Speaker 0: Hi, everybody. Thank you for coming to MarDreamin’. Uh, my name is Richard Harris. This session is on a Smarter Selling, Faster Closing, AI Powered CRM Revolution. Uh, really excited to talk about this topic. Uh, I actually yesterday, we’ll talk about it a little bit today. I literally just saw the new release from, uh, one of our our big CRM folks called maybe you’ve heard of them called Salesforce. Uh, so just wanna let you know that I’ll share a little bit about what I saw, and it’s pretty cool. But wanna get into this. Um, unfortunately, my partner, Gabby, had a family emergency, not urgent family emergency, so everything’s okay. So she won’t be joining us, but, um, very interactive. I want this to be an engaging session for people. So please, um, use the chat. I can monitor questions, ask questions, all that kind of stuff. I I wanna make this about you. It’s not about me even though I can be long winded. Uh, I would love for people to first go in and just put in the chat where you’re dialing in from, uh, just so I always like to see where people are. I’m in the Bay Area, but, uh, people are here, would love to see that. And we will go ahead and get started.

So, you know, thanking, obviously, our sponsors, um, with the spa, Stencil, StoryLane, Circante for hosting the spa, and Salesforce, of course, for Marjorie. Really appreciate them doing this and helping get good information out to everybody. I hope everybody’s enjoying what they’ve learned so far. So here’s our agenda for today. Uh, where are we with AI? Where are we with AI in the CRM? Where are we with AI? Well, we ain’t there yet. Like, that’s the first thing to know. Um, we’re gonna go through some of these things and, again, ask questions. Feel free to ask any question you want, and we will go from there. If there’s something that’s not on this list that you’re like, hey, Richard. What’s your opinion of? Let me know. I’ll jump in. I got lots of thoughts.

So here’s the deal. Here’s why we’re not there yet. Right now, it is spray and pray still. Even with the advent of AI, we’re still seeing this. And, yes, that is specifically typed p r e y because it feels like we are stalking our prospects. Right? It’s taking I think the last data I saw was 15 touches just to set a meeting. Now every touch isn’t an email. Sometimes it’s LinkedIn likes or LinkedIn comments or connection requests and those things, but it’s still a lot. And we’re still preying on people. Um, part of that also is I think is, you know, maybe the the goals are still a little aggressive and it’s always a challenge in in, um, the SaaS industry, particularly startups, to go after those aggressive goals.

Um, the other thing that I’m not seeing well yet in AI, it’s getting better, is the humanity. I’m a big fan that you’ve gotta be a human to sell. We are being conditioned, and we have been for decades now, to not talk to salespeople. Right? Think about Amazon and Best Buy and all those places and any other online place you love to shop, eBay or, you know, Etsy, any of those fun places. But they can lack a certain level of humanity. But when we do find something in that business to consumer world, it is connecting with our humanity. Right? It’s it’s meeting a specific need. It’s positioned the right way, all those things. In the SaaS world, it still lacks humanity. Yes. We’re trying to get better at customization and personalization. It’s still not there. And if you sound like a cookie cutter, then that’s not good. I’m a big fan in sales, by the way. Don’t get me wrong. I’m a huge fan of scripts. I think you need to know your stuff inside and out. What I don’t want is for anybody to sound scripted. This is why actors are so good. They have a script, but they don’t sound scripted. So that’s where the humanity and the authenticity I feel is still being lost.

I also think that when you’ve got a larger consensus by, right, when you’ve got a larger group making the decision, AI is not gonna solve those communication problems at the finite level, at the very specific level. At a high level, it can. It can send some messages, some value adds, and help with your PowerPoint, make it better, and do some little customization. But in that human to human conversation, which is still a part of it, AI is not gonna get there yet, not for a while.

We’re gonna talk a little bit about, you know, understanding between a a sales strategy versus a sales plan. Right? A strategy is how you approach the market. The plan is how you actually execute. And, again, I think the AI can help more on the strategy side of helping figure out the best way. Here’s my ideal customer profile. Here’s my verticals. Here’s my average sales price. Here’s my value props. Right? It can help formulate a strategy and create some talking points and, yes, scripts as long as you don’t sound scripted. And it can help create a sales plan or maybe a process, but it can execute those things. Not yet. Right? In a transactional world, it can. Right? If I’m going as a business owner to buy insurance because I’m a sole proprietor, I probably don’t need to talk to a salesperson, although I probably want to because I don’t wanna get screwed by insurance anymore than I have to. Um, so there’s a difference in here, and this is where AI isn’t there.

