Latest / Sales Pipeline Radio / What's Next for Agents in Sales? Are They Here to Stay?

Transcript

What's Next for Agents in Sales? Are They Here to Stay? · Sales Pipeline Radio

• 0:15
  Matt Heinz: All right.
• 0:16
  Welcome everybody to another episode of Sales Pipeline Radio.
• 0:19
  I'm your host, Matt Heinz.
• 0:20
  Very excited to have you here on the last day of the month for some
• 0:23
  of you, last day of the quarter.
• 0:24
  It's our guest last day of the quarter here today, so appreciate him joining us.
• 0:28
  If you are joining today's episode live on LinkedIn, we are really
• 0:32
  excited to have you join us in the middle of your workday and work week.
• 0:36
  You could be part of the show if you hear something you wanna comment on, if
• 0:39
  you've got a question for our guest today.
• 0:42
  If you've got a rebuttal, if you've got a rant on any topic related to sales
• 0:45
  and marketing, we'd love to hear that.
• 0:46
  We will see that we can respond to that.
• 0:48
  We can put you in the show as well.
• 0:50
  So thank you for that.
• 0:51
  If you are listening or watching on demand, thank you so much for subscribing.
• 0:54
  I think we're a little over 300,000 downloads now of Sales Pipeline Radio.
• 0:58
  So thank you so much for being a part of that.
• 1:00
  Every episode of Sales Pipeline Radio, past, present, and future, uh, is always
• 1:04
  available at Sales Pipeline Radio dot com.
• 1:06
  Very excited on the last day of his month and last day of his
• 1:09
  quarter to be joined by the CEO of Outreach, Abhijit Mitra, Abhijit,
• 1:13
  thanks so much for joining us today.
• 1:15
  Abhijit Mitra: Thanks for having me here, Matt.
• 1:16
  Yes, super excited to be here.
• 1:18
  Yes, it's the last day of the quarter and I'm here with you.
• 1:21
  Matt Heinz: And, we're gonna get into why you're not like as hair on
• 1:24
  fire because you're drinking your own champagne a little bit here.
• 1:27
  I will say, just as full disclosure, I am an Outreach customer.
• 1:30
  I'm a happy Outreach customer.
• 1:31
  I literally use it every day and have for almost 10 years.
• 1:35
  Uh, it's just a key part of our workflow and my workflow.
• 1:38
  So I was excited to have ya on today.
• 1:39
  And in addition to the end of the quarter, I know it also, you guys are just coming
• 1:43
  down off of the big Unleash conference, which Outreach has been doing forever.
• 1:46
  So talk a little bit about that and what you heard and learned there.
• 1:50
  Abhijit Mitra: Yeah, so we, um, actually announced our
• 1:53
  AI revenue workflow platform.
• 1:56
  This is something new.
• 1:57
  It's not the same old thing, a new, uh, bottle.
• 2:01
  So basically we talked about how AI agents are gonna help uh, revenue
• 2:05
  teams, um, across the company.
• 2:08
  Um, automate a lot of the work through agentic AI.
• 2:12
  And then we also announced a few key partnerships.
• 2:15
  One of them was with SAP.
• 2:16
  And we had customers on stage talking about outcomes that
• 2:20
  they're getting by using Outreach.
• 2:22
  So these are some of the, sort of the exciting moments of the
• 2:26
  Unleash customer conference,
• 2:27
  Matt Heinz: I would imagine among a lot of the attendees that were there that
• 2:31
  there's a lot of conversation around that balance between agents and humans.
• 2:36
  Yeah.
• 2:36
  Uh, I was told three years ago that by now inside sales, uh, BDRs would be extinct.
• 2:42
  That has not happened.
• 2:43
  I have seen people try to completely replace BDRs in many cases with
• 2:47
  technology, and that in many cases has not worked really well.
• 2:50
  It seems like there's a balance that needs to happen here.
• 2:52
  What are you hearing from your customers, from people at Unleash
• 2:56
  and then what's your perspective on sort of, you know, how agents and
• 2:58
  humans will interact moving forward?
• 3:00
  Abhijit Mitra: Yeah, so I mean, with every new technology there is a prediction.
