Sales Management Podcast
Cory Bray, 8x author and co-founder of CoachCRM, digs into hot sales management topics.
Sales Management Podcast
83. AI and the Future of Sales Enablement with Sriharsha Guduguntla and Atul Raghunathan
This episode moves beyond the question of "what is sales enablement?" to "what could sales enablement become?"
In the 2010's, software was eating the world, and now AI is taking a big bite out of software.
Join us as we take a peek into the future.
Welcome to the Sales Management Podcast, your source for actionable sales management strategies and tactics. I'm your host. Coach CRM co-founder, corey Gray. No long intros, no long ads, let's go. We're going to peek into the future. Today, we're going to look at the future of sales enablement and sales training, and I've got some AI co-founders with me. Today we've got sy and atul from hyperbound. We're gonna dig into it. Hey guys, how are you? Doing well, carly happy to be here. Visit the future with you, guys 100.
Speaker 3:This is long overdue man. I'm just happy to be here I love it man.
Speaker 1:Good to see you all. So let's just paint a picture for folks 20 years from now. What's the biggest thing that's going to change when you look at a sales enablement or sales training organization?
Speaker 2:I think a lot of the menial tasks are going to go away. I think that's really the core of the statement, right? Whichever way you slice it. Like a lot of the listening to the calls, the time-consuming daily activities that are not strategy-related, where you're not doing that core decision-making, but those things that no one looks forward to every day, they're going to go away. To elaborate on that further, right I? I think the main thing that's going to disappear is deciding which call or how to act on call feedback. So, for example, if you just had a bunch of role plays or real calls that day deciding what to do for your next set of role plays, I feel like that segment is going to be the biggest change. That is going to be automated.
Speaker 1:So we don't have to create a bunch of spreadsheets and then have a bunch of meetings to figure out who we're going to loop into the next meeting. We're going to get some quick iteration on what we should do.
Speaker 2:Exactly, yeah, it's interesting.
Speaker 1:There are a lot of menial tasks. I don't know if everybody recognizes them as menial, but it's wild because when I look across sales organizations, I think with our consulting firm we've worked with about 500 B2B companies over the last 10 years or so and they're just like, oh, we've got to build this and do this and change this and all this other stuff, and it's wild While their salespeople are out there not consistently setting agendas, uncovering pain, setting next steps, and they're talking 60 to 70% of the time on their call.
Speaker 3:No, you just wrapped it up completely there, I think also another thing that I want to tack on to what Athol said is just the fact that I think everything's just going to become a lot more measurable in the future too. Like right now, the way sales enablement is done, it's inherently very hard to measure the impact of the training until a couple months have passed by and you see the lagging indicators. Lagging indicators, right. But I think part of what we're hoping to solve is just being able to collect enough data early on to tell you how to improve that training and how to build personalized training plans for each person on your team, right?
Speaker 1:Personalized training plans for each person on the team. Now, that's novel, because to me that seems hard. That's impossible because we've got all these different departments. I've got sales development there's inbound and there's outbound, and there's sales and there's new people and there's people that are experienced and customer success Some of them do upsells, but maybe we have account management. Oh my gosh, how can we personalize it for each person, let alone each team? That's the world that exists in many companies today.
Speaker 2:Exactly. It's just it would take an insane, irresponsible amount of man hours to make that possible right now, and that is the number one thing that's going to change, because that is possible. It's almost there with the technology that we have today and I think it's right around the corner for us.
Speaker 1:How long has that technology existed? That's new huh.
Speaker 2:So the technology to actually analyze these conversations to the degree, to pull out these analytics and to simulate these conversations right, they go hand in hand and it's only really been possible for about six months. So really like November to December of 2023 is when we ended up with these fast and relatively affordable models that allowed this.
Speaker 1:Interesting. Yeah, so less people required in the future. It's funny you say that. So we're sitting here in 2024, you're talking about six months ago and I think the enablement world has kind of exploded. It was it first came on the scene, most say, in 2008, when, when Forrester wrote their article about it, and then in 2017, there was the inaugural sales enablement society conference in Palm beach, where about a hundred people attended.
Speaker 1:And all of a sudden, in 2020, 2021, everybody said, oh, we need more enablement. We're growing, we're growing fast, and the wild thing about fast growing organizations is, as soon as they get their first enablement person guess what they want more enablement people. And I think the things that you guys are talking about is you, you need leverage because you need to do a lot of different things, because teams are different, people are different and you can either throw bodies to create that leverage. I mean, leverage generally comes from three places it comes from capital, it comes from humans or it comes from technology. So what I'm hearing now is that technology now has an advantage over human labor when it comes to getting leverage and enablement.
