Sales Management Podcast
Cory Bray, 8x author and co-founder of CoachCRM, digs into hot sales management topics.
Sales Management Podcast
86. A.I. in sales deep dive with Nick Caruso
Nick is the chief revenue officer at KnowledgeNet.ai and knows more about AI than anyone we've had on the show. He has great perspective on how AI will impact sales today and 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 talking AI today. I've got Nick Caruso, co-founder and CRO at knowledgeai, and we're ready to rock. He's going to talk about is AI going to replace salespeople? Is it going to augment salespeople? He's got a really interesting background too. How are you, nick? Good to meet you? Same here. Thanks for having me on. So the big question is where are we at in this journey of AI? People have been talking about it since the 60s. There've been movies about it throughout the 90s and 2000s, and then, all of a sudden, chatgpt comes onto the scene and people are making these outlandish predictions that salespeople are going away. What's the point in time that we're at today from your perspective?
Speaker 2:We're at the infancy still of the AI space. So I've been dealing with AI myself for almost 30 years now and my AI journey actually started with the US government and the US intelligence community. We were using AI to try and well, back in the day you know the statement, you know the open source information you can find out there from like 20, 30 years ago was that we were collecting enough information to fill the Library of Congress. Collecting enough information to fill the Library of Congress every couple hours Wow. So when you think of that, how do you process that amount of volume of information? And that was what the US intelligence community was dealing with 20, 30 years ago when I was involved with them.
Speaker 2:Lots of tools, lots of technologies that are now coming into the commercial space. Lots of technologies that are now coming into the commercial space. And you know I chuckle a lot of times. People don't even realize how much you hear about NASA and you hear about like you know, like spam or you know what's that drink that I forget the name of the drink, but that that they that came out of NASA.
Speaker 2:Well, there's a lot of stuff that came out of the intelligence community that you use every single day.
Speaker 1:Interesting. Yeah, cause like this, this, the pillow I like came from NASA or department of defense or something like that, right?
Speaker 2:Yep, yep and uh. So, like you know, google maps, um, google maps has its origin with the uh, the CIA, um, and so that's a tidbit that a lot of people don't even realize. You know, I remember the days of looking at satellite photos and hitting like the next button and waiting like 30 seconds for the next screen to load up, and now you can just pan on Google Maps right on satellite view, and a lot of that came out of funding that came out directly out of the CIA.
Speaker 1:Fascinating. Well, I'm curious is that still happening today? Is that wave still occurring, where the government invests a bunch of money in R&D and then it gets commercialized? Have things changed? I'm always skeptical about things have changed. It sounds like it's still the same, that it's been on the innovation curve.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, the government still heavily invests and a lot of times that does translate into the commercial sector. In fact, everything I'm sharing with you is open source, meaning it's public record. But the CIA and the US community, um, has a venture capital arm called incutel and they go out and they invest in startups, where their gig is. We will invest in you, we will give you x million dollars. The catch is we get to use it for free and um and then and that was actually one of the Google has actually acquired several of the startups that came out of In-Q-Tel. I was one of those startups that came out of In-Q-Tel about 20, 30 years ago. But it's not just the CIA, it's the US military also has their own investment arm you might be familiar with, like DARPA, as an example of things like that. So KnowledgeNet, which is a company I co-founded a few years ago. A lot of the technology that we use in KnowledgeNet directly came out of some of the work that I had been doing for the last 20, 30 years.
Speaker 1:Interesting. Well, tell us a little bit about what that looks like, and then let's see how it applies to the folks out there.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So peeling back, I mean, I you know where we are in the AI space. We're still at the infancy of the AI space large language models, which is a lot of what you're familiar with with chat, gpt. You know that that obviously did. The explosion recently is all about, you know, harnessing that, those, the, the terabytes of data, all that data being collected by the on the web and on the web, and now you can use it in everyday life. So I'm sure a lot of people listening have played around with ChatGPT.
Speaker 2:As far as it replacing sales professionals, which is one of your original questions that you had, I think it will absolutely be replacing SDRs in the very near future, but it will absolutely not be replacing sales reps. So sales reps, sales management, that's not going away. But what's different is if you're not leveraging AI in your day-to-day activity as a sales professional, you will definitely be behind the power curve. It's the equivalent of saying you know, imagine not having a cell phone right, Imagine not using a computer. It's the equivalent of saying imagine not having a cell phone right, imagine not using a computer. It's going to be critical to understanding how you can leverage AI to help close your deals Interesting.
