S6E30 - David Knight - How to Bring Back the Fun in Sales Coaching

Podcast.

All right, Scott.

Where are you, my friend?

Now, he's here, but his mic is off. You're on mute, Scott.

I'm trying to learn how to use technology. Hold on, right?

It's tough. It's tough.

It's not my sky suit, as you know, Brandon.

Right? And Scott, just so you know, I, I, I took your advice. I, I've recorded even this part before we kick off the call. So we now want to hear your five minute, Your reason for being five minutes late.

My rant.

Yes, please, please. And then, then we'll introduce our guests.

Well, you know, sometimes you're on, you're on calls with people and you're staring at the clock and you know that this person is really long winded, right? It's like a prospecting call, and you're like, I got two choices. I can kind of try to give some subtle cues that I need to get going here, or I can just be rude and, you know, be like, hey, I gotta, I gotta go and just blow things up. So I had a long talker.

Oh.

I was dealing with somebody who was a long talker, and I was like, I gotta get going. And it's like, one more thing.

There's always one more thing.

There's always.

And I.

And I know Brandon, so I could care less about making him wait. But I have to apologize to David. I'll apologize.

Notice he's not apologizing to Richard. Not even, not even a little.

That's not even worth the breath.

So. All right, well, let's jump into stuff. So welcome, everybody, to the latest episode of the Surface sales podcast, where we're trying to start things out differently than we used to after five years where we try to be even more organic than forced organic. And it seems to be working. Well, I think. I don't know. I haven't seen anybody drop off. But before we jump into stuff with our guests and introduce you to them, want to just give a quick shout out to Win AI, who is sponsoring the surf and sales event coming up in October that is still sold out. We actually have people wanting to join. Like, it's nice. Like, usually someone bails on us by this point and we might be scrambling for somebody, but now we've got, like, a solid wait list. It's pretty cool.

So, yeah, like, I had somebody messaging me today saying they'll sleep in a tent outside.

Yes, exactly, exactly. We also want to give a quick shout out to our friends over at Vasco for sponsoring us. They're really helping you cut through the Noise and pull data from your CRM and billing systems to help build better forecasts, not just at a high level, but then help you figure out some better day to day execution. So please check out our friends over at Vasco. We appreciate their support and win support. So. All right, why don't we. Since we didn't do all of our precursor stuff. Here's the quick thing. Brandon, David, we're going to go for about 30, 45 minutes. If there's something you want to avoid, just put it in the chat. Although, sure. People listening, be like, oh, what did they put in the chat? So we don't talk about it. And let's see, at the end we'll turn it over to you to let you ask us a couple of questions and we'll give you all the raw files to make whatever social stuff you want around it and do whatever you want with it. And I think that's kind of it, so.

Well, I, I wasn't even planning on being. I was just here to intro David. So like he, he's. He's the genius that you guys want to talk to, not me, so.

Well, you can just mute yourself.

Hang out.

Yeah, just hang out.

Okay.

I, I'll just hang out. Yeah.

So why don't you give us the grand. This is, this Scott is like. We have.

We'll have somebody else do the introduction.

I was gonna say we have an announcer. Go ahead, go ahead.

Introd, introduce David.

Oh, you want me to do. Okay, well, yeah, this is professional.

We. Are we professional that this is how we do it?

I know how you.

It's one button down operation. I can tell.

I know how you guys roll. All right, well, David Knight, the CEO and co founder of Avara. And Avara really is sales AI. Sales simulation and coaching software help you ramp. Ramp reps quicker and you know, be customer ready. And David's worked at a few companies that you may have heard of before, like Proof Point in, in Cisco, WebEx. And you know, he knows a little bit about the pain that we're solving and he'll obviously talk about that. But yeah, Avar is just one of my favorite clients that I've worked with. And yeah, the team over there is great. The software is great. The, the first moment that I saw the software I was like, okay, this stuff is really cool. I like, I conceptually, I understood it. And then once I went through the Sims itself, it was, it really was like eye opening. It was game changing and so welcome to the show that I'm, I guess hijacking now.

Yeah, yeah.

What.

Brandon, what questions would you like to ask Dave?

We'll make him do that. I. I'll go. I'll go first. My question. No, no, I got.

I got this. I got it, I got it, I got it.

All right, fine. Whatever.

