Kumar Dattatreyan: Hi, everyone. This is Kumar Dattatreyan again with Agile Meridian and the Meridian Point. We're up to, I don't know what episode this is. We're in the hundreds, for sure. Today, I'm really thrilled to have Matt Hall back with us again. I don't know if you recall, he was on the show a couple months ago, and we talked about the sales operating system. I'm thrilled to have him back. Matt is a seasoned sales consultant from Pivotal Advisors, and he's known for his expertise in building robust sales operating systems. That's what he does. He builds these systems that allow companies to really supercharge their sales process. It's not just about selling, it's about providing services and things to his clients. He has over fifteen years of experience transforming sales processes for small to medium-sized businesses. Matt has been at the forefront of integrating innovative strategies into sales management. Today, he's here to share his insights on a topic that's revolutionizing the sales landscape: the role of artificial intelligence in sales. So let's get ready for an enlightening discussion on how AI is reshaping the way we approach sales strategies, customer relationships, and sales team management. Without further ado, I'm going to invite Matt here to the stage. Hi, Matt. How are you doing?
Matt Hall: I'm great, Kumar. Thanks for having me.
Kumar: Yeah, of course. This is always fun. It was really fun talking to you last time. And of course, we've had conversations before that, which prompted me to twist your arm to come on the show. And I'm so glad you did. I know this is something we touched on towards the end of our last talk, the role of AI in sales and in business, really. And I thought it would be great to have you back on and just do a show dedicated to that topic and what you see, being a sales professional, advising your clients on sales processes. How do you see AI impacting the sales landscape?
Matt: That's a big question. When I think about the impact, I almost start to look at it as a spectrum. Think about this for a second. There are salespeople - I've talked to them, they're in some of my clients' businesses - that are still using what I'll call the yellow pages. We all know they're not using the actual yellow pages, but they're using something else that acts as the yellow pages. They're going, "Okay, here we go. Bust down the list." Some people are still doing that. Then there are some people who have graduated from that and they're using Sales Navigator and they're building a more targeted list, or maybe they're doing some outreach through that, or maybe they're using some email or some tool. That's good. Then there are some other folks who have cannonballed into this water and they're using tools upon tools and they got things running in the background and they got AI responding to things.
Those are three buckets on this journey, but there are people in each one. That's why it's always tough when people ask, "Well, how's it changing?" It's changing rapidly, but sometimes we need to almost take a beat and ask, "What's happening with your sales organization or the individuals inside of it? What are they doing?" Because if you go to the man or woman who's kind of in that yellow pages mode and you go, "AI this, tool this, AI that," you might lose them.
Kumar: Lose them, they might quit.
Matt: Yeah, that's a risk. But you might take them off their groove. So it's almost like, okay, it's changing everything. But we need to take a step back and ask, "What's happening with our sales team right now?" Start there. And then that's kind of the foundation of, okay, how do we then build a plan to use this?
I want to set that foundation because how it's changing - oh, my God. I've gotten cold calls that were made by AI. I didn't think that was possible two years ago. So is it changing? Yeah. But when you start to think about what to do with it, let's slow down and look at our team, look at what's working, what's not, and then start to build what AI can help us do on top of that.
Kumar: I like the way you set the stage for this conversation. So like you said, it's a spectrum, right? There are people that are still yellow pages, looking through the book and just calling people, cold calling people and going through the process that they probably have been using for twenty years, right? And it doesn't mean it doesn't work. It probably still works to a certain extent. And then you've got the people that are using the tools, Sales Navigator and so on and so forth. And really Sales Navigator, if you think about it, there's some intelligence built behind it. You can do all sorts of things to filter and pull appropriate leads to call and whatnot. And then you have the sort of the super users, the cutting edge, if you will. They're the early adopters of all this new technology. And so approaching it from that lens and you sort of figure out where your client is and what they're doing, you can help them get better.
Matt: Absolutely. And here's something to keep in mind, that spectrum of people can be on the exact same sales team in the same business.
Kumar: Oh, interesting. So it really depends on the individual.
Matt: It does. You got one salesperson using a robo caller to do the cold calls and somebody else on the same team that's using whatever, antiquated, relatively speaking, antiquated. Antiquated in today's world is what? Something that's three years old, four years old. Sometimes it was six months old and it's antiquated.