Speaker 1:Well, I know there's lots of SDR managers that listen to this, so they're probably either shivering in their boots or ready to have a debate with you. And since they're not here, I'll ask a couple of questions in their honor. And the great thing is, sdr managers out there, if you're doing a great job leading your teams, there's lots of other jobs for you inside the company. So, don't worry, you're safe, you're fine. So the thing I want to know is what's going to replace them and how's this going to work? Because a lot of times, the SDR is really focused on how do we generate leads that marketing couldn't catch or that we couldn't get through other channels? There's these people out there that are in the right market. They're the right persona. They could potentially want to work with us, but we just haven't had a way to get in contact with them through other channels, and so we're doing this manual thing. Is the idea that there's AI that can do that thing and completely cover that market from a prospecting perspective?
Speaker 2:Sure, and completely cover that market from a prospecting perspective, sure. So when you look at what the roles of an SDR, let's just go over a typical SDR persona, right, it's at least some kid coming out of college or hasn't graduated or whatever, right? You spend three months training them up and then they start understanding a lot about your company during that training process. And then you go through a training process about objection handling and then how to navigate that and so forth, and then they might be a superstar for you for a few months, maybe a year, and then they're going to either get hired by a competitor of yours or somebody else, or you're going to promote them into a sales profession.
Speaker 1:I want a promotion now, because I was good for a quarter.
Speaker 2:You're absolutely right, right? So it's a constant churn. So I would imagine an SDR manager. Their dream would be to get rid of the SDRs. So what are you managing instead? You're managing a bunch of AI agents, ai assistants, instead.
Speaker 2:So now I use the word. When I use the word AI, I say AI is augmented intelligence, not artificial intelligence. So who's driving that AI agent? Well, it's the SDR manager. It's the SDR manager that has 100 agents at their disposal and they're communicating to these agents. Okay, this is how you handle this objection, these agents okay, this is how you handle this objection. And now imagine you know part of the bullpen every single day for SDRs and you're going over objections or you're listening to calls and did the SDR handle this right? And then didn't they and things like that. Imagine an AI agent that they're all learning. They all instantly get smarter, they can all instantly improve based upon how to better handle objections, and when they're making those phone calls, they're getting your best possible SDR that's going to be there for the next 10 years and constantly improving throughout the process.
Speaker 1:That's really interesting, really interesting. Okay, so, instead of the SDR manager's job being taking somebody who has no work experience, has no subject matter expertise, has some talent, has some promise, but really trying to figure out how to harness that in the context of their company, and doing that, the job is to take something that's already good or great and take it to the next level or so and be able to scale that without having to go out and do this very time-consuming and risky human talent search. Yep.
Speaker 2:Yep, absolutely.
Speaker 2:Now there are some legal issues with automated SDRs. As far as making phone calls, you can use automated SDRs to do emails, linkedin campaigns, et cetera. As far as picking up the phone call and making the call, there are legal issues associated with that right now, which is good, and I hope US Congress continues to pass laws to ensure there's consumer confidence when a person picks up the phone, that it's not a robot talking to them, because the robot right now it's about 95% good, like you really have a hard time telling it and you can throw a bunch of objections on it and you won't know if you right now it's about 95% good, like you really have a hard time telling it and you can throw a bunch of objections on it and you won't know that you're talking to a robot, yeah, and within the next year it's going to be completely like you'll have no idea you're talking to a robot, wow. But where it's phenomenal is imagine you have 10,000 customers and you're trying to upsell them or you're trying to you know. So it's kind of like a do not call concept. You have every right to use robots to go after existing customers or people who have maybe signed up for a webinar or sign up for a webinar a few years ago. You have every right, from as of right now, to reach out to them.
Speaker 1:Wow. So the game becomes how do I get somebody to do something that's opt-in and then, all of a sudden, they can deploy my army of robots to get them moved into the next stage of the process? Correct, yeah.
