Connecting Your Data To Milestone Moments That Drive Customer Growth | Jack Siney

Hey CX Nation,

In this week's episode of The CXChronicles Podcast #279, we welcomed Jack Siney, Co-Founder & Chief Revenue Officer at FrontRace. 

FrontRace brings together your team’s real activity data and connects it across systems, and apply powerful AI to reveal what’s working, what’s not, and what to do next.

This is the future of AI transformation: grounded in truth, built on your data, and tailored to how your company actually works.

In this episode, Jack and Adrian chat through the Four CX Pillars: Team, Tools, Process & Feedback. Plus share some of the ideas that his team think through on a daily basis to build world class customer experiences.

**Episode #279 Highlight Reel:**

1. Leveraging & configuring your data to drive growth
2. Connecting your customer data across the whole journey
3. Understanding which metrics matter most
4. Ensuring your team understands what drives the business
5. Always be learning & course correcting

Click here to learn more about Jack Siney

Click here to learn more about FrontRace

Huge thanks to Jack for coming on The CXChronicles Podcast and featuring his work and efforts in pushing the customer experience & data configuration space into the future. 

For all of our Apple & Spotify podcast listener friends, make sure you are following CXC & please leave a 5 star review so we can find new members of the "CX Nation". 

You know what would be even better?

Go tell your friends or teammates about CXC's custom content, strategic partner solutions (Hubspot, Intercom, & Freshworks) & On-Demand services & invite them to join the CX Nation, a community of 15K+ customer focused business leaders!

Want to see how your customer experience compares to the world's top-performing customer focused companies? 

Thanks to all of you for being apart of the "CX Nation" and helping customer focused business leaders across the world make happiness a habit!

Transcript

Adrian Brady-Cesana (00:00.686)

All right, guys, how are you doing? I'm Adrian Brady-Cesana. I'm your host. Another episode of the CX Chronicles podcast. Super excited today, guys. We have an awesome guest. Jack Siney from Front Race is joining us. Jack's got just a super cool background. He spent years working at all sorts of awesome companies, thinking about all sorts of different iterations of customer experience and user experience. So pumped to have Jack on the show today. Jack, say hello to the CX Nation, my friend.

Jack Siney - FrontRace (00:26.635)

Hey, thank you so much for having me. Appreciate it. We both have challenging last names, so we'll just roll it. We'll roll it. That's our kindred spirit. We're bonded.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (00:30.478)

Hey, if people could get Siney and if people could get Chazanna, we'd be in a much better place, So, Jack number one, I was pumped to have you on the show today, but why don't you...

Jack Siney - FrontRace (00:35.895)

Amen, amen. Thanks for having me.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (00:44.014)

Why you start off today's episode as we start off all these episodes. Spend a couple minutes, number one, introducing yourself to the CX Nation and giving people a sense for who we are and what you guys are doing today over at Front Race. But definitely spend a couple minutes, man, setting the stage. You've got some really, really cool backgrounds and experiences. And from our last couple of conversations, man, I genuinely enjoyed kind of hearing some of the things that you've been doing and then also just...

how you've seen the space evolve and how you've seen things kind of progress as we moved into the future. So go ahead take the mic my friend and spend a few minutes kind of introducing yourself.

Jack Siney - FrontRace (01:14.847)

Yeah, that's a lot. That's a lot of stuff for people to stay tuned. I believe humbly, the front race will help you and your company deal with the AI challenge today and everybody, every website, every person that's in the business world is like AI this and AI that. Even companies that are tech companies, right? We offer our solution to a broad set of companies. Everyone has AI on their website, even cooking companies. It's super hard. It's super hard to figure out.

Where should you put your, you know, what eggs and what basket and humbly for folks to stay tuned. feel like front races really helped solve that puzzle in a way that gives you a lot of flexibility moving forward. So that's purposely our intent. Just quickly, my background. When I came out of college, I started my career as a civilian with the U.S. Navy. I was on the F-18 fighter jet program, which is for those of you out there, the Blue Angels. So if you've seen the Blue Angels, those are all F-18s. They're crazy. You know, who goes to school and figure that's where you're gonna start a career.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (02:06.627)

Nice.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (02:11.928)

Jack, Jack, we had the Blue Angels fly over Buffalo and York last year, brother. It was frickin' amazing, dude.

Jack Siney - FrontRace (02:16.943)

And when you have those fleet shows, if you have the chance to go see those planes and sit in them, had to, as part of my credit opportunity, sit in one of those aircraft. Funny, quick side story. If you come as a guest and go out to, and say I want to sit in a plane and maybe do a fly, right, do a flight with them, the first thing the pilots will do, they'll take you out, take you up 90 degrees, 99.9 % of people will, it's a little gross, will throw up in their mask, the pilots all laugh, and then they continue the flight, then you land.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (02:35.918)

You

Adrian Brady-Cesana (02:41.044)

Absolutely.

Jack Siney - FrontRace (02:45.663)

And everybody that does it, if you're the next one up, you see the person come off the plane with their eyes are like this. You know what mean? It's like, kind of, right, you kind of want to do it, but you really don't, right? So it's like a crazy, what is it? Roller coaster ride that definitely, so those guys and ladies that fly those planes are enormously gifted individuals. so, starting my career there, obviously US Navy, huge organization, went to Price Forgives Cooper's as a consultant, kind of leveraged my time at the Navy.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (02:50.488)

They're debating if they want to do it still.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (02:58.968)

Right.

Jack Siney - FrontRace (03:13.547)

both huge organizations. And from that I took, I never wanted to work in a huge organization again. So a variety of reasons and that really started my entrepreneurial journey. And so my last 20 plus years have really been in entrepreneurial ventures. One advanced public safety in the public safety space, putting technology in some of our largest law enforcement agencies around the country. Leverage that into my last opportunity was GovSpend, which is we aggregated government purchase orders from agencies all across the country.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (03:43.256)

Very cool.

