How Do You Keep Sales Human In An AI-Driven World?

This has been generated by AI and optimized by a human.

[00:00:00] John Hirsh: I think AI is going to be probably the biggest change that we’ve ever had in terms of the way that we do business. I think there’s good and bad about that. I think we got to be careful in terms of what actually do we want as people to be doing on the sales front. I think people are going to crave on the sales side that human connection and that human connection leads to that business connection.

[00:00:23] Lee Brumbaugh: There’s no silver bullet in sales, but on Sales Against the Odds, we’re here to give you the best shot at building a sales infrastructure that helps you scale. I’m your host, Libra Bull. Welcome everyone. This is Sales Against the Odds where we help business owners, sales leaders, the challenges of driving sales, driving ROI. I’m your host, Lee Brumbaugh, CEO of Sales Xceleration. I am joined today by the amazing John Hirsh, a fellow sales acceleration advisor, AI guru, rainmaker. For those of you who watched the Karate Kid, he is a Mr. Miyagi of driving results. So thank you, John, for joining us today from Indianapolis. Do we have a sunny Indianapolis? Were we starting to get a cold chill in Indianapolis?

[00:01:09] John Hirsh: We’ve actually had some great weather, so it’s getting a little cooler at night, but we still hit some eighties earlier this week and we have a few more high seventies, eighties, so we will take as much as we can get before winter comes.

[00:01:22] Lee Brumbaugh: Well, I’m in Balming Houston. It’s probably 110 degrees today because we don’t know what cold looks like, but glad to hear you’re having some nice weather. Well, thanks John for joining us. I wanted to start with, I’m very excited to have you. This is one of my first podcasts and you’re my first advisor to come on. And the reason I was so excited to get you, John, is I know you’ve got such a good background of driving results using AI for really top of the funnel, how to take deals, how to make them more impactful, and you’re using technology to your advantage. So talk to us a little bit about what have you seen, especially in the SMB space. We know these big companies are able to get it and really help the technology generate their business, but what are you seeing in the SMB space that’s really working from an AI perspective?

[00:02:06] John Hirsh: There is a little bit of buyer confusion out there. Companies are struggling because if they want to apply AI, there might be 50 to a hundred different applications they can apply and how do they keep those all in line? So I really look for tools in the toolbox that can drive a business result. I’m more focused on what we could do, not the features in the functions, but how are we driving a business result. So even one client I worked with was literally doing nothing with AI and I met with the CEO and the COO and just explained like you’re going to be falling behind. And even to a point of, we would sit on meetings and someone would have a word doc up and they’d be typing the word doc as we were having the meeting. And if you’ve used a Fireflies or a Fathom or an Otter, you realize you no longer need to do that.

[00:02:56] John Hirsh: We want people to participate in the meeting. So having a transcribing tool like that is really, really helpful. I was able to convince them to just take some baby steps and put that in. They were also a HubSpot user, so we use their HubSpot prospecting AI agent to at least take some steps towards that. And one of the things they would often do was they would assign a webinar to one of their salespeople and that salesperson would have to research the subject, spend a couple days building their slides and doing that. I was like, no, that’s kind of the old way. Let’s do it the new way. So we would sit down with chatGPT, build out the agenda, put the person’s background in there and actually have AI help us build out what the 45 minute agenda would be. Once we’ve actually been able to build that out, you could put it in a tool Gamma AI to actually help you build your slides.

[00:03:49]  John Hirsh: So what I really look for is what are those areas where whether it’s busy work or things along those lines that salespeople don’t need to do. I want them focused on their face-to-face time with their customers. And so that’s an example of maybe someone who is just getting started and taking three little baby steps towards using ai. I have another client that is really big on AI, so as we were looking at growing out their sales, we had options of hiring an S-D-R-B-D-R outsourcing that or trying an AI tool. What I like about that is I didn’t have to be committed. I didn’t have to sign a three-year software agreement like we used to do in the past. I could sign a four to six month agreement, try it out and see how it does. And I’ve had excellent results with that driving some really, really big growth. So much so that I actually had to hire A BDR early because the existing people couldn’t handle all the leads that were coming in. So I like to find those technologies that are going to make our jobs easier, but I still want that human to make sure they’re touching the customers and make sure they’re connecting with those customers so we can get a good result.

