Leading Humans in an AI-Augmented World | Kristie Jones

In this powerful episode of The Uncommon Leader Podcast, host John Gallagher welcomes back author, consultant, and speaker Kristie Jones to discuss her upcoming book, The Sales Leadership Gap: Leading Humans in an AI Augmented World. 

As organizations rapidly integrate AI tools, automated workflows, and agentic systems, a critical leadership bottleneck has emerged: most executives are managing people using obsolete playbooks rather than managing end-to-end systems. Kristie breaks down why leaders must step out of the cockpit and into the control tower, providing actionable insights on workflow design, prompt architecture, objective judgment, and hiring for discernment. 

🚀 𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐘𝐨𝐮’𝐥𝐥 𝐋𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐧:

• The Control Tower Metaphor: Shifting leadership perspective from tactical execution to 360-degree system oversight. 

• Obsolete Playbooks: Why waiting for industry playbooks puts you behind, and how to co-create the 2027 framework today. 

• Human Discernment vs. AI Copy-Pasting: Why AI outputs require strict human verification, critical thinking, and objective judgment. 

• Pre-Call Planning & The Art of Sales: Reviving old-school pre-call rigor to eliminate failure modes before buyer conversations. 

• The 5 Core Executive Competencies: Systems thinking, workflow design, decision leadership, coaching objective judgment, and accountability clarity. 

📌 𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐧𝐞𝐜𝐭 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 Kristie Jones👇
➡️ LinkedIn (primary):  https://www.linkedin.com/in/kristiekjones
➡️ Website: https://kristiekjones.com/
➡️ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@kristiekjones
➡️ Book: https://kristiekjones.com/book/the-sales-leadership-gap/

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Transcript

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Motivating The Self-Motivated

SPEAKER_01 0:00

I used to say, uh, back in the day, one of my favorite phrases was, I can't motivate the unmotivated, but I can inspire the self-motivated. Like I can't make you want to do it if you don't want to do it, but if you want to do it, oh my gosh, can I give you some doy uncommon

Why Sales Leadership Needs A Rethink

SPEAKER_01 0:26

leaders?

SPEAKER_00 0:26

Welcome back. This is the Uncommon Leader Podcast. I'm your host, John Gallagher. It isn't often that I bring back guests quickly, as quickly as I am here. Christy Jones is an author, she's a consultant, she's a speaker, and she is working in the space that we're going to talk about today with regards to gaps we have in sales leadership. And really for you all as listeners, I think uh generally in leadership overall in companies today and how they utilize or don't utilize AI to help them with decisions and to help them move their organizations forward. She's the author of the book Selling Your Way In that was out just a couple years ago that we talked about on the podcast before. And her new book that she's writing right now, The Sales Leadership Gap, Leading Humans in an AI augmented world, is coming out real soon. When this episode hits the uh airwaves, she'll be ready to launch her book and you'll be ready to get a copy of it real soon. So that's going to be a good thing. So, Christy, welcome back to the Uncommon Leader Podcast. How are you doing?

SPEAKER_01 1:24

Thanks, John. I'm good. I'm uh I'm I'm energized by everything that's going on. I I was also in freaked out mode about a year ago. Um, but uh I got my act together and think it's a super exciting time if you if you view it that way.

SPEAKER_00 1:38

I think if we can embrace it, it absolutely can be that it's a super exciting

Sports, Optimism, And Leadership Energy

SPEAKER_00 1:41

time. But I gotta ask you, as we as we do this, we're just coming out of fall camp. NCAA football is getting ready to lock it up. We talked about some uh basketball, I think, last time we were on with regards to KU. But what are you looking more forward to, the Jayhawks football season or the Chiefs?

SPEAKER_01 1:55

Yeah, you'll I always have to be uh uh cautiously optimistic with the Jayhawks. So I'm feeling a little better about the Chiefs, but I have I've uh I made an investment in the Jayhawk football team. We are headed uh uh in the next couple of weeks to London to watch them play Arizona State at Wembley Stadium. So how cool is that? That's very cool. I mean, I I it's very cool. I can't believe that those are the two teams that were chosen.

SPEAKER_00 2:21

I know.

SPEAKER_01 2:23

Well, TCU TCU kicked it off and we're gonna it's very cool.

SPEAKER_00 2:27

I would have liked to have seen TCU win simply for the Big 12 while they were over there. But uh let's hope for better weather for KU getting started off against Arizona State, you know, Big 12 competition there. That's really good. So yeah, I I am cautiously optimistic about my Mountaineers again, year two of the second go-around with Rich Rod. We're pretty excited. But that's not what we're here

The Book Idea And Conference Wake-Up

SPEAKER_00 2:50

to talk about. We can talk about those things in leadership. Because those are fun things, but we're here to talk about your new book coming out. And really, I I wanted to jump right in in terms of where the idea came from. You talked about, as I read through the introduction, this conference that you were attending. So tell me where the idea came from and why you wrote this book and frankly who you wrote it for as well.

