Bonus: Why I Built a Smart Sales Playbook

Bridging the AI Gap in B2B Sales: A New Program Unveiled

In this episode of Revenue Remix, host Summer introduces a new program designed to address common business challenges, particularly in the realm of AI and sales. Summer shares insights into the inspiration behind the program, emphasizing the importance of partnerships, personalization, and strategic use of AI tools. Key issues such as administrative burdens on salespeople, the need for dynamic sales playbooks, and the pitfalls of generic AI-generated content are discussed. The episode provides a sneak peek into how the program can make sales processes more efficient and accessible, with Summer offering beta seats for early adopters. Tune in to explore the intersection of AI and sales and see how it can solve real business challenges.

Learn More

Show notes:

• Connect with Summer on LinkedIn
• Episode recorded and edited using Descript
• Repurposed content, such as this description created using CastMagic

00:00 Welcome to Revenue Remix
00:16 Introducing the New Program
01:45 The AI Gap in Business
02:37 Salespeople and Administrative Work
04:19 Challenges with Generic Outreach
06:54 The Problem with Sales Playbooks
12:38 Balancing AI and Human Touch
15:58 Making Sales Training Accessible
17:14 Conclusion and Next Steps

Transcript

0:00

Hello and welcome back to Revenue Remix. I am your host Summer ti, and today I'm using my human brain. I didn't even write out a total script who still uses their human brain anyway. It's lightly scripted. I've got some notes. I've been talking quite a bit about the program that I'm putting together, but I haven't really talked about what it does, or more importantly, what I was hoping to solve with it. You know, the business challenges. I always like to align virtually everything with business challenges. So today we're gonna talk a little bit about that. The funny thing about this project is not only does it have inspiration from client projects, but it has inspiration from projects. I turned down. If you know me, you know that I don't like saying no to people. That is one of the reasons why I'm such a big proponent of partnerships. Partnerships allow me to tell somebody. Well, I don't do that, but let me introduce you to my friend so and so they can help you out. And then I'm not rejecting somebody. We don't have a weird experience where they feel like they came to me looking for something and I couldn't help them. You can't be all things to all people, but you can't have a guy for that. So anyway, this program, the seeds of it were planted almost a year ago. We're gonna talk a little bit about the journey that got us here, and it'll start to give you a little bit of maybe what the program will do without giving away things that I'm not ready to give away yet. So first of all, I hear from a lot of business owners that they need to get some ai, they need to start working with it, but they just don't have time. So as a fractional leader and an AI leader, that is something that I work on, is I do some of the strategic work that you don't have time to do. Bring in an expert, let them handle it. Then you can check off that box. So when I first started thinking about this, it was like, how can I help bridge that AI gap for business leaders? What's interesting is a year ago it wasn't as much I should be doing something about ai. I feel like I was trying to drag some people in. A lot has changed in a year though so another challenge I'm looking to help with is salespeople spend too much time on administrative work. I think the figure is 28% of seller's time. Is actually spent selling, you know, talking to and meeting with customers and prospects and partners and that the rest of it is meetings and research and updating the CRM and adding notes and putting together proposals, doing follow up emails, this and that. The sales job is much more heavily administrative than we really wanna think. I'm always looking for ways to remove those roadblocks, remove those barriers, and get the salespeople to focus on what it is that makes them magical. And I don't know, that's selling stuff. You don't hire your sales folks to do 70 something percent admin work. Right. And then on that, salespeople spend too much time researching. Looking through the CRM, figuring out who to call, figuring out who's the best potential deal, learning about that customer, trying to find other, members of the buying committee, looking on LinkedIn, looking up on the website so, when. LLMs, when those AI models first started being able to search the web, we saw that AI search can give you results really quickly. So I started focusing on that. Another challenge I'm trying to address is generic outreach. We know now that today's buyer expects some level of personalization based upon previous engagements with you and based upon their actual needs. I like to call this the Netflix effect. People are used to sitting down and having the software tell them what they might want. And so your buyers now expect you to serve them up, what they might want when they want it. And to do that efficiently, we're gonna have to leverage some amount of automation and AI tools now that we have the availability to do those. But then another challenge that is related is cheesy messaging from those LLMs, the LLMs, the