And then we’ve created a lot of false belief systems. We have created this world where we think this is going to solve the problem when in fact it hasn’t. Right? We think, you know, we saw this with, you know, all the, uh, sales engagement platforms. Right? Well, that just increased spray and pray. It helped a little bit. It helped with some quality, helped maintain the process, but AI hasn’t necessarily taken over yet. There’s a couple of tools out there that I like, um, that are doing it, and, um, I’m happy. I hope I’m allowed to say it, but one of them is called reggie.ai. They actually do work on crafting that message the right way in the way the person wants to see it and hear it and read it. But we’re still not there yet in terms of what AI is gonna do for us. It’s coming, though. It’s coming.

So this is what I like about AI. Right? I do like the automation when it’s done right. When it’s done wrong, not a good thing. Right? And we’ve seen that. That’s the spray and pray approach. The cool thing about AI, particularly in messaging, is there’s this new eighty twenty rule. I’ve actually gone and and used AI to write some blog post, and it spits it out immediately. And it makes sure it’s got the right SEO keywords, and I make it, say make it sound like Richard Harris from the Harris Consulting Group. And I put my LinkedIn profile and my website in there, and it gets it about 80% right. But now I might spend forty five minutes on a blog post versus an hour. But those forty five minutes, I’m using my creative brain. I’m adjusting the words. I’m making it sound more like me. Right? Like one thing kicked out and it said, what’s up peeps? It’s your boy Richard Harris. And I’m like, I’m casual, but I’m not that casual. So I had to go check that. And then I have to make sure it aligns with my thought processes around certain topics as I’ve uploaded it. So it’s allowing the creative brain to work better. And I like that in the sales process as well. If I can say to it, here’s my demo. Here’s who I’m pitching to. Tell me the highlights if these are their main pains. How should I say it based on this persona? It’ll spit my demo back out to me, but then I’m not having to think as hard. It’s done the heavy lifting for me and I can use much more of my brain for the creative thinking. So that’s where I really like AI. Right?

And I think I won’t speak for marketing, but I wonder if that’s the same approach. If anybody here is from marketing who wants to chime in, I’d love to hear that. But I’m hoping that’s what’s happening is that marketing is helping you craft those messages and then allow you to be more creative and use that creative brain for you. You know, there is a mediocrity challenge. Like, if, you know, everything if everybody’s rushing to everything, then it sounds mediocre. It doesn’t sound unique. It doesn’t sound specific. It does sound scripted. So that’s a challenge we have, but those who embrace AI will get rid of the mediocre people. Right? It’s look. I’ve look. I’ve been around a while. I’ve been selling since the nineteen hundreds. Alright? Late nineteen hundreds. But I remember when typing wasn’t a requirement. I remember when emails couldn’t even be tracked, so they didn’t count towards your prospecting because all we could count were phone calls. And there were a lot of people who had to hunt and pack on the keyboard. I’m not kidding. You know, it was that way. And those people, unless they were really good, got weeded out because they couldn’t embrace just the technology. The same thing is going to happen with AI. You either better embrace it and learn about it or you’re going to get left behind. And that’s just the way it’s going to be.

I think I read a study. I can’t remember if it was Gartner or Harvard that said by 2030, like, 70% of the jobs that will exist in 2030 don’t even exist now. We don’t even know what they are. So this concern about being replaced, which will happen, also provides some other opportunity for different types of roles to open up. Right? You know, I can have a sales ops person and a sales engineer build out my AI bot, but if they don’t know how to actually talk to customers, well, as a salesperson, I’m going to that’s going to be my sweet spot. How do I help train the conversational side of things? So it’s really important that we understand that. One thing I want to make sure is that if people have questions, please put them in the Q and A. I’m happy to pause for a second and see if anybody has a question and take any feedback. Um, so, you know, just feel free to jump right in. Otherwise, I will continue going.

