Latest / Sales Pipeline Radio / Why AI Will Redefine the Workplace, for the Better
Transcript
- 0:01All right. Welcome everyone to another episode of Sales Pipeline Radio.
- 0:05I'm your host, Matt Heinz.
- 0:06Excited to have you here for our first episode of September.
- 0:10I dunno where the year's gone. Manny, my daughter,
- 0:13my oldest child just started high school.
- 0:15I need time to slow down for a variety of reasons,
- 0:18but happy to be here on another Thursday.
- 0:21It's for those of you who are joining us on Sales Platform Radio live from
- 0:24LinkedIn or YouTube.
- 0:25Super excited to have you here in the middle of your workday and workweek.
- 0:28If you want to join the show, you can do so live.
- 0:30Make a comment if you can have a question, a comment, a rebuttal.
- 0:34It's a little bit of a family show, so keep it safe and the sane.
- 0:37But we can make you part of the show. We can ask your question live,
- 0:40give you a shout out here on the show. So if you want to participate, please do.
- 0:44If you're watching and listening on demand,
- 0:45thank you so much for downloading and subscribing every episode of Sales
- 0:49Pipeline Radio all the way back, all 345 plus now,
- 0:52all available on demand at www.salespipelineradio.com. This is a real treat.
- 0:57Very excited to have with us today, the founder and CEO of Outreach,
- 1:02Manny Medina. Manny, how you doing?
- 1:04I'm excellent, man. Happy to be here.
- 1:07We were just joking before we got started here that as we record this in early
- 1:11September of 2023,
- 1:14I was talking to another CEO that you and I know,
- 1:17and he asked me how it's going. I'm like, not my favorite year of all the years,
- 1:21and I think a lot of people can resonate with that.
- 1:24But you made a good point about sharpening the steel right now and knowing
- 1:29that you get through this, they're going to be better,
- 1:31but knowing where to focus on things right now and I'd love to have you share
- 1:34some of that.
- 1:34Yeah,
- 1:35I think that this is a year in which we come from a world in which
- 1:40we will do everything. We'll do one of each.
- 1:42We will take on as many projects as we could,
- 1:45and our portfolio was very large and very broad with the hope that many of those
- 1:49things will pay out, and now we're forced to prioritize.
- 1:53If you don't have one or two things that you're working on and you're putting
- 1:55all your resources behind, you'll be doing it wrong.
- 2:00The appetite for overinvestment, the appetite for waste, the appetite
- 2:07for growth at all costs has gone out the window.
- 2:09So now you have to be very ambitious of making sure that every dollar lasts and
- 2:13that the probability of things paying out is higher than average.
- 2:17So I like the discipline,
- 2:20I like the thought that this is a world in which you
- 2:24have to make your investments turn into cash in a very short period of time.
- 2:30And constraints actually free you to be more creative.
- 2:34The creativity and the constraints is far more exciting than
- 2:42the time in which you don't know what to do with the cash. You did everything.
- 2:46So it's not sour grape argument, just to be clear.
- 2:51It is more of a, this is a different world,
- 2:54but a world that rewards those who are ready for it.
- 2:56I really appreciate what you just said.
- 2:58I think a friend of mine who I worked with at a number of startups who's
- 3:01actually running enterprise sales at Smartsheet now, when we worked together,
- 3:05he had a saying at the top of his whiteboard that said,
- 3:07startups typically don't starve. They drown. Right?
- 3:09They take on too many things. You try to do too many things.
- 3:12And a big part of strategy is choosing. And before we get into that,
- 3:17I want to talk about sales platforms and AI and the things we tend to talk
- 3:20about, but I love this topic. I think if you are prioritizing,
- 3:24if you are choosing the things to prioritize, by definition,
- 3:27you are leaving things on the table and someone else in your company in your
- 3:31world cares about those things,
- 3:32you're no longer prioritizing and they will remind you of that, right?
- 3:35And that is an anxiety spiral that helps no one.
- 3:40As an entrepreneur, as a leader,
- 3:42I've just been so impressed at how you've built culture and driven the team and
- 3:45the growth at Outreach. How do you encourage your team to not only prioritize,
- 3:51but accept sometimes the ramifications of the things that you're not doing?
