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Sales Strategies that Unleash the Power of AI · Sales Pipeline Radio

• 0:16
  Matt: Welcome everybody to another episode of Sales Pipeline Radio.
• 0:19
  I'm your host, Matt Heinz.
• 0:20
  Super excited to have you all here.
• 0:22
  Thank you for joining us.
• 0:23
  If you are here live, in the middle of your work day, work week, we're super
• 0:26
  excited that you're a part of this.
• 0:27
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• 0:31
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• 0:33
  If you found us somehow on accident, on purpose, I would
• 0:36
  love to have you stick around.
• 0:38
  You can find every episode of Sales Pipeline Radio, past, present,
• 0:41
  future at salespipelineradio.com.
• 0:44
  Always trying to feature some of the best and brightest minds in
• 0:46
  B2B marketing to help you think better, market better, sell better.
• 0:49
  Very excited to have back on the show, Jeb Blount, CEO of Sales Gravy.
• 0:53
  Jeb, how you doing, man?
• 0:54
  Jeb: I'm doing pretty good, man.
• 0:55
  It's been a long time.
• 0:57
  Matt: It's been way too long.
• 0:59
  Since you're in your studio, I assume it means you're home,
• 1:01
  which means that is a rare event.
• 1:02
  Because I feel like every time like I see or hear from you, you're an
• 1:04
  airport or in a boardroom somewhere.
• 1:07
  For the half of a person who doesn't know Jeb Blount is, just quickly
• 1:10
  gives an introduction yourself.
• 1:11
  Jeb: I'm the CEO and founder of Sales Gravy.
• 1:14
  We're an international sales training and Go-To-Markets consulting company.
• 1:18
  We work with sales teams truly all over the globe, everywhere except for
• 1:22
  Antarctica, but I'm working on that.
• 1:24
  And you're right.
• 1:25
  I do travel a lot.
• 1:26
  I think I've spent 154 nights so far this year on the road.
• 1:30
  I've had a couple of months where I've been able to focus and write, but
• 1:33
  next week, all the way to Christmas, I'm going to be pretty much gone.
• 1:38
  Matt: I'm a lifelong marketer.
• 1:39
  I didn't carry a bag until 16 years ago when I started a business.
• 1:42
  And then once you have your own business, you very much are in sales.
• 1:45
  And as a lifelong marketer, I try to spend as much time as I can
• 1:47
  learning about sales and learning from people that are sales experts.
• 1:50
  And when those people ask me, like, who are the people you read and listen
• 1:53
  to the most, of the top five people, two are on that book right there.
• 1:56
  You and Anthony Iannarino, who I've just learned a ton from.
• 2:00
  I have no idea how you, with all that schedule, have time to churn
• 2:04
  out the volume and quality of the books that you do, you've written
• 2:08
  a number of amazing books around prospecting, selling strategy.
• 2:11
  You had a book around selling in the pandemic.
• 2:13
  And not surprisingly, the new book is focused on how to leverage AI in sales.
• 2:18
  There's so much noise around AI overall in business and especially around sales.
• 2:24
  I was told a year and a half ago that by now physical sellers,
• 2:27
  inside sales, BDRs would be gone.
• 2:29
  Hasn't happened.
• 2:30
  Those that aren't using AI, I think are quickly at a disadvantage.
• 2:35
  Tell me a little bit about your perspective and what you're
• 2:37
  seeing in sales relative to AI.
• 2:39
  Jeb: Yeah, it's true.
• 2:40
  Let's maybe back up.
• 2:41
  We'll talk about marketing and sales and AI and how it all fits together.
• 2:44
  So when we think about AI currently at the pipeline side, so from marketing
• 2:50
  all the way through sales, and as you are clearly aware, and you talk about
• 2:53
  with your audience all the time, sales and marketing from a merger standpoint
• 2:57
  is way different than it was say, 25, 30 years ago, where these were two
• 3:01
  separate entities and separate silos.