Kumar: You still do that?
Matt: Yeah. But when you look at that, that's a big spectrum across your team. And the other thing to look at is sometimes people will miss the Yellow Pages guy. We're cutting this guy down. Okay. All right. Fine. What if he's successful? What if there's something that he's doing that's really, really working? We want to take that. It's probably not anything AI driven, but what if there's something that he's really good at that AI can make him a little better at? What if there's something he's bad at or takes him way too much time or he's frustrated with and AI can help him?
You want to get it down to the individual level. And here's why: we're going to eventually with these tools and all the opportunities out there, we're going to have to drive change inside of an organization. In my experience, if we go to drive change and I don't talk to the yellow pages guy, or I don't talk to the heavy AI user and I just go, "I know, I know we're just doing this," man, I'm missing a huge opportunity. And I'm missing a huge opportunity to drive adoption on my team. So asking them where they're at and understanding that, that's a big part of what we do. Where is it fitting? And then we start to take a step back and go, okay, so now that we know this and we see the tools that are available and we know what's going on with our team, we have kind of a benchmark and assessment, lay of the land, labeling. Now we know. Now we can start to go out and go, "Okay, what tools are available? What are we already using? What might fit to solve not the problems, but what fits the opportunity to make our team better?"
What I see a lot, and again this is changing so fast - heck, this could all change in a month, who knows - but what I see a lot is AI, okay, we need it to do X. Go find the tool that does X and buy it. Okay, maybe X is the only problem. Maybe it is only lead generation or maybe it is only spitting up fifteen different emails to test out in your cold outreach. Okay, I can do that. Is that the real problem or is that the problem that one person identified?
That's kind of they go too fast in a world where everyone has a sales number they need to hit. I get it. I'm not trying to slow you down. I'm not trying to keep you from hitting your number, but we got to build a plan. We have to build a strategy. We need to understand all of this and then we need to start to implement. And it goes back to what I said about driving change and adoption. If we just say, "Here's the tool guys, here's the AI tool. We bought it, do it." Now we're leaving the strategy in the hands of salespeople.
Kumar: Right. I mean, you know, it's a risk. Yeah, it's going to be all over the place. And that's true for any kind of change, right? So when you're adopting change, you do need to have a strategy behind it. You do need to understand what the problems are that you're trying to solve, the jobs that people do, what are the jobs to be done and how are they doing them today? And where are the bottlenecks in that process? And then you can start to apply the tools and just maybe it's not even a tool. Maybe it's just an adjustment of the process, the flow, if you will, the sales funnel, the sales cycle and so on and so forth. Where have you seen AI transforming the traditional sales funnel, sort of like the different stages of the sales process? And have there been any parts of that that have been particularly disrupted because of AI?
Matt: Oh, I love that question. So where I've seen it have at least present day, you know, early October of 2024. Where I've seen it is on the front end, the front end heavy with list building heavy with spinning up varieties of content to use in some of your communication. I've seen that be used a lot. I've seen it be used effectively and efficiently. The other piece is on inbound. When I say inbound people go, "Well, that's not sales" and that's a different topic for a different day. But think about it like this. If two-thirty in the morning, well, they're reaching out to you then. I don't know about you, but I'm asleep. But there are a variety of AI tools out there that can respond and say something like, "Oh, hey, thanks for reaching out. I see you're working late." Or maybe they're in a different time zone. Maybe they're overseas. And the AI picks up on that and changes the communication to meet that person where they're at. That's huge. Like you're responding quickly. It's human. It's not just asking simple questions and it's getting that person to go, "Oh, wow, this Matt guy, he kind of gets me. He knows where I'm located and even hadn't talked to me yet."