Speaker 2:And don't get me wrong, I think we're still going to need a lot of humans in enablement as well. This is more along the lines of there are there like to develop the most detailed enablement plan that you could dream of Like? If you had an army of a hundred enablement people for your hundred sales reps. Like what would you do then? Like that's the future that we want to bring about you know, without the enablement people right.
Speaker 1:So the same number of people plus technology equals much better outcomes.
Speaker 2:Exactly exactly.
Speaker 3:Because right now it's just not feasible, right Like, if you have 200 reps, you can't hire 200 sales, enablement people to do one-on-one training and planning for every single rep. But with the technology that's available out there right now, you know that's definitely becoming more and more possible.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so why do reps need more personalization?
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's a great question, right. I mean it's with just the whole thing that's going on in personalized learning right now, in general, right, like every person learns differently. Every person has. They take different amounts of time to learn certain things and certain skills, right, and I think it's very important that these enablement plans aren't just assuming that every rep is going to follow the exact same timeline and it's going to learn every skill the exact same way that the other rep learns it.
Speaker 3:Right, and I think, especially like the way it's done today. Right, like you're supposed to listen to your top reps calls on Gong and just automatically somehow emulate that, right, but there's a big gap from listening to those calls, right, actually, yeah, how do I get there? Right, and it's there's one training plan that's going to get you there, right, so that that's exactly what we're trying to figure out is like, what are the things we need to put in place? Right, to figure out how to take that rep and get them to their ideal state in a way that's personalized to them, and that is super important because it's the only way that you can actually guarantee every rep will improve. Otherwise, there's no guarantee.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think having personalized instruction has proven to work in every other area of the world. You think professional golf, for example. Every professional golfer has their own caddy and they have their own coach.
Speaker 3:A hundred percent, except for.
Speaker 1:Bubba and John Daly. They don't need it. Everyone else. And then and then all of a sudden, these people are just getting incrementally better because they're identifying what the specific things they need to work on are, and then that trickles down into the school system. Look at the public. Have you all seen these stats in the public schools, where there's like 21% of kids are proficient in math? That's disgusting.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's ridiculous. Yeah, because they're taking them all.
Speaker 1:They're putting them in a big room, uh-huh, doing who knows what with them, and then coming out the other end. They can't do math.
Speaker 2:And they're not like. Some of the most fundamental problems with education right now are the fact that it's not tailored to the individual learning style of each user, like, especially, children, and they all learn differently and, in a sense, right. These, these sales development reps, especially the very early folks who are just starting their careers. They benefit the most from personalized instruction. We've seen that time and time again from speaking to enablement people in the space. It's just they wish they had the ability to spend more time with each of these folks to get them up to speed. But yeah, there's only so much time in the day.
Speaker 1:That's interesting. So when you think about the impact and how you measure it, what changes in a world where you can measure enablement versus a world where it's tough and people are scared to measure it? And then also you get all these arguments around causality.
Speaker 2:The biggest thing that's going to change is the ability for leadership to prioritize this without getting fired. So you know, as a leader, right when you have metrics to report back to on why your enablement strategy is working, and also like understanding exactly which part of your enablement strategy is working. You now have the ability to take big risks and, you know, prioritize incentives without being worried that your boss, who doesn't understand what you're doing, is going to get rid of you.
Speaker 1:Yeah so.
Speaker 2:I think that's actually the most impactful change that's going to happen, because of this analytics rather than any of the actual direct impacts to any of the reps. Weirdly enough, I think that's the biggest change that's going to come about.
Speaker 1:So it gives leadership courage to invest.
Speaker 3:Exactly, Exactly, and you know, more often than not, it's funny because when orbs don't hit quota like for quarters, months on end, right, they always come back to enablement and they blame enablement, right. In fact, they end up cutting enablement in many cases, right, and it's funny because it's a result of you not investing in enablement in the first place, right. But as an enablement leader, how do you actually show that? How do you actually show that you're doing your job every single day and that your reps are incrementally getting better, right, and so it's like we're giving them that superpower that they just didn't have all this time to show leadership.
Speaker 1:Well, and when things are easier, then managers can also take ownership of it. I think one of the big reasons that enablement has become more popular is because the number of business processes is greater than it used to be and the number of technology applications that support those business processes is substantially bigger than it used to be and the number of technology applications that support those business processes is substantially bigger than it used to be.
Speaker 3:Right, yeah, the products are getting more complicated. You know these companies. They're just continuing to expand more and more. So it's like a lot of retraining that needs to be done and a lot of it's just like not easy to take a team of 300 people and get them to sell a whole new product that you just released. Right.
Speaker 2:And one thing that we're seeing a lot more of and I'm sure, corey, you might be seeing a lot of this too is a lot more platform products Like a lot of products are growing horizontally. These days.