Jack Siney - FrontRace (03:43.383)

an amazing, amazing data set for companies to see what the government spends, who there's exactly, exactly. You get to literally, cause it's our taxpayer money. We literally have this database of if you said the city of Buffalo, who's what's everything they bought, who they bought it from and what they paid. So it was really interesting that are the vendors. Imagine a company like Dell would love to know, what computers is the city of Buffalo buying? Is it iOS? Is it windows?

Adrian Brady-Cesana (03:46.998)

Like are we talking like war dog stuff? Like the movie War Dogs? that? Okay, cool.

Jack Siney - FrontRace (04:10.614)

What's my opportunity there? Blah, blah, blah. How long ago did they buy? It's a really amazing data set. The challenge in that business was normalizing the data, which we'll talk about AI. leveraged. So we took a data set that we had at the end of that company, both those ventures, fortunate enough to have very good exits, both of them acquired and folded that into what is now Front Race. Some of the things we did at the end of GovSpend turned into Front Race. And again, big part of AI is

Adrian Brady-Cesana (04:27.669)

Awesome, man.

Jack Siney - FrontRace (04:36.82)

The data, what data are you analyzing? Is it normalized across your company? so leverage same team, did advanced public safety, got a span in the same team now with Front Race. we've worked together for decades. And so that's really our goal. So Front Race, a 30 second commercial, just is it really a layer we add onto a company's, whatever a company has today, system agnostic. You don't have to replace anything. And I think it provides what people want today, which is we connect the data and then start to make you look smart.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (04:47.426)

Fantastic,

Jack Siney - FrontRace (05:06.622)

really quickly with some AI and to be honest, some non-AI analytics, which is not very sexy today, but that's the reality to get really the insights people want. there you go. People want, and literally you need both parts. And so that's what we do for companies today.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (05:23.362)

I love it, man. So wait, couple of things. Number one, I just want to call out, first of all, thank you for sharing that. Jack, the same team piece. I want to jump on the same. You just said, Adriaan, same team kind of went through all of these different experiences together. Dude, that's awesome. I've had a few guests over the years with CXCP that said exactly what you just said, where they were blessed and fortunate to have the same group of guys and gals that saw it in one vertical or one sector. Then they sort of...

Jack Siney - FrontRace (05:35.082)

Yeah, yeah, amen.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (05:51.555)

They took some wins, they took some learnings and some lessons from that. They applied it to another sector, then they saw another set of winnings or another set of learnings. And I just love that, man, because I think, number one, how cool to be able to, almost like a band, brother. I'm a big music guy. Almost like taking the same band or the same group of guys and gals.

Jack Siney - FrontRace (05:54.848)

Yeah.

Jack Siney - FrontRace (06:07.286)

I know, I see it, why not?

Adrian Brady-Cesana (06:11.178)

with their subject matter expertise and their perspective instruments and being able to keep taking the, creating new albums, man, creating new albums or new songs or new tunes, super duper cool. And talk about the world that we're in right now, man. This couldn't be more front and center. You and I were joking about it the other day where every company on planet earth is going to need some type of help with this. And then here's the other thing, depending upon what type of company you are, whether you're an SMB, whether you're a mid-market company, whether you're one of the biggest companies on planet earth,

Jack Siney - FrontRace (06:14.698)

Yeah.

Jack Siney - FrontRace (06:31.744)

Yeah.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (06:38.636)

those different groups or those different cliques of companies, they've got different, number one, they got different levels of resources. They've got different levels of sophistication of the team. But yet this is stuff that every one of us is going to need help with. The idea of normalizing it, aggregating data, normalizing it, being able to speak to it. So super, super cool space that y'all got into here.

Jack Siney - FrontRace (06:51.54)

Yeah, amen. Totally.

Jack Siney - FrontRace (06:59.19)

Yeah, I want to say some contrarian viewpoints I have today, which is if you're on LinkedIn or Twitter, you think AI is revolutionizing every business in the country, right? And I just want to say, if somebody lives it at a granular micro level every day, across thousands of companies, on the tech side it is, on the tech side, the programming and coding and the ability to code and what they're doing, a lot of innovation. On the business side, listen, there is a long way to go. On our side of

You these people are like, you go to LinkedIn, you'd swear every company in the world is plugging in agents, getting rid of their sales reps and their SDRs and off they go and they're 10Xing their revenue and the company is just this efficiently driven. And I'll just say that is really not true at all. think the, is AI amazing? Does it have a lot of capabilities? It does. But it also, even at its very best, it's very best. It's an 80 % solution. If you follow all the AI stuff, Deloitte and Touchler, they're a huge consulting firm, released a report.

with a bunch of hallucinations in it. They had to pay back the client. It was really embarrassing because it starts to do some things that aren't actually real and live. And when you talk about analytics of your company and you're gonna make corporate decisions, the hiring and firing strategy, you can't have a 20 % miss rate in what it's giving you. And so that's really the hardcore part of how to do good analytics with AI is really challenging. And that's really what we endeavor to help companies with today.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (08:24.183)

I love it. And you're right, there's going to be certain immediate gains that you can get from all the incredible things that we're all playing with and seeing on the AI front.

Every time it every I feel like every call of the day not even on this episode, but every call the day Jack We keep hearing people say the same thing which is still got to have humans selling you still got to have humans being the human to human connection for for making somebody excited enough or Eager enough or interested enough to even think consider it as a potential option And the other thing too is last mile man I see across all sorts of different companies customer journeys last mile or being able to deliver that sale or deliver that product or that service the last mile you still need humans all over

Jack Siney - FrontRace (08:45.194)

Yeah.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (09:04.603)

over onboarding and the implementation and the kickoff of actually putting the stuff into motion.

Jack Siney - FrontRace (09:04.767)

Totally.

Yeah.

