S6E35 - Chris Albro -From Fish Washer to CRO: An Unconventional Path to Sales Leadership

Welcome everybody back to another episode of Surf and Sales podcast. I'm here with my good friend Scott lease co founder, co host and partner in crime. Scott, I don't think we've done one of these since we got back from Portugal, have we?

No, we have not. We, we've rolled right from surfing sales into preparing for midnight to millions and the 24 hour marathon sales event. Males.

Yep.

Yeah, marathon sales event that we did. And I don't know about you, but I've been catching up on sleep the last few days.

Me too. Me too Much. Much to my wife's chagrin, so. Well, it's good to see you as always and excited about this guest who they came in with a little sponsorship with us People AI, we have Chris Albro from People AI with us who is the CRO. So it's always fun to talk to these CROs because we'll get them to spill the beans right like that. That's the goal. So Chris, you know, welcome to Surf and Sales. Tell us a little bit about, about People AI. Just, just so they have some context of like where this conversation might head.

Oh, yeah, okay, happy to. But by the way, I mean, let me start by saying one of the, one of the reasons I ended up here was because somebody mentioned surfing in Portugal.

Yes.

Yet here we are on a zoom. I'm still in, in cold Montana and now I'm hearing all these stories about this amazing Portugal trip. So clearly we have like a disconnect on the communications here that I need.

Yeah, yeah, we've, we have blame Scott for all bad communications. That's always.

Yeah, that's, that's fair. We, we should definitely, it would be better if we were all on the beach somewhere in Portugal.

I agree. Now I have one burning question for you guys right out of the gate though. Sure. So I was listening to your last episode, which I think was recorded before the Portugal trip.

Yes.

And Richard, if I remember correctly, you had eked your way up to being able to do seven push ups in preparation for the Portugal trip. Did you ever get over 7? Did you get 10 or what?

Like, yes, I will say this, that yes, I did. I got to seven and a half. So I was very excited about that.

Ironically, I will say that. And you know, we've done surf and sales for almost 10 years now. And, and just so we have clear communications, Chris, the next one is in November next year, the week before Thanksgiving, but we're going back to Costa Rica. So, you know, as a family man such as yourself, you could come down to surf and sales and then the next week bring your family down. So you're welcome to join us.

Oh, make it a. Make it week. In a way, that's what we typically. I like the way you're thinking.

That's the pro move right there.

That's pro move.

Yeah.

But I will say back to the push ups and surf. This was my best surfing session ever. Like I, for whatever reason, it just came together with, for me after eight years. And it could be, we had, we had some amazing instructors in Portugal. So, so yeah, my push ups came through, got up many times surfing at sunset. It was beautiful. Really good time and you know, hopefully we get to do it with you one of these days. Or, or maybe you'll spiff out a reward to someone on your sales team.

Okay, so now the whole team's going to hear that and be like, when's my surfing, surf and sales spiff coming?

Well, you got a whole year to use it. Like you can motivate them for the first half of the year to hit numbers. So yeah, we'd love to have you guys.

Well, I'm going to need a whole year to get to raise quotas to pay for it. Right? Isn't that how that game works?

Oh, goodness, was that.

So am I giving away industry secrets there?

No, I think that secret's out of the bag already.

Yeah, yeah, people know that one. But anyway, Chris, tell people a little bit about people AI just so they have some context if they don't already know about it.

No, I'm happy to. So the company's actually been around for about 10 years now and we set out to solve a myriad of problems that I think unless you're one of our customers, probably still plagues many businesses today, which is salespeople generally are best at working with other people. Yet we ask them to spend hours and hours and hours every week doing a bunch of manual rote tasks that add very little value to the way they work and their objectives.

Things like manual data entry into, into CRM, for example. We spent a decade automating that in a really unique way. We've got best in class ability to match activity data to not only accounts, but opportunities. Doesn't matter if you have one CRM instance or 25, like many of our customers do. We'll find the right account, we'll find the right opportunity, match that stuff. And so we're literally all about giving the sales people back time in their day, in their week to go work with other people, buyers, hence the name.

People AI, yeah, totally, totally get it. I also want to add one piece of context for people. And you know, this is how long I think I've known you is that you're also VP of Enterprise Sales over at Outreach. So you, aside from what you're doing at people AI and what you've done there and at Prodigal, you get it like you've been in those trenches of this sales world, which I think is so great at a CRO level to actually know that nuance all the way down to the front line. So thank you for being that part of it.

Well, and if you don't mind, like one thing beyond that that I think has been really helpful to me is I actually came into sales in a very non traditional way. I came into sales prior to sales. I was spent well over a decade, kind of aging me a bit, well over a decade in consulting and implementations.

During the whole migration from on premise software to the cloud. And I just got in the weeds, hands on exposure to what buyers go through after they work with a sales team. And I think it's the thing that's probably helped me the most in sales is I know what customers are afraid of, what risks they see during a buying cycle, if things go sideways on them. Because I've been the person that worked with them when things were going sideways after they worked with sales. And so that's been a real unlock for me in the selling environment.

Do you call those things out during the sales?

Absolutely, absolutely.

Talk a little bit, talk a little bit about the reasons why you should proactively call that out versus sort of reactively address it should somebody bring it up?

Well, the most fundamental reason you should do it is just because it's called being a good human. Like it's called empathy. It's called, you know, like, hey, I know you're probably concerned about X, Y and Z right now. Aside from that, aside from just it's the right empathetic human thing to do.

There's al. There's also a bunch of science behind it. There's a bunch of research and studies that prove, hey, if you're empathetic, you'll probably win more deals. So do it for, do it for the right reason, but also do it because it's, it's professionally been proven to generate better outcomes. If you demonstrate that you know the risks that your buyers are grappling with internally and that you have an approach to take those risks off the table, I think that that plays well for, for both buyers and sellers, frankly.

I hope People who.

Don'T proactively discuss these types of things, hear what you just said and maybe dig into some of that research and really kind of change their approach. Because I, I think there's a, there's a school of thought in some people who just believe, you know, never bring up an objection on your competitor or a competitor or whatever. Right. And it's actually in my belief as well, not the right approach. So I hope they hear that.

Well, we, and in the SaaS business, we fell into this trap. You know, there was like this.

Golden decade of SaaS, right. It was actually probably more like 12 years, 2010 to 2022, and money's free, frankly, everybody's winning.

And we got into this kind of like race to the bottom on the implementation side of SaaS where vendors were rewarded for showing up and saying, no, no, no, no, no, everything's configurable. It's so easy to implement. It'll just take a couple of weeks and it only costs a couple of thousand dollars or we'll just throw that in, we'll just discount that down to zero, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So we ended up in this race to the bottom of implementing SaaS and the cost structure around that. And frankly, in the pure SaaS world, maybe that was warranted. But things have changed dramatically.

You guys might have heard of this thing lately. AