How AI Revolutionizes B2B Sales Outreach with Usman Sheikh

Welcome to the B2B Growth Blueprint podcast, where we talk with entrepreneurs, founders, and leaders at B2B services, tech, and SaaS companies to learn the systems and processes they've used to create success for their business. We'll also learn from marketing and sales experts to provide insights to help you grow your business. I'm your host, Mark Osborne, and the podcast is brought to you by Modern Revenue strategies and their 10x ROI B2B growth guarantee. Schedule a free diagnostic call to learn the fastest path to double your B2B revenues in just 90 days. Hello and welcome to another episode of the B2B Growth Blueprint podcast. I'm your host, Mark Osborne, and today I'm very excited to welcome my guest, Usman Shaikh. Now I'm gonna read Usman's bio because he's done a lot of stuff. He's the visionary founder and CEO of xIQ. xIQ is an award-winning B2B sales and marketing platform that uses the fusion of generative AI, behavioral science, and ChatGPT to revolutionize the industry with its personality-driven sales approach. Now we're gonna talk a lot about how the solution does this and sort of the, the pluses and minuses of it and sort of the future of using these types of tools. As a futurist and design thinker, Usman aims to humanize B2B sales and marketing by leveraging generative AI with psychology. With xIQ, sellers can understand the mindset of prospective buyers and hyper-personalize engagement at every stage of the sales cycle. Before xIQ, Usman held various global roles at SAP, including Vice President of Corporate Development, Product Management, Sales Enablement, and digital commerce. Usman frequently serves as a guest lecturer on artificial intelligence and B2B sales and marketing at renowned business schools such as the University of Texas, University of Wisconsin, University of Alabama, LSU, Louisiana State University, and Clemson University. So Usman, welcome to the show.

Mark, thank you very much. That was quite a mouthful of an introduction, but thanks for going through that. Oh yeah, you can breathe now.

Well, thank you for joining us. I'm really excited and we've been chatting a little bit So I'm very excited to sort of share some of these topics with our audience. Before we kind of jump in on some of the specific things about xIQ, just tell us a little bit about sort of your journey and how you came here and what you're really excited about there at xIQ.

Yeah. So let me work my way backwards. So xIQ is a Silicon Valley-based AI startup. Our focus is on introducing generative AI solutions to solve B2B sales and marketing solutions. And a couple of unique things that we have built into our IP are the ability to incorporate behavioral science and AI to interpret the mindset of your prospective buyers using behavioral science, proven, you know, psychology to help you understand the mindset of your prospective buyer. And that sets the stage for how we do our sales, how we do our marketing, how do we do our demand generation, our outreach, our communications. Secondly, we can feed the sales rep with up-to-the-minute information about the company and industry so it can help them attain much more strategic level of understanding of what is happening at their client. And thirdly, we can help incorporate the customer's own content and collateral so it can infuse the one voice the factual information and correct statistics and descriptions of their products in any outbound sales communication that may take place. This is what ExIQ is and how I got to ExIQ. I used to work for the world's largest B2B software company called SAP.

Sure.

I held many global roles with them. I built their digital demand generation marketplace for them and did product management for them. And working with sales guys, I learned to really respect what they did, their professions. Good salespeople are really masters of the craft and they're very intelligent. And I wanted to see how we could take the wisdom and the intelligence of these top 1% performers and really package it and make it available to the next 99%. And that's where ExIQ came about. We started looking at the best practices that the top salespeople do. And how could we use AI behavioral science to help those sales reps that don't have the time or don't have the skill sets necessary or don't have the personal social networks to get this information to help them perform at the same level. And before that, University of Michigan and a couple of other companies as well.