Speaker 2:That's interesting. I view that as a perfect application for AI. Yeah, it's not per se the SDR brain. It's a brain that knows everything about your company, knows everything about your product and your services, knows every case study, knows every reference and knows how to go through the objection handling process, knows your ICP, knows the ideal customer profile, the buying personas and everything. So it's this truly huge brain that you can leverage to implement for SDR purposes. But then imagine it being a coaching assistant for your sales professionals, the ones that are about to walk into a meeting with a customer and now, based upon your bestselling methodology spin or customer-centric selling or whatever can it really be that assistant to help coach that sales professional?
Speaker 1:Yeah, and you can even have an earpiece in, like I've got right now your triangle selling earpiece in your ear telling you, hey, corey, here's the move. Well, I'm on your shoulder because we're not going to replace, you're not going to have a physical robot. How weird would that be If a physical robot walked in a room and started trying to sell you something. You'd probably think that's a little fishy.
Speaker 2:So you're absolutely right. So that's where AI becomes. The A is augmented, right? You're augmenting the sales rep. Then we're cyborgs, so you're never going to replace the human. Yeah, but imagine now how many meetings are Zoom meetings? Too many Right. Meetings are Zoom meetings, too many Right. So imagine, on the right-hand side of your Zoom is your AI assistant, right? That's coaching you. So, as the customer is saying objection handling, or you're wrapping up a call and it's reminding you hey, you haven't you haven't yet scheduled a follow-up call, we recommend that you do that. Here is a follow up email. Here's the customer's asking for your security documentation about how your company handles security, whatever. Here's a reference to that security documentation. The customer is asking for some case studies. Here are two or three case studies based on the customer as a healthcare customer. So here are three healthcare references. That's the transformative part of this process.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love it. Well, I recently heard it described that when people want to know lots of things, they're fighting biology, because our brains inherently programmed to forget things that aren't important. So we can focus on things that are important, like where's food, where's shelter, where's danger, and knowing everything about your business inside and out. Yeah, if you have 10 case studies, you should know all 10. But if you have 200 case studies, you should know all 10. But if you have 200 case studies, even your most studious salesperson is never going to know those. But for AI, that's very simple for them to get to that number right.
Speaker 2:Yep, yep, you're spot on, right, yep. And then what happens if you find one case study resonating more than the others with your customers? Your customers are clicking on that case study more, they're sharing it with you. Know, like, as a sales manager, I often tell my sales reps look, when you're selling to a customer, you're really coaching that customer to navigate their internal processes. Yeah, like, like, who? You know who makes the decision, who? Who has the financial sign off? Right, who else do you have to convince? But, based upon the customer sharing content, what if the AI assistant was aware of who's clicking on what documents at the customer site? Yep, right. How is it being shared? How can it start coaching the sales rep? Look, you're getting traction, the documents are getting to the right people. This is what I'm recommending, that. Here's a follow-up piece of content that you should be sending it to, right?
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think one thing that's real interesting here is when you have one manager that's on top of, let's say, 10 people, well, it's hard to spot trends Because each one of those 10 people will occasionally surface things. They will often not surface certain items, and pulling it out of them and being able to analyze it across those 10 and maybe you have 10 managers, so that's a hundred people out there in an individual contributor role it's really hard to spot trends or defects or opportunities. But if you're managing a team of robots, boom, they can communicate with each other. They'll do their own analysis and say hey, boss, here's three things that you should look at that caught our attention. Right, right, right.
Speaker 1:Or assistance right, so I was like yeah yeah, yeah, I keep using the bad, bad words. Assistance augmented.
Speaker 2:Right, right, but it's really.
Speaker 1:It's really one when you think about it's one assistant, one super brain that's helping every, your, your 100 reps right that may be dialing many numbers that may be dialing, dialing from many numbers that may be sending from many domains that may be doing lots of activity that would mirror the effort level of several people, but it's one assistant that has as much knowledge as you need them to.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Like, how often do you have you know, your once a week team calls yeah Right, and you go around and you're like, oh, we found a new, maybe, maybe, hey, a sales rep heard about a new competitor or there was an issue, or whatever, and it's a very manual process to share knowledge, correct, right. Imagine an assistant who now is automatically, is aware of a new competitor in the marketplace, automatically pivots, automatically gives you battle cards based upon how to navigate that new obstacle.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, and remembering things is hard and the motivation for a lot of people to learn this new stuff, what's the motivation of a salesperson? To learn that eighth competitor in the market and the one place that we might lose against them? Now there's no motivation. If there's no motivation, people aren't going to take action.