[00:05:03] Lee Brumbaugh: Yeah, it’s interesting say that talking about Gamma and putting presentations, I was actually working with one of my past clients and I had a sales rep that used to be very good at putting together the agenda, especially when the CEO was going to go on these big C-suite meetings and we started running it through agenda like you did through chatGPT. Then we’d get that down, we throw it through Gamma, get a really good deck. I felt like I was cheating, right? I’m like, I get it. I know because you used to spend three hours on it, now you’re spending 15 minutes. But those are the types of efficiencies that we’re looking for and so much of it is not only on clean presentations, but it’s understanding your clients, it’s understanding their profile, how they think. I mean we can take all of that data that’s out there on the web and everything that’s out there from a social media perspective and aggregate that and then be able to understand our customer better present in ways. So talk to us a little bit about from an account management enterprise level, how are you understanding your customers better before that meeting and is allowing you to engage better from a better sophistication level to drive RO?

[00:06:06] John Hirsh: I think you bring up a great point. It’s not only for that top of the funnel, but for instance, I have a client that has the enterprise, a sales person that has more of our enterprise accounts. So our top 12 accounts, these are like multimillion dollar accounts and what I’ve started to use is crystal nose where I could actually get a disc profile on someone. And when I first was using Crystal Nose, I kind of wanted to see how accurate it is. So I downloaded about 10 different things. I read my own and I was like, I don’t know how it did this, but it nailed who I was. And I sent out about 10 to different, Hey, review this for 10 minutes and let me know on a scale of one to 10. And the majority of them came back eight, nine or 10. But what we do on the enterprise side is when we have a meeting coming up, we could look at our past meetings, we could look at their business history, we could look at the agenda, but we could also look at the buying influences.

[00:07:00]  John Hirsh: So if we have a meeting with five people, but there’s really two main buying influences, how do we cater our presentation and our meeting and our discussion towards that? So your ability to take those tools and put that into chat GPT where I want a meeting agenda, I want a certain number of questions, but I want to tie to the personality backgrounds of my main decision makers, then it becomes across organic. I think one thing we do have to be careful with ai, whether we’re making a sales playbook or letting it write an email is you got to be careful just doing the generic. And what I really like about what we do at Sales Xceleration is we get down to let’s understand your ICP and we’re going to sit in a room and we’re going to whiteboard and we’re going to dig through some things and get down and get specific.

[00:07:49] John Hirsh: Let’s look at those buyer personas. And as we’re building out that playbook, it’s not generic. It’s really truly what inputs are you putting in there. So I think I would caution for people to go online, go to chatGPT and say, “Hey, give me a playbook.” It’ll give you a generic playbook, but your ability to put and feed information into that AI brain before you make the playbook is going to be able to connect those dots. And I think people still want that human connection. I think as we continue to move forward with ai, we have to be very, very careful because, Lee, I’m sure you’ll see a LinkedIn post that is 100% written by AI, and what I try to do is write my posts first from something personal, something that means something to me, and then I’ll use AI to clean it up, but we got to make sure that we have that authenticity moving forward because it’s going to be less and less with some of these types of tools. And I think that’s real important to connect with our customers and our prospects.

[00:08:47] Lee Brumbaugh: Along that line I was talking to, I was at a forum and they were talking about from an STR perspective, did we get to the part where we’re going to lose that sales rep, like that early interaction? And I laugh at it because again, during this conversation, I’m going to have 10 different emails that are going to come across my inbox and I’m going to go delete, delete, delete because there’s no customization. I think what we’re both saying is the tools that are out there give you an advantage to understand your customers, to prepare more efficiently to plan, but at the end of the day, it’s still that human touch. It’s still relationships that are going to drive sales. And if you get that email that you can tell has been just bullet written by chatGPT, you’re deleting it, right? But if it’s got something, Hey, I know John, we’re connected. I see that so and so, how about the Alabama game? And then you’re going into messaging that resonates with them that it gets to the why, act the now, then it’s a powerful impact. If you don’t, you miss that. Right. And same thing on ICP. When you think about ICP, what have you seen that customers have done the best that really understand their ICP and how do they leverage that and to really how they use it from a top of the funnel from a sales perspective? Talk to me a little bit about that.

