Episode 38: What Sales Leaders Must Do To Prepare for the Rise and Rise and Rise of AI with Matt Swalley

Hi everyone, I'm Ben Wright, successful entrepreneur, corporate leader and expert sales coach to some of the most talented people our amazing planet has to offer. You're listening to the Stronger Sales Team podcast where we bring together and simplify the complex world of B2B sales management to help the millions of sales managers worldwide build, motivate and keep together highly effective sales teams. Teams who grow revenue and make their businesses actual profits. Along the journey. We also provide great insights and actionable steps to managing your personal health. A happy and productive year is not only better for your teams, but everyone around you. So if you're an ambitious sales leader who wants to build the highest performing and engaged teams, stronger sales teams is right where you need to be. Welcome back to Stronger Sales Teams, the place where we provide real world and practical advice to help you develop superpowered B2B sales teams. So today is a fantastic day because we have Matt Swolley, one of the co founders at Omnecki with us. And Omnecki, quite a cool name, right? It took me until I saw their logo when I was doing my research to realize that it's an anagram around monkey. Very clever, very much like it. But om, they are an AI marketing platform that generate and optimize personalized ad creatives to increase sales across all of your digital touch points. So they have lots of fantastic tech that powers in behind their business. But for the easy explanation, for those of us listening, Omneche will take marketing and advertisements and start to personalize them for your audience. Right? It's a terrific way to use AI and a terrific way to make sure your brand is resonating with with the customers you want to. So Matt himself, he has a fair bit of horsepower in sales. He's got 13 years of strategic leadership experience from ATT and in those roles he looked at corporate strategy, he looked at business development, sales, team growth, all of those metrics that we have known and come to love as sales leaders. He also held leadership positions such as Chief of staff. Cool title. I love it when someone's called Chief of Staff and that was for AT&T's global business as well. And he's directed sales teams in smaller businesses and mid market enterprise accounts. So Matt made the big jump over to OMNEC few years ago. He even had to relocate. So he's done the opposite of what our family's done and moved away from the beach. Now that's a big commitment, right? So complete hats off and commitment to the entrepreneurship cause. So Matt, welcome and thanks for joining us today.

Hey Ben, thank you so much for having me on the Stronger Sales Team podcast. And like you said before, sales is such a big part of my life ever since I was young as well. And then through all my last 15, you know, 20 years of from the initial days of making cold calls and meeting with thousands of customers to leading teams and now on to, you know, startups.

Yeah, yeah, cool. And what a world for the not so faint hearted it is. Well, tell me please, and everyone listening, tell us a little bit more about Omnecki, what you do and why you love it so much.

Yeah. So we are an artificial intelligence powered marketing platform. We use data and analytics for why your customers are clicking or buying or signing up for a lead. We look at the data and we use a tool called computer vision. It can quantify design and what's working based on performance. Then we use these as an input to generating more effective creative for all the different digital platforms. And there's a huge challenge out there now for number one, marketing is becoming more and more personalized. First there was broadcast. One ad reached millions. Then there was narrowcast, it got a little more narrow. We're getting increasingly closer to personalization. When you hear it, it's the biggest buzzword. Again, there's still not really one to one, but you can get much more granular on your specific audiences, your verticals, your different locations, your business sells to, different languages, different geographies, different products and services and then all the different places that your customers may be, you want to meet them where they are and keep moving them through the sales process.

I am a huge fan of personalization. It's something I've spoken about a lot to see that AI is leading us down this path. Scale is pretty amazing, pretty scary, but pretty amazing. And that's what we're going to focus on today. We're going to focus on around how sales is changing with the rise and rise and rise. Right. Of machine learning and AI. So why don't we start there in your opinion? You've got some blue chip experience here around sales. How has sales evolved over the last decade or so?

Sure. So in my background was primarily direct sales back at AT&T, the early days. So we were meeting with customers face to face. It was a large geography, but not, you know, global scale. Well, we had the global team for a while, but we were focusing on a specific smaller territory and we loved the relationship building aspect of sales, but it was a lot of cold calling, meeting face to face more so and the whole evolution of what's happened now is that things are becoming more transactional. Like when you're meeting with customers, you have to be much more prepared upfront. The expectations are people are meeting with maybe five to eight people in a day now versus back in the day it was like a couple of meetings because they're taking zoom calls, they're having maybe a face to face meeting. But digital now it has to be that base to driving lead generation in sales. Before you would go get business cards, make phone calls, put it into your CRM and then continually nurturing that through email or other avenues. Today you can go test your messaging to thousands or millions of people with different types of advertising or even organic content. Figure out what's working based on the messaging, what's bringing customers to your website or buying your product and then you continually to refine it as you figure out who your ideal customers are. And then the next step of the conversion is figuring out how to continually refine your sales process. Like how do I improve the discovery phase, how do I give a better sales demo? How do I improve the contracting process? It flips where you can have a much smaller sales force that's actually spending more time with customers than before of a huge outbound motion.