Interesting. So it's so interesting that you talk about some of these really sort of important and foundational things. One of the things that we see that's so important in you know, sort of crafting an ideal customer profile for, you know, sort of the target accounts that you go after is to go beyond just sort of the firmographic descriptions, but actually get into the context that they're operating in. And so if you look in, well, you know, we tend to do well with companies that are, you know, they're trying to react to a market contraction. And so our solution tends to work really well for companies dealing with that versus, you know, other solutions that might do better with, you know, companies that are in a more stable position or whatever it might be. And so having that up-to-date information about the company is really sort of vital towards aligning to that ICP. And then you also talked about sort of the psychographic component. And one of the things that we see when building sort of, you know, buyer personas or buyer avatars, people might call them, of the different members of the buying committee is You want to again go beyond just sort of these descriptive labels of, well, they have this title or they're this age or whatever, they've had this background, but instead get into, you know, what are the personal motivations? Like, what potentially do they get out of, you know, bringing this? Is it more time to do their job, or is it doing their job better, or is it potential promotion or advancement within their career by implementing these types of solutions? So it's really interesting that the software does that. I'm curious, does the software infer from using a, you know, do I feed it, hey, here are the last, you know, 2 years worth of deals that I've done and who the decision makers were on that? Or is there still sort of that marketing synthesis that needs to happen, you know, within the company to say we've done our analysis and we've built an ICP. or, you know, an ideal customer profile. We've done our analysis and we've built buyer personas of the different roles on the buying committee and then feed that into the solution. Talk to us a little bit about that.

So the methodology of building an ideal customer profile stays intact. How you go about building that is where AI can play and xIQ, our platform, can play a critical role. And the agility that provides you can play a very critical role. So first of all, knowing which industry, what scale of business you want to go after is very important. The tool can then start picking it up, right? It can start doing things along the line of like, okay, in this industry we have these companies that meet the demographic, the firmographic requirements that you've put in. Okay, but we need to go beyond that. I want to take this list of 1,000 companies now, I want to prioritize it. So an AI engine like xIQ, what it can do is it can take your solutions, it can go into those 1,000 companies, identify what are their opportunities, what are their pain points, sort them on the basis of which are the ones that have the most pain, biggest opportunity in front of them, and then start to prioritize your account list on that and then help you map your solution into that particular company. And not only can that do that into a particular company, it can also do that into a particular individual. So your ICP can be the ideal customer profile and it could be the ideal candidate, the individual that you're selling, the ideal buyer profile as well. IBP, you could say as well, right? So you can sell into that. That's where the AI can help you collapse the time and do that and kind of map the solution, give you much more precision selling capabilities, right? The second part of the ICP is, Mark, that the ICP changes just as you said, right? Market contractions happen, right? So I'll give you our company's example, right? So we, for example, look at the top 1,000 companies or 2,000 companies and global companies. And then we are looking for indicators like which are the companies that are hiring the most salespeople or are doing account-based marketing initiatives or are In market like that. And suddenly we see that market contractions take place. Now there's a new dimension and urgency that creeps into my ideal customer profile, and that is that companies are laying off salespeople also. That means they're not reducing sales. That means that they're going to have to do more with less people. And that is a direct call to action for xIQ to come in and help, because that's what our platform does. It increases sales productivity. and sales intelligence. So for me to be alerted and be able to use AI to very quickly change my direction to focus on those companies that have an urgency to upgrade is a huge advantage for me. And these are the kind of advantages that having the world's entire information at your fingertips through a large language model gives you, right?

Yeah.

In seconds, you can alter your direction.

So interestingly, we, you and I were chatting a little bit and we talked about, you know, other solutions in the marketplace and especially even sort of ABM orchestration or platform solutions would sort of lean on third-party intent data and say that that's the, you know, the source of this prioritization, the source of this focusing. Talk to us a little bit about, you know, sort of how XiQ either uses or doesn't use third-party intent data and how sort of fits into this puzzle for you.

