Woody led the sales team at Divvy from the beginning to their $2.5 billion acquisition. Now, he's building Elephant to take advantage of his insights into the world of B2B sales and what's currently going on in the market with AI. Join us for this tech-meets-sales conversation.
Woody led the sales team at Divvy from the beginning to their $2.5 billion acquisition. Now, he's building Elephant to take advantage of his insights into the world of B2B sales and what's currently going on in the market with AI. Join us for this tech-meets-sales conversation.
In life, we make choices. Yeah, all right. Welcome to the Sales Management Podcast. I'm your host, coach CRM co-founder, corey Bray. This is your source for actionable sales management strategies and tactics. No long intros, no long ads, let's get started. Today is a first. I've got someone who is a sales leader. When Chad, gpt and all this first wave of AI came out not first wave, current wave of AI came out and now he's founder of a software company. We've talked to the tech people. They're doing tech things. Well, here's somebody that transitioned from leading a sales organization into founding a company focused on AI. Woody Clementson is the founder CEO of Elephant AI. Former VP of sales at Divi and billcom. What do you good to see up? Hey, good music, corey, all right. Well, let's talk about this. You're a sales leader. That's the job. You took something completely different. I mean, it's all in text. It's interesting, like what motivated you to go out and become a founder of an AI company in 2023?
Speaker 2:You know, corey, I think that when you look at how the world is changing, there's only going to be a few times that we can look at a technology that completely changes the world. And this new language models and this new the AI that's here is now to a point where it's going to completely change the world. It's just like the internet and just like the printing press. This is something that's new and we have to evolve with it or we'll get evolved out.
Speaker 1:Well, I think it's funny because I talked to a lot of founders, I work with a lot of founders, probably done advisory engagements with 250 founders at this point, and the rule across the board for most of them, when it comes to things that are related to sales tech, is that they did a bunch of interviews, they heard a bunch of things and they had a hypothesis. Well, you lived it. What's digging to some of the things that you lived, that you observed, or there's an opportunity to apply AI to those?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think when you look at how AI first came out, gpt really had a cool introduction. It was about creating content with little instructions, and so it started off with just trying to see could it write an email, could it respond to this, or could it write a LinkedIn post, or could it do something Like kind of quickly generate some sort of content that was directionally correct. You see, little tricks.
Speaker 1:We'll start our things.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I had a bunch of friends that left Divi and went to Jasper and Jasper AI and they started building it towards marketing and doing that. So we were had a super early introduction to what this genitive AI was doing. Now that it's out there, everyone's kind of used to it those cutesy little tricks. People kind of aren't no longer excited about it. They've gone past the hype cycle and looking at, like well, it just can write cute text but it doesn't hold context, and so a lot of sales leaders and other sales reps that I've talked about have now thrown it to the wayside. It wasn't good enough. You know I'll come back in a few years.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but when you're looking at what you can do with AI is it's understanding texts, not just generating texts With language models. It can be able to understand what is going on. So then you can be able to work directly with that. And so there's even with chat GPT. Right now you can upload a document, you can do doc UNA if you pay for GPT for and that is where you can start giving it the context necessary to give you better, meaningful answers to help you understand yourself, your client, your business, to be able to really take advantage of the new technology.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I know one of the things that you're working on is the intersection of what happens in meeting and the sales methodology that the companies rolled out. Let's dig into that a little bit. Where are the opportunities, based on what you've seen from a sales execution and coaching perspective when it comes to sales methodology, and where some of the gaps are?
Speaker 2:Yeah, for all sales leaders out there we have. We subscribe to sales methodologies out as I've subscribed to triangle selling. I purchased it and use it at Divian bill is implementing. It is hard. There are multiple sales leaders out there that like it. They love the structure, they start using the same terminology and it gets the team and sneak. But to actually get it scaled is very, very, very difficult.
Speaker 1:It's a behavior change. You got to get humans do something different every day.
