did well. We got some big licensing rights from sporting environments and stuff like that.
• 17:37
  But ultimately we had to offload it to actually one of our clients, a media
• 17:42
  company in in Africa. boy. If we launch it today, I think we'd be very
• 17:47
  successful. Just imagine
• 17:49
  Yeah.
• 17:50
  running that on an Apple phone and Android
• 17:52
  my goodness.
• 17:53
  phone, right? Or a tablet. You know, it would be wonderful. But it was a
• 17:58
  great experience. but that's the first time I realized that my skills and somebody tell
• 18:03
  me how good I am means nothing in in in the startup world because you
• 18:08
  gotta listen. You you gotta have an hypothesis, you gotta find out why this person
• 18:14
  on the other side is gonna trust you trust you without a track record, without
• 18:19
  a brag. Why? Why should they and and I f I frame that years later
• 18:24
  as I'm selling into the trust gap. And I think that is I'm not selling
• 18:29
  something, I'm selling trust. Because those early sales and startups is about that person trusting
• 18:35
  you as a person. And that's again also why I think this overhyped idea that
• 18:40
  we can have a AI driven SDR or BDR, reaching out to people and go,
• 18:45
  Hey, this is how wonderful I am. Maybe, maybe it can help us. But those
• 18:50
  conversations, they need to be real. They need to be new because you are selling
• 18:56
  internet plus cap. And maybe somebody doesn't even care about your product, they care about
• 19:01
  you and that you'll be around. so that's a big answer. But that was the
• 19:06
  first startup. Big lessons, lots of gray hair. It was it was a great experience
• 19:11
  because I learned about trades and marketing and media and all that kind of stuff.
• 19:17
  Yeah.
• 19:18
  Yeah.
• 19:19
  It so I want to get into the trust gap, but before we do, I'm
• 19:22
  curious. Back then, I I mean, to your point, it was ahead of its time.
• 19:27
  If you rolled that out today, it'd be, you know, you'd be a billionaire tomorrow,
• 19:32
  right? Easy, easy peasy stuff, right? Yeah. at the time, it was probably obviously a
• 19:37
  a newer technology. Do you see any correlations to today with AI and the speed
• 19:42
  at which it's moving to the card trading platform that was ahead of its time?
• 19:47
  Yes. And funny enough my another startup I joined was also a bit ahead of
• 19:51
  its time. So I kind of have this tendency to
• 19:54
  Yeah.
• 19:55
  to pick these hard roads, right? But yes, I see a lot of correlation. I
• 20:01
  I think One thing that develops very quickly are these two schools. The one school
• 20:07
  goes, This is the greatest thing you've ever seen, and you have to get involved,
• 20:13
  otherwise, you'll miss out. And the other school goes, Why don't you just do it
• 20:20
  the way you've done it before? This thing is threatening you. It's threatening your purpose.
• 20:26
  It's it's threatening everything that you know. And it's it's easy for that school. To
• 20:32
  gain momentum because it speaks to our inherent insecurities as humans, right?
• 20:38
  It's comfort, yeah.
• 20:40
  we want the we want a little bit of comfort, right? But
• 20:42
  Yeah.
• 20:43
  when you come with this brainy, out-of-this world idea, I mean, I I don't want
• 20:48
  to teach the audience to suck eggs, right? But it's commonly known that you go
• 20:54
  through that chasm, right? You you you you sell through those enormously innovative people to
• 20:59
  start with. And then you get to the the real market. And those are more
• 21:05
  you don't sell to the legouts, you'll waste your time. But you know, just selling
• 21:11
  to the more to the more the progressives of the conservatives. And then you and
• 21:16
  then so slowly you grow your market when you get customer references and and all
• 21:22
  that kind of stuff. And I think those two schools are There today as well.
