Why and How AI is Going to Replace Sales

for those of you in businesses to business and in particular those of you involved in goto Market or GTM motions the ground underneath our feet is Shifting as we speak AI has entered the scene and it is changing everything and I'm telling you it has started it is accelerating and it is Unstoppable and may I add this is exciting as heck I'm loving every part of it now today what I'm going to do I'm going to share it all with you what have I learned a few weeks ago I launched an article and that article on LinkedIn blew up and you know gave us all these Insight since then more and more companies have approached us and have demonstrated to us what their capabilities are one particular company stood out that company is called one mind and that company brought us the idea of a superum what I'm about to demonstrate to you with thanks to them is they are presenting to you in this demo a photo realistic engagement between a buyer and a seller in this photo realistic engagement you'll see the seller pulling up slides instantly in a live Zoom session okay I just want you to see it and realize this is where we're starting nice to meet you Rob are you new to crossbeam or have you been exploring the platform through a free trial or paid plan no I don't know anything about Cross Beam at all no problem Rod Cross Beam is the first and largest ecosystem lead growth platform used by over 29 zero companies to enhance customer relationships through their partner ecosystems ecosyst Le deals are 53% more likely to close 46% faster to close and 58% less likely to churn Cross Beam helps you unlock the power of Partnerships in for steps find Partners share data map accounts and drive sales how does that sound to you so far that sounds really amazing I kept leaving to do all that well welcome back how was that demo right like seriously folks this is where we are today can you imagine where we are going in the future I'm excited I'm excited for the opportunity this offers and this offers opportunity across the entire goto Market motions okay let's start what this means because we need to understand that we are not in an easy period there are some serious issues we face and this seems to be the opportunity now where I want to point you to is that while we're going to look at AI not as a means to do what we are currently doing doing more better we're doing better better not more better not more email not more spam better no we're going to do better better create a better experience that starts with we need to think that this is all about growth not cost reduction then we're going to run a demo I'm going to do a more extended demo so you can see a little bit more of it and then I'm going to tell you where I share with you how you can start how do you personally get started right so let's get going let's talk first about why this is all about growth and what the fundamental principles are that we're working with fundamentally for many of us who are in sads and forms of recurring Revenue we are primarily doing this to create growth growth is valued over cost with a factor you know some say 3 to1 4 to1 but it's value it's most valuable thing that we can do is growth as startups and scale UPS our goal is to grow grow grow now that means that we go through an scurve and this scurve has an exponential growth curve and I want you to remember this because this is a vital piece of what I'm trying to explain to you this exponential growth curve that we're going through that we are having to have as the output of what our Enterprise is doing of what we're all doing together we mostly do that based on hiring more people right when a company grows from like 10 million to 100 million it grows often from about 20 people to 200 300 400 500 people it grows people exponentially grows people but the people performance doesn't grow exponentially and that's the reason why we need to hire more and more people if you hire twice as many people you're not going to get four times the output if you hire four times as many people you're not going to get 16 times the amount of output no no no if you hire twice as many people you're going to get 1. 5 1. 6 times the output and if you hire four you're going to may have three three and a half why because people are having issues right some work some don't work some work out some get fired you know some leave and so it is a very linear process and in order to get that linear input to generate exponential output we simply hire more right if we need 10 more people we hire 50 more people we take that into account the problem was this cost so much money this is the reason why we had so many sdrs and so many AES and believe me when they put Salesforce Tower up they envisioned floors of sdrs and AES right like that would you know helping the SAS companies in that in that building so we need to do something different the way how that works is we we have learned that from plg we have learned from plg that is a based on systems growth not on people growth when the plg company grows of course they add a few people here and there but those people are operating processes via systems via AI via tools and and and and techniques system based growth and system scale as we have seen with plg they do scale exponentially now we can find the problem of this in every day when we look at public companies what you see down here is a number of public companies that we looked at the last five quarters you can see this back we have I've reported extensively on this under the topic GTM efficiency and what we notice here on the vertical axis is the amount of dollars needed to secure $11 of net new Revenue that pink line there that line says at that point in time I'm using $2 to acquire $1 in net neue $2 on sales and marketing spent pulled from the public figures if you have you know $1 you need to generate $2 uh if it cost you $2 to generate $1 you need approximately eight nine n and a half years to recoup that back and to run a successful you know financially successful business now you can imagine if you spend four five $6 that you know need extensively longer periods in order to run that what we see today and