S4E52 - AI will make lazy sellers obsolete with the Sales Doctor - Chet Lovegren

What's up, everybody? Welcome to another episode of the Surf and Sales podcast. It has been a while we've been gone, we've been in Costa Rica, living it up at the surf and sales summit. We had a great time, welcomed, I don't know, 35, 40 people down there, Richard, something like that over the last few weeks.

Yeah, it was, it was awesome. It was a really good time. And, you know, the vibe you hear back from people. We've got some, some fun stuff as is.

Good.

They just loved it. They just loved it. Of course, we did have our one epiphany moment that, you know, after 10 of these, we finally decided, we asked people to create some social media video stuff about what they've learned at surf and sales and it's really cool and we're going to put something out with it. But of course we looked at each other going, it took us 10 of these. We had to do 10 of these before we realized we should probably ask.

Yeah, we're a little, we're a little slow on the take.

So in a minute we're going to introduce our guest, Chet. But first, a word from our sponsors over at HubSpot. If you're hustling in the trenches to build your business or bootstrapping one of your own, let's Talk about an AI powered tool that can lighten up your workload. HubSpot's Campaign Assist is a game changer for creating marketing campaigns at scale. It quickly turns your key selling points into cohesive pivot pitch, which helps you deliver knockout emails, ads and landing pages in minutes. Just choose your content type, input a couple of points, pick a tone like friendly or witty or Richard and let the AI robot handle the rest. You can copy and paste the content to whatever channel you want or like and convert it in and. Or even convert it directly into publishable campaigns without leaving your HubSpot interface. So let Campaign Assist take care of the campaigns. You have campaigns so you can get back to your growing business. Work smarter, not harder@HubSpot.com campaign assist. Nope, that's not it. I screwed it up. Work smarter.

You can tell this is the only episode that we've done month of December. We're a little rusty.

Yeah. Work smarter, not harder@HubSpot.com Campaign Assistant. Oh, my gosh. HubSpot.com Campaign-Assistant could they please HubSpot. I love you guys and we appreciate it, but for the all that is holy serious. An AI URL creator that gives me something easy so I don't have to sound like I'm reading stuff.

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So that's right.

There it is. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome Chet Lovgren to the show. He is the founder and head of sales at Sales Doctor based in la. What's up, Chet?

What's up, Scott? What's up, Richard? And I love that you put that in there because it's kind of funny. Which founder is not typically the head of their own sales. Right. Unless they're a big ass company.

That's the point. And maybe we'll, maybe we should talk about that because I can think of plenty of software founders who are not the head of sales.

Yeah, well, when you get to a certain point, but when you're in, in the, in the world of fractional and consulting, unless you start really getting up there. Right. Yeah, we all, we all should be.

Around running our own business in this world are definitely our own head of sales. Tell everybody about the Sales Doctor and what you do and what your specialty is.

Yeah, Sales doctor. Essentially we have two different things that we kind of do. And our goal is to partner with sales leaders and enablement teams to kind of prevent them from these archaic training practices that are really common. You know, the only way you really upskill people, in my opinion, from what I've seen, is either hey, here's a sales guru and here's hours and hours of video content that nobody engages with and doesn't really get any value out of, or it's, hey, go join one of these like, you know, training programs. You're going to meet once a week for 12 weeks. But thanks to the forgetting curve, people forget 84% of what they learn in 30 days. So in week five, you're learning advanced tactics that build on foundations. In week one, you probably forgot most of. So we kind of go in with a more prescriptive approach, hence the name Sales Doctor and try to provide a way for them, whether it's a short term engagement with upskilling their people from an execution standpoint or it could be long term where they're going, hey, like our strategy from the ground up is just not working. So let's rip and replace. Or you know, the triggering events could be just fired. An SDR leader need someone to come in for a couple months until we find someone else to still coach, enable the team. Could be, hey, we want to stand up an SDR department or we want to stand up a sales team. We need someone to come in and just give us the foundational things, get a set up, get us going so I can kind of get people where they need to be and then hire a VP of sales or a head of sales when I actually need to, or an SDR manager when I actually need to. Especially this day and age where it feels like people are getting let go left and right and people's, what do they call it? It's not quiet. Quiet hiring. That's the new term, right, where you give people more stuff to do in their current job without giving them more money or a title change. Yeah. And so unfortunately, I feel like we help the bad guys in that situation because we enable, you know, CEOs and founders to be able to do that to their VP's of sales. You know, give them the ability to not need an SDR manager or even not need to hire a director of sales. But you know, it's the, it's the market, it's what's needed and it's a problem that we're solving.

So we have, we've talked a lot about what's wrong with sales coaching and kind of enabling reps to get better and sales orders to get better and all that kind of stuff. I feel like we've covered that ground before. One thing that we haven't talked much about is where the future of sales coaching is headed. So what are your thoughts on, on the future of sales coaching? Could be AI aided, tech aided, fractional aided stuff. Where do you see.

Solutions going to tackle this problem and what's gonna, what's gonna work?