So here’s the other thing that I love about AI, and this was talked to me by a friend of mine named Ralph Barcey. If if you are the type of person who likes to follow folks on LinkedIn, um, obviously, I’d appreciate a follow, but Ralph Varcy is a really smart guy. And he said, you know, for the longest time, sales leaders have been asked to report the weather. Yes. We’re supposed to have a forecast, but that forecast was based on reporting the current weather conditions and then making certain assumptions. AI is now gonna be able to predict the weather. Right? We’re going to have better data. The fact that we can now use AI to get all the relevant conversations into your CRM is critical. Right? So it’s going to help predict the weather, not just report the weather. They’re both valuable. They’re both meaningful. They’re both necessary. But I think that’s a really strong play. And I would say the same thing applies on the marketing side of predicting the weather of demand gen, lead gen. Right? Understanding what are the right white papers? What are they resonating? What’s resonating, who are they resonating with title, role, vertical industry, what’s happening by inputting 10 k reports from large companies, can we create better content, better sales conversations through the advent and use of AI, which is where I feel like we are at the moment. Right? We’re we’re we’re uploading all the data, and we’re trying to get there. Uh, so I think it’s super, super important.

The other piece I wanna talk about is that, you know, because of AI, there’s no more silo heroes. Right? That’s not my phrase. I I learned it a couple of weeks at a conference. But, you know, we always talk about sales is siloed from customer success, which is siloed from marketing, which is siloed from product marketing and even engineering. Well, now with all this data. Right. All this data that’s in there. Everybody’s going to have access to that data. Right, without having to go look for it. That’s gonna be the best part. Again, we’re gonna be able to use the tools and the AI to predict the weather and have that weather reported to us by the machine better. So I think it’s a really, really important thing to think about as we as we look at this. The one thing that I will encourage people to think about and talk about in your CRM is everybody I know is recording their calls and conversations and uploading them into the CRM and they’re gonna use that in the AI. Here’s what it’s not getting recorded, and it’s about 30% of the conversation. What about your own internal conversations, your pipeline review, your work with your product development team? You’re on Zoom calls. Hopefully, you’re recording them. Why are those not getting uploaded into the CRM and uploaded into that opportunity within your CRM? Because that affects the forecast probability. Right? You get on a call, the simple or version. Right? You get on a call with a sales leader, and you’re like, okay. Here’s where the pipeline is. Here are the four deals. What are the things we need to do to try to make this deal come forward? Right? Are we gonna offer a discount? Which discount? Are we gonna hold steady to our pricing? Are we gonna offer extra months? Are we gonna offer, you know, extra service? Are we gonna waive the service fee? All that stuff affects the ability to close, but we’re not capturing it where it could be analyzed and utilized the best way to help predict the weather. So again, these are just little things where I think there are places we can get better to help us reach where we wanna go. So it’s it’s, you know, it’s not hard. We just have to stop and think about it in unique use cases. And again, if I’ve got this data and I’m looking at everything the system can share with me about how to move a deal forward, well, then aren’t I spending more time getting creative and thinking about it versus having to download the information to a sales leader and then start to banter around? What if the machine will give us the topic to banter, and then we’re being more creative? That is where I’m really excited about what can be done and where I think we’re that’s sort of the next evolution for me. That’s where it is. That’s where we’re headed on the sales side of things.

All right, let’s talk about AI coaching. Um, so yes, AI can do some sales training. Again, this goes back to this generational thing, by the way. The gen z’s and the millennials who I think the millennials are turning 40 now, which is gonna sort of blew my mind when I heard that, but it’s true. They’re more digitally native. Right? So to send them into an online training thing may or may not be the worst thing, but I don’t particularly like it because I think human to human interaction is better. But maybe it’s generational, maybe it’s not. I don’t know. The coaching piece is amazing. Right? So I literally saw, you know, um, agent force yesterday. And look, I’m a salesperson. I am not a programmer. I’m not a developer. I’m not a go in and build tons of deep, deep, deep, deep sales reports. I can do some basic stuff. And I now within the CRM system, within Salesforce, I think it’s coming out next month, um, I can go build a bot that my reps can role play with. So imagine I’m hiring SDRs. Before they get on the phone, after all my training, they could then role play a cold call. They could role play a discovery call. Maybe I’m an advanced rep. Maybe I’m a senior rep and I’m going and selling to Fortune five hundred and I got to go negotiate with procurement. Trust me, nobody teaches people how to negotiate with procurement. Until recently, I do, but it’s not there. But now I can role play that scenario, and I can even tweak the buyer within the agent to be easy, medium, or hard. Right? Are they gonna be cold or are they gonna be warm? So that my reps can get better and better and better before they ever get on the phone. So this is a huge thing. This is Agent Force with Salesforce. Um, there’s a lot of tools out there that are doing this, and the challenge is gonna be it’s just one more tool. And trust me, Salesforce, they’re, you know, the the endpoint solutions are gonna be struggling. Right? Salesforce is coming after that. Here’s what’s happening in the big business world. Salesforce can grow revenue. HubSpot could grow revenue. Anybody can grow revenue with net new clients. However, there is a finite world. And everything that Salesforce has built and then put into the App Store, they’re gonna go start to steal that revenue. If you’re an endpoint solution, it’s very possible something like this can come in and take that away because there is tool overload. How many windows does a rep have up? Right. That’s all critical thinking. That’s all what’s about to happen. So this is gonna happen.