Speaker 2:And that means that your rep needs to be able to do discovery, for example, on a cold call or on a discovery call across the entire suite of products to figure out which product to sell them. They need to understand a much wider range of things than they did just even a couple of years ago, so this becomes all the more important.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Selling one product to one persona. How hard is that? When you have six personas who could buy one of seven products from you, that becomes much more complicated 100%. Yeah, requires more overthinking.
Speaker 1:I think that that's the other piece. Man Like people, a lot of people stop forcing themselves to learn once they get to a certain place and if you've got new product launches across several products and the market's consistently changing because there's competitive pressures that are either coming in or going out, it's fun. When the big private equity firms buy somebody, the competitive pressures go out because they send that thing off to pasture. Oh man, there've been some bad ones recently. I think that's. The key is keep the pressure on learning for people to continue to build their muscle, otherwise atrophies.
Speaker 2:Absolutely Like without a doubt, right. I mean absolutely like without a doubt, right I?
Speaker 3:mean, you know, we've even heard stories about. You know, we talk about attrition, right, and a big reason behind attrition that most people don't really talk about these days is the fact that these companies just don't have good training programs. Right, like you come in as a rep, right, you have no idea you're about to sell some very complex technical engineering product that's aimed at, you know, like VPs of engineering, right? Like, how, like, if I, if there is no training plan for me and there's no strong enablement program, it's very hard for me to ramp up as a rep and I'm just going to leave, and I'm just going to leave, right, and so that's. You know, most people don't talk about that as often as we wish they could, but you know it's been something we've been noticing as well.
Speaker 2:You know I had a customer tell me, like right before this call, that he was able to recruit a sales rep from you know, one of the other, like the company, that that sales rep was already at, like a star performer, by talking about how he was investing in enablement Like reps do really care about this stuff, uh, right, and by saying that, hey, I am using this cool new AI product, like here's what it does, like the rep was instantly enamored and uh, you know well, and uh, continue that recruiting conversation. So I'm sure you've seen this as well, corey. Like when they say that, hey, I'm bringing in someone like Corey Bray to you know, to coach you. Like reps are, you know, more excited they're they're less likely to, you know, leave through attrition.
Speaker 1:Yeah, people want to get better.
Speaker 2:Exactly.
Speaker 1:And it's. It's funny with my favorite Jack Barker quote, when, when Richard Hendricks says, well, if there's such good salespeople, shouldn't they be able to sell it? He's like no, it doesn't work that way. The way you keep the best salespeople is you need to give them something easy to sell, otherwise they just go somewhere else 100% Jack Barker executive of the year. If anybody doesn't know, i'm'm not even gonna say who it is. If you don't know who jack barker is, google it jack barker ceo. He's, he's the best yeah, no, I've.
Speaker 3:I've watched the entire show, man, it's amazing. I love it. I've watched.
Speaker 1:You know, I think I've watched every episode at least four times and I've watched season one probably seven times and it's.
Speaker 3:It's actually very accurate. I'm'm not going to lie, having gone through the founder experience ourselves. Now, like a lot of it is actually pretty accurate. Obviously it's exaggerated, but you know, we've seen it like when it comes to CEOs, vcs, like you know just everything falling apart. One day your entire code base is just crashing and you got to go in and figure out what's happening.
Speaker 1:Been there, done that. Yeah, oh, it's wild. I watched, so I watched season. Here's funny story. I haven't said this on the show yet. People, this is new, so I move. We're talking about silicon valley, the tv show on hbo everybody, if you don't know. So we're going to talk about a little bit more. In 2014 it came out I think the first season aired in June and July. In August I was living in Houston, texas, and I was head of sales at a consulting firm that did business intelligence, sales and implementations. As soon as season one ended, I sold all my stuff and took two suitcases and moved to San Francisco and took two suitcases and moved to San Francisco. That was the reason. The reason I moved to San Francisco in 2014 was because of season one of Silicon Valley and I have met I've met lots of Richard Hendricks's. I've definitely met a lot of Dinesh and Guilfoyle's. I dated a Monica.
Speaker 3:I mean these people are God, yeah, and then you also applied to Y combinator yourself right back in the day yeah, we've done.
Speaker 1:We've done lots of things. There have been a and and have I met an erlich bachman?
Speaker 2:yeah, yep, yep we literally met a we, we met a erlich. So I you know exactly who I'm talking about. Yeah, we met an Ehrlich Bachman a couple of weeks ago, so you know they exist.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so Ehrlich Bachman's, this eccentric guy that has a story and he's always talking about Aviato, his old company that he sold, and he just takes founders under his wing for 10%.
Speaker 3:Sounds like YC. No, just kidding.