Jack Siney - FrontRace (09:12.981)

So many, I always say right now, so if this offends you, I apologize if you're listening. So many people are using ChatDBT, Clark as like enhanced spell check. You know, let me buy emails in there. I'll put my verbiage for my marketing and they're using it as this way to create ideas or create verbiage and God bless. So AI today is amazing for very analytical one-to-one type analysis. It is amazing, can create great verbiage. But again,

Larry Ellison just this past week or so said the magic and what AI is going to do is analyzing your own data, your company data, all whatever platform you desire. It's all using the same open data set that's available via the internet or open sources. And so, okay, pick a platform you like, but until you're able to take the, all the answers are in your data. All the answers are in your company data. So you can have some historical data. If you have some size, you have a good data sample. It's there.

Historically, we just haven't been able to analyze it the right way. And so that's the key. would just add this, especially on the sales side, people know this and we like just numb to it. CRMs and that whole thing. We've started with this tech stack. It's only about 40 years old. So let's say mid 1980s, 1990s, Salesforce started in 2000, right? We're no better. No better. You can go chat, GVT, or we're no better today. Forecasting, hitting goal, delivering on sales.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (10:40.375)

Yeah. Right, Yup.

Jack Siney - FrontRace (10:41.649)

It might be worse, it might be worse depending on how you... So great, we added all this tech, but we are almost no better at delivering results. And now we have this tech stack that we never even had 40 years ago, which is shocking. It's shocking.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (10:55.119)

Yep.

Look, I'm glad that you brought that up because you know that that's one of the biggest things that we talk about here at CXEMAN is like the world has as great as all of this technology is and as incredible as all of these different solutions can become and then most importantly as wild as certain teams of humans can then take that technology and make these incredible things happen from it. The world has over the last 20 years, globally companies spend $1.27 trillion a year on just their SaaS. The utilization, Jack, to your point,

Jack Siney - FrontRace (10:58.889)

Hahaha!

Jack Siney - FrontRace (11:07.455)

Yeah.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (11:25.841)

I didn't even have to beat this drum, but the utilization, some of the best companies have played on earth only utilize 30 to 40 % of their tech stack. Now you enter AI into the mix and there's a whole bunch of stuff going on. Number one, it's still ultimately, oh, all goes back to the data. It's still ultimately, we'll always go back to how is your data configured, the way that you have configured your contacts within your CRM, the way that you've configured how companies display inside of your CRM or inside of your company database.

Jack Siney - FrontRace (11:32.159)

Yeah, yep.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (11:52.912)

That stuff is still the answers or the information or the validated data inside of those fields is still going to drive all of this stuff. like, it's like we're in this interesting world where like we already got a software problem. Now you're going to enter AI or people think they're going to do 10 times and 10, and maybe they are.

But we're still in this period of like, whoa, whoa, whoa, maybe pump the brakes and see what do we have? What are the tools that we've amassed to this point? What are the ones that we're utilizing at the highest rates? What are the ones that the whole damn company understands how to lever and how to use? What are the tools that, shit, nobody looked around for a minute, but we haven't used these things in eight quarters. What? We've been paying a bill for eight. Or here's another thing, man, that we see a lot, Jack, and like at CXC with a lot of our clients, many of our clients are.

Jack Siney - FrontRace (12:20.307)

Yeah.

Jack Siney - FrontRace (12:28.596)

Amen.

Jack Siney - FrontRace (12:34.655)

Yeah. Amen.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (12:41.933)

You know, series A, they're growing, they're emerging, they're tomorrow's leaders. What often happens here is as leadership changes happen, specifically extended leadership, as different VPs or different senior directors come and go.

Jack Siney - FrontRace (12:54.419)

Yeah, they come with their own systems. Yeah.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (12:55.887)

You got it, brother. Those playbooks that those people have, oftentimes those playbooks are built around specific tools, whether it's if they're marketers, it's HubSpot. If they're salespeople, it's Salesforce. If they're support people, it's Zendesk. And what we often find times is see is that like implementation, training and actual team utilization or support management was never really put into place. So it's going to be an interesting time, because there's so much opportunity out there for all of these different businesses to really kind of hit pause, audit themselves, assess

themselves understand how they're performing across different key parts of the business and really begin to think about how that is going to impact the future roadmap for their AI foundation build and then for their future investments across team and tools and process. Jack, with that being said, I'd love to jump into the first pillar of team. Spent a couple of minutes talking about team, and so I'm excited to hear about how you've been building the team at Front Race. Give us a sense for some of the first roles or the early roles that you guys really kind of focus.

or even just spend a couple minutes kind of talking about how you've thought about team construction and team management across your career.

Jack Siney - FrontRace (14:02.51)

Sure, I know the four pillars that you all frame. I think there's a huge tie between team and process, right? We haven't historically been very good at, but on the team's side, as I mentioned, I've been personally blessed with our core founding group has kind of gone through a couple of ventures together. And as you mentioned, to start the show, I can't recommend that more. you find good people, hard to find them, just like in your personal life. If you have a good mechanic, if you have a good repair, you're like...

Don't lose that person, like a good doctor if you're blessed, right? It's like, whether you have a home form or not, when you find good people, make a home and make sure you keep them close, because it's really hard. Because it's both skillset, which is super important, but can you work together? And both of them are equally important, because just because somebody has great skillset, if they have different values or different ways they look at the world, or if they're driven in a certain way, it doesn't work. You're constantly butting heads throughout the entire process, right? So finding...

Adrian Brady-Cesana (14:30.999)

Absolutely, absolutely.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (14:57.955)

Yup. Yup.