• 3:04
  These days, there's a mash where Marketing flows into sales because you're so
• 3:09
  responsible for leads and lead generation.
• 3:11
  And then salespeople, they own a little bit of that inbound lead
• 3:15
  generation themselves through their work through personal branding
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  and getting out in social and supporting the marketing function.
• 3:21
  And when you get those two things working together really well, it's powerful.
• 3:24
  When my marketing team, my sales team are all working in the same direction
• 3:28
  and we're looking at the world as one funnel or, one path for prospects.
• 3:32
  It works great.
• 3:33
  I think AI right now, from an impact standpoint, is having a greater impact
• 3:38
  on marketing than it is on sales.
• 3:41
  And the reason is that with, with marketing in particular, when it
• 3:45
  comes to lead generation, you've got content creation, which is something
• 3:49
  that AI is pretty good at with some human help, human shepherding.
• 3:53
  So you're able to create a lot of really good content with fewer human beings
• 3:58
  because AI picks up a lot of the heavy lifting and the humans are able then to
• 4:02
  use their creativity to further craft that content to make it more powerful.
• 4:07
  I think AI is doing a really good job in terms of signaling intent and
• 4:11
  helping us understand where to target and micro target prospects that are
• 4:15
  moving into buying windows that they may not even know they're moving into
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  the buying window but their breadcrumbs that they're leaving online or giving
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  those clues and smart marketers are able to grab that information and they'll
• 4:25
  build marketing campaigns around that.
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  We've even seen it just in your ability to work in social, which is again,
• 4:32
  inbounds for content creation but you know I've got one person doing the
• 4:36
  job that I would have had to have 10 people doing even three years ago in
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  order to create the volume of, say, video content that we're able to build.
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  Now, humans built the video content to begin with, but AI does a
• 4:47
  very good job of mashing it up.
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  And there's a great deal more, in terms of the way that AI is able
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  to look at the entire marketing and inbound top of the funnel landscape.
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  When it comes to sales it's a little bit of a different animal.
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  This idea that AI is going to take over sales, or you're going to need fewer
• 5:04
  salespeople because of what AI can do.
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  It's absolutely ludicrous and we've already proven it.
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  So you recall that ChatGPT hit my radar hard.
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  It was already out there, but January of 2023, we all woke up and we essentially
• 5:21
  had let AI out of Pandora's box.
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  It had opened.
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  And we started seeing what it could do and I would never forget this because
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  I was laying in bed (I talk about this in the book) with my wife we're about
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  to go to bed, but we're on our phones which is what couples do when you're
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  when you've been married for 30 years, and I just I I typed in to chat gpt.
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  I'd read an article about it in Wall Street Journal I typed
• 5:43
  in "hey write a story about Mr.
• 5:46
  Wilson's foxhounds and the swamp cat, Bobcat" or whatever and this thing
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  pumped out this story and I showed to my wife and she's go, there's
• 5:54
  no way even a robot wrote that.
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  I mean, she was like completely, there's no way robot wrote this.
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  I knew at that moment that things had changed.
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  We'll flip forward a couple of months and what do you have?
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  You've got tech entrepreneurs who are going out to sales teams and
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  saying, AI will handle all your prospecting for you, which essentially
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  meant that we are going to deploy spam bots to send email to people.
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  Well, AI didn't sleep.
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  So it can do this relentlessly.
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  And within nine months that group of people essentially has killed
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  one to one prospecting via email.
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  It's almost dead.
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  It sells teams everywhere.
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  No matter where you go, they will tell you that it's dead.
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  Now, bulk email, the type of email that marketers typically do that
• 6:33
  are built around newsletters or in e-commerce, they're built around
• 6:37
  particular products, that hasn't necessarily yielded less results.
• 6:40
  Our bulk email that we'd use as a marketing channel is doing just as
• 6:45
  well as it's always done before.
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  But prospecting emails, you're lucky if any executive opens them anywhere
• 6:50
  because of the way we look at AI.