• 21:28
  Now, when I did my first follow in, there wasn't Facebook, there wasn't this TikTok
• 21:33
  ability to amplify what you have overnight. So our problem is bigger now, because everybody
• 21:39
  with a microphone has a stage. And as if I put myself in the buyer's
• 21:45
  seat, right, it's difficult. You know, how how do because they want to do self-evaluation,
• 21:50
  Gardner's telling us that, but who do they believe? Now they go to Claude and
• 21:56
  Claude has got a bunch of crawlers, and if Claude recommends somebody, then it must
• 22:02
  be true. How many of my clients am I speaking to? They're going, We've got
• 22:07
  an AEO specialist, because we don't appear on Claude's searches, right? And you have that,
• 22:13
  you have to have that. It's table stakes. But still, who made Claude the expert
• 22:19
  all of a sudden? Right?
• 22:21
  Right.
• 22:22
  But be being we we've been teached that. AI knows everything and it can bring
• 22:28
  all this stuff. So so those two schools are definitely developing. The other thing I'm
• 22:36
  seeing developing that there's parallels for me, very much parallels is the importance that the
• 22:44
  relationship, the human relationship still has.
• 22:48
  Yeah.
• 22:49
  Now we've got different ways of getting there. And I do believe that it's the
• 22:54
  most difficult I've ever experienced in my career to break through noise and have good
• 23:00
  conversations. That is true. But isn't it rewarding as a revenue operator when you actually
• 23:06
  have those conversations? And you can show the person on the other side of the
• 23:12
  table that you honestly you care. Right? Well especially for people that don't sell commodities.
• 23:18
  I mean if you sell an iPhone, it's easy. You come in, see the features,
• 23:24
  buy it, you walk. But people selling complex services, or people like me, you know,
• 23:30
  selling a fractional or a consultancy, right? That's where I think it becomes insanely rewarding
• 23:36
  to actually have those conversations. But very often we try and make it a volume
• 23:42
  game. Well, let's just have twenty conversations because our conversion rate needs to go up
• 23:47
  from four to six percent. Mm that's very eighties of us, isn't it? I think
• 23:53
  IBM taught me that. you know, if you
• 23:57
  Yeah.
• 23:59
  have a problem, up your conversion rate. I mean that was a very elementary heuristic.
• 24:05
  it's it's you know it it's it's too complex today to do that. But certainly
• 24:12
  those two those two are probably s still very you know, it it sort of
• 24:18
  matches, but I think the human connection matters more, especially when you're selling complex stuff.
• 24:25
  Isn't it interesting that the more AI advances, which by the time from the from
• 24:29
  us recording this to us publishing, this is gonna who knows? The world could be
• 24:33
  entirely different at the speed it's going. But
• 24:36
  Right. Right.
• 24:37
  isn't it interesting that the more that that happens, people assume that people are just
• 24:42
  using AI, people are just in part of some sales funnel process, whatever, and they're
• 24:47
  just trying to pump volume through it because it's all gonna work out. And yet
• 24:52
  they just wanna talk to a human. They just wanna say, Hey, I'm I'm here
• 24:57
  for you and I you know, I'm I'm I wanna I hear your problems, we're
• 25:02
  gonna fix your problems for you. Is that kind of the trust gap that exists
• 25:07
  today? This lack of human in the loop?
• 25:10
  You know, the short answer is yes. The longer answer is I firmly believe it
• 25:16
  is a bit more nuanced than that.
• 25:20
  Okay.
• 25:23
  and the reason why I'm saying it is there's there's just more factors that plays
• 25:28
  in on the buyer than what we've had in the past, right? So the classically
• 25:34
  trained salesperson from IBM, right? You rock up, you talk to somebody in a boardroom,
• 25:40
  your decision maker. And at those, in those days, you were the most informed person
• 25:46
  in the Right, you were the source of truth. And for that reason, somebody can
• 25:51
  pick up the phone and go, Hey Jack, I want this, get it done, best
• 25:57
  price, this, this, just just do it. Right? That's not true anymore. Our clients and
• 26:03
  prospects know much more than we do. Well, A, they know more about the business
• 26:09
  than we ever were. And they now have all these tools that helps them to
• 26:14
  know about us. You know, I mean, how easy it is it? I'm meeting with
• 26:20
  Jack in half an hour, Claude, tell me everything about them.
• 26:25
  Yep.
