Latest / The Adults In The AI Room / [Earley AI Podcast] Episode 63: Revolutionizing CRM with AI: Insights from Adam Honig

Transcript

[Earley AI Podcast] Episode 63: Revolutionizing CRM with AI: Insights from Adam Honig · The Adults In The AI Room

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_02: Well, welcome to today's Early AI podcast.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_02: My name is Seth Early, and I'm really excited about our guest today.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_02: I've been really looking forward to this because you're going to hear some really interesting things about the evolution of customer relationship management systems and the integration of artificial intelligence, the role of AI and how it's transforming CRM systems, misconceptions about CRM and how AI can help to address those.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_02: And then, of course, the practical implementation.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_02: We like to get to the practical implementation issues around AI and managing sales and customer interactions.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_02: Our guest today built and led one of the largest Salesforce consulting partners in the world, which was later sold to Accenture.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_02: His current venture, Spiro, that's S-P-I-R-O.ai, uh, aims to revolutionize customer relationship management by utilizing AI to simplify and enhance the CRM experience.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_02: Adam Honig, uh Honig, sorry.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_02: Uh welcome to the show.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_02: Did I say it correctly?
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_01: I usually say Honig.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_01: Uh in German it it means honey.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_01: And so I usually tell people that my ancestors were beekeepers.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_01: Ah, okay.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_01: Do you know that or is that I don't know that.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_01: That's why I tell people that I say that.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_01: So it's a little complicated.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_02: Well, great.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_02: Um, really excited to have you.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_02: And you live in the New England area.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_02: How's the uh weather been for you?
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_02: Because we've had tons and tons of snow down here.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so I would say that uh we did something wrong and the gods are punishing us because it's a winter that we'd see in the 19s, you know, with a lot of snow, freezing weather, and only uh the slightest glimmer of hope for spring.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_01: We'll see.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, my eye driveway has been alternately melting and then freezing.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_02: And because the drainage is poor and it's a long, steep driveway, the last third of it is sheer ice, and I always have to salt it down, and I still end up uh slipping and uh it's been uh see.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_01: This is what we need.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_01: We need AI to take care of all the snow plowing and everything like a Roomba that uses AI to get rid of all the snow and ice, puts down the sand at the right time and everything like that.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_01: Can we just get on and invent that already?
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_02: I think that would be a wonderful invention, certainly for me.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_02: So, what I wanted to start with was I like to understand kind of misconceptions.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_02: So when we first spoke, I said, Well, we're really about AI, not necessarily about CRM.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_02: And you're like, Well, that's exactly why I'm doing what I'm doing, because CRM has all sorts of challenges and there's a lot of problems with adoption.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_02: I use the example of when people talk about business versus IT owning data.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_02: I say, well, the business has to own its data.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_02: You can't say to IT, hey, my salespeople aren't putting information in the CRM, fix my data, right?
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_02: That's a process issue.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_02: It's not something that the IT organization can can handle.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_02: And of course, the adoption and getting people to utilize CRM requires that you have good data, but there's a big obstacle to that.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe you could talk about the misconceptions that people have around, say, CRM and then CRM and AI, and then we can talk about what people, what you need to do to kind of you know remediate that or educate or bring people up to speed and disabuse them of those misconceptions.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I think the biggest misconception that I would point out is that CRM is needed at all.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_01: It's really not.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_01: It's antiquated and it's old.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, when our fathers were in business, they had Rolodexes and they had physical business cards that maybe they kept in a book or in like a spinny thing on their desk.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_01: And nobody came to them and said, Hey, you know, we want to give you an electronic Rolodex that you can press a letter A on it and it'll just show you the cards that begin with A.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_01: No, they threw that away and they invented CRM.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_01: And now, you know, 25 years later, it's time for us to just throw away CRM and replace it with something built from the ground up that actually helps people.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_02: You know, it's interesting.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_02: Uh you mentioned cards.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_02: I uh remember cleaning out an old desk, and uh, this is uh several years ago, and I was like, the cards look funny.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_02: Like, what's with this?