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  When we know a robot did something, everything else that
• 6:56
  looks like that becomes suspect.
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  So we just ignore it all.
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  I've had people tell me that we're going to get rid of all the BDRs, that all the
• 7:02
  outbound prospecting is going to be BDR.
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  Now we're talking about the robots are going to call people up and they're
• 7:08
  going to have conversations with them.
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  There's a couple of companies out there doing that, that will end badly too.
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  There's another company that is duplicating their sellers voices
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  and then using that to send voicemail-- that will end badly too.
• 7:21
  Because the robot will overdo everything.
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  And I'm going to give you a really good example of this, Matt, that if you're a
• 7:27
  marketer and you're listening to this, this should shock you because it will
• 7:31
  break your brand with executives like me.
• 7:34
  So I get this email, and I'm very very suspect of of AI generated emails.
• 7:40
  I usually know when they are, and I just delete and block them.
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  And I want you to hear what I'm saying.
• 7:44
  I delete and I block.
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  So in the old days you would just delete.
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  Now I delete and block, because I don't want to get hit by AI generated emails.
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  So, I get the subject line in.
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  I opened it because the subject line was intriguing.
• 7:57
  I turned around, was talking to Yuli who is our producer and I'm having
• 8:01
  a conversation with them, I turned back, I got six additional emails
• 8:05
  with the exact same subject line from six different companies who
• 8:09
  were all using this AI bot from some tech company to do their prospecting.
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  And suddenly I realized, oh crap, it was an AI that sent me this email.
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  So everybody else got deleted and blocked.
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  If you're a marketer, pay attention.
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  I blocked you.
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  I blocked your URL.
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  So you no longer have the ability to do any marketing to me via
• 8:31
  email because you're done forever.
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  And I would have never done that before the age of AI.
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  I would have just deleted a salesperson's email and they
• 8:38
  would have gone away eventually.
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  And maybe they would have come back to me down the road when the buying cycle
• 8:44
  was better, but I would just, I would signal my disinterest by the delete.
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  But because you're a robot, and I know that you are relentless and
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  I know that it is disingenuous because you're not a real person.
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  And I know that no one actually invested in it.
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  In fact, I don't even know if you are a real salesperson.
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  And that's one of the things that's begun to emerge-- we'll grab an
• 9:04
  email that we're interested in and we start trying to find the salesperson
• 9:07
  on LinkedIn and they don't exist.
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  Or if we find them, we know that it's a fake profile.
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  Those type of things for your brand kill your brand.
• 9:15
  And that tells an executive, I'm not going to do business with you anymore.
• 9:18
  But imagine how many times your top line URL gets blocked.
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  And you can even do those funny things where you create another URL that you're
• 9:25
  sending an email from, but even that's going to end up getting blocked and you're
• 9:29
  going to be chasing that whack a mole.
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  So this idea that you're going to replace your sales team with a robot
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  is being proven out again and again.
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  It's absolutely ludicrous.
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  It's not going to work.
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  So what we have to start thinking about when it comes to AI for salespeople is
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  how are we leveraging AI for salespeople to take a burden off of their plate so
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  that they can go spend more time in front of customers having real life synchronous
• 9:57
  conversations, which is what we do best and is where you as an organization are
• 10:02
  going to get a true competitive edge?
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  That's what we need to start thinking about.
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  Matt: Yeah, until robots sell to robots, which, hell, might
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  be down the road somewhere.
• 10:10
  Until that happens, we still want to talk to each other.
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  We're still social animals that want to engage with each other.
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  The volume of stuff going out right now.
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  It is a hundred percent true, and someone last week described
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  it to me as The Great Ignore.
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  We have created this problem where we have conditioned every decision maker to ignore
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  virtually all of what we're sending them.
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  You may have an authentic, good story to tell, but you're not starting from
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  scratch building that reputation.
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  You're starting from a negative position that other people have put you in
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  that you still have to dig out of.
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  Your book, "The AI Edge", and this concept of save time, sell more.