Jack Siney - FrontRace (14:58.93)

good people that are highly skilled that you've learned to work with and develop good routine. And I just want to say, it doesn't have to always be synergistic. My co-founder, Jeffrey Bernstein, we've been working together for 20 plus years. We're total opposites. We're like the yin and the yang. He's highly technical. I say he's like Spock on Star Trek. He's super analytical. mean, just the smartest guy, literally super smart guy. And I'm more of the sales people person.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (15:17.611)

Yeah, nice,

Jack Siney - FrontRace (15:28.414)

process and so those fit complimentary amazingly well. We've developed a good working relationship and I can't really emphasize that enough to make sure that you find really good people that are highly driven, that you work well with. And so all three of those are really desirable. And particularly, I'll just say, since COVID, this whole old school, we'd all be close, we'd all be in an office, we'd synergistically work, you'd build rapport. And now we all know that lot of teams have no office.

They're scattered. Our team right now at Front Race is in every time zone. We have somebody in every time zone and the ability to make sure that they're highly driven and you can trust them and they do great work product is just more challenging today as we're now dispersed rarely in the same place at the same time.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (16:17.178)

Jack, let me ask you something, brother. Some of the companies earlier in your life and in your career, like eRide and Advanced Public Safety, were these companies all built on the floor? Meaning, not what you just said where we had this luxury of remote and having people all over, were those companies all built?

Jack Siney - FrontRace (16:35.06)

Oh yeah. Listen, everything up to, I'll just be very confession. Everything up till March 12th, 2020, I was a huge advocate in person. Huge advocate of like, I people be like, can I not come in? Can I work far away? And during that time, during those years, we tried, you you try to like, you want to be a flexible, a good employer. You want to like make all that happen. But, I think, I think for me, since COVID, we've never gotten back to optimal efficiency.

And for me, one big reason and part of the elements of your four pillars is in the old days, when you were in the office, there's a lot that happens that's now doesn't happen. There's informal things, meals and check-ins and checkups and getting to know people and dot, dot, dot, and going through some of those informal things. But then also if you had a great person, know, Adrian's great. He's our best person. He's crushing it. Hey, new person, go follow Adrian around for a week and right. And, just watch what he's doing.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (17:13.178)

Yep, yep, yep.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (17:29.284)

Yeah, you're shadowing, the shadowing piece.

Jack Siney - FrontRace (17:33.138)

And not that you'll be him, but typically if they spend a week with Adrian and then a week with our number two person and a week with our number three person, they'll pick something of each one of them. That person's already very good if we've hired well and they start to formulate their own kind of how it works. Now that's almost impossible. Everybody's in their living room or their home office. You're like, you can't send it. Can't send them over to Adrian's house. Go sit in Adrian's living room or whatever. And so really a struggle today. And I think companies are really struggling with.

If you hire a great person, immediately they're like, what's success look like? What's greatness look like? Companies have a very, very, very, very, very hard time trying to give new people. Here's our formula for success. I can tell you that Bob, Chuck, Mike, and Susan are all doing well, but really hard for me to answer why and what gets, hey, go listen to their calls and listen to their video conferences. Really hard to piece all that together today. Really hard.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (18:30.448)

So really good point. know, Jack, I think a big part of the work that we do at CXE with our clients and to your point, you keep saying thanks to COVID, it normalized number one.

this notion of having an extended support team, meaning we're also used to seeing each other like this and seeing each other on video and doing video conferences. It became really normal for some of our clients to see the CXE team coming onto weekly calls and helping with let's say CRM optimization or utilization training or whether it's HubSpot or whether it's Intercom or whether it's Salesforce. you know.

I'm thinking about, you say this back in the day, we used to have like when we were all on the floor, there might've been one or two days a month where we were able to send some of our sales reps or support reps or ops reps literally into like, like Salesforce training or send us like, and so we would have times and places for it to happen. But what I, what I, what, what you just said that makes me think about is now things are different where like,

Yeah, in onboarding, they might cover the one on one of HubSpot or the one on one of intercom or the one on one of here's the tools you're using. Nobody that you, you, you miss or the, or the, opportunities omitted of you being able to actually shadows sits, sit over someone's shoulder and, why like doing that remotely is a little bit difficult. And what we learned at CXC man is like having, almost like a safe zone or having a specific weekly session that's literally carved out for a bunch of account executives or customer success managers.

to know it's a safe spot to go into a one hour session and like, dude, why aren't these reports working? And what's going on with these fields? How can we, where do we keep getting these duplicates? Dude, that's almost a different skillset that when we, when you and I used to run teams on the floor, like it's a, a different thing. It's part of remote work. It's also, it proves that part of remote sales management and remote customer success management has changed. Meaning like, like.

Jack Siney - FrontRace (19:58.569)

Yeah.

Jack Siney - FrontRace (20:08.797)

Yeah.

Jack Siney - FrontRace (20:21.075)

yeah. And I know that did anyone create training for any of that? We all just went home sometime in Q1 of 2020, Q1, Q2. We're now remote. We now all video conference. We're all in boxes, right? Hey, did we do massive training about how do we make that work? How do we check with our people? Are our goals aligned? Are they on track? Like all

Adrian Brady-Cesana (20:41.296)

100%. It's different thing. It's a different art. It's a different skill.

Jack Siney - FrontRace (20:46.013)

totally different and then as anyone stopped and retrained and re, nope, we're just hiring and firing and figuring out and we're making mud, know, in the entrepreneurial world, you're like, you push a boat out in the water, it's only half built, you you try not to make sure the boat doesn't sink and I think that's what a lot of managers have tried to do and being really, really honest, I'm 56, a lot of the older managers like myself, we saw the world one way, now it's different. The folks coming up, they only know this way.