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_02: These cards, I don't know what it was, and it turned out none of them had email addresses.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_02: Or URLs.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_02: It was an old, old style.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_02: So that was that was back then.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_02: So so when you talk about throwing it away, well, you know, so one misconception you're saying is that we need CRM in the first place, and you're saying there's an alternative to that.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_02: So talk about what else when you go into an organization.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_02: This must be pretty foreign to old school or you know, uh even digitally transformed organizations.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_02: CRM is so important.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_02: Talk more about that.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_01: So we we focus on the manufacturing and distribution sector, and our customer base, you know, makes things from ranging from electrical conduit to ball bearings to mattresses, you know, kind of everything in the spectrum.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_01: And uh for these types of companies, actually, most of them have not adopted CRM along the way.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_01: CRM is primarily adopted in the finance and high-tech industries, where the the technical skill of the employee is able to overcome the barriers that uh CRM kind of throws in their way.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_01: So for a lot of our customers, they've looked at CRM and they've rejected it, and rightly so.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_01: They said, Why is this any better for me than just putting stuff in a spreadsheet?
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_01: And in fact, it's not.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_02: And interestingly, you know, a lot of our customer base is also in the manufacturing world, and and the things we work on are product data and knowledge.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_02: So you and I definitely need to collaborate about those uh those intersections.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_02: But I agree that they are usually uh a generation behind in many of these things, and and there's still a lot that's based on relationships, and even when they have websites, it's still there's still people who are picking up the phone and you know, as you say, using spreadsheets.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_02: So when you go into those organizations, you know, they they must be coming to the point where saying, well, we really do need to do this better, and we really need to have a better approach.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_02: So, so what's catalyzing their interest in this?
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_02: And and are they looking at this from the CRM perspective, or are they saying, well, let's, I mean, are they are they thinking about your your frame of reference?
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_02: Skipping CRM?
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_01: We have a customer who manufactures electrical components and they're used in many different things, including the Patriot missile systems and stuff like that.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_01: And when we first met with them, like many of our customers, they were managing everything on a spreadsheet and they were scheduling production building based upon what they were the sales team was projecting based upon the what they were putting in that spreadsheet.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_01: And they had grown to about 30 salespeople using this crazy integrated Excel spreadsheet.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_01: At the end of the week, they'd all email it in to this one lady who'd put it all together, and they had just reached the point where it was too creaky.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_01: You know, they needed something else, but they needed something that wasn't going to take time away from the sales team.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_01: And how large was that sales team?
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_01: They were about 30 people when we started working with them.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_02: What size organizations do you typically work with?
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_02: Do you see in in your world?
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_01: Like with so we work with sales teams anywhere from like 15, 20 salespeople up to 250 or so.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_01: That's kind of the mid-market segment of the distribution manufacturing space.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, what we find is if sales teams are smaller, they really don't need even Spiro or any kind of CRM because they can just kind of keep everything going that way.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_01: But there becomes certain like a boiling point, you know, at some point where a company just can't manage the complexity without something.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_02: Sure, sure.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_02: And so so you called yourself a non-cRM CRM uh at the time.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_01: We're the anti-CRM CRM.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_01: So if you think zero is a CRM, it creates like an explosion that it annihilates all matter for a kilometer.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_02: So like positrons and exactly, exactly colliding and annihilating each other and throwing off energy.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_02: So tell me more about that.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_02: And what you know, what does your system look like and what does it do?
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_02: And how do you take away tell me how it works?
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_02: Like what is it doing and and how are people interacting with it?
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so so the dream of the product is to have something that's like CRM, but nobody needs to do any work.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_01: And it still gathers the information, it reads emails, it listens in on Zoom Teams, meetings, it listens to phone calls, and it just correlates all of that information about what you're having, what you're interacting with the customer, so that anybody else who comes along can make sense of that data.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_01: And so literally you can turn it on and have it work with the sales team.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_01: And then later the sales team can come back and be like, hey, what did I talk with Seth about?
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_01: And it'll just give you the update.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_01: And you can say to it, what would what should I do next?