I think it's gonna be a really healthy mix of the two. You know, somebody said it to me about six months ago and it's never left my mouth. This is the worst AI is ever gonna be. It's already pretty damn good. Like, let's be honest, it's not meant to be out of the box just yet, but it's pretty good for a lot of stuff. There's a lot that you can do with AI and it's not just generative AI, it's not just ChatGPT. There's tons of stuff. There's AI tools that will scrub the Internet for data. There are AI tools that'll, you know, do sales calls for you. Now you can create AI sales bots for yourself to make cold calls and things of that nature. So it's not just generative AI. Hey, write me a blog, chat GPT or create me a sales email. There's so much more to AI and I think that's going to first better enable tools that are meant to enable Sellers. I'll refrain from naming any technologies because usually when I do that on podcasts, someone's like, oh, we really shouldn't name other technologies because we have such and such interests. So I'll refrain from that. But you can probably think of 5 to 10 sales enablement softwares out there that if they had some form of AI in their product, it's just going to make things more efficient and better.

Check all the ones you want because that becomes lead gen for us. And we're going to say, here, talk to our podcast. Here's a snippet. Now you should be our sponsor, so mention anything you want.

Yeah, Seismic is a great example, right? To what extent can we implement AI into a tool that's managing sales enablement alongside sales enablement teams, right? Like that's a great example. How can we make it more efficient? How can we make it more effective? How can we make sure that maybe we're learning using AI tools instead of scraping the data and then looking at it? Maybe we're using AI tools to interpret data about customers. You know, our customers, engagement of their sellers on their certain documentation, right? Like even just simple little tiny things like that so they can actually turn around and show customers, hey, that sales team, that training you rolled out, here's the information from the software on how much time they actually spent engaging with it. Like little tiny things like that I think can provide more insights to sales leaders to know what's working and what isn't. The fractional thing scares the shit out of me and I'll tell you why. Everybody and their mom that got laid off this year went out full time on their own. And I hate to be frank with you, but aside from you two and maybe three others, I don't trust anybody else because I've heard some horror stories and I'm not saying that because I'm in the same boat and their competition, I could give a shit. I've been in this game, you know what I mean? I'm not, I'm not worried about newcomers. I see people. I've already seen four people come and go this year. But the rise of this fractional thing that. And I think part of it is self created because I'll tell you, I'm out here prospecting and doing my own thing. It's not as easy as people make it sound. It's not as big of a need as people make it sound. Right now too, there are thought leaders that are making it sound like fractional is the new thing. I have not really seen that and people are very abrasive to it right now. And I get it. VPs of sales think, oh, well, I'm supposed to have the answers. If I bring in an outside voice, then that means I don't have the answer. But then it's kind of like, well, you buy software, right? It's the same thing. It's just solving a problem associated with the task you're trying to complete. Where I do think fractional. Oh, go ahead, Richard.

Yeah, I was just gonna say this is, this is very similar to, you know, there was this phrase of, you know, the Walmart king of America many years ago when Walmart was doing. Well, Scott was probably like four when that happened. So no, you know, but the same thing with Amazon, right? Like everybody's coming out and doing it. And I've actually done some research now. The two things that I think people are doing is, you know, they're either saying they're fractional or all of a sudden they're a fucking go to market specialist. And it's like, you know, really, if you're such a specialist and it's the first time doing it, why did it just happen six months ago? Like, where are your clients from before then? From the side, right? So I think people are doing it out of fear to show that there's a hole in their resume. They don't. Nobody's coached them about how to talk about these things when it happens to their career and those, those pieces.

So.

And I see the same thing, right? Everybody, everybody started their one little thing. They got one or two little logos or clients from people they knew. They decided to go on their own for whatever reason, often. Cause they were laid off and they got a couple more clients and then they realized the well runs dry and they're lasting about six months before they can look for the next job. Which I'm not opposed to. Like, I'm like you, Chad. Like, hey, more power to you. Several will do well and sort of make their name and do great things. But you're right, there's a ton of people out there who are just getting away with it, but hopefully they learn and through all this stuff, kind of circle back to what you've been saying too. The thing, what I liked hearing you say chat was that all this AI, all this stuff that we're doing is ultimately going to help us with our own eq. As humans, we're going to get better at understanding the customer, therefore our conversations can get better, therefore the experience gets better. You know, that's sort of My holistic.

Are we, though, are we going to get better or are we just going to get lazy?

That's why Chet and I have the jobs we have, Scott, because that's what we do.

We just. I'm just asking, I'm just thinking there's a counter argument perhaps that it'll just make sellers lazier and not actually have a bigger EQ and understand buyers better. It'll be like, oh, this AI tool is going to understand things for me.

But I think, I think until the buyer is ready to buy from the AI tool itself, then it's about. Then it's about the conversion and the conversion of conversations, which happens still at a human to human level.

I agree with Scott, though. It's gonna. But the thing is.

Here we go, here we go.