[00:09:56] John Hirsh: I got a good example too. I started working with a client to do fractional sales management and as we were starting to build out, and they were one of these clients where their sales were pretty good, but as they’re growing, it was time to really mature and really trying to dig in. So they had an ICP, but it was way more simplified. When we sat in a room and I kept asking questions and trying to really boil it down, we realized that we might be focused a little too much on the distributors. And what could happen is the distributors could come in when we had a hot product and kind of wipe us out a product. So we might make one distributor happy, but we might make a hundred brick and mortar stores unhappy or a thousand consumers unhappy, and we kind of realize that we were maybe being led a little too much that way. And then once you get into that specific sales channel, it was really digging into keep asking questions and go deeper so you could refine what that is because oftentimes people will say more of, oh, here’s who it is, it’s this, this, and this. And when you dig a little bit deeper and look at the data of the sales and understand who’s a long-term customer and who actually has more opportunity to grow with us, your ICP can get tweaked and changed a little bit and then you can get better results.

[00:11:14] Lee Brumbaugh: Yeah, that’s a good point. At the end of the day, you need the expertise to say, is this the ICP of the shiny object or is this the ICP? That really works? And then you’re looking at it from a sales cycle, right? You’ve got specific targets that are going to have a shorter sales cycle, longer sales cycle, and it all needs to come together with an actual strategy that you can execute upon versus again, just what a chat GBT has put through your ICP. So let’s talk a little bit about top of the funnel. So there’s a lot of different tools. I think one of the big things in the SMB space is I want more leads, I need more leads. And at the end of the day, it is not just launch as we know, it’s not just the book in my shelf that says predictable revenue nowadays. How do you have quality with quantity? You can’t just say, well, if I do a thousand outreach, I’m going to get X percentage, and that’s definitely going to work. I mean, we think we both agree those days are over. So how are you seeing companies balance quantity versus quality? What works well for lead generation and what tools are out there to help support it?

[00:12:12] John Hirsh: If I go a few years back, we would always have, you’re going to buy a ZoomInfo, you’re going to buy Apollo, you’re going to buy Seamless. And what you have is that BDR, that SDR building out their own leads, especially at a smaller business. What I might see is marketing just kind of blasting the same message to everyone. I’ve seen that where the B2C message goes to all the B2B consumers, they’re going to hit unsubscribe, they’re not going to interact, they’re not going to read it. Back in that time, that SDR, that BDR and still some companies today, unfortunately, they’re spending time building their lists, building out their templates, putting it in their CRM and running those things. When I started to look at should I move forward with an AI tool, I had that ability to kind of try it out a little bit where we put data into that.

[00:12:59]  John Hirsh: So we took data from our source systems to see what could the tool do. One of my clients is using a tool called Knowledge net ai, and it’s been working really, really well by the time we were done with the demo, the CE o’s exact quote was, I’m blown away because that ability to take your existing data as well as that outside data from a list builder and combine those together. And what we’re doing to build top of the funnel is as we’ve built a list of all of our ICP in North America, we segmented to which specific spot it should go, but we also have an agent that is tied into our systems so we can classify them further. Are they an existing customer? Are they kind of a stale customer that hasn’t done work? Are they a prospect? Are they one of our bigger ones?