Speaker 2:Right, right. Well, now think about you've got this brain that knows everything about your company, is just super knowledgeable from a sales perspective. But think about how much smarter that brain is going to be a year from now and two years from now and three years from now. Yeah, not only does the brain gather more knowledge and more awareness and more intelligence, but the underlying engine that's powering that brain continues to revolutionize so well. I started the conversation. You said where are we? Well, we're still at the infancy, but it does get scary when you start looking out. You know 10, 20 years from now, how scary. Well, it's.
Speaker 2:It's one of those I, we, you know, we don't know, yeah and um, I don't think it's, like you know, terminator type of scary from that perspective. Um, I think humans will always be in that feedback loop, but it's going to be extremely impressive with how it can further assist a sales professional.
Speaker 1:Well, I think that's the big question as a society is what's more scary, the Terminator or structural unemployment to the point where only 10% of people are actually desired to be in the workforce? Right, because the 90% then become the terminator.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so you're going into, like the Elon Musk realm right now and you go into, like you know, the minimum. Like you know, the government's going to be giving every, every, every citizen a hundred thousand dollars a year because there's not going to be enough jobs. Right, I'm not smart enough to predict where that's going to go. Yeah, but I do from my perspective and we're going off of sales here but from my perspective, the the entertainment industry. You think about a hundred years ago, how many people were employed in jobs around entertainment?
Speaker 1:Charlie Chaplin and a couple of backup dancers right.
Speaker 2:It was all about, you know, farmers, factory workers and things like that, Right yeah. Now you look at how many jobs are around the entertainment industry.
Speaker 1:It's crazy right the credits on a movie. You got 300 people involved in a movie, maybe more.
Speaker 2:Right. But you look at you know my, my expendable income, you know I goes to a lot of entertainment, right, it goes to golf or goes to, you know, travel or goes to you know lots of entertainment goes to whatever you want, like how much of your expendable money. It's not going to put money on the table, it's for fun. Well, interesting.
Speaker 1:So I've got a tie back for this. As capital allocation shifts, one of the biggest expenses for a company is sales marketing. Well, if this assistant is able to learn and grow and develop, and maybe it's high fixed costs out of the gate but the variable costs are negligible or low All of a sudden we can shift capital. So in a world where you've got a finite amount of capital that you would invest in the business, traditionally a large chunk goes to sales and marketing. Maybe a smaller chunk goes to sales and marketing in the future and a larger chunk goes to things like product development or customer success or customer service, something like that. Any, any thoughts on that world? Just random idea that came to my brain.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, that's, that's a great question.
Speaker 2:So, as far as capital shift, definitely AI is going to be a line item on your, on your budgets for a company, right, like, I mean, even like, 20,10 years ago, the word sales enablement didn't even exist, right.
Speaker 2:So things like sales enablement tools or you know a lot of the sales stack tech, stack product that you basically it's CRM systems 10 years ago and that was it, that was the only line item. But I think AI in general will definitely be a chunk of that, but it's it will be at the expense of, uh, fewer people is more efficient use of people, right. So a you may, you know, if you have a hundred sales reps, you may only need 50 sales reps because they can have twice the quota, right, they had before because they're so much more efficient. Um, but that will leave a lot of I mean so many companies I've worked at sales and marketing was 40%, the salary was 40% of the cost of the company. Big number, and if you can reduce that by down to 20%, that's huge, right, and that 20% is not going to go towards running AI. That 20% is going to go back into reinvestment of the company or back into the profitability of the corporation.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly. So my concern about this area, where you shrink the size of the sales organization and the entry level sales job, is gone. How do you create an apprentice program for people to get into sales? Because if you've got your just best people out there working with their assistants, that's great. Where's the next generation come from?
Speaker 2:That's a great question. I think it's still the same as it always has been. Where I would hope is as sales managers, we've always had journeymen and we've had eagles, right, and I mean in every sales team I've been part of, and those eagles are the ones that are making over quota. They're in their multipliers, they're going to president's club, right, and I think that's where you're going to be bringing the talent are people that are coming in that are leveraging AI, know how to leverage AI and look at that as a great opportunity to accelerate their careers.