The other thing I like about sales with AI is that it’s gonna prioritize the deal. It’s gonna give strategy, which we talked about. It’s gonna improve the buyer’s experience. I have a firm belief and I you know, a little bit controversial in the sense of I do not believe there’s a buyer’s journey. There’s no such thing. There’s only a buyer’s experience through the seller’s journey. How many apps do you have on your phone that you never used because it was terrible? I go and Google something. That might be the first step. I Google some solution. Well, from there on, it’s a sales and marketing journey. It is not a buyer’s journey. It’s an experience. Why did they click on my link versus everybody else? My ad versus everybody else? What happened when they hit the right landing page? How often did they abandon on that page? That’s all about the experience. So if you’re not giving them a good experience, you’re gonna you’re gonna get hurt, and AI can help improve that. Personalizing the communications, teaching me how to say things in a way that Sarah wants to hear it, not the way Richard wants to hear it because I’m different than Sarah. That’s very important to understand. It’s gonna enhance our sales cycles. It’s gonna improve our discovery conversations and conversions because we’re gonna have over time the best conversation intelligence with those tools that tell us what to use when we’re at a certain stage with a certain person or on a certain opportunity. So overall, it just drives the entire buyer’s experience.

So I know we’re getting sort of towards the end, we got about eight or nine minutes left. I will gladly take any questions. Um, things I would want you to think about. The new eighty twenty rule. Right? Uh, 80% creativity now. Right? Predicting the weather, upskilling is required. Right? We’re gonna have to teach our reps how to do this, and we’re gonna improve the buyer’s experience. And, yes, it’s true. This entire deck was built with AI aside from the graphics that was given to Buzzfire, you know, by the by the group. But I plugged this stuff in. I use Claude, and I said, build me a presentation around these topics, around this, based on this, and this is what it spit out. And I tweaked it using creativity. That’s where I think AI is right now. And it’s gonna keep going and it’s gonna keep growing and it’s gonna keep going forward. And I’m I’m excited about the future, nervous like the rest of us. But if we don’t change, if we don’t adapt, we’re gonna get left behind. We don’t we don’t really have a choice. So, uh, thank you for your time. I appreciate it. I’ll certainly hang out for questions if there are people here, um, and we will go from there. Sarah, I’ll turn it back to you if you need to take control.

Speaker 1: Yes. Thank you, Richard. Um, that’s crazy to now sitting through this and understand that all of that was built with AI. Um,

Speaker 0: I’ve seen

Speaker 1: them before. So

Speaker 0: I I rarely I rarely build a dapper, write a blog post without using some other tool. I I still spend not I probably spend 80% of the time that I would if I did it fresh, but I’m being more creative. Right? I’m not trying to build the plane while I’m flying it. Plane’s already built, and now I can just tweak it. Right? Like, that’s my whole thing. Um, I got a I did get a question of, uh, from someone that said, you know, when do I think the SDRs are gonna be replaced? Right? Like, that’s the big deal. That’s what’s happening. I think that’s gonna be based on buyer behavior as much as anything. I think that the challenge right now is we hear that, hey. We gotta break through all the noise, and this is what AI won’t fix. AI won’t fix the volume of noise. Noise is about volume. People are getting inundated in their inbox. So I could have AI write the best subject line, the best email, and all those things. But if it’s one of 25 emails, you know, maybe it’s gonna be a percentage better because the subject line’s better, but you’re gonna have to find a different way to break through. And this is where the human element comes in. And so it’s gonna be about networking. So imagine I have an SDR, and I’ve got, you know, 10,000, 50,000 contacts on LinkedIn. Or, hey. I’m trying to target this company. I’m gonna have my SDR go troll my LinkedIn profile or the people I wanna talk to profile to see where they can find a common connection and see if I can get a referral in. Right? It’s called network led selling. Using your network to break through the noise, not the volume. So the SDR role is gonna shift. I do think they will start to be reduced in quantity, but what we’re teaching them is gonna be very, very different because that’s what’s gonna be necessary. I would even have my SDR log in to my LinkedIn and let them send messages on my behalf to ask for a referral for people. That’s where I really think the the SDR role is headed right now. Um, eventually, particularly in the transactional world, the SDR might be replaced. There will be some SDR leader who understands how to navigate the machine, and there might be a couple of reps to handle the one offs and understand the messaging. But I don’t know that we’re gonna need, you know, teams of 20 or 30 SDRs in the next three or four years. We’ll we’ll see. We’ll see what happens. But, uh, but that’s what I’m seeing right now in the TVs. So