Hold on. It's gonna make the worst people worse and it's gonna show how bad they really are. Because if we give you this AI stuff that is going to help you get your job, do your job better, and you still don't do it because you just makes you lazier. Look, top salespeople, they're not going to get lazy just because AI is around. They're going to go, how can I make this thing do more for me? How can I go from hitting 100, 110% every quarter, month, year, whatever you're measuring on, hopefully it's not year. Hopefully it's just quarter a month. Ultimately, how can I take that and go to 150 with this? And then, of course, now my quota is going to move up because all the top sellers are doing 150% of quotas and now they're going to move quotas up. So now my 150 is now more like 110. And again, so how do I do it again? That's, that's the heart of a top seller. It's the bottom sellers who, yeah, got slowly right, they're going to get.

Isn't that, Isn't that what we already have, though? Like, that's what all these different enablement tools are. The people who don't engage with them, you know, they.

Yeah, but there's so much. There's so much scapegoating with bottom reps that they get away with it for a very long time. But when we get to a point where AI is even better than it is right now and you're fully enabled and it's like, look, there is no excuse now at this point, it's really going to show me who I am. Or you have the people that like will get lucky and maybe they hit quota like a couple times and then they're back at the bottom and it's like they jump between building, being a departer and a maintainer. Yeah, you have it right now, but it's a little less air apparent because there's. Because we're in this participation trophy era where we think empathy means a lack of accountability. But when you get something like this in place where you're now we have these AI tools where it's like literally you should be converting at this rate because we have a software that's telling us that cold email should convert at this rate. And this is like their guarantee and their statement of work and all this other stuff that we put into things that we want to promise. Right. We should be converting at this. All you literally have to do is like press two buttons. So why are we still not generating appointments? You know what I mean? Like if you're talking about SDR specifically or full cycle sellers, but I think it's going to become more apparent that it's like, hey, it's not. All the other things aside, you're just not going to do any job that you're given. I don't think a lot of those sellers are still exist right now though, this day and age. You know, one of my triggers for business is looking at job boards and finding out who's hiring right now. And I'll tell you, I see AE jobs at SMB companies with almost 2000 applicants in three days. Those are all the people that need to sit back and collect a paycheck and work from home because their kids are running around and they don't have anybody to watch over them. You know what I mean? Like those are the people that need to collect the check, in my opinion. And I see it a lot. And I'm seeing like now that I'm having sales calls with a lot of companies because I'm looking at buying some additional software for my company. I'm on these calls where I'm like, this is completely different than it was two years ago. I'm not going through a box checking exercise. This person's actually having a real conversation with me. I'm sure there are still pretty crappy sellers out there that exist. I know pretty crappy sellers that still have jobs. But unfortunately I don't think we're not in a candidate market anymore. So we're a little bit more fortunate that we can be more stringent on who we have and who we're hiring. And then once we recover and now we have more AI tools in place. It kind of gives people no excuse. So it helps us weed people out faster and they can't scapegoat their time, you know, an extra six to eight months like bottom sellers usually do. So I agree with Scott. I think it's going to make lazy people lazier, though. I think top sellers are going to go, man, how can I harness this? Like a superpower? Like, I've just been given a gift from God. Right. Like, let's, let's figure out how to triple. Triple what I'm selling every single month. But maybe that's just me as a top seller. Maybe that's just how I think about it. And why that way?

I think that's how top sellers think. But you, you said something interesting, which is.

If, if you're a top seller and now all of a sudden you're like, well, I can do 4 million this year instead of 1 million this year. How long until the powers that be know that and exploit that and suddenly they're not paying you what they used to pay you on every deal. And they're paying. They're dropping it lower and lower and lower. And it's like, cool. Might keep paying you to 50 this year even though you did 4 million instead of 1 million. How long until that? You know, I'm wondering if there's like a, a window of opportunity here.

Yeah.

Where everybody should go real, real hard to maximize their earnings. Because I think the powers that be might see a loophole and try to close that shit real fast.

But they always do. They always look for it and they always close it.

A brutal part. Yeah.

Yeah. So I don't, I think there's going to be.

What can you do in 2024, especially at the beginning, to, to get out there ahead of the skis and, and get yours before the loophole gets closed.

Well, with any, any job, if you start doing really well, people start wondering what's going on. Right. Like, that's the first question. Like, why is this different right now? I think if, if salespeople are going to have a. Tools that are purchased, like there's a lot of different scenarios. Right. Maybe let's say VP of Sales purchases AI tool. And now we expect our sellers to be able to do X amount more. Great. Well, now you're 100% attainment doesn't really. Yeah. That's your. Still your quota. They probably don't raise quotas just because they bought a new AI tool. Maybe they do. I don't know. Not normally do you raise quotas just based on the new software? But there is an expectation that X outcome is going to happen in terms of conversions or revenue. Right. And so if the status quo continues happening, that determines pretty much an unsuccessful purchase. So the bar is still going to be already set a little bit higher while you, while you're in that learning curve. I think once that happens, you have about. Once things start going well, you probably have about six months of Runway. In my opinion, any company I've ever worked at once, everything was like a party. You had about six months before they got wise to it and then made some changes. So that's the time frame. So.