It's getting that first initial back to somebody. It's making it happen faster and it's still humanizing it. I've seen some tools out there that do that. Now, again, you have to have the right amount of inbound to do that. Like if you're getting two inbound inquiries a month, probably don't want to invest in that, but I've seen it. It's more been on the front end. That's where I've seen a bunch of big impact. And on the other side is on the coaching, the sales leadership side, because it's tough. It's tough to be in the field with every salesperson on every call. I never had time for that when I was leading a sales team. So the tools, and there's a variety of them - I'm not here to pitch specific tools. Each tool has to fit the unique context and the situation, but there's a variety of these tools that go, "Oh, wow. Like man, Kumar, that was a great call. You did this. I love this question. I love that question. Oh yes. This question." It just gives the sales leaders so much insight into what's happening in the field that it can empower them to be better coaches, which if I'm on a soapbox, I think that's what sales leadership is about: coaching. So I've seen heavy on the front end and then heavy on the sales leadership side. That's where I've seen the biggest impact is in those two areas of the sales process that a sales leader really needs to be focused on.
Kumar: That's very interesting. So when you say on the front end, can you sort of define some of these terms? Inbound, I'm assuming it's people calling you. Outbound is you're calling, cold calling people. What do you mean by front end?
Matt: Front end. So think of your list building. Think of who am I going after? Now, again, we have to know what our ideal client profile is. We can't just build a list for everybody who can fog a mirror. But if it's "Hey, I'm trying to reach" - I'm just making this up - I'm trying to reach businesses that are in the greater Philadelphia area that do five to fifty million dollars in revenue and they're in manufacturing industrial based businesses. I just completely made that up off the top of my head. If you have an AI engine that you've trained about your business and know something about your business, I've heard people call it the brain, like treat, educate, build the brain. And then you type that into there, you're going to get a much more targeted list. So that's on, when I say the front end, it's much more of, we need to identify our targets. Who are we going after?
And then I've also seen it drill down further where okay, hey, these are my two hundred target accounts. I want to communicate to these two hundred target accounts in a relevant way. So you load up. Okay, this is what the business is. Here's the decision makers. Here's what they do. Here's the potential pain points you solve. And your brain of your AI understands what you do. You put that in there and it can kick out different ideas, different questions, different content to use to engage them. So that when I say before we're in, it could be before even the client knows we exist, but it's this, we're in this planning mode of who we going after list. It gets us out of the, "Oh, there's a name in the phone book, or there's a human that I see on LinkedIn. I'm just going to call them." Like, so when I say that front end, it's kind of more of a, I should call it planning. It's more of that planning phase to the product.
Kumar: So really, the AI will help you do better prospecting. So once you've identified your ideal customer and whatever your unique value proposition is, and you start making these calls, these outbound cold calls to these people, you're not just randomly picking from a group of people that fit the category. You're doing more research. You're finding more about these people and what their industry is and maybe a little bit about their sales and perhaps gleaning information using AI to look at what similar companies, the problems that similar companies face in that space. And so you may get even a set of questions to ask because now you have more information about them. So you're sort of mining this information to make the call more customized to that business, right?
Matt: Yep. And doing that, that's pretty...
Kumar: Yeah. And you're doing that at scale. I mean, I'm assuming that a good salesperson is gonna be doing this anyway with their list. It just takes a lot of time to do that kind of research, right? To go look up the company and look at their sales and, you know, they probably are looking at many different sources. And so for each client, or prospect, I should say, these salespeople are spending a lot of time. Now AI is accelerating that because it's doing that work for them and it's helping them prepare for the conversation. That's fascinating. So the other thing you talked about was in the coaching aspect. So tell me more about that. So I'm assuming that in order for the sales leader to coach, these conversations would have to be recorded so that they can listen to it or have an AI listen to it and provide some feedback. Is that what you're getting at?
Matt: Yeah, that's exactly right. Now, again, I am not an attorney. I know in the United States, each state has different laws. I'm not, I just don't want some lawyer to call me and say, you can't say that. So I'm not an attorney. I don't know each law. And again, if you like, if you've been on a call when someone has their AI note taker, if they're like, "Hey, I don't want that on," then you shut it off. But the idea is for the sales leader, it is tough to be in the field as a sales leader these days. When I say in the field, it's riding along with your sales rep or sales reps like being on a virtual meeting or if you're doing things you know face to face or if it's just on the phone it's tough to be on all of those it's just not scalable like these people are working for forty-five hours a week and as that sales leader but you need some inputs like what are they doing? What questions are they asking?