Speaker 1:At least you get cash. Oh, his facial hair is so good though, yeah. So let's talk about how okay, you talked about the horizontal span of of products, a lot of companies out there that are they're buying software. They're like, oh my gosh, it's so confusing, everybody does everything. How do you stand out from the noise when it comes to, hey my gosh, it's so confusing, everybody does everything. How do you stand out from the noise when it comes to, hey, we've got this new thing.
Speaker 3:You guys are faced with that right now. What's going on? So the nice part is right now, Corey, we're building something that's fairly unique at the moment, and I don't expect it to stay that way for too long. I'm sure some of these other bigger players will eventually enter the market, but the nice part is that what we're building is just something that you can only get if you work with us.
Speaker 1:So tell us, just so everybody has context, tell us what specifically that is it.
Speaker 3:So the space is being called the ai sales role play space for for folks out there.
Speaker 3:So the idea is you know, you, we, you can design these ai bots for your personas and you can role play with them. Right, and you can also build out different scorecards to score those calls and and use it as a way to track how your reps are improving over time. Right, and so we offer basically a whole system where you can go in, build bots for your different ICPs and have your reps practice with them, and you can also build these really complex scorecards to go along with it. So that's what we're building, right, and eventually our goal is to tie this back into the rest of the sales pipeline. Right, eventually, we want to introduce this for your real calls as well. Right, and figure out how we can use your performance on that and push you back into hyperbound to build those personalized training plans we were talking about before. Right, and eventually, down the line, we do want to build out the rest of that stack, and I think that's when this becomes extremely powerful.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, two main problems I've seen with role plays. Tell me what you guys think about those. One bandwidth People don't have the time. Let's do 1A and 1B. So 1A is bandwidth they don't have the time or 1B is they absolutely have the time. They just think that they don't. And people drift towards.
Speaker 1:I had a guy tell me this. It was the best way to position it. He said I'm not lazy, I'm just like water way to position it. He said I'm not lazy, I'm just like water. He says I still go down the river. I just go down the river and the path that is at the bottom of the Valley. Why would I go over the mountain? I can go. It's not laziness, cause I'm still getting from point A to point B. I'm not just still walking out of pond. That was pretty silly, but the uh. So they're not doing a bandwidth. And then the second one is the quality of the person on the other end of the role play. I can't tell you how many times I've seen role plays where it's it ends with ridiculousness or giggling or abandonment or going off track and things like this. And if, if you're role playing with another human and the other human isn't doing probably a better job of being that recipient than you are of being the character that you're role-playing, then it just falls apart and breaks.
Speaker 2:And there's a part B to that as well, which is the consistency right.
Speaker 2:People role-play differently with different like, for example, if you're a sales manager, we've seen this time and time again where, like, the quality of the role play they do with some reps is so dramatically different than with other reps and you ask them to explain it and they can't give you a good reason. So all three of those problems really get solved with an AI role play solution. Like those are really the core selling props. In fact, we had a customer just a couple of weeks ago who, within two weeks, they did what was it? A hundred and like 12 hours of role plays on our platform across their team. This would have been the equivalent of if they had 27 managers doing role plays with their team during this time period. Wow, they have nowhere near that amount of managers. By the way, this is like more than three times the size of their whole enablement team.
Speaker 2:So, you know, the bandwidth just straight up is not there for the amount of role plays that people need to be doing.
Speaker 1:How much time a week should somebody be role playing? And I know it depends early career, late career, early to company, late to company. But pick a bucket what's it look like in an ideal state and compare that to what you guys have seen in terms of what people are doing today.
Speaker 2:We like to say that during onboarding it should be five hours a week at least. Onboarding role plays are the best way to do it Only during onboarding. And for ramped up reps, you know right, somewhere on the order of 30 minutes to an hour a week right. So these are mostly in terms of warmups, right. So five to 10 minutes at the start of every day, before those calling blocks, before those crucial discovery calls.
Speaker 1:And we're talking about prospecting for the most part here.
Speaker 2:No, no. So also discovery calls as well, right, so it depends on if you, if you call that prospecting, uh, but yeah, for cold calls, absolutely Before those cold calling blocks, but before, like a discovery call with a with a big, big customer, right, you want to make sure that you, you knock that out of the park.
Speaker 1:Well, there's things that you prep for. I always have been doing I've been doing sales stuff forever. I prep for calls and there's always one or two or three things and I say I want to make sure I get this in there. It's like prepping for an interview. You go on TV for an interview. You've got a Zinger line that you want to deliver. Well, if you're going into a big sales meeting, you've got a Zinger question that you want to deliver. Especially if it's a big group. You want to get the deal moving forward or closed or whatever it is. There are things that you're going to want to get in there. And what's your alternative? To hope that it works the first time you do it.