This is why people. David is like, what have I gotten into? But this is why people pay attention to the shows, is for all of this kind of chaos. This is almost our 500th show, so, yes, something that we must be doing right. My question is, as much as we all want to prognosticate, like, what's coming and where the direction of sales is headed and marketing is headed and all this stuff, the reality is none of us really know. And I find it increasingly difficult to make certain bets. And when you're building a company like yours, you're essentially betting on the technology being good enough that these role plays in this coaching is effective. And you're betting on the comfort level of salespeople, CS people, perhaps of engaging with the tool and these types of things. So where do you. What is your mechanism, I guess, for like, deciding to place that bet when the future is very cloudy and perhaps more scary than it's been in our career and lifetime, at least.

Well, that's the fun part, Right? Sort of.

Great answer.

That's actually a great answer. Guessing, okay, where is this going to go? And I've been doing this for a long time. And the really interesting thing is we're built on the. On the foundation models. Like, we're not training our own models, any of that, because you got to ride that wave. But then you're building on quicksand and you're kind of guessing, okay, well, it's going to be good at this and not good at that. And sometimes you're right, sometimes you're wrong most of the time. In the last two years, we've been wrong in that the AI has been better than we thought it was going to be. When we started the company, we thought it was going to be mostly about simulation, that we'd be able to create these realistic customer avatars and people could get at bats. And we have a scorecard and a little bit of coaching, but we're like, no one's going to take coaching from an AI that's just not going to work. The experienced reps going to give the thing the virtual middle finger. Don't tell me how to sell it actually, turns out the AI coaches are really, really good. I would have never guessed that. So you make incremental bets. You Build the things, you know, work and then you experiment and say, well, will this work? And you just kind of incrementally push the envelope. I never go out like we build a whole concept and technical prototype before we ever raise funding because I wasn't sure it would work. But we had to prove ourselves that at least the base thing would work before we took the next step. So everything's incremental.

I'm old enough that I founded a SaaS company in 98. And the reason I founded a SaaS company in98, before it was SaaS, was because I was building enterprise software on two or three year release cycles and I wasn't smart enough to get it right. And how am I supposed to know what people want two years from now? We decided we'd build a SaaS company because so we could do faster releases and AI is just that, like, no, it's not releasing once a quarter, it's like releasing every freaking day. And you got new capabilities tomorrow you didn't know how to do today. And that's either scary or fun. And I choose to look at it as fun.

Yeah, that's actually a great answer. The fun aspect of it, I suppose if you didn't look at it as fun, then you wouldn't be entering this type of space which is very quickly become a very crowded space.

Yes.

Yeah, I, I can think, I'm not going to name anybody, but I can think of a few people that are also in this space, which is market validation. Of course, it's increased PR and you know, notoriety for the category and all that stuff, which helps you, I think. But now you got to compete with everybody out there all at once. Everybody's kind of brand new. There is no 800 pound gorilla. And it's a little bit of a race to capture market share and capture the trust of everybody. How do we think about differentiation in this new kind of world order where even traditional marketing channels are not working the way that they used to and people are doing things differently and certainly the sales channels for growth have changed quite a bit. How do we compete and get differentiation in this brand new super crowded category?

Yeah, good question. But let me answer the question before that. Well, why compete where everybody's competing? I feel like when you start a company you take two risks. You either take market risk. Hey, is there a market here? Are people willing to pay for it? Or you take execution risk. Right. Are there going to be competitors? Because wherever there's a market, there's likely going to be competitors. And again, being A more experienced founder who has a track record of execution. I take execution risk over market risk any day because you can control your own execution. You can't control the market as they're paying. And as I was chatting briefly with Richard when we started, I love problems like this one where it is so fundamentally broken that most people don't think it's fixable.

And how we train and ramp reps is like this multi billion dollar strategic problem that most people had kind of given up on even though they spend billions because none of the enablement worked. It all kind of sucks. And it's really unfair to the rep. And we can talk a little bit about why it's so unfair to the rep later if you want. But it's this huge problem where if you get it right, you can build a meaningful business that has a meaningful impact on hundreds of thousands or millions of people. And that's the kind of problem I want to solve. Then how do you create differentiation? Well, you got to. You've got to be solving the right problem.