Speaker 2:I am any person that's in college today, including my children. I am telling them use ChatGPT as much as you possibly can. Learn how to use it've. I've taught them how to build ai assistance for themselves. So, um, they're building ai assistance for their coursework and so it's more. It's way more advanced than just you. Know how do I answer this question prompt in chat gpt, right, it's upload. Upload your every piece of document you're supposed to be reading in class, every piece of source material. Build an AI assistant, train it specifically on the course that you're learning and it's an assistant for them going through that course program and it's fantastic to see professors right now embracing it. There are professors out there that are saying look, I don't care if you use ChatGPT to answer these questions, because in the real world you're going to be able to leverage external sources to help you in your work.
Speaker 1:Yeah, as long as they make it challenging and difficult enough that it's not just a done-for-me task, because I think that was one of the challenges with the calculator Well, make hard calculator problems. I remember I did a math competition in high school and there was a program called Calculator. I was like, oh, I'll just use a calculator. This is the hardest thing I've ever done. I truly don't think I've ever done anything harder than that Calculator Math Competition.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but they need to transform the way that they test now right. So instead of saying, write a five paragraph essay, it should be no, I need you to write a book right, yeah, there you go deep analysis. I need you just, instead of source five pieces of sources, no, I need you to source 100 pieces of sources. I need you to take on the persona of, of, a, of, of, whatever the topic may be right but it's you need to.
Speaker 2:professors need to transform the way that they teach and the way that they evaluate students now, Well that's really interesting because you can look at it from different angles, right?
Speaker 1:So instead of hey write a paper in favor or against this, we'll write one of each and then compare and contrast them and tell me which one you'd pick. That now that you've done both of them. That's interesting, Okay, so there is a cohort of folks in the sales leadership world. People never actually learned management. Let's just talk about individual contributor world for a second. There's a decent argument to be made that 2022, 2023, you don't have to have a college degree to be successful in sales. It sounds like 2030, 2035,. That may change. What are your thoughts?
Speaker 2:it sounds like 2030, 2035, that may change. What are your thoughts? Oh, I, one thing I've always been astounded at is that the fact that they're is I'm not aware of it that there's not a degree in sales in in universities and um to to truly understand the sales profession, understand what it means to be a sales professional, be a manager in sales, etc. Et cetera, and I absolutely think that there's huge value in that. So do you need, if you're selling a photocopier, do you need, to go to college to be a photocopier sales professional? No, right, but imagine having the person that used to have a $2 million quota but now they're able to carry a 10 or $20 million quota because they understand methodologies, they understand the tools they, under it's selling to me nowadays is so much more complex than it was 20 years ago. Understanding how to leverage AI and how to leverage tools in that process and not only the tools but the methodologies behind it and best practices is absolutely valuable. And then there absolutely should be a master's degree program in sales management.
Speaker 1:And then you become a $20 million quota person. You're more of a general manager than a sales rep, because you've got different assistants that are doing different things across the org and you're doing a lot of things. You're not just that one person that's playing that one role, and I agree with that. I mean, where I went to college, man, no sales courses undergrad. One sales management course in the MBA program Wild. I talked to them about it too. I said you don't need to think about this and they said no, it's not, it's too. I don't want to put words in people's mouths. I don't remember exactly what they said, but I was. I was smiled at and dismissed.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, it's, it's. It's a huge undervalued profession, which is fascinating because it's the profession that makes the most amount of money, yeah Right, but it's hugely under. I mean from from, and I'm starting to see, slowly some universities realize that and the power behind it, and truly I mean, you know, the best salesperson is, in my opinion, a consultative salesperson that truly understands the customer, the customer's industry, the pain points, understands profit loss, understands how to navigate, understands psychology. All that and that's you know absolutely can be you. All that and that's you know absolutely can be you know, and that's the human element of things. Right, I don't see a, an ai system being able to to truly understand that, but they can coach you along that process and remind you yeah it's psychology plus business.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and then if you sell a technology solution that's in depth and there's engineering involved too, right. Especially if you sell a technology solution that's in depth and there's engineering involved too, right. Especially if you sell hardware, then it's actual engineering software.