Speaker 2:It's hard and that's in that they they've been hitting quota without it during the during the wonderful rush after after COVID, where everyone was getting money, the money, the market was flooded, where our jobs as sales people what was easier than it was back when I first started knocking doors, or back when I first started doing sales, like when money was tight, money what hasn't been tight, the few years and rising tides made it so people were spending money and our jobs were really easier.
Speaker 2:Now that that money is gone, implementing the proven sales methodologies are is more important than ever, and knowing and practicing and watching your tape to see can I actually do this is important. So with AI, what we're able to accomplish is we were able to to consume and interrogate a self methodology, just like we did with triangle selling, so that we can now compare everything from scan to cause inside of the market. And so we were able to do that because, inside of the call to see, did the sales rep and consistently be able to implement that sales methodology. And then what is the exact example, to know what to say and when to say it, using that sales methodology integrated with the AI.
Speaker 1:And so we can serve as things to managers and say, hey, look, here's, here's the execution you want them doing. Discovery, uncovering pain, managing resistance, setting next steps, coming out of the meeting. If they're doing a demo, you want to be engaging the conversation out of presentation. There's all these fundamental things that should happen, regardless of if you're using triangle selling or something that's overly complicated to help the consultants make more money and pay their bills, which is hilarious. Let's make things really complicated so we can build a lot. Okay, steve, good idea. Yeah, that's, that's almost tells me that the dog is there.
Speaker 1:Made it, if you don't know, but that's true story. Korean home and purchasing is differently, but that's not the point. The point is that with call recording technology to really inspect that and understand what the hex going on, yes, or keyword trackers Nobody was using keyword trackers properly. I I probably looked at 75 companies, implementations of call the initials. I never once saw a manager that could sit down and be like I'm gonna sit down, I'm gonna look at call keywords and I'm gonna have really good conclusions coming out of that in a short period of time. People didn't do it because it wasn't enough.
Speaker 2:It's not that they didn't do it. It also is like when I work with sales leaders, as I talk with them, on average they're doing the best managers out there do one call review a week and what they do is they sit down with the rep, they listen to the call together, they stop with the. They have common, they talk, they bullshit for a little bit and then they get into doing the call review. They listen to a few minutes of the call, they give one or two feedback, sometimes relevant with the sales methodology. Other times it's just based off of the deal and then they kind of move on and hopefully they talk next week. So one out of 50 for AEs calls are getting recorded. For SDRs it's one out of about 300 calls actually get the call review. It's just not happening.
Speaker 2:And when you think about what you want to pay a sales manager to do, when I would hire a sales manager, I would hire someone not to do call reviews but to truly take my B players to A players to help with pipe management and to get involved with the deal to make the people better In a call review.
Speaker 2:If a team has eight people, that's eight hours, that's one full day, 20% of their whole week is gone just in trying to sit and listen to calls. That's a huge waste of time Now that we have a new technology that can give the manager and the rep instant feedback and help them be better, not just give them a tool that they could go waste time on. And no one has ever sat down and truly use these call recording platforms out there because they had to go hit a number and now that the number is harder, they're way more worried about. Okay, where's that next deal? How do I help the customer overcome this objection and help with the sales rep on this deal versus let's go watch yesterday's tape. They're more worried about the next deal than the last deal.
Speaker 1:Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1:Well, I think one of the things I always work with our customers on is that the car review on a standalone basis still isn't that helpful, because if you don't couple it with the pipeline review and with the person's performance, then it's just a data point and that's the problem with the disconnected technology stack is that the car review people are pushing the car reviews and CRM people are pushing CRM, and then executive leadership and finance are pushing the performance and you got all these things that are that are somewhat disconnected, because if you go in and the pipeline this is funny I see all these companies. I like watching videos of people's pipeline review meetings because a lot of times it's just so finance driven and then it's finance driven on the screen and then the sales people provide narrative Because like, well, sales leader, how would your world change if you had next steps, next update and pain as three fields on the screen during the pipeline review? That's what's going to deal. And then you can look at that and say, OK, well, is it the right stage? Does the amount seem right?
