S6E16 - Kevin Hopp - How AI Will Destroy Sales Reps (But Make Them Superheroes)

Foreign.

Welcome to another edition of the Surface Sales podcast. I am your co host, Richard Harris, along with my co host, Scott Lee. Scott, how are you? Oh, that's right. Scott is not here today, so it's going to be me. And of course, as we always say, more of Richard is always better. Super excited. Introduce our guest in just a second. If you don't know him, his name is Kevin Hoppett. I'll give him a chance to introduce himself in a minute, but I really want to just give a quick shout out to our sponsors, WIN AI. It handles all your sales busy work so you could type less and win more. So please check out WIN AI. We appreciate what they're up to and they are always appreciate. We are always appreciative of them sponsoring serpent sales. So, Kevin Hopp, welcome to the show. I've been on your show. I know you, I thought you'd been on ours, but I guess you have not. So welcome, welcome. Give everybody a heads up of what you're doing, where you're at, and let's go from there, man.

Totally, Richard. Thank you for having me. This is, this is exciting. You and I go back many, many years, right? Yes. Told you when you were on my podcast that watching your videos when I was an SDR in 2014, 2015, was part of what got the wheels turning for me to do what I do today, which is like be a sales development geek because you videos on LinkedIn way before, I mean, 2014. Yeah.

Now I don't do them at all. So in fact, I'm actually trying to edit some right now and trying to figure out the right, the right tool to use. So if there's any, you know, those video editors who want to, you know, give me a license, we'll give you a plug. And you know, if you want to sponsor surf and sales, then by all means reach out to me. But I didn't even know I did videos back then. Thank you, Kevin.

Yeah, they were, they were very straightforward. I mean, this is like before half the kids that are popular on LinkedIn right now, they, they were in diapers when you were making videos on LinkedIn.

Thank you. Thank you for reminding me that I've been selling since the 1900s. Thank you. Thank you.

So look, it's, it's, it's good. You're, you're, you're a legend in my eyes, Richard, so I'm really happy.

Thank you. So, Kevin, tell everybody what you're up to though, because you and I can talk banter all day long, but I want to get into some stuff to help people. Tell them what you're at, tell them where you're doing. I know you got some new stuff going on, so, yeah, feel free. Cool.

Awesome. So my name is Kevin Haup. I live here in San Diego, California. Anyone in SoCal, give me a shout on LinkedIn. Happy to meet up. Network. What I'm working on at my heart and at my core, I'm a sales development geek. I'm just obsessed with the. The idea that there's a better way to do it, to open new relationships. It's. It came from me being an SDR and an AE and having the same problem in every single job I had, which is generating top of funnel. My new venture is called Smartbound. Really simple. Don't go outbound in 2025. Go Smartbound. So this is what I'm working on. I've got. I've got a few clients already. We've got some really exciting pipeline clients. Got a text from a CRO about 10 minutes ago that we're looking really good for an incredible logo. So I can get into that and talk about kind of what it is and what we do and why that's important. Tell me what you want.

I mean, we certainly can do that. I think that's. That's kind of where we're headed. But I want to know what even generated the idea. Right. Because we all know that. We all know outbound is hard. It's suffering. It's a part of the whole context of everything you've got to do because it's not just quote, unquote, outbound. So what's the pain you're solving? Yeah, because I think that's the pain everybody's trying to understand.

Okay, so the year is 20. 2018. Right. That's when I got into consulting full time. That was the last time. Early 2018 was the last time I had a W2 from anybody other than Hop Consulting Group.

The playbook when I became a consultant back then was access to a database, you know, a zoom info, a seamless, a something, you know, a data just. You need a database full of leads. You grab those and you rip them in a dialer and you rip emails. Right. And you try to segment as best as you can and, you know, but you knew that there's an element of like, volume that needed to happen. Well, that volume equation on every channel has evolved tremendously. Right. And I'm not speaking Spanish out there. If you're doing outbound sales today, you know what I'm Talking about the volume game has just changed forever because the effort that it takes to send emails, to blast people on LinkedIn, to make a hundred calls in an hour, that effort has never been lower that it needs to get there.

So effort is lower or the results are lower.

The, the effort is so low to just turn on volume. Like volume is, is ubiquitous. So volume's ubiquitous. Everything is noisy. It's crazy how noisy it is. Inboxes are flooded. Right. So 2018, until about 2320, the playbook was relatively the same and it wasn't super complicated. What happened in 2023?