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_01: And it'll have that information available to you right there.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_02: Hmm.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_02: Interesting.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_02: So uh when you install something like this, it's basically connected to email and connected to uh phone.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_02: Uh are you making calls through the system or how is it uh Yeah?
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_01: So so we natively integrate with Google Workspace and Office 365.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_01: We have our own built-in voice over IP calling platform that's part of the software.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_01: We also integrate with Microsoft Teams phones, we integrate with Zoom and whatever kind of data sources we can pull into the platform, that becomes like an automated um data capture for companies about their customers.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_02: And then are you also integrating that with outbound types of interactions or personalizations?
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_02: Or how is that?
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_02: Talk a little bit about the customer lifecycle and where you plug in and where people may still need other pieces.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_01: So the most important thing for our customers is often ERP data.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_01: And so, you know, order history.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of our customers, they don't, they don't sell opportunities, they don't sell projects, they build relationships with customers and then people buy things from them.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_01: So they need to know what that order uh pattern is like.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_01: And so we integrate with all these ERP platforms and we bring in the order data so that we can say, hey, Seth, your customer just bought this stuff.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe it's a good time to give them a call, or or maybe they haven't bought something and it makes it a good time to give them a call.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_02: Right, right.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_02: So when you walk in the door, what do you need to have in place in order for this to be successfully deployed?
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_02: What are some of the uh prerequisites?
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I would say, you know, not there's not a really a technical prerequisite, but what what I find to be super important is having a clear understanding of what their the customer, Spiros customer, is trying to get out of it.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_01: Are we trying to increase sales to the existing customer base?
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_01: Are we trying to bring on new customers?
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_01: Are we bringing out a new product line that we're wanting to expand upon?
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_01: Because you know, software is great, but like without a business goal behind it, there's no way of telling as to whether we really succeeded or not.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, I I'm not really concerned about the network or the data or any of that stuff as much as that's all technical issues that can be solved.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_01: But what do you want to get out of it?
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_01: Is really the the main question.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_02: And so do you end up uh displacing CRM?
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_02: So so if someone has made a big investment, you mentioned Salesforce and that you did huge Salesforce initiatives.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_02: So is that something where you're complementing or you're relegating the uh the existing technology?
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_01: So so almost always, so more than half of the time, customers don't have any sort of CRM in place, uh, which actually makes it harder.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_01: And in the other case where they do, we have a we have a new customer uh who's in the scaffolding business, and they had been running Salesforce for three years.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_01: A very typical story, but they invested a lot of money in Salesforce.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_01: Less than a third of the team was logging in on a monthly basis to do anything.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_01: And they said, you know what, this just doesn't make any sense.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_01: What are we doing here?
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_01: So we've completely replaced that with Spiro, and and the beauty is even if nobody logs in, it's still doing its job for them.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, first of all, it's it's a Spiro's a modern platform developed, you know, in with modern standards and stuff like that.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_01: So it's got a much nicer, easier use than Salesforce, but but even so, just the automated way that it works means that it's it's not like something that you use in the same way that you would use a Salesforce.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_01: And so so a lot of cases, yes, we are uh you know taking out an existing CRM and replacing it with Spira.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_02: And when you think about where what what types of algorithms are you using or what types of functionalities?
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_02: So you clearly you're you're monitoring and and reading email and communications, outbound uh communications, inbound communications, and you're correlating that with products and services and so on.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, where are you um you know what is the what is the AI actually doing in those situations?
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_02: Is it doing things like extracting entities?
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_02: Is it detecting intent?
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_02: Is it routing things?
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_02: How does it just tell me a little bit more about the mechanics of it, if you could?
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, sure.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_01: So so I'll give you a very basic example.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_01: So when you are a Spiro user and you get an email from a contact, which we don't know about in Spiro, we're gonna go ahead and deduce who that contact is, what company they should be associated with.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_01: We're gonna read the email signature and we're gonna parse out your title, your phone number, your mobile phone, like the information on the business card, right?