[00:13:46]  John Hirsh: And what that’s allowing us to do is get a really specific message to that person. And I think people are just so tired of being inundated with generic messages. And what’s nice is my BDR, because the knowledge net tool is building the list, it’s scoring that list. My BDR comes in and knows exactly who to start calling that day. So he spends a lot more time on the phone connecting with those customers with a specific message to that customer. And I think that’s what’s really driven some great results. We implemented in Q1 and did our tie-ins to the system. We ran kind of a little trial for a show we did really well. We brought on about 30 new wholesale customers and normally at a show we might bring in four to six to maybe a good one eight. So that was a really good test run. And then in Q2 with building out that list and reaching out and having that BDR make follow-up calls, we grew our new accounts by 42-43%, and we just finished Q3. We grew our new accounts in that sector by 65% and we compare year over year, quarter. We have some cyclical things, but the sales results are showing we’re up 40% total in that specific segment. And it’s been working really well for us.

[00:15:03] Lee Brumbaugh: Most companies don’t have the bandwidth to build a high functioning sales department to allow them to meet the revenue targets with Sales Xceleration. They don’t have to. Our experienced fractional sales leaders consult and implement your sales strategy, infrastructure management and team development, discover how we deploy these proven sales solutions to address your sales challenges. By going to our website, filling out the contact form, we’d love to hear from you. I love the fact when you say pick up the phone, so much of this is again, it is that human touch. And I know whether it’s phone, whether it’s text message with Sales Xceleration, we’ve got a great partner in Ring Group and we do a lot of facilitation of rain group training. What I love on a lot of what they do is you’re building that attraction campaign. So what works nowadays, I think what we’re both saying is, yes, you need an email brand that’s specific that resonates with them.

[00:15:59] Lee Brumbaugh: We need to connect on LinkedIn, we need to pick up the phone. It’s a multi-touch step. And so when your BDR can come in and say, instead of a thousand, these are the hundred that are best aligned to us that even may have some level of engagement with us. And now it’s how do we take a campaign that is meaningful to them and hopefully drives value to them. So many times the campaign is written around what we do, what do now it’s about here’s the value we bring to you on your terms, the resonate, the why act, the now. So much of that is aligned to a step process, but it’s still old school. It’s still one of those steps until somebody’s got to say, this is the right person to call and I’m going to connect with a human and driver relationship. And so much of that gets lost from a generation standpoint too. I mean, I’ve worked with a lot of SDRs and that generation’s like, well, but I sent an email. Well, great, but did you connect with anybody? And so it’s not just driving 50 emails, did you actually connect with somebody that builds a relationship, right?

[00:16:57] John Hirsh: Yeah. And Lee, I think you’re getting into that standard blocking and tackling in sales that we’ve done all the time. And again, I caution people because some people will say, well, I tried this AI project and it didn’t work, but part of it is what are you relying on it to do? You still need to execute on those best practices of sales. I had a client that had sent out 484 emails and had two responses, and when I started to look at their email, it was two paragraphs long all about us. And it was like, oh gosh, I’m never going to read that one. So I really try to get right to that point. Make sure you have a call to action in every one of those emails of what you’re trying to do. And what I don’t want to, your point was I don’t want my BDR calling a thousand people.

[00:17:46] John Hirsh: I want to reach out to a thousand people connect with. As soon as they show an interest level, then we’re following up with that call. We’re putting them at the top. Some other people, maybe we put ’em in a nurture campaign. We have to be careful because the AI tool can find what you want. You can set it up to find all your leads, but if your message is, eh, it’s okay, it’s blah, nobody’s going to convert. So you still need those major pieces in what you’re trying to do. It’s not just the AI tool can do everything for me. It’s going to make that BDR way more efficient. It’s going to make that salesperson way more efficient. But that salesperson, that BDR still needs to do their job and they need to be supported to make sure their messaging’s coming across, they’re hitting the three bullet point items on why the person should move forward. They still have their business case studies to follow up with. And if you don’t have those pieces, AI’s just going to give you a very large list that you don’t execute on.

[00:18:43] Lee Brumbaugh: And so much of that too, I think is the connection point, right? Is again, this is somebody that is a past client with us, we’re connected on LinkedIn. So if I get an email with somebody that’s saying, Hey, I see you’re connected to John, great guy at nd, I know I have to respond to that, right? So much is that the connected point? Some of the things I see with business owners when they first start and they hire that sales rep, it’s like, well, I want them just on new, right? I’m like, well throw the yellow pages at it. It’s like, why not give them some of your existing customers where we can drum up referrals, where we can go to our existing base, say, who are you connected with? So much of it is the referral and helping, right? We helped this customer achieve this. Who else do you know that would need this same type of results and success? And so if we do that, we’re bringing value. We’re not just doing, like you said, features and benefits.

[00:19:33] John Hirsh: I have seen some AI tools and you’ve probably got these emails before where they might say, Hey, we’re from the same school. If you mention, Hey, I know so-and-so, then I’m definitely kind of interested. But some of them are like, Hey, we both live on planet Earth. Hey, I also enjoy breathing oxygen. And what I’ve seen with a couple AI tools is they’ll get that first line personalized where they’ll say, Hey, congratulations on a recent award or congratulations for this. But then they just give the same generic message to everyone in the list. So some people are calling that personalized, and what I’m looking at is tools that I can get hyper personalized where I know what type of customer prospect you are. I know your background. I was working with a client that does some work in the safety space and unfortunately they do too much where they might tell everyone about a construction safety thing.

[00:20:28] John Hirsh: Well, if you’re in manufacturing or you’re in utilities, you don’t care. You didn’t interact with that. So when I’m looking at or a lot of these tools where I could hyper personalize that message and make sure that it connects with that specific person, that specific buyer influence, because I’m just going to get a better conversion rate. I don’t want to talk to the CFO about operational issues and I don’t want to talk to the COO about financial issues. I need to make sure that that resonates. And the first thing I need to do is take the data that I have and segment those out correctly because there’s just way too many, Hey, I personalized this piece, but then the next two paragraphs get the same message and it doesn’t land, and people are saying, oh, well the AI tool didn’t work. It’s like, well, your messaging’s not working and you got to make sure you’re doing more than just finding something online to say, we’re both in the state of Indiana. Okay. I’d rather you come to me and say, Hey, John, here’s something that’s tied to your background as well as what you’re doing today that can drive an outcome. Those are the ones where I want to reach out and I will spend the time to set up a call if it piques my interest. So we have to make sure we’re still doing those parts of it and not just rely on the tools.

[00:21:42] Lee Brumbaugh: John, so we’ve talked a lot about the good, right? So we’ve talked a little bit about the bad, but anything that bad looks like or any story you’ve got of like, we used AI and thought it was going to be able to make us a widget instead it made us ice cream cone. Anything that stands out that you’ve seen that was bad from the horror story of what it looked like?

[00:22:03] John Hirsh: I think the big thing for me is if you don’t have the basics down, I would be careful. I would put the basics in place first before you just automatically put ai. And I think what I have seen for some companies is where they don’t have the same sales process. Every salesperson does something different. They quote totally different this way or that way. They might have problems of actually executing because the salespeople are kind of just doing what they want to do and throwing AI on top of that, you’re just asking for a recipe for disaster. So my big thing is we’ve got plenty of tools we can add, but we’ve got to get the basics down. We’ve got to make sure we have a solid strategy. We know that at every portion of our sales stage, what are our tasks and what are our exit criteria?

[00:22:51] John Hirsh: I don’t have salespeople saying, oh yeah, we’re going to put this one in negotiation, but they haven’t done some of the things ahead of time. So I’m a big person on, hey, let’s get the discipline around our sales process first. Make sure that we’ve vetted that out before we put in a tool. If I put in a tool to a bad process, I’m probably not going to get great results. And I’m almost just, let’s start with that piece and build our foundation on what we need to do as an organization to improve our sales. What I have seen with some people is you got to be real careful with ai. I was helping one of my enterprise guys with a proposal. I was actually putting the proposal in. He was really heads down, he had a lot going on. He had to figure out our costing, our packaging and all that.

