Sales needs to get comfortable with transparency in the age of AI

[0:00] You should listen to this episode of Full Funnel Freedom if you are a sales professional or a sales leader and you're wondering if, how, and wondering, oh my gosh, what am I going to do with the way AI is changing the world of sales? If you think AI is going to change the world of sales, you're right. You want to listen to this episode to find out how.

[0:20] Music.

[0:24] Welcome to the full funnel freedom podcast if you are listening to this you are likely leading a team responsible for generating revenue purpose of full funnel freedom is to support people like yourself and keep your funnels consistently reliably full.

[0:42] Welcome to the full funnel freedom podcast i'm your host hamish knox today i am delighted to have Julie Holmes as my guest. Julie is a serial inventor, tech developer, and strategic innovator with a keen understanding of the rapidly evolving technology landscape, especially when it comes to artificial intelligence. As a dynamic innovator, entrepreneur, and popular keynote speaker, she brings over two decades of leadership experience in enterprise technology to the microphone with the goal of helping businesses innovate and differentiate. With AI and other new technologies transforming the business landscape at a breakneck pace. Julie's expertise and down-to-earth approach are highly sought after by brands such as Oracle, PeopleSoft, Expedia, and American Express. Audience, I'll let you guess which of those two of those I use on a regular basis. She's quick to help leaders and teams decipher the constant stream of new tech and map out what they need to do to survive but thrive in the new normal. Julie, welcome to Full Have fun with Freedom. Hey, thank you so much, Hamish. I'm so glad to be here. Thank you for having me. I am delighted that the audience is going to get a chance to hear your amazing ideas and insights, specifically around technology and AI. Now, I've given the audience, you know, the 30,000-foot view of who you are and a little bit of your story. Tell us your story. Tell us where you started and how you got to where you are today. Well, I started, I think like most people did, at a cubicle somewhere many years ago.

[2:10] I did. I worked in corporate. So I actually, you know, studied communications and kind of PR and organizational communication and structure. And then I went into technology because it was a great time in the late 90s to kind of get into tech and to be all embedded in that. And I was a consultant with ERP software for decades and became a product strategist and product manager, manager ultimately leading teams around next generation products and then I decided that I'd had enough of the cubicle world and wanted to go off on a bit of an adventure I've been really lucky because I'd done almost every single job at software companies so everything from sales to consulting to strategy to pricing to customer support like you name it I had done the gambit it was great and I decided to kind of go off and do my own thing and that included building my own manufactured products, creating my own software applications. I do a lot around innovation. And as you can imagine, in the AI space, so I spend a lot of time working with organizations and sales teams in particular, on how they can leverage AI to sell smarter and serve better and save time. And yeah, so that's kind of what I do now. I'm really fortunate. I get to travel around the world and work with great people all over the place and get to stick my nose in all kinds of of new fantastic technology and just see it change the world. That's pretty awesome.

[3:34] Very cool. What an inspiring story. Now, I'm curious, before we dive into AI and that, and especially for our audience of sales leaders, product, sales, Mars, Venus, cats, dogs, however analogy you would like to use as you relate to those two groups. So speaking to our audience of sales leaders around the world, from your experience, not only being in a sales role, but then also leading these product teams, what are the things that a sales leader should really know about their counterpart on the product side? Oh, I think the biggest thing that they should know is that product does not want to prevent sales. Okay. Tell us more about that. They don't. They don't. I can, you know, I can remember being on both sides of the fence and I can remember that feeling like, why can't you just give me what I need to sell? Why can't you just do that? Like you should be able to turn that out in a week. Why can't you just, you are trying to be a sales blocker. And I think that is probably the biggest thing is product doesn't want to do that.

[4:34] But product is also thinking in sales should be as well and often is. So I'll give everybody lots of kind of credit, but should be thinking that we're not just thinking about the first sale, but we're thinking about the upsell and the cross-sell and the forever sale. I think from a product perspective, product has to recognize that salespeople are really trying to make sure that they've got everything they need to really shine in front of that prospect and to get their attention. We had a great conversation actually just last week about.

[5:08] About what I called kind of marketing features and sales features versus product features.

