https://www.listennotes.com/e/8d4d1ae338db464093a8567e2d773f30

Foreign. What's up, everybody? Welcome to another episode of the surf and sales podcast. I'm Scott Lease here with my good friend and co host, Richard Harris. What's going on, buddy?

How are you hired, man? I'm tired. Plus, the little zoom thing didn't say you're recording. So now there's this little thing at the beginning after.

Yeah, I was waiting for that. Now you're gonna have to. You're gonna have to edit because I'm a professional. No, no, no, you're gonna leave it.

Yeah.

Did you take a red eye last night? Is that. No. You're. You're home. But I thought you. I thought you were in Tybee Island.

I was. I was home visiting my mom as. As a good kid should do. And then I came home two days ago. I came home on Father's Day, so I made it back for Father's Day. Okay. But I don't know, lately, like, I'm just old, dude. Like, every time I travel, like, I'm just like napping constantly. Like, give me a. Give me a sweater and a place to nap. I'm old.

I'm gonna get you a travel blanket and a nice little head pillow for you.

I have a travel blanket.

Oh. So this is the state that we are in. We are excited to talk to our guest today. He is the founder of Calm Ocean sales, fractional CRO sales leader, and many times over executive sales leader, Mike Mofelder. We appreciate you spending some time with us, man. How's it going? Welcome to the show.

Thank you. Oh, it's great to be here. So I'm super excited and I'm also tired, Richard. So I guess we could, we can commiserate.

Yeah, we could go get the, you know the, the special where we get. For 5.99, we get a steak and a baked potato. Yeah, yeah.

And then we're home by 5:30. Sounds great, right?

So something like that right down at Boca del Vista. Right, so.

Oh, you guys, you guys. All right, Mike, one of the taglines on your website is we don't have enough pipeline. Something is just off. And that is probably the number one issue that people have right now. So my question for you is, where are you seeing that come from? How are people dealing with it? And yeah, talk to us, Talk to us a little bit about that.

We can consume a lot of time on this. So it's kind of. It's epidemic. It's not kind of. It's an epidemic. Everybody that I talk to seems like, oh, we don't have enough pipeline. And I think that's been, you know, true across my entire career. Like, I don't know that I've ever been in a situation or run a team where it was like, please turn off the spigot. We have way too much to handle right now. But there's a lot of things that have happened, especially over the last, I'm going to say, 15 to 20 years in sales that have not helped with, with the pipeline problem. And the biggest one is that somewhere along the way, we lost how to qualify. So what happens is, and I see this in my clients, I could see it going back in my time as a leader that you end up putting more into the pipeline in order to offset the fact that we're not working on qualified opportunities. So to kind of try to illustrate that a little bit, my last company that I worked at full time, we generally had between 1.8 to 2.5x pipeline going into a quarter. Right? You're always shooting for at least 3x. A lot of companies now are 5 and 6x. And that's a whole nother conversation, by the way. And somehow or another, even with 50% or so 60% of the pipeline production that we needed, my teams were consistently between 75 and 95% plan. And we did that because we were ruthless about our qualification and who we spend time with. So there's a lot of things that wrap into that. So if I'm not good at qualifying opportunities, I end up spending time on unqualified opportunities at the cost of the qualified opportunity. And I lose the qualified opportunity to a competitor because I'm distracted. So, in fact, I'm working on an article right now about this. What we're trying to do is we're trying to get people very focused on the mission and on the job so that the deals that they work are deals that actually have the components to bring it to a close. And that's. That includes, do I have an actual project? That's the biggest thing. Do I have an actual project? Meaning there's a defined timeline. Meaning that a senior executive has directed the person I am talking to to fix the problem. Meaning that there is a catalyst, an actual trigger event that caused your prospect to have a conversation with you. Because in B2B sales, there's always, and I mean always, a trigger event. Something happens, something that something happens, right? That that caused the prospect to raise their hand or reach out or take a call from you. And that's the very first thing that we want to understand to know that it's Qualified. It's worth spending time and then we can get into know, the discovery and figuring out, you know, can I technically solve the problem? Does it, is the, the cost of, of inaction greater than the cost of or than the cost of change or the other way around? Right, because otherwise they're not going to invest, they're not going to spend the money and it's always, always about the money. So the we don't have enough pipeline is another way of saying we may not be working on a fully qualified pipeline.