• 26:27
  we didn't have even Google couldn't do that properly, right? Yeah, and it could give
• 26:32
  us some basic websites and whatever, but a summary in what? How long does it
• 26:38
  take Sonnet 5 to give it to us? Maybe seven seconds, right? So what does
• 26:44
  that mean for us as a revenue generator? And I say that specifically because This
• 26:50
  thing applies to BDRs, account managers, marketing, customer success. Anybody that touch a customer. What
• 26:56
  does it mean for us? We have to find different ways to be valuable to
• 27:02
  our buyer. And if it isn't the center of the universe like we used to
• 27:08
  be, if it isn't the only source of truth, what is it then? Why would
• 27:13
  our prospect listen to us and why would they buy from us? That's the trust
• 27:19
  gap. Right? And if we don't if we
• 27:23
  How the heck how the heck do you solve that?
• 27:25
  rock up at a at a meeting and we go, I've got this widget, look
• 27:30
  at it. It's this AI bot, you know, and it's gonna replace all your your
• 27:35
  entire SDR team. Okay. I don't see the purpose of that. Right? But if we
• 27:41
  rock up at a meeting and we're inquisitive and we ask, what does your team
• 27:46
  look like? What are the things you're struggling with? I have all these things, but
• 27:52
  I need to know from you. And and by the way, here's the discovery question
• 27:57
  that beats our prospects seven ways from Sunday, right? What does your world look like
• 28:02
  when I solve this for you?
• 28:05
  Interesting. Wow, that's pretty good. Yeah.
• 28:07
  Right? Because you make it personal. There is no way an AI tool, Claude or
• 28:12
  anything, can make things that personal. They just don't get it. They don't get that
• 28:17
  there's a human on that side. They don't get that somebody has got to deliver
• 28:22
  it into KPIs. They don't get that there is somebody that the boss has told
• 28:27
  them you've got to fix this or you're fired. They don't get that somebody told
• 28:33
  them you've got to cut 20% of your staff and they don't want to. Right?
• 28:38
  That's empathy. That's the difference we make as revenue generators now. All right? And if
• 28:43
  your prospect doesn't want to trade in that world with you, you've got to ask
• 28:48
  your question. Right, is this worth a a conversation I want to have? Because if
• 28:54
  they're looking for the wham bam, just quick, give it to me, write a check,
• 28:59
  take it if it's if it's there. But you're then being compared with the next
• 29:04
  guy with a widget that is green instead of purple, that costs five cents less.
• 29:09
  So what is your differentiation? Right? But if you've built that personal relation and it
• 29:14
  doesn't take weeks, and it can be done over Zoom. You know, people tell me,
• 29:20
  you're old school, you know, you you carry a bag, you knock on the door,
• 29:25
  you go up with the elevator to the 22nd floor, you sit in the boardroom,
• 29:30
  you want to shake somebody's hand. I am old school and I'm not apologizing for
• 29:35
  it. But this stuff can be done on Zoom. It can be. Let's just calm
• 29:41
  down. You know? So our person on the other side is sitting there and they're
• 29:46
  expecting you to pitch. Right? What if you sit down and you ask them, why
• 29:51
  did you take this meeting? Well, they now cannot answer their email or they cannot
• 29:56
  text their assistant because you've asked them a question, they have to think about it.
• 30:01
  And salespeople often
• 30:03
  Yeah.
• 30:05
  tell me, You can't ask them that ask them that. Well, why not? Because when
• 30:09
  I started to ask that question, right, the the answer I had the most superstar
• 30:14
  BDR known to mankind, right? If I wanted to reach somebody, he can find them.
• 30:19
  And he will set up a meeting with them. Right? And so the answer I
• 30:24
  got a lot of times was because your BDR is so good and they convinced
• 30:29
  me to come. Okay, well, now we understand this, right? You maybe don't want to
• 30:34
  be here, but at least you
• 30:36
  Right.