for each company over the P five past five quarters we see that the GTM efficiency the system is running less and less efficient they need more and more people they need to keep increasing the spend to keep the growth up right and that is a challenge and you all know this this is nothing new come on look at your email how much spam look at the text messages look how annoyed you are all of us are when we get you know addressed on LinkedIn and somebody's trying to sell us LinkedIn right like look these current methods have run their gammoth it's you know like it's no longer working the way they were supposed to work they still work but it just needs a lot more investment that's what you see down here we need a lot more people we need a lot more this a lot more that and that's costing money and the model is not designed that way that model that we're currently running is inefficient but also ineffective now let me draw your attention what I mean with INE effective because there's a reason for that and once you understand the reason you go like so I'm going to point out this to you and now I'm going to run this story by you first my wife was stung three times by a wasp uh you know on you know like on a hike the other day and she had an allergic reaction it actually inhibited her her breathing very very scary stuff so she made an appointment with the doctor soon after and While She Was preparing to see the doctor she studied she studied what is a wasp the Venom and so on and so forth as she showed up with the doctor it show you know the doctor didn't know all that much you know a little bit you need an epip pen and we got some very mundane advice that we already knew like we saw that already what had happened is my wife for in that period had become an expert on the topic the doctor I mean like she sees what 10 20 30 patients a day she can't study like for every patient three to four hours there's not enough hours in the day right so she's dealing as a general doctor she's dealing with all these the these people coming to her with all these questions that they've studied three four hours a day like that's on that's change what happened here is my wife become an ex a relative expert on that while while the doctor needs to study now obviously if my wife would go to ex doctor that's an expert on that topic of course you know like that she would never even come close to that folks this is happening in our world too our buyers in generally know more about the market these days than ever before they often know more about the solutions that they're looking for folks I'm telling you that many buyers are sitting on the call thinking to themselves I know more about the product that they are selling than the seller who's selling it to me right right you know it and I know it it's the truth right and you know like this is the point in time where we're at and that is because the buyer's knowledge has gone up while the sellers knowledge as we looked at lower cost sellers more cost efficient sellers has dropped and that created a reversal of the knowledge that it flipped right that means that the buyers today need are looking for a different experience are looking for a different role from their sellers that's the mindset I want you to be in right this happened now something else happened and that is over the past you know little decade or so right we've seen an evolutions of process systems and people now when you go back to the 1950s it's a management technique that says like hey everything can be put into like a a framework of process systems and people and when we look at this and we align that with the evolution that we've seen over the past decade or so we see that in 2012 high velocity cell came to ple that's the that's in in our world that's sdrs and a sales development rep setting up appointments and qualifying and then setting them up for the sales person to close right that's high velocity selling shortly after that was optimized by email sequencing you notice the sales Loft originally shortly followed after that by Outreach and all the slew of other companies who who came there to be and so that became in 2016 we we optimized these systems in order to increase performance of the people further when we looked at targeting companies like John Miller andio uh came to play and became a product right and then uh um Terminus became another product right like these Solutions came into the market and they primarily said like hey what have we been doing manually with people effort we are now going to do with systems with tools soon after 2018 and I'm putting a wet finger in the air averager right plg came to be right and what they did they actually focused at optimizing the process in 2020 you know as the world uh endured the the pandemic we got a distributed Workforce and suly was all about people right like Zoom enabled remote people working and soon after that you know now we had so many people and the cost was so high and you know like uh the the the the markets uh didn't give as much room for for investment suddenly sustainable growth became to be we had to fire all these people right if you go to layoff FYI you're going to see like all these people that were laid off right again a very people focused mindset we need to reduce cost we're going to fix this by letting go of people and now here we are in 2024 and what we are now seeing is that if you think about plg and you think about Ai and you just think of the concept of AI LG artificial intelligence let growth AI growth if you think about it that way we essentially are doing what plg has proven to work but we're now doing that for the human let growth GTM motions right that's what we're doing but what this means is that we we're looking for systems to augment the process and that is what I'm explaining down here most of the time when we are thinking about AI today we're thinking about optimizing peopel processes right we're thinking about like co-pilots Hey we're putting an AI based co-pilot that teaches the human to sell better the point is that is you're tweaking with the linear growth of people you're moving from in case of doubling the sales performance and getting 1.