And why, I guess what, what I'm thinking of as you're talking about this is what caused people to stop qualifying. Because I, I don't feel like, let me try to phrase this the right way. Nobody in sales leadership or an individual contributor role suddenly was like, hey everybody, let's stop qualifying. This is a waste of time. We don't need to do that. But something happened. So what's the thing that happened that got everybody away from qualifying? Did that, did the quotas get so big that everybody was just like, who freaking cares? We have to just like let anybody in? Like what, what triggered that abandonment of qualification?

You know, I, I, I, I, I would love to have that answer. I think there was, I think there's, there's a bunch of things that happened. One is that, and I feel somewhat responsible for this because, and I wrote about this at one point, you know, I was in the proverbial room when this happened, which is I was selling CRM when it was even before it was called CRM. But at the time I was working for Siebel Systems and the, this pipeline metric of 3x pipeline to make quota came up. We're talking like 1998, 1999. And everybody's like, yeah, that makes sense because if you have a 30% close rate, but that, that's kind of wonky math. It doesn't really make sense when you, when you kind of take it down. So we just started adding more pipeline and we said, oh, what if we get 4x or 5x and we, what we did is instead of getting better at selling and, and going, you know, selling 2 million instead of 1 million DOL, we went the other way. So we just kept pouring more into a leaky bucket. And then you get out to the other side of the, the 2008 crash and all of a sudden the, the market is flush with money. And I mean I, I, people will probably get upset and a little offended that I'm saying it, but I think we in sales got a Little bit lazy.

Yeah.

And we stopped doing the very fundamental things that have existed in sales for.

Yeah. So, yeah, you can argue. You could. You could argue then perhaps we just started, like, playing down to the level of the competition, and now the competition level is higher and we've been unable to adjust.

Yes, right.

Down to the level meaning, oh, I can still win by, you know, not doing some of the things that I know I need to do in the sports kind of terminology right now. You can't get away with those things anymore and everybody's struggling. Right, Right.

Yeah. And you hear things that, you know, when I'm on forecast calls. This has been going on for years. And I, Yeah, we. We stomped it out pretty well. You know, it's like, oh, well, I'm only. Yeah, I. I know it's not really qualified, but I'm only spending a few minutes on it. Well, you shouldn't be spending any minutes on it if it's not qualified. You can put it into your lead bucket and work on it until it becomes qualified or even worse. Well, I don't really have enough to do, so I'm going to try. I'm going to work on these deals. And I go now that. And that, you know, somehow that became acceptable in sales leadership. But I can tell you, you know, again, I don't want to be like the, the old guy. The old guy on the porch. Yeah, get off my lawn. But. But back in the day, we just didn't operate that way. If it wasn't qualified, we didn't spend time on it. That was it. Move on. Go find something you can sell.

Yeah, I agree with you there. And I think the challenge, though, is that, you know, there's. There's not one thing right. Like, there's never just one thing right. I think I agree with you about the part that we got flush with money in 2008. I think, you know, it started out really well with the whole predictable revenue model from Aaron Ross. Right. And the, and the advent of the SDR. Well, I also think that AES got lazy because of the SDRs. Yes. Right. I'd love for there to be some analysis of, like, people who had legit SDR roles. How much better are they at sales than AES who never did it? Right. One would think that they'd be better. Right. Just. Even if it's just cold calling, like, because they. They're less afraid of all that stuff. But I'd love to see that. I also think the goals got really high. I think that at an executive Level we have a lot of inexperienced younger executives because they're getting this money thrown at them in the world we live in, Right. And they don't know how to manage a pipeline. They've never built a pipeline. You know, the only pipeline they actually built was actually maybe a physical pipeline like, like whatever their product pipeline is or whatever that is. Right. So I think this culmination of, of all this stuff and now we're throwing AI into it, right? Like now we're throwing this whole other thing which I think is helpful, but I think it's going to get abused too, right? I think it's going to get abused and misused. Right. So as you work with companies, right. I got a couple of questions. My first question is let's start with that founder stage, right. And they're starting to go after their first sales hire, Right. What are the things that you think a founder should know or should have accomplished? Not on the product side, but on the business side. Do you think there's a magic number of customers? Do you think they need to pitch this stuff? Do you think they have to have this much ARR. Mr. What are those things that you think are important at the early stage and then after they make that first hire, what should they be looking for?

So the very first thing that a founder needs to do, be able to do. And this is going to sound really weird, but.

We like weird.

I'm good at weird.