And doing it. You got to really understand the pain. You got to really understand the problem for the right kind of people. And then you've got to be super nimble and ride the tack like we just talked about. And so lots of folks have jumped into this simulation space, but a lot of folks, I think have picked not the hardest, most interesting problems. And a lot of people have been focused only on the simulation and not the coaching. And to really solve the problem, you need to do both. Otherwise you end up with what I call half a walking stick. It doesn't, doesn't do a lot for anybody.

So how do you.

And if you're like, well, Richard, this is the thing we can't talk about. How do you differentiate that? Because everybody's claiming it, right? And you've got to break through that noise of like, we have the coaching thing that will do the coaching thing you're asking for. Right. How do you.

And can you differentiate at that very specific minutia level? Right? It's easy to say we've got a coaching platform. You know, reps can record their calls and listen back and they can get some advice and blah, blah. That's easy to say. Where's the proof? In the pudding, so to speak.

Yeah, well, you got to create a magical experience like hook them day one. So in our first sales calls, we, we build a live simulation and coaching on the call in 20 minutes. And we do that by leaning into generative AI where our AI avatars interview you and say, okay, what's the scenario that you're really trying to solve? What's the critical conversation that if your reps could do better, would move the needle for you? That could be your SDR opening line, or it could be objection handling, or it could be better discovery, whatever it is. And we can create that experience for people in 20 minutes in a way that they've never seen before. And that moves.

That's a differentiator. Yeah. I've not heard someone. It's interesting. I've not heard someone using their tool to do the discovery, to then turn it around into the platform, which I think is pretty cool.

What I think is, I mean, jumping in here is another. Well, maybe this time as a, as a guest for this five minutes.

Yeah.

I would say, like part of it, Part of the. The proof is you got people like Kyle Norton, who is on stage at Saster talking about Ivara on, you know, on the 20 BC podcast, talking about Vara on, you know, top line podcasts, always talking about Avara, like, that's the proof. You don't, you don't see David and the team over there pouring tons and millions of dollars into these fun brand campaigns. It's customers who are doing a lot of the selling because they're happy customers that they just love the product, you know?

Yeah, I think I, I think that's cool. So how did you, you know, David, because you, you've been around, you know, like me for a while, right? Selling since the 1900s. How, you know, you've seen a lot, you've been through a lot. How did you choose? Like, how did you, how do you decide which thing to go after? Because it sounds like you got enough experience in life. You could have found five other categories to dive into or to create. Right. So I'm thinking about at that early stage, founder level. Right. How do you decide which one of these things to chase? Like, what's your method for saying, you know, I got these four ideas, I want to go chase this one?

Yeah, it's a great, it's a great question. This is exactly what I did. I did two back to back, sort of 50 million to a billion plus runs running product, first of WebEx, then Proofpoint. And I took a year off and did nothing. You know, I baked bed, I played golf, I went backpacking, and then decided I wasn't done. And I went through exactly this process, like, what is it I want to go do? And part of it is like, who do I want to go do it with? And I built My founding team and all of that. But then it was like what problem to go solve. And I looked at everything from climate tech to collaboration to security to this AI space and what I wanted to do was solve the beauty of.

Of.

Being work optional is you can like, you don't have to say this is the, the lowest risk, you know, best economic outcome. Now you can, you can say I want to solve this because it is big and if it's successful it's going to be huge and I'm willing to take some risk to go do it. And so I was looking for that AI.

Problem that wasn't just some added feature into some existing product that was a problem that could only be solved with AI. Like could never be solved before, could only be solved with AI and was if we got it right, a, you know, a billion dollar problem because it was strategic. And then I also want to do stuff that I believe in, that that's going to make an impact. And, and I've seen how like just blatantly un bad how we used to do things are and I thought we could do something that would actually make that people really enjoy and would make their lives better.

Yeah. So here's, here's my question and I posed this question to everybody in this space specifically.

How do you, and it's always about adoption, right? Same thing with like CRM engagement and stuff like that. But even when I was managing teams, right, maybe 20, maybe 20 would want to be self taught and use a tool like this. 60% might dabble with it and then they'll forget about it and the other 20% have no interest in it. So if someone's, how do you change that part of the game for the team, for the reps? And it's not necessarily your job to do that with your clients, right? Like because they're, that's their, it's a sales manager issue. Right, like it's a sales leadership issue.