Speaker 2:Especially with some of those more advanced techniques. Right For something. For example, let's say that you want to ask three discovery questions to this individual prospect because you know about their business and you want to tie that back at the end. You want to practice summarizing those in the phrasing that you want. The only way to do that as a role play, like you can't just say that I'm going to go do these three things and actually remember to do them on the call unless you get some reps in.
Speaker 3:So yeah, so one of our customers recently he had a meeting with Nike coming up right, and he was very nervous for that call and he he knew there was a huge list of objections that he's not ready for. So he actually went into hyperbound, built a bot for Nike practice with that like 30 minutes before that call and he came back to us and he was saying if I hadn't done that role play, I wouldn't have booked that meeting today. Right, that that was the first, like that was the first response that we got from one of our early customers and you know, that's what we, that's what made us realize like, okay, we are onto something here, clearly.
Speaker 1:So it's like the drag range before you tee off.
Speaker 2:Exactly, exactly. That's exactly what it is.
Speaker 1:Or the bullpen. Yeah, yeah, man, I did. Oh, I pulled my hamstring last time I played softball, or two times ago. I pulled my hamstring because I warmed up for the first game and then I forgot to warm up for the second game, and I'm 40. So anybody out there that's over 30, please, please, please, please, please, warm up and stretch.
Speaker 3:You're not 18 anymore I think the other thing that folks um aren't doing these days is, uh like just doing role plays weekly. Because of the whole remote culture that's going on right like pre-covid, I feel like people are role-playing a lot more, but lately, because of the remote culture, it's just kind of been thrown to the side right and we're kind of like coming back and reminding people like hey, there's this thing called a role play and you can still do it, right. In fact, we talked to.
Speaker 3:Oh, go ahead, sir oh no, no, that's all I was just saying it just. It's just funny how it blows people's minds when we tell them you know, you can still do it in a remote world.
Speaker 2:We talked to a leader at an org who actively watched this fall apart within his own org. So, like, what used to happen is that, like someone from like, basically the manager would go around to each rep at their station and role play with them to warm them up at the start of every day, every day, right, and after the reps went remote, they used to do calls with the reps. They used to like, actually, the manager would phone call each of these reps and have them go through it and then, just over time, you know, they just stopped doing it and then, when, when he found out about hyperbound, he was like, oh my god, like we can go back to. You know what we used to do in 2019 when I had the system going and it worked.
Speaker 1:So yeah, yeah, remote culture. What is remote culture?
Speaker 2:I don't know the manager being closer to their boat.
Speaker 1:That's the first. The first, most important part is the manager being closer to their boat and then HR being in a spot where they can hire much faster because, oh, you can go get somebody from anywhere. I just think it's wild, especially if you're talking about prospecting and warming up. Can you imagine and I know there's people out there can you imagine what it would be like to be? When I was 22, I lived with two other guys and we lived in a house and it was wild. And you're sitting there in your bedroom where you sleep and you're calling strangers while your friends are in the kitchen making a pizza and the other one's tapping a keg and you're sitting there. That's wild to me.
Speaker 3:That is wild.
Speaker 1:I guess not everybody had the pleasure of living with a U S army recruiter Like I did. He had the best sales pitch ever. He was like hey, you got student loan debt. Yeah, what do you think about it? Don't like it, you want to get rid of it. It was two a month. All you had to do was get two people to say yes, a month, really.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah.
Speaker 1:Best sales pitch ever.
Speaker 3:So, yeah, it's a similar. Right now, otto and I, we both are living together at the same apartment and it's funny because sometimes Otto will just be in the kitchen making himself like a you know avocado toast or something, and meanwhile I'm here like booking like a six figure deal on the side talking to some CR.
Speaker 2:The funniest part is that when we both have meetings at the same time and one of us actually has to go into our bedroom, to take the other call.
Speaker 1:I think what you guys are doing is you're saying, all right, well, let's, instead of this whole out of sight, out of mind which is how a lot of people do remote, let's actually get smart and intentional about it and say, all right, well, if we're going to do this thing, there are several buckets that need to be filled, and one of those is warmups, practice enablement for people, so they get the same similar experiences that they had always had when they were in offices.
Speaker 2:Exactly, exactly.
Speaker 1:Well, here's the other thing. The other problem I see a lot of teams run into is when they're in the office. People are scared to make calls on the floor because they go what if someone hears me? What if it's loud out there? Well, they can talk to a bot and all of a sudden realize you know what. It's okay.
Speaker 2:The lowering of blood pressure of reps is something we're planning on measuring. We're going to strap these reps up to a heart rate monitor and we're going to before and after hyperbound, you know, added two years to your life.