So everything was a party. You've got about six months.

Yeah, you got about six months because you have another quarter where your sales leader's happy, and then the board starts going, well, maybe where it's too easy and we're paying our reps too much. And then you go through a whole nother quarter where the CFO and the CRO are working together to figure out a better comp plan that's more profitable for the company and then they implement it. So, yeah, you have about six months until the party ends. Not six months from now, but six months from the second that your team is aware of that you're using AI tools. So if you're an individual seller and you work at a company that's, you know, a little less stringent on your IT security, I would say go just research as much about AI tools as you can and how they can enable you. Don't do it just because it can, though. That's another thing. I've seen a lot of Gurus on LinkedIn posting. Here's an AI workflow I created and it's like, yeah, but that's about as long as I already do it manually, you know, like, in terms of, like, how I look at account research and my process, I don't need to go create this backline code connected to Zapier and do this 100 account research thing. Pulling people's websites with AI, like, that doesn't really provide me anything. The results are pretty canned and not very insightful. I'd rather just look at a website five minutes before I hop on the discovery call, you know what I mean? And, like, understand their org chart. And the person I'm talking to, that's. That's good enough for me. And that's about as much time. Because it's like Katherine Caldwell, you know, she opened my eyes to this thing where she said, why would you Ever put video as a step in your sales sequence? Because if people aren't replying to your emails, why would you waste time sending them a video? They're not even opening your emails, obviously. So find other triggers or challenge yourself in other ways, like maybe LinkedIn. They accepted a friend request. Friend request. Good God. A connection request. Sorry. That's the nature of the social platform. It feels like a Facebook now, Right. It's a business Facebook. But she's like, wait until you actually have some level of engagement. Why didn't cross that bridge when you get there? And I think of, like, I think of it the same exact way. Don't research a bunch of accounts just because you can research the ones that you should research. Because you're going into a conversation where you need to understand what you're talking about, right?

Yeah.

And unfortunately with cold calling, that's never really the case that you really need to understand the entire account. Discover. Yeah, you need to understand a little bit more. So wait until you get to that part to actually go in and do the thing. So with AI, don't do it just because it can, but find things that can actually enable you the right way. Get those tools going, start getting ahead of the pack, because pretty soon your sales leaders can start buying some AI tools. And then again, once. Once you start enabling yourself and you get better, you have about six months of the party before you're back to square one.

I got a question for you. You know, I think, and this is actually an example of what you're saying, right? I think there are plenty of reps out there who have done exactly what you're talking about. About, right? These are the ones who are probably hitting the goals. They're doing it, they're figuring it out. The ones at the bottom that have always existed, they're paying attention, but they're thinking about it. The way you said that AI is going to replace me, right. Is there any. What advice would you give someone if they were like, okay, I got to start to embrace this thing and I don't know how, and it scares me and I think I'm going to get replaced by it. Where does one even start to research AI and sales? Right? Because you can, you know, Google, you know, the keywords crazy, like someone's new. Someone's what? You know, maybe there are two people, I would say, in general. One, the college graduate who's trying to figure out life and understanding how AI and sales might affect them. Or B, someone who's at the bottom of the list, right? Where do they even start to learn? And what to learn? What's important to know. You know, your first 30 days versus your next 30 versus the next 30. Not just the tool but like what do they need to know? Where do they go?

It's a great question and let me preface with saying if you're in sales, not everybody will be replaced. But we have about a five year window. Go and make as much money as you can and go start investing in real estate because most of you are going to get replaced. I'm a firm believer. Like you listen to an air that I call that thing is pretty darn convincing. And again, if this is the worst it's ever going to be, like think about email like 1988, right? Like if that was the worst it's.

Ever going to be.