[00:23:34] John Hirsh: I said, I’ll give you a hand with this one. So we put the proposal, we put the background, we put the disc profiles in and the buyers and I started to build out my proposal. I started to build out a compliance matrix and it said, we have a 98% on-time shipment. And I was like, where did you get that from? I was like, well, I didn’t have one, so I put it in there. So sometimes AI is trying to solve problems for us and doesn’t realize that, hey, maybe I need a level of accuracy. So I think you have to be really careful. As I gave that over to the enterprise rep, I said, this thing’s probably 90% done, but you got to read through every little bit and make sure that we’re not saying something that isn’t true. I think you have to be very, very careful because some people are too reliant on the AI piece. Hey, I’m being so efficient. But when you have that final product that’s going to that customer, make sure you’re putting eyes on it, you’re reviewing it, it’s true to who you are as a company and what you can perform. Because sometimes AI will do its job, it’s going to get you a great number, but maybe it’s not accurate or you need to dig in deeper to find the real number. You got to be careful with things like that.

[00:24:44] Lee Brumbaugh: No, absolutely. I agreed not only from just that human touch, but even you said the setup. The great thing about the CRMs we use are, yes, they’re easy to set up, but you can go too fast, you can get too many tools. I actually had, this was a few years ago, but I had a business owner and he went for me at two sales reps. He was going to five, and I was looking at working with him and we were going to do, he is like, well, let me get this all set up and then we’ll kind of bring you in. And he didn’t have a CRM at that time. And so he went in and he went in and he got HubSpot and he went from two to five reps. I said, you need to use Amplify. You need to use a recruiting arm.

[00:25:21] Lee Brumbaugh: You need to get this right. He’s like, oh, no, we’ll find it through Indeed. And so he hires three reps all at once and two of the reps are not working out. So again, he starts putting it into CHE GPT, and this is early. And so he is putting it in and he’s like, this rep’s not succeeding, not doing well. And so all this comes up. Well, the problem is when he did HubSpot, he linked in his email and all those types of things. So he emails, he starts putting this in, and he emails this to myself and another couple other contacts. Well, we were in his CRM and he’d linked it over. So now the rep goes in and is seeing, Mike got seeing the contact, and so he is reading about should I be fired? I mean, it was just the point is, understand your tools, set it up properly, get somebody that can help you with guidance there. I think so much of what we do at Sales Xceleration, the value is picking the right tools, helping the setup, getting the right partner in, because again, you got to do this, right? If you get it right at the onset, you get that foundation. If you don’t, you’ve got tools that don’t work, they get dusty, your sales reps aren’t using ’em, and it can be so much more of a negative than a positive.

[00:26:25] John Hirsh: I think when you’re coming in and you might be making change, you got to understand where people are. And some folks, you got to breadcrumb ’em to that, right? Let’s just take a step forward. And that earlier client that I mentioned in the beginning, they were using no ai. By the end of it, they were using fireflies, they were using Gamma, they were using the HubSpot prospecting agent. They still have a ton more we can do. They have some great data, and we’re likely to go very much deeper, but at a minimum, they’re moving in that direction. That’s one thing I’ve had some people ask is I have some things where I’m like, you’re frankly not ready for AI yet. We have to fix these things first, and then once we fix these things, we’ll build an outbound engine. That’s going to be great, but it’s not going to do very well if every person has a different pitch and people are making promises they shouldn’t and we’re not being disciplined and we are not putting things in our CRM and we’re not asking the right questions and we’re not trained to the right spot.

[00:27:25]  John Hirsh: I mean, AI’s just going to amplify a bad process and it’s not going to really get you what you want. Right?

[00:27:31] Lee Brumbaugh: Yeah. And good hooks too. At the end of the day, if you’re selling something, 1 0 1, basics of sales, if you’ve got a product, if you’ve got a service and you don’t have differentiators in the marketplace that actually are meaningful to your customer, it doesn’t work. I’m a big fan of the story brain concept and building your storyboard and those types of things, because if you’re not allowing, if you’re not the hero that’s solving for what the customer’s looking for, if you’re just features and benefits that don’t resonate, you put that into chat GBT all you want, it’s not going to work. So when you think about the last area, when you think about where sales is heading, anything that you’re excited for keeps you up at night. Where do you think we’ll be 10 years from now? From a sales perspective, where do you think some of the shifting landscaping is going?