You know what mean? So they are more predisposed, it's more natural. And so I think it's really a challenge that doesn't get talked about and folks are really struggling to be elite. We haven't seen corporate production, corporate teams go like over the last couple of years. If we're trying to figure it out, you know, but it's a challenge.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (21:14.746)

That's right.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (21:33.713)

It's definitely something different. It's something that all of us listeners too, this is going to be why there's so much opportunity right now. Talk about the opportunity for finding picks and axes and shovels that might be the little fix or the little willy or where that sets some of these companies apart. That's a big part of it. Jack, I'd love to pick your brain in the second pillar of process. So a couple of things. Number one,

Jack Siney - FrontRace (21:52.913)

Yep, amen.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (21:59.835)

front race is really kind of built around this idea of understanding how a company has sort of developed or not developed their processes. And then they've spent a ton of time understanding what the data processes are like. Spend a couple minutes kind of talking about that second pillar process. I know for someone like you, we could go on and on, like, even if it's just some of the basics or spend a few minutes kind of talking about sort of why the importance of having playbooks or basic SOPs or basic parameters that all companies need.

Jack Siney - FrontRace (22:03.533)

Amen, amen, amen.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (22:29.798)

to kind of think about to kind of keep their information in line. And then more importantly, as this stuff grows, man, you said it the other day when me and you were catching up like tribal knowledge, brothers, business grows and as more people come on board and as more stuff gets complex, how do you wrangle tribal knowledge? So spend a couple minutes talking about process.

Jack Siney - FrontRace (22:32.722)

Yeah.

Jack Siney - FrontRace (22:45.939)

Yeah, this is my little soapbox. if you can listen to anything I say, is critical. This is it. So listen, the numbers last year, you follow it, US companies spent 650 million plus on AI stuff. A vast majority of that has not been put into production. Over half those pilots didn't finish. A third maybe got implemented. 90 % of companies don't have AI corporately across the board. Those are all just McKinsey, ISG, stats are out there. So why is that happening?

Adrian Brady-Cesana (22:50.416)

It's your big showpox. It's your big soapox.

Jack Siney - FrontRace (23:15.731)

ton of money, why is that happening? This is what's happening free. This is all free. Listen, here's what's happening. Every company, you've been around for a while, has a set of, you have your process flow. Hey, here's how we sell client service. Here's how we retain, right? 22 boxes. Hey, we get a lead, we send them an email, we use our PDF, then we schedule a call, expand the cast of characters, do a demo, frequently ask questions, send pricing. We all know, right? Here's how we sell. There's 22 boxes or.

37 or whatever boxes you have in your processor diagram, right? Listen, that's not the process. It's not. It's not the process. you human beings, if you have boxes, you're a CRO, VP of sales, and you have 22 boxes in your sales process, your elite rep who's maxing it out and your top 20 % of reps, they probably have 97 boxes, right? It's all these things. It's all these micro details that your best sales reps are doing.

that are not in a box. And by the way, maybe move your boxes around. They start with, sometimes they do pricing earlier. They do, they move things around. It's not that order and no one knows. Most sales reps, most leaders don't know. I'll give you an example. have two reps, every company has this. Two reps, their metrics are basically the same. Give or take. One is out selling the other one three X or four X, right? One's bringing in a million, one's bringing in four million. One's bringing in half a million, one's bringing in two and a half million.

inevitably the CEO, the board says, hey, head of sales, why is that happening? Why is it offset? The head of sales makes up some answer. Well, Susie's just good at sales. Susie's, yeah, that's what they do. Come on, I've been there. Look, I have a team of a hundred. I know, look, Susie is good at sales, has a better pipeline, a better communicator. She's a better closer. Whatever, we make up some answer that's not factually based. Go back to our last.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (24:53.935)

Whoa, whoa, whoa, heads and tails don't make up answers,

Just kidding, just kidding.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (25:10.405)

Yep, yep, yep.

Jack Siney - FrontRace (25:12.332)

The question we started analyzing. So we put this whole tech stack into being more accurate to know what's happening. We don't know. So I know most of this time we've been together, I've been pooping on an AI. The miracle of AI is we can start to analyze those things that differentiate your C players from your A players. That's what AI can do. We'll delve into that. But that's the miracle of process. What AI, the first step for any company is to

Adrian Brady-Cesana (25:18.033)

Yep. Yep.

Jack Siney - FrontRace (25:39.485)

Track and understand all the steps into a win, all of them. Hey, when your top sales rep sent somebody a text last night because their favorite team won the NBA playing game or their college team just won that, those all count in rapport building, building relationships, building connection. You have to track all the things that happen, right? Then you could start to analyze and predict and create, how do we replicate with the top 20 %? But if we don't know all the process we're doing,

Adrian Brady-Cesana (25:53.745)

point. Good point.

Jack Siney - FrontRace (26:07.762)

Then you try to invoke an agent. go, Hey, Mr. AI agent, Mrs. AIJ, replicate what my top sales reps are doing. They do 22 steps. Just replicate that. The reason all the agents are failing all of last year's money, most of it wasted because you're not telling them the other 47 steps that are actually happening. So the AI agent can't invoke, replicate what they're not told to do. And so please for the love of God.

before you spend money on some AI, analyze all of your process. What is it? What are they actually doing to a micro level? So then you can figure out, can we automate it? Like you said, can I automate the last mile? Probably not. Can I, are there parts of it? You can, but to automate all of it, people are wondering why it's failing. It's because you don't understand the process, all the steps. Then you try to automate it, get rid of your SDR team and just automate it. Well, if you don't tell it all the steps they're doing, it will fail and people are shocked.

that they're why it's failing. It's failing because you don't know the process. Allah, time at the front race when the first thing we'll do is help analyze and tell you what all the steps are.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (27:12.953)

I love it. do. Guys, when I got to meet Jack and Jack was bringing us through what?

What have the team are building with front race at this very part? I, Jackie remember I started laughing man. Cause I was like, dude, this is think about a huge part of what we do at CX Chronicles. It's the customer journey mapping or user journey mapping. And guys, we're not talking about this at like a, at a high level fluffy, like, you know, like, like CX like trade show type of thing. We're talking about granular AF. We're talking about understanding your customer journey, intimately from, from a,

Jack Siney - FrontRace (27:31.256)

Amen. Totally.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (27:49.684)

How does somebody become aware of your brand to consideration? How do they consider you as a potential option that I might go spend 30 minutes with Jack or 30 minutes with to maybe learn about their thing all the way to conversion. Wait, they liked what Jack and Adrian, they liked what front race for CXC maybe could do. So maybe, you know what, maybe there's something here. Now you start to talk about conversion, you talk about selling, you start to put clothes in that. Then you close them. And now you have to talk about onboarding. Okay, now we closed you and we just promised you the world. Now how the hell, please, please, please, please.