How do you tackle that problem where someone comes in with the objection of look, you know, only 25% of our reps are going to use this or are they not? Are they that naive still to think that, no, everybody's going to gravitate to this because I tell them, like what's.

Well, the.

At the end of the day you got to make somebody some money. They got to believe it's more valuable to spend an hour in your tool than an hour doing some other part of their job. And if you can't convince that end user that it's a good use of their Time like, well, they shouldn't use the product. Right. And that's why most enablement hasn't worked and it's had to be mandated is because people didn't view it as a good use of their time. And how do you make a good use of their time? Well, you understand what their job is and actually help them do things they need to do, like look smart in front of the customer. No self respecting rep I've ever talked to wants to look dumb and not be confident in front of a customer. Right. You need to be able to personalize that experience for the way they want to.

You need to go work at some other companies then because there's a lot, you know, you know, there's a lot of those reps out there.

You know, personalize the experience. You know, how I want to be coached and, and what works for me and then, you know, make it a little fun, have some competitions, have a little light.

I'm really glad, I'm really glad you just added that last part. So I'm jumping in. You just, you said you got to make it fun. Because that part has been missing for, for as long as I can remember from all of these kind of tools, you know. Yeah, it has to be a good use of their time. It has to be roi productive, you know, has to be valuable. I can't remember the exact phrasing you used, but if we just pause for a second, the rep will not do something just because it benefits them financially or benefits them in keeping their job. They're only going to take action on it if they enjoy it, if they actually enjoy the thing. We've all been a part of, of organizations where people know what they're supposed to do and don't just because it's not a fun journey, kind of like.

Going to the gym. It's like we all know we should.

You know, fun, not fun for some people. Right, Right. And I think this has just not been fun for damn near everyone. And nobody's really tried to tackle the fun part of it. So how do you build in fun to the experience?

One thing you build in a little competition because sales people like to compete. So we have, you know, leaderboards and those kinds of things. And then the other thing is you let people dial in how they want the, the coach to behave. Right. And so you can tell the coach to speed up, slow down. The other day I was just screwing around, see what would happen. I asked our coach to coach me in the style of Yoda. And sure enough, you know, all Of a sudden, the coach is like, you know.

Sale. You must, you know, and, and you can, you can totally, you know, groove with it in the middle of the sales call, you know, when you blow up with the customer, you can, you know, you can just, you know, go off script and they'll, they'll play along with you, right? It, it, it's, you know, it's, it comes down to the learner and how they.

So, so what's it going to take to put a button in that says coach me like Richard Harris or coach me like Scott Lees, like, do. No, but seriously, like, I love what you just said about that.

How do you do people know how to request the styles? Right? Like, this is still sort of a input, output, transactional approach, right? Like the challenge with AI right now is that it's, it's still very transactional in what it can do. And the strategy side of things are we're starting to get there, but not yet. But.

What kind of styles do people even ask for? Do they even know they can ask for that style?

They don't know they can. And that's one of the real challenges with AI interfaces. Richard, you nailed one of the key problems with AI voice interfaces. It's why people hate call trees, even good ones, is because they're opaque analog interfaces. You don't know what they can do because there's no menu to pick from, right? And you can only do one thing at a time. So we spend a lot of time in how we build and prompt our avatars to let them know, hey, you can do this and have a conversation. And once people learn that they can talk to these folks like they can talk to people, then they start treating them more like they would treat.

Have a normal conversation with another human. And that loosens things up. But it is a key thing we try and design for, and it's something that's. I don't have the answer to. Part of it is multimodal interfaces that we're getting better at, where the avatars can share content, so you can quickly scan things while you're having a conversation with the avatars. But it's, it's a real design challenge with AI.

Do you, I mean, can you. Like, I remember, I remember when Waze. I don't use Waze anymore, but you know, you could actually, it would prompt you to say, do you want this, to do this in Shaq's voice? Right? Like, I don't know.

And we do that. And, and we.

So you do have that built in. So you are trying to build in. Like, hey, if you want your coaching in this style, then that. That I agree with what Scott said is like, they don't know how to have fun, and even they don't know how to ask for it to be fun. Yeah, totally. Right. And so that's really smart.

We're putting all that in. But you also don't want to always be asking, getting away. You know, your personal assistants are super annoying. And so finding the right balance of all that is, oh, can I help you today? Oh, go away. Right, so. So that. That's the fun challenge of this space.