• 3:04
  There's a doomsday prediction that, hey, it's, uh, you know,
• 3:07
  you know, humans aren't needed, not needed anymore, and uh, right.
• 3:10
  Yeah.
• 3:10
  Granted, generative AI is truly, truly a differentiating technology.
• 3:14
  If we, it can do a lot more, for us.
• 3:18
  But you know, my belief has always been that technology is in the service of
• 3:21
  people and it's not the other way around.
• 3:22
  And we invent technology so it helps us.
• 3:25
  Mm-hmm.
• 3:25
  And, uh, you know, that's why we do it.
• 3:27
  So there's always a balance.
• 3:28
  And if the technology is really good we will see more adoption of that.
• 3:32
  It's like, uh, you know, uh, using this device that I have
• 3:36
  here, you know, the more I use it, the more I get attached to it.
• 3:38
  And I can't go from room A to room B without this, uh, next to me.
• 3:42
  And I'm just a lot more productive because of this.
• 3:45
  Imagine when this was being, you know, uh, you know, people were
• 3:48
  starting to use cell phones and we were saying that, Hey, you know, you
• 3:50
  shouldn't hold this to your head.
• 3:52
  You know, you've got a brain tumor, you'll die.
• 3:54
  That was a prediction.
• 3:57
  So it's somewhat same for AI and generative and agentic AI as well.
• 4:01
  It's still I would say in early stages it's still maturing quite a bit.
• 4:05
  Yeah.
• 4:05
  But we are seeing internally, we are using this in Outreach as well.
• 4:08
  We are seeing a lot of productivity, a lot of helpful work, meaning all the grunt
• 4:12
  work that AI agents are doing for us.
• 4:15
  So one example of that you mentioned is that today's the end of quarter.
• 4:19
  Mm-hmm.
• 4:21
  Do you see me frazzled?
• 4:22
  Do you see me?
• 4:22
  You're remark.
• 4:23
  Matt Heinz: You're remarkably calm, Abhijit.
• 4:24
  I'm just, I'm very impressed.
• 4:27
  Abhijit Mitra: So, not to market too much, but like, one of the
• 4:30
  things that that we do here is with use Outreach to run Outreach.
• 4:34
  And I look at my AI prediction on my pipeline summary.
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  By the way, I posted a version of that on LinkedIn today.
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  So it's my actual life of a dashboard that I posted, obviously grayed out
• 4:43
  a few numbers, but, uh, so it's my live dashboard and the AI prediction
• 4:48
  actually tells me how I'm gonna do in my quarter, and it's been really accurate.
• 4:52
  And the reason why that is happening is because of how agentic AI
• 4:57
  is driving our sales process.
• 4:59
  That's why we can predict all of that stuff.
• 5:01
  It's being, you know, the insights are, you know, real.
• 5:06
  That's, that's what I need to say, and it's helping me and it's helping us.
• 5:09
  So it's not making me redundant, and I don't think it's
• 5:12
  gonna make humans redundant.
• 5:13
  Matt Heinz: Well, let's just use that, that, that example as
• 5:16
  sort of like, you know, the, the double click on that a little bit.
• 5:19
  I think, you know, forecasts in terms have been notoriously unpredictable
• 5:24
  and inconsistent and incorrect over time for every company.
• 5:27
  Big company, small companies.
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  It Why?
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  Because, because I think there's too much human emotion and
• 5:32
  guessing that goes into it, right?
• 5:35
  And so if you can actually use AI to, to objectively look at the data and
• 5:40
  look at the trends and be really clear about what is and isn't gonna close.
• 5:43
  You might not like the answer, it may not give you the answer you want, right?
• 5:49
  Sound.
• 5:50
  It gives you the reality.
• 5:51
  You have something to react to and do something about as opposed to
• 5:54
  being surprised or unhappy later.
• 5:56
  Abhijit Mitra: So, um, Siemens, um, Scot Gardner was up on stage
• 6:00
  at Unleash and he talked about.
• 6:02
  How they're using Outreach for standardizing their sales methodology,
• 6:06
  essentially for forecasting across all parts of the business,
• 6:10
  which is across 190 countries.
• 6:12
  And the reason it is so important for Siemens is because when you have a
• 6:15
  standardized process and that drives predictability, that drives visibility
• 6:21
  in the business and the way it works, the way AI works in this process is that.