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_01: But an email, and we're gonna automatically update the system with that.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_01: So we're gonna create data based upon what we see in the email.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_01: When you're on a phone call and you have a conversation and you express to the customer what the next steps are gonna be, we're gonna draft an email for you based upon that conversation to say, hey, Mr.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_01: Customer, we discussed these five things.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_01: You know, here's what I said I was gonna do.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_01: Please confirm that this is right.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_01: And we don't send the email for the user, everything is done with their consent, but you know, they they can edit it, send it along, and Spiro will know that those actions are meant to be taken, and it'll remind the salesperson that they committed to these things to the customer.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_01: So there's a bunch of different things we're doing in the platform that way.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_02: And uh, I would imagine so we have discovery letters that we have has a certain format and structure.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_02: And I imagine you are able to put in whatever structure that's appropriate for your business when you're doing those types of follow-ups.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_01: And and we don't have this in the platform today, but in the next year, we are going to be ingesting customer data sheets about their products and then applying that data in in the way that we're training the model to make the follow-up letters conform to the language or the specifications that our customers have in their product so that everything is super accurate that way.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_02: And so that means you need good product data.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, somewhere.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_02: So uh so that's important.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_02: And when you think about what are the obstacles to the industry adapting, adopting more agile and AI-driven approaches?
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_02: So, Salesforce, HubSpot all have AI embedded in certain aspects.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_02: Can you talk a little bit about where you see those legacy providers or vendors kind of adapting their products?
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_02: But also what is what is holding back adoption there, or what is holding back adoption overall in terms of either your application or some of the AI capabilities and legacy platforms?
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_01: So let's take a uh angle from the customer perspective first.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_01: So I was at the National Association of Electrical Distributors this week in Tampa, Florida.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, we had a round table with about 12 different electrical distributors talking about how they use AI within their organizations.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_01: And it pretty much ranged from people who are saying, I've used ChatGPT once to I'm automating my order entry using AI.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_01: That's sort of the spectrum of people there.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_01: And when we when we kind of got into it and talked about what they were doing, I I don't think it's like a fear, but I think that there's a lack of clarity about how to implement things slowly in the organization to give people comfort with it.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_01: It still feels very much like a homegrown thing, like when we all had AOL email addresses and we were doing business emails on that because people hadn't kind of figured it out yet.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_01: So that's that's so I think that the the adoption will definitely come, but I think I think people need to have a little bit more practical experience with it.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_02: So in some cases, you know, it's it's a matter of you don't want to overwhelm people, they need to take incremental steps, but at the same time, they need to do something differently, and and that means changing their workflow, changing their business process, changing their practice.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_02: And that's always difficult no matter what.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_02: But it's like you're saying that the uh that the the unknown, the fear of the unknown or the trepidation around how to start implementing or leveraging these tools is really, you know, that lack of maturity is really what's holding people back, that lack of foundational understanding.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I'm gonna take a maybe a slightly controversial position.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_01: I think what's really like controversial positions.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_01: So I think what's gonna tip the scale, frankly, is the fact when business owners can see that they can use AI to reduce their staff quite a bit.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm starting to see this in the electrical distribution industry.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_01: One of the big use cases is this order entry automation.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_01: And so think about it this way you're an electrical distributor, you're doing hundreds of transactions a day selling electrical components, and the customers email you stuff or they send you a form or something like that, and somebody has to key that in to make it happen.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_01: And that is gonna be completely wiped out by AI, and all of these positions at these companies are gonna be eliminated.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_01: And I think when business owners start seeing that and they start seeing, you know, the the hard profits that are gonna come from the AI of certain elements of their business, I think that's gonna move a lot of people quickly.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_02: So you're not the of the opinion that uh most AI vendors are saying, oh, it's gonna free people up to do higher value work.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_02: You're like, yeah, that's nonsense.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_02: They're gonna eliminate them.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I mean, I think it's I think it's a more realistic way of thinking, right?
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_02: Because if you can cut staff, you can cut staff.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_02: Many times people who are clerical can't necessarily, you know, move to a more, you know, uh a high higher value task.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_02: But what are your thoughts about that?