Yeah. Austin Scott likes to keep Austin weird, as they say.

That's it. Yeah, I think I've seen that. That's your key poster.

Yeah.

But be able to actually state succinctly the business problem that your solution solves. No features, no functions. What is the problem that you solve? And then you as the founder need to be able to sell it. Right. So there's a wonderful book written by Bruce Cleveland, who I disclaimer, worked with, worked for really at Siebel, called Traversing the Traction Gap. And it's about starting with minimum viable market and building up to minimum viable product like and actually taking a step by step approach so that you don't just think that I've got something really cool and I'm going to go hire a salesperson who then can't sell it. And I'm going to get frustrated and I'm going to fire that salesperson and go hire another salesperson who also can't sell it. You as the founder have to be able to sell it yourself.

And how do you, how do you define when a found, when you believe a Founder can sell it themselves. Right. Because so often. And Scott jumping on this, too, because I know you work with people, you know, they go get their first 10 customers, their first 15 customers. Right. But oftentimes that's friends and family. Right. That's. And. And they're buying the founder. They're not even buying the pain because the. To your point, the founder doesn't know how to articulate it. Well, is that enough to go get a salesperson, or is it like, no, you gotta. There's this thing you keep missing.

Well, I think there's a. You know, the metric is going to be a little bit different. Right. So some of the investors that I talk to are looking, you know, they don't want to really want to talk to you until you've got a million dollars of ARR. And, okay, well, that's great. But if you're selling a solution, that's $250,000 a year, that's only four customers.

Right.

So I think that 10 customers is a pretty good metric to shoot for and then pull out of that the ones that, you know, bought because, oh, well, Mike Muhlfelder knows what he's doing. Buy from him. And, you know, you need.

It's really 10 customers that you had to acquire the way you'd be asking other people to acquire.

Yes. Even if they were referred by the friend. You know, and Scott went to Richard and said, michael knows what he's doing. You should buy from him. Richard still has to run his. His, his own evaluation. That's what we're looking for is people who are like, okay, you've got some credibility. But I still don't know that I want to give you my money. Can you solve the problem or not? And, you know, is it, you know, is it an idea versus an actual solution? Now, I, you know, I actually love this part of Shark Tank. Right. When you watch that show and you. And you watch how the sharks operate with people and the questions that they ask right up front, where did the idea come from? They want to know, does the person know their numbers? And then you've got, you know, very quickly, Mr. Wonderful, we'll talk about him on another podcast. But when he says, like, this is. This isn't a business, it's a hobby, that's what I'm looking for when I talk to a founder is like, is this an actual business? Because the fundamentals of business have not changed and will not change. We exist to sell whatever it is that we sell to make a profit for ourselves or our investors. That's it. Everything else is noise. So if you, whatever it is that you want to sell or bring to market cannot make a profit for you and, or your investors, you have a hobby, not a business.

I really like that. I was just, I was just typing to Scott. I think Scott runs his, like a business. He might, he might rightfully say that I run mine like a hobby. Sometimes I think that's a fair statement.

I think I would say that I think that's fair. Sometimes.

Yeah, sometimes I do. That depends. Like I. Yeah, it depends on the moment. Right. And sometimes Scott. Sometimes Scott wishes it was a hobby.

Yeah, that's true. Yeah, that's definitely true.

Yeah. Well, to an extent, a founder should be as, as passionate about their business as if it were a hobby we do. Hobbies are things that we do because we really, really enjoy it. We want to do it. And if you don't feel that way about your business that you've built and you've nurtured, you are in the wrong business.

That's really interesting. That's really, really cool. What's AI going to fuck up for us? What is it already fucking up for us? Which I think might be the title of this podcast now that you'll get.

A lot of attention if you do good and bad. I listen. I'm a huge fan of AI, of AI. I'm a proponent. I think that the potential and the possibility that exists is truly limitless. And it is also the single biggest change in business, maybe ever, certainly since the Industrial Revolution. However, I don't think people really understand how to use it in the different ways you can use it. I'll give you an example. I was, I was. I have every Father's Day, I go on a cycling trip, three day cycling trip with friends. And this is an interesting group of guys. It's all guys, by the way, about half of which are retired. And these are like retired Ernst and Young partners and attorneys and like guys who've done really well. And we're talking about AI at one point, I think it was over breakfast and what I realized and what I started to show these guys, they're all using maybe chat, you know, chatgpt a little bit and they're intimidated by it. They haven't heard of or using other tools like Gemini, like Perplexity. And I explained to them, guys, it's different tools for different jobs. ChatGPT I find to be great for writing. Gemini is great for taking a lot of content and putting it into one piece of content that I can Use Perplexity is great for research. Data driven research. Different tools, different jobs. So I think the same thing has to happen here, you know.