Look at email now. It's archaic. We don't even really think about email anymore. So similar thing, I mean these, these calls that these robots are having are pretty, pretty good. And you pair those up with a parallel dialer, a power dialer that has local presence and voicemail drop and all these things, man. I, if, if I have a little bit of funds as a founder, I can run, I can scale software business like that without the need for SDRs or full cycle AES. I'll just do discovery myself. Right? It's, it's. You are going to be replaced. I know there are companies like my co host, my podcast is an RVP at seismic, right? Great example. Some sales. I just don't think you're gonna get replaced. You're still gonna need a human to have that interaction right now. Maybe not in two decades, but right now I think of a salesforce enterprise sales. You're gonna have to still have salespeople but with a lot of these like SMB mid market point solutions. With the rise of PLG and AI, I think a lot of salespeople are gonna get replaced. So go make as much as you can right now in the next five years, start investing in real estate. The background, figure out an exit plan, go buy a boomer business like plumbing H Vac, something like that that you can run with a couple friends, make some money. They're very profitable businesses that boomers are looking to sell right now. So that's, that's my advice first and foremost there in terms of learning. I'm a little bit more close ended on this because I play it close to the chest because I want to be helpful. But there's a little secret sauce behind all this and unfortunately I think it's an easy way for lazy sellers to get along is by just getting the answers from someone. So you got to go do your own research. Start at YouTube and see where that takes you. Start playing around with chat GPT, see how it works. Understand the differences between like, understand what generative AI is versus when everybody else says, oh, we have an AI tool. Like, well, is it generative AI, like is it going to generate something for me or is it like an AI analytics tool? Like, there's a huge difference. So understand that AI is a buzzword. Go play with chat gbt. Start figuring out how to write prompts. Start even understanding what prompt engineering is. Play with that a little bit. Go play with mid journey. Go try to learn how to create content, video content, and use tools like Munch or Opus and see how fast it can do the job that you're doing. I can't remember. It came up in my head while you two were talking about something, regard, oh, the party, how long? You know, Scott, you were asking the party, like, how long until they're keen to it. Yeah, actually I love this content creators podcast called the 505 Podcast. And there are a bunch of guys that create content for brands for a living. And he was like, how long until you think these companies realize that we do 40 hours of work and 10 hours a week with AI tools? Because video editing, it's unreal how fast people can do stuff now. Everything you're seeing, and that's why you see so many like fake gurus online, because everybody can create the hormozy style content now. It's like super easy. And they were talking about that a little bit. I thought it was funny because I create content myself and when I show people how to do stuff, they're like, now that's gonna take me so long. And I'm like, you don't understand. You can get this done in like two hours. Like you can publish like a high quality podcast and get short form clips and transcripts and a blog post and a newsletter. You can do all this in like two to three hours a week. It's not very complicated. So if you're a founder and you're like, I have a marketing initiative, but I can't hire a marketing person, this is the way to get some content marketing done on your own as an ancillary thing that you're doing without taking a lot of time out of your day. Because these tools accelerate and they. It's like when no code tools became a thing. You didn't really have to know how to code to be able to build an app. Now same thing, you don't have to, you don't know how need to know how to use a DAW or video editing software to really make a great short form clip. Now you can easily use tons of different tools online that will do the auto subtitles emojis movement key.

Scott, there's hope for you yet.

There's hope for you yet, Scott. I'll show you. You hop on a call with me, I'll show you how you get get you clips.

But ch, make sure that I'm there because he won't remember. In fact he's going to just say, you know what, teach Richard. Because Richard likes to learn this. Yeah, I'll just get him to do it. I'll find a way to manipulate Richard to do it again. So.

You talked about.

First of all, a lot of the things that you're saying. I feel like I'm listening to myself because I've been talking about the demise of bad sellers and they're going to go obsolete for sure. Three to five years. So I'm just sort of over here smiling. But you're like get into real estate, buy one of these boomer businesses, whatever.

Okay.

Before that though, you've got like three to five years. Where should somebody try to go work, what should they be trying to sell over the course of the next three to five years?

What's.

What do you see as like.

A big hit? Like doable people will be able to hit their number, you know what I'm saying? Like where can people target what type of company, what type of product or platform? Do you have any kind of visions on that?

Yeah, what's the two letter word that we've been hearing most of in the news over the last year?

AI.

Yeah, cyber attack. Yeah, we've had, we've had more cyber attacks this year than I think I'm gonna mess it up. I saw, you know I'm a huge Tick Tock guy, so I get a lot of my news from Tick Tock. It's only independent media out there. So I saw a guy was talking.

Oh my God, that's a rabbit hole. We could go down, but we won't.

I think he said the number was there were more cyber attacks this year than there have been in the last five years alone combined. And when I think about it, I actually we went on family vacation in June. We went down to Phoenix visit my buddy and then we went up to Vegas as a family. We stayed at the MGM grand. And then Literally two months later, my wife's sending me a tik tok. She's like, oh my God, the MGM grand got hacked. They have like all these people's information. I've stayed there over the last year. Their emails, their names, their date of birth. And I'm like, okay, is this like a TikTok thing where somebody said it and you're just taking it or did you actually go like Google it and like find other sources and validate? She says, no, no, it's real. Then I got really terrified because I'm like, yeah, they asked for a lot of information when I booked my reservation, looked it up and sure enough, MGM Graham got hacked. And it's like, that was a big deal and it was actually like really affected Las Vegas because there were other hotels in that network that got hacked. You just heard about this other thing that happened where, you know, they're talking about, you know, foreign country hacking US infrastructure again last month. You know, it's scary and I think that even though a lot of it is pertaining to government, to government, you know, enemies trying to hack into the U.S.

I think that that's going to scare a lot of businesses and they're going to want to purchase cyber security tools. So it's a great triggering event to be able to get into cybersecurity.

That's his answer.

Cybersecurity. I would, if, if, if I were looking for a sales job, even if I was a youngish ae, I would take a step back and go be an SDR to get my foot in the door at a Z scaler or an extra hop or wherever, right? Like, I would be doing my best to get into cyber security.

I can confirm this. I had a conversation, I was hanging out last week with Guy works, worked at like north of grumman for like 20 years. And we were talking about sales and the value of like industry expertise. And I, you know, always said, look, if you're not, if you're not, we don't need industry experience. Unless maybe you're selling, you know, super high end security software or an airplane engine. He's like, yeah, that's pretty true. And I said, are people, I asked him, I said, are the people in your team? He's this company sells, they sell the software that goes in commercial. Jets, fighter jets, all this stuff, right? Like all the stuff, you know, think, look, Tom Cruise makes Tom Cruise look cool.

I said, you know, is your team even concerned about this like AI replacing them? And they're like, no, because there's this factor Right. Like in a fighter jet, there's still this element. Like, we could technically have the machine do everything to drop whatever from a drone or to have the fight go out there. We could do all that. The challenge is that sometimes the computer doesn't know that the building on the left is a school. The building a block and a half over is the target. And you need that human element for when. That moment when a bug comes up to sort of come in. And so that's how he was saying is like, the fighter pilots aren't going anywhere. And the salespeople who understand the technology and who understand security and focus on security are absolutely going to be around for a long time because the human's still never going to trust the computer. No matter what we say, there will always be that human element. So I.

What you're saying, until Musk starts getting cybernetic implants and everybody has a standard at birth, and now we're basically hacked in by the robots. But that's. That's my son's problem. That's not my problem.

That's already happened, dude. Like, we're already. We're already, you know, we already took the pill.

So, you know, I would say also like, cyber security. Let me just say real quick, and I'm sure we have other questions, so I won't linger too long on this one, but I feel like that's an easy answer because a lot of us in tech know that. We've heard of it. And even in sales outside of that, I would say get very creative on industry trends and see what softwares or products, services, whatever you want to call them, whatever you're interested in selling, are associated with that. And I'll give you a great example.

Helicopter parenting is very real for millennials. And it's just by nature that the next generation is going to follow suit, maybe even worse, right? It's been getting worse. Like, the longer along we go in the world, even with more technology, we're less. We're more terrified of letting our kids leave our site. I'm guilty of this. All my friends are guilty of this. So what's something associated with that that I can alleviate that people are going to be concerned about? Well, there's a company called Flock Safety, and they essentially solve for this, right? Putting up cameras and security and infrastructure in schools, HOAs, parks, all sorts of places that communicate with the police in real time. Like they've caught. They caught a murder suspect in Hollywood up here. They tracked this guy through because he was, like, passing through certain cameras that were connected to the network, that are connected the police and stuff like that. Especially with like the rise like school shootings and things of that nature. Helicopter parenting, great tool to go work. You look at their LinkedIn insights, that company is booming, you know, because it's. The product almost sells itself because of what it does and what it solves and who it caters to. I think there's going to be a massive shift in hospitality and how that works with the rise of obviously delivery apps. And I mean, I know people that, I know people that are getting by, but they don't mind spending, you know, 20 bucks to have buffalo wild wings delivered to their front door. You know, it's like, save yourself the $20, go make the drive. That's like two hours of your paycheck right there. You know, I have some friends in some flyover states that work at convenience stores that never did much after college. It's just the life path they chose. But I'm like, you're making 11, 50 an hour. Why are you spending $15 to get food delivered to your work? Like, make yourself a salad with some chicken breast and then hop in the car and go. You know what I'm saying? Not a big, not a big deal. Save yourself the hour. You're basically paying an hour of your time to just feed yourself while you're also taking that hour off for lunch. It doesn't make sense. But hospitality, I think is going to go big one too.

Some people stayed broke for a reason.

Yeah, yeah, that's true. It's just in my mind, I'm just like, it's such an easy solve. Like it's almost ludicrous. You know, it's not like, you know, there's, there's a lot of other worst things you could waste your money on, which unfortunately are getting promoted left and right on sports networks these days.

But, well, we gotta, we gotta do the mid roll slash three quarters, 80% of the way. Done. Roll with. With Richard right now and then we will move towards wrapping up. Richard, talk to us.

That's your, that's your cue to take a limit and think about what questions do you think you can challenge Scott and Richard to in a death. A battle of the death of balding men now that Scott shaved his head. There it is. Scott.

I had to go for it.

So want to thank HubSpot Podcast Network for sponsoring all of 2023. We really appreciate the support. So overseas equal swag too. That's not so bad. That's a little interesting people, but want to talk about the dtc. DTC pod, how the best brands are built. It is a podcast that specifically, it's a little bit more, you know, business to consumer, but they talk about how your favorite brands created their brand. And as we all hear ourselves talking about building your brand and your brand finding you and hearing what people do and how they do it, please go check out the DTC pod over at the HubSpot Podcast Network or wherever you'd love to get all your podcasts in general. So chat as we slowly roll it down. What questions you got for us?

So, I have some opinionated questions, but I don't want this to turn into a rant for either of you. Unless you like that. I can ask you that question or I can ask.