[5:14] And that's this whole idea that there are some things that we need to have in product because they're sexy. And they may not be the most useful or the most practical or even the most valuable necessarily, but they're the things that will catch somebody's eye and get them to come over and talk to us at a bar. We need to have something that kind of gets their attention. And that is is about creating balance between the product and the sales team is that it isn't ultimately everybody wants the same exact thing but we have to do that by making the perfect mix and working as a team to do it okay i want to know more about this marketing features sales features product features okay so i got the i got the sexy bit walk us through that because this is super interesting because these three groups are usually talking the same language or trying to get to the same mountaintop,

[6:04] but they're trying to do it in three different ways. So tell us more about this conversation because it sounds really cool. So we were having this conversation where I was talking to the development manager and the CTO, and it was very much focused on, you know, we have to deliver these specific features to meet the existing customer demand.

[6:23] And I said, I love it. I really appreciate that we have customers that are using the product and that's really great. But we also need to deliver some features that are really in the consciousness of the market right now. So, for example, if we're talking about computer vision, computer vision is very much a back-end AI technology.

[6:44] It's not the kind of thing that, for example, everybody in an organization would use, and probably not everybody in an organization would even necessarily understand. Computer vision is about transforming video or images into data that you can consume and do things with. Got it.

[6:59] I said, you know, well, let's talk about doing some things that we could then piggyback on the collective narrative and the exciting things that are happening around AI in the market. So, for example, how do we add generative AI? You know, how do we add generative AI into computer vision? How do we connect those two things together? And he was like, oh, but, you know, with generative AI, you won't be able to do everything you need to do in order to create a computer vision app. And I was like, I get it, but I'll be able to tell an entirely engaging story.

[7:32] And the truth is, is that most of those customers wouldn't really want to use generative AI there. But it's this idea that we have to speak to the whole of the market, to the people who are going to use it on a day in and day out basis, and that want to kind of be in and be nitty and gritty and dirty in the technology. But we also have to speak to those leaders, particularly executives, who are hearing buzzwords, and we need to be ready to kind of leverage those buzzwords to really connect them to the product. And even if it is something that isn't what's going to get used every day, it's definitely this idea that you have to be where the market is, and you have to be in those conversations. Conversations you can't just sit around on your laurels and hope that you know somebody is gonna you know think down into the nitty-gritty you have to be prepared to have those top of funnel conversations and the bottom of funnel conversations totally totally and so i out of curiosity and you're we're not naming names so we're not throwing anybody out of us did that land with this with this cto like did they really grasp what we were you were talking about to really get to the nerds right? We've got the nerds, love it. And also get to the people who don't speak nerd necessarily.

[8:45] I'm going to go with kind of. So it kind of landed with the CTO. It definitely landed with the CEO.

[8:53] And so I think that it's about challenging everyone in our organization to have that broader, more democratized perspective. I just had a call this morning, for example, where we were talking about how AI is going to change product development and product design across the board for big manufacturers around the world. And one of the topics that we were discussing was the democratization. Of a process. AI is going to break barriers and is already starting to break barriers in all of these silos and processes that we have throughout our organizations. That's everything from sales to marketing, to product design, to quality control, to manufacturing, to supply chain. We're going to be able to get more people involved in more processes and they're going to have more time to do it because they're going to be saving times on a lot of busy work. Cool.

[9:47] What's an example of that that you have either read about, seen, witnessed directly about how we're democratizing processes? Because, yeah, silos don't work. We all figured that out years ago, even before AI. So what are some of those examples that the audience might want to pick up on and possibly implement in their own organizations?

[10:05] For sure. So if we think about something like, let's just keep going with product design since that's what we were just talking about. So we think about something like generating product ideas. Like let's say that you're a manufacturer, for example, and you have an idea for a new product, but you've got to come up with a design for that product. Now, historically, only the designers could really work on that. You had to understand materials. You had to understand how to do CAD drawings, you had to understand, you know, what it was going to cost to manufacture it and the molding process and the injection process. And you had all these things that you had to know technically, in order to effectively design a product. But now we can just have a conversation. So now anybody can step into that. So marketing can step into that and say like, Oh, we really want to challenge this product to be no bigger than, you know, one foot by one foot. You know, or we want it to have a smaller size, or we want to be able to put a logo on it, we want to decide where that logo goes. Give me 100 variations of this product and put the logo in different places so I can see what it looks like. So this idea that different people can come into play, like even the QA team could look at a design before it's ever been manufactured and say like, yeah, but how am I gonna troubleshoot that?