Quick question, Mike.

Yeah, yeah.

Do you, do you Google something first or do you AI at first?

Depends upon what it is. If it's something really simple, I still do Google.

Okay.

Something that I know. Oh, I actually want to know about this. I want to learn about it. Then, then, then I use, I use.

AI like so anyway, I, I mean I just wanted to capture that. But go back to your thought.

No, I know.

Distract you too much.

That's right. No, it's fine. And you know, and I, by the way, I'm a super curious guy, intellectually curious. So when someone brings me something can be about history, can be business, whatever. If I, you know, if it doesn't seem right, I want to research it. Or if it seems right but interesting, I want to research it. I want to know more. Which by the way, salespeople, this is who we, who we historically have been. Right. We know oftentimes we, you know, if you're in a particular industry, you know a lot about a lot and if you're, you know, a generalist, which is where I started, you know a little about a lot and you still have to be able to do that. What I, you know, a concern that I have with AI I'll give you an example. It's you know, enterprise forecasting. I won't mention any vendors. When you're selling an enterprise deal, you've got anywhere from six to 12 people involved in that deal. You can have all of the buying signals that AI says, oh, this deal is going to close and you have it on your commit and everybody's ready to, we're ready to ring the bell. It looks great. Well, what AI still can't do is it can't understand or predict human behavior. So on Friday you think you're closing a deal on Monday and over the weekend Richard goes to a cookout with Scott and Scott says, oh, you're thinking about commotion sales as a fractional head of sales. I got a friend who does that. In fact, my brother in law, you should talk to him. And all of a sudden on Monday blows it up, it's gone. And this happens all the time. And AI can't predict that. So that takes us back to the basics of selling and qualifying and qualifying and, and I think I'll say this and then I'll pause the. I think the flaw right now in AI is that in order for it to really be the Magic that we want it to be. You have to fix or address and understand the underlying process to whatever it is that you're using the AI for. Because back in the day, when I started selling ERP in 1995, it was, you know, if you automate a, a, you know, using workflow, you. If it's a bad process, you get worse faster. With AI, you're going to get worse at hyperspeed.

Yeah.

So you gotta, you gotta look at the processes there. Here's what we want to have happen. What are the prompts and what's the right AI tool to layer on top of that? Whether it's, you know, for, for outreach sequences, whether it's for forecasting, whether it's proposal generation, whatever it is, what's the. What is it that we want to have happen? And let's find the tool that does that. Not just say, oh, we'll just use ChatGPT.

Yeah, I love it.

Go ahead, Richard.

I was, I was just going to say that Chris Beal has always said, you know, and long before AI, you know, be careful because you're just going to accelerate the suck.

Yes.

Right. Like that's his quirk. And, and he's. I really, really appreciate him. And he. To your point, AI is just going to accelerate the suck. The interesting thing is, I love what you said is it can't predict human behavior. And I've spent. Scott knows this. I've spent the last four to six weeks uploading everything about me in ChatGPT. Right. Because I've found that my prospects are now finding me there regularly. Like, four out of the last seven people who found me come from ChatGPT. But I texted, I just messaged Scott and say, I wonder if Chat GPT could predict my behavior on something now that it has so much. Because it, it actually has the information about me and my. But anyway, I'm gonna go play with that. But I love that point that it cannot predict the human behavior yet. And that's. That's a nobody is. I have not heard anybody say that, but that's.

So I'm not putting in a plug for Perplexity. I actually did this yesterday because I was doing some other work and I went. I put into Gemini, Perplexity and Chachi PT the same prompt. Who is Michael Mohlfelder? Oh, Perplexity. Nailed it. And you know who I am, what I do, what I talk about, my four W's of qualifying, it was all there.

I was like, oh, careful, that's amazing.

I was gonna, I was Actually gonna ask about the four W's of qualifying because I, I basically did some research through your, not through AI, but through your LinkedIn profile. And you have famously replaced Bant with the four W's. What, why, who and when.

Yeah.

So how do you go about training a sales org or sellers to kind of pivot from this checkbox heavy sort of methodology to more of this narrative based kind of qualification?