And pick on my salespeople. Some salespeople might be angry that I say this. Salespeople by nature are not great self-reporters. We're optimists, we're go-getters, we're hunters. "Oh yeah, that deal's going to close. Oh yeah, I asked them all those questions." Well, that's not our strength is self-reporting. So these tools capture this information, capture these meetings, capture these calls, and it organizes it in a way that the sales leader gets to go, "You know what? These are the top ten questions we ask our client potential clients on a discovery call like these are the top ten." Not saying we need to ask them on every call but we've found that these are successful to get the kind of the conversation going get the information that we need to learn for us to be able to take it to the next step which is whatever their next step is in their process.
Well, okay, if we have if we teach the brain in the AI platform that these are the questions, then that tool goes and listens. And then that sales leader goes, "Oh, well, Matt, you didn't, it was a pretty decent call Matt: Well, okay, if we have if we teach the brain in the AI platform that these are the questions, then that tool goes and listens. And then that sales leader goes, "Oh, well, Matt, you didn't, it was a pretty decent call, but like you only hit on one of the ten kind of main questions. Okay. Well, that's a coaching opportunity." There's no such thing as a perfect sales call. So we're not trying to make it one, but it's "Well, Matt, you went in this whole other direction. That's not our best practice." If I did that with nobody in the field, checking me out or riding along with me? Could you imagine? What if someone did that for two years? They're asking all the wrong questions or they're over-promising or under-promising where they have the value prop for the business all wrong. Well, I'm probably not going to be as effective as a salesperson if my manager or coach isn't helping me, but also my results are going to struggle.
So the idea is to capture this information. And again, I get it. Sales leaders are managing teams all over countries, all over world. And there's so much, but having a, "Okay, here's how Kumar handled the last three discovery calls. And I can listen to them, have AI kind of put it through a lens and say, oh, this was good. Hey, you might want to flag this." Then I get to come back to you, not to come down on you, but to have a conversation, a coaching, guiding conversation that's holding you as a sales rep accountable. "Hey, you know what? I'm astray from our best practices and it's my job to kind of help bring you back because the goal is to make you a little better so you get a better result." It's not a micromanagement thing. It's meant to be "What I heard this. I saw this and let's have a conversation about it" and then coach you up a little bit. Maybe the next time I listen to it, I'm like, "Oh, you know what? That was great. That was a great discovery call. I love this question. I love how you improved upon this." We're just driving reinforcement but we need the data and the information on the front end.
Kumar: Right, right. So of course there's privacy concerns and as long as you are very up front with the prospect and say "I'm just recording this for my own improvement purposes. I listen to it later and it's that virtual note taker." I've actually used tools like this to help my calls, especially my coaching calls. And so I feed the transcript into the AI and I tell the AI, "Okay, you are a master coach. Assess this call and give me some feedback on how I could have done better." Do you see that as taking away from the sales leader's role? Or do you see that sort of maybe allowing that sales person to sometimes it's easier getting feedback from a machine, right? Than it is from a human, especially one that you report to. What are your thoughts there?
Matt: Ooh, so true. The machine can, cause it's not as personal, right? It's like, oh, the machine just, so I don't see it replacing what I, what I think it allows the sales leader to do is to focus on reinforcement or sometimes you'll hear me say the ABCs. Antecedents, the things that happen before the behavior, training, documentation, more training, whatever's happening. And then the behavior happens, the sales call, the discovery call, whatever. And then there's consequences. Most people, not even sales leaders, they spend eighty percent of their time on the antecedents. The behaviors happen, and then twenty percent on the consequences. Consequences don't always have to be negative. It's better when they're positive.
A lot of the data out there on human behavior and driving change will tell you to flip that. Have twenty percent on the things that happened, the antecedents before the behavior, and then the consequence. I think these tools make that easier to do. It's like, you know what? I don't need to train you for seventy-five hours. I need to train you, but also now I'm going to have some information of you in the field, you in the wild doing it. And now I get to focus on the consequences, the reinforcement, the accountability, as opposed to those antecedents, because the tools have made it easier for me to go, "Okay, I know that's going to happen. I know I'm going to get information." Now I get to focus on the reinforcement, the "Hey, you know what? This is our best practice. I saw you do this."