But one interesting part to me is that you can keep track of the trends for these requests and prompts, which could actually give a lot of insight and clues into what the overall global market.

Is. Is pushing back with, like, if everybody using your product is saying, be, be more tough on me. Be harder, be more rude, or whatever, that's potentially a signal that that's what the market is doing to everybody.

Yep.

Right. So are. Are you taking some of the data from these queries and then you're nodding your head yes. So talk a little bit about that because I.

That's.

This is an interesting piece that I haven't heard any of your competitors in the space talk about, of what to do with the data and these learnings from how people are actually using the product.

You guys are like, well, I need to hire you as PMs, because you're asking.

We're available. So we'll send over the rate card as soon as this is over.

Just look at as redemption from how we started the show. We get there. We get there.

So.

So one of the key things that we have invested a bunch in is what we call insights, which is like trolling through all these transcripts and. Because, like, no one can read transcripts, but AI is really good at it. Right? Well, what are people. What skills are people good or bad at? How are they interacting with the coach? Are they interacting with the coach? Are they taking the coaching? Or are they just like the Heisman and going back to the. The training? And then we built a.

And this isn't released yet, but we're testing it internally. We've built a AI analyst that the manager can then talk to that.

You can say, ask about the trends. It'll report on the trends of what your people are doing and which things are working well in your training, which ones aren't, and suggest things you want to work on. So, yeah, the AI. One of the real strengths of the AI is its ability to troll through all these transcripts and provide some of those insights. Because we. We know that managers don't really review the Gong recordings. Because back to what you talked about, Scott, you know, people don't do stuff that's painful. I think there's nothing more painful than watch one of your reps like crash and burn and not be able to fix it.

Right.

It's also just really slow, but the AI is really good at it.

Another thing that. That I'm thinking about as we're having this conversation is. And I'm gonna. This may be a challenge a little bit, so feel free to come at me, but.

Right now, this is new or new ish. So there's a novelty factor at some point down the road. I don't know when that will be. A year, two years, this will be normalized.

Yep.

And once it's normalized, you now run the risk again of like, well, this is not fun. This is boring. This is tedious or whatever. There's got to be a new thing. So how do you take what you've got now and dial it up a little bit, like, soon am I interacting with an AI avatar, coaching. It's not just a, you know, a voice. It's an actual Already. Okay. And then beyond that, that will get tedious. Like, when is the hologram gonna show up? And I'm interacting with, like, a hologram version. Are these the. It sounds like you already are, but are you thinking of it in a roadmap style of like, oh, this is now. This is coming after that. Then people will want this. And it just, like, keeps going farther and farther out there to the point where people probably start to chuckle at me asking some of these questions. But I believe that it's headed in that direction. And I. And I wonder if you have to start thinking about that stuff now or.

We do. But to the earlier conversation, like, I'm not nearly smart enough to know where the models are going to be in 18 months. Like, who knows what's going to be possible in 18 months? So what you're building is option value. Like, you're getting people to love the current experience, and you're making sure you're learning and instrumenting from that experience so you know what to build next. And then when you've got the time to go build it, you say, okay, well, here's how people are using and what they want, and here's what the deck can do today. Like, okay, let's build it today. So it's much more just in time planning than it was five years ago, which is a lot more than it was 20 years ago. Right. And that's, that's the challenging and fun part.

So how do you. So again I'll come back similar to the question I asked before because anybody in the AI space, everything is innovating so fast, right. And there is this balance of, you know, product market validation, product market fit, product market creation, et cetera. How as a founder.

Do you navigate all that? Because you can't, you know it. This is feels like one of the most tech heavy resource requirements anything in AI, right. And so often, and I'm not talking about, I mean maybe a little bit about UX and ui, but how do you balance that? How do you create space so that you can constantly be innovating at this scheme? Right. It's not even like, it's not like where you did two, two week sprints, so to speak. Maybe it is a two week sprint, but you know, it's innovating so fast. How do you do all the other parts of the business while also making sure you don't fall behind on the tech side? Behind the scenes?