Do that, dude. No, no, no, no, no. I'm gonna rant right now. You can't do that. You can't say that. Go for it.

So, Richard, your shirt, for anybody that might just be listening, that says hashtag, earn the right.

Yep.

And so we talked about this. Rise. Look, I'm going to do this. The quotation marks, air quotes rise of fractional. Right? So. And Scott, I've known you for some time, and I know what you do. So as two people that are masters of their craft who have earned the right to earn business of others, how do both of you feel about every numbskull on the planet saying, I'm a consultant now because they don't have a job? Because I'd. I'd like to know, because I personally look at it, and I've seen four people already go back to work this year that said, oh, I'm going to go do consulting. And I think it just, it muddies up the space a little bit. I'm not to your level, either of yours, level that, like, I'm still working to earn the right. I'm doing what I can. But for.

For.

For people as tenured as you, as experience, as smart as both of you, like, what's your opinion on all this? And do you. Do you think that maybe some people give it more thought than others? Do you feel that it's going to muddy up the water for those of you that can actually do well and put a bad taste in people's mouth when those people that haven't earned the right perform poorly and piss off founders and VPs of sales?

You want to go first? We probably have the same answer. You want to go first.

That's why I said there's going to be a rant. I know it's Going to be a rant. So I had two types of questions.

It'll be more politically correct than I am.

I'll go first and I'll be probably nicer than Richard will be. But where do I start? Yes, it muddies up the waters for sure.

I have been in.

Competitive deal cycles with folks that I know who have a fraction. They focus on the fractional word. A fraction of the experience level and track record of success.

Who charge similar prices sometimes. And it kind of blows my mind. And.

I have to encourage people to check the receipts basically, you know, do some digging, see if this person is who they say they are, have they've done what they say that they've done. Then there's other people that are doing this that just charge a fraction of the cost for similar type services. And we've, we've all dealt with that kind of objection before. But you know, pay Pinto prices. You're going to get a Pinto, you.

Know.

We have to find a new word. I don't think, I don't think the youngins know what a Pinto is anymore.

I'll have to ask my kids what the worst possible car is.

That's a good.

My dad used to have. My dad used to have one. That's probably the only reason I know. I mean, I'm not a kid. But that's, that's so funny because my.

Dad had a Ford bit though.

I think that it is a natural consequence, however, of.

Mistreatment of sales people and sales leaders and distrust that employees have for employers. Right. If I've been a VP of sales once or twice, three times, even if I've had sub one year stints every single time, I might be thinking, at least I control my own destiny here. So I understand why.

I understand why people are doing it. It's never been easier to start your own business, monetize your knowledge, your skills, your content, even all this kind of stuff, I get it. But it's definitely muddying things up. And people are misusing the word advisor, they're misusing the word consultant, they're misusing these terms. And so whenever people come to me now and say, hey, I'm looking for a, a coach or I'm looking for a mentor, I'm looking for an advisor, I'm looking for a consultant, I have to say to them, well, what do you mean by that? What is your definition of that? What does that look like? What are you actually looking for? So, you know, it does upset me. Should it upset me? Probably not, you know, but I have to do a lot of the damage control, because people come back to me and they're like, hey, I work with this cat named Richard, and I probably shouldn't have.

And not me.

Different Richard. Different Richard.

So, yeah, Richard. Richard will probably have a less PC response than me.

Go ahead, Richard. All of that. And.

What'S frustrating is.

I am going to sound like a jerk, right? I'm going to sound like my. My namesake of being a dick. But it's really frustrating when people call and ask for advice for which I will come. I give people, Scott, are you still using the contract template I created for you years ago? Oh, yeah, right. Like, same thing, right? Like, oh, here's a template. Like, I don't want someone to go waste their time, and then I find out they're going in to do the same thing that I'm doing, right? And so here I am as a human, I'm, like, trying to help someone. On the other hand, I still got to pay my bills, and I don't want to be that dick. But it's massively frustrating. And I think the part that's even more frustrating is the lack of. Thank you later. The lack of, like, hey, Scott, you know what? You spoke to me two months ago. You help me do something. You know what? I got a deal. I got my second or third deal or I got whatever. So I think that's a big piece that pisses me off.

This was taught to me years ago.

And I.

And I tell everybody this, too, and they still. They do it, but I don't hear it enough. Is that if I pick up the phone and I call you chat, right? And I ask you for me, I might talk to you and say, tell me some stuff about this AI stuff that you talked about today. I'd like to learn from it. I will immediately turn around at the end of our conversation. Chat. What can I do for you? You just gave me all your time and all your knowledge and all your wisdom. What's something I can do to help you? So that's the stuff that's really frustrating is that they want to go pick from certain people, but then they just aren't sort of kosher about it. I've yet to run into the situation where Scott has, where I've actually lost a deal to someone I actually coached and gave a bunch of bunch.