Jack Siney - FrontRace (28:15.506)

Can I interject, can I interject one thing? Imagine this, how much of sales, those of you who are in sales every day, how much of sales is contact 100 people, 20 you'll get a hold of, 10 are interested, three demos. Imagine, imagine if we do AI right and analytics right, you don't have to contact 100, you don't have to contact 20, of 20, 18 are interested, of 18 you get 15. Like if we just do it right, if we start to take what we know is our ICP,

Adrian Brady-Cesana (28:28.709)

Yep, yep, yep.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (28:38.843)

Yeah, right.

Totally.

Jack Siney - FrontRace (28:45.466)

and start to take some other market variables. We don't have to reach out to 100 people. The old world of all that stuff will go away. We just have to be diligent. People don't want to take a step back. I'll get your data in order, out where your ICP is, how you do business before they want to take this step forward. Everybody just want to jump off the cliff and be like, let's go put AI in. And you're like, okay. You wonder why it's failing because you don't even know how your company operates lovingly. know, really, I say that really lovingly. Not that you don't know, but the secret, you know, that's it.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (29:03.427)

Absolutely. Yep.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (29:08.817)

Yup. Hey, no, I know that, by the way, love that you used that phrase as well. I say that all the time. I'll say something really negative and harsh and then I'll say, of course you all know I meant that lovingly, of course. But wait, check, one more part before I forget.

Jack Siney - FrontRace (29:20.274)

Well, listen, if you can answer why your best rep is 2X, the rest of your team are 3X, then God bless, then you're further down the road. Can you really answer? Can you replicate it?

Adrian Brady-Cesana (29:29.199)

Yeah, then you're good. So I think like a big, as we talk through this.

I think that this whole area right here, unmapped, uncharted, uncategorized, just to generally, like a misunderstood landscape is why so many of the companies across planet earth just got into this software predicament we're in right now. Now, if you don't learn from that, and if you're not listening to kind of what Jack, Jack and myself are laying out here around understanding the variables, you're going to get yourself in the same problem with AI.

Jack Siney - FrontRace (29:46.151)

Amen.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (30:04.131)

So, Jack, I'd love to real quick before I bounce off this, I know that we've talked about a bunch of different tools, outside of Front Race, are there any tools that you guys are leveraging as part of this whole journey?

Jack Siney - FrontRace (30:18.129)

Yeah, it's fair. So this will sound overly, what is it, myopic or whatever, but not really. So I would just say this paradigm is that, I would love you to test front race and try this and go look at frontrace.com and blah, blah. But forget that I said that, but our view of the world is, if it's, if it's a 10 mile long race to win deals or your company at about mile nine, we want to stop front race stops at mile nine right before the end. Cause the last mile.

is going to continue to change in the AI world over the next five years enormously. I mean, the models cannibalize themselves. I don't even want to be out here. And I don't encourage you to stay out here and invest much money out here because what looks great today, what might be cannibalized in three months, and that stinks, right? What we want to encourage people to do is we want to stay one step in from the cutting edge and make sure you the right data and the right analytics so that as you test it,

Adrian Brady-Cesana (31:04.901)

Yep. Yep.

Jack Siney - FrontRace (31:15.025)

an AI agent for part of your process. Maybe you automate some of your marketing outreach. You want it, you got to measure it, right? You don't want the measure to be you get fired. People are like, that didn't work. We didn't make quota. I got fired. No, no, no. We don't have to go with does not have to be done that way. You need to have a right analytics tool so that let's say if you're nine miles in, right? The last whatever tool, the cutting edge tool you want to try, you got to measure it. Is it working? Is it improving what we do?

Adrian Brady-Cesana (31:17.2)

Ahem.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (31:23.995)

Yeah, right. Right.

Yep. Yep.

Jack Siney - FrontRace (31:44.166)

You mentioned systems people aren't using. We measure that too. They bought a tool before and every time they go into that tool, actually hurts your ability to close deals. Let's get rid of that tool, right? So just make sure you have the right set of analytics and core data before you start to invoke some of the client tools. I just, again, that last mile, it's going to change so fast all the time over the next four or five years. I don't encourage anybody to spend a ton of money out there because again, something that looks so sexy.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (31:50.993)

Yep. Right.

Jack Siney - FrontRace (32:13.391)

and amazing today on, you know, mid April. It may not look so good in July. You'd be like, we get that free. You know what mean? So, yeah.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (32:17.746)

can be totally different. Completely agree. Literally, that's what I was gonna say is that some of these other tools, leading tools are moving so fast and adapting so fast and with the open source and all this stuff and it literally might be table stakes for things that you need inside of a free package within the next six months. Jack, I'd love to pick your brain on feedback. So I know this is big part of what you guys do, a big part of...

Jack Siney - FrontRace (32:33.681)

Totally. Yep.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (32:44.958)

what you're doing if your clients is going in and understanding either what historical or existing feedback is. Let's zoom that camera back a little bit further. The general question I would love to ask is spend a minute or two talking about things that you've learned around how some of your best clients have really kind of been able to dig in and understand their customer feedback. And then I also want you to save a minute or two of that answer for also what are the best companies on planet earth doing?

on the same guard for understanding employee feedback. So I'd love for you to spend a couple minutes talking about feedback.