So thank you, Scott. So the checkbox heavy stuff does work and it has its place especially in, you know, enterprise selling.

Still, you still believe you still?

It does, it does. But as a, as a place to, to memorialize the work that you're doing and to make sure that you are steps. Right.

I, I call that the exit criteria. Right. From one stage to the next. You need to, you do need to know some things.

Exactly. I totally want to know that I've got the executive decision maker. I still want to know that I understand the decision process. I've identified the. I, I got all that. And I do think that it has its place. However, I think where we kind of went astray and I've used Medic and a few different companies is that Medic doesn't tell you if you have a qualified opportunity.

Amen.

Jesus tells you it gives you a process map for a longer engagement. And the way the four W's came about was I was CRO for a company called Map anything that got acquired by Salesforce. After I left, we were early days of using a recording solution similar to Gong or Chorus. And I was on a plane listening to SDR calls. And on the call the prospect said to my sdr, are you banting me? And which like, obviously that, that got my attention and the tone of the call changed immediately, became more contentious, less friendly conversation. So I was like, okay, well that's, that's weird. So I then started listening to some other calls to see if it was like, is this gonna a repeating pattern? And it was.

Now it doesn't feel, it doesn't feel good when you know this stuff and you know what somebody's doing.

You're like, yeah, all right.

So, so when you want to buy something and this goes, this is kind of the answer to the question. When you want to buy something, you want to be treated as a human. Right? And when people come to the SDR call, and I love SDRs, I built one of the first SDR teams back in 2012, 2013, but they now come to those conversations and they're like, all right, I'm going to talk to the sales guy, he's going to ask me a bunch of questions and one of them is going to be, and I'm ready for that budget question. And nobody gives an honest answer to the budget question. Not because they don't want to, but because they're not allowed to give you the budget number or they're afraid if I tell you I have $100,000, you're going to come in.

Well, they don't know it or they don't actually truly know it.

So why ask it a question that is going to create an adversarial situation?

Great point.

So like it took some tweaking to get this. So the four W's the first question we ask. So we do the, you know, whatever Sandler close or whatever you want, upfront commitment, you know, we're going to do this, you're going to do that, and we're going to decide should we work together. Is that fair? Yeah, that's fair. But then they say, hey, Scott, let me ask you a question before we get going. What happened that caused you to reach out to me or to my company or if it's, if, if it was outbound cold call and you took the meeting. Scott, just out of curiosity, everybody's calendars are jammed. What, what did we say to you that made you want to take this meeting? What happened? So there's a bunch of things here. One, I'm now engaging human to human, which is what I sell to humans. I don't sell to General Motors or whatever. I sell to another human being who has human problems and human needs. So the first thing that's happening in that question is I'm, I'm saying to somebody, you're a human and I'm a human and I want to help you. The other thing that happens in that this was kind of a side discovery is that a lot of times when you're doing the qualification call, you're dealing with somebody who's at a mid level in the organization. And I don't mean this in any derogatory way. They oftentimes don't get asked their opinion of anything. They get told to go do something. So now along comes this human salesperson who says, oh man, what happened? Now we've recorded those calls. We had one guy go almost 11 minutes. Oh, well, this happened and this happened. And then Mike said this to Scott and Scott said this to Mike and.

I thought they were getting 11 minutes.

Yeah, because you have did.

You'll hear about the cat. I do this too. And it's like, you'll hear about the cat, too.

Yeah, just shut up. Let him talk.

Yes, let him talk.

And then. And then you can say, okay, that's amazing. Got it. Now that what happened is going to usually tell you that question in and of itself is if you have a deal or not.

Yeah, yeah.

And because one of the things you also want to dial into is, is it personal pain that we're solving for or is it actual institutional pain? So the next question gets into the, well, why. Why do we have to solve it now? Which is a bit, you know, that's a salesy question. But what we want to understand is, like, is it's not about pain. This is one of the things that I also discovered we were taught for last 30, 40 years, sell the pain. Nobody buys because of pain. Nobody changes anything because they're in pain. If that was true, we'd go to the doctor all the time. I mean, I hurt my shoulder in August and finally went to the doctor in February and had surgery in April.

I'm right there. I just went yesterday.

You hadn't hit rock bottom yet. You haven't had any urgency. There's no urgency behind it.

