Michelle Seger: The Real ROI of AI? Better Thinking, Not Faster Work

Business. Business. Business. Business.

Welcome to Go to Market, a podcast for RevOps, sales, and marketing leaders to dive deep into industry insights and best practices. Go to Market is sponsored by Fulcast and Silicon Slopes. I am so excited to welcome my friend Michelle Seeger, the Chief Operating Officer at SalesGlobe. Hi, Michelle, how are you?

Hey, Amy, it is so good to be here today and thanks for having me on.

Oh, thank you so much for coming on. You are an icon, a podcasting icon in your own right. So the fact that you're coming on to my show means a lot. So I really appreciate your time. So today we're going to talk a little bit about what's on your mind. But first, I want to get some of your background. Can you tell our listeners a little bit more about where you come from and how you got into Sales Globe?

Okay, I certainly will. So I'm a serial entrepreneur and consultant, and my career in consulting started way, way, way back earlier than I would wish to even remember, back at Accenture. I really, really loved it there and I started in technology. So I was in change management and a technologist working on— you'll be familiar with the SAP projects, right? In that world. So I loved my work. And the reason I left my work, the only reason is that was in the day, you know, it was 5 to 7 days a week on the road and I just couldn't see the path. I couldn't see the path to family. And, you know, what that was going to look like. And I got to tell you, Amy, this was back in the day, right? But there was one too many females in leadership in consulting at Accenture at the time, and they had their nannies with them and their, their babies. Right. And I just didn't really want that to be my definition of motherhood. So I did an easy thing. I went to Italy on vacation for 3 weeks, and one year later I opened up a master franchise. For— to import Italian ceramics and home accessories in the United States. And after 12 years of that, I did sell that business. And, you know, long and short of it, got back into my love of consulting. And I am a partner here at SalesGlobe. And what we do is sales effectiveness consulting. So just like you, we're solving sales problems, the biggest challenges they have, and bringing solutions to their companies. So that's a little bit about what I do. I do it because I really love it. I just love it. I love dealing with change management, and I love dealing with salespeople and sales because I truly do believe we have a direct impact on not just their livelihood, but their life and the enjoyment they get out of their work.

That is so beautifully said. I love that. And what an incredible background you have. I didn't know. That is how you opened your ceramics store. That is interesting. Wow.

I'm multilingual as a result also. In fact, Amy, I'll tell you what, when I went to Italy, I had no idea the Italians did not speak English. So I negotiated my entire contract with them in Italian. And at the time I only spoke Spanish and French. I didn't even speak Italian. So it was a really interesting process that I went through.

Well, and you still did it.

Did you use—

was there Google Translate there to help you, or was—

No, it was organic. So I will tell you the— it was very funny because the, the owner of this Italian business, he did speak French, very broken English. I spoke French, almost no Italian, but Spanish. And we tried the Spanish-Italian thing, we tried the English, and then we finally just decided We're doing this in French.

Français s'il vous plaît. Oh my goodness.

Wow.

How amazing to have that tool in your tool belt to be like, this language isn't working for me. Let's try this one.

Yeah, it was really fun. I do believe that every child, every person should actually learn a second language.

I agree wholeheartedly. I think it just expands your, your culture, your brain, your perspective in so many ways. I love it.

It really does. Yeah.

Tell me more then about what you do right now at Salesglobe. My understanding is you lead the AI strategy there.

Is that correct? I do. So we embarked on our AI strategy about 18 months ago. So back when we heard all talking. Now I happen to be in a fairly unique position. I don't necessarily hire people that are the direct fit for roles, but what I think is the best fit. So I say that because our director of marketing, he is probably one of the best AI strategists and thinkers that I've ever met. So you're not gonna hear him talking too much about how many, I mean, I shouldn't say this, but how many guest appearances I'm gonna be making this year. But he can tell you exactly what he built this weekend using, you know, Open Clock, Claude AI, Google Analytics, and you know, and here's the latest dashboard, right? But anyway, I embarked on this strategy because I saw, or we did, I saw what was coming for the future of work, for the consulting, the arena of consulting, right?

Right.