Speaker 2:But? But imagine in my experience, like you, you sell to a pharmaceutical company, right? You sell some, some widgets, right? Some new laboratory piece of equipment. The technical specifications and the details around that are crazy, right? So a lot of times you may have a sales engineer to help out. So sales engineers, they might be out of business pretty quickly because an assistant is going to be your best sales engineer ever. But a lot of times you also hire from within the industry. So you might hire a scientist, because they build that trust and confidence with the customer, right? But that scientist isn't a sales professional. A scientist is a scientist, right that you then try and train them to what's a pipeline? How do I navigate a customer? How do I navigate objections? How do I navigate? Oh, it's too expensive, it's not the right time, et cetera. Imagine a sales coach, a sales assistant that's with them, where you know they're in their email, they're in their CRM system, they're in Salesforce, whatever that the system is, their income and system along the way.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's really interesting because there's always that trade-off between do you want subject matter expertise or sales skills? Yep, and that there's always that trade-off between do you want subject matter expertise or sales skills? Yeah, and that's a tough decision because you can make good arguments both ways. I think I've always tilted on the side of hire somebody who's really good at sales that can learn the subject matter stuff, because at the end of the day, we all did biology class and had a thousand-page book, and then we did physics class that had a thousand-page book, and chemistry that had a thousand-page book, and a lot of us did extra advanced levels of all of those types of things.
Speaker 1:Well, the subject matter expertise we need to sell a product into a market, very defined product into a very defined market. Unless you're doing consulting or something that's more open-ended, it's usually not that much stuff. Well, with the AI assistant, it sounds like you can go one of two ways. You can either take that really good salesperson and dramatically increase their depth into that subject matter expertise, or you can take somebody that's a subject matter expert and have them open their aperture into the world of learning sales, Yep, Yep.
Speaker 2:But I would to your point. I would believe that the hiring a salesperson with a technical assistant is the closest thing to reality right now. So that could be done very, very quickly. And especially, imagine all those technical questions. The assistant could be able to navigate that very, very quickly for you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you can navigate the questions then tie them back to the right thing, because that's the challenge. Where you see these tag team salesperson plus sales engineers. They're in a meeting, especially if they're on Zoom, especially in this weird situation where some of them are remote and they've never actually met each other before. Can you imagine two basketball players playing basketball and they've never played basketball together before? There are passes going into the stands. That's not going to work out well. So what's the handoff, what's the trade-off, what's that look like? And so the salesperson sitting there team up the meeting, whatever do some discovery sales engineer gets involved in the middle presentation, demo scoping, whatever it is. Well, when's the salesperson jump in and how do they jump in? What do they say and how do they make sure they don't front run the sales engineer? These are a lot of problems that everybody that's worked with sales engineers in the past has experienced. Well, if you've got a salesperson and an assistant, that's not a person. It sounds like you're mitigating a lot of that risk.
Speaker 2:Yep, yep, and you've got the. You got the best, the most knowledgeable sales engineer out there, is a depth of knowledge and is constantly learning after every single call.
Speaker 1:And so then, your, your salespeople, aren't fighting over that one person.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, there you go, yeah, your best sales engineer out there, somebody told me 10 years ago.
Speaker 1:They said the best salesperson in Silicon Valley is the one that has the most political capital to get the best sales engineer for the most hours. I said, wow, that's insightful and it's true.
Speaker 2:Yep, yep. In fact, I used to be a sales engineer myself. And then I was like, well, wait a minute, like I'm doing all the work and the sales rep getting all the commission. So I transitioned into that sales role myself. Smart man, yeah.
Speaker 1:So, but I yeah.
Speaker 2:So I come from more of the technical aspect of things, from the consultative perspective and, you know, building the customer's trust, yep, but also and it's part of that because customers are like, oh, you're not really quote, unquote a sales rep. You're really there to help me. Uh, you know whatever it is right, so you're not out there just to quote, unquote, sell to me. But to get a salesperson to, to be able to be that consultative and to be very, very smart, can be very, very powerful in that sales process yeah, I love it because, well, that's what a salesperson is supposed to be.