• 6:27
  Because AI is involved in every step of the way.
• 6:31
  It's helping you figure out who you want to connect with.
• 6:33
  Mm-hmm.
• 6:33
  It's helping you figure out what you want to say.
• 6:36
  It's helping you figure out what your action items are.
• 6:38
  Matt Heinz: Mm-hmm.
• 6:39
  Abhijit Mitra: Um, it's helping you give insights from your conversations
• 6:41
  in real time and post conversation.
• 6:43
  All of this data is coming up in the forecasting, in the pipeline,
• 6:47
  analytics, in the pipeline summary view.
• 6:49
  For you to know, okay, how is my team doing?
• 6:52
  How is my quarter doing?
• 6:53
  So once you are doing all of this work in one platform.
• 6:57
  That's when you get the insight.
• 6:58
  Otherwise, if it's disconnected platform with a bunch of different tools.
• 7:01
  Yeah.
• 7:02
  It doesn't matter what you do, you'll not get that insight.
• 7:05
  Matt Heinz: Yeah.
• 7:05
  Well, and, and I think, you know, in the past we've had to ask explicit
• 7:09
  questions of the tools we have.
• 7:11
  Right?
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  You have to, you have to know enough about what you're looking
• 7:14
  for to ask the right question.
• 7:16
  What I love about most platforms, including Outreach, now you,
• 7:19
  you can ask a broader question.
• 7:22
  And, and not have it be as structured as you needed to before to get to,
• 7:27
  to have the agents do the work for you to help figure that out and in
• 7:32
  as you train those agents, to have the agents start to question your
• 7:35
  questions as well and say like, what are you actually trying to achieve?
• 7:37
  And let me suggest a different way of coming about that as well.
• 7:40
  So as an augmentation.
• 7:42
  Of what we're doing and as to, as an augmentation of some of,
• 7:45
  quite frankly, the limitations we have in our linear thinking.
• 7:49
  The sky's the limit it feels like in terms of what it can do for us.
• 7:52
  Abhijit Mitra: So it's very interesting you say that.
• 7:54
  Um, because traditionally how, uh, people have worked is they
• 7:58
  looked at a whole bunch of data.
• 8:00
  And then you try to make sense out of, okay, what should I do next?
• 8:03
  Matt Heinz: Mm-hmm.
• 8:03
  Abhijit Mitra: Um, even most CEOs or CROs are at this time today
• 8:07
  actually looking at staring at a big dashboard and trying to figure out,
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  okay, which graph is going which way?
• 8:13
  Right now with the AI, it's very different.
• 8:16
  The paradigm is very different because AI is looking at all the data you
• 8:19
  are not, and it's coming and telling you that, Hey, you know what, this
• 8:23
  is what where needs your attention?
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  This is what you need to do next.
• 8:27
  The next is the best next action that AI is recommending for you because a lot
• 8:31
  of the reasoning is been done, the data processing is done by the AI, right?
• 8:34
  So that's the whole idea, the whole promise of agentic AI and
• 8:38
  autonomous AI and how that works.
• 8:40
  And we want to make that a reality 'cause that makes a lot of sense.
• 8:46
  Matt Heinz: Really excited to have on Sales Pipeline Radio today.
• 8:48
  We've got Abhijit Mitra, he's the CEO of Outreach.
• 8:51
  Talking about the future, really the future of selling, you know, what are
• 8:55
  humans doing, what are agents doing?
• 8:57
  Um, there's obviously a wide adoption curve right now of people using AI.
• 9:02
  There's some people that are sort of way ahead in sort of adopting it
• 9:04
  in every level of their business.
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  Um, still figuring things out.
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  There's some that kind of have their head in the sand.
• 9:10
  And say like, I like my status quo.
• 9:11
  I like the way I've always done things.
• 9:13
  Um, I imagine there's even Outreach customers, right, like myself,
• 9:16
  that, you know, been been doing it for a long time, where adopting new
• 9:20
  things can be exciting and scary.
• 9:23
  As you talk to people that are sort of in those early stages of adopting
• 9:27
  AI as part of their go-to market rhythms, what are your recommendations
• 9:31
  to them and what do they need to know as they start down that path?