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_01: Well, let me ask you this.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_01: How many administrative assistants do you deal with in your day-to-day life today?
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_01: We've automated the heck out of that, right?
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_01: Like you've got voicemail, you've got email, you've got texting, you got calendarly to sketch up your meetings.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_01: You don't need any of that.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_01: And I think I don't know, I'm not an economist, but I know the economists you know talk about the fact that when you have job destruction, there's job creation that comes with that.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_01: So I can't speak to that.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_01: But what I can tell you is I think there is no doubt that AI is going to destroy whole classes of jobs.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_01: And anybody who says otherwise, I think is just trying to soft pedal it.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I mean, look at uh what um you know automated vehicles will do.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_02: There's I forget the numbers of millions of people who drive vehicles for a living, and automation is going to, you know, as it as it continues, is going to eliminate those jobs, right?
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_01: And I, you know, I don't think it'll mean the end of the economy or anything like that, but I think I think what's going to drive AI adoption is the profit motive.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_01: And the profit motive is going to be mostly because we're going to have to have less people doing work to get the same amount of stuff done.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_02: And and we're seeing that already, and uh certainly uh lots of new efficiencies and effectiveness.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_02: And it does beg the question of how the trans economy will transform in prior iterations of this stuff when we've seen displacement throughout history, right?
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_02: Where the people have been concerned about automation taking jobs, and you know, back back in the uh the day of of the uh first adoption of uh looms and uh you know automated approaches for right, the the Luddites who were smashing the looms and saying, well, we're not gonna have jobs.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_02: And anyway, but but I think that we've seen that, and then of course we can't imagine what the new jobs will be, but it is an interesting time because of the inflection point we're at with AI and what it can do, and then you know, where does it leave um people in in terms of their careers and their jobs?
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_02: So it really is a very, you know, a very, very cataclysmic kind of evolution, or or there's a lot that's gonna happen in the next several years, but it it is interesting.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_01: But there's really only two reasons why people ever adopt new technology, right?
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_01: Like there is we're gonna drive growth and we're gonna make more money.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_01: Otherwise, why should we even bother doing it?
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_01: Just because it's cool doesn't get you very far.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, no, absolutely.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_02: And so what should what do you think when you when you start when you start thinking about the where organizations are going, what do they need to think about?
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_02: So if someone is saying, well, we use Salesforce and that's really working well for us, or we're using HubSpot or some other CRM, what do they need to think about, you know, into the future?
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_02: Is it is it a matter of those platforms are likely going to adopt to do these types of things?
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_02: Do they have to rethink their processes?
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_02: What do they need to be looking forward to or thinking about uh down the road in terms of preparation for this ongoing evolution of tools and technologies?
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, if somebody is using Salesforce or HubSpot and it's working well for them, great.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_01: And they should keep using that and you know, get the most out of it that they can.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_01: But but I'll tell you that I speak with people every week who tell me over and over again that the these solutions are not being adopted because they require salespeople to be data entry clerks.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_01: And if if you have a culture where people are happy to do that, you know, maybe you're okay with the low productivity of the sales team entering data, that's fine.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_01: You know, but but what I find is that nine times out of ten, Salespeople didn't go into sales to enter data.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_01: They want to meet with customers, they want to be where the action is, and they need the software to just get out of their way.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_01: So if that's their case, you know, then they need something like Spiro to help them with that.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_01: And if not, that's fine too.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_02: No, that makes a lot of sense.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_02: And I I think if people will do what's what's uh uh the the it will will follow the path of least resistance, whatever that is.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_02: It's like water flowing downhill, it'll it'll it'll go around the obstacles, right, and find the easiest path.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_02: So for salespeople, they will certainly do that.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I think salespeople are optimized to that, you know, because salespeople is the population that that has the highest percentage of their comp based upon getting something done.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_01: And so they're not going to waste their time, you know, unless it's really required.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_02: So what's on the uh uh roadmap for you?
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_02: Where do you hope to go with your technology?