Artificial intelligence comes out of the scene. Right. And what does that really mean for salespeople? Well, there was this initial wave that was like terrifying, which was, we're all getting replaced, we're getting replaced tomorrow, it's going to take all of our jobs. And 23 was like the peak of the SaaS crash, where every SaaS company was shrinking, not growing for a whole five years there. Right?

Yeah, yeah.

And the thought was AI was going to replace a lot of these jobs. Now what we found coming out of that in the 24 and now 25 is AI is replacing jobs, but it's not replacing all jobs. And so that is the gap. So now we, now in 2025, there's a gap in the market that I see that I'm filling squarely in the middle. And that gap is. Mr. CRO, Mr. VP of Sales, you are being told by your board you need to use AI. Back in your day, you didn't use AI.

We just did this.

We did this. This is what we did. It needed bodies in a room in order to get things done. Right? So you're being told by a board you need to use AI. The list of people that know how to implement AI for sales development is very, very short. The list of people that want AI in sales development is really, really big. So there's a gap in the market. So what smartbound does is we help outbound sales teams inside of companies that are developing or that are already there. We help them implement meaningful AI and then do the old fashioned stuff which we all know works, which is picking up the phone.

So define, define meaningful. Right? Good buzzword, you know, tell me what that means. Like give us a use case. Like, by the way, you know, this is, this is not a conversation to plug what you're doing. It's conversation say this pain needs to be solved. And so it just so happens you do it great. So what, you know, exactly. So yeah, and give people A use case. Like I got a team of 10 SDRs, I've been using, you know, one of the different, you know, conversational intelligence tools or the sales. Sales engagement platforms. Right. What? You sort of see a standard table stakes. Right. What, what do people need help with in the traditional. We move into 2025.

Yeah. Conversations are still king. And that's. So I thought for a minute there I, I really did get worried that cold calling was going to be gone because with AI emails, I mean, some of these emails.

No, not everybody's an email person. Right, Right.

Robots doing what I, what I used to know how to do.

So what.

What ended up happening in 23 into 24 was AI emails became ubiquitous. So now if all of our good asynchronous communication can be done way faster and way cheaper with AI though, the final frontier of value for a salesperson is the phone.

Yeah, but, but give me. Come on. All right, you're talking in buzzwords. You know me, I don't like fucking buzzwords. So tell me, you come into my company and you say, richard, I'm going to help streamline this part of your process.

Yeah.

Because this is what you're doing that's wasting time. Right. What does that look like?

Okay, so. So that looks like. Who are you talking to?

Yeah.

What reason? Yeah, Are you talking to them? Are you having those conversations?

Sure.

So.

But you're coming back and telling us that, that the challenge is, is it's so noisy out there. You're trying to make sure that you're focusing on the right things because you can help them offload those things. What are the things you're helping them offload?

Targeting, messaging and then productivity as it relates to conversations. How do we have a productive conversation first? Culture. Like how, how do you get there? So let's, let's name the elephant in the room. The elephant in the room that I'm not naming, that I should be naming, that everyone's talking about. It's Clay.

Right.

Clay is at the backbone of everything that we do at smartbound. Why it's the world's most powerful go to market platform.

Yeah, no, we got it. So I'm still trying to get to the use case, though. I'm trying for you to say, okay, Richard, here are the, here's what I'm gonna do. Right. Like that's.

Yeah. So I'm gonna bring in Clay and I'm gonna use Clay not to power your cold emails, which we can do some cold email stuff, which is kind of cool. But I'm gonna use clay to make your cold conversations much more intelligent and much more frequent.

That's what I was trying to understand.

Okay.

Okay. Yeah.

So it's a, it's a combination of using clay which allows us to have this, you know, operatization of data. All of a sudden we got all the data in one place at one time. Then we can have a non linear approach to the way that you think about data. And this is where I took a guy like, like Mike Ferrari from the CRO at Doppel whose mind just went like this at dinner the other night. Right. I was talking to. I'm like, you used to think of your market as mid market companies with this amount of employees and this amount of revenue. Clay allows you to be nonlinear with that. So we can now have a judgment in a actual opinion on these companies based on what the AI knows about your business and the angle of attack your business should take. That is insane. That did not exist. Did not exist before.