The buying signal, there are many, many buying signals, okay? Not just somebody going to a search engine and searching using an IP and then being reverse tracked into, hey, this belongs to this company and therefore they're searching this product. That's the inference that's happening with third party. There's a lot of other things also happening today. We're living in a place where corporate officers go and talk about strategic directions of their company. Yeah, and that's a really big signal. We want to attain these goals. We want to downsize. We want to get into a new market. We're opening offices in a new geographical location, right? There's a lot of different signals. You know, we're buying facilities. You know, we're expanding. There's a lot of different signals out there, not just search signals out there. Secondly, there's a very robust news channel, especially around some of the bigger companies and social media channels. And they're constantly dropping hints. So our XIQ focuses primarily on what companies are saying, what is being said about them, what's in the news, and what their executives are saying and what their staff are saying. And we pick up on that and we derive what are some of the directions those companies are taking.

Fantastic.

And we can perform SWOT analysis. We can do that at an industry basis. Again, the advantage of AI is that it can go through a lot of information through a set of filters that you may have placed in front of it and bring you answers in microseconds. And that is the amount of data it has consumed to give you a highly qualified answer is your strategic advantage.

Well, and I can certainly see sort of the use case of You know, someone's selling or marketing a highly technical product that has different sort of applications for different types of companies. So, you know, and I'm just gonna make up some things, but if it's, you know, a type of product that integrates with this, you know, cloud-based storage and they're, well, they're using Amazon storage versus they're using Google storage, that immediately might change some structure. As a salesperson, it's really difficult to memorize all of those specs. But an AI could, you know, sort of immediately sort of say, well, we know this about them. And so sort of queue up different customized specs to sort of feed conversations. Is it doing this in real time? Like, does it listen in to conversations like, you know, call reporting software and sort of provide real-time copiloting to sales conversations? Or is it more sort of the prior research that goes into the setting up for the call, the research?

So good, good point and good use of the word Copilot as well. I want to address that as well. So not in a voice basis at the moment. We're not listening into conversations and taking that, but from a transcript basis we are. But that's not a big gap for us to be able to take that into from a voice, which is something, by the way, we're working on roadmap, just being able to listen into conversations, infer that, and put that together. Having said that, Copilot— copiloting requires a lot of external data input. And the tool Copilot per se is not— it doesn't provide data. It doesn't provide a personality like xIQ does, for example. It doesn't provide information on a company like xIQ. It reads your emails, it can read your documents and can provide value add on that. The difference between them and us is that we can, we pull these things out from other sources and we give you direction based on what are indicators within the market, like actual market indicators, right? And I think those are like, for example, merger and acquisition is going to take place.

Yeah.

The acquiring company is known to chop off a lot of Headcount and those customers that are low-hanging customers. The competitive landscape for the company that is being acquired is certainly very active in going after those customers. And a tool like ours can help you build that list, identify those job titles, identify those individuals. We don't provide contact information, emails and so on, but can get you that far. And then it can help you start putting together unique selling propositions. emails that you're going to write to reach out to them and so on, right? So it takes you and it does that in really, really short, like minutes, right?

But I know one of the big value props is the sort of reduction in sort of research time and, you know, good salespeople are, you know, doing this research to identify, okay, this change is happening in the market, a merger and acquisition. That means that, you know, a bunch of these customers are gonna be You know, sort of on the bubble, but potential targets. So now I gotta go research, well, who should I talk to? And then I gotta research what I'm gonna say to them in order to cut through. There's a lot of tools on the market today, or maybe not a lot, but a lot of buzz around this idea of, you know, oh, we're gonna write all your cold outreach for you. It's gonna be totally personalized. And I've played around with some of them. And, you know, that personalization tends to be you know, either kind of coarse or kind of blunt. Like, it's, it's either like, you know, go Wolverines, because I know you went to a certain university, or it's, you know, how are things in, and it, you know, lists the city that you went to, and, and maybe you don't really live in that city. That's where your headquarters is. And there's a lot of opportunity for mismatch of, of that data. How does xIQ, you know, sort of fit into that kind of customization of that content you talked about?