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_02: You just mentioned integration with product data.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_02: What other things are you are you uh looking forward to?
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so there's been a lot of talk about, you know, like uh AI agents, right?
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_01: Autonomous agents doing things.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, what what we've been kind of thinking about is could there be a anti-CRM AI agent?
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_01: And and the way that this would work is instead of like even going to Spiro and typing in a question, you could just call it up, like when you're driving to the customer and be like, hey, tell me about Seth and what I need to know for this meeting.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_01: And you could do it like a fully disembodied CRM that has no UI, that's just all interactive.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_01: We have a prototype that we put together of that.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not sure how well it's gonna do, but uh we're gonna go and test it out.
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_02: It's a first iteration, right?
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_02: It's a first I usually don't ask this question, and you don't necessarily need to uh answer it because I usually don't focus on products themselves, but just curious what your how you price your your uh your tool.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_01: So right now we're pricing it uh per user of the platform, and it starts at fifteen hundred dollars per user per year.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_01: Um and uh, you know, I'm not great at math, but that's like a little bit more than a hundred dollars a month if you want to look at it that way.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_01: Um so that's and this is all on our website.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, you know, we we offer some additional add-ons and stuff like that.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_01: But uh yeah, it's it's not a tremendous investment.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_01: The the investment for a company to take on something like Spiro is more do they have the organizational goals set like we were talking about?
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_01: Do they really have you know the the desire to make more sales happen with existing customers or bring on new customers or something that's driving that transformation?
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_02: Well, uh, you know, it and you know, these CR these other CRM pro project programs are are not cheap at all.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_02: You know, don't remember what we spend on HubSpot, but I know it's a big number.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_01: We we picked our price to be very much in the middle range of CRM.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_01: So there's nothing, uh even though we're anti-CRM, we're still priced like a CRM.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_02: And then where what does it talk uh take to deploy the technology?
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so we uh first of all, we offer an implementation service for our customers that goes through the process of configuring the software, in you know, making sure it's integrating properly with their ERP, email, marketing automation, whatever it needs to connect with and training everybody.
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_01: But I would say that typically our customers are starting to use it within two or three weeks of the platform, and we just deploy more and more over time.
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know if you've ever been involved with a training of salespeople, uh but we we recommend keeping it short because salespeople have like the attention span of uh well, a small child quite often.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_01: And so we we don't want to give them too much at once, we just want to deploy in little bits, you know.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_02: And um and what obstacles have you run into?
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_02: So are there obstacles on the data side?
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_02: You know, you mentioned product data or integrating product data.
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, obviously, you go into organizations and many times things are pretty messy.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_02: What obstacles have you run into?
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_02: What are what are some of the things that um either hold things back or uh have bumps in the road?
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_02: And everything has a bump in the road.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I mean, besides the the people side of things, which is quite often a big obstacle.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_01: From a data perspective, it weren't for those people, you know, it'd be it would be so much easier.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_01: I know, but but from a data perspective, we see a lot of challenges in customer data.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_01: And so you we have a new customer who's in the oil and gas business, and you know, we connected to their ERP, and we didn't realize they had five different duplicates of one customer, and that was sort of endemic through their data.
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_01: And the data structure of an ERP is such that once you write a transaction, you really can't undo that because that's part of your financial system, you know.
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_01: And so they had these multiple companies, and it took us a little while to realize that, and so we had to come up with a different approach to how do we bring their customer data into Spiro that way.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_01: So we we use a unique identifier of the domain of a company, which it works reasonably well, and most ERPs don't store that, and so they had no way of, you know, because you may have, you know, if you if you're a manufacturer distributor, you may have a customer with multiple ship twos and uh build twos, and like are they different companies?
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_01: Are they the same company?
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_01: It can be hard to tell.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_02: So sorting that out is something that needs to happen before you can really effectively deploy.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_01: It's it makes the last thing you want to do is turn on Spiro and have it look like a big mess of data, then you kind of lose confidence with everybody, right?
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_01: You want it to look good when you first turn it on.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, you know, you have uh one one one opportunity to make a first impression, right?