Yeah, you want the urgency. You want to know they are in an untenable situation or headed to an untenable situation. That's when change happens in humans and in organizations. This is one of the mistakes, by the way, in forecasting that I don't think AI yet has picked up, which is, is the pain significant enough to drive change? Otherwise, we're just wasting our time. So then the next question is, who in the organization owns this project? I'm not calling that person. And I've had people say, oh, well, I don't want to tell you that. It's like, I'm not calling the person here's. And I'll be very honest. The reason I'm asking is because in today's world, nobody has time. So if your CIO or CFO has directed you to fix this, I know that this is an actual project because the CFO doesn't want somebody wasting time on a pro on something that they're not. That they're not going to buy. And the CFO doesn't want to sit and review eight different proposals for something they're not going to buy. So that's.

Soon. They won't have to do that at all. It'll just run it through their sort of buyer decision model. Boom, boom. Yeah.

And then the last question is, when do you need to be in production? Not when are you buying?

Yeah. When do you need this? Live by. Yeah, yeah.

And that will also say, like, well, I gotta. I gotta be live in two weeks. And you and your project product takes six months to implement. We have a problem. And.

Right.

In the other ways, like, you know, in. Where we're going now with. With solutions is we got stuff that implements in hours. So if somebody says, I gotta be live in two weeks, you say, well, how about if I give you a link and you're up and running in two hours, what would that do? So that's. Those are the. Those are the gates that get us into. Are we going to have a sales conversation? I'll give you this analogy. And then. And then. And then I'll pause again. We've all. Almost everybody's bought a car. If you walked into a car dealer, a BMW dealer, and you're in your Led Zeppelin shirt, dungaree. Dungaree jeans, you pull it in your.

1990S, exactly how Scott would do it.

Honda Accord. You lift the door up and you shut it, and you walk in and you look at that beautiful four series in the showroom and say, I want to take that out for a test drive. This. They're not going to just throw the keys at you. Say, absolutely. Go have fun. Let me know they've got questions. They want to see your driver's license and take care of it.

They want to see your bank statement if you try to do that with a Lamborghini.

Yeah, so. And by the way, it may be that you just hit the lottery or you're a rock. You're a rock star, and that's how you dress. But they still want to know, is this guy going to steal the car? Has he never driven before? Has he never driven anything more than a Honda Accord? And he's going to wrap it around a telephone pole across the street. But for some reason, in tech sales, we don't qualify that way. We say, oh, you called me, or you hit my website. It's time for me to sell you something.

Love it, love it, love it. We need to sort of pivot here for a minute. Going to do a quick blurb to our sponsor, Vasco, who we really appreciate coming on board to sponsor the surf and sales podcast and the event, which is happening in October. You know, Mike, now that you've had your shoulder surgery, we expect to see you in Portugal at surf and sales. You know, maybe take my spot in case I have to have surgery. But anyway, I want to thank Vasco for coming on board. If you don't know about Vasco. Imagine you're sitting there on Monday and dragon feet going into your, your weekly, you know, boardroom or, or sales meeting and sales miss their number. And we want to blame marketing for the leads, right? The terrible leads and marketing pushes back and customer success. Success shrugs and rev ops is, you know, trying to put all this stuff together. Vasco helps put, get through all that noise and pull the data and your billing systems to account revenue forecasts and helps with day to day action and execution. So they're a little bit of an AI play on the back end, just helping to figure out that single source of truth. So if you have not checked out Vasco, please go check them out. And we greatly, greatly appreciate them coming on board to support us. So Mike, this is the part of, as we start to wrap of, you know, what question can we answer for.

You or questions, I mean, curious because like across the three of us we have, you know, I don't know, I'm going to guess here somewhere. 60, 75 years of sales.

Ouch. I was just doing the math and he said it. Scott, Scott's got 10. We have the rest of the. That's kind of Scott's the baby face assassin.

And I got more than 10. Come on.

Yeah, I know you still got the baby face though. So I appreciate, you know, I guess.

You know, and I appreciate the reactions to me, you know, one of the hard things, you know, is a, as a, as a solopreneur working remote like this is my team. I don't ever want to think that, like just believe my stuff. Right. Because that's easy to do. So I'm curious, you know, what, you know, your feedback on some of the things that I've said and where do you both see the B2B sales world going? Do you think we're going to have more salespeople, fewer salespeople? Is AI gonna actually displace workers the way I think it will? What do you think?