[11:19] How am I going to know if there's been a flaw in the design? What's that process going to look like in the manufacturing? Or maybe it's the support side of things where you've got a support person saying, you know what, I'm going to put in like the top 50 support requests or questions that we get on this product. And I'm just going to give those to you so that you can incorporate those into your design and ask AI to analyze your design and how it would answer those questions or how we could build a design that enables us to answer those questions more effectively. Wow, that is mind-blowing. A lot, right? Well, it also sounds like,

[11:53] from a sales leadership perspective, sounds kind of terrifying, right? Like, I don't want people in my pie, right? I don't want people in my sandbox or whatever analogy we want to use. So when we're looking at this AI perspective from a sales leader and, okay, hey, great, I can have influence on product. And I know sales leaders like to have influence across the organization. Organization how how should a sales leader start to think about collaborating across their organization with their peers to make them successful and then ultimately nothing happens until somebody sells something so they got to make their their team successful so from from your perspective how should sales leaders be thinking about using ai to collaborate cross, organization. Okay. So let's start with something that is going to be a little terrifying for salespeople.

[12:45] The first thing is, and this comes from me, you know, being in sales, I was a quota carrying sales rep. So let me just put that out there. Like I've been there, I've done that. I've got the shirt. Um, so I think one of the biggest challenges is that sales has to be prepared to let people look under the hood.

[13:01] So, you know, it used to be, and I, there are some sales people that are amazing at this today, but there are a lot who are still really reticent to have people on their sales calls. They don't kind of want people to hear what's happening when they have these, you know, these quiet calls with their prospects and their clients or what they're promising them or what they're suggesting or how they're displaying them pitching their product. So the first thing is, is that salespeople need to get really comfortable with having a very transparent sale. And I mean transparent, not just internally, but externally as well. So for example, one of the tools that I recommend all the time is if you are a sales professional and you are not using an AI tool to record every single one of your sales calls, that is a huge missed opportunity. That is like, stop right now, pause this podcast, go check out a tool like Fathom or Sibyl, go get something and start using that.

[13:57] That's going to record all of your prospect calls. It's going to inject that information into your CRM. But it's also going to enable everybody else in the organization to be a part of your sales process. And that is to your benefit. It might be a little scary at first, but I promise it's to your benefit. Because those product people, they're going to hear what customers are asking. They're going to hear what customers are most interested in. They're going to hear when the customer perks up and goes, oh, that's a feature? Oh yeah, we've got a huge problem with that. That's a massively expensive problem for us. We could see a lot of ROI there. So we can do things like win-loss analysis off of calls. We can do things like analyzing the way people are perceiving the call. We can look at things like what their attitudes are, how quickly they're listening, who else they mention. We can get so much more data just from something as simple as seeing the sales process in action and being able to engage with that sales process across the entire organization. And that is going to be really good for sales, but sales has to come to terms with that's one of the things that's going to have to happen.

[15:10] Fair enough. Fair enough. And actually, listeners, there is a link to Fathom in the show notes. So if you'd like to check fathom out Click wherever you're listening and go to the show notes and use that I use fathom and I absolutely love it. Okay, so Sales has got to get a little bit more comfortable with you know Transparency for lack of a better term and we get all this data, right?

[15:31] So as a sales leader, I got lots of data I got call numbers. I got revenue reports. I got this I got that now I've got this whole other data set and, hmm what can i do with that to better lead my team so you have a lot of data today as a sales rep but what you have are a lot of kpis a lot of end data but what you probably don't have is a lot of explanation as to why that data ended up where it did so for example let's just stick with the whole idea of recording your sales calls because everybody who's listening today is definitely calling a prospect at some point or should be. I want you to think for a second, if you could really see and understand what's happening on every single sales call, and you could see that on mass. So let's say that you recorded 100 sales calls, 500 sales calls over the course of a month across 20 or 30 different sales reps.