- 3:57Yeah,
- 4:00it is a really good question because there's no silver bullet for it.
- 4:03And the whole disagreeing commit only works so many times the
- 4:08disagreeing commit is you have a cookie jar and you only have so many cookies in
- 4:13the cookie jar.
- 4:13When you can have somebody disagreeing commit before they're like, alright,
- 4:15you're just telling me what to do without selling me.
- 4:18And I think that one of the things that we did really well by having four
- 4:23co-founders as supposed to use one is that I couldn't get my co-founders to do
- 4:27anything because see, I am the CEO because the CEO was the only job not taken,
- 4:31when we started the company,
- 4:32everybody else would pick a lane and the CEO was a lane that wasn't picked. So
- 4:38the job for me to get anything going was to have to sell the
- 4:43idea. So we got very used to selling to each other. So we couldn't just say,
- 4:47we're going to go do X, we're going to have to,
- 4:50for me to convince my co-founders to do X or Y,
- 4:52I have to go sell them to the X and the Y,
- 4:54and I have to bring in evidence and I have to deal with the counter arguments
- 4:58and we have to spend time in this rock tumbling.
- 5:02And the tumbling and the friction of the ideas made the
- 5:07rock shinier over time.
- 5:09So we got really used to selling arguments as opposed to making arguments,
- 5:13selling ideas and selling propositions as opposed to forcing a proposition
- 5:17through.
- 5:22In this time in which you have to leave things on the table,
- 5:25it's actually better than that.
- 5:26You have to leave things on the table that other people are very attached to it
- 5:29and that your competitors are going to pick up and run with it.
- 5:32So not only are you going to get the noise internally from saying, Hey,
- 5:34I want to do that, it's on the table,
- 5:36but your competitor is going to run and go with it.
- 5:38And then whoever had the idea,
- 5:40it was attached to the idea on the table's going to say,
- 5:42look at the competitor is running with it. See, I told you, And I mean,
- 5:46you have to be okay with that. You have to be, yes, it is on the table. Yeah,
- 5:49I know you like it. Yeah, I know somebody else wrong with it.
- 5:51Our bet is still this one, and the reason it's still good is because of X, Y,
- 5:55and Z. And it's okay to resell the idea.
- 5:57It's kind of like rekindling the love with your partner.
- 6:00You have to do every once in a while, otherwise it goes stale.
- 6:02So it's okay to resell the idea, but we have to be aligned. The one thing
- 6:08that is not a sacrificable thing is alignment. You have to be aligned.
- 6:12You can't be doing this one thing in somebody else doing another.
- 6:14That is the case of that. That is how you die quickly.
- 6:17That's so good. If you haven't read,
- 6:21and I want to move on to some of these other topics we wanted cover,
- 6:23but I can't remember the exact title of it, but there's an article,
- 6:26go Google like Legos on the table.
- 6:28Basically this concept of as you grow your business,
- 6:31there's a million things you can focus on, prioritize what you want,
- 6:34leave the rest of the Legos on the table.
- 6:36Someone else may pick them up and decide that's a priority. And those things,
- 6:39if you prioritize well as a team, as an individual,
- 6:42can move your business forward. But I love the concept of just focus,
- 6:45be willing to sort of say,
- 6:47there's only so many times you can disagree and commit and shout out to Jill
- 6:50Richards who's said here in the comments that saying no more than yes.
- 6:55That's what focus is. Finding the things, saying no more often,
- 6:59saying yes to a small number of things,
- 7:01moving it forward. Think a little bit to one of our other topics today is this
- 7:05whole idea of AI in the workplace,
- 7:07and I know I want to talk about what that implies around having a platform
- 7:11mentality in your sales tech stack as well.
- 7:15I feel like we're in this moment where everywhere you turn,
- 7:19you read about the emergence of AI and the importance of AI and the future of
- 7:22ai. Yet at the same time,
- 7:23I find so many people that just want to have their head in the sand that are
- 7:26like, I don't know what this is. I'm going to ignore it.