SPEAKER_01 3:08

Yeah. Like I said, about a year ago in June, I was starting to get really nervous, right? It's as I'm in my 50s. I'm trying to, I was trying to decide if this big shift, if you know, and what it might mean for my consulting business was, you know, whether I I had it in me. You know, I had enough energy and interest in me to make the pivot to make the pivot. And so I really wasn't sure. I was really like, maybe I should go just like buy an apartment building and become a landlord. Right. That that sounded that sounded a lot easier, actually. And so I made the decision. I went and signed up for six conferences, some of which I spoke at that were startup weeks. I spoke at Business of Software, I went to the pavilions annual conference. I really just immersed myself and I made it, I kind of made my gave myself a deadline of the end of the year. So I went to all those fall conferences. I sat in on everything I could, I could, you know, get my hands wrapped around. I, you know, challenged people in the breakout sessions. I spoke up, I did all the things. Um, and I came back and I started writing about it. And I talked to my marketing manager about it. We started putting some, you know, deciding about what's about some LinkedIn posts and blog posts and all the things. And I really wasn't getting any traction, right? I mean, I wasn't, you know, people weren't engaging, people weren't whatever. And and I kept like, I get real frustrated because I was like, this is a really good topic. Like, like this should have gotten a lot of comments. And finally, after about the third or fourth time I said that, frustrated to her, she said, You're way ahead of where people are, right? Like you're probably scaring the shit out of them. Right. I mean, she's like talking about things that they don't want to talk about right now. And it's not that you're wrong, it's just that they're not there yet. And you're saying things that, you know, like, you know, I bought lovable and I'm vibe coding and I'm talking about it, and people were like, and so finally, you know, we started talking more and more about what might resonate, whatever. And finally she said, I think you need to write a book. And I was like, Oh my gosh, I felt like I just finished. You know, some people call it a labor of love, and I just called it 48 hours of labor, you know, with no epidural. And so, but I decided to write a smaller book. So I decided to write 100 about 114, 120 pages versus the you know, the 220 that I wrote before. Because I wanted to get it out quickly because I think it only has a shelf life of X, right? Like, you know, I think but but one of the things I didn't hear, all I heard at all the conferences for the most part, with the business of software being the exception, was tools, tools, tools, tools, tools. And I'm like, okay, we're all gonna have to pick them or you know, build versus buy all the things, but no one was talking about how AI and all these tools were gonna change how we needed to lead teams when they were no longer just exclusively human. You know, so I affectionately say, you know, a year or two ago we only had one throat to choke. We knew when something went wrong where to go, who to point the finger at, you know, and who to like you're out of here. But now when you've got, you know, automation, augmentation, agents, and humans all working together, the analogy I'm using is as a leader, you're no longer flying the plane with your people back in the cabin. And, you know, you're drive, you're figuring out where we're gonna go, and you, you know, when you can see in front of you or whatever.

From Cockpit To Control Tower

SPEAKER_01 6:02

We need to stop spending our time in the cockpit and we need to get up into the control tower because we're no longer leading a team, we're managing a system. And the best way to do that is from the control tower with a 360-degree view of everything going on around you so that you can help prevent, you know, on the ground or mid-air collisions.

SPEAKER_00 6:19

No, I love that. I love that analogy. That metaphor exists in terms of being in that control tower versus being in the plane. Uh, you talk about that a lot in the book, and we're gonna get into some of those details. I I want to ask, because early on, you say what the book is not. You say it's not a tech book, um, but it's also not a motivational leadership book. Okay, then what is this book? What is this book and why should leaders, because I know your your area of expertise, your niche, is certainly sales leadership. That's where you've that's where you've cut your teeth. That's where you've, you know, in essence, started and run your consulting career. But I think it's like to me, blank leadership. Whatever the area is, it's a leadership book of some sort. What is it for you?

SPEAKER_01 6:55

Yeah, it's it's a little bit of a playbook, but it's really more of a hashtag own your own shitbook. It is, I mean, you know, it's like, hey, like, where are you at? Because when this came along, like you may have employees who are further along than you are. You know, you may be further along than your company, your company may be still vacillating on which enterprise tool to purchase. Like, you're gonna have to like, you know, I'm trying to to encourage leaders, like you may have to be the person that takes a stand. You know, I mean, the entire really, I mean, the entire company rests on the revenue generating department, which is ours, right? We are the most important department. Without money coming in, the the company has, you know, is gonna be in trouble. And so, you know, you are one of the most important executives at that company. And if you aren't sure where you want to go or have a plan or know how to devise, you know, understand the competencies are gonna be needed. So, you know, the first two competencies I say are gonna be needed that you might not have today are systems thinking and workflow design, followed closely by coaching, objective judgment, and you know, teaching and coaching objective judgment. These are things that we as leaders have not needed to be good at. Sometimes we had to go to market engineer, sometimes we had sales ops, sometimes we had enablement, sometimes we had none of that. So the people who who had none of that are probably a little bit better about workflow design. But but chances are you may be good at workflow design, but have you, do you are you really comfortable about which pieces should remain human, which can be automated and which can be agentic? And so what I really want to do is I want to take people who, you know, sales leaders that are a little scared or a little uncertain, and I want to say, like, these are the things that you need to be learning. This is your professional development plan. This is how you're gonna lead differently, this is how you're gonna hire differently, this is how you're gonna build differently than you've done in the past. And I just want, I want this book to be step like us. If you don't have a step one, if you haven't built a foundation, then I want you just to, again, like you, as you already know, it's a quick read. Call it the airplane, right? Like take it with you on the airplane, you know, download, you know, we'll get the audible out there as soon as as right right after the book drops, too. So, but just get some foundational information because everybody else, you go to all those conferences I just mentioned, right? But they're all going to be talking about tools. They're not, there's not gonna be a how to lead differently, how to hold people accountable differently, you know, writing a role brief for your agent, how to write a role brief for your agent. Like no one's talking about that.

SPEAKER_00 9:15

Well, and I love that because and I love how the book is laid out in terms of the sections, the three sections you talk about.

Your Process Is Obsolete Now

SPEAKER_00 9:20

Situation, you're painting a picture for ultimately what's happening. And then you go right at their throat, the leader. And that's your leadership style. You go right at them. And then then the third thing is the team that goes along with it. But your section one says uh your process isn't broken, it's obsolete in terms of that again, that sales leadership process, whatever that is. So tell me more what you mean by that. Your process isn't broken, it's obsolete.