Yeah. I mean it only existed if you were super smart and could figure it out. Right. Which is not, which is not really existing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's like world that could do it.

Yeah, exactly.

So now anyone can do it, but it's hard to do. So that's. Yep. Yeah.

Got it, got it, got it.

All right.

So that's what's changing. Right? So, and you even said, you know, so does that mean you can do more with less and we are losing SDRs. But you have more capable SDRs.

Absolutely.

You are. Okay.

The playbook used to be 12 SDRs. Right. And now the math is just so much better on the productivity side that each rep can have 15 live conversations, they can get three good replies a day via email. They can get all this stuff with very little human effort. It's all about how you set up your system. It's about process. So you don't need 15 people, you need two or three. The teams that I'm working with, four, four or five maximum SDRs. And they're crushing.

Yeah. And that, that's the key thing that I think people are afraid of. Right. You know, and I think it's, it's a fair concern. Right. The question then just becomes now it's, now they theoretically could have more SDRs if they had more AES who can close the business. So now it's about conversion, right? It's about conversation conversions. Not just, you know, conversations and not just conversions, it's both. It's conversational conversions or conversional conversations.

On the other side, you bring up Richard, you bring up the point of like, you know, okay, so you need less SDRs, but do you still need AES? And like, I think the role of an AE needs to change dramatically as well.

That was my next question. So what, what happens for the AE now?

Yeah, so the AE should be getting more meetings, right? More meetings. But does that mean that they're actually going to be better at closing them, right, 100.

No, no, they haven't, they haven't for the longest time.

Exactly.

For the longest time. So we've seen that, we experienced that. You know, that's, you know, kind of why I'm in business, right, Is, you know, I, I help them stop saying stupid, right? I, I teach reps how to earn the right to ask questions, which questions to ask and when. So continue, Go ahead.

So, yeah, so I, I think looking at parts of the process that could be replaced with AI, very frequently.

I see, you know, 80, 90% of both jobs being replaced by AI. Like there's so much baloney that AES do that you just don't need a person to paid, highly, highly paid, 120k base to do this stuff. That if you have really good AI trained the right way, can educate so much more and do such a better job of preparing of, of telling the story of this and that.

And then is that really, at this stage of the game, does that really get rid of the AE or does that really just enhance their capabilities?

I think it, it enhances their capabilities, but the goal should be reduction in force for sure. You do not need 10 AES, you need five that are closing at a very high rate, that are only working on deals that are really, really qualified.

I agree. Look, if you force rank every sales team, right, there's always people at the bottom, right? We all know this, right? And then, you know, the, some excuses are ramp time and some excuses are, you know, there's a ton of excuses. I do think there is some level of reduction in force.

But I don't know that.

I'm still, I'm still not convinced that because it's, at some point the rep only has so much bandwidth. So it does come down to a bandwidth issue of how many meetings can you set, how many people can you have to do it, how good are they at it? And at what point can an AE capability diminish? Right. If I'm selling an enterprise solution, right? Yeah, I would guess.

I would guess that it takes any more than three sales calls in a day is tough for an AE. So if I'm having 15 sales calls. Right. And that assumes I'm eliminating the fact that my AES got to take a bunch of notes and put them in the system. And the AE like it allows the AE to actually do their job and maybe do some follow up communication with assistance from AI, but then structuring the deal and getting things done because at some point just even their brain, you know, ex explodes. Right. There's only so much you can do. But maybe I'm wrong, maybe threes not enough. But at some point if I have three hours of sales conversations for me and I don't even put notes in my CRM, I probably spend another three hours, two to three hours in revenue related activities to support that opportunity. Now the question is what if that could get reduced?

A lot, a lot.

You know the other thing too is that.

As you go into the enterprise sale, right. The more decision makers involved, the more those people, as much as they, I don't know if they trust the AI any more than they trust the human salesperson. Right, right.

Yeah, it's, I, I agree. And you know, this is like the, when people come to me because I'm a loud voice in the sales development cold calling community. I've had like five or six entrepreneurs come to me saying I built a cold calling bot. It's incredible. It'll replace poll. And I'm like, I say the same thing to every one of them. Show me a recording of someone who's not a VP of sales. Right. Booking a call with that and I will, I will invest.

Well, not, not well, I wouldn't invest because it's illegal. That's the first thing. In the United States you cannot use people, not use bots to do that.