- 7:28I'm going to pretend it's not going to happen. We're very early days on this,
- 7:33but that juxtaposition is really interesting to me. Now that said,
- 7:36AI has been in a lot of tools we've had well before chatGPT.
- 7:40I know that ai, this is not a sales pitch, but I'm a happy Outreach customer.
- 7:44I know,
- 7:45and I'm thankful that there's AI in the platform that I use and our team uses
- 7:48for sales engagement. But if you're a sales and marketing leader watching,
- 7:52listening to this right now,
- 7:55how should you be thinking about AI in the workplace and why does that matter?
- 8:01The first in instantiation of AI is to
- 8:05do a survey of your tools of whatever you're using and figuring out
- 8:11where is AI helping,
- 8:12who is actually embracing and how is it showing up in the form of taking a task
- 8:17away or replacing a workflow with something else that was not done before?
- 8:21So for instance, in the course of Outreach,
- 8:24if you look at a task of building sequences,
- 8:28so our first instantiation of AI is of course the degenerative offering of
- 8:31writing the emails for you. That's par for the course right now.
- 8:36But as you can see the progression of AI,
- 8:38you will see that Outreach will write your own sequences,
- 8:40so you don't have to worry about that.
- 8:42It will automatically generate your AB testing. In the case of Kaya,
- 8:45it will generate your cards.
- 8:47And one of the things that we're about to release is scoring. So there is a
- 8:51scoring of the calls,
- 8:53but the scoring of the calls only happens post facto by a manager,
- 8:56and it has to be manual when reality doesn't need to be.
- 8:58You already know what a great call looks like.
- 9:01So why don't we create an AI scoring mechanism that actually helps to rep a
- 9:06score better during the call so she doesn't have to score after the call and
- 9:11how a call went.
- 9:11It can actually improve as the call is going through and improve the score of
- 9:15the conversation based on the outcomes that you expect in the conversation.
- 9:18So the first thing you do is make sure that every one of your providers or your
- 9:22vendors,
- 9:22your partners are embracing AI themselves in a way that is more meaningful than
- 9:27the obvious. That's number one. And that they're doing a responsibly, right?
- 9:30They're not exposing your data. They're not just connecting to ChatGPT and
- 9:34throwing your data out there because that becomes part of the public domain,
- 9:36et cetera. So make sure that that is happening.
- 9:41So that's go do now. The second aspect of it is, look,
- 9:46the beautiful part of the AI and the scary part of the AI is it can be whatever
- 9:50you want it to be.
- 9:52And that creates a lot of either for those who are early adopters and innovators
- 9:57leaning forward and being like, alright, what can I make it be?
- 10:00And for those who are a little bit more on the pragmatic side, they're like,
- 10:03show me first before I jump in too early.
- 10:06And when we go talk to our own customer base, it's a little bit divided,
- 10:09some people will be like, yeah, give me all, give me now, give me fast,
- 10:12give me flying cars. And some others are saying, no, no, no, no, no.
- 10:15I heard that AI hallucinates, AI makes it up.
- 10:19AI does these other things and I don't want to be part of that equation.
- 10:22So what we all need to do as an industry
- 10:27is continue to sell the vision of whatever that vision is or as the vision is.
- 10:32There is no world in which there's a general AI assistant for reps and managers.
- 10:37Right now the way it shows up is in the task, right? You're going to do a call,
- 10:42you're going to do a deal inspection, you're going to do a forecast,
- 10:44and AI is assisting all those things.
- 10:47But panacea or the world that we imagine is one in which you wake up and your AI
- 10:52tells you, Matt, today you got two deals to close.
- 10:55You got three deals that got pushed out and the customer went cold. So you need
- 10:59to reengage that conversation.
- 11:00You're short on pipeline for next quarter and you have a QBR at the end of the
- 11:04week that you need to prepare for.
- 11:05Would you like to book your calendar full of those activities and organize
- 11:10your day accordingly so that your day is the most productive?