large language models. If you're not an AI nerd, chat, GPT is the one everybody knows. It's pretty decent at writing if you think about it as a computer, which it is. It's pretty good at acting like a person. But the people who programmed it are tech bros. And tech bros don't know anything about sales. So what I see when I'm working with it is that it's gonna produce. A call script, it's gonna produce an outreach, it's gonna produce a follow up. And if you are not someone who is a sales nerd who spends a lot of time thinking about buyer needs and buyer preferences and why people buy and why they don't, and all that super nerdy sales psychology stuff that I spent so much time thinking about. If you don't have that in mind. You're gonna look at what chat PT produces, and you're gonna be like, great copy, paste, send however generic approaches, as we just said, don't really work with today's buyer. So without getting too far into that chat, GPT is a great tool. But it isn't really sales focused in the way that we wanna think it is. It can help you do things, but I feel like sometimes it's just checking that box instead of really doing something super strategic that we know is gonna work. So another thing I was looking at is I was getting a lot of people coming to me because they know that I write sales playbooks. And for the uninitiated sales playbook is a, you know, think about when you see an NFL coach and he is got that giant binder of stuff with all the plays, you know, that's the sales leader's playbook. It is. Generally long. It has sales process, it has competitor information, idle client information, partner information, sample questions you can ask, sample campaigns, all sorts of stuff, and it's a good thing to have. And then the challenge is it's between one and 200 pages, and your salespeople will look at it while you're training them and then never look at it again. So it takes 12 to 24 months to develop when I'm working in tandem with somebody. Um, which means that that is, um, uh, an expensive time and money and then tragically it doesn't get used. So I started thinking about how can we make something that salespeople will actually use, they should use the playbook, but they don't. So a lot of this is me kind of getting into the mindset of your average sales guy and thinking about what's important to them, why they don't use it, and how we could make the experience a bit more attractive and user friendly to a salesperson. So we'll get into that a little bit more, but that is something that I wanted there's a lot of good stuff in those playbooks, but how can we serve it up to salespeople in a way where they'll actually use it? And I was also having people come to me and ask me, you know, they didn't wanna engage me in fractional leadership, and that's totally fine, but what they wanted was like the magic pill. I don't need a playbook, I don't need sales strategy, I don't need sales coaching. All I want is give me a campaign that salespeople can use. Give me a call script and write out some email templates. So these are projects that I turned down and I turned them down for reasons. It has everything to do with me wanting to provide value. So 17% of salespeople have. Gone through formal sales training. Most salespeople are trained by their manager who also didn't go through formal sales training. And that sounds like a shocking number. But then think about experiences that you've had with salespeople and then kind of ask yourself if that's really all that shocking. Getting back to the scripts and the templates, I understand that those tools can be helpful when a salesperson is new. But the thing about that is buyer preferences change so frequently now that I. In my work, I see whatever approach works now probably isn't gonna work next year. It might not even work in six months. So a set it and forget it, let's build some call scripts and build some templates. They don't last very long, so I feel like it's a little bit of a waste of money. And then some of that stuff is built into a sales playbook. Which means that the, the campaigns, the sample campaigns, even the sample questions, the sample follow up emails, uh, this email worked. I got a client, after I sent this, they finally got back to me. This set of questions helped me close a deal. Like I like that peer-to-peer sharing. But again, what worked a year ago doesn't work again today, so that's why I'm not a huge fan of writing out scripts and templates. Templates are that generic outreach that buyers don't really respond to. If you're on a sales call on the receiving end of it, you can sort of tell if someone's going through. A script You know, it feels like the verbal equivalent of, a checklist, right? So these things are helpful in the beginning, but then they lose their effectiveness. But then salespeople kind of need constant encouragement. Our skills need to be constantly refreshed. Again, the buyer preference is changing so much and so frequently that we gotta keep our skills sharp. And one of the things I learned as a sales leader is that when times are tough, salespeople can forget everything they've been trained. If they went through training and they kind of revert back to some bad behaviors. I've seen excellent salespeople revert back to bad behaviors. It's no shame on them. When times are tough, you get a