People don't talk about AI, they just don't.

Right. So no, I've seen some that do, I've seen some calls that actually do. It's just a question of.

Viability. Are they going to like it when they find out and, or.

The legality of it. Right.

So, but you, you, you brought the point of like trusting the AI. So in the enterprise sale in the cycle, the parts of the process that you think you need a human to do, if you really decompose it. For most companies, a thoughtful approach to using artificial intelligence. What do humans do? We, we, we take in information, we then make judgments on that information and then we use asynchronous communication to. That's what AI does. It does it so much better than humans.

Yeah. Efficiently it does. That doesn't mean the buyer is ready to Buy though, right? My, my biggest, my biggest concern is and, and I love what you're talking about is that the messages get better. You know, with the right data and the right inputs and all those things that you can book more meetings. I get it.

That, you know, give it another year and then how good is it going to be? Because now they're going to be inundated with great messages. And I say this all the time that, you know, you can use AI to craft emails, right? And they can craft the best subject line and the best body and hyper personalize and all that stuff. The challenge isn't always the creativity of the email. The challenge is just the real estate of the inbox of the person you're sending it to. You could have the best subject line, the best body, but timing is going to become more and more important, right? So my. Which I don't think we've ever talked about. I'm curious to see how that affects things. Like, I ran a call center once and we sold newspaper subscriptions old school, right? And we knew when we were reselling the subscriptions to Reno, we knew that between 10 and 12am on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, that was when people were home the most. That's what the data told us. Which no human would have ever thought about, right? We never would have picked that day to call home and think that that's when we're going to get the most pickups. And we couldn't figure out why. To save our life, right? We really couldn't figure it out. I called some casinos to see if there were shift changes, maybe people were coming home, stuff like that. Nothing. So the question now becomes the messaging will always get better. Then we will abuse the problem. Then the only thing that's going to do is it's going to come down to timing.

Unless you see it differently. Like, tell me in six months if, if, you know, 80, you know, again, we're still at the early stages of this, right? And it is working. What happens when everybody's doing it?

Well, it's not going to happen for a while. Like people are slow to this, right? Like I, the companies that I'm talking to in our pipeline right now, I'm like, oh my God. This kind of company has no idea what they're doing for like AI. And then they. Then like the CRO is trying to tell me, he's like, no, no, no. But Kevin, you don't understand. We have a deep partnership with open AI. And I'm like, yeah, and your reps are doing stuff that's 2018. Like what. What are we doing?

Yeah, deep partnership that tells gap between.

Wanting AI and implement using AI is huge. And that's. That's where. That's where I am. That's. That's. That's probably.

So. So let me ask you this. What do you think of 2025? Right. It's a crazy Tom, yet again, crazy year. 2025 felt better for me. Felt like the economy was doing better than 2024. We were hoping 2024 was going to turn the road to 20 from 2023. It really didn't. 2025 started out turning the road, and now I think there's a lot of, oh, press pause and wait right.

Now. And I still see some things happening. I still see some growth, but I see a lot of things that are just. We're pressing pause for a minute. What are you seeing in your world? And it could be, you know, if you're in the startup SaaS world, it may not be as directly impacted. But what do you. How do you think the economy of 2025 is going to be?

I think the. I think the angry orange man with the Twitter handle is really wreaking some havoc. Like, yeah, crazy, right? And it's a level of havoc that we haven't seen and we didn't even see the first time he was president.

I wouldn't say that.

But I don't know. It's. It's just.

But regardless of all that, right? Like, regardless of all that, what do you. What are you seeing at the economic level? What are you seeing from buyers? Like, I'm just trying to. And that may be a bit. That's a piece of the cause. But is the hypothesis, right, that people are pressing pause and holding on? Is it that they're freaked out or is it that. No, we get it. This will, this will pass and we're just going to keep going and plugging forward.

What I'm seeing, people are not pressing pause.

Okay.

I'm not selling to people that sell commodities across the border. Right, Right. Or things like that. Right. They're directly affected. But do people make comments about it? Is it a topic conversation? Absolutely. But I have not seen a real slowdown. People are. Venture capital is flowing way more than it used to in 23 was like. It's like the group stopped running. Right. Like, that was scary. Everybody, the riff, everybody's doing this. And I, I had a. I had a lot of lonely days, you know, I mean, it was not good. But come out the other side of It, I do feel like so far in 25, I'm talking to people that are getting financing or getting, getting VC money. I'm talking to people that are making bets. I'm talking to people that are, you know what? Also what I'm selling is an efficiency play.