Yeah, it's one of the hardest problems as a founder and a technical leader today is things are moving so fast. I could spend my entire team's time testing the new thing that is potentially better as opposed to the model or the language or the thing that I'm on. Right. And so we actually with the team have to kind of ring fence our. Here's what we're going to build on the stack and the tech we know and the features we're going to build. And here are the resources we're going to carve out to do this experimentation with this new thing which may leap a frog us ahead of where we are. But if you spend all of your time evaluating the new thing, well then you never like ship product to your customers. And if you spend all your time shipping product to customers, you might get leapfrogged by, you know, something new that your competitors on that you're not. And so like finding that balance is.

I don't have the answer to, but it's something we think about every day and we are working on because that's.

What do you do. You literally like time block your calendar, say okay, I've got to go spend an hour on the business application side of this or the business messaging, like do you just have to get massively disciplined around stuff? And I assume what we more do.

Is time black resources. So like, you know, there's a member of my founding team who, you know, who takes on most of this early prototyping stuff and that's kind of his role. Spend some time. We then have members of the team that, that are sort of our designated people out front with all the latest AI coding capabilities and are experimenting with those tools on behalf of the rest of the team and bringing in the ones that work as opposed to everybody like wasting their time on it. Right. So you time block certain people and certain skills to be looking the step ahead and you spread that across the team so everybody's got something more forward looking and then the thing that they're responsible to deliver to customers today.

Cool.

Awesome. Well, thank you. This is fascinating. We can go on for hours, particularly on this topic because we're all in sales. Anyway Scott, I am thinking about back in our leapfish days of where we had 70 reps, how, how much better this would have been for training vast large size teams. You know what I mean?

That's, that's the irony is some of these tools, you wish you had them when you had 250 people and under one roof. But unfortunately, or unfortunately depending on how you look at it, those types of sales orgs are not going to exist anymore.

Right.

So it's, it's an interesting dynamic but yeah, I agree with you. I would have loved, love to have my hands on that 20 years ago.

Yeah, yeah, agreed. So we want to, we're going to pause for a second, do our sponsor thing but want to give you all a chance to ask us some questions. In a second but you know, we'll turn it over to you. But just real quick shout out to Vasco who comes in with your systems and glean and enrich your data automatically to give you AI ready foundation. And you don't have to know anything like coding and you don't have to hire any extra people which if you didn't know Scott, that's exactly what he wants. If it's more complex than Excel, he doesn't want it. He really doesn't. And so kudos to them. There you go. And, and thanks to Win AI for sponsoring the upcoming event surfacesales.com we are headed to just outside Peniche. Everybody think you were going to surf big wave? Scott, when we say Portugal everybody just.

Yeah, everybody's like you guys are going to Nazare, right? Well yeah, we'll go look at it but I'm not taking beginners, I'm not getting out there surf a hundred foot wave and I wouldn't even Go out there myself.

Yeah, no doubt, no doubt.

They have a really, I mean, they have a lot of confidence in our surfing ability, Richard.

They do. It's, you know what, let them believe in them, like, let them create the picture. So.

But I don't want to burst their bubble, you know.

Yeah. So David and maybe Brandon, if David will let you, he'll let you ask a question. But David, what question could we answer for you, if anything?

Well, you're talking about surfing and, you know, the new wave pools are, are, you know, the equivalent of a, a simulated environment. And I think people are going to learn a whole lot faster or new tricks, etc, in these wave pools. So I'm curious, but there's a set of the, you know, the pure surfers who think it's kind of sacrilege. Right, so where do you guys come down on wave pools? And, and have you had the opportunity to, to surf in one? And, and what impact did it have on your surface?

Yeah, great question, actually, and really good analogy.

The first surf question we've gotten in six years.

Yeah, it's been a while. They are becoming extremely popular. They're popping up all over the world. I was just talking to our buddy Jeff the other day. They're opening one outside of Sacramento in California, for example, and there's one in Waco, two hours from me here in Austin.

It is very different.

Have you done it?

Yes, I have. I have done it. It's very different. It is very unforgiving. Let's just say.