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  When I think of that, I think of the old days when someone would spend
• 10:44
  30 minutes researching a prospect to leave a 45 second voicemail.
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  That doesn't scale well.
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  That 30 minutes of research needs to now be almost instantaneous.
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  You think about the jobs to be done to be a successful seller.
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  How do I increase my active selling time?
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  How do I get on the phone in live conversations with
• 11:00
  more prospects more often?
• 11:02
  The job to be done to get me there-- the prospect research, the intent signals, the
• 11:06
  reason to call today versus yesterday-- to me, those are some of the key components
• 11:11
  of how me as a sales rep, whether I'm an enterprise AE or a BDR, this is how I can
• 11:16
  think about AI to really, juice my impact.
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  Jeb: And I think that's where we start looking at the holy grail of AI for
• 11:23
  salespeople is you come in in the morning and AI has done a beautiful job of
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  scouring intent data, taking a look at the signals coming off your own website,
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  looking at even just your responses.
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  Like marketing does an email blast, bulk email, and you
• 11:41
  look at the responses to that.
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  What are the click throughs on that?
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  And you're looking at social, you're looking at all these pieces and you're
• 11:47
  looking inside the CRM and you come in as a salesperson and it says, here
• 11:50
  are the 25 prospects that have the greatest probability of moving into a
• 11:55
  buying window with you now, call them.
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  And there's companies that are doing this today.
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  I've got a couple of clients that are doing it, but they're, they're doing
• 12:02
  it through a lot of mechanics that aren't capable of pulling together
• 12:07
  all that disparate information.
• 12:08
  To me, that's the holy grail, because from a modern selling standpoint in the
• 12:11
  United States, at least, we've been doing this since 1900, industrial type selling.
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  But for 125 years, we have sucked at building lists.
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  We're terrible at it.
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  And we're still terrible at it.
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  So AI can do that.
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  That's something that your salesperson comes in the morning,
• 12:27
  they're not doing research, they're getting in front of the customer.
• 12:28
  The thing you can do, and we have a couple of prompts in the book is, okay, let's
• 12:32
  just say that I need to go out and and build a message for a particular segment.
• 12:37
  So I could take staffing, for example, and say to my AI...
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  And your AI is going to be built more and more.
• 12:43
  I just had to do a really wonderful tour of SalesLoft and they've built
• 12:46
  AI into their sequencing platform.
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  If I go in and I say.
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  I'm calling on mid sized staffing companies between 25 million and
• 12:57
  100 million and I'm making cold calls to them, and I'm looking for
• 13:02
  some ideas for the challenges that the CEOs are [put in your role] are
• 13:10
  experiencing in these type of companies.
• 13:12
  Can you give me five?
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  In 15 seconds, maybe even less, you'll have five.
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  Then now this is what's important, and this is where salespeople
• 13:19
  fail and this is where marketers come into play, because marketers
• 13:22
  have to guide this and teach this.
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  It has to be part of your entire development process to teach
• 13:27
  your salespeople how to use their intuition and be thoughtful about
• 13:31
  how they take a message like that.
• 13:33
  Once you get those messages, now in our world, the fanatical prospecting world,
• 13:36
  we're going to build because statements.
• 13:38
  You should meet with me because.
• 13:39
  So we would look at that and say, okay, we've got five of these things.
• 13:42
  How do we mix this up and match this up, stepping into the prospect's shoes,
• 13:46
  using our human intuition, our human advantage to say, this is what we want
• 13:51
  this message to say, because we think this is going to have the greatest
• 13:55
  impact on getting them to engage.
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  This is going to evoke the emotions that we're looking for
• 13:59
  to get them to respond to us.
• 14:01
  ChatGPT or Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot any of these large language models that
• 14:08
  are kind of built in the same thing can give you that information just like that.
• 14:11
  Salespeople, we have to use our ability to then go through that and build messaging.
• 14:17
  Somebody explained this the other day.
• 14:18
  it's the difference between coming in and staring at a blank page or
• 14:22
  coming in and someone is giving you all the words that you need.