[00:28:14] John Hirsh: Going? Well, it’s interesting. Given my advanced age, I went through before the digital world or the first computers coming out, or when the internet was very technical, people sharing manuals online. I think AI is going to be probably the biggest change that we’ve ever had in terms of the way that we do business. I think there’s good and bad about that. I think we got to be careful in terms of what actually do we want as people to be doing on the sales front, you might be the same way, Lee, we see these things. Oh, I would’ve loved to have this. My first proposals were coming across mailed in, or when we finally had fax machines and I had to take a fax that was on a paper roll and cut up the 60 pages and Xerox it five times for everybody, better review it.

[00:29:06]  John Hirsh: So you see these tools and you’re like, wow, what are they going to do? But it still goes back to, I think people are going to crave on the sales side that human connection and that human connection leads to that business connection. Everybody at that company, people like to do work with people. And I think if you’re selling something that’s a lower cost item, I see a lot of things being able to be converted and handled directly by ai. But on that sales front, if you have some level of complexity and you can put something together like your customer support, good example is Chick-fil-A. A lot of people like to go to Chick-fil-A, they’re right there. You got a person, they say, my pleasure. Versus now you go to McDonald’s and maybe you’re just getting your own order on a tab and it comes out.

[00:29:52]  John Hirsh: And I think people are going to look more for that personalized type of touch from their suppliers and from their vendors and things. So I think we’ve got to use the AI tools to really help us do the mundane things that frankly we didn’t really like to do. I mean, it’s not that fun to build out a list and tweak a list and do that type of stuff. I know good salespeople and good BDRs love that conversation. They love to connect with people. They love to solve people’s problems. I saw an email the other day that was just glowing to one of my salespeople. I mean, that makes us all feel good. They helped them through a problem, and they’re going to be a long time customer for us. So I kind of see, I think 10 years is going to be a little crazy.

[00:30:34]  John Hirsh: I think it’s going to be crazy even in two, three years because the AI technology has got that hockey stick growth. We just have to understand where we’re applying it and where we’re not. But how do we still keep that human connection to our customers? How do we make sure that we have authenticity in what we do? And I think the companies that can continue to do that are going to be the winners. I think the companies that are applying AI tools across all areas of their business are going to be the winners, but you have to make sure you’re authentic. You have to make sure that you have your niche. If I put all these great tools in and I’m just like everybody else, I’m just not going to see the same growth. I still have to make sure that I’m solving a problem for my customers, and it’s something that I’m good at. What I’m doing, I’m delivering on that. Customer support and customer success I think are going to continue to grow because the winners are going to be people, the ones that take care of their customers.

[00:31:29] Lee Brumbaugh: John, again, there’s so much that we’ve taken away from this conversation today, but if there’s one tangible area that you think an owner in the SMB really want them to walk away from this podcast today that they can actually put into action, anything that resonates with you from that perspective?

[00:31:45] John Hirsh: Yeah, I think the big thing is we are at a massive change in terms of what AI is going to do for sales as well as throughout our business. So I’d say just continue to learn and continue to go out to people that have proven results, have conversations, talk to people. I have a ton of conversations with folks on what I’ve seen that works and what I’ve seen that doesn’t. And I think you have to continue to learn through that because you’re either growing or you’re dying. And in this space, if you’re just standing still, you’re going to be falling behind your competitors. So I would tell those SMB companies, dig in. Find that person that you can find value from. Have conversations on it. Spend some time learning about these. They don’t have to be overly scary tools from a technology standpoint. There’s a lot of stuff going on in the background, but get somebody there that can help you walk you down that so you could be successful.

[00:32:41] Lee Brumbaugh: So thank you, John for joining us. This has been Sales Against the Odds. Tune back in two weeks. We will have a senior EOS implementer that will be joining us. We’ll be talking about building your entrepreneurial toolkit and how that ties into sales success. Thank you for joining us, and we’ll talk to you soon. You’ve been listening to Sales Against the Odds. Be sure to hit that follow button so you never miss an episode. And if you want more resources on scaling sales, check out our website at salesxceleration.com.