You have, you have to get it right. You have to pop up, you have to get on the wave quickly. If you don't, you know, you look foolish in front of everybody and another wave is coming, like, very quickly. It removes a lot of the exercise. So part of the thing with surfing is, you know, you gotta paddle out and you gotta paddle in. All right, well, we're bypassing that. It's, it's almost the equivalent of having a, a ski lift in a way. So a purist would, would say, like, ah, you didn't have to work for it. Like, that doesn't count. Like, you're not really surfer. Um, but if you can figure out how to get up and things like that, you can certainly catch way more waves than trying to go in the Bay Area for a whole summer. So you do get better, faster at, at certain things. Uh, I don't love it because the adventure is not really there. The routine and the ritual of it all, like loading the four of us into my SUV trap, strapping the Boards on top, shooting the. While we drive 30 minutes to the beach. All of that ritual kind of stuff is gone. So it feels a little bit artificial. It's very transactional, to use Richard's kind of word. But that's the direction that things are going, 100%. And, you know, if I had a lot of. If I won the Powerball today, investing in one of those kind of businesses would be a pretty good idea, I think. What do you think, Richard?

Well, I haven't done it, but I want to do it. I'm also at a different skill set for surfing, so for me, it would be valuable to improve.

Right.

Very similar to what we're talking about in general, like, to be able to get up on the board faster, better, and ride waves better. You know, that part is something I always need to work on. Right. Because I don't get off as often as you do. So that, for me would be massively valuable.

You know, I agree with you about the ritual side of things, but I'm also more transactional than you are as a human, I think that's fair to say, wouldn't you say, Scott? Like, I can be a little more transactional.

I think that probably surprises people, but I think the answer is yes.

Yeah. There's a lot of things about us that people have opposite, which we.

Yeah. Like, a lot of people have an initial impression that you're the nice guy.

But that's not true. No, no, no. I'm the. Yeah. I am the.

So. So for me, that. That would be awesome. Like, I would like that a piece to it.

You know, I also like the idea of that if you aren't near a place to go surf. Like, I've got kids and they really enjoy surfing. And if I could, you know, tell them, look, we're going to drive for 30 or 45 minutes or an hour, and you're going to get up five or six times without the effort. They will appreciate that. Now, I don't think they're going to turn around and stop wanting to go to Costa Rica, though. That's the beautiful thing of this. I think it'll actually enhance their desire to go do more surfing. Right. At least that's my belief system. So. But I like the idea.

I think that's what's happened with golf simulators. Right. Same thing. It's a hard sport. Being able to simulate, have a coach right there and playing on the course is a huge commitment of time and money and resource.

And so you want to be able to enjoy it when you're on the course simulator helps you build the foundation so you can enjoy it when you're outside. But there's no. There's no replacing being a Pebble Beach. Right. And there's no replacing being a casserole.

Totally agree. Totally agree. Brandon, you got a question? Will David let you ask a question? All right.

I don't know. David, what do you think?

Are you gonna.

Should I pop in here?

Yeah, sure. Go for it. Cool.

By the way, my answer to that other question would have been like, I. I'm with Richard. Like, I. I wouldn't get as many reps as possible as I can, but it's still not gonna replace the real thing when it comes to either surfing or golf. You know, it's so cool just to, like, lunchtime, go out here to buckle balls, come back, and then get back to your day, you know, and hopefully I improved a little bit. But anyway, no, my question really, I think so deep in AI stuff right now, and obviously more on the marketing side, because I'm a marketing leader thinking about the AI but, like, my question for you guys is, how do you really create the culture of adopting AI and when do you find the time for your reps to. To do it? Right? Because everyone's so busy with their current job, and, like, they know that they have to be adopting AI and learning about it and practicing with it, or they're not going to. They're going to be out of a job soon.

Right.

But, you know, every time that you're playing with something new and these days, like, you can say anything on the website because, like, any. Anyone can publish anything these days. And I've just seen so many people that try something get burned and then not want to now go try the next day, I think. So how do you actually create that culture and the space for your team to actually be on top of AI?

Well.

I think you have to embrace creativity in a way that has historically been shut down. My example would be that sales organs have often been run militaristically. Meaning Scott says, hey, this is what we're doing. You know, your job is to run up the hill and execute exactly that. Right? It's like, we cold call here, you know, and then some rep is like, well, I have this idea to do blah, blah, blah thing. And it's, you know, creative. It's different. It's off the wall. Historically, we've been like, come on, stop it, pick up the phone, whatever. Right now, I think you need to embrace those creative ideas and starting at the top, which means you have to allow space for them to fail and flop and not see that as a waste of time and a zero value thing.

It's like that psychological safety that you got to build with the team.