Great question. So, a number of dimensions to answer that. So, first and foremost, the B2B sales executive's role is changing from being the guy who talks about baseball teams and talks about baseball teams and how's the weather doing and which college you went to, to somebody who's actually a business partner helping you get the 411 of what's happening within the industry. Right.

Yeah.

You find out what's happening with competitors. So our platform takes that approach, you know, a much more mature, adult, strategic, business acumen-oriented approach towards helping our sales professional users use xIQ. And what we do with that is we again merge 3 schools of data. And those are, one, who's the person? What is the EQ level that I should maintain? How should I communicate to them? 2, the business corpus or the company news, what's happening within the industries, the SWOT analysis, the challenges, the pain points, the competitive threats, the opportunities. And 3rd, your own marketing and product information. And so by combining these 3, we can bring the degree of conversation in your outreach, selection of the subject, selection of the call to action within that to a much higher degree. Okay. Does that mean that the sales rep or the human should be moved out? No. Does the practice still exist of using AI? Of course it does. You know, we've seen where people say, hey, just drive, generate an email, and I'll just copy paste first name and then send it out to everybody. That's not the purpose of this thing. The whole idea of personalization is that now in seconds, You can actually write hundreds of emails that are actually specific to Mark, Usman, John, James, Jane, right? All of them get their own version. And that's the change that will happen and will bring about results.

So you talked about something really important that I think will be important for our audience to understand. This is really customized to each individual use case because not only are you looking at, you know, specific buyers for a specific type of solution and specific companies for a specific type of ICP, which is being fed by the company. But you're also sitting on top of proprietary data about a company's own solutions and, you know, how those solutions work. What's the type of, you know, what should companies be thinking about? And here's the reality for our listeners, whether it's xIQ or some other solution that they're gonna embrace, whether it's today or whether it's tomorrow, eventually to stay competitive, they're going to need to learn how to leverage generative AI, large language models, ChatGPT-style interfaces. And so they're gonna need to structure their own content in a way that it can be ingested by and used by those types of solutions. So, you know, for our audience, it's like, wow, this sounds really exciting. I, I'd love to do this. What are the things that they need to make sure they've done to have sort of their house in order? Or for those that are like, I'm not quite there in terms of a size, like, of being able to deploy something like this, but they want to be thinking ahead, what are the kind of things that they should be implementing to make sure that they're ready for this type of solution? You're on mute, Usman.

Sorry, let's go back to the 3s. Cardinalsuites, schools of information, the data knowledge person, Exeque will provide that through public data interpretation, news on companies, information on companies, Exeque will provide that. And the third part is what you're asking, which is what should companies be doing? So today, large language models, which is how, which is how ChatGPT, for example, works. That's what is used to query data.

Yeah.

And, and, and the format of the data is no longer text-based, it's numbers-based. So it's called vectorization. So in order for you to turn a large language model on to be able to read a document very efficiently and bring it in, you need to vectorize that document. So it's, it sounds scarier than it is. In the case of ExaIQ, all you need to do is upload your document. We have an internal process that automatically vectorizes it, and the moment you load it up, it becomes vectorized. Means that I can now ask questions, and that will become a source of information for those answers for you. So, so the, the, the bar on raising the data is not— or incorporating your data into your output and your research is not that difficult. Now, a couple of considerations should be, you should obviously not put in pricing and, you know, proprietary secretive stuff out, just like you wouldn't, but anything you're using in sales enablement, right?

On your website, in pitches.