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_02: And that exactly it does does the trick.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_02: Um interesting.
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_02: And and what about what about the knowledge piece of this?
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_02: Because many times people are uh in front lines of customer service support sales are more than you know clerical, they're they're helping customers solve problems, right?
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_02: There's a lot of deeper expertise.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_02: And how do you integrate that knowledge, or do you, or is that a future um uh future yeah?
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_01: So right now we're more focused on the context than the content.
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_01: And and let me explain.
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_01: So we know that you've been talking to a customer, we know you haven't been talking to a customer, you know that they've been ordering stuff or not, and we can use that the context to make recommendations about what should happen.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_01: But in terms of the content, one of the dreams is if you're uh you know on the phone with a customer and they're looking at product equity z and maybe you don't have it, that you know, the the the customer probably knows what's a good substitute, but the software doesn't today.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_01: And we can definitely make training and onboarding of new employees a lot easier if the software made those connections.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_01: But this is this is a little bit more of a future thing for us today.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_02: Well, that is our sweet spot, so we'll definitely have to totally talk about that for sure.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 28:58
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and uh what what do you do for fun?
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_02: What do you do outside of work?
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_02: I I don't remember if we've uh talked about that when we when we met before, but um what do you do uh besides work?
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_02: I in my spare time, I wonder why I have no spare time.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_01: But um, I'm sort of a tinkerer and I like making things, and so I've kind of really gotten into cooking recently.
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, nice, and been uh kind of working, really working on my Asian cooking skills.
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know where you live, but there's not a lot of great Asian restaurants on the north shore of Boston.
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you know, making Boston West, so yeah.
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_01: I think there's a little bit more there.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_02: A couple of places that are decent, yeah, yeah.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_02: But I love Asian fusion, so yeah.
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_02: So cooking, any other yeah, tinkering, what other types have you?
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_01: Are you a maker, a builder?
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_01: So I I've built decks and patios and all kinds of stuff like that.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_01: I really like doing things physical because you you probably have the same experience.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_01: We work in like an abstract industry, and so having something that's really concrete is so gratifying.
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_01: I am totally with you.
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_02: When I I sheetrocked my garage, finished it all, put up cabinets, uh, all sorts of things.
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_02: It's a beautiful finished garage.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_02: And and there was something about finishing the day and having put up this sheetrock or mudded it or painted it or do doing you know, where you have that physical embodiment of what you've worked on that day, and it is incredibly gratifying.
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_02: So, more of that.
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, cool.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_02: Excellent.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_02: Well, listen, anything that we we missed?
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_02: Anything else that you'd like to kind of add in that uh maybe we didn't cover uh in terms of the industry or your space or your plans?
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_01: No, I mean I think I think we covered it well.
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I think that you know, the for me, you know, people, you know, if if people see me on social media or LinkedIn or anything like that, they know that I really hate CRM.
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_01: And this just really comes from such a long number of years of having it be such a failure and having people blame me for it.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_01: Like they bought Salesforce and it didn't work, and I'm the guy whose company was trying to help them with it, and they would just get mad at me, and it just became so frustrating.
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_01: That's why they were the anti-cRM.
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_02: That's interesting.
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_02: So people can find you on LinkedIn, and it's Adam Honig, A D A M H O N I G.
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_02: They can also find you on Twitter, your same username.
• 31:12
  SPEAKER_02: And then, of course, the company website is Spiro S P-I-R-O.ai.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_02: And I really want to thank you for joining us today.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you for your time.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, thank you, Seth.
• 31:23
  SPEAKER_02: It's been great to talk with you.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_02: And uh thanks for uh to the audience.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, if you learned something today and to let somebody know about the podcast, and again, really appreciate it, Adam.
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_02: It was great to talk to you.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_02: And uh, we will see folks on the next episode of the Early AI podcast.
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you.
• 31:43
  SPEAKER_00: Visit early.com to find links to the full podcast on all audio platforms to listen on the go.
• 31:49
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for watching.
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_00: Contact us today at infoearly.com.