So again, the, I think that machine makes it easier to get it. And I think it makes it easier for the salesperson to go, "Ah, man, I went back and listened to that. Yeah, that wasn't my best." So they kind of can self-reflect. Really focus on how do we improve? How do we change? How do I hold you accountable? So we don't repeat the things we don't want them to repeat.
Kumar: Yeah, I think so too. And I'll just share a little feedback I got from the AI tool that I use to analyze my calls. They're not sales calls necessarily, although maybe I should use it for that since I don't close as many as I should. And so I told the AI that I use, I use Claude, that it's a master coach and to analyze my conversation. And it says this, "Areas of improvement, active listening. While you demonstrated good listening skills overall, there were a few instances where you could have dug deeper into the client's statements. For example, when the client mentioned something, you could have explored this further to understand the root causes." I mean, I love it. It's amazing, right? So I think something like this could be a fantastic tool for whatever you do in your role, if you're a salesperson or a coach or whatever it is, to use these tools to help you become better. Right. And the things that you mentioned, the ABCs, the antecedents, I don't know what the B is. What's the B again?
Matt: Behavior.
Kumar: Behavior. Behavior that happens. Yeah. And then the C?
Matt: Consequences.
Kumar: The consequences. So the antecedents, you know, the tool, if you use it wisely, of course, you have to teach people how to use these tools and how to prompt the AI to do that. But a lot of these tools will do it automatically now. Right. Especially if you pay the money for it. It will give you all of those things. And so I almost see the salesperson going into the sales manager's office, you know, for their one-on-one and saying, "Hey, these are the calls I had and these are the actions I'm going to take because I got this great feedback from this tool." What do you think?
Matt: That is a sales manager's dream come true. And here's why. Think about what you just said. That salesperson you just described has a plan. Yeah. Now, again, how they get to that plan, that's a different discussion. But they have a plan and they know directionally where they're going. So, yes, a sales leader, I would hope that they would love that because here's why. "Well, let's listen to it. Yeah, Kumar, that's awesome." Again, consequence. Reinforce that they did that. We want them to continue to do what you just described. I say that a lot. People hear consequences and they think negative. Why? Because when you put your hand on a stove when you were a little kid and your mom goes, "Don't do that, you're going to get burnt." Negative consequence. But if they're doing something really well, we want a positive consequence.
But think about that. That changes an entire one-on-one. And it makes that sales leader's job easier because then you go from, "Oh man, I got to like help. I got to build their plan. I got to like, have them do A, B, C, D, E." No, now they're like, "Okay, now I just need to hold that salesperson accountable to their own plan." And that's easier. But also that salesperson is a lot less dependent on their manager now. And that manager can then focus on other things like, "Hey, I got it. Hey, it's October. I got to go build our sales strategy for the next year." Well, now I have time to do that.
Kumar: Yeah, I mean, I see an AI enhanced... And they're coming to me with what they want to improve upon. That, if you can get your team to do that. That would be amazing. I mean, I see an AI enabled or enhanced sales team really focusing on this. Any team is going to be focusing on, should be focusing on continuous improvement, you know, improvement on how they, whatever it is that they do, right. If it's a sales team, it's conversion or, and it's, you know, of course servicing those clients afterwards, perhaps for, for AI, it would be maybe writing better, you know, prompts, you know, for the AI tool that you're using the brain, you know, feeding more data into it. So it can give you more effective strategies to use for the clients that you're prospecting or give you better feedback on your sales call and, or whatever, whatever that might be and really free you up to exponentially accelerate your improvements in my view.
Matt: I agree with that a hundred percent because the goal of the tool, any tool on AI CRM, pick one, the yellow pages when it came out, I mean, the goal is to make you better and help you improve and ultimately help us get to the goals we have as individuals, as teams, as businesses. That's the key to all of this is how does that tool do that? And I always say, if you can't, you don't need to have every answer, but if you can't directionally explain that to somebody, you might not want to buy that tool today. Now, again, it's a hundred and eighty dollar tool like the AI note taker I use. It's a hundred and eighty bucks a year. Go for it. Go for it. But if you're making a more capital style investment with an AI tool or suite of tools or whatever, man, you should really be able to explain to somebody why. What are we doing? How does this fit? How are we going to measure success? How are we going to onboard the team? How, where are we going with this?