- 11:13And then once you go into each of those tasks,
- 11:15there's yet another AI who's guiding you through be optimized around creating a
- 11:19deck or running a meeting or running your call or getting prepared for your QBR.
- 11:25So that you see that there is a nesting of AI,
- 11:27one that is generalized for your day or the context of what you're trying to do.
- 11:31And that is very task specific and things are going into that direction and it's
- 11:35very encouraging. So we all need to A). move in that direction, and B).
- 11:38ask our vendors to start moving in that direction too so we can get the most
- 11:41productivity out of the applications that we buy.
- 11:44So one of the number of ways I've tried to get people more comfortable and more
- 11:49out of the fear cycle of AI is to talk about like, Hey, listen,
- 11:52let's assume for a moment you're not going to lose your job.
- 11:54Let's assume for a moment you're going to be able to still pay your mortgage.
- 11:56You're going to have something to do. We separate this idea of tasks and jobs.
- 12:01The job of marketing in 1960 is a little different than what it was 40 years
- 12:05later versus where it is now. The tasks are different. The job,
- 12:09the outcome is still the same. So if you think about a task, a job,
- 12:12and then the body of work to get there, if you are in sales,
- 12:15your job is not to write emails. Your job is not to follow a sequence.
- 12:20Your job is not to shoehorn your way into someone's calendar.
- 12:24The job in the body of work is to build a relationship,
- 12:26create a win-win scenario here.
- 12:28So talk a little bit about the context of AI and also,
- 12:31I mean this kind of speaks to the importance of sort having a consistent
- 12:33approach to all those different tasks and jobs to do the body of work well.
- 12:39Begins, I think I stole this from somebody else, it is mindset, tool, skillset.
- 12:44So it always begin with a mindset, and this is the problem,
- 12:47is that if you associate your worth,
- 12:50your self-worth with the tasks that you do,
- 12:55then you're in trouble.
- 12:58So if you are a great email writer,
- 13:01if you are a great follow-upper you know what I mean?
- 13:03If you are a great preparer for meetings, those things are going to go away.
- 13:07It's like I love washing dishes, but I'm not better than the dishwasher.
- 13:11I'm actually more wasteful. You see what I mean?
- 13:14I find washing dishes as a zen moment,
- 13:16but the machine is way better than me and more efficient,
- 13:19and that's all sorts of things.
- 13:21So we need to disassociate ourselves from the tasks that we
- 13:25do and associate ourselves with the goals that we're trying to achieve as a
- 13:29whole. So as a sales rep, your goal is to solve a problem,
- 13:33identify the problem, solve the problem in a way that is win-win,
- 13:37build that relationship so you can get permission to solve the next problem.
- 13:41You see what I mean?
- 13:41And there is no AI that will ever replace that because there is so much that is
- 13:45very human to human communication that is sort of like fifth sense
- 13:50level stuff that we can't code that won't be replaced.
- 13:53So get good at doing that.
- 13:56So fix your mindset into an expansive way of
- 14:01seeing opportunities as opposed to seeing threats.
- 14:06When you buy a car, if you buy a Subaru,
- 14:07all of a sudden you start seeing Subarus everywhere.
- 14:09So if you fix your mind and saying, look, AI is a threat,
- 14:12you're going to see threat everywhere and you're going to see nothing but
- 14:14threats. But if you fix it in your mind and saying, look, AI is an opportunity,
- 14:17then you start seeing opportunities everywhere.
- 14:19So you need to start fixing your mind. It's like,
- 14:20what can you do for me and how can I identify more opportunities?
- 14:23Then the second thing is that you're fix it in your process.
- 14:27Have to make it part of your process so you can feel good about doing it.
- 14:29So it becomes chopped wood carry water kind of stuff as opposed to being all,
- 14:34what is it going to do for me? Is it hallucinate?
- 14:36Is it going to do something weird?
- 14:38And the third part is it needs to be part of if you're a manager or you're part
- 14:42of an organization,
- 14:44it needs to be part of the organizational culture in that it's okay for you to
- 14:50disrupt your job to find a better way to do it.
- 14:53That needs to be culturally acceptable that I'm going to break this process to
- 14:57come up with a better process because a better process gets into the outcome
- 14:59faster. So I'm going to stop there and see.