We are a lot of stuff going on there. First of all, from the things that you said, your philosophy and everything, I mean, Richard and I have been nodding our head saying yep, yep, yep, yep. So I think we're very well aligned on how we think about things. I never subscribed to band or medic or med pick or any of that kind of stuff ever. That's my stance on, on that stuff. So I think you and I are aligned philosophically on the kind of where we're headed front. I mean, the fun part is that it's anybody's guess. And if you say we're all doomed, a large number of people will throw rocks at you and tell you you're an idiot. And if you say everything is going to be status quo and this is all a fad, then a large portion of the room will throw rocks at you and tell you you're an idiot. So, you know, I think we're at that phase where, like, some people fervently believe we are beyond the point of no return and jobs are going to be disappearing. Intelligence and low level, like knowledge, working jobs are going to be gone. And then it's only a matter of time before it moves up market as the technology gets stronger. Labor jobs are safe for now until robotic versions, humanoid robots can do some of those jobs. And then what? That's my belief, which gets rocks thrown at me and also gets some people who are deep in this space nodding their head saying, yeah, it's actually probably even worse than you're saying, Scott. So I've been kind of outspoken. I would say I've been more outspoken than some, at least with my platform about how I feel about this stuff. I feel decently strongly that I'm right. I don't really want to be right, if I'm being honest with you. I don't like the direction that it's going. We've got so obsessed with perfection and efficiency that it's going to. It's going to cost us everything, everything external. You know, we forgot that part of being human is making mistakes and not scaling perfectly.

Oops.

So for the sake of what, capital, for the sake of making more money, we decided to basically eradicate the need for humans. This, this is problematic for me, but unfortunately I think we're past the point of no return. So I have to try to find positives. And some of the positives are, well, if everything external that human beings have had to worry about for so long is taken care of, what is left for us to think about and explore? Well, a lot of that is internal stuff. It's mental health, it's spiritual health, it's longevity, it's all the biohacking kind of trends. It's personalized medicine, personalized diet plans, because the three of us are all different. And you need blueberries and I need strawberries and Richard needs pineapple. That's different. Based on who we are and eradication of illness and eradication of disease and expedited healing from injury and things like this, those are positives that I think can and hopefully will come from all of this. Stuff we're just going to have to like lean way more into that or it's going to get real dire and real depressing quick. I think that's my take. I'm very curious to hear Richard's.

Yeah.

Before Richard filtered tape.

Before Richard goes. I just want to hit one thing on what you said about mistakes because I think mistakes are magic, right? I try to get my first mistake out of the way early in the.

Morning because I make 6am every day. Mike makes his first mistake waking up.

Yeah. When my kids were in elementary school, they had a teacher who, who taught them a whoops to wahoo. When you make a mistake and you turn into something magnificent and that happens all the time. And it's like, you know, there's the, there's an old story about, you know, some engineer made a massive mistake at a tech company and cost the company like $10 million. He got called into his boss's office, is like I'm getting fired. And the boss said why would I fire you? I just paid $10 million to train you. There's mistakes are okay, but you're right, we, we're trying so hard to be perfect that it creates anxiety and all this other stuff. But anyway, Richard, I, I, I, so.

Under here I, I agree with Scott and you know, it's interesting, I think there's, it was interesting to hear Scott say the labor jobs are safe for now. Meanwhile, every technological advantage, right? Every technological advantage in the last 150 years feels like it's hit the labor jobs, right? Farming industry and you know, automobile industry, manufacturing, all those kind of things. And now it's coming after the white collar people like us, right? It's, it's coming after the bankers, right? Imagine the AI is just going to tell you no in the bank loan, right? You can't even, you can't even get a hold of somebody easily, right? So I think, I think that you know, we are to a large degree doomed and I do get worried about well, what are we going to do with all these people who aren't making money, right? What happens? Because you're not going to have money to buy stuff and do things. So that's a big thing. I do think in a sales world when I get super specific right now the safest place to be in sales is, is upmarket where your decision makers are mid market enterprise where there's five or six teams that have to do it, where there are multiple humans involved in the decision making process, right? Like I think the, the, and it'll be interesting in the, in the SMB market. If you think about the, the Yelps of the world, right? Like if I'm a small business restaurant owner, right, Am I going to take a, you know, what percentage of, of the, those owners are going to want to go do all this stuff on Yelp and AI use, right? A percentage will, but I think they'll also be a percentage. You still want to talk to a human. So, you know, it's, it's a real flex, like it's a real pivot moment, right? Like we're right there and we're, we're looking, you know, we got to figure out in the software sales startup world of how do we cross this chasm and not fall into the abyss in the chasm. And I don't know that anybody has that solution yet. I don't know. And I don't know that there will be like, that's the part that scares me. I think there's some good stuff that's happening. I think that's going to enhance and help. I also think there's, you know, I'm more fearful than I've ever been about job security. Right. You know, the other place where I don't think AI or the robots will kick in is professional sports, right? Of the, of the athlete. The trainer might, the massage therapist might become a robot. You know, all those other things. We're already seeing it in sport. We already see it in baseball, right? Like how often, you know, theoretically, pitchers don't get to necessarily call their pitch as much as they used to, right. We're seeing it probably in the NFL and football to the quarterback and stuff like that, right? Like the, you know, anyway, so, so the athlete. Scott, we need to get our boys back to being professional athletes.