And that's why I've seen some folks get frustrated. Is they chase the shiny object and I get it. I'm guilty of it as much as anybody. I have horror stories of where I did it, but it's, they chase it and then they kind of end up with a Ferrari in their garage, but they can't drive it because they don't know where to put the gas.
Kumar: Right.
Matt: Right. So it's your strategy and direction where you're going and all your ICP and all these other core foundational elements. If you don't have that, you don't have any gas for your Ferrari. And then people come over and say, "Let's take a Ferrari for the spin. Like it's the AI. Let's take," "Oh, I don't know. I don't know where to put the gas." That's where I've seen that kind of become frustrating for salespeople, sales leaders, owners, people who are consultants. I mean, like I've heard those stories across a variety of different people, especially over the last like six months.
Kumar: Yeah. So yeah. We're at the thirty-some minute mark here, so I want to make sure we cover the most important takeaways from this. So if someone says to you, Matt, "Hey, I want to implement AI into my sales process," my assumption is you're going to sort of find out more about their process as it exists today and figure out what their problems are and say their problems are in the front end of their, you know, sort of the list building and things like that. What would you tell them? What would you, how would you advise them?
Matt: The first thing I would advise is, have you talked to your team about this? Like, I'm not saying ask your team for tools, just ask them what they're doing, especially if it's in some of the front end planning or like the lead gen, not lead gen, the list building. Ask them. Good salespeople are always trying to get a leg up. They don't want to be the yellow pages guy and get left behind. No, they're trying to win. They're trying to win, you know, hit their goals, hit their bonus, all the things that salespeople have been trying to do for a long time. Ask them. Open environment. No answer is a bad answer. You're just trying to figure out what they know, what they don't know. I would start there.
Kumar: Yeah. Yeah. You're really surprised with what your sales team, you might have somebody who's like, "I've been doing A, B, C, D," and you have no idea.
Matt: Yeah. And they may very well have just defined your best practice for you.
Kumar: So it may not even include AI at that point. It might just be, "Hey, let's do what Matt's doing. Let's try that first before we bring in some tools to do whatever." Right?
Matt: I lost you there for a second. It may... Well, you're all good. I do think that starts with that. It may lead you down a different path. But I think you start it. I think you start that. And I don't think you put in like the meeting invite "We're going to talk about AI."
Kumar: Yeah.
Matt: Because then salespeople go, "Well, I don't use it. Oh, man, am I on a block here?" Or you might have Timmy over there, who's like an AI wizard, and he's been going rogue because there hasn't been any governance or any planning around it, but he's just trying to win. He's going to go, "Oh, am I doing the wrong things?" So you don't want to lead with a potential negative consequence. It's just more of a, "Hey, we're going to have a conversation around kind of what we're doing at this stage of our sales process. Everything you're doing, all the ideas, bring them all," you know, the old, "It's a safe place" adage. That's how I would start that conversation.
Kumar: And I suppose it really depends on the problem you're trying to solve, right? So the problem that, you know, sort of for the team is in converting sales, they have no problem getting calls inbound or outbound. They've got plenty of demand there. The channels are working, but they're not able to convert. Then maybe a solution that includes AI would be something like a note taker or a virtual coach or something like that. Would you say that's fair?
Matt: Oh, I think that's completely fair. It comes down, you nailed it. What problem are we trying to solve inside of our if it's sales team, if it's our entire business, whatever it is, what problem are we trying to solve? And I think leading with the problem you're trying to solve when you go to your sales team, it lowers the temperature. They're like, "Oh, he's just trying to, oh man, he's trying to solve the same problem we're trying to solve. Great." And if you lower that temperature, it's again, if it's on the planning side, if it's on the, "Hey, we need to win more deals," and then you just have that conversation. It could still lead you to an AI tool. And I've seen it happen. I'm kind of in the midst of this myself with my own business. Like, okay, how does this fit? So this is really timely for me because I'm in the midst of this with some folks on my end. But what are we trying to solve for?
Kumar: One other thought I just had while you were speaking, I suppose you could use AI to figure out what your problems are that you're trying to solve, couldn't you?
Matt: You could.