• 14:25
  And you just need to put that puzzle together that speeds us up.
• 14:29
  And even from a marketing standpoint, I use this type of thing now when I'm
• 14:33
  building course descriptions, like I go in and I use Claude most often for that cause
• 14:37
  it's really good at course descriptions.
• 14:38
  And I'll go, give me a course description for this.
• 14:41
  It's never cut and paste.
• 14:42
  It's always take the course description and then make it better.
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  Lean into what we know as humans and lean into that intuition.
• 14:51
  But it shaves off an hour.
• 14:53
  Think about it, you're building a 200 word course description.
• 14:56
  It takes an hour to two hours to build that right if you're
• 14:59
  starting from a blank page.
• 15:00
  I direct this to marketers because I really believe marketing has got to own
• 15:03
  a lot of this getting into the sales organization, but we have to teach our
• 15:07
  sales people how to use these models that way in order to get that time, even
• 15:12
  through pre call planning, but we have to help them get that rhythm down, or they'll
• 15:17
  spend all their time with a robot and no time with their clients, which are doing
• 15:20
  right now already with your technology.
• 15:21
  They're spending all their time on technology and no time with clients.
• 15:23
  So we just got the same problem in a different format.
• 15:27
  Matt: You just a couple more minutes here with our guests today on
• 15:29
  Sales Pipeline Radio, Jeb Blount, prolific author speaker, trainer,
• 15:33
  and author of the new book, The AI Edge which you can find on Amazon
• 15:36
  and all other fine retail bookstores online, bricks and mortar, et cetera.
• 15:41
  Earlier you were talking about what I'd interpret it as the difference between
• 15:44
  lists and relationships-- the difference between own land and rented land.
• 15:48
  The fact that if we are trying to trick prospects into engaging with us, then you
• 15:52
  might get a few people that convert on that, but that's not a long term strategy.
• 15:56
  If Google goes and changes their algorithm all of a sudden
• 15:59
  your search is screwed, right?
• 16:00
  I mean, there's so many places where even on LinkedIn, so many people in our
• 16:03
  industry, flock to LinkedIn and spend time there that could go away tomorrow.
• 16:07
  So what are you doing to build relationships and credibility as an
• 16:12
  individual sales rep, as a company for your brand so that if Google went away
• 16:16
  tomorrow, if LinkedIn went away tomorrow, the relationships, the brand you have
• 16:21
  built, the reputation and trust you have with that customer, it continues to exist.
• 16:25
  So tactically you can say, well, build your list.
• 16:27
  You've been a proponent on that forever-- BUILD YOUR LIST so that
• 16:30
  you have the direct relationship, but there's still a difference between
• 16:33
  a mailing list and a relationship.
• 16:35
  Talk a little about that.
• 16:36
  Jeb: Yeah, that's the ultimate message of this particular book is that salespeople
• 16:41
  are not going to go away because when people are trying to make complex
• 16:45
  buying decisions, they need your help.
• 16:47
  And a robot can't do that.
• 16:49
  A robot's not going to help them make that final decision.
• 16:53
  So our job is to go out and build relationships.
• 16:56
  Our job is to have synchronous conversations.
• 16:59
  And everything that we're doing around AI should increase the number of
• 17:03
  synchronous real time conversations we're able to have with people.
• 17:07
  And there's really a couple of mechanisms for that.
• 17:09
  We have the phone, we have video, and we have in person.
• 17:12
  And that's how we're going to have those conversations.
• 17:14
  So as a seller, your human advantage is your ability to have empathy.
• 17:20
  It's your ability to, as you say, build the relationship versus the list.
• 17:24
  It's your ability to demonstrate that you are a consultant.
• 17:28
  I mean, essentially, that's what we're trying to do.
• 17:30
  We're trying to move them from a place where we're selling them something
• 17:32
  to we're an advisor that allows them to step into making a decision.