Speaker 1:All these, all these types of things that are critical to know about the deal. And then you can look at it and be like, okay, cool, there's no next step. Let's go look at the last five minutes of three calls instead of one, and so we're just narrowly focused on a thing there. But still, it's still a big lift if you're doing it manually and so it sounds like. What you're trying to do is say let's take that and do it at scale, and do it in a way that is trained on the specific sales methodology that's rolled out to the tier.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and so instead of saying what happened in the last three calls that you just ask Elephant, hey, what happened in the last five minutes of each of these calls and why isn't there next step? Yeah, and one thing when we look at what computers are good at, they're really good at looking at patterns, and the reason why the sales methodology is so important is it's a proven pattern that helps majority people purchase, that helps them get enough confidence to be able to make that decision, to partner their money, and so we can start looking at those patterns. But objections have patterns. They have people's concerns.
Speaker 2:If someone's an active listener or if they're just kind of by themselves and not really paying attention, how long between questions? What type of questions can start indicating what type of buyer that you have as well? So one of our customers right now we're trying to look at their buyer's intent when is the customer actually like showing engagement and what they're purchasing with their product, and that completely changes how you look at a deal versus a sales rep who's like, oh my gosh, I killed it on that deal. That was the best demo ever and they talked 80% of the time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, every time I hear someone say that, what you just said, it's usually not very good.
Speaker 2:And that's hard to tell. And so when sales reps can now get honest feedback of, hey, your buyer was just being polite, they weren't that interested.
Speaker 1:Well, because buyers know the best way to get the salesperson to believe them alone is to tell them good things To be like. Oh yeah, hey, I'm really interested. Let me go check with my team. But you did a great job, woody. You know, you're just your top notch.
Speaker 2:Yeah, let me just talk to this one person. Hey, you know what? Don't call me, I'll call you. I'm so excited.
Speaker 1:I don't anticipate any challenges.
Speaker 2:And that makes it hard, because the only way that a sales leader can know the truth when you're excited and you're excited about the deal, it is harder, and so a sales manager has to step in and help with that. And sales managers sometimes they only listen to those five minutes of the call and they're like, oh my gosh, they did show interest by some of these things. Yeah, you'd have to be able to just see the pattern, and computers are gonna and I work with.
Speaker 1:Yeah, computers are uniquely situated to do that because they can do lots of things at once. People can only do one thing at once, maybe, yeah, I don't know. I think multitasking is a thing that people point to, that are there's science on this? You can't.
Speaker 2:I've never been able to figure out how to do it.
Speaker 1:I don't think anybody has. I think that people are yeah, you can go back and forth and do a lot of little logistical things that don't matter, but you can't do things in port and the multitasking.
Speaker 2:I think it's called like the context switching. Like you can be good at context switching, but like I, if I wanna get something done, I have to. Everything else has to be off the screen, I have to. I can do one thing good at a time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, it's funny, man, like I see it myself, I'm with anything that's writing based. I can't write during the day, because there's stuff that happens. Yeah, the phone rings more during the day or I might have a Slack notification during the day. I might have the temptation to go check my email and say, hey, did that proposal get signed? Or things like that. But if I'm sitting here at 10 o'clock at night or on Sunday afternoon, I can write like madman.
Speaker 1:That's one of the reasons I go to Asia. Man, I've written, because when Hellman and I write, part of my job is I call it blackout writing, where I just completely black out the world and I say I'm just focused on creating content and I can write. I think that my record's like 14,000 words in one day and it's just going after it because I don't edit Cause you've got this creative brain, you got the editing brain, yeah, and so you, just, you just create and create and create and go and go and go and you're focused. Well, if you've got your editing brain, you're like, well, okay, well, I created, but I've gotta adjust it, and then you're just fighting with yourself mentally. And I think that here's where that segues into what we're talking about a little bit, which is when it comes to coaching.