Yeah.

So there's, I'm not having trouble.

No, no, I, I got it. And you're at the top of the funnel, which is what, what everybody wants. Right. You know, which I think that, I think that's, that's the right place to be because everybody needs it and wants it.

What do you see is the challenge in conversations like what are REPs, whether they're SDRs or AES, still struggling with? Right. Because you're talking about top of the funnel, they're getting into some conversations, but then it's still got to go to AE and do discovery. What are you still seeing that that needs to improve?

Well, it's, you know, one of the core things of my business and like the, the calling culture business that I was running and I've done straight SDR training frequently. Right.

The, the language, the, the way that I talk about how you should be talking to people is something that I still to this day, C reps, not very, very 1 in 100 reps actually talk this way without me having to bring it up to them. And that is the concept of when I start a conversation with you, Richard, about your company, the first five things we talk about are about you and not me.

Right.

Everybody always leads with this, Mimi. I, I, I r stuff our stuff like language and then I, I, I big thing in every one of my trainings is I challenge them to flip that. And when you want to ask somebody a question about something, instead of saying what's your budget? We can flip the way that we ask things. People like you generally have a budget like this, but I don't know if you match our best customers. I don't know what are your thoughts?

Right.

There's a way in which you go about it that if you take pause and you think about what's best for them and not for you, you get better outcomes. And this is key to my whole methodology on the phone is that really, really does work. And it's because it's not eye centered language, it's about them. And all of a sudden you get into this business conversation about what's really going on with them and we can align problems and solutions, but it doesn't come from, I'm with Acme and we are Gartner Magical.

Yeah. As I always say, the logo salad goes at the end of the slide deck, not the beginning. Nobody cares about your logo salad unless they ask, then you can show it. So. And I think. I think you and I have known each other a long time, and we're aligned on every single thing you're saying. So I love the fact that you found this nice little niche that. That people need help with. Well, I want to flip it to you and let you ask me some questions. Before I do, though, I want to just again, give a shout out to Win AI. They will absolutely help you spend time on the things that matter most in your sales conversation, sales pipeline, so that you can win more and get across the finish line. So check out win AI. What can I answer for you, Mr. Hop?

I guess. Are you seeing what I'm seeing in that? Like, I feel like cold calling's having a renaissance. It's kind of obvious, but I can't. You know, I'm so deep in the cold calling circle jerk algorithm that I can't tell if it's just me or if it really is becoming the thing that people are leaning on.

I don't think they're leaning on it. I think they're getting better at it and they're realizing if they have better data, it works. I think we've. There's always been a resistance to cold calling. Everybody hates it, nobody likes it, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It got really hard during COVID because nobody had a desk phone anymore, right? So many, like, the phones were gone, the data was gone. Right? Then there was the concern of, well, I had their cell phone number. Can I call their cell phone number? Can I cold text them? Can I do all this other stuff?

And so I think that, Yes, I think. I don't know that it's a renaissance. I think the people who've known to do it have always done it. I think there are more people who now understand how to do it better. Right? Like, you know, you and I were probably the anomaly back in the day of understanding how to do cold calling. Right. And the ability to teach it. There was not a lot of teaching of cold calling. It was, hi, this is Richard. I'm calling from so and so and Right. We've now all learned about pattern interrupts and the different kinds and how to be creative without being cheesy and how to cut to the point and all those different things, right?

So maybe it's a renaissance at a larger scale of more people buying into it. Maybe that's what A renaissance is, I guess, but that's kind of. But I don't. I don't know that it ever went anywhere. Right. And. And.

As it'll be interesting to see what happens in 10 years from now.

Right?

Like, we don't have home phone numbers anymore. Right. We all have cell phones. Okay. Lots of businesses don't even have cell phone or have desk phones anymore. Right. Some do, some don't. So it'll be interesting to see where that goes. Right.

In terms of cold calling and how that affects us. It also depends on how the generation grows up. You know, as I was telling my son Riley, who's 16, he's like, I never check email. I don't do email. And I said, well, you know, you better start, because guess what? When you move into the real world and you communicate with your teachers and you communicate with your bosses, they're still going to be using email, so you better figure it out. Right. Because he never responds to my emails on stuff. I'm like, well, then you're going to miss it until his generation gets in charge. Then we'll see how that happens. Right. I think, I don't think email is going to go away any sooner or any faster than. Than phones are. You know, the only thing that might be different is.