Yes. They have to have the ability to test out some things, share these ideas. And you as a leader have to say, well, I don't know if that's going to work, but I've never heard of it before. And I love the idea that you want to mail whatever to somebody in order to, you know, try to get their attention. Great, let's do it. Let's try it. If it works, we'll figure out a way to try to test it more and replicate it.

But also, like, probably more importantly, what happens if it fails.

Right? Like, yeah, that's what I'm. That's what I mean, it's like there can't be punishment or punitive measures. Right. You can't come down on somebody for that. I think on the adoption of AI side, you guys maybe know better than me, but I think resistance to that stuff is diminishing. I don't think you're gonna have to fight that much longer. I think it's going to be kind of a everybody knows that to be true thing. And anybody who doesn't want to deal with it is going to have to sort of self select out of this particular field and go back to selling, you know, whatever they're selling, it doesn't have to deal with this kind of stuff at all. So that's kind of my thought. Richard, you want to go?

Yeah, I think so too.

I think.

I think part of it is.

There's this. There's this. You're gonna have to.

Teach people. We've said this all along in sales, like, you have to teach people how to buy your product. Right? Because they don't if they've never used something like this before. Right. People didn't know how to buy a CRM back in the day. Right. They had to be taught that there was an event, there was an evangelical part of the sale. I think the evangelical part of the sale for what y' all are in is very specific to. And AI is helping them understand how to use it, not just what it does. Right. And I don't mean going and creating. We have this great onboarding program and all. I mean, that's a part of it. Right. But you have to dig into their pains as you have, show them the value to it, and then you're gonna have to get them to admit that what percentage of their Reps are gonna do this on the. On their own. Right. And what are you going to do to do that? Or you're gonna say, hey, we have pro. We've built this playbook of how you implement a tool like this, you know, with all the different ideas we've talked about today. Right. So that. So that they feel like they're getting more than just like this other transactional tool. Because right now, Scott's right, that people are resistant to these things, but they're. I also think they're over indexing on it. They're over indexing to think, well, gosh, if I do this, I can get rid of my mediocre reps and I can just have, you know, five reps instead of 15 reps. And that's not necessarily the case because as all five of them get better, you know, they're not going to be on calls six hours a day. Like, it's just like the human capacity isn't there? So teaching them how to buy the tool and understand it in a different way than I think has been part of it. I don't want to say onboarding comes sooner, but I think you have to address that. Well, if you're really serious about this, here's how you're going to implement it. Right. It's kind of like, you know, I've written many posts about how do you choose a sales trainer, Right. And I don't talk about myself. I talk about. These are the things that I have learned that people value in a trainer. So make sure whoever you talk to does these things. I think there's going to be that evangelical part of what. What has to be done for. For y'.

All.

So.

Yeah, I agree. And the thing that about that is it's actually teaching people at all levels because.

Right.

You've got. You've got the economic buyer, the Sierra head of sales, et cetera, who's got to figure out how they're going to fit in their process. And then people are actually going to implement and operationalize the tool in rev ops or. Or in enablement. And getting those folks on the same page as to how this is going to work is. Is an area that has proven like we're spending a lot of time trying to figure out.

Yeah, yeah, no, I agree. I mean, I think you guys are on. On track and probably on track better than most people I talk to in this space. I hear from someone like y' all twice a week at this point. I don't know, Scott, do you hear about it that often?

Yes, all the time. All the time.

Yeah.

So a year ago, it was innovative. Today it's like, now it's just a massive land grab. Right. Like, it's. It's. It's an interesting space to. To see the space grow so quickly has been interesting to watch on the outside. All right, well, gentlemen, thank you for joining us. How can they get a hold of you, David, if people want to check out more. Yes. Plug away.

Yeah. I mean, link LinkedIn and. And the website's the place to go, so. Avara AI and. And look me up on. On LinkedIn and. No more complicated than that.

There you go. David Knight, everybody. Just. Just like a shining knight in armor. K N I G H T so he is. He is there to be your hero. Right? So.

Well, cool. Brandon, thank you for help setting this up, man. It was good to see you as well.

Of course. A pleasure.

All right, everybody, we will see you next time. Scott, I will see you at our next one. I think it's tomorrow, everybody.

We'll see you next time.

Thanks, guys. I appreciated the conversation.

Sure.