6x out of it you may get 1. 7 a 1. 8x which is fantastic for the global market except if you are in hyper growth land like we are with startups and scale UPS like you are here you need to grow like 2x 3x 4X 5x that small Improvement of you know like of human beings won't be enough to drive the growth for you so what you'll see down here is you don't not need systems to make people better in order for that and in order for to experience what plg experienced we need to flip that around we need systems to make the processes better right now of course people sit on the top and design that and and and and create that but systems improving the processes and fixing process problems is the goal not systems not AI fixing people problems AI should be used to fix process issues and skill the process that is a flip here's what we learned right about this what what I just told you is like hey we need AI you just seen the demo you go like what can we use it for well what we need to use it for is we need to create growth and we need to create efficient growth well Hallelujah AI operates at a fraction of the cost and as we are seeing here like hey what if it could help us with growth well we know exponential growth is essential we know that the knowledge Gap has flipped which is bringing the the customer the buyer asking and demanding for a different experience and we know that human growth which historically has been linear will not help us to achieve that exponential growth that we need but system growth which has been proven for plg to work does work right and now what we need to do what we need to learn from that we need to learn systems AKA AI to improve the process right that's the goal a process that is based on the knowledge Gap flipping and that the buyer wants to buy differently right do you see it you start to feel it folks this is it it's good okay that is all about growth let's run one more time now I'm going to run a different demo but I now want you to look at it through the fresh eyes that you now gotten you got like okay now let's take a look again at this demo that I'm going to to to show down here now I want you to think of the following think of going to a website the homepage right then there's a button do you want you a sales agent talk to a sales agent you click on that what you're going to experience is how that would look like when you would talk to a sales agent the questions you can ask what you can do with it now imagine right right that instead of just engaging with that sales agent there's also a zoom button click Zoom imagine that you're now in the zoom or the agent joins your Zoom depending on whether you provide the zoom link to them or they provide the zoom link to you but imagine you're in a zoom session and while you're on the zoom session you know like you can engage with that let's take a look at what you're going to see now I want you to take a look and what you're going to see is you're going to see an agent that is accurate you're going to see an agent that is Rel aable you're going to see an agent that is engaging you're going to see all that you're going to see expert level like and you're going to realize folks this is scalable let's go let's step into the demo hey Mindy let's do a little role play where you're the sales Ride Along engineer I'm ready to handle all kinds of questions even the highly technical ones here's a nerdy joke to kick things off why do engineers always carry a pencil in case they have to draw a conclusion now what would you like to dive into first so my cgo wants to know about your network design here's a diagram detailing how our network is set up it's a lot to take in quickly so I can share this with you after the call and we be on standby for any specific question our system and network architecture is designed to support a highly scalable secure and resilient environment it utilizes a cloud-based infrastructure with microservices for flexibility security is Paramount with encryption protocols and intrusion detection systems in place want to dig deeper into any specific part him my lawyers want to know about your compliance certifications sure thing we take data protection and security very seriously we have certifications for S so to C welcome back how was that seriously right look I know there's issues you know there are issues but folks you got to realize where we were a month ago or three months ago you got to go understand like look let me give you an ID when the apoll Mission launch I think the the the US spent 36 37 billion on that that is an investment that took place took about a decade right and they spent in today's value about $150 billion on that right uh if you look at cancer research over the past 25 about $200 billion were spent on that right folks we already spent over $150 billion investment on AI and there's another 150 so by the end within a period of 3 to four years $300 billion will be invested more than on the Apollo Miss more than on cancer research folks the largest companies on the world are spending every dime that they have and investing in this if this is where we are today where will we be three months from now right like seriously think about that okay that was the demo and this is demo was by onm mind.