Speaker 1:A salesperson is supposed to be consultative. Yeah, they, they close deals, but they help both same time. Yes, when they're out of their depth, though, they can't do the consultative piece, they can't do the helping piece. So, whether or not that's their intention, their, the perception of the prospect, is this person's only interested in closing the deal. The reality is cause.
Speaker 2:That's the only the greatest sales calls are oh yes, mr Customer, we just helped a hospital down the street solve this problem. That was very similar to your problem that you're having right now, and this is how we did it and this is how we transform their business. Yeah, selling through references and stories I've always been a big fan of, of story-based selling, and that's where AI, again, again, is just invaluable, because that AI is knowledgeable on every single story that your company has. And how do you leverage that? So it's again. It's how do you get now a sales rep to have double triple the quota they had before, because they're so much more effective than they were before? And that follow-up email that would take 20 minutes now takes 30 seconds. You know, it's just there's so much faster in everything that they can do.
Speaker 1:Supercharged supercharged sellers. How does it impact demos? Sounds like you probably pinpoint specific things for a specific duration, with some good questions to ask as you're going through those. Is that something that you've thought about?
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely, and I am, I am. I had a sales mentor who told me once he said you know when you I don't know how true this is, but there was a study that was done and at excellent sales professionals peak at about 18 months into the job and after about 18 months they have they hit a trough. And it's because they've seen so many of the same pain points by the customer that by the time they're about 18 months into the business they stop asking questions about the customer and they automatically say I know what your problem is, here's how we solve it, instead of a consultative. Oh, let me hear your pain.
Speaker 2:And the analogy they made is imagine if you go to the doctor's office and the doctor walks in and says oh, I know what you have and just write you a prescription. No, you want to have that 15, 20 minute conversation with a doctor to tell him all your ailments, yeah. And the doctor's like, oh well, let me think about that. And oh, yes, and here's the prescription, right. But the reality is the doctor's seen the same situation a million times, right? So you know, an AI assistant can be there to try and help you, bring you back to reality. Like, make sure you ask the questions. Hey, did you listen? This is something that the customer brought up. So those things that you may just be on such autopilot that it's going to bring you, you know, steer you back to reality. So there's so many different benefits from that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's great. So it's analyzing you and giving you feedback in the moment, because it says hey, corey, I know you can do this, you're just not doing it right now. Settle down.
Speaker 2:Exactly Yep, or you miss this point. You know, so you've probably been on a bunch of like. I use a lot of automatic voice transcription systems to try to transcribe meetings and things like that, and it's always amazing to me feeding that into an AI system and for that to come back and say, well, you missed that, or, or this came up, or to follow up on this. So it's, it's truly transformative.
Speaker 1:I mean, look what happened yesterday with Rory. Did you watch the tournament? No, so Rory McIlroy missed a three and a half putt. Three and a half foot putt All of us can make a three and a half putt. Three and a half foot putt. All of us can make a three and a half foot putt Right exactly Did he lose the? Tournament because of that Yep on 18.
Speaker 2:Yeah oh, wow.
Speaker 1:He was going to take Bryson to playoffs. So Bryson hits a bunker shot out of the fairway bunker, and then birdies, and I think Rory missed the putt for par or missed the putt for birdie.
Speaker 2:Wow, wow, yeah, well, that's a classic analogy in sales right, Like your best salesperson chokes. They've been, they've done it a million times, but they missed that, that, that last putt.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, the most frustrating thing in management is when they say oh yeah, I know I talk too much, or I know I missed that question, or I just wasn't on my game today. What game were you on? We all have terrible days. That's why you get paid, man. That's why you get paid, All right. So what's going to prevent people from wanting to embrace AI in sales?
Speaker 2:So change is always the biggest obstacle in everything right Is the human nature not to adopt that change, and so that's going to be the biggest obstacle. What I recommend to a lot of people is just start somehow. Looking at one is if you haven't started playing around with chat GPT, you absolutely should, and just use that as hey. Here's this quote, unquote free tool. Even if you're paying for it, it's still. The paid version is basically just a very generic version of chat GPT. Yep, so play around with that, just start experimenting with it and then start reaching out to professionals that are bringing AI into the sales space and seeing OK, what is something that I can do? That's a crawl phase about bringing AI to help my sales team or help me as a sales professional.