Speaker 1: Yeah. And for those who watch are watching, if you didn’t get a chance yesterday to be at the panel discussion that we had yesterday about AI. A lot of what Richard is saying here too, um, was discussed specifically, Richard, about the the SDRs and how that will shift. Um, really talking

Speaker 0: about out of that? Yeah. Just No. No. Yeah.

Speaker 1: What we heard there a lot was exactly what you’re saying is the shift to more a strategic role. You know, it’s gonna be less the, um, in the weeds kind of repetitive tasks. Tasks and execution. Yeah. Task and execution and more so going towards a a straight a creative and strategic mindset of the how, um, and understand, like you’re saying, like, putting that human element back into it. Mhmm. Uh, we talked a little bit too about we all have, you know, PTSD, I think, at one point or another as a marketer where we ran a segmentation list and that one got through. Right? So that that part’s not gonna go away with AI. It might get smarter and it might, you know, reduce that UGG here and there. The data is the data. But having us to be able to just lean more into that strategic role, put that human element to it, like you mentioned, having a script but not sounding scripted. Yeah.

Speaker 0: Yeah.

Speaker 1: I think that’s gonna be huge.

Speaker 0: Yeah. And I think I think the SDR role is I still think it’s gonna eventually become tactical again. It’s just new tactics. So right now, it is strategic. Right? And there is this opportunity for us to actually hear what’s happening with the SDRs, right, to understand what’s happening. And by the way, if I am an SDR listening to this or I run an SDR team, I would be trying to get into an AE role and getting upmarket as fast as possible. I would be trying to get into midmarket and enterprise as fast as possible because that’s where I think the role is gonna last the longest before it’s replaced.

Speaker 1: Yeah. I think there’s a lot too to say. Like, we talked a little bit too yesterday about not necessarily replacing, but just shifting those rules too. We talked, um, at Circante here. We’re we’re having our own custom, like, BDR, SDR, um, GPTs that we’ve been building.

Speaker 0: Mhmm. And kind of

Speaker 1: building that. And I see a a shift in that role too is, like, you’re almost managing those bots in those roles. Right?

Speaker 0: Yeah. I’ve I’ve got that too. Like, I’ve got a bot on my site that’ll give you career advice, sales advice, how to penetrate, how to train. You know, here’s a topic. Help me learn it. And, um, I agree. Like, there is this other piece in there that’s much more strategic and fun, uh, in my opinion because it’s new. Uh, but I I agree. I love hearing that people have that and that you can now build it. It’s not that hard. Right? Like, Agent Force, I can go build my agent in Salesforce within the instance, and it’s gonna pull the data from my CRM on those deals to help me practice the role play based on that particular opportunity, which I think is fabulous. Right? So, um, um, I know I know we’re at time. Um, yes, by the way, anybody watching, that’s my real cell phone number. And I know it because it’s the one my kids ignore when I call from it. Um, having anybody has two teenage boys, please let me know. I’m open to all kinds of advice. But, uh, happy to help. Happy to have conversations with people. Um, just happy to, you know, you know, bounce ideas and see where it goes. And, uh, I I thank you guys. Thank you so much for having me. And and, Sarah, thank you for having me and asking me to do this. Uh, really appreciate it.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Awesome. Thank you, Rich.

Speaker 0: Alright. Bye, everybody.

Speaker 1: Bye.