little desperate, those call scripts, those templates can help them to get back to the basics. But if the playbook's not being used, and the call scripts and the call template or the email templates have aged. How effective is it gonna be to help that sales person who might need a little sum? So we don't want things that are too generic and segueing into The other challenge that I was looking to address is that too much AI is also a bad thing. If it, if everything is that automated, written by chat, GPT stuff that doesn't really have any human empathy or human insights in it, it doesn't really land well. This is, a reason why I don't love LLMs or AI doing all the marketing because if everything sounds the same then you're not gonna break through. You're gonna have trouble differentiating. Too much AI can creep out customers. My own personal story, someone did a cold outreach through LinkedIn and they had leveraged one of those like deep fake video things that makes it sound like they're saying your name. So they're producing personalized videos at scale, but it was a cold outreach. It was really creepy. Maybe, nurturing at scale when you're doing your follow ups, especially on a SAS deal. That might take months, not days. I could see a deep fake tool working, but for cold outreach it was really creepy. So I was looking to balance. Efficiency and personalization at scale with making sure that we don't overuse it and creep people out because you get that one chance to make that first impression. Okay, so I have one additional challenge that I wanted to solve, but I'm gonna save that for the end. I went through a lot of different ways that we could make this. Solve all the challenges I wanted to solve. We're gonna save the world, right? Um, and I came up with something that I used with a client project, and it worked really well. I've got a video from that salesperson talking about how he's using it. It checked off some of the boxes, and then he also gave me an extra insight. It's helping him in a way that I hadn't anticipated. So happy accident. Then this was somebody who chose to invest in fractional leadership to lay a complete foundation before they hired their first salesperson. This is a very strategic owner, and what we got out of that was this sales playbook that. The person actually uses, he was trained, he was coached in good sales, psychology and all that good stuff. And he started talking to his friends about it and his sales friends were like, oh my God. You know? That's so cool. And then it gets me to thinking about the thing about sales training and how few salespeople have actually gone through formal sales training. Then it also gets me to thinking about how many businesses invest in that level of coaching and that level of sales strategy and sales foundation. And from what I see, it's not very many, so what I wanted to solve in taking the sales playbook and making it into a program was. How can I make this a little bit more accessible? How can I make it more accessible to companies that might not be able to put this in their budget to go through a full build and full coaching program and things like that? Let's meet them where they are right now and help them get to the next level. With a sales playbook program that will give light coaching, light AI help, and then get them to the point where it makes sense to invest in the full program that will give them their own playbook, their own custom built like, so this is the intro model. It's gonna help people be more efficient and just get you from where you're at today to where you would need to be in order for it to make sense to like build a full revenue engine. I hope this didn't sound too salesy, because that's not how I roll at all. Over the next few weeks, I'm going to be sharing a little bit more about how I built it and what's included and what it can do. I wanted to start with this so that everybody would understand. I come from a place of looking for business challenges and looking to solve those. So what I will say is if any of these business challenges have ever been on your mind, reach out to me. I could do a custom demo so that you can see the product that I'm not ready to show to the public yet. I'm even giving a few. Beta seats so that people can start playing around with it. Right now, So if this sounds like maybe anybody, you know, I would appreciate a share with your network so that I can grow this and. That is it. I appreciate the listen. I hope this gave you a little bit of food for thought. Little peek behind the curtain here so that you can see that there is some method to the madness. This has. Everything to do with the challenges I help growth stage businesses solve. It has nothing to do with changing focus. This is just doing some of that work at scale and at a price point where maybe even an individual contributor who works for somebody who doesn't have access to coaching and things like that, and they wanna upskill themselves we're making this a little bit more approachable, so I appreciate the listen to this download of my brain. You can find me on LinkedIn. I'm Summer Polli Rhymes with Spaghetti. You can also find Revenue Remix podcast on LinkedIn. It has its own page now, and I'm putting little snippets that are fun. Go check it out. I appreciate the listen and I will see you folks next week.