Are you going to cold call on a Zoom? Are you going to cold call on a FaceTime? Right. Which some people are doing. Right? Yeah, that would be the difference.

So, well, you, you kind of think about, where is Gen Z? Yeah, they're on discord. They're in WhatsApp, they're in Reddit. Yeah, but.

But when Gen Z moves into the workplace, is that where they're going to get their information? Yeah, you are.

Discord will become. It's like, it's like Slack, but it's like public, Right?

Right.

More public than Slack. So my point being, the. They're the most connected generation ever. Right. With all these things. But they don't use the static ways of asynchronous communication that we did, which is email.

Right.

Email became a thing when I was growing up.

Me too.

I'm that old.

I'm that old.

All you Gen Z people listening. Email did not exist when I was born. Okay.

Yeah.

Came around in the, in the mid-90s when I was, you know, too young.

But my question is.

When does that happen?

Because right now all their bosses are Gen Xers and millennials, and they see those things as social, separate than business. Right. You know, Facebook tried to create a business approach.

Sure.

I don't know that it's worked yet it works. B2C. I don't know that it's working. B2B. Right. So the question is, are we 10 years away from that?

No, no, no. We're closer than that for sure, though.

I disagree. You think email is going to go away that fast?

I. I didn't say that, but I do it. That's what I'm asking. Okay. If you're asking, when's email gonna go away? I don't think email will. Will ever really go away because it is such a clearly designated, asynchronous, thoughtful channel.

Mm.

It's gonna be replaced. A lot of what happens in email will be replaced. Just like Slack and teams have done. Right. I. I venture to guess that at big corporations in small, the amount, the total volume of internal email has gone down significantly if they invest in Slack.

So you're so, so then let me ask you, does that mean.

The research to find a solution to a product will be conducted on Reddit and Discord, not Google?

No, I think. No. No.

So.

So Discord and Reddit are mostly for communication and the sharing of ideas. But.

Right.

There's going to be more and better AI platforms to search that, which is kind of Google. Right? Google now the AI snippet is like, on every single search.

Right.

I think that's important. I think Discord will be a place that SDRs in 2030 get meetings.

That.

I, That I can see. Okay. If. And I don't know enough about Discords. If you. But you're right. You have to fish where the fish are.

Yes.

The question is.

Well, their generation of fish are. Yeah, right. But what about the millennials who are going to be their bosses?

We're good enough. We can get in a Discord too. I'm a millennial. I'm on Discord. Like, yeah, for business.

I'm on Discord for all personal reasons.

You are. I. I don't use it like I'm. I'm. Look, I'm Gen X, right? Like, it's not my thing. So that's, that's why I'm sort of digging into this conversation. Because I don't know this. And that's why I'm asking. And of course, my old grumpy man, get off my lawn is telling you you're wrong. Right. Because when you get old. Right.

So the question for you is, how much do you think that.

Buyer organic discovery is going to change in the next five years? Because to really talk about this whole thing in terms of communication and Meeting setting and sales and AI, you gotta zoom out a little bit and say, well, how much outbound prospecting are we going to need to do in 2025? Because right now the main channel to like get your shit out to the world is a website, right? And for Gen Z, websites are kind of dead. Like, what do you mean? I'm not going to your fucking website and downloading a white paper. Like, come on, right? Subreddits, Discord servers, Discord channels, Twitter threads. This is where the product marketing of 2030 is going to be. So outbound, by definition would be completely different because you can learn 10x more at 10x faster pace about solutions, about products, about companies in different ways that you just simply don't do today.

It's just, I would, I would agree, I would agree with that because I'm a knee, I use red a little bit. I don't post a ton there and I probably should post more. You know, I did a little bit of that with Quora too for some time, you know, but I can see that being the new part of a new part of the marketing channel, right? Just like you see TikTok as part of the, the marketing channel. And so it's about driving, which has always been for advertising. It's about driving awareness, right? To your point, I, you know, I just said this the other day, is that.