• 17:38
  We have to understand that in every interaction with another human being,
• 17:42
  they're making five core decisions on their buying journey about us.
• 17:46
  And that is, do I like you?
• 17:47
  Do you listen to me?
• 17:48
  Do you make me feel important?
• 17:50
  Do you understand me?
• 17:51
  Do you get me and my problems?
• 17:53
  And do I trust and believe you?
• 17:55
  And you have to answer all five of those questions in order to get people
• 17:58
  to either advocate for you on a buying committee or to buy directly from you.
• 18:02
  And the whole promise of AI is that it allows you to flip the switch and really
• 18:09
  change the current balance, which is, and Matt, you can catch me if I've got my
• 18:13
  number wrong, but I think that salespeople are spending somewhere between 60 and 70
• 18:18
  percent of their day doing things that are non sales work activity and you can
• 18:23
  start spending 60 to 70 percent of your day doing things that are sales activity.
• 18:28
  That is having conversations with other human beings.
• 18:30
  That's what we're good at.
• 18:32
  And by the way, people are starving for it, even though sometimes it
• 18:35
  doesn't feel like they are because they keep you at arm's length.
• 18:38
  But the more that we do that, the better it's going to get.
• 18:41
  And I'll leave you with one thing.
• 18:42
  If you are a purely inside sales organization you better by God, get
• 18:46
  good at the phone quickly, because as you said, and I love what you said,
• 18:49
  The Great Ignore, I'm stealing that.
• 18:51
  It was great.
• 18:52
  But they're ignoring all of your other channels.
• 18:54
  You're you've got that.
• 18:55
  If you're in field sales, as much as I'm not a big fan of prospecting by
• 19:00
  foot, because it's so inefficient, suddenly they can't ignore you if
• 19:04
  you're standing in their lobby.
• 19:05
  They can't ignore you if you walk up on the back dock and
• 19:07
  you start talking with people.
• 19:08
  So you've got to get out there and get face to face with
• 19:11
  your, with your customers.
• 19:12
  That's back.
• 19:13
  Matt: Yeah, I 100 percent agree with you.
• 19:15
  I know Anthony Innarino agrees with you on this as well.
• 19:18
  I will tell you this year I created a quarterly goal of a number of
• 19:22
  calls to chief marketing officers.
• 19:24
  And for me, doing a regular habit of outbound prospecting is a new muscle.
• 19:28
  It's not cold calling.
• 19:29
  These are people that have been following our content, people in our CMO community.
• 19:33
  It's still an outbound call.
• 19:34
  It's still an an unplanned call.
• 19:36
  It's my second best source of pipeline this year.
• 19:38
  [yes].
• 19:38
  Right?
• 19:38
  It's literally the phone, not zoom, not video-- phone calls.
• 19:43
  So for anyone that thinks like the phone is dead for anyone that says that people
• 19:47
  aren't working, they're working from home, they're not answering their phone.
• 19:50
  I'm here to tell you, even the chief marketing officers, it works.
• 19:53
  So, that's I think going to be a huge differentiator for people
• 19:56
  that are not just looking for the shortcut, not just looking for
• 19:58
  how do I do more faster, cheaper?
• 20:01
  How do you do more better?
• 20:02
  And I think that's a huge theme of your book.
• 20:04
  So folks check out Jeb.
• 20:05
  You can find him on LinkedIn, find him at salesgravy.com.
• 20:08
  He mentioned courses.
• 20:09
  He is a fount of content and resources and advice and best practices.
• 20:14
  Definitely go to Amazon, get The AI Edge.
• 20:16
  Jeb, I know you're super busy.
• 20:17
  Thank you for grabbing a couple of minutes and doing this with us.
• 20:20
  Jeb: Thank you so much.
• 20:21
  I'm so grateful.
• 20:21
  I appreciate it.
• 20:22
  Matt: Absolutely.
• 20:23
  Well, thanks everyone for watching and listening.
• 20:25
  We'll see you next time on Sales Pipeline Radio.
• 20:26
  Take care.