So although all jobs are impacted and we all know that, if you think about what you can do today with ChatGPT and with Claude and, you know, Gemini and all of them, You can ask them a lot of questions if you're working for a company, even about sales or sales effectiveness, and it will give you pretty good answers. And so I'm thinking, okay, wow, we gotta rethink this because it's going to totally change what the expectation is out of consultants. So I don't believe that consultants are irrelevant. I know that there is a place for that face-to-face and that problem solving and that thinker that you can have with you by your side to really help you work through your problems. However, the expectations of what you're going to deliver, I believe, will greatly change. So that's the first part of it. The second part of it, Amy, as I think about— that's internally. As I think about externally, I also am looking at what we offer and bring to the market. And I do see a lot of consulting firms are starting to bring AI solutions out to the marketplace. I just don't know exactly how prescriptive they are and what problem they're solving today. So we've been really focused on that piece. So internally, it's been kind of fun. What we did was provide— what we had our consultants actually— so let me back up and say, we hire consultants that are very good in their field. So they've worked out as sales operations leaders. They've worked in areas like sales effectiveness, maybe in training or sales directly, or sales operations incentive compensation. So we hire those people, we work with them to become great consultants, but what we hire are people that are very curious. They're continuous learners. They have a real learning mindset. And so I actually used our group of consultants and I said, have at it, right? We picked a sub-team and said, let us know, you can play and use every tool that's available out there. And we talked about what they all are. We don't care. Use it as a sandbox, go out there and play. So every week they report back what they've learned. And we went through a period of 3 months of vetting tools and we rolled out our first AI toolkit. So what that means is that we are expecting every consultant to leverage AI in very key areas to make them more efficient, more productive, and more targeted in how they collect and gather information from our clients. So, but why? What's the outcome? The outcome from our perspective and my whole mission around this, it's not for us to become more efficient and bring up our, you know, increase our margins. It's not about saving time on projects and compressing them so that, you know, we can get on to the next project faster. That is not it at all. What I believe is the future of work is going to rely on really, really good thinkers and people that know how to solve problems, that know how to leverage tools like AI effectively, not to just give the first answer, but to really solve underlying issues that companies have. So I want them to decontaminate their job, right? That's what we call it. So job decontamination, where we're taking away things like cleaning data, things like pulling together. We might do 50 interviews. If you think about an interview that I conduct as a consultant, it can take an hour. I got 50 of them, done 50 now. Now I've got to go back and listen to them pull out all of the relevant talking points, you know, trends that come out of that. All this work that the consultants spend can take about a week or more. So if you think about 50 hours of interviews, this is just one piece of discovery. Then you've got probably another 40 hours and one FTE re-listening to those. They were setting them up, Amy, a year ago now in Excel spreadsheets. You know, these guys are really good. Pivot tables, they'll set up pulling together things, but now, They take all of that information. We use several different AI tools. I'm happy to talk about what those tools are. They gather, synthesize the interviews. We pull them together. They get all the talking points, everything they need. It takes less than an hour, you know, to— Wow. Wow.

That is amazing. You know, the word decontaminate is something that I really like. I've never heard anyone talk about an outcome of AI as a decontamination process, but it's so perfectly stated. Truly is. It's getting rid of all of the yuck in your job that takes time. And especially in consulting, you know, your clients are paying for that time when they could be, you know, when they want to pay for your thinking. And so I think that's a really, really excellent way to describe one use of AI that I've never heard of before. So I think that's something new I learned today.

Well, that's great. I'm glad that you did. So now if I think about— and the other piece of it, so I talked about interviews, but it's the same thing when we talk about data analytics, when I talk about running trends, pay curves, whatever it might be, graphs, pulling together presentations. I want my team to really focus on— here's the other piece of it— how do I become a better thinker and explain to my client the story. So a lot of times our clients will come to us and they'll say, here's my problem or here's my question, but yet what we may recommend could be a very different outcome. So I'll give you a really good example. I had a CEO of a financial services company come to me and I had worked with her before as CEO of another company. And she said, hey, look, Here's what I think. I think that we need an inside sales team. So in this financial services company, it was B2B, working with other banks, and what they would provide to those banks were services and things that they could help them with to provide to their clients. So it was white label. It could be lending solutions, it could be letters of credit, it could be a whole myriad of different things that they were providing to smaller banks, even to credit unions, that those banks couldn't really provide themselves, right? That's very common in the banking industry. So she said to me, I've got all these salespeople that go on site with the banks, but I think I need inside sales to kind of handle some calls. And we also have, they're all on a bonus program. I don't know if we can do some kind of an incentive program, but I don't know if you're familiar with financial services at all, but many, many years ago, I think it was 15 years ago, there was the famous Wells Fargo credit card debacle where Wells Fargo was paying their associates like incentives to sell credit cards. And, you know, as a result, like credit cards were being provided to people that maybe didn't qualify. Some were being opened up and maybe they were false. There was just this whole thing going on. So financial services is very skittish of that. Well, we ended up going back to her after doing a pretty thorough assessment of the organization and saying, you don't need inside sales, but what you do need is a business intelligence team to provide your salespeople information about your member banks. So what does their P&L look like? What is it that they really need? What is it that the consumers in that industry are needing and responding to that that bank can offer? So that's what we ended up doing, and it was highly successful. But what we needed to do, Amy, was have really good consultants that could tell the story as to what the client was asking for and why, and why we were making this particular recommendation. So it's things like that in places like that where I really want the consultants to spend their time.