com you can go and experience this yourself go to the website look I sit there every now and then at night quiet room and I just start talking to to to an agent I I'm trying to figure out how does this look like how does this feel and you know like do it experience it like look nobody could tell you how chat GPT was until you experienced it go talk to agents right for example the onm mind. com Superhuman what you'll see from this demo you have to realize this was engaging it was on point and I need you to understand based on the Investments that are being made this is accelarating and Unstoppable right like we got we all got to realize that okay that was for another demo right you you get the sense of it where do we start Joo I'm excited I'm pumped you know like how do I do this where do I go from here folks I wanted to pick to you what the nature of an agent is now I'm we're going to focus an agent on a specific area I gave them specific names you know thanks to my friend Dave Boyce you know my colleague and friend Dave Boyce who said like give them names Joo give them names so Scout is our outbound you know like agent Finn is our inbound agent Mia is our seller Quinn is is our onboarder Lena drives adoption and Sasha is our growth agent folks these are all agents they're not real human beings they work together they specialize in a specific area now many of you probably know either Scout or Finn or Mia the best I'll pick Mia for the time being right Mia is the seller what I'm going to do I'm going to give a description how Mia would work now Mia Runs a sales process this process needs to be fed Mia again is an agent right and so MIA as the agent needs to know a process in that process Mia Runs a discovery call here at the top and for that Mia in that Discovery call she's going to run a diagnose as part of the diagnose she needs to learn how to ask questions and as part of those asking questions she need to learn how to tell a story if she you know to share a customer story for that she needs to know different pocket stories and those pocket stories are derived from guess what existing customers so for example if Mia is talking to a bank she needs to know that ICP being a financial institution and so on and so forth this creates a loop this is the process that half but everything of this can be an agent so MIA as a seller can be Mia specialized as an agent a sub agent of Mia that does nothing but Discovery calls then a sub agent of Mia the discovery call is Mia who runs the diagnose then we have Mia who runs the story all of these are agents let me tell you you already do this every day when you travel you know like uh you have you have an agent that books your travel you have an agent that transports you to and from an Uber to the airport you have an agent an airplane that takes you from spot A to point B and so on and so forth that is a form of agentic think think of in modules right what are the modules and you'll see that down here now what you can also see is that all these things are specialized agents in that that creates another level of Agents so for example if I'm running multiple diet diagnostic calls I can have an inspection agent who specializes at live listening to all the different diagnosed call and says hey there's a way we can do that better and if we do that better we should improve I have an expertise agent like a storytelling like that is a specialty and I can upload new skills like like remember the movie The Matrix where Infinity gets uploaded with this this new B25 helicopter program fly how to fly a helicopter or Neo gets taught how to you know within a within a flash card insertion how to to do kung fu well we have agents that specialize in different storytelling you know like could be men in the whole storytelling and so on like there's a specific storytelling format then at the three at the top over there you see we can have an agent that does nothing but listen to existing customers learn from that and identify new targets that is a targeting agent and I can have a forecasting agent all these agents can run simultaneously which is something we called Mia the sales agent right and Mia the sales agent has a colleague called Finn the inbound agent who has a colleague called Scout the outbound agent all these agents need to communicate with each other that ladies and gentlemen is the power of something we've designed at winning by Design long ago that uniform bridge between these agents communicating is called spice and spice not only communicates between Mia and Finn and Quinn spice also help communicate between the diagnos storytelling and the customer stories and so on and so so forth what you find is that human interface that interface that we today do verbally needs to be automated with AI system and for that as many of you know who are spice customers can be used in that way Joo I love this love it where do I get started look I want to show you and a very basic concept right and and the concept is this AI needs to be hired it needs to be trained it needs to be sorry onboarded trained coached managed all that you need to think AI as the same way as a human being now here is the winning by design process how we would normally build out a sales organization or a go-to market organization if customer success or marketing elements of it right look at is on the left we take your kpis we you know we come we identify your customer Journey uh your different processes right you your your icps that you have ideal customer profiles that you have we collect all the data the conversion rate we listen to calls and you know whatnot read emails from that we do a diagnose that diagnose tells us okay here's an optimized process here's the best Playbook to execute that and here's how the skill training associated with that we then go out and we train people on the top right now what we do here is folks folks your AI needs the exact same training it needs to know which icps they're calling on now a person I can only give like three or four icps and overload right an AI folks we can create hundreds of icps think about that okay so this I this AI gets the exact same information it gets the processes The Playbook and the skills and it's uploaded alongside your product information alongside your Market information it is it it's training on this and that's the key the training of the AI you're going to hear this every time you're going to go why are we training the AI you're going to hear the smartest people on Earth that are the the most experts in AI going to talk about training the AI training the AI folks this is all about training the AI that AI once it gets trained need to be managed afterward needs to be improved we need to see that