SPEAKER_01 9:43

Well, everybody's calling, everybody's saying if you look on LinkedIn or everything, like the playbook is dead, the playbook is dead. That playbook is obsolete, it's no longer gonna be value as valuable to you. And so, guess what? We as sales leaders, the the playbook fairy is not gonna show up with your three with a three-ring binder and set it at your door. She's just not. And so, who built the last playbook? We didn't have a SAS B2B SAS playbook in 2000. Though we had to build that, right? We had to get together as a group. We had you had to find your community, you had to find your people, you had to get into chat rooms, you had to get into communities where you could ask questions, and people were like, I tried this and this didn't work. You know, I was on a I used to be part of a group that's kind of feels like it's disbanded, but it was a lot of sales leaders and consultants, and people would just win in, you couldn't sell in it, right? You got kicked out if you sold. All you all you could do is ask a question and then wait for an answer, right? And I think those are the kind of like like you're we're gonna have to do that. Like if you're waiting for the dust to settle, if you're waiting for the ferry to show up, you know, if you're waiting for some big webinar to happen where you're gonna get like just, you know, at the end, we're gonna give you the PDF, just hit the download button. It's not happening, right? And and by the way, we want to be involved in those conversations and building that. You know, like if you take it back to a very, you know, very exam, a very good example that it will resonate with sales leaders, the best RFP is the one you helped write. Absolutely the best new playbook. Yeah, the RFP that you have the best chance of winning is the one that you were involved in influencing. The best playbook for the future is the one that you helped influence and helped write. So stop waiting for somebody else to do it. Find five or six people, you know, find people who are builders, find people who are visionaries, find GTM engineers, find other sales leaders, like get a nice collective group of six or seven people together and start figuring out what the 2027 playbook looks like.

SPEAKER_00 11:33

Yep. Give them a stack of sticky notes, start writing those process steps down and just walk it through. I love that because you know, oftentimes that we and you talked about this in the book, it's process first, then it's people, then it's technology, or then it's AI

Hiring For Judgment Over Copy Paste

SPEAKER_00 11:45

uh that we've used in there. And I've used that before, process people, technology is last. What I love about the what you're talking about in terms of workflow design or whatever that means, and many of the things that I teach in inside the lean world or continuous improvement is to map it out. And there's at least seven flows. What is it that's flowing? And one of the new items is that technology that flows through this. Where can AI be used at this step in the process to make my life easier? And sometimes where is it gonna go to make my life more difficult? Back to the sales leadership component and the process, they would lead in in an old way as well. Tell me about where they're going wrong and how they're leading a team and how they need to change their leadership style as well.

SPEAKER_01 12:28

I mean, we're gonna have to be first off training on things and coaching on things that we were never doing before. So, you know, and you're gonna have to be hiring differently, right? I I'm I just think I've been very, I've been very kind of vocal about it. You're gonna need to hire a higher level of individual, you know, somebody who has critical thinking skills, strategic thinking skills, discernment, objective judgment. We don't we weren't always, you know, when the process was just, hey, like we just need you to follow the formula, you know, like it's you know, we didn't we didn't I mean for SDRs particular, right? We were like, check your brain at the door, just here here are the three steps. This is a 10-minute call. Don't get complicated, don't talk about price, don't do this, right? We sort of wanted people to follow the formula and not and not critically think. Well, now that everybody's gonna be using an AI thought partner, they're gonna be two, they're gonna be two groups of people. The AI copy pasters, as I'm calling them, right? Whatever AI said, that's the strategy, that's the agenda, that's the email, that's the whatever. Those people are gonna crash and burn and they're gonna take your team down with them. You have to be hiring this other group of individuals who is still happy to use AI as a thought partner, but is gonna overlay objective judgment, discernment, critical thinking skills, and say, yeah, like I think, I think I think I agree with AI to 60% of that, but the other 40%, I think I'm gonna go a different direction on that. And here's why. The fact of the matter is, like, we're never gonna be so good at, you know, using the example, you know, AI is only as smart as what you put in the CRM or what your AI note taker captured. But if after you walked out of the meeting and the, you know, buyer walked you to your park to the car in the parking lot and a separate conversation happened that maybe they, you know, implied some things that maybe would be helpful to you as your champion, they were giving you some inside information. But if you didn't share that with AI or you never wrote that down or whatever, or you or you know, AI, AI was in the room listening, but they didn't see that side glance when you mentioned something. And they didn't see somebody grab their calculator, or they didn't see like this, you know, they at some point I think AI will do that, right? But we're not there. And so the human still has to be in the room for all that nuance that's happening around them. But if you're not feeding that in, and even if you are feeding that in, even if you said, like, you know, Judy looked at Susan, like gave her side eye when I said whatever, I don't know that AI is gonna understand what what that might have like what's the implication of Judy giving Susan side eye? Like, what does that really mean? So, you know, I I think the leader, so the leader's gonna have to bring better people in around them. And and then I say, like, we love to coach the postmortem, right? We never coach it when it goes to hell, by the way. We only coach it when it when it falls.

SPEAKER_00 14:59

Right, that's right. Only when it goes wrong. That's right.

SPEAKER_01 15:01

Only when it goes to hell, right? So when it when it goes south, we love to go and talk about all the things that went wrong and how that'll never happen again. But when you're talking about people who are making decisions, people being sales reps who are making decisions with AI as their thought partner, you need to be having that call before it happens, that coaching call before the call, the call before the call, right? The conversation before the meeting. Because and then what happened you know, and I tell them I'm saying the book, and I if you got that far, I was like, make them close their laptop. Make them tell you about the deal, make them tell you about the people in the room.

SPEAKER_00 15:32

I love that. Yep.