Too late. It's too late.

I know, I know. I don't know. Bodhi, I haven't even told you about bodies seal thing they went to. But, you know, Bodhi's my last hope, right? He's, he's going to be my Obi Wan anyway. So that, that's where I think it's going. So, and what I'm concerned about, I.

Think, so I think we're pretty well aligned. I, I, I'm trying very hard to be and remain positive. I think, you know, what I'm watching right now, and I haven't seen it yet, is for a company to realize that, you know, we all say, oh, we're human selling to humans, but I'm not seeing a company actually embrace it. Meaning I want Humans to interact with other humans in a human way.

That's what I'm gonna, I think that that will happen, that will happen after this current wave.

Yeah.

Right now everybody's enamored and trying to figure it out and all over indexing inevitably will happen is there'll be backlash and people will. And I made this post as a joke yesterday morning. All I wrote was a human being wrote this post and it's a joke. But that will be the rallying cry. There will be a point of pride.

And there will be the subject line.

Certain buyers who only want that. There'll be a whole movement, an anti AI sort of like movement. So I, I, I see that wave coming, but not for, not for a little bit.

But I do see that as humans we crave authenticity and simplicity and what are we doing? We're, we're making people less authentic and we're creating all kinds of complexity and everybody's life just make it. So much of, of the deals that I've won or my team has won is because we just made it really simple on the buy.

Yeah. So hopefully, hopefully with the advent of all this stuff, we can actually start focusing on, on solving more important problems than how do I make my sales team sell more? Because if we're being honest, we haven't built many companies or many products that actually solve real human problems and, and challenges. Right. Like that the lifespan stuff that matters. Planet stuff that matters. Right. These types, these types of things in medicine, in green, in energy. It'd be interesting to see people start taking swings at some of these things rather than, hey Mike, I got a cool piece of, piece of Martech for you. So you have a better list of people that fucking cold call all day. I'm so bored and tired with these types of companies. I can't even begin to tell you.

This is the reckoning that's coming.

I'm here for it.

And the record is coming is that there's only so many dollars and there's a lot of noise out there and there's a lot of in the market that people like. How many Martech solutions do you need? How many CRM solutions do you need? How many AI solutions do you need? How many? Like I need one of those, one of those, one of those, one of those. And, and the fact that there's 50 or 100 or a thousand in any sector and I, I can create an app on lovable overnight and like that's great, but there's only $1 to be spent and that's the reckoning is like, you know, this is a cycle, right? And then it all gets flushed out and then we build it back up again. Now fortunately, you know, my age, I'll probably, you know, this is probably my last cycle. So we'll see. We'll see.

Yeah, I think, I think Scott and I are both offline. We're like, man, we got to take the money and run and we got to invest, right? We gotta like, we got ourselves up, like, you know, I, I do appreciate that part. I, I like what you just said that I would, I would love to get Mike and just take that one part where he says there's so much in the market and just put it on a loop for like 15 seconds, right? On a tick tock loop. There's so like, what's wrong with sales? There's so much, you know, that's the title. There's so much over and over. There's so over and over and over again.

Yeah.

Well, we appreciate you spending time with us this afternoon. Thank you. Enjoyed the, the conversation, the tactics, the. A philosophical debate and everything like that. Check him out. Mike Mofelder, calm Ocean sales. He's on LinkedIn. Best place to message him is probably right there. And yeah, we will see you all next time on the surf and sales podcast.

Thank you, everybody. Thanks, Mike.