conversion rate improve whether it's a seller that improves the win rate this creates three steps for us step number one determine where is your best use case run it like where are we going to apply Ai and where is the best place to start number two we then need to you then need to train that AI system and number three you then need to iterate but here's the beauty of it there's a difference between Ai and human beings and that is that when your human beings operate at the top performance and particular sellers are you know like performing really well they have a tendency not all but some of them have a tendency to walk out the door because they get paid elsewhere more money and when they do that they walk out with all your knowledge all your investment walks out of the door with them right if you didn't integrate that in these processes and the playbooks and the skills they'll walk out of them in a way their knowledge dissipates and those of you who have been relying on their skos or RKOs every year know that within 30 days after archo most of the knowledge has dissipated AI is a different story AI is a different story people it will not only accumulate it will get better the knowledge will sharpen up right okay now I'm not saying that this is going to replace all salespeople folks obviously not I'm just telling you we have a large amount way too many salespeople that we literally had to pull off the streets and believe me I was one of those people who on behalf of our customers had to pull people off the streets we were training unskilled labor to become skilled labor in a way in order to deploy them in this field the many of these folks weren't in sales and many after they leave this job will not be in sales ever again right I'm just letting you know is that that part of the working population that we refer to as a g GTM motion will be replaced experts have will not be replaced they will be augmented okay what do we start and where do we start folks think of this number one Define the best you use case number two recruit AKA get a vendor on board train and deploy and step number three iterate manage coach improve right winning by Design sales pitch we offer services to help you with each one of these three we offer you to analyze where AI applies and where to start first we then help you with unboarding we can create the process depl the the playbooks to feed the AI to train the AI and then we offer the ongoing Support Program over a 12- month period train iterate iterate iterate that or drum roll from Joo we can actually consider you can go and buy ready to go super humans powered by winning by Design we are currently working you know at this day you know mostly with one mind but obviously in the future could be other but I want you to think go super humans Buy powered by winning by Design we have that available um and for those of you who thinking about deploying this I want you to think about this if you're looking to hire 10 extra salese sales professionals and so on it's going to take you about like three months to get all the job descriptions open launch and so on takes three months to recruit on board another three months you know make him operational another three months we're talking about a year I just want you to know this technology where we are at from a year I think you're going to be all ready that AI is going to be more operational in a year than than that many recruits think about that like like make that part of your decision process right I'm not saying that you shouldn't be doing it make it part of your decision process and decide whether that is the best thing to do for or not folks that is how to get started right I've now given you all of this but I wouldn't want to let you go with the following because the one thing that there's one thing there's a fundamental element that we need to understand right was Uber a taxi company is Airbnb a new hotel and is chat GPT a new way of of doing a Google search it is not in my view and what I've learned is like like these are things that have been created with a different experience in mind Uber was not just an upgraded taxi it was a reimagining of how we are going to transport ourselves Airbnb if I would have told you you would get in you know if relating to Uber if I would have told you you would get in a car with a stranger a decade ago you would have laughed or was it more than a decade 15 years ago you would have laughed at me if I told you that you would rent out that empty living space in your house and you put a whatever you know air mattress right Airbnb but you put an air mattress in there and you would rent that out people laughed at it right but it was a new experience and it wasn't invented from within Airbnb wasn't invented from the hotel industry Netflix wasn't invented invented by media companies Uber wasn't invented by the taxi industry right like what you'll see and what we see here with chat GPT it is a new experience but I want you to to know this I want you to go back 18 months ago 18 months ago you were still doing a lot of Google research searches okay today not only has much of your traffic to from all of you listening much of your traffic from Google has dropped because you're doing more and more work in chat GPT than ever before if you're like me at least 70% has dropped but I would say it's more like 80 90 for me personally but hey for all of you you need to make that decision yourself how much did it drop but not only did it drop the quality of what you get out of chat GPT is so much higher than what you get out of Google it has become a new experience if we choose to use AI to do the same experience but make it cheaper we are not getting the opportunity that is put in front of us this will engage in a new buying experience we will learn more about a new buyer the buyer will start changing I don't think we have a good handle on what that will be where I will tell you where it will start it will start with an agent on your website you click want to speak to an agent that agent will engage that is an AI system that you can ask any question there will be a zoom button when you click on that either will ask you to enter your Zoom credentials or it will uh give you a zoom to start it will engage right away in the conversation that's where it will start and it will be there within weeks months not years it took chat GPT 18 months to replace 70% of one of the world's largest companies do not underestimate the power that AI is going to have on GTM motions if you want to learn more you want to get started this is kind of like hey we need to start this folks download this white paper you know like uh obviously there's a QR code but just type in winning byd design.