SPEAKER_01 15:33

Make you them tell you about what happens when like what objections are you expecting? Like it's old school art of sales pre-call planning, but we haven't been teaching art of sales for some time now because science of sales came on, came along and you know, X number of years ago.

SPEAKER_00 15:49

10 cold calls a day. Here's a script that you use. I'm gonna track you and make sure you do 50 a week.

SPEAKER_01 15:56

In fact, my biggest concern is that today's sales leaders don't even know how to teach the art of sales because they didn't come up under art of sales. But and so it's funny, uh the all of the hiring I've been doing this year with clients have all been for high-level sales performers, enterprise account executives, strategic account executives, national sales managers, key account managers, the highest of the high. I haven't hired an SDR, haven't hired even like a basic AE this year. Some people have figured out that we're gonna need higher level sellers, and by the way, like older sellers because I'm in my 50s. I went, I've gone through the World Wide Web didn't exist when I was born. We went from on-prem to cloud. CRM systems were janky when I first got in. It was mostly like sell spreadsheets. Gold mine was my first CRM system as a sales leader. We've been through this. I was talking to somebody earlier in the week who said, I just read an article that Gen Xers are adopting AI like faster and they're more excited about it than the Gen Zers. And I thought, and they and the article concluded it was because we've lived through so many very large technological changes that we know that we are gonna survive it because we've survived all these, you know, when we were, when we have we used to have to call the movie theater to figure out what time the movie was, how much was it, and you know, but the Gen Zers don't never knew that they had to pick, they never had to pick up the phone to figure out, you know, what time where the nearest Chipotle was or what time the movie started.

SPEAKER_00 17:18

That's so true. That is so true because they didn't have to find it out, it just kind of told them. You know, as I as I listen through, there's so many pieces I can uh jump in on. Like I see this as a math equation. I don't know, again, for leadership and sales leadership, where there's some 10% of the effort that goes in on the front end preparing, and I'm gonna talk to you about prompts here in a minute. 60% of the middle is like, okay, let's let AI do its research and bring us a list of suggestions, whatever that means, of what we could do. But the last 30% that you talked about is you know, the judgment, the discernment, the critical thinking that is not easy to train. We can talk about that a little bit, nor to recognize in the interview process. So I want to focus on those two ends

Prompt Theater And Training Gaps

SPEAKER_00 18:00

with you. So the front end in terms of preparing the meeting before the meeting, even with AI, so to speak, you use a term in your book called prompt theater. What do you mean by prompt theater and and what's there for you in terms of how you coach or teach how to do the prompting on the front end?

SPEAKER_01 18:14

Well, I mean, again, unless you're a journalism major or an English major, your writing skills might not be that great, right? And if you're in the the zillenial world, as I call it, you know, you're you you spend most of your day texting or on Teams or on Slack using shorthand and not, you know, not putting periods or not doing complete sentences. And I do think that AI will come along, but in general, a lot of times we've, you know, we've lost that skill to write and to write in a way where we can really get our point across. And so, you know, the prompt theater is just, you know, I mean, it's just, it's, it's a little bit of acting, right? But I mean, think how many times that you have to before you really, really understood how to write a prompt. And even then, sometimes you get lazy. Like I get lazy all the time. I'm like, I because I'm like, I've been working with, I was a beta tester for ChatGPT, and you know, now I'm using Claude as well. And I'm like, oh, they know me, like they'll get this. You know, and then something comes back and I'm like, okay, now stop, stop, stop, stop. That doesn't sound like me at all. I thought you would remember that, whatever. And I'm like, my bad, right? Like, let me let me start like let's start over again. Let me pretend I didn't put that, you know, two sentence prompt in there, and that was a bad idea. My, you know, my my apologies. But, you know, like I'm asking three questions to candidates right now. I'm asking them, do you work for a company that has an enterprise version of an AI tool? Have you been provided formal prompt writing training? Have you built an agent? And 98% of all candidates are saying no to all three of those. Occasionally I'm getting a yes to an enterprise version. Mostly I'm still hearing they're paying for it, they're letting us use whatever we want. And then this other thing is, you know, the other thing that I'm seeing leaders do is if the company is, if you've made a decision or you've gone down a road with something, then then they're just assuming they're gonna, you know, we we have all kinds of software and technology. You'll figure this out like you figured the other thing out. And they're and this whole attitude of, well, they'll just figure it out. And I'm like, I don't think that's a good strategy. And and again, some people who are naturally curious and lifelong learners probably will, but they'll take, you know, they'll take their own prop personal time to do so. And so I just, you know, but you can't teach prompt writing if you can't do it.

SPEAKER_00 20:15

Right. See one do one, teach one, right? You gotta be able to do that yourself. You gotta be able to see somebody else do it, and then you do it yourself, and then you can finally teach somebody else. Absolutely. And so what that that 10% on the front end, again, if you write a bad prompt, the garbage in, garbage out, it's gonna give you a response and it's gonna sound really good. AI is sharp enough to really it loves you if you don't tell it to not like you. Uh, and it'll say, that's a great comment, and it'll give

Coaching Objective Judgment Before Calls

SPEAKER_00 20:40

you an answer. But this 30% on the other end, again, in your interviews with others, you talk about five core skills. You mentioned a couple of them systems thinking, workflow, design, decision leadership. The fourth one, coaching, objective judgment. And then number five is accountability clarity. I want to I'm gonna zoom in on this coaching objective judgment. So now I'm on the end of it. It's given me some potential solution, some help in terms of how I deal with a client or how I deal with a proposal, whatever that is. And you're now saying, oh, by the way, I'd like to use some critical thinking with what it said, see where it might break, and be able to talk about where it's gonna change. How do you coach that though, in that objective judgment? How how how do we have to change as leaders to be able to coach that?