[16:30] What kind of insights could you gain from that? For example, you might be able to gain insights like, Like the more somebody talks, the less they sell. The more questions they ask, the more they sell. How often are people suggesting upsells and cross-sells opportunities? How often are they asking for the call to action? What kind of objections are being raised on every one of those calls? What are the top 10 objections being raised across 500 calls? How long is a typical sales call going to last? So you're looking at the numbers that you have today, like revenue numbers and clothes. and you're looking at your funnel and you're looking at your conversion rates on your funnel. But what you're not seeing is some of that really tasty underlying data that would tell you what gets those numbers into the funnel, what leads them into the KPIs. Because we've just never been able to be that granular before. Maybe you'll find that it's certain words or certain language that really connects. And if you know that, you can take all of that data and you can work with those other teams, like marketing, for example, to say, hey, I need a white paper on this. I need an ebook on this. I need a presentation on this. We need to be promoting this. And this person's talking about these five competitors. We've never even analyzed these five competitors to do competitive analysis.

[17:55] And imagine being able to take things like, gosh, we keep losing to this competitor. Why do we keep losing to this competitor, well, you could analyze their whole website in five minutes. You could look and see what's all their messaging. What is everything they're saying? I can go out and find all their content. I can get a list of their customers by using tools like Perplexity, for example. I can use all of this technology to very quickly get me to answers that before would have just been on my should-do list. I love that because ultimately one of the things we coach the the leaders we work with on is building out a playbook, right? So what are those common objections? What are the best questions? And and what I'm hearing in your in in what you just shared is, you now have.

[18:39] Legitimate, real-time, hey, it happened as opposed to, so Julie, when you were on that call with that prospect, like, what did you say? And you're like, well, I said this. And it's like, well, the human memory is fallible. So you probably said something like that, but not literally that. So sales leaders, you can build a playbook way easier based on what Julie is just sharing with you. Julie, what are some of the other tools that you have seen useful at that leadership executive executive level for supporting the present and the future of the business? Because it's getting harder and harder to do five, 10 year plans. You know, three years seems to be about the norm that I'm experiencing. What else can a sales leader use to effectively support and grow their team and hit their targets? Well, there's a lot of things that they can use and it's going to change every single day. It's actually becomes just such a tricky, almost a tricky question, right? Every day, there's probably a thousand new AI apps that are coming out. There's probably, you know, 500 that go away that don't make it.

[19:45] So we're going to see this space moving a lot. So in some ways, rather than necessarily thinking about them as specific tools or apps, I would think about them in use cases. Like what are some of the things that you should be thinking about using AI and technology to do for you. And then when you're ready to do those things, go out and see what are the big players at that moment in time. So for example, you just mentioned a sales playbook.

[20:11] Well, I can use AI to look at all my sales calls, I can dump in all kinds of data, I can dump in everything we have right now and say, I want you to create me a sales playbook. So right away, I can use it to help me with all kinds of things like documentation, standard operating procedures.

[20:30] There are all kinds of incredible tools right now that will auto-generate your sales playbook, and then you just go in and edit what you want to edit. Wow. So that you're not starting. Sometimes starting with that blank piece of paper is the most painful thing in the world. Totally. Right? But you can also then be using it to work on all of your messaging. Same kind of concept, right? I can use generative AI to say, you know what, let's think about how we create our messaging and let's try to get some really consistent messaging going for all of our sales reps. But then I can use AI to scale and personalize that message. So a lot of people will have like, hey, we have a template for a cold outreach. We've got a template email that we use, or we've got a template call script. And that's how we kind of teach our salespeople to do it. Well, imagine if you could take that template and you could put that into AI and say, Actually, I've got a call with a professional services firm that's based out of Calgary that has 150 employees that is using XYZ technology that, you know, whatever it is that's going on with them. I want you to go and research this company. I want you to find out what their big initiatives are for this year and what's really driving them. I want you to look at the industry as a whole and tell me what's really important for this industry. and I want you to tailor this outreach email so that it's specific to this industry and to this client.