Your website, etc., you can make it because even there, sales, even your sales team turns there to pick up the language that they're going to use to write communications to. And so if that language is already brought to the foreground and incorporated into their communication, That makes life a lot easier, right? And a lot cleaner and a lot more streamlined terms. The other thing, so bringing that content and making their life not that big a task to do. And then, you know, essentially just, oh, the other thing is, so you talked about ingesting. The other thing is bringing information out. That's very important. So what ExaQ has done is we've created prompt libraries. We don't want sales guys to become prompt engineers. Okay? They shouldn't be figuring out how to speak to Gilroy, which is our AI bot, on how to get an answer. So what we've done is we've created our frequently used prompt library. This is best prompt for writing an email and so on. So what it does is it gets you off ground zero, right? The biggest challenge in B2B selling is coming up with that first idea, the light bulb. Right? It's the ideation. And the ideation happens at different stages. What is my opportunity? What solution should I sell? Who are the buyers? What are their independent goals? What are the opportunities they have? What should I sell? So these are all different light bulbs going on. All of those require research. All of those require ideation. And by having xIQ, we can take that down into seconds. Right. And here's the thing, you know, people have this big conflict, you know, machine-based emails and communication coming out and taking over the world and so on versus what's happening with human connection that's always required. They don't have to be mutually exclusive. They can be very, very inclusive, right? We used to live before the days of the internet. We live now with internet very deeply integrated into our daily lives.

Yeah.

Same thing's gonna happen with AI. It's not gonna be any different. It's not gonna take us out of the equation. It's just gonna collapse a lot of timelines, right? That ideation phase is a big thing. You know, my writer's block is a real problem.

Yeah.

You know, it's a real problem that nobody takes into account in the 8-hour day that I have to, or 12-hour day that I have to put in.

Yeah.

You're not taking in the 40, 45 minutes where I'm sitting there thinking about what, how, where. what I'm gonna compose, it's not going in and I'm spending less and less time with my customer because I'm doing that and it's not being accounted for. And this is a big leakage that's happening in terms of sales productivity. Yeah.

Well, and also just sort of, you know, really good salespeople spend a lot of time researching and prepping for meetings, but most average salespeople don't. And so to enable sort of average people to upskill themselves just by Doing all of that research for them really sort of makes it easier for people to upskill themselves and get better. So I can definitely see a lot of that value.

So yeah, and absolutely correct. And, you know, again, it's the idea of taking those next 99% of your sales players and making them have the tools and ability and agility To react like the top 1%.

Yeah.

Right. And there are 2 big factors in B2B sales that help you win deals. One is intelligence, the one with the superior information about their clients, the competitive market space, the positioning of their product, and that person who's going to be fast to get it in first to get it in. Those are the 2 factors that will drive. 50% of deals, this is a stat that was out there, 50% of deals are won by sales guys that are first to respond to their customers' requests. So early bird does take the worm.

Well, and I think that's maybe correlational, not causational, because it's also a signal that they're the type of salesperson That is responsive, that is fast to you know take care of issues, and you know sort of understands the the dynamic between them and their client more so than it's just you know the raw speed actually causing it as much as it's indicative of other things. That's my that's my guess, having worked with a lot of salespeople along the way. So you you raised something really interesting, which is you know this solution enables salespeople to. To get better. But one of the things that we see, you know, so often is no technology, no data, uh, really sort of solves the issue of not having a system. And so really you have to start with having a good sales system of you do this research, you have this type of outreach, you communicate, you know, you intake what their needs are and really understand them. You communicate this value proposition, you guide them through the decision-making process, This technology can really make all of those things work better, faster, and at a higher level. But it really requires having that system first. And that's the thing that we always try to call out to, you know, our customers. Buying a particular piece of software or a particular data source is never going to be the magic bullet that you'd like it to be. You need that system first. But certainly these types of things can really accelerate those systems And improve the performance of them and really improve them in lots of different ways.

Fully agree. Yeah, the sales, the structured sales process is very important. Putting the structured sales process into something like xIQ, which is turbocharging, is putting it on steroids, gives you the ability to remove the kinks out of it and then helps you standardize across all sales players with a high degree of information and rapid speed being delivered to the people when they need it, right? And those are just basically what you're putting into play. You're setting a new infrastructure into play, you're building new roads and so on to make the sales guys much more responsive, more intelligent, more tied into their customer needs, right? But you need to have a process for sure.