Jack Siney - FrontRace (33:13.905)

Sure. That's fair. We don't necessarily play in the employee thing. I'll come to that. I have a personal opinion. for feedback, one of the things we try to do, you mentioned earlier, people show up, hired new executives, they come in with their own, this is how we sell, or here's my client retention model, or here's the tools I want to use, right? I just want to say, humbly, we just don't buy into any of that. As Core Team, led a couple of successful companies, had

Thousands of clients that we work with companies. We sold b2b on last two decades people show up with our own opinion and We at front race we don't care about anyone's opinion what we track are what happens and did the company win Right. There's there's no other variable that matters you you can do surveys. You can do survey monkey You can do net promoter score. Whatever. Whatever. Did you win and did they renew? There it is

Adrian Brady-Cesana (34:03.462)

Yep. Yep.

Jack Siney - FrontRace (34:11.793)

The people, money talks, right? And so people come in with a lot of theories, whether you want to do Miller-Heinman or Sandler, whatever you want to do. We try to take it, no matter what systems or what process or what training you have in place, hey, your people are doing, did it win? What Bill did, did that result in wins? Okay, then let's start to microanalyze what Bill did and we won. And the same was what you mentioned before. What are the things that caused us to lose? Because there normally are,

constant variables that result in losses. No one specifically screws up their deal. We had a company that provided text ability in their CRM. Unbelievable stat when their team sent a seventh text, their loss rate on those deals was like over 90%. Right? It's like, soon as you, right. once they sent a seventh text, they never won any deal.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (34:44.134)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (35:02.642)

Annoyance? Just annoyance?

Adrian Brady-Cesana (35:10.148)

Interesting. Sorry, just that was it meaning you were the contact was not gonna got you

Jack Siney - FrontRace (35:10.171)

find upfront, maybe that's how you connect. That was it. Right? Because people were defaulting to not calling, not re-engaging. They were stalking the person. well, must, they must be interested. You're like, no, no. And so a lot of benefit can be added by taking things out of your pipeline. Stop working on stuff. There's a lot of opportunity costs. You spend chasing things that are dead. And so really we focus on the feedback that we always focus on is did the company buy?

Adrian Brady-Cesana (35:18.289)

Yep.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (35:24.464)

Right, right.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (35:33.905)

Yes.

Jack Siney - FrontRace (35:40.559)

and did they renew? And so if you're focused on those two variables, that will lead you to a lot of success because all the other things, somebody could give you a great net motor score. Somebody could say you were awesome in SurveyMonkey and if they didn't buy and you're like, we loved Adrian, he was great, loved his customer service and we went out and bought some other products. You're like, hmm. So we would drop the ball somewhere because who loves something, thinks it's helpful and then doesn't buy it.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (35:53.83)

Yep, doesn't matter.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (36:00.464)

Right, Yep. Absolutely.

Jack Siney - FrontRace (36:08.75)

In the feedback world, that's what we do corporately. I'll just say, you mentioned employees. Our company doesn't operate in that paradigm much, but I will just say, going back to team and people, it is the most critical factor. I just say this all the time. It sounds so obvious. It'll go in one or the other for most people. Listen, you want to hire adults and you want to treat them as adults, right? This thing of like, you're going to micromanage people and...

put in spiffs that make them do certain things and blah, blah, blah. If you just get in your head, hire an adult quality, I'm gonna treat them like an adult. I don't have to track eight hours a day. I just have to make sure, how do I support their endeavor? Because they might do things different. I've had people show up our company and do things drastically different and open up all new worlds to us. We didn't have all the answers. You're not hiring somebody to come in most of time, just repeat what the frick just happened. You're trying to have them push you to new bounds, right?

bring in new ideas, do new things. And so just want to encourage you that when you're thinking about comp plans and managerially and giving people rope and those kinds of things, it's like, hey, you hired a great person, you trust them, and then, hey, treat them like an adult. And typically great things come.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (37:06.766)

Absolutely.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (37:22.822)

I love it. Is there like...

Is there like one, you've given us a bunch of awesome ideas and a bunch of golden like CTAs to bring, cost action to bring back to team. But if there was, and I really like your one about don't spend too early and be careful about your investments. That's freaking glaring to me. But outside of that big one, I guess what's like the one, many of our listeners today are other startup founders, startup CEOs, or they're guys and gals that are building tomorrow's companies. Outside of that, awesome piece of just like don't spend too early. Cause I think that's brilliant, brother. That's literally everyone in my sales call.

Jack Siney - FrontRace (37:38.756)

Yeah.

Jack Siney - FrontRace (37:47.258)

Yeah. And then congratulations.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (37:55.685)

every single day. It's not just because we're like we want to work with some of these companies. It's because they're about to screw up. They're about to screw up by not so I love that but if there's like one big area of education if you think that like if you were able to kind of call out from all the things that you've seen then all these different market trends that you've watched throughout your career

Jack Siney - FrontRace (38:04.015)

Yeah.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (38:15.396)

What's like the one area of education that you would push everybody to really kind of just spend a little bit of extra time or spend maybe a little bit of extra self-motivation, time or money on learning about over these next 12 months? Because we know that AI is here, we know that that's gonna change a bunch. What would be the one area that you push all of our listeners to really kind of push themselves to educate themselves on in the next year?

Jack Siney - FrontRace (38:39.28)

Sure, so I want to say to the founders and entrepreneurs out there, God bless, stay strong. It's hard, right? So keep plugging away. If it was easy, anybody would do it. So, know, at night, at night when you're standing at the ceiling, just keep going, right? The best things, it's like brainstorming. You know what they say in a brainstorming session, the best idea has come at the end. Like if it was easy, everybody would do it. So you just got to, as a founder, a entrepreneur, just got to remember if it was easy, wouldn't be, you know, there'd be no money in it and everybody would doing it.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (38:48.496)

And he would do it.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (38:57.679)

Absolutely.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (39:05.596)

Totally.