• 30:37
  heard some. So what did you hear? Right? And they say something, and then okay,
• 30:40
  to tell me about your world. Okay, why did that resonate? What are we talking
• 30:44
  about? I have this thing here, but I can't tell you if it's going to
• 30:49
  solve your problem or not unless I can dive a little bit into this. And
• 30:53
  if you can make that personal connection, and you can do it, maybe not in
• 30:58
  the first meeting, but maybe you have tactics to get to the second meeting and
• 31:02
  you start talking to them. But if this thing becomes personal, what happens if The
• 31:07
  person you spoke to in the first meeting brings their CEO to the next meeting,
• 31:11
  right? How are you going to warm that up through that personal connection? That's how
• 31:16
  you're going to warm it up. You're going to ask
• 31:19
  Yeah.
• 31:20
  them, hey, you need to prepare me for this person. I hear your CEO is
• 31:23
  a fire breather. Can you help me? Right? I need to know what I can
• 31:28
  say, what I can. They will help you, of course they will, right? Because there's
• 31:33
  now a trust relationship. Hard work. Our salespeople, I believe. And this is not a
• 31:38
  general statement and I'm not beating up on salespeople, but it's become a little easy
• 31:43
  to give our thinking and our ability over to tools. It's a warning sign for
• 31:48
  me because the more that happens, the less we're gonna think. And the less they
• 31:53
  think, we become like the AI that's trying to replace us. So there won't be
• 31:58
  any differentiation. But there has to be.
• 32:01
  I've heard some of my friends, and you're probably seeing this with Claude. Claude responds
• 32:05
  all the time with, you know, if you ask like, Hey, you know, what should
• 32:09
  I do about this situation? It goes, Well, here's my honest answer. I've heard my
• 32:13
  friends leading conversations with, Here's my honest opinion. I'm like, No, no, you can't do
• 32:17
  that. You can't do that. You're now being the AI.
• 32:20
  But also, isn't your opinion always supposed to be honest?
• 32:25
  Right. And would I want to hear a dishonest one? No. Okay.
• 32:28
  No. Yeah. So I mean, number one, it's an oxymoron, but yeah, I get you.
• 32:32
  You know, it's not it it's it's an unnecessary thing to say. Because if somebody
• 32:36
  tells me here's my honest opinion, I go, Well, you have others? So now I'm
• 32:40
  distracted because you actually
• 32:42
  Right.
• 32:44
  said something that distracts me from this kind of thing, right?
• 32:48
  And I think that attention to the wording, I want to go back to the
• 32:51
  question that you asked. What would your world look like when I solve this for
• 32:54
  you? Is that the right phrasing?
• 32:56
  Right. Yeah.
• 32:57
  So you get into what does your world look like? So that's already a personal,
• 33:01
  like you specifically. What does it look like? When I solve this, I can solve
• 33:05
  this. I know I can solve this. And so we're talking about after that. It's
• 33:09
  a when, not an if. And then I solve it for you. So this is
• 33:14
  as personal as it gets. We don't mention tool, we don't mention AI. That evokes,
• 33:18
  I imagine I've never asked this. I'm gonna start asking this. I imagine that in
• 33:22
  like invokes quite a bit of emotion, whether it's shown or not.
• 33:26
  Well, you know, I can again I can write a book on the answers I
• 33:29
  get.
• 33:30
  Yeah.
• 33:31
  Right? Because some people come into the meeting going, Well, look, you got my time.
• 33:36
  Tell me what you have and get out of here. Okay? Well, I'm not gonna
• 33:42
  make that pitch. Now I
• 33:45
  Yeah.
• 33:46
  know I don't work for a VP of sales that's got a target to chase,
• 33:48
  but I'm not gonna make that pitch. It's a waste of time. Because that person
• 33:52
  is only interested in what I want to tell them. And what I want to
• 33:56
  tell them, they can get out of the cloud. This is not what this meeting
• 34:00
  is about. So if I can't get them to agree to that, then this is
• 34:04
  not my meeting. And I'm not saying don't pitch. I'm just saying don't think you're
• 34:07
  gonna put it in Salesforce and say you're a 20% because you have your first
• 34:11
  meeting.
• 34:12
  Right.
• 34:13
  Right? But then I also get people that start talking for 45 minutes and we
• 34:17
  only had a 30-minute meeting. And those people that talk for 45 minutes. Maybe I
• 34:22
  sometimes I can't even solve their problem, but I can find somebody that can.
• 34:27
  Yeah.
• 34:29
  Now again, in our growth stage companies, we're so obsessed with the number. Because the
• 34:34
  board has an investor and they've got, you know, something hanging over my neck all
• 34:39
  the time, right? So they want to see the progress and whatever. And so revenue
• 34:45
  leaders or company leaders are telling me, Well, what are you talking about? Right? I
• 34:50
  hire a salesperson to sell. And I'm saying I'm not telling you not to. It's
• 34:56
  absolutely not having the same conversation here. I'm just saying
• 35:00
  Right.
• 35:02
  we need to surround our sales team with the tools, AI included. But also the
• 35:07
  thinkers to allow them to come to us and go, that was a rubbish meeting.
• 35:13
  And this is the reason. And by the way, I want to talk to marketing,
• 35:19
  because there's something in this meeting that we don't want again. But often marketing's got
• 35:25
  their KPIs and SDRs have got their, but they're not talking to each other. And
• 35:31
  y this for me, for me at least, was a profound realization when I worked
• 35:37
  with a client a couple of months ago, right? And so when I asked the
• 35:43
  head of marketing, the head of BDR, the head of customer success, right, tell me
• 35:49
  what your objective is. And they, without exception, tell me my objective is to give
• 35:55
  sales 25 leads. Then customer success said my objective is X. And so none of
• 36:01
  them said, My objective is to close another customer. None of them said that.
• 36:07
  Huh.
• 36:09
  And so when I started talking to the CEO, I said, you know what? There's
• 36:14
  a bandag here. You can give them all the same KPI because they don't even
• 36:20
  have it. There's no coherent KPI across your team, which encourages dysfunction because they're chasing
• 36:26
  the wrong things. Right? But when I wake up in the morning as a BDR
• 36:31
  or an SDR or a customer success person, right? My question should be. What can
• 36:37
  I do today to move conversation with Prospect X forward? That's what I'm asking myself.
• 36:43
  Not have I sent fifteen emails. And if what I do today doesn't align with
• 36:48
  that, then I'm busy with the wrong stuff. And then people say, well, the salesperson
• 36:54
  is so important. Then I'm like, this is not about a person. Because before your
• 37:00
  salesperson could close a complex deal, they can't do it anymore by themselves. It's impossible.
• 37:05
  It's too complex. There's too many things going on. It needs a village to close
• 37:11
  a deal. And as a leader, if we don't gel all of that together with
• 37:17
  the one single question, what can I do this morning to move that conversation with
• 37:22
  that prospect forward? Not to move the sales stage or to send an email. That's
• 37:28
  a difference between action and action intelligence, you know, in that game. These things are
• 37:34
  simple, Jack. It's not, it's not, I'm not asking anybody to re-engineer the company. I'm
• 37:39
  really just asking them to ask different questions.
• 37:43
  And I'd go one past that too. I I'm about as data driven as you
• 37:46
  can get. I have a whole data company, I have a data platform, right? I
• 37:49
  do all this stuff.
• 37:50
  Right.
• 37:51
  What you're saying is it's it's n it's very simple to your point. It is
• 37:55
  just a mindset shift of don't go put in another number. Think first. And then
• 38:00
  worry about what does AI do? What does the number look like? It's just have
• 38:05
  that think first. Have that what is my actual goal here first? And then that
• 38:11
  if you do that, the rest of the KPIs, they they work, right? Yeah.
• 38:16
  They do. And you know, your data capability is a classic example, right? We've got
• 38:20
  our fingertips at more data than we've ever had before. And we've got AI so
• 38:25
  we can interpret it. Right. But I work, I work with another, I'm working with
• 38:30
  another client, right? And the question came up recently because they're saying, look at this,
• 38:35
  I've got 20 leads here, I've got this conversion rate, I've got this, I've got
• 38:40
  that, and then it goes. Or I've got these conversions, everything works, everything is green,
• 38:45
  and then they go with a competitor. And you know, all we've heard all of
• 38:50
  those things, right? And sometimes the biggest loss in our sales teams is not to
• 38:55
  competitors. It's because prospects don't make decisions. That is dangerous.