Speaker 3:He literally had a rep that said that to us. He was like the single, single biggest thing that hyperbound helped me with was lowering my blood pressure. I'm like, okay, we gotta, we gotta make this a KPI and measure this thing.
Speaker 1:Oh that's great, yeah, you guys can go on, huberman, we're corporate health.
Speaker 2:Oh man, Imagine the type of investors who'd be interested in that. That would be crazy.
Speaker 1:You should pitch somebody and say hey, we're a health tech company. Okay, what do you got? Well, we have AI, cold call role play bots that lower people's blood pressure.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's a great. This is great. We're just coming up with new startup ideas Great.
Speaker 1:Well, this goes back to the Silicon Valley. You go in there. What was the one that Jin Yang pitched Seafood?
Speaker 3:Oh, my God dude, the hot dog or not the hot dog or not one, and the octopus seafood one. Yeah, I remember that, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, jin Yang entrepreneur of the year.
Speaker 3:This is definitely a Jin Yang type of idea.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. Well, I think I think it's fun. You gotta, you gotta have crazy ideas like this. I mean, I think I think cold calling from your bedroom is a Jin Yang type of idea too, but a lot of people are doing it. So when a manager has somebody doing role plays, what's the feedback loop to them to understand? Okay, are we doing what we need to do? Or where's the manager interviewing and step in and take action?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so the manager comes in even before the rep makes the first role play. Right so the manager, their goal at the beginning, when they set up the bot, is to basically figure out what good looks like so far for them, right, and then put that into a scorecard that you can attach to the bot and actually measure, right? So these scorecards and I wish I could show them on this call, but they get very- specific, we're audio only baby yes, we all have great hair, so maybe we should go video.
Speaker 3:Sometime we'll see in fact, although you you can uh explain the scorecards and stuff, but the idea is like you know, once you set up these uh different bots and their different scorecards, then you can figure how each rep is doing on the role plays. So, um, yeah, I mean I'll, how about they'll talk a little bit, got it so so?
Speaker 1:so train them on the front end with what good looks like and then on the back end, be able to look at scores that are automatically generated across the team and then intervene where scores start dropping or when scores start going up. Then then maybe take those and use, use those snippets as best in class examples for other folks.
Speaker 3:Exactly. But it's like you know things like talk time right, like if you notice that your reps are actually their talk time is going up over time, that's that's a great indication that they're becoming more comfortable, because our bots do shut you down If you don't uh, you know, if you don't follow what good looks like they will just hang up on you mid conversation. That's happened before. It's really important.
Speaker 2:And what really gets involved here is actually the big data side to things, because doing this based off one call is good and all. Looking at the rep scorecard performance off one call, like yeah, that definitely helps. But now you see like a trend in how a rep performs on a scorecard and speaking to a specific type of prospect when handling a specific objection. Right, that approach that you know a manager would have to go listen to 40 calls to go figure that out. But you know, with a system like like this right now, the manager knows exactly what to act upon without having to go get you know. Basically, do that level of grunt work, right, that is really the biggest contribution.
Speaker 1:What's the workflow for the manager in terms of how often they're looking at things and how often they're using it for coaching input?
Speaker 2:We like to say once a week is sufficient to you know. Basically, if you're evaluating more frequently than once a week, you know you're not giving your reps enough time to improve on things. So if you give your reps, like you know, like once a week between those sessions, your weekly one-on-ones with those reps, that should be more than enough.
Speaker 1:Yeah, got it. Well, I got to ask the question that is on everybody's mind how far are we away from artificial general intelligence, where computers take over and none of this matters anymore?
Speaker 2:Corey, this is my least favorite question to answer.
Speaker 3:I've been waiting for this question to be asked, okay.
Speaker 2:So there are two major problems with this question. One is, I believe we can't even define AGI.
Speaker 1:We can't define sales enablement either. So at least we're Well we can't.
Speaker 2:I agree with you on that, but we will never know when we have reached AGI until we're way past. It is generally my take on it. The second piece to it is you will see components of AI that outstrip human performance on certain tasks, that are convincingly AGI-like in specific areas and then are significantly sub human performance in others.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:So basically, like establishing like any type of like, for example, like LLMs are already, like you know, superhuman at certain tasks, like summarization or even certain things as advanced, as like machine, as like translation between certain languages, but they are significantly subhuman at, like you know, reasoning and inference, et cetera. Right, so like defining any like a point where you know you feel that it is above a human in every category, is, is, is just so, so, so hard. Those are more pedantic, you know technical, like annoyances with the with the question, but you know to give you a real answer like 10 years, uh so 10 years yeah wow.
Speaker 1:So what's the world gonna look like in 20 years?