[21:54] Just like that, you've got incredible personalization at scale. Salespeople know, you all know that you should be doing this, but you don't do it. You don't do it because you don't have enough time, because you have a big to-do list, and because it keeps you really, really busy. And so you kind of just do the best you can with the time that you have, but now that excuse is going to just totally go away. You're going to have so much more capability to personalize and scale. sale. Then we can take that to a whole other level, things like, oh, I don't know, making sure that things get updated, like your CRM.

[22:32] There's not a single... I speak to sales teams all the time. I do a lot of sales kickoff events. Every single time I can walk in and go, bet you're not updating your CRM, are you? They all go, no, no, we're not. We're not updating our CRM, or the sales leaders will say, no, no, they're not. So what we can do is now you've got tools like, you and I both use Fathom and we love it. There's another tool called Sibyl, for example. And Sibyl actually has built-in integrations with CRM systems. So it actually goes out and fills in your CRM based on your calls. So now you can automate actual processes and connect up things behind the scenes. That's pretty amazing to be able to do that. And I think from a leadership perspective, there is all this tools and technology, but I guess the one thing I would want to say is, yes, you should look at all the things that AI can help you to do from a sales perspective. But you as a leader, the most important thing you have to do is you have to build the skills on your team to be able to do all of that. Because it's a whole different set of skills that you need to be able to effectively leverage AI and a lot of this new technology than what you have maybe been anticipating in the past.

[23:43] Fair point. And that ties into something else that I was curious about is like, okay, this is great. I'm super productive. I can throw a templated email into an AI and get it instantly personalized, instantly quote unquote personalized for this specific buyer. And well, wait a second now, I'm now more productive. That means that I probably have higher expectations on me and my team. So from your experience, and whether this is directly with sales leaders or maybe it's on the product side, doesn't matter.

[24:14] How does that conversation go? Because that's one of the things that salespeople have gone away with for years is, well, boss, I'm busy.

[24:21] And it's like, well, yeah, now you can't be busy anymore. You can't use that as an excuse. So from that executive, that leadership perspective, how does that conversation go around more productivity and higher expectations? So the way that I talk about it with a lot of sales teams is I'll say, okay, listen, you have three categories of things. You You have a to-do list, you have a should-do list, and you have a could-do list.

[24:45] So when we think about applying technology as a sales leader and talking to your team, same way that if I was talking to your team about how they should think about applying this technology, the first step is to try and tackle your to-do list. Because a lot of times we keep our salespeople so busy with counterproductive work, or what I would classify as non-revenue generating work, right? Updating the CRM, filling out reports, providing updates about this customer, doing customer handovers, all this stuff, valuable, essential, critical, but not necessarily revenue-generating. So they've got this big list, and I think, gosh, and I can't remember, Hamish, you probably know the number, but it's probably like 70% of the work that a salesperson does is actually what we would classify as busy work or non-revenue-generating work. It's a lot. Yeah. So how do we use AI to speed that up? So step one, that's your to do list, right? Then we move on to the should do list. Now, this is what your sales leader is already nagging sales professionals to do. So this is all the things that the salespeople they know they should be doing this, they don't get to it, you know, or they only get to a little bit of that list. So that's things like, hey, I should be more present on social media, I should be, you know, contributing and I should be commenting on these prospects' LinkedIn posts so that I can start to develop rapport and relationships with them. I should be doing more research on my prospects before I contact them.

[26:14] Big should-do list. So as sales leaders, when you're thinking about how do you start to coach or develop your sales professionals into expanding past the busy work, it's figuring out what's on their should-do list and then talking to them and getting them excited about what they could be doing on that should-do list. That third list, that's where you start to inspire them. And I think that starts to get really exciting from everybody's perspective as a leader, as well as a sales professional. And that could-do list is if you had lots more time, what could you do differently? What could you do better? How could you rethink your sales process? How could you rethink your market? How could you rethink your prospecting in order to get to a whole new market? What could you do around partnerships? How could you reach out to people in a new and different way that you've never done before? Could you do personalized videos to every prospect instead of just sending them an email. So what could you do? And what would that enable? Now, the really important thing from a sales leader perspective is that you will now start to get data to support all of these. So historically, it gets a little nerve wracking from sales perspective, in my experience, to try new things, right? Because, hey, you know what, if I try something with this prospect, and it doesn't work, did I lose that prospect? Right? It's a pretty expensive experiment.