• 38:59
  Yeah.
• 39:00
  Right? When they don't make a decision, now you don't know what to do. Right?
• 39:04
  But I sat down and I was talking to the team and all that kind
• 39:09
  of stuff. And We were analyzing this stuff and I was asking the head of
• 39:14
  the sales team. I wasn't beating on them, this is tough stuff. You know, I
• 39:19
  was saying, this deal sits at this percentage, right? Show me where your client told
• 39:24
  me why they would buy from you, because you've got it at 80%. And he
• 39:30
  goes, No, here in the sales process, it moved from this to this. That's not
• 39:35
  the question I'm asking you. Show me where your client told me they will buy
• 39:40
  this from you. No, but I've submitted a proposal. Again, it's not what I'm asking
• 39:45
  you. And they couldn't answer that question. Now, if in any of our processes we
• 39:50
  don't have the c prospect on revenue intelligence recording saying, I will buy from you
• 39:56
  for these reasons, then you can't forecast this deal. Now you're surprised that you appoint
• 40:01
  five more people and they can't sell. But at their previous company, they were part
• 40:06
  of the Golden Club, they went on incentive trips. Because they made 200% of the
• 40:11
  targets. So all of a sudden they become dumb. Right? We just don't surround them.
• 40:16
  We're not setting them up for success. Because it's easy to say, sell the scrap,
• 40:22
  let's fire the PP. I tell you, unless you have a really rubbish team, that's
• 40:27
  very rarely the answer. Very rarely the answer. We're just not guiding them to where
• 40:32
  the epiphany lies, and the epiphany lies and ask your customer. Like in Discovery. I
• 40:37
  ask them, what would your world look like when I solve this for you? Halfway
• 40:42
  through the deal, I want to ask them, well, what makes me tell me, please,
• 40:48
  Mrs. Prospect, Mr. Prospect, Miss Prospect, tell me, what makes me uniquely qualified to solve
• 40:53
  this problem for you? That's the words. Not the best, not
• 40:57
  Interesting.
• 40:58
  the cheapest, not the fastest, not the prettiest. What makes me uniquely qualified to solve
• 41:02
  this for you? And if they don't can't answer that for you, you've got a
• 41:07
  problem. Because I bet
• 41:09
  Wow.
• 41:10
  you they're either gonna ghost you or you're gonna compete on price. You're dead in
• 41:12
  the water.
• 41:13
  Yeah.
• 41:14
  And that's the hard work we cannot outsource to AI. That's the human thing. That's
• 41:19
  where we now and your prospect will go. If you're asking me that, what's happening
• 41:24
  here? dear. And you'll get different look, we're all classically trained, we can deal with
• 41:29
  objections. So I I don't think that people can't deal with what comes back at
• 41:34
  them. But ask the question and see what happens.
• 41:38
  That's awesome.
• 41:39
  It is, we don't want to stare the truth in the face because our VP
• 41:43
  is telling us if we don't move five deals from 10 to 20% next week,
• 41:48
  we're fired. Well, that may be so, right? But as CEOs, as leaders of businesses,
• 41:53
  we can't have that anymore. Because activity is not quality. You're not hiring a hundred
• 41:58
  thousand dollar a year salesperson plus benefits and all that kind of stuff to Click
• 42:03
  on things. That's why AI companies can come to you and say, I can replace
• 42:09
  your salesperson with an AI tool, is because you have the wrong metrics. Now I
• 42:14
  tell that AI company, that's fine. Tell me how your AI thinks. Tell me how
• 42:19
  your AI is uniquely qualified to deal with that unique circumstance of that customer. That's
• 42:24
  why I play a classically trained salesperson, because that's what they do and that's where
• 42:29
  the value lies. And that's how we're gonna differentiate ourselves. And sorry if I sound
• 42:34
  preachy, but I'm so passionate about this. Because I
• 42:38
  this is great.
• 42:39
  think we need to stop and smell the roses. This is not human against AI.