The buyers, I've never thought that the buyers are, you know, smarter than salespeople. I've never thought that and I never will. And I'll tell you why. The buyers 100% can have more information than they used to, right? Even five years ago, right before AI, they could go do their own research and find these things. Even in 2030, they can go do their own research. But there is some point where their capacity of how much research they can do, whether they get it from a Google search or Reddit, there's only so much they can actually absorb to trust, right? That there's just. Here's the challenge. They're not smarter than us because we can do the exact same level of research, probably at a better level than they can about them, their pains, their buyers, their Personas, all that. And on top of that.

Good salespeople practice their profession of selling regularly. I don't know anybody who role plays as a buyer. Maybe before you go to the car, I'm not going to let them talk me into it. But the buyers are not necessarily smarter. They might have more information and they might self select fewer people to a certain extent even that in 2020 in 20, 30 I don't think will change, particularly at the enterprise level because there's too many people involved in that decision making process to just trust the AI. I just don't believe it. I just don't see it. They might think they're smarter than us. You know, there's always some division that thinks they're smarter than the salespeople, the CRO, the cfo, the the IT developer, all that stuff. Right?

Yeah.

But they're not smart about the buying cycle like we are, so. Right.

So think about this though, right? And this is like a meditate. I got a bumblebee in my office. Being in San Diego, I am in a open garage right now.

Sweet.

Yeah, I'm trying to make sure that he doesn't land on my face.

I'll let you know.

So think about this.

In the future, AI is not just going to be an application or something that, you know.

Right now it's a bunch of platforms. It's a bunch of stuff, right? What that's going to look like, what it's going to consolidate to is every company having their own hive mind.

Owned, owned AI.

And well, what does that mean? Why is that useful?

Right? Well, it'll essentially gonna own their entire culture and their Personas and all that information that's in our heads.

It'll plug in all that and the bag of peanuts, right? So it'll know all of your financial information, it'll your HR information, it'll know all of your marketing, what you're doing, sales. So.

When you have that, now we have an intelligent engine that will have a point of view on the problems in your business.

So fair point.

You don't even have to do the research, you don't even have to be doing all this. The AI will see your business in a snapshot as it grow, as it's evolving and then do the research for.

You and then make the recommendations.

And guess where it's going to get that information? Reddit, Twitter, Discord, these other places. Because the dissemination of data is going to go across these, these platforms.

Wait, that's convincing to me. That is really, really good. That is the part that I didn't get that I make sense. That makes sense. That makes sense. So now all these marketers need to know how to SEO their Reddit profiles.

Yeah, that's going to be the new frontier. The new frontier is going to be on these other platforms because these other platforms offer kind of like non linear ways of dealing with data and they feel truthful, they feel truthful. They feel authentic. You can have a video embedded here. You can comment on the video, you can share the video. You can react with emojis and like. It's another, like, axis of human communication that AI will dominate and index so that the AI knows what to. What you should gather from that before you. So the concept of bior research is going to be so different. It's going to be so different.

Interesting. Interesting. Cool, man. Well, this has been fascinating. This is very educational for me. So I appreciate it. Teaching this old dog a new trick and convincing me. So thank you. Thank you. Kevin, how can people get a hold of you, Kevin? Ha. Yeah, Hopp, by the way.

H O P P. That's right. That's right. I've only been to one brewery where they gave me a discount for my.

There you go.

Sierra Nevada Brewing Company. Shout out to Sierra Nevada Brewing Company. They gave me a discount card and they were like, hot. Oh, man, his name's hot. I'm gonna give you this. I was like, thank you, thank you. People can reach me on. On. LinkedIn is like the best place. Connect with me, follow me. I'm gonna start talking more and more about this kind of stuff. Our website, smartbound AI. So go there, check out.

Can they find you on Reddit? Can they find you on Reddit?

No.

Or Discord? Should they be finding you on credit or on Discord yet?

Not. Not yet. Those. I mean, so the beauty of Reddit also is that it's completely anonymous.

Right?

Discord. So it's not like LinkedIn where you go and see my face and Kevin hop and all that. I'm on.

I got it. I got you. I got you. All right, man. Well, Kevin, this has been fascinating. I'm glad. So please, everybody check out Kevin Hopp. Grab him on LinkedIn. Go check out what he's doing. He's clearly there to solve this current pain at the top of the funnel. We're happy to help him do that. Kevin, man, always a pleasure to see you.

Yeah, thanks for having me. I really.

All right, we'll see everybody next time on the Surf and sales podcast.