Speaker 1:Coaching doesn't work. It certainly doesn't work well, unless the person doing the coaching is really good at diagnosing and prioritizing what to coach on. And so to diagnose and prioritize, diagnose pieces, what is the problem? Well, you can't understand what the problem is unless you understand a few things. First of all, what could the universe of problems be? So, with a new business account executive, you've got things. They do. They do discovery, they do demos, they handle objections, they navigate stakeholders, they send up proposals, they get signatures, they disqualify. They do lots of things right, lots more than that. Those are just some examples. Well, within those, they're applying sales methodology and they're doing that on top of a sales process. So those are a couple of other variables to look at.
Speaker 1:Well, what's good look like, what's bad look like, and what are the things that don't really matter? And then for anything that's good or bad, there's degrees of that, and then you've got degrees of good and bad and then you've also got degrees of impact. So there might be something that's really bad but it doesn't really matter. Or you might have something that's kind of bad, but just because it's kind of bad, it really, really matters. So, understanding what all of those different things could be and being able to diagnose which ones are a current issue for each individual person on the team and then prioritize what to coach them on. Also, knowing that there's this idea that you can really only coach somebody on one thing at a time High performance you can coach them on two or three.
Speaker 1:Okay, we can get into edge case, but let's just talk about for a second, if I throw you eight basketballs, you're going to catch zero basketballs. If I throw you one basketball, you're probably going to catch one. Coach somebody on one thing at a time. Well, what if that one thing is the wrong thing? What if it's not going to have an impact? Or what if it might damage your credibility with a salesperson because they say, look, you're sitting here nitpicking on this thing. That doesn't even matter. What I'm really worried about is this other thing over here. So the diagnosis and prioritization is the precursor to even being able to coach. And that's what I love about what you're doing, because I think computers are uniquely positioned to help aid the manager in that diagnosis and prioritization.
Speaker 2:And something that we sometimes forget is a lot of us as we have watched our sales careers. Over the last couple of years, we've more sales reps have been promoted than historically, and so they've had less time to bake in their sales role to truly understand even themselves. How many times does the sales rep get promoted to a manager when they didn't even know why? They were good, they were just good at sales. And so now I'm the best rep, now I'm going to be the best manager, but they don't even know why they're good.
Speaker 1:Well, the funny thing is maybe they weren't even good at sales, Maybe they just were good at getting into the right company at the right time. You guys had a couple of teams in the last couple of years. If you had a pulse, you're closing deals right.
Speaker 2:I've seen that over all of during 2021, when there was so much money in the market and everyone was like, hey, you have this problem, great, we solve it. And they didn't. It was there, but it allows for someone who really wants their career to turn into sales leadership, which is a completely different career than being a strong account executive. And when you want to be a coach, when you want to be a leader, it changes how you should do your job and the questions that you do in self-discovery, in helping your reps do self-discovery, and I think that's where some managers accidentally got a little ahead of their skis. Where they're now in a role, they're running a team.
Speaker 2:The job is now harder than it's ever been.
Speaker 2:Like, shout out to every sales rep and every sales leader out there right now your job is the hardest it's ever been, and to do that job right and to be able to put everything where it's meant to be and to handle the pressure from finance.
Speaker 2:You're being asked to do more and being given less, and it is hard. The market has less, but your quotas are still going up, like you're seeing layoffs happen and you're seeing all these other things that are there. So, like, retention is now harder, and so everything is now harder. And so to survive, to survive this evolution of AI, we have to empower individuals to be more self-aware, to have more self-discovery, because all of the easy deals, corey, I actually think we sometimes forget this. A job as a salesman is not to be an order taker. Our job is to help someone who needs to be convinced to purchase, who needs to be pushed over the edge, but order taking just like we see at restaurants and just as we now at the grocery store that part of our sales job is gone, and the next three to five years is gone.
Speaker 1:Totally, yeah. I mean there's three types of prospects. There's people that are going to buy from you no matter what. There's people that are never going to buy from you. And there's people that might buy from you, and sales people only exist to serve that last group, Yep.