[27:43] So this way you can start to kind of try new things, but you get to see what's different and what's the same if you're truly capturing that process and reporting on it and documenting and analyzing it. And you will be able to lead with data in a way that takes a lot of the emotion.

[28:03] I shouldn't say the emotion that takes a lot of the judgment. It's a lot of the judgment out of a conversation with sales professionals, right? Instead of you saying, look, I think you should do it this way as a sales leader, you get to say, listen, we've analyzed 500 sales calls this month from, you know, 50 different, you know, sales professionals. Here's what's working. Would you like to sell more? Because if so, here's what works. Like, I've got a list of what works. Exactly. Now, take that one step farther. And as a sales leader, you get to give your sales professionals some incredible tools that they have never had access to before. For example, you could create a sales role-playing chatbot where you could actually have an AI tool function as a prospect.

[28:52] You can preload it with like, here's what our prospects are saying. Here are their most common objections. Here's all this stuff. Now, I want my sales professional to be able to sit down and test that theory out. Test out the new messaging. How did the AI bot respond to that? How did that messaging feel? What was it like? And we're going to start to see that right now. Today, you can do that by typing it in. But we're like a week away, maybe two weeks away, maybe not even that by the time this episode goes to air. It'll probably be available. We're now going to start to have kind of this multimodal experience where I can talk to AI. AI talks back. I can have an actual conversation. I can have it function like a prospect. And I can really nail and practice and really deliver incredible messaging and relationships and rapport building with my clients and practice it in a way that we never could before. Because I promise none of us did role playing with another salesperson. None of us. Totally. Best way to learn. But yeah, most sellers and most leaders don't do it anyways.

[29:57] Julie, these are some awesome thoughts that you're sharing with us today. And you and I could probably nerd out about this stuff all day long. I have a few questions for you before we wrap up the episode. First one being, if you could go back and coach younger Julie, go back as far as you like and go, hey, younger Julie, in the future, you're going to have had this amazing experience. You're going to have this incredible organization. You're going to be working with with great companies around the world, you will also have a lot of scar

[30:21] tissue and bumps and bruises. What would you coach younger Julie to say or do different to get to the same place with a little less scar tissue and maybe a couple fewer bumps and bruises? I would probably tell myself the same thing that I tell my kids, the same thing that I tell, you know, people who are just coming into the workforce. And that is that you are living a life in chapters now. You know, there was a time, you know, I, you know, some of us have been around the block for a little while.

[30:49] Um, and you know, there was a time when we thought like we take a job and we would stay there or we would go into a profession and we would stay in that profession for years and years and years and years. And that's just not the way it works anymore. So the world is moving faster. We are moving faster. And so, you know what, sometimes it's about like doing things in order to learn a new skill rather than to get a new career. So as you're thinking about yourself and as I think about my past, right, it's okay, what skill do I need now? I'm going to go do that job for two years, or I'm going to go do that job for a year, knowing that that's not where I'm going to stay. That is just the next chapter in my journey. And then I'm going to move on to the chapter after that. And maybe I know where that chapter is. Maybe I don't. But it makes it easier to make a decision and to say, yeah, I'm going to give that a try. Sure. Why not? It's not forever. It's just for now. So I would live a life of chapters that is for now and not forever. Beautiful. What a great sentiment. Thank you for sharing that with us today.

[31:50] Next question I have for you is, what have you read, watched, listened to, whether recently or in the past, that you would recommend sales leaders listening check out for their own development? Well, I do like podcasts. I'm a big podcast fan, and especially now, because while I love a good book, the world is moving too fast. So by the time a book gets published, it may or may not be as useful.