• 42:43
  It's where we are uniquely qualified to do something better than the tool can.
• 42:48
  I and I would say throughout this entire conversation, and I'm so bummed that we
• 42:50
  have to cut this off because it's such a good conversation, but throughout this whole
• 42:53
  thing, you're
• 42:54
  Yeah.
• 42:55
  not anti sales process, you're not anti KPIs, you're not anti any of this stuff.
• 43:00
  It's just start with the right thinking first.
• 43:03
  Right. And what did Eric Reese tell us? What did Steve Blank tell us? If
• 43:08
  you haven't read the book, Ruth, but it's seminal books. It reads quick. They always
• 43:13
  tell it, get out of the building. Why is it then that when I speak
• 43:18
  to an AI tool operator that come and tell me they can replace all my
• 43:23
  humans, everything they sell me is inside the building. Everything they sell me is this
• 43:28
  is your process. I'm gonna get these intent signals for you. What does that even
• 43:33
  mean? Anyway, there's people that sell intent signals. So, you know, it everything is about
• 43:38
  that, right? So, where does my prospect fit into this? How is this tool gonna
• 43:43
  help me hearing from my prospect how their world looks like when I'm done? no,
• 43:48
  but this tool is just gonna get you the meeting. Okay. Now we're real. You
• 43:53
  still have somebody that needs to take the meeting. So don't tell me you're gonna
• 43:58
  replace my sales team because you're not. Right? That's the exciting thing for us as
• 44:03
  thinkers, revenue thinkers. And I I think we'll prevail. Maybe I'm wrong and everybody crucifies
• 44:08
  me, but I I think
• 44:10
  Yeah.
• 44:11
  I think that's and I'm a nerd. You know that, Jack, but I I think
• 44:15
  that's the magic. That's where we have to focus. It's just slow down and focus
• 44:20
  on the prospect a little bit, on their bio journey. Where are you meeting them?
• 44:25
  Are they a tire kicker? Are they just learning? Do they not trust Claude? Give
• 44:30
  them time. Give them time to tell you where they are and then you pitch.
• 44:35
  It's awesome. I love it. I love it. we we blew past the scrappy verse
• 44:37
  sophisticated lightning round, but that is okay because this is some really important stuff. And
• 44:40
  I've got a sales meeting to jump to, so I'm gonna use some of this
• 44:43
  stuff right now. No, this is great. Are you kidding me? This is awesome. this
• 44:46
  I'm I'm so sorry I've taken up so much of your time. So okay. Yeah.
• 44:52
  is this is fantastic. give us what what are you excited about? What are you
• 44:57
  promoting? I know you mentioned another startup too. Give us something to for the folks
• 45:03
  to check out.
• 45:05
  You know, Jack, I I can give you websites and blogs and stuff like that,
• 45:10
  right? But you know, go to the wondering dot net, right? And connect with me
• 45:15
  or go to LinkedIn, Gus Byleveld, and let's just have a conversation. I'm I don't
• 45:20
  want to sell you anything yet. I just wanna know did what I say even
• 45:25
  resonate? Am I swimming on an island here and I I have rocks in my
• 45:30
  head? Or is there something here and and how can we do this better? Let's
• 45:35
  just have conversations. Right? And ultimately, yes, I want your business. But you know, it
• 45:40
  all starts with me understanding better what's happening out there. And that's what I love
• 45:46
  about being a fractional. I can speak to these many people and wonderful people like
• 45:51
  yourself on your podcast. So yeah, that's me.
• 45:54
  I appreciate it. Thank you so much for coming on, Gus. I gotta say, it
• 45:58
  there's a dash of scrappiness for sure, but this is some sophisticated methodology, some sophisticated
• 46:02
  thinking, Gus. I'm a big fan, man.
• 46:05
  Great. Well, thank you so much for your time. I appreciate that.
• 46:08
  Awesome. Everybody go connect with Gus. It is worth a conversation or two or ten.
• 46:12
  if he's willing to give up that much time, of course. But Gus, thank you
• 46:16
  for so thank you so much for coming on. It's been a blast.
• 46:20
  Thank you.