Speaker 2:And I think that's where a lot of us and I know I was the my team was the benefit of it as well. We had some cool laydowns. We had people literally calling us that would say, how do I sign up? Like, well, do you want to get rid of the product? Nope, just need to sign up. You guys have a good reputation. Things are like you have what we need, so I just need to sign up. And then we have other that were the hardest deals in the world that our talented team was able to close and it's. I really think this next generation of sales has to be become the best, because everything that was easy is going to be gone and everything's now harder because of the market that we're in. So we have to be the best. We have to implement everything better and faster.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I agree, and I think that's where really strong sales execution comes in and just fundamental adherence. I was, I was working with a team I don't know a little while ago and I remember one person said we're running around, I was working with the manager and we're doing some car reviews and one person there's a concept and triangle selling called velocity plan, which at the end of the meeting you just set logistics and agendas for the next meeting and then you talk about what potential next steps could happen later on in the in the sales process. Well, this one person said well, none of my meetings last week really required a velocity plan and I didn't want to be controversial. And then in the session so I just said okay, we'll just move on to the next person. I go. Look at their calls. Completely missed opportunities. It was insane because what they had was the next step of sending a proposal. There's no meeting on the calendar. And if you're sending proposals, you don't put meetings on the calendar. What are you doing?
Speaker 2:no-transcript. But if it's on a calendar, it's not going to happen. It's crazy.
Speaker 1:It's not so, then you're going to send the proposal, and then your next step is going to be oh, three days from now, realize that you should have booked a meeting with them. Now you're chasing them.
Speaker 2:Yep, and now they're busy onto someone else. Someone else is selling them the same solution.
Speaker 1:And I think the cool thing about computers in this case is that if the manager is constantly on that person around, well, why didn't you set next steps this time? Didn't we talk about that last week? It's just going to cost some kind of friction, especially if you're managing people remotely because their kid's screaming in the next room, they're pissed off about something else, whatever, and then all of a sudden you're bugging about this thing. Well, if the computer's bugging about this thing, they're much less likely to get annoyed and upset and they're also more likely to think that it's an objectively reasonable thing for the computer to say. Because this is the other piece around fairness, which is you can only coach somebody on something they've been trained on, and if the ground rules are set. I mean this is why in sports, the rules are just very clear baseball, football, basketball. You know the rules very clear.
Speaker 1:And yeah, if Angel Hernandez is behind the plate, he's not going to implement the rules properly, but most other people will. So I got it. So have you, do you follow him? Oh, he's the worst. Just Google Angel Hernandez. It's the worst. It's disgusting. It doesn't know the difference between a ball and a strike. It's almost like you just guess.
Speaker 2:Is he the ref?
Speaker 1:that got kicked off. No, no, no, that was Donahue. The Angel is a baseball empire. No, donahue's. That's real funny for anybody that follows Donahue. So, donahue, I forget his first name, tim Donahue. Tim Donahue was an NBA ref that got taken brides and he now is on Cameo and he'll do Cameo videos for you. So if anybody's in the sports betting, get Tim Donahue to do a Cameo video for one of your buddies. Oh, that's funny. Oh, my gosh, I was actually one of my.
Speaker 1:I'm single and have free time, unlike some people my age, and so I have silly little fun side projects. One of the things that I work on on the weekends is I write movie scripts, and so I was writing a scene about a WNBA points shaving scandal this weekend, which was pretty fun. That's going to be a great movie. Yeah, you ripped the 16. Well, just the scene was this guy, this Congressman, got indicted because he realized that, while the volume bet on any single WNBA game is very high, if you fix all six of them at once and bet the parlay, you can make some cash. So that's what he does. That's smart. It was like when Walter White got all the guys in prison at the same time, within a 15 minute period. It's like this guy gets all the WNBA teams to shave points on the same exact night and then hits the 16.