[32:14] So one of the podcasts I listen to is called the AI breakdown that talks about kind of the latest news so every day there's what's the latest news in AI so if you're really trying to stay on top of things the AI breakdown is great if you are somebody who just likes to be challenged to think differently and to kind of see the world in a different way one of my favorite podcasts is Freakonomics yes and of course that's a hugely popular podcast so many of you who are listening right now probably already listened to it. But if you don't, go check out a few episodes. I just love that it challenges me to see the world in a different way. And then, of course, I would definitely listen to something like Managing the Future of Work. That's a Harvard Business School podcast. And that's really good from a leadership perspective and what different organizations are doing to kind of like take their teams to the next level. Very cool. Thank you for sharing all of that with us. Audience, check all those out. I've listened to all of them and I can highly recommend as well. So Julie, amazing ideas and insights from you already. What do you have as a closing thought, a final bit of wisdom or something to

[33:20] plug? The floor is yours. Okay. So what I would say is if you have not done anything to support and train your sales team in AI, shame on you. Go take care of that right now.

[33:34] The reality is, is that when we survey our audiences and we have like a sales readiness assessment that kind of analyzes whether sales professionals feel like they're, you know, ready for all the AI that's coming down the pipe. Generally speaking, they're like, absolutely. I'm all in. I'm excited about this. I think it's going to change the way I work. And then when I asked the question, how many of you are getting trained at work or feel like you're being supported or be provided the tools, it is like five to 10%. So you've got to enable your salespeople. So bring me in for a sales kickoff. If you are having a sales kickoff and you are looking to get people excited about AI and just start get them leveraging it to improve their sales process. And in the bonus content, which Hamish has put a link to in the show notes here, there's also a link to some additional resources. I've put some of my favorite prompts. I've got a prompt library available on my website. So, you know, go out and just try some new things, like challenge yourself to try one new thing every single week with AI. And before you know it, you will be a master of the AI trade.

[34:35] And you will be selling smarter, serving better, and saving time. Very cool. Julie, what a great way to wrap up. Thanks for being a guest on Full Funnel Freedom today. It was my pleasure entirely. Let's nerd out again soon. Amen, sister.

[34:49] As leaders, AI is a thing. We all know that. A bit cliche to say at this point. I really appreciate Julie's enthusiasm for AI as a tool to support people. There's plenty of doom and gloom out there with AI as well. And I would rather focus on the positives. And I really appreciated a few things that she was saying today, specifically like getting a tool to record. And I mentioned that there's a link to Fathom. I use Fathom and it's been really, really mind blowing for me where I can go back and I can prep more effectively. I can add things into my CRM. I can have action items. I can also analyze. And then also this idea of transparency.

[35:39] Which I want to reinforce what Julie said there, this idea that sales is some kind of black box, dark art that we just go out and sell stuff. Well, especially if you're in a startup world, sometimes salespeople overpromise and product goes, you said that we could do what now? Now, that was actually one of my very first experiences in selling SaaS is the previous seller had told a very, very well-known electronics retailer that our platform had a specific function that didn't actually become available on the platform until nine months after this retailer signed the deal. So one of my very first meetings when I got into the role of selling this SaaS platform was getting multiple new holes ripped in my body that I was not expecting from this retailer in our first meeting where they fired us. And my sales manager and I said, we have to agree with you because you were sold something that you didn't actually get to use until you were three quarters of the way through your initial term with us. So having that transparency is really powerful.

[36:50] And what I know to be true is A players want to show you how awesome they are. So when you go to your sellers and say, hey, we're going to implement Fathom, we're going to implement another recording tool. And the ones who resist that that's at least a yellow flag if not orange or red flag for that person being on your team long term because if they're not willing to show you how awesome they are and have a real opportunity for you to support them with coaching after the fact and build out the playbook and support their colleagues they're probably not a good fit long term i'm very curious to hear what your big takeaways are in the comments so let me know what you think and what your takeaways were and until we connect on the next episode go create full funnel of freedom, Thanks for listening to today's episode of the Full Funnel Freedom podcast. You can continue to support us by leaving us a review and a rating, sharing this episode with a couple of sales leaders in your network who you care about. I'd love to connect with you. I'm easy to find Hamish Knox on LinkedIn. Also, if you'd like a free 15-minute call with me, go to www.hamish.sandler.com forward slash how to Sandler. Until we connect on the next episode, go create full funnel freedom.

[38:15] Music.