Yeah, no doubt sales is changing from how you contact customers as well. I think you mentioned there it used to be quite simple cold call meeting, whereas now there's multiple ways we're getting in touch with customers. And from that is also a rise of a requirement to actually get in touch with customers more. The touch points moving from five to six were the numbers pre Covid around closing a sale now up to 11, 12, 13. So whilst there's some great advantage to get messages out there on mass, we actually need to be getting out to customers more because they're doing their research because they're involving others in the decisions. So cool. So out of that, what do you think of the emerging channels that are coming through and do you think that the attention span we have from buyers is remaining the same or do these emerging channels need to take into account how that's changing?

Well, each channel has different types of content really. So a lot of like your TikToks and Instagram stories and they require like video content that's more user generated that people can connect to more. Your websites are going to have more banner ad type of ads still where you're like scrolling and you click on it and sometimes people like them so they're like what they call native ads so they look like they're not an Ad. And then the biggest challenge to all this is keeping your brand consistency, but then telling your story in different ways that resonate across the different channels. I mean, you still have emotion. You can meet with a customer, you know, after they visit your website, you can retarget them with digital ads across all these different channels. And where personalization is going now is AI can power every different aspect of the creative process. It's the biggest disruption in all of AI really is content creation today that is reaching the point that it's good enough to scale through growth. So you could give AI a, you know, the different attributes of a customer where, where they live, what industry they're in, and then feed it the product details and be like, write me five different ads that resonate with this audience. Then all of a sudden you have these scripts and then you can use those scripts to feed image generation or video generation. And then it's getting to the point, Ben. Now with video, there's two different ways we look at it is one is you take all the brand assets and production assets. You can retell the story through AI that way using the assets. The other is AI avatars. And so they're getting better and better. So it could actually train the AI on you. Ben, you're a podcast host and have businesses and after they learns, you know, what you look like, how you talk, I can give AI Ben a script. And then within 30 seconds we have production level stuff that can go out to market. One of the fun examples I like on this is like automobile groups or someone that has like a bunch of automobile dealerships. You could have a new promotion that goes out on the first of the month and have that person that owns the dealership talk at 15 different locations and then have those go out with the new promotion. Who to talk to at the dealership without having to go film at all?

Yeah. Wow. So we're not just talking about AI being an empowerment tool for the channels that you get out to, but we're also talking about it being an efficiency tool. In fact, almost a clone like tool. So let's say you cloned me. Heaven help, there were more of me in this world, but let's say you cloned me out there. How close is it getting now to being very much like myself?

It is getting 95% there now. Some of the emotions and enthusiasm is more challenging to mimic today. But it's 95% looks really good. If it's film like what you train the model on is good green screen, quality production. It's 95% there.

Yeah. Well, I can't wait one day to say that. Avatar me out there. I don't know if I'll cringe or I'll be pleased about it, but no doubt it'll come one day.

Well, we were Talking about earlier LinkedIn, Ben, before the podcast here for a second. Like how you can, you know, constantly have content on LinkedIn, but imagine you could train AI on yourself and be producing, you know, sales tips of the day every day. You just have a long list and you're no longer having to film it. You've got your best tips going out every single day.

And I think we might jump into that in a minute because there's certainly going to be this overlap between automation and personalized value where individuals with our own levels of EQ just can't mimic. And there is absolutely, I think, going to be a special place moving forward for those salespeople that can really think, think about how they drive that personalized value. But before we do that, let's talk about how sales teams now and moving forward, particularly over the horizon, let's say horizon one and into horizon two. Right. So months and into the next year or so, how can sales teams prepare effectively to actually capitalize on the AI tools that are in the market now and emerging?

Yeah, so this is one of my favorite topics as well. So one thing I highly recommend is start subscribing to the different AI newsletters. So there's a. I have a handful of them I really like. Binsbytes is one of my favorites, but they send you new technologies that come out every day. So this evolution of AI has thousands of new applications and efficiency tools being built every day. Now, not every one of them is solving a fantastic business problem, but you can go test these for free. So, like, this newsletter will give you five to 10 new apps every day. A lot of them can empower you in your sales process in a different specific area. Write a better email, produce content that you can send along with your emails. And I just suggest testing out a couple of these every day so you learn how to start communicating with AI to get great results. Because prompt engineering is one of the biggest skills right now, where if you don't know what to tell AI, you're not going to get great results. So the better you get at prompt engineering, the better your outputs are going to be and the more efficient. I mean, there's a lot of talk out there right now that there's gonna be billion dollar businesses out there with 20 employees just based on learning how to utilize all these tools and really the best way is to just start trying out a bunch of them, learn from each one what you can incorporate into your workflow and then either you can build some things in house or use what you think works great.