SPEAKER_01 21:18

I think it is the like leave your laptop in your office and let's talk, right? I mean, what like what do you know about what do you know about your prospect? What do you know about your client? What do you what it like what what could go wrong? Are you prepared for that? What happens if they say this? What I mean, have you double checked your information? You know, what happens if, you know, your information told you that they're in the middle of an MA and you get in the room and they tell you that MA fell apart two weeks ago? It's not a thing anymore, right? I mean, your whole message was built along this like you're about to double your employee count and you're gonna need a system like ours. And and then they tell you, Oh, yeah, that that deal fell through. And now you've lost trust, credibility, and the deal, right? And so, you know, like it that's you know. If if you have the leader are not challenging their strategy, and pre-call planning was always something as leaders, we should be checking. Like, you know, when I was a leader and someone was bringing me in, I made them give me a one-sheeter. I'm like, I need to know why we're having this meeting, what the agenda is, who's gonna be in the room, who's on our side, who's not on our side, what's my role, what could go wrong, you know. If I if I have to step in, where where is that okay to step in? You know, or or am I just there to as, you know, sometimes I said just throw my title around, right? Sometimes I would, but I'm just trying to throw your title around. They're bringing in a VP, I gotta bring in my VP, right? And so, you know, I used to make them like I used to make them create a one-sheeter before all these meetings. I don't even think leaders are doing that anymore. And so if you can't, if you don't, if they don't have that, you know, you're not asking those hard questions. Like, where do you think this could like if you if you lose this deal coming out of today's meeting, what might have happened?

SPEAKER_00 22:52

Right. That's so that's that failure modes analysis. It's like, let's predict where it's going to break and then have a potential solution in there uh for each one of the potential countermeasures to expand that. And I'd the other side of that, and you touch on this in the book as well, is that the the knowledge of the person you're going in to meet with, whether it's your buyer or your customer or whoever that is inside of that space, like if we go in blind to think, oh, we got them, we've checked AI and think that they haven't used AI to help them prepare for the meeting as well. That's absolutely you know, grounds for uh a performance improvement plan right off the bat. So our our buyers

Buyers Arrive Mid-Cycle And Build It

SPEAKER_00 23:30

or our customers are a lot smarter going in as well, right?

SPEAKER_01 23:32

Well, yes. And you know, we're not even you know, if you start at the beginning, I've been saying and I think say in the book, you're gonna come into the sales cycle midway through now. And again, as a sales leader, are you preparing your team to build that trust, that judgment, and that education in half the amount of time they used to have to build it in? Because the buyer is is qualifying themselves and doing their own discovery. Hopefully, again, hopefully, if your if your marketing team has done their job and they can now and all the questions they have can be answered on your website or in Substack or in Reddit or whatever, you know, they should have disqualified themselves in. They've also seen your product, so they've basically demoed your product. So they're gonna come in with a whole lot of high-level questions, which is why I'm saying we can't hire the same type of rep we've been hiring because you're not gonna have that time to build that rapport or that relationship and educate them on how you you know, teach them what you want them to learn. Now you may have to, you're not gonna get the chance to educate them. They educated themselves. Now you're going to have to re-educate them or challenge their assumptions in a way that is not offensive, doesn't put them on the defensive, is professional, and and ask, you know, and say, like, it looks like you've done a lot of research here. You know, let's talk about this situation. What are your thoughts on that? And hear the side and hear the pilons so that you can fill that in. What what I'm hearing from other customers is fill in the blank. And so the that's art of sales, right? I mean, that's going back to that art of sales. And and I just feel like so many, you know, there's so many great products out there, right? In fairness, like a lot of people have become order takers.

unknown 25:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 25:05

Right? The product and the brand name carried it. And and I've seen, you know, particularly because I work more in the startup world than in other worlds, I you know, when when someone has mishired, it's more, it's most likely that they have hired someone from a larger organization with a sexy logo that they're like, you know, so that they don't have to train them like, well, they trained them. I know they didn't. They're like they're a good company. They they would have provided like formal training, so I don't have to train them. Well, they also didn't have to work that hard to close a deal. And even if you're and even if you're a sexy logo today, a well-known name in the industry, guess who your biggest competitor is just about to be or is? Oh, I think we're just gonna build it. Build it or buy it has always been out there. But but but you could talk people before you could pretty much talk people how to build it, right? Like, yeah, build it is hard, it's time consuming. What if the person who builds it leaves? And what about the maintenance and we'll do all that? Build it is way, way easier than it used to be. So you're you know, again, like are you pre-call planning for that? Like, I like I'm still not hearing enough sales reps ask about the build it yet. But that's what's I mean, I talked to two people this week already who are prepared by the end of the year to get rid of their CRM systems and are actively building the replacement.

SPEAKER_00 26:14

Yeah, building their I mean the build or buy. I think the build is so I I don't want to say it's easy to do, it's easier than it used to be. Again, back to the the prompt writing and how well you're trained to put your information on the front end for it to give you

Personal Brand Sponsor Break

SPEAKER_00 26:29

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Using AI To Write A Real Book

SPEAKER_00 27:09

I think this is interesting, and you're pretty transparent in the start of your book as well that you know you actually use I to write your book back to that 10, 60, 30 or whatever that means. You know, you're checking it as well to make sure that it sounds like, uh, smells like his Christy Jones and your tone of voice. Tell me about that process and how you wrote it, what that what that was like for you, and frankly, how much, maybe how much time that saved you as well in that process.