Speaker 2:man that's a good question I honestly, like we're going to have to start looking into stuff like UBI, that's. I think like there is a certain degree to which, you know, like automation is going to, you know, make humans more productive and is going to, you know, increase economic output, et cetera, right. But I think, like the balance of like labor is really going to shift, like there's going to be a lot of tasks that are no longer human required.
Speaker 1:Many fewer jobs.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:You got to ask. Sam, yeah, he might know the answer.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, I think he knows the answer. He just doesn't want to tell us. Eventually he's driven about. I don't know.
Speaker 3:He just doesn't want to tell us. Eventually he's driven about.
Speaker 2:I don't know we really asked him this question, in fact, I think. So Sam speaks a lot at YC events, right, and we had the pleasure of it was literally just us and 20 other people and Sam and we spent roughly an hour and a half just grilling him on questions and I was very pleased that he stuck around for the whole thing and faithfully answered every one of our questions, even like really nasty ones about like AI ethics and yeah, like I really believe that this is just an unknowable thing, like even to him.
Speaker 1:Well, in sales, it seems to me that at least let's say 2019 to 2022, throw bodies at thing. Was the move in B2B tech sales Right? It seems like in the future that spike probably won't happen again, even when capital markets change and go back to where they were. But I always think it's funny. People are like oh, it was the zero interest rate period. I was like do y'all study history at all or do you just watch MSNBC? Because there was zero interest rates, like most of the last two decades, right From like 2003 to 2005, 2009 to 2013, 2019 to 2023. I mean, most of the last two decades there was 0% interest rate. So it's not like there was this thing that happened in 2021. But there was a reaction to a lot of things happening together that caused massive spikes in labor and it seems like that demand for labor in that specific area probably won't return. Is that fair?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean not to that extent. And we saw something really similar in the startup funding space. People were throwing money around in 2021 to a degree that has not been seen in recent history, so that was just a weird year, I think yeah, yeah, weird year, but now people are still throwing money around yeah, but there's a lot more uh you know reasoning behind decisions now than otherwise it was worse back in 2021, oh yeah for sure, but it's still out there to be had.
Speaker 1:It's not like this is gone, it's. It's funny, man, people are always just like, oh, this is how things are now. It's like no, that's that's how things were a year ago. You're just realizing it now. People are very bad at spotting where we're at on the trend curve, and it's it's easy to say you know, that's that's how things were back then. Um, I don't know. It's easy to say you know that's how things were back then. I don't know.
Speaker 3:It's wild. Yeah, man, people are going to have to specialize in things a lot more. They're going to have to get really good at the things that they do. Like, there's no like anything where you're doing something repetitive over and over again, right, that's like I like to call it a mindless task. Right, it's going to be automated away. So if you're, like, if you're just an SDR, that's just, you know, sticking to the way you've been doing things for the last 15 years and you're not going to, you know, use the latest tools or learn how to, you know, actually become a really good communicator, right, you're not going to last, right? So for sure, and that's that's. I think part of our goal, like with what we're building, is like, help get people to that state.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So, when we think prospecting in general, there's you've got to figure out your accounts and your contacts. Well, it seems like technology can probably do that for us. And then you need to reach out to people. Well, the laws are going to prevent robocalling, so there's still going to be a job for that. Probably that's a reasonable thing to expect. And then these people that are human reaching out to folks, they need to get trained, and so what we're talking about specifically here in this conversation is that, instead of having a bunch of trainers, you can have technology take a good chunk of that, and then it's only trained by the best. It's like having a specialist model in a hospital versus an elementary school where, like, every teacher has their own classroom and does their own thing.
Speaker 2:Exactly, exactly, like in general, I think upscaling is going to be the future of both enablement as well as just any place where AI gets involved. There's going to be a big leader of AI upskilling in every industry, right? Because, as AI replaces those entry-level jobs or you know those like, basically replaces that period where people can afford to make mistakes at the beginning with, you know, like an AI product that can actually just go and do that outcome, you now need to like graduate people to that second level of like being the expert already without having had that time to make those mistakes. So AI upskilling is going to become huge.
Speaker 1:Yeah, love it man. Well, yeah, I was reading stat 20 million people work at the federal government. 42 million people are on food stamps.
Speaker 2:Yeah, oh, my God.
Speaker 1:Okay, and we're going to make the people that are good really good, and then everybody else is going to have to figure something out. This is going to be wild for society.
Speaker 2:Seriously, UBI or something is going to actually have to like there has to be some, some type of change, unless you know, some regulations change.
Speaker 1:Yeah well, I don't think we've done a good job of regulations historically.