Jack Siney - FrontRace (39:08.772)

God bless to your listeners and continue. I just want to encourage them and keep doing what you're doing. I would say in today's AI world, it's the noise that's happening. So this is what's happening in my mind. There's all these free things or this chat GBT, Claude, $20 a month type solutions out there. So that's a thing. Hey, let me just try it myself. I have Claude at night. That's a thing. Everybody in the company is like, let's try free first.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (39:32.252)

Guilty, guilty of that, Jack, guilty.

Jack Siney - FrontRace (39:37.968)

Every system you've already bought has added AI to their solution. Any tech system, you can't go into any website that doesn't say, just added an AI module or we just added AI. That's the thing. And then you have all these net new AI only vendors, right? So there's at least three categories of things happening. A lot of noise, a lot of noise. And the reality is it's like the internet. We are just in day one. This is all going to look like

Adrian Brady-Cesana (39:41.98)

Yep. Yep.

Jack Siney - FrontRace (40:06.391)

Neophyte type stuff five years from now. We're we think we're like, I'm running late. I'm late. I'm behind the curve. We're not we're still in the first, you know section the first quarter what this thing's gonna be No one knows so if someone shows up to your door and goes I'm an AI expert I know but kick him out of your office hang up the phone and the video comments, but no one knows we're all trying to make so my encouragement with all that said is to do things that

Adrian Brady-Cesana (40:25.305)

Kick him out.

Jack Siney - FrontRace (40:33.273)

that prepare you for a constantly changing future. That's the, like people don't, again, people want to jump right to let me do AI, but so much of it is figuring out what your processes are. Get your data out of silos, align, get all your data together and standardize it. And then you could start to take little bites of AI. Most people don't want to do that. like, already know my process. like, you don't. Most people were like,

Adrian Brady-Cesana (40:55.453)

Yep. Yep.

Jack Siney - FrontRace (40:58.639)

I don't want to my data together. I wanted to do that by the way for the last 25 years. Why the heck would I want to start now? don't want to that. seems script side note. AI makes that a lot easier. So if it was very painful 10 years ago, less painful today, but get your data all together standardized. And then you can start to look at AI things. But people are just again, jumping into stuff. I'll just say this is one real world thing that happens on the free front. God bless.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (41:03.891)

100%.

Jack Siney - FrontRace (41:28.107)

I will chat GBT club. I have them all my favorite, right? But listen, if you're trying to do any complex query of like, Hey, why did my rep with the biggest pipeline or smallest pipeline sell the most last year on what metrics anything that has two or three variables on it, the free solutions are going to stumble. You've all seen it. They hallucinate. They will swear it's right. They'll start to put joints together that aren't real things. And so just want to encourage you that

It's not as simple as it looks. Is it simple to like create an email to do some basic analytics? It is. But as soon as you want to start to piece together two or three variables and do strategic things to help your company get to the next level, it is broken. Please do not believe whatever comes back on your screen. It's not right. 90 % it's not right because it can't connect the data in the right way. And so just encourage you to process data, then AI and do it iteratively in small little chunks and start to add to it.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (42:02.141)

Sure.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (42:12.221)

Yeah. Yep.

Jack Siney - FrontRace (42:26.947)

We're way early, no one's ahead of you. Ignore social media. People are like, we revolutionized our whole team yesterday and we are twice as a fit. We just fired Oracle, we just fired 30 or other people and they're struggling. It's a struggle. And so just encourage you, we're in early days, be patient, do the right foundational things. And you'll add creatively as we go along, you're gonna add great things to what you're doing.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (42:40.349)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (42:50.417)

I love that Jack. I love that. Jack, there's an awesome quote that encompasses what you just said, man. It's not the strongest of the species that survive, not the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change. And that's by Mr. Charles Darwin. And guys,

Jack Siney - FrontRace (43:06.583)

Amen. Yeah.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (43:09.351)

Man, the universe is already showing it out, so if you don't wanna follow universal law and all that jazz, the universe is already proving it time and time again. Jack, it has been an absolute pleasure. Before I let you go, number one, thank you so much for doing this. Thank you for coming on the show. I'm excited for us to keep these conversations going. Before I let you go, where can people that want to learn more about front race, where can they connect with you, sir, or where can they connect with someone on your team to learn more about what y'all are doing at Front Race?

Jack Siney - FrontRace (43:21.369)

Thanks for having me, I really appreciate it.

Jack Siney - FrontRace (43:31.984)

So I appreciate that. I just want to say first, Adrian's great, Safe Chronicles is great. I can't recommend them enough. So yeah, they're amazing. And so from our end, if you're in, you you're looking for kind of how to add and get some analytics on your AI, you can go to frontrace.com, hey, join the race and then fill out your information. One of the things when we built this company, I mentioned it's our same team. I wanted to build a company that was the company I was under to do business with. Cause people show up to your front door and be like, I have the answer. Give me a hundred grand. I'll tell you in six months.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (43:35.987)

Thank you brother, I appreciate it.

Jack Siney - FrontRace (44:01.411)

and they never want to take the risk. we literally will show up. We'll give you the solution. We'll customize it. We'll let you use it for a month. Don't pay us a nickel. So if you think you're not sure what to do, no obligation. It's more than a proof of concept. We'll literally customize it. It will be perfect. You will look so smart. So if you want a free way to look super smart in Q2, go get, go get Front Race. We'll set it up for you. You're going to get a bunch of learnings about your company. If it's not the greatest thing you've ever had, don't buy it. Just turn it off.

Totally cool. So again, platform sits on top we have. I think it's the analytics that most people are looking for from an AI perspective that's risk adverse, lets you stay with what you have, lever what you have, start to make you smarter so can make great decisions over the next three to five years.

Adrian Brady-Cesana (44:48.923)

I love it. Jack, it's been an absolute pleasure having you on the show. Thank you so much for sharing your story. And then we'll be on the lookout for all sorts of great things to come from Front Race in the near future, man. Thank you so much for joining the CXEP.

Jack Siney - FrontRace (44:59.308)

Amen. Thank you so much. Appreciate it. God bless. safe.