SPEAKER_01 27:33

I think it saved me probably 50% in fairness. I spent a ton of time rewriting, you know. So I had it help me. I had been writing about this topic for a long time. So the first thing I did was fed it in everything I've been writing about. And I said, So, based on all the things that I've been writing about, like give me chapter options, right? So we started out with nine chapters. I think we ended with seven or eight. I combined chapters two and three at some point because they were re like when I, as I was writing it, so I did it like within each chapter, as you know, there's sections within each chapter, and they're fairly a little bit formuletic in most cases. And so I took a section at a time, I fed it information, I had it spit me back out the section, I edited it in Word, I fed it back in. But it was interesting. It wasn't until the book. So that's that was how I worked with Claude. I fed it information, it fed me three paragraphs.

SPEAKER_00 28:26

60%. Yeah, 60%, let it do 60%. Yep, you're rewriting.

SPEAKER_01 28:31

Rewrote it, fed it, copy pasted it, fed it back in, corrected some things along the way. Like we had a bunch of what I call not X but Y. We had a not of not X but Y going on. It I love the word actually, so I had to put that in the prohibitions list, like a bunch of stuff that was like, but when I read it from start to finish after I had finished, I realized that chapter two and three were identical. But one of them was about process and one of them was about people, but the information was literally like the same. And it it didn't catch it. I didn't catch it because I was doing it in these little chunks. So I went back in and said, Oh my. And one of the things, by the way, I've taught Claude to do is give me a like a red, yellow, green. It'll say certainty equal like certainty colon likely. Certainty equal unclear. Certainty equal a hundred percent certain. Like, so I've asked it to give me certainties because I I've I turned I told it early on, like, you know, stop trying to kiss up, like this isn't helpful. So take take my same direct communication style and use it against me, and that's fine.

SPEAKER_00 29:30

I was just gonna ask you, like, how do you put in there my I am a take note prisoner's approach, and that's what I want you to use with me, kind of thing, right?

SPEAKER_01 29:36

And I did, and I did, and I said, when I'm wrong, I'm wrong, or what whatever. But like you had said early on, the problem with AI is it tells you things in such a confident manner. And I I I laughed the other day. I was talking to somebody about it. I said, you know what, it's never done? And they're like, what? I go, ask me my opinion about anything, right? It will never ask you your thoughts about anything because it is certain about everything. And it's and it's a problem solver, like it was built to solve problems. So even if there's no more problems or the problems are small, it'll keep surfacing problems even when you think it's good enough or it's ready. But anyway, I fed it in and I said, let's take a look at chapters two and three. And I said, I think we've got a problem. And it came back and it like, you know, thought, thought, thought, and it came back and goes, uh, the uncomfortable truth, certainty, a hundred percent. We have a big problem.

SPEAKER_00 30:20

That's so funny. That's good though. You can't get teach it. I'd like to do that. 100%.

SPEAKER_01 30:25

We have a yeah, Houston, we have a big problem over here. And so basically, like it basically I said, so let's talk about what our options are. And basically it said, we either have to get rid of a chapter, and you have to decide which chapter to eliminate because they they're too similar, or we have to combine them, which really means rewriting it again. And I said, So again, give me the highlights. I said, give me the five topics that I have to keep in that if we're combining it. And then I started rewriting it and it took it, and it was funny because I was I worked with the book coach and she didn't catch it either. But when I write when you read it, when you read it in parts, it you don't see it. But when you read it one fell swoop, you see it. And as you know, chapter two is ginormous because we combined chapters two and three. But it took me five hours to fix that chapter and put it in a way that I was comfortable. And then it, you know, and because the first thing Claude asked me was, we've got nine chapters. That's gonna take us down to eight. Now what happens? And I go, we have eight chapters. Like, if we only need eight chapters, we only need eight chapters. I'm like, we're not gonna, we're not gonna, we're not gonna like fake information because we because we need nine chapters. I go, we have as many chapters as we want. But so it was a really interesting, it was it was in some cases really a frustrating process because I had been working with Claude not anywhere near as long as chat, but I chose to to create a project in Claude and use co-work to do it. And there were just so many, there were so many things that I was like, you know, I would copy paste. I'm like, this doesn't make any sense whatsoever. You know, you use the word that. Well, you know, that the the you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, that, blah, blah. And I go, what's that? What's that mean? You know, and so like, you know, I I was trying to like, it was, it was, it was a twofold process because I was rewriting and trying to chair train it simultaneously. I'm like, well, what does that mean in context of this sentence? You're right, that doesn't make any sense. I'm like, I know, right? But you know, so then I'm rewriting it and feeding it back in, you know, and so it got it got we got in a nice pattern, which would be like, here's the section, go edit. Now it's ready for edit. So then I would go off to Word, edit it, feed it back in, and then it would regur. I taught, I told it to regurgitate to me. This it went, I wanted to know that it understood what changes I had made. So, okay, so it looks like you eliminated the, you know, these three sentences, you combine this, you don't like that word, whatever. But I mean, you know, it's exhausting to train it along the way. But because I do so much writing in general, you know, from a content perspective, this was a great way to jumpstart. I mean, I've been probably been using CLOD six months, eight months before I decided to use it for this project. And it's it should be so much better for me going forward now. But it the amount of time, you know, I say it saved me 50% because I did I did write it, but I also wrote, I say that, and then I thought to myself, well, but I also wrote half the book I wrote before, which took me two years.

SPEAKER_00 33:00

Right. That's that's what I kind of that that part of improvement, even in it. It it will, if you map out your flow of how you write a book, it's gonna change dramatically as to how you do things.

Building A Research Agent That Works

SPEAKER_00 33:11

Let's learn a little bit about you and how you've grown since you know you wrote that book a couple of years ago and how AI is changing how you do your work as a leader in your space. What's a prompt you're working on right now that's uh gonna help you in your business?