This really capitalizes on my beliefs around training. The higher you can build your base or the bigger you can build your base, the higher the peak will be of that pyramid down the track. So what I'm hearing from you is that to really capitalize on AI, we need to start getting comfortable with it. So you mentioned Ben's bites. I use Superhuman to do something similar. Is an email that I get. Hey, I'm switching to Ben's Bytes. Right. With a name like that, how can I not go? Not mine, by the way, for those listening. So by getting comfortable with AI and what it does, it takes away some of that fear. Right. Inaction can cause absolute terror. Action will certainly reduce that fear. So as leaders, if we can be getting across what's happening with AI, we are first of all doing the right thing. And the second thing is that by testing it within, raising that knowledge base a level again, that allows us to be ready when that next generation of AI comes out. Right. When Chat GPT goes from Chat GPT to Chat GP4 and starts charging. Right. Which is obviously happening now, we understand exactly what these technologies can do so we can take more advantage of them. So I like that. I certainly hope we don't get to billion dollar companies with 20 staff because I love working with people and a lot of people I know like working with people too. So I think that would be a shame. But in fact, as we talk about that, that certainly sounds like a business where AI is taking over. But I've been following omnecky on social media. I love some of your posts that come out, but one in particular grabbed me and that's around talking about AI as a copilot rather than a human replacement. So can you talk me through your thoughts around what that means and where to from here?

Yeah. So employees jobs will not be eliminated, but people do not skill up. They're going to have to go find something else to do. It empowers creativity. So where we're seeing a lot in the content generation is an ideation creativity. Like places that you couldn't think of new ideas quickly for different audiences or different verticals. You might have only been advertising for one of those. Now you can go to five different ones and come up with concepts and ideas much, much quicker. That's where we See, empowerment. The second is plugging in AI to all the different areas of your workflow. So like the traditional content, I'm just going to go back to content again. Advertising. So you have a strategy, you have the different customer types. A lot of times you have a content strategist, you'll have a copywriter, you'll have a designer, and you'll have approver and a trafficker. So there's like six different jobs in there now. You can streamline a lot of those different roles. With AI, it can power like the copywriting, it can help with image generation, video generation, it can help with trafficking and some like getting it to the right people in many cases now it becomes more of a curation process. So the people in the creative, they have to just start to realize how to use all these pieces and, you know, piece them together and become more efficient and then be able to do the personalization. Because the people that don't learn how to become more personalized, those companies are the ones that are going to be left behind as the, you know, the early adopters figure it out.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So very similar to that message you're talking about there, about, don't be afraid of it, embrace what's coming and start to learn about it. So when we talk about learning, what are your learning? Go to hacks. I'm again huge on learning and training programs. I speak about this a lot. What do you do to keep yourself learning?

I read a lot of the newsletters. Plus our team's full of people with AI backgrounds and data science. So I'm like constantly in the middle of it. And then another big change in the decade of sales is everyone shares stuff in the open now. In the past, you used to have to read sales books. Probably have a list of 10 of them, Ben, that both of us have read back in the day. Now you can go on Twitter or X, whatever you want to call it, and there's a hundred different people you can go follow that are either sharing things they've learned or repurposing content they've seen somewhere else that are valuable. That's where I see that you can learn a lot more with less barriers to entry than the past. And that's what I do. I constantly, like, try to learn from all these different places and take what I like and share it with people. It's a constant, like figuring out what information works in our situation and then trying to implement it into our process.

Okay, so you're very much a social media public information scourer. To take that in anything else you do for your learning programs.

I like listening to podcasts a lot as well.

Yeah, good call. They're, they're a great way to learn.

And I liked reading. I used to read a lot. And right now we have a 4 year old and a 10 month old. So podcasts are sometimes easier when we're.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Free time. What? Free time? Yeah, no, we certainly know that. In fact, I actually posted about my daily schedule the other day and it was a great comment from a fellow based in the US as well. And essentially I have an hour and a half to two hours a day to spend with my little one the week and a lot more over the weekend. And he said, doesn't seem like enough time. And I was like, yeah, it's really hard to balance everything, but things like reading, they for me at the moment are a distant memory. But I'm sure they'll come back around. Fantastic. Awesome. Well, so taking from today, what I'm hearing is don't be afraid of AI. There is some amazing things happening that will make your customer journey even better. Right. Personalized down to what they want to be hearing rather than necessarily generic messages that you're putting out. We've spoken about the importance of testing the data that you put out there and how platforms like Omneche can help you do that because they allow you to test multiple messages. So I think that was fantastic. Right. And for sales leaders out there, the message is get comfortable with AI, start to practice it, and you'll be ready for more and more. So thank you, Matt. Very grateful for your time today. Can we tell for those listening, obviously go check out Omnecki O M N E K Y But also where can they find you if they'd like to get in touch with you?

Yeah, you can send me an email@matmnikey.com o m n e k y.com or you can find me on LinkedIn at Matt Swally.

Excellent. And if you've got any tips on becoming a soccer coach, I know Matt, you've got one of your kids in there in soccer, so send them through as well. Right. Matt will be really happy to hear them.

Oh yeah, I've been reading up on that. I've been on the weekends, I've been reading up on some of that because I had to like refamiliar myself with that.

Well, we've gone from, from soccer to ballet in the conversation we had earlier. And for me, I've opted out of ballet because I have no idea but certainly very involved in teaching my daughter how to swim. So excellent. Fantastic. Well thank you Matt. That's been wonderful today and for everyone else out there, keep living in a world of possibility and you'll be amazed by what you can achieve.

Thank you so much Ben.

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