• 9:35
  Abhijit Mitra: Basically, Matt, I think every company of every size is
• 9:38
  looking at AI in some shape or form.
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  And, you know, there have been different forms of AI, predictive AI assistive
• 9:44
  AI, and most recently, agentic AI powered by generative AI, right?
• 9:49
  Um, so everybody's trying to figure out what makes sense.
• 9:52
  Now, the problem with that, there's a lot of noise in the market.
• 9:55
  Everybody says, oh, we got it.
• 9:57
  Come to us.
• 9:58
  We'll help you solve world hunger.
• 10:00
  That's not true.
• 10:02
  Okay, so the, so that actually creates some challenges for customers of ours.
• 10:06
  Or other customers or generally any company in the market as to
• 10:09
  what, what should I do with AI?
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  What should I look for?
• 10:11
  What works, what doesn't work?
• 10:12
  Where should I apply?
• 10:13
  Where should I not apply?
• 10:14
  Um, what I tell my customers always is that, first of all,
• 10:18
  choose a partner you can trust.
• 10:20
  Mm-hmm.
• 10:21
  Um, choose a partner who has a platform vision and not a point solution vendor.
• 10:25
  So that's one.
• 10:26
  Because you are looking at not one use case, you're looking at a platform
• 10:29
  which can basically, you know, run all your different use cases tomorrow,
• 10:34
  as long as they're connected by data.
• 10:36
  Right?
• 10:36
  The second thing that we tell them is, okay, let's, let's help you identify
• 10:39
  what use case you're looking for.
• 10:41
  Um, the use cases really matter a lot.
• 10:44
  Um, 'cause AI, agentic AI today, in spite of whatever people may come claim.
• 10:49
  Uh, it doesn't work very well for everything.
• 10:52
  So there are certain use cases.
• 10:53
  For example, one of the ones that we hear quite a bit is,
• 10:56
  uh, MQL to SAL conversions.
• 10:59
  Mm-hmm.
• 11:00
  Leads, I don't have enough people.
• 11:01
  They're just like, falling on the floor.
• 11:03
  What can I do?
• 11:03
  Well, you can run my AI agents that's going to, you know,
• 11:06
  filter them out for you.
• 11:07
  They're gonna enrich them, follow up and tell you which ones you should focus on.
• 11:11
  The improvement, the help in productivity saving is just tremendous out there.
• 11:14
  So this is just an example.
• 11:16
  Identify the use case.
• 11:18
  Make sure you pick the right vendor.
• 11:20
  And the last one that I think is super important that many people don't think
• 11:24
  about is get your data strategy together.
• 11:28
  'cause it's like garbage in garbage out.
• 11:30
  Mm-hmm.
• 11:31
  Garbage agents, they'll do garbage for you also.
• 11:34
  So you need to have the right data strategy.
• 11:36
  You need to make sure, like, okay, where is the data coming from?
• 11:39
  Do I even have clean data?
• 11:40
  Most people don't.
• 11:42
  So then what am I gonna do about that?
• 11:44
  Now, one of the ways in which we help in Outreach is that we say that, look,
• 11:47
  even if you have garbage data in your CRM, Outreach, the data that you are
• 11:52
  getting through your interaction with your customers, that's not garbage.
• 11:54
  That's fresh, that's real time.
• 11:55
  That's real data actually, and we can help you and enrich that data also
• 11:59
  with our data connectors, with our partners, with data partners as well.
• 12:03
  And finally, in the end, even after doing all that, let's say you don't
• 12:05
  have the right data, turn the agents on because they'll filter out.
• 12:11
  Yeah, the noise from the signal for you, whatever you don't
• 12:14
  have right data, it's noise.
• 12:16
  Throw it out of the system where you have the right data it signal.
• 12:19
  Act on that.
• 12:20
  Matt Heinz: But we could have a whole nother episode just on data and like the
• 12:23
  importance of data and the lack of data so many companies have to make this work.
• 12:27
  I did wanna go back to something you said earlier in that, in those comments around
• 12:31
  the need and value of the platform, right?
• 12:33
  Yeah.
• 12:33
  Because I see a lot, there's so many tools out there right now.
• 12:35
  Yeah.