Speaker 2:No-transcript. I assume, corey, that you probably use ChatG, chat gpt yourself, that you've been playing around with it. I, I am familiar, yes, so you've. You've probably done things like just asking some generic questions, like I use it all the time for every wide range of things, right? Um, you know, like I was just buying a new house and I was talking to my loan officer and they were asking a bunch of terminology I wasn't familiar with and I was askingGPT to help clarify a bunch of questions for me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly, it's easier than calling up Uncle Randy and having to hear his lecture about what it was like back in the seventies when interest rates were actually high, right.
Speaker 2:Right, right, so that's just using it as just a generic, a generic assistant. But then start thinking about wait a minute, if I'm using it to just ask some generic questions, imagine if this thing was completely trained on my corporate knowledge. We use, let's say, spin selling or customer-centric selling and the best practices and approaches, and then when that light bulb goes off and say, wow, imagine the power of that. Yeah, that's where it gets crazy, crazy efficiency and it can go way beyond just sales. It can go into your customer support within your company. Let's say your company is an HVAC company with a bunch of technicians that go out and fix air conditioning units. Imagine those technicians having access to an AI assistant that is an expert on every single unit in the world, every single manual that you have in your company, all the best practices, you know, some esoteric way of fixing the unit that some rep found out about six months ago is now available in the assistant that can help your HVAC rep that you just hired a month ago.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I don't have to go memorize a 400 page manual Exactly. Yeah, that's interesting. Wow, so it seems like across the board it just accelerates the apprenticeship process and makes people experts much quicker. Now, obviously there's some rough around the edges, but it's got the ability to do that.
Speaker 2:Yep, and it's in deployment today. A lot of this capability is today. So if you're listening to this podcast and you're like, oh, that's interesting, you need to realize that your competitors are doing this right now. Yeah, now. And where will your company be two to three years from now when your competitors now can have you know their HVAC technicians are going out and they're servicing their customers, so they're not going back and saying, oh well, I need to come back and get an extra part. They should have known when they walked in the door what part to use, because your AI assistant that talked to the customer to make the appointment wasn't some generic receptionist, but it was an AI assistant that was able to walk through all the challenges that you had with your HVAC unit and just the entirety of the process can become so much more efficient.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly, and interviewing people. Unlimited applications, but don't use it to bet sports, because somebody has a better algorithm than you and these guys out there losing so much money, but these dumb parlays. Don't bet parlays. Bet single games if you want to, but parlays are just. You're giving other people money. That's my public service announcement for today.
Speaker 2:But yeah, that's. That's a. Actually, I have a friend in the AI space in the betting world, but you can you can a friend in the AI space in the betting world, yeah, but you can absolutely guarantee that the bookies out there have AI. That's way better than anything that you have. In fact, he actually works for one of these companies that does it, so they're going to do it when you are yeah yeah, you're going to get smoked, so do it for fun.
Speaker 1:Do straight bets. Avoid the parlays.
Speaker 2:That's my take. So, nick, how can people reach out to you and is there anything that you want to point them towards today? Sure, I just encourage them to play around with AI. And you can also reach out to me at nickcaruso, at knowledgenetai, or just search knowledgenetai and you'll come to my company and then I'm happy just to coach, you know, just provide guidance and feedback. You don't have to use my product. But a lot of what we talked about today was not centric to just my company, but just it's an exciting world. It's a tiny bit scary. So who knows what's going to be five, 10 years from now? But I'm not sitting back and just seeing what's going to happen. I want to be part of that process so I can try and steer it in the right direction.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the right direction. Yeah, if anybody's sitting there saying, well, I'm scared, I'm going to go into a cave, trust me, other generations have been through many scarier things World War I, world War II, the Cold War where my parents were under their desks thinking that there were going to be bombs dropped on us by the Soviet Union. We've got some robots that might make cold calls for us. We live in the best of times. Go out there, enjoy it. Everybody. I've got a special gift. I'm not even gonna announce what it is right now, but if you've worked with me before, even if you just bought one of my eight books, shoot me a note. Freestuffatcoachthearmcom, I got something special. We haven't worked together before. Then listen to other episodes. There's you, everybody else. Thank you so much. This is Sales Management Podcast. We'll see you next time.