SPEAKER_01 33:24

I wrote, um, I'm actually an instructor for Jed Blunt Sales Gravy University. And I just got back from Georgia where I recorded about 24 new courses for the university. And one of the ones that took me a lifetime to write, but I wrote a enterprise level for an enterprise seller, an enterprise level research agent. And I taught and I taught it. I taught a light version, and then I gave them the the workbook worksheet for the extensive version. So that's the one I wrote most recently. And again, I think everybody thinks they can write a research agent, but I mean, it took, it took, it was almost 45 minutes to teach it. Um it's the longest course that I recorded, and it took a lot of back and forth of figuring out like, you know, like what do we want to, you know, what are all the things that need to be in there? You know, we asked it to like, you know, think like Deloitte or Gartner, like you're a Deloitte or Gartner consultant, you know, go look for these documents. Um, what if it's not a publicly traded company? What if it's private? Go look for these documents. Like, so that's the one I just most recently wrote as a result of wanting to teach somebody how to do it. And it took a long time.

SPEAKER_00 34:29

Wow. Okay, very cool. So again, since your your last book, uh, and maybe you kind of touch on this inside of this book, but what's something you believed about how to lead either in

Not Everyone Is Trainable Anymore

SPEAKER_00 34:40

sales or generally in leadership three years ago that you no longer believe now with regards to leadership?

SPEAKER_01 34:45

I think I believe now, and this isn't gonna be a super popular one. I think I believe I think I've always believed this, but I think I believe it stronger now, and it's something I mentioned earlier. I don't believe that everybody's gonna be capable and everybody's trainable anymore. Well, I mean, I don't think everybody has I mean, we I test for it. I I run my candidates through a sales profile assessment, and one of the traits we look for or competencies is objective judgment. I don't think everybody ha yeah, I mean, you know, you you say these things, but it's true, right? Like not everybody's self-aware, not everybody has situational awareness, not everybody has critical thinking skills, not everybody wants to put the energy in, right? I mean, like like in some cases, I think you could, but you just choose not to. Um everybody, you know, some people just want to take things at face value because digging deeper is harder. You know, not everybody's gonna want to put the effort in. Um, you know, I think, I think before with the old playbook, you could like I, you know, it was never all about I know it was never about hiring C players. But in a lot of cases, I was like, you know what, you know, there will be a good B plus player, right? Like they'll be good enough. And like, and and if they're willing over time to learn, like they'll be an A player. Like they're probably a B or B plus player today, and we can make them an A player. I don't think that I don't know that that's gonna be the case going forward. I don't know you can take someone who has a copy paste mentality. And and and again, like as sales professionals, we're professional interviewees, as I say, so buyer beware. So, you know, I think it's gonna have to be. I actually run people through an AI assessment as a as the final step to the interview process now. Okay. And I think people are gonna fail that.

SPEAKER_00 36:14

I think one of the most and you you have it as discernment as one of yours as well. Well, I mean, I don't know if it's specific to that, but I think that's one of the hardest competencies or I think it's a skill. I don't know if it's a competency. I think hardest to teach it's hard to teach discernment. Like you have to learn that in the streets for years, whether it's in sales roles and different sales roles, but it's also in your upbringing in life and things like that. It's just it's hard skill to teach. It's true. It can you can make it better by studying, by you know, doing, but it I don't know that you know you can really become great at it. So it's it's one, it's hard to do as a skills. And so in your in your work of trying to interview folks as well to help your clients, it's hard to, it's hard to get it in an interview, too. It can be really hard. But if anybody's

Discernment, Job Hopping, And Hard Stuff

SPEAKER_00 37:00

gonna do it, AI can help us get there with the types of questions and things like that we could ask.

SPEAKER_01 37:04

Yeah, I uh I've been interviewing a ton of candidates recently in the last couple of months, and one of the patterns I'm seeing is I now no longer will even look at a resume if they've had four jobs in five years. And I'm equating it to discernment, right? And people got again, like I posted about it, I got hate mail. I got a lot of hate mail after I posted that on LinkedIn. And I said, and I and they're like, you know, the economy's bad and people are being laid off, and you're where's your empathy and where's your compassion for people and all the things, right? And I was like, okay, if you obviously don't know me that well because I really don't own pom-poms. Like there's no short skirt in my closet, there are no pom-poms. I really am not that girl. But I'm like, listen, if you join two companies back to back that then, you know, you got laid off that went out of business or whatever that happened, and you didn't learn how to improve your interview questions, you didn't learn how to how to determine whether or not company number three looked like companies one and two, and how to figure that out, if you weren't working harder to make sure that that didn't happen to you a third time. I interviewed a I interviewed two people in the last week that got one and one got nasty with me, and I just said, I I'm sorry. You know, I wanted to under, I wanted to understand my my uh the person, my assistant had passed them through on the phone screen. And I looked at the resume and I was like, yeah, I don't know about that, but it'd already been scheduled. So again, like I don't have to spend 60 minutes with anybody, right? Like if I can figure out in seven minutes this is a bad idea, I'm gonna spend seven minutes and we're gonna be done. And so like I asked deeper questions on these last four jobs that had happened over like six years. And every time he he he started off by telling me that he was a finance major in college and he figured out in the first year out of school that finance just wasn't for him. And that's why he went into sales. So that was mistake number one. And then he said, you know, in the first job, you know, I thought I wanted to work for a really big company, you know, good sexy logo name or whatever. But like I was like one of 220 sales reps. And he goes, I didn't really like that. So check. So then the next job, you know, downsized the number of individuals, but yeah, but like they're not like you know, they're not really, they didn't have all the processes and stuff together, whatever. So like maybe that was just a little too small for me. And it can't it like we did this like with every job. And I thought, and and then I think this industry is gonna be more entertaining for me. I don't really like selling to you know the IT department. And I said to him, I said, Hey Jacob, I'm like, it's been a pleasure to meet you, but I said, I just can't take the risk for my client. Like I can't, I can't put the pen may take the risk. And he's like, Well, I don't understand why. He goes, I it was confident, right? No, no, this is this is what I want to do. Like now I know, right? You're number five. Like now I know for sure this is what I want to do. And I said, you know what? I said, I just can't take the risk because you you've thought those, you thought that four other times and in college. There's no there was no discernment or objective judgment. Like he wasn't seeing it, right? And he didn't, again, no self-awareness around it. And then he says to me real real defiantly, why would anybody stay in a job that they don't like? I said, so that they can get past the hard part.