So, Usman, this has been a super interesting conversation for our audience out there that's, you know, sort of hearing this and like, wow, that sounds really interesting. Give us the pitch. Like why, you know, who really does this work best for? You know, what's the real benefit that they're gonna get out of trying something like this?

Yeah, B2B sales is complex. It, you know, there's a lot of people that are involved in the decision-making. It's long sales cycle, long multiple decision makers. And so what our platform helps you do is it helps you manage those different buyers. We call it buyer relationship management. It helps us understand the mindset of the buyer. This is a very unique capability, helps us bring the salesperson's EQ up to the— up to par with them being able to communicate and win and influence more prospects. It speeds up the whole process. It improves the business acumen of the salesperson because it goes to much more in-depth, much further into the internet, much faster. extrapolates the information and presents you that information in a consumable manner that you can actually use. Consumable and usable manner, right? It reduces, you know, because it's one platform. And the view that we have taken, Mark, is very important. We've taken the full funnel view from demand generation all the way through to sales, every step in between. And we've augmented that with the personality with the business insights and sales alerts and your own product knowledge and the ability to ask questions and prompts at each stage and use that, right? At the very stage when you're prospecting, the why now, the why us, and why do nothing, right?

Right.

That happens at the very top. And then as you go through each stage, all of these can be put in prompts. Now, companies can also put their own prompts together themselves. To your point about, hey, you know, you need to have a process. So yes, have your process. This is the question that's required to be asked at step 4 of the funnel, right? So ask this question, but ask it as a prompt, and then everybody can hit that prompt and get an immediate answer to that right away. And by doing so, you immediately raise their level up, right? So what xIQ does, just again to simplify into tangible metrics, is we help companies reduce the time to research by almost 97%. We increase engagement rates, meaning people that go into opening emails by 37% and clicking through on those emails they've opened by 48%. And here's the most interesting statistic, the most important statistic for any sales leader, any salesperson listening to it. We help you reclaim customer-facing time. This is super, super important. We make you smarter in front of your customers and we give you the time back to go and spend time with your customers. You don't need to be researching and learning new tools and tricks of the trade. xAQ is available on your mobile, it's available on your desktop, it's available in your CRM, it's available in your Outlook, it's available in your Gmail, it's everywhere. So you have no excuses to say I did not have up-to-the-minute prime information to use and in seconds to use that information to advance your sales opportunities. It will make life a lot easier. It will reduce stress and give you much higher win rates.

Wow. So really compelling pitch for our audience that is hearing this and getting excited about it. How can they get in touch with you?

So xIQ Inc. .com. XiQinc.com is our website.

Okay.

So everybody can go there. LinkedIn, we are XiQ Inc. as well. You can see the logo over here. Our chatbot Gilroy actually wears 4 hats. So that's another important thing we didn't really discuss, but I just want to highlight this, if you don't mind, Mark, is that with Gilroy, a salesperson today needs to basically wear 4 hats. They need to be a researcher and an analyst, Okay, they need to be a copywriter, they need to write really, really good emails, they need to be a solution engineer, they need to map the value propositions of their solutions to the client's challenges, both the client at an individual level as well as at a corporate level, and they need to be able to do their sales business. So xIQ helps you fulfill those 4 roles at a fraction of the cost. So think about having these 4 guys that you see right over here, right over here actually, supporting you every time. They're virtually all the time there with me, right? So xiqinc.com, sorry, and come to see us on LinkedIn at XiQ as well.

Super interesting, exciting vision of the future that you've laid out for us, Usman. Thank you so much for joining us today.

My pleasure. And thank you so much, Mark, for having me.

All right, talk to you soon.

Thank you.

Thank you for joining this episode of the B2B Growth Blueprint podcast. We hope you've gained insights to grow your business. If you enjoyed this discussion, please rate, comment, like on your favorite platform, and share to others who will find it useful. Do you know a CEO, founder, or leader at an early stage B2B services, tech, or SaaS company who would like to be a guest and share their story, send us a note. Let's schedule a conversation.