- 15:01No, it's really good.
- 15:02We're talking today on Sales Pipeline Radio with Manny Medina,
- 15:04he's the founder and CEO of Outreach.
- 15:07And I find it interesting that some of the same people that worry that the BDR
- 15:11function is going away because of AI are also the same ones who complain that
- 15:16their sales team doesn't spend enough time actively selling that they spend all
- 15:19their time doing administrative tasks and writing new emails,
- 15:23and you got 14 different tabs open with 14 different tools to do 14 different
- 15:26parts of the process.
- 15:28And so it just seems to me like if we want the artists, the craftsmen,
- 15:33that our salespeople to do what they do best,
- 15:35if we want more active selling time,
- 15:37if we want the humanity and sales to be the majority of what they do,
- 15:42there's a lean in moment there for AI,
- 15:44but also a lean in around really improving the process and not having 14
- 15:49tabs open anymore.
- 15:50Absolutely. And I think somebody at Verizon called this the swivel chair tax.
- 15:55There's a real tax of going from an application to the user experience is
- 16:00different. You're trying to remember where things we're at.
- 16:03And the real impetus for all of us leaders
- 16:08is to figure out how to minimize the swivel chair tax and take tasks away from
- 16:12our reps so that they can focus on solving somebody else's problem. See,
- 16:16the beautiful thing about sales is that your job is to get into somebody else's
- 16:20mind and see the words and not being spoken.
- 16:23And to read between the lines is to get yourself into this
- 16:27hyper empathetic point of view where you are really understanding from your
- 16:30customer point of view what the problems are so you can actually craft a
- 16:32solution. And the more time you have to do that,
- 16:37the better off you're going to be.
- 16:38So I just don't see a world in which we continue to do this nonsense of 20 point
- 16:43solutions to the five jobs because that is just not where the world is going.
- 16:48You see what I mean?
- 16:49So the outcome that we're seeing is an AI that works on the back of a single
- 16:54platform where you can do your prospecting job,
- 16:58your deal qualifying job, your forecasting job, you run your meetings,
- 17:01you build your account plans, meet your action plans,
- 17:03and the AI just learns from all that and sort of continues to get better in
- 17:06helping you at your whole job, not just each of the tasks.
- 17:10Yeah, I had literally earlier today,
- 17:12I had with a CMO who was just really struggling with getting their BDR
- 17:17function to work and be successful. And over the course of the call,
- 17:20I realized a couple things. First of all,
- 17:21they were focused on BDR as the function. I said, that's not the strategy.
- 17:25That is a tactic.
- 17:26That is a channel that is a component of what is a bigger strategy,
- 17:29which in their case is like an outbound motion for target accounts.
- 17:33And I said if you're setting it up to automate it and just
- 17:37do it automatically,
- 17:39you're going to send a bunch of crap spam to a bunch of people that is not going
- 17:42to land well, as opposed to saying,
- 17:45what is our strategy for engaging in building value with this audience?
- 17:49We leverage machines and robots and tools and data to tell us who to call next.
- 17:54I mean, no matter how complicated this all gets account-based motions, whatever.
- 17:58Every sales rep I know just has the same questions.
- 18:01Who do I call next and what should I talk with them about? Right?
- 18:05And the last thing you want to do is go spend,
- 18:07I remember back in the day spending 45 minutes doing research to leave a
- 18:1230 second voicemail. That doesn't sound very efficient.
- 18:15And yet people still do that. So I think about the machines,
- 18:17I think about the tools,
- 18:18I think about the data that can shorten that time that tell me not only help me
- 18:22make a better call and better conversation,
- 18:24but to fast track that information to me for me to go have more time in front of
- 18:28my customers as opposed to more time in front of my CRM and that swivel chair
- 18:32mentality.
- 18:32Right? No, what's really interesting, I hear this a lot, right?
- 18:35Is the BDR job going to go away? Is the SER job going to go away?
- 18:39New
- 18:43technologies do this, display some things and there's more.