Kumar: How do you figure that might work? Because it's great at analyzing reams of data and then giving you some kind of a result. How would you use it to analyze the entire process, the sales funnel, if you will?
Matt: So it's a good question. I've never done this. So this is me kind of picking bits and pieces off other people. I know other things I've seen, but I've never put, let's say I have not personally put a sales process into AI to give me a better result. When I think about doing that, I think if people today just pick on one, pick on ChatGPT, because it's the one that most people are familiar with. If you have never put anything into it ever, and you just go get your free account and jam your sales process into it, I don't think you're going to get a lot of things you can take away from it. I do believe that you need to feed that brain as it pertains to what your business is. Does it hurt anything? No. But I would hesitate to say to start with that. I would say, okay, you need to feed this brain so it frankly knows who are you? What is your business? What is all these things? And then I would do that.
But with most things AI from different folks, I've had the pleasure of working with and meeting is whatever it kicks out, whatever output you get, human eyes still need to touch it.
Kumar: Right. It's not absolutely. Oh, well, the AI said our sales process was six steps and now it says it needs to be thirty-seven and a half. Like, well, whoa, whoa. We might not want to take that as the truth quite yet.
Matt: But it's I would look at that as an option. Once you kind of fed into some, some other information. I was, I was thinking more in terms of see what I get with my own. But again, the other piece of caution is again, I'm not an attorney. I don't know all the ins and outs about privacy and data protection, but I'd be really cautious if it was me to put financial data out there because we just, Matt: But again, the other piece of caution is again, I'm not an attorney. I don't know all the ins and outs about privacy and data protection, but I'd be really cautious if it was me to put financial data out there because we just, we don't know. And I'm not saying there's a lot of, it's not malicious. I'm not saying that, but I would be hesitant to put that.
Kumar: Yeah, of course. There are tools out there that protect your privacy where it doesn't store the data that you put in, that you input into. It doesn't learn from it. It's not using it for learning purposes. And so that might be a tool to use. I was really thinking more in terms of putting your sales process, sort of the numbers, if you will, through the sales process, the whole funnel. And seeing what AI would come up with in terms of, "Hey, you've got challenges here, here, here." They would either validate what you already know, or it might provide some insights that you don't know, you know, and that might be, that might be a powerful thing.
Matt: I've done something similar. I like that idea because you know what?
Kumar: Go ahead.
Matt: For sure. I mean, think about that. One, it doesn't take a lot of time to do that. You're going to get an output. It might make you think differently about something. It might point you in a direction that you didn't think you necessarily had a problem in. I forget who I worked with that said this. I wish I could give him credit. His name escapes me. No one has a monopoly on good ideas. And guess what? That includes AI. AI is not people. I'm not saying that. But if you can get another point of view, another reference from a tool that can help you, I still don't think that would replace the human element at all. But I would look at it and go, "Well, you know what? Our AI tool said this." Then I would want to have a conversation with my team about it. Like, "What do you guys think about this? You guys are on the front lines of this deal. Like, what do you think?" And see what they say. What if six people on your sales team go, "Yeah, that's exactly right. I've been experiencing that for six months." Well, guess what? Success. But let's go and do something about it. Let's adjust. Let's adapt. Let's change our process.
So I think there's a lot of ways, a lot of applications that you can use it for inside of your sales team from, you know, the process to the coaching, to the list building, to the spinning up of communication, to helping you have a different set of strategy eyes on what you're trying to do. But it all comes back to the prompts and how much you fed it.
Kumar: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I mean, there's so many ideas.
Matt: Yeah. Me too. It's all over. It's like,
Kumar: Yeah, there's lots of ideas popping in my head that you could potentially feed the brain, if you will, with the top performing salesperson along with their calls and the lowest performing person along with their calls and do some comparison to see, okay, what is it that the top performing salesperson is doing everything else being equal that is resulting in that's creating that result for him or her. Right. And you have to do this, of course, with their consent to ensure that these people aren't feeling threatened. Oh, my God, I'm going to get fired or something. But you could do things like that where you focus on the positive. You know, where are we getting the best results and what are the strategies that are working with these best results? And then and start to coach other salespeople to use those, you know, if if if if the data supports it. Right. So that's where the AI can be so good at churning through reams of data and and picking out the trends, if you will, from it.