SPEAKER_00 40:05

Chapter one in my book that I just came out with, do hard stuff. You know, it's not always easy. We're not always going to get to do things that we I love that as a I mean, sorry, I could I can imagine that conversation. And again, imagining your approach here with them to let them know because I think about that, and you know, the question I didn't hear from that person as well in discernment is what part of the problem am I in this whole thing? And uh it's always somebody else's issue. I mean, we could gosh, we could spend all day talking about that topic on a leadership.

SPEAKER_01 40:34

It's interesting that you said though, I wanted to mention something that I thought was really like like discernment is built, not learned, so to speak. Yeah, it reminds me of one of my favorite books, Grit, by Angela Duckworth, who's coming out with a new book, by the way. If you haven't, but you know, she like she's a researcher. So just like Brene Brown, like you know, you love Brene Brown, but she's a shame researcher from the University of Houston. Like, she's like, I'm a data chick. So like I love all these things, but you gotta go like show me the numbers, right? But Angela Duckworth did all this research on how, like, what the difference between gritty people and non-gritty people. And to your point, the majority of gritty people had something happen to them somewhere along the way that built that, right? And I think with discernment, you're right. Like, you know, either you were challenged as a child with your parents, your parents just didn't agree with everything you said, they challenged your assumptions, they held you accountable, they did whatever, all the things. And so I do wonder if discernment is nurture versus nature. And if it I don't think I'm with you, I don't believe it can be taught. Like I used to say uh back in the day, one of my favorite phrases was I can't motivate the unmotivated, but I can inspire the self-motivated.

SPEAKER_00 41:41

Love that.

SPEAKER_01 41:42

And I feel that way about objective.

SPEAKER_00 41:44

Say that yeah, I can't motivate the unmotivated, but I can inspire the self-motivated. Yeah, love that.

SPEAKER_01 41:50

Like I can't make you want to do it if you don't want to do it, but if you want to do it, oh my gosh, can I give you some juice?

SPEAKER_00 41:56

Absolutely, right? I mean, I think about that as you say, because I actually don't, and it's you know, if if I spot it, I got it. I think that's a weakness that I have. But I know when I was back in operations and leadership, that's why I took my wife with me on interviews when I was interviewing for key leaders. I'm like, I want to know what you think of this person, okay? Because I want I'm I'm missing something, I believe, and I want to see if you feel, and she can feel it. She's got it. She's like, there's something that's not quite right with this person. And she's usually, I don't know how it's a spiritual gift or not, but she's spot on normally as you go through. That it's a fun discussion, no doubt about it. I want to honor your time as you

Walk-Up Song And Where To Connect

SPEAKER_00 42:30

come through. I do have one more very important question, much like the first question that I asked you today, but you get a chance to speak on a lot of stages as well, uh, as a uh keynote speaker. What's your walk-up song? Very important question.

SPEAKER_01 42:41

I was trying to think what my last walk-up song was. Sometimes it's misindependent.

SPEAKER_00 42:45

Well, Kelly Clarkson, okay, yeah, yeah, I get that.

SPEAKER_01 42:48

What was the I I uh that's the first one that comes to mind. I I brought I had another one last year. I'm a big Earthwind and Fire girl.

SPEAKER_00 42:56

Okay. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 42:56

Sometimes I sometimes I fall back to the uh Earthwind and Fire days.

SPEAKER_00 43:00

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 43:01

Like a little old school.

SPEAKER_00 43:05

Yep.

SPEAKER_01 43:06

But yeah, I uh I really resonate with I really resonate with Miss Independent. That really does speak to me because I I uh yeah, I'm I'm I'm trying to be my own person.

SPEAKER_00 43:16

Makes sense, no doubt about it. Christy, where can folks learn more about your book and about you as well?

SPEAKER_01 43:20

Yep. Uh my website, Christy, the letterkjones.com. So Christy Kjones.com has a book tab at the top. You can find information about both of the books. And then I would love for you to connect with me on LinkedIn, send me a note, tell me what your one takeaway was uh from this, or throw me a problem, right? Throw me a I'm struggling with this right now. What do you think? I would love to, I would love to, you know, banter that back and forth and see if we can come up with a solution.

SPEAKER_00 43:44

Excellent. So good. Christy, I've enjoyed our time. I enjoyed our second conversation. I appreciate you coming back on the Uncommon Leader podcast. I know folks are going to find great value in it, and I wish you the best with the book launch.

SPEAKER_01 43:54

Thank you, John. You as well.

SPEAKER_00 43:56

Love that conversation. People, then process, then AI. Uh, when we get those things out of order, we are going to identify gaps that we have in our processes, but also uncommon leaders. We have to recognize that we have a leadership gap that we have to continue to grow inside of this space as well. So I appreciated that conversation with Christy K. Jones. Be sure to go out, connect with her on our website and on LinkedIn. And if you get a chance, get out there on Amazon and get a copy of her book. I'm sure you're going to enjoy that and find a lot of value in that. Not just from a sales leadership standpoint, but from an overall leadership standpoint. Her no nonsense approach is refreshing, and I'm sure you'll get value. Until next time, go and grow champions. Until next time, go and grow champions.