Speaker 1:Anyways, back to sales management. Yeah, I think that if you know what your team is expected to do, you train them on the sales methodology. They understand it, they accept it, and then the computer can just guide them and nudge them and the managers can take that and abstract it to a point where, hey, this is where I'm going to focus my coaching effort on each individual person, because people are different and taking in the context of who is this person, where they want to go professionally, where they want to go personally, and what intel can I use from their past around how I've coached them or how others have coached them in the past, man that creates such a great coaching relationship.
Speaker 2:And a lot of us in sales leadership. We get so focused on our team and our number, but the best sales leaders in the world actually work out of their silo. They partner with marketing, they partner with CS, they're onboarding team, they partner with finance. And when you can have more free time to not be in the weeds but actually be working on the business not in the business then you actually become the best sales leader to the best revenue leader, helping drive. So a lot of times when we're high-pressured, we're concerned about the month's number. We actually forget about our partners on the other side of the fence. We forget to be able to say okay, is this deal set up to drive real revenue or is it just to drive my quota and we might over forecast or under forecast and we don't have time to work with finance.
Speaker 2:Now we all know the only way to have a good relationship is by investing time. You cannot have a relationship without time. So sales managers have the best relationship with their reps because that's where they're spending their time. Now, if they can become a revenue leader, not just a sales leader, then they're actually looking at how they're spending their time with their counterparts from marketing to help drive them deals to customer success, to drive quality, to finance, to be able to have a stronger voice inside of partner for setting quotas and actually where the company is going. And so you have to look at this as the.
Speaker 2:If you want to be the best sales leader in the world, you have to figure out how to do all of it. Now the way that you should look at it is a time of thirds. It's about a third of your time should be with your individual reps, one-on-one time. A third of your time should be on the team, the structure and the strategy. That's a little bit high level. And then a third of your time should be with your partners, and right now I would bet that most of your listeners are not. They don't feel like that's even possible.
Speaker 1:They don't even have the time.
Speaker 1:That's crazy, man. Yeah it's. I think I'm quoting this right. I think that Patrick Linceoni wrote about this in the five disfunctions of a team, where you have two teams. You've got the people that work for you, and then you've got the people that are your partners, your peers or the people that are above you whatever the other folks in the management group and those are actually your more important team, because you're going to get more leverage from them. You doing something great with finance is going to get you a heck of a lot more leverage and a heck of a lot more results than nitpicking. One more call recording with Timmy yeah, timmy being an AE in this case, of course, I always use Timmy Timmy's my favorite, actually, then. So this movie I was working on.
Speaker 1:The son's name is Timmy. He's a new creator. He's a cool kid.
Speaker 2:And at every company there's going to be a different set of partners. Most sales leaders have marketing, post-sells and finance, but it includes everyone from RevOps to at Bill. We had risk and underwriting and we had other teams out there and when you look at that, it is time consuming because it is hard to maintain partnerships. The best sales leaders then have it with product and then they have it with engineering and they really become that's your future, that's it.
Speaker 1:That's your future, baby. If you can work with product and engineering, that's your future. That's 12 months from now. It's going to be easier to sell stuff.
Speaker 2:And you have to. There's no other choice. I want everyone that's listening to know like our world is changing. What we've done is not going to work. It's not going to get you where you want to go. You have to change, you have to evolve.
Speaker 1:What got you here won't get you there. So, woody, how can people get in touch with you?
Speaker 2:Well, first off, reach out on LinkedIn. You can also email me, woodyaskelephantai, and they can be able to reach out. If you guys want to be able to get a free call recording from Elephant, send it off. Or if you just want to be able to get some feedback on what you're currently doing and how you're implementing any sort of strategy, while you're welcome to reach out, Wow, what an offer.
Speaker 1:I love it, man. Well, thanks for joining us today. I'm Corey Bray, co-founder of CoachCRM. Check us out at coachcrmcom. This is the Sales Management Podcast. Like subscribe, Spotify, Apple. See you next time.