Speaker 2:The whole theme of, like you know, the US brand of free market capitalism is doing a bad job at regulations on purpose right Like to a certain extent.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean we do a bad job at regulation. Lots of companies get really, really strong. I mean OK. So let me ask you guys about this question now. Traditionally, we talked about investment, we talked about venture capital a little bit. When we think about the future, if people can do more with less, that means to me that a lot of companies don't have to go out and raise $2 million in their seed round and then raise an $8 million series A and then a $20 million series B. You can probably do a heck of a lot more without that. So are we going to see a world where two guys in a truck can build a successful software company?
Speaker 2:Sam Altman has a running bet on the first single person unicorn, Like the timeline for the first. I think he has an over and under on the first one. I don't remember what year it is, but it's going to happen. You have enough AI employees and one person with an idea and you make it happen.
Speaker 1:So one person creating a billion dollar business with AI.
Speaker 3:Okay, but the thing I think the thing that that that's still missing is the creativity aspect. It's like sure you can have a bunch of AI employees that just do all this automated work, but you gotta you gotta have someone coming up with the ideas and the creativity and I feel like you know AI. I wouldn't say AI is really inherently creative, it's just taking. You know AI. I wouldn't say AI is really inherently creative, it's just taking. You know trends that have seen in the past data. That's the data that's fed and and, yeah, makes you feel like it's coming up with ideas.
Speaker 1:Oh, it's terrible being so. My, my hobbies are at movies. I've written three movies. I haven't sold any of them yet. If you're new to the other buys movies, buys comedies let me know, cause I've got a couple to sell you. Yeah, I tried to dabble with a couple things just to expand on some plot lines, to punch up some jokes. It's just not funny, it's not good. It's like there are three scenarios in which this character no, I want like a zinger.
Speaker 3:It's just, it's not good at that it's not even if you I don't know if you've ever tried to get it to make like a hero title for your website, even something as simple as that. It's just very hard for it to be creative, you know, whereas, like humans, like we've just seen enough, we've communicated with real human beings, so we know, like you know, what people excited.
Speaker 2:A little bit actually I disagree with both of you. I think you're just using the wrong ai models for the wrong task, like you can actually get a really funny comedic AI if you train it on just comedy and you can get a really good hero title generator if you train it on the rights. I mean, this is the whole point with using a generalist LLM for all these subtasks is that they suck at all these subtasks and a human's going to be better at any one of them, right, but as we get like specialized models for each of these things, they will be better than humans at each of these things. It's just about orchestrating these specialists across the spec, like deciding which specialists to use when. That's yeah yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:So if I look at the general chat GPT model, it's trained on dad jokes from the internet. But if I go feed it Ari Shaffir and Artie Lang, then it's going to be funny.
Speaker 2:Exactly exactly.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. What would Artie Lang say if a steak came out well done. I would love to know that.
Speaker 3:Corey, I actually have an idea for you. So we've been. We have a couple advisors who are basically building gpt versions of themselves, right, I don't know. Do you know richard harris, for example? Yeah, yeah, that's it. He built a richard gpt and you can just anybody can just talk to richard gpt, like, let's say, like, maybe it's like a free tier that you offer. You're like, hey, if you can't afford my services, you can just talk to my GPT, exactly.
Speaker 1:Delegate to the GPT.
Speaker 3:Exactly, yeah, and then they get some advice from that. If they like it and they want more, then you just have them pay for the full service.
Speaker 1:Well, I'm sure people are loading my books in there as we speak. It was funny. I went to this event in Calgary and I was doing this speech and three people came up to me afterwards and said, oh, we do sales playbooks for the local startups using your book. And, like three different people, I guess somebody got the idea and two other people copied it. I was like, oh cool, let's go get them Tiger. If that's go get them tiger on a plus product, Call me yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah, no, I would actually use that it's. I think it's really cool, like Richard Harris is as cool. I don't know if you know Pete Kazanji from Atrium, yeah, yeah, so Pete, for example, also has his own GPT. Now he basically just put in founding sales. You know his whole book in there and he saw it. I've been seeing his content. It looks good.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Love it. That's the world we're going towards man, and there's some I'm not going to say them out loud, but there's some scary use cases around that stuff too. Whew, so many Yep Wild. But this is positive. We're making enablement better up-leveling B2B folks.
Speaker 3:So how can people get in touch with you guys? If they want to reach out, feel free to just visit our website, hyperboundai, and you can always email us or just message us on LinkedIn. Our email is just founders at hyperboundai, so just shoot us an email.
Speaker 2:And go try out our free demo. Before you even talk to us, just go head over at hyperboundai. So just shoot us an email and go try out our free demo. Like you know, before you even talk to us, just go like head over to hyperboundai, call one of our bots yourself, see if you like it and then hit us up. Yeah, founders at hyperboundai.
Speaker 1:Love it. All right, guys. Thank you so much, and everybody. This is the future. Now you can get back to the present. Enjoy the rest of your day. Sales Management Podcast. See you next time.