I think that's absolutely excellent. How good do you think AI is going to be in terms of business analysis? Can AI eventually get to the place where it, where it can think as well as the consultants, or do you think that will never happen?

I think that what it'll do and it already is, and I'll give you a couple of very good examples where it will be good enough for the— what would the— we— so we run standard analytics today. It will become very good at running standard analytics. And what I do believe is that the more information that it is fed— but this is going to be the key, all right? We're going to talk about why and how it can be good or not so good, right? So I believe that for companies that— and this is what we're looking at right now— that can create a closed environment, it can be very good. Because here's the challenge. I do believe that the analysis can be as good as far as the standard analytics that we run. In fact, we let it— we use AI to do that today. Maybe not all of the conclusions or what would I ask next, but why do I think it can get there? Because if you continue to feed the AI with what you did as a consultant and it learns from that, it can come back and say, have you thought about? And then you as a consultant can correct it. So what we are looking at are AI agents. So we don't have them yet. What we are, as I mentioned, my marketing director, he's actually creating one now for marketing. And I want to look at how I have that as we're going to start with being a project manager here at SalesGlobe. So we are going to have to call her a name. Our AI tool that is a proprietary internal one is called SalesGlobe Sage. We've talked about Sagey. We've talked about different names for her because she's going to have to be a woman, Amy.

Obviously.

Obviously. Obviously. There aren't enough women in technology, so we got it. That's great.

So the AIs are leveraging that. Isn't that funny?

I love it. So I believe, to answer your question, which is taking me way too long to answer, I believe the answer is yes. However, with the big but, it's not gonna be through the OpenAI, I do not believe, because that's open to interpretation of everything that's out there. And we as people, we may or may not, really know the answer, right? Like, as far as an expert, let's use a sales comp question. If I'm not an expert in sales comp, but I think I might be, and I'm just putting all this content out there and that's picked up by AI, how will it know? But I believe you can train the agents to be as good as. Do I believe that they'll replace consultants? No. But I believe what happens is we're gonna expect and hire people that are very highly skilled, better skilled. Now we already have the top people. Out there, but we want people that are thinkers and that are going to be wanting to continue to innovate and come up with new solutions, not just rely on what they've done before. So I think that the face of the consultant will change and what we— the type of person we hire, and they will become the face to the client that they really can leverage as their trusted advisor and not just as someone that can augment their own workforce, for example. Mm-hmm. That's what I think.

I really love what you said. Well, Michelle, obviously you are such an expert and it is such an honor to be able to have you on the show. My final question is, how do you stay at the top of your game? What do you do? Do you do red light therapy and yoga? Do you read all of the books? Do you have Sage tell you things? Like, what do you do?

My God, I wish I had time for all the above. So there is, so my greatest, my greatest secret, and I can't say I've been doing it as much lately because I recently moved into a new home. It was mid-December, so I've been a little bit nutty, but I get up early in the morning and that is my time. So my ideal day is I get up at 5:00 AM. I love to have my, my latte in the morning is my thing. And I sit down at my desk and I do meditate and pray. But I think about when I meditate, what I really do is I'm thinking about what are the things that, you know, matter that I want to achieve, not just going through my day of here's everything I've gotta do this day and here's everything I've gotta do this week. But I try to keep myself focused on the bigger picture, right? And I think about things like, okay, what, when am I gonna spend time with my daughters this week? What am I gonna do with, you know, some other things? My mom, how do I call my dad 7 days a week effectively? You know, I've got so many different people in my life that really want me to spend time with them. And I'm also running a business and I use that as time for me to kind of regroup. So 5:00 AM, meditate, spend some time. And that's also when I work out is in the morning. And when I work out, I feel my best always. I'm a runner. I work out with weights and I just, I just make it part of my life. So that's really my sanity is making sure I have that time for me. And that's when I fit it in is in the early morning.

Well, that is so inspiring. And I need to get back to that point. I used to run and I have let work get in the way and it—

I know.

Not. So thank you for inspiring me. Well, Michelle, thank you so much again for coming on the show, and I wish you the very best of luck, and I know that you will be able to guide all of us as we try to navigate through AI complexity and consulting.

Thank you so much, Amy, and I'll see you again soon.