Matt: Yeah, but it kind of comes down to, we're trying to find the best practices for a particular business and team. That's really what we're trying to do. If somebody on your team is a rockstar, you can't clone them. I don't think AI has cloned anybody yet. If you've, if you're otherwise give me a call, but we want to, what is our best practice in this business? From a sales perspective, what works? And AI can help you uncover that more and compare and contrast. I hear a lot, "Well, I need to hire salespeople, but I don't, you know, I struggle with this." We gotta define what exactly are you looking for? I hear all the time, "I'm looking for a hunter, I'm looking for a farmer," whatever the business is. I hear hunter a lot more, but what kind? Like what are we doing? Like we got to really define it now understand our best practice and AI can help us do that in a variety of these ways and we we let off with I don't think it's going to replace humans but use the tools use the data to save you time make you more efficient give you new ideas give you new ways to look at things. And then put it in front of the people that you hired, you hired them, you trust them. They're there for a reason. Let's talk about it and let's figure out together with all of the minds, all the tools, all the data, what is our best practice here?
And here's the other word of caution is too strong, but we're going to go, we're going to go with word of caution. Cause I can't think of anything else. You have to repeat this process. You can't go. "Oh, this is our best practice today." And then we ignore it for five years. You know, let's make it part of your strategic. I like to look at it as part of my strategic annual planning. Some people, you know, plan differently. That's okay. But have this be part of it. Like, "Okay, here's what we were doing over the last year. Here's what was working. Here's not, Hey, the brain just didn't forget all of this stuff. All right. AI. Now I want to go, I want to shift. I want to not go northeast. I want to go north, straight north. That's our new strategy. Give me something." Cause I've seen it where they ignore that.
Kumar: Yeah. Constantly iterating, improving the process. You don't want to stay fixed or adapt for sure because everything changes, right? The sales process that works today may not work tomorrow because the tools change, the climate change, people change, people don't respond to cold emails or cold calls the way they used to. And so you might need new strategies that will work better in the future. Who knows? What did I not ask you, Matt, that you'd like to share?
Matt: We covered a lot of ground. I think the one thing that I would want to share is we talked about it a little bit. Have a plan. Just have a plan of what do I need to accomplish with any tool. Today is focused on AI. It applies to a lot of things. Where am I going with this? What problem am I trying to solve? Put some time into that. Be it if it's you're a sales leader or business owner and you, you know, you lock yourself in your office with your headphones on for an hour and that's what works for you or you bring it to a peer group, whatever, really define the problem that we're trying to solve and the why behind it. Start there and then bring in your team and then use the tools.
If I had a magic sales tool bullet, I'd be taking this from a yacht and I'd probably have my shades on and I'd, probably wouldn't, you know, like, no, like that's not how this works. We need to iterate, iterate, but we need to start with a plan. And usually when people come to me and we're having an AI conversation, they went too fast. They had no plan and they've committed to something. And now we're backpedaling and trying to square peg round hole this thing, which you can figure out, but start with a plan. It just makes everything easier down the road and it makes iteration easier, it makes coaching easier, it makes all the things we've talked about just a little bit easier when everybody knows the plan and where we're going.
Kumar: Yeah. It's been a fantastic conversation again, Matt. I appreciate you coming by. It's got my head thinking about all these ways to not just use AI for sales, but really, I mean, I use it all the time for a lot of different things and There's so many more applications for it, but certainly has my head spinning on how it can be used in the sales cycle and the sales process. So I hope our listeners got a little bit of something out of this conversation. We purposely didn't talk about the tools because the tools change all the time. It's more about the strategy behind it, you know, and I love the way you put it. It doesn't matter what tools you use, you still got to start with the plan, you got to figure out what the problems are. And then based on those problems that you're trying to solve, there are tons of tools out there, some more traditional tools, and some of the newer tools that are out there that use artificial intelligence to augment the way we work.
So with that, it is disrupting several industries that will continue to do so. But humans are, if nothing else, humans are very adaptable. So we will adapt and we will change and we'll thrive in spite of it. Thanks again for being here.
Matt: Yeah, it's been great.
Kumar: All right. Thank you again for joining.