- 18:46The old technology ends up finding new uses. So for instance,
- 18:50we still see SDRs being productive when you're trying to crack into new markets
- 18:54when nobody knows you, where a person to person conversation about
- 18:59what the hell is that you do and how I can help me in the general sense of my
- 19:02organization is valuable.
- 19:04So having a conversation at that level is super helpful
- 19:09in new customers. Or
- 19:13I also see SDRs and BDRs being helpful in expansion place.
- 19:17So there is a place in which you deploy it, but the general statements of like,
- 19:21oh, it's working or it's not working, lacks the context.
- 19:24What industry are you in? Is it oversaturated?
- 19:27Are you already a winner and everybody knows you?
- 19:29So the SDR incremental code is not going to help. So
- 19:33this general statements are just madening because this is the problem of social
- 19:37media that the pithy arguments wins the day and it lacks the consistency and
- 19:43the nuances that we as organizational leaders need to actually make a decision.
- 19:50The last question I have for you is, and we're September, right?
- 19:53And people are already starting to think about next year, which is smart,
- 19:56I think tend to think of Q4. If you're a calendar fiscal year,
- 19:58Q four is quarter zero is the time. You should sort of get your mind right,
- 20:02as we talked about earlier, strategize and put some of those things in place.
- 20:07What are some productive things and practical things that sales leaders should
- 20:10be thinking about in prioritizing for their teams using technology and AI into
- 20:152024?
- 20:21If you are not actively thinking about making your reps more productive and
- 20:26minimizing that swivel chair tax your competitor is.
- 20:30We are in a world right now that because everyone is
- 20:35to some degree frozen, you have to overinvest in that customer relationship.
- 20:40The
- 20:45winner in this kind of environment is status quo.
- 20:48So you have to figure out what is your key,
- 20:51your approach into that customer conversation that will unseat on status quo and
- 20:56get the conversation open, not even for your product,
- 20:58but just the conversation going. That could be an overinvestment in SEs,
- 21:05that could be more overlay reps. It could be a number of things.
- 21:10But for you to be able to make that investment,
- 21:12you have to get efficiency out of somewhere else.
- 21:14You won't be able to just add headcount and call it good.
- 21:17You have to get your reps from being out on 50 to 60% participation to like 70,
- 21:2180, 90% participation. And if you're not planning for it, somebody else will.
- 21:26So you have to get your mind right,
- 21:29and you have to lean in and to make productivity gains so that you can invest in
- 21:33your sales cycle in a way that makes sense.
- 21:35Well, when you say competitors, I think about that two ways. I think one,
- 21:39your direct competitors trying to sell to the same customers are adopting this
- 21:42technology, making it easier for your prospects to buy,
- 21:46creating a better experience with their sales team than your sales team,
- 21:49your other competitors,
- 21:50the other startup down the street that wants to hire salespeople, right? Right.
- 21:53And so dude, that 45 minutes just to leave a voicemail. That hurts, right?
- 21:58Because you've been there. If you've been seller, you've been there.
- 22:01If you're doing your homework and doing it right,
- 22:03if some other company can offer you an opportunity to provide the right tool set
- 22:07to be just as successful or successful to do more of the job that you love,
- 22:11that's going to be a competitive differentiator in the hiring market,
- 22:14let alone your competitive market in your go-to-market strategy.
- 22:17Of course. And if you don't have high performing reps,
- 22:20it's just as bad as not having technology.
- 22:25This is not a static game. The game doesn't end with technology or go to market.
- 22:29You have to have it all play nicely in sync.
- 22:32Manny, I know how busy you are.
- 22:33I really appreciate you taking the time today to do this. Everyone,
- 22:36check out Outreach.io.
- 22:39They've got a conference coming up here in
- 22:41Seattle.
- 22:42I'm super excited to get out for that one and just check out their content as
- 22:45well. Super good stuff, Manny. Thanks so much.
- 22:47Thank you. And come to Unleash. See you all later.
- 22:49All right, we'll see you at Unleash. Thank you everyone for joining us today.
- 22:52We'll see you next week on another episode of Sales Pipeline Radio. Take care.