• 12:35
  And with the variety of tools and then the vibe coding people have, I
• 12:38
  hear a lot of people saying, well, I'll just, I'll stitch some things
• 12:41
  together and I'll do it myself.
• 12:43
  And my reaction is always like, well, here we go again.
• 12:45
  Yeah, because every time we see sort of some innovation, some, some, some
• 12:48
  innovations in the space in various different technologies, people say
• 12:52
  like, well, I can do this myself.
• 12:54
  Yes.
• 12:54
  Like, no, you can't because like, this isn't really what you do.
• 12:57
  Right?
• 12:58
  You may have the capacity to do it, but are you going to really be able to
• 13:02
  continue to invest in making that work?
• 13:04
  Is this really what you are best at, and is this really where you
• 13:07
  should be spending your time?
• 13:08
  So, you know, I'm sure you guys see this as well, like from a platform
• 13:11
  standpoint and as a category leader, like how, talk about why a proven
• 13:17
  platform is still so important.
• 13:20
  Abhijit Mitra: So, um, so I tell my customers that, look, um, if you're
• 13:25
  looking for a partner, so if you're looking for AI, first of all, come to us.
• 13:29
  Why?
• 13:30
  Because we are technologists, we are engineers, we are looking at this day
• 13:33
  in and day out, and we are best at this.
• 13:37
  Um, unfortunately you are not, so, yeah.
• 13:39
  Yeah.
• 13:40
  So, so come to us.
• 13:41
  We'll figure this out for you.
• 13:43
  We'll give you pre-configured agents.
• 13:45
  Mm-hmm.
• 13:45
  We'll customize and make it work in your heterogeneous landscape to make sure that
• 13:50
  it does what you are wanting it to do.
• 13:52
  If you go out and do it on your own, you can, you can, you can buy a
• 13:55
  bunch of tools and do it on your own.
• 13:57
  Yes, you can put some things together for sure.
• 14:00
  And many people are doing that, by the way.
• 14:01
  I'm not saying that's the wrong strategy, it's just that it's not
• 14:04
  a scalable strategy because we see the use cases across every customer,
• 14:09
  across all our 5,000 customers.
• 14:11
  We see those use cases, and we are productizing those and bringing out those
• 14:15
  best practices to everybody out there using the best technology out there.
• 14:19
  But individually, a customer cannot do that customer by customer.
• 14:22
  They cannot do that.
• 14:22
  Now it's to some extent, it is true whenever you have a technology
• 14:25
  disruption in any industry.
• 14:26
  Matt Heinz: Mm-hmm.
• 14:27
  Abhijit Mitra: That's how you know it.
• 14:29
  It was true for like mobile for example.
• 14:31
  That's how it was true for SaaS and now it's true for generative AI tools.
• 14:34
  Whenever you have a new technology, it takes a time, little bit of time before
• 14:39
  you know, the market figures out that, oh, this can be packaged into a pre-packaged
• 14:43
  software that I can buy and deploy.
• 14:45
  And I don't have to own that.
• 14:47
  And, uh, it's cheaper for me.
• 14:49
  It's better for me.
• 14:50
  So that's going to pan out, I think over some months.
• 14:53
  Uh, I think we'll see that.
• 14:55
  But that's the situation that is true in the landscape today.
• 14:58
  Yeah.
• 14:58
  So we tell, we tell our customers.
• 15:00
  Trust us.
• 15:01
  We know what do and what we're doing.
• 15:03
  Uh, just deploy a platform.
• 15:05
  Matt Heinz: Yeah.
• 15:05
  No, I like that.
• 15:06
  Well, as, as calm as you appear and as generous as you've been with your
• 15:09
  time, it is still the last day of the quarter, so we're gonna let you go.
• 15:12
  Uh, Abhijit Mitra, CEO of Outreach.
• 15:14
  Thank you so much for being here today.
• 15:16
  Abhijit Mitra: Thanks for having me here, Matt.
• 15:17
  I really appreciate it.
• 15:18
  Matt Heinz: Yeah, great conversation.
• 15:20
  Shout out to Haley Flanagan, who prefers to be in the background,
• 15:23
  but help make this possible as well.
• 15:24
  Thank you everyone for joining us today, listening and watching.
• 15:27
  We'll see you next time on Sales Pipeline Radio.
• 15:29
  Take care.