Yeah, that. That's. That's the. That's the brutal situation, right? I had somebody that I was coaching that I found out I was in a deal cycle with, and I lost the deal. To them. And this person Ben, messaged me and said, hey, I just closed this deal. What do I do?

Literally that was the text I got. What do I do? And I had to reply back to him and be like, yeah, I'm aware of that deal. You just won. You actually just beat me out for that deal. Congratulations. You're on your own now though.

Right? So it is, it's tough. It's, it's a weird, it's a weird, wacky.

Yeah, and it's weird too because, you know, I do it because that's what happened for me. I got into this because John Barrows gave me some advice around it and he's always sort of been one of those people I've gone to. And then the same with Scott. Like Scott, when I was struggling with trying to figure something out, you know, Scott was able to give me, I mean, that's our, more as much of our friendship than our business side. But so I do it to pay it forward. I'm happy to do it. I take the calls all the time. But it's gotten to the point of like, you know, I'm going to create a fractional sales coursework. You want to create a fractional business? I'm going to go, I'm going to talk to you, Chet. Going to learn how to create some Instagram shit and I'm going to create a fractional, how to be a fractional whatever and create some videos and I'm going to charge people 49, 99 and I'll split the profits with these tenants. So that's, that's what I'm going to do because clearly there's enough people out there and need it.

That's what I'm interested to see in the fractional world, more task oriented fractional solutions like email deliverability experts, you know, content marketing experts, people that can come in, do something in a niche that our business isn't doing and help us get it done.

Instead of that's always been there, right?

Go to market consultant. Like, what does that mean?

I mean, I think that's always been there. I think it's just gotten flooded like everything else. And you know, the cream will rise to the top. And to your point earlier and to Scott's point before of.

You know, we have to go do damage control. Well, on the back end, that's not the worst thing because it just creates a longer tail pipeline. And to a certain extent, you know, frankly, if you told me no, now you want me to come clean up because you went to someone cheaper My price is actually going to go up. It's not going to go down. Right. Like, my pricing is based on what the market will bear and I know what the market bears. Even if someone's undercutting me by 40%. Go get 40%. Go get it. I'll talk to you in six months. Like, see you.

So, yeah, so that's. I don't know. Was I to unpolitically correct there?

No. But, you know, at the end of the day, we have to try to just focus on ourselves, obviously what we do and what we can control and delivering good work, good service, because these other people are going to create their own. Create their own hell. Right. And. And you do good work for somebody and that becomes a referral and that becomes more business. That's the way that this stuff has worked for me over the last four plus years. I'm not out there prospecting for consulting gigs. I don't have to do that. I've been blessed and fortunate that I have.

Hopefully built a reputation that, you know, stands up. And the work that I'm doing for people is leading them to tell other people looking for help to come have a conversation with me both at the founder level and the VC level. And that is what I have to focus on. Not Junior who is stealing deals from me and then asking for help.

Yeah.

So I got to kind of get my feelings out of the way a little bit.

Yeah.

Focus on what matters. I'm not saying it's easy all the time.

No. We're still human.

Still human.

We're still human.

I have to have a little bit of a wake up call with myself every now and then.

Chad and I like to.

We appreciate you being on the show with us, man. Any parting thoughts you want to leave people with?

I had one more quick question for both of you. This one's easily answerable though. In 10 seconds. Pizza or calzones?

Pizza.

Pizza.

I love it. We're all best friends. Yeah. If you want to connect with me, LinkedIn is a great place to do that. I got a bunch of free resources like everybody and their mother.

Of course.

I have a newsletter also, so you can subscribe to that if you want. You can unsubscribe after the first two if you don't like them. I have some free resources like. Objection. Handling guides, outbound sales sequence guide stuff that's absolutely free. You can download a bunch of podcasts I've been on in my link tree you can check out. So it's just a flurry of resources. Probably won't even get through 10% of it. Even if you went heads down an hour a day and tried to get through all the content. But yeah, anything you could need there. I'm happy to have conversations with people about anything related to how I look at the state of sales development or even content creation as a lead generation source. I wish I was in Scott's position. I still do some prospecting, but content creation has done really well for my business and it's been very helpful and it's helped me get my name out there in ways I couldn't imagine. I'm always happy to share how that workflow works within my business because I don't spend three hours every day creating content. I've got it down to a science in two to three hours max. So. Still want to have time to coach my son's T ball league on Saturdays, right? So I can't be doing overwork on the, on the weekends.

Those are the, those are the best years, coaching the T ball team and all that. So enjoy, enjoy those years.

Yeah. Those kids suck though. They suck at playing T ball. I can't wait till it's actually like fast pitch and I'm like, well, you.

Can say that my voice, it's a kid pitch for the first time and it's just like walk, walk, hit by pitch, walk. You'll see.

I'm just going to tell the other pitcher to hit my son as much as possible. I want him to get tops on them off.

If you get used to that, you won't ever flinch again.

Yeah. All right, Chad. Thanks, bud. Really insightful and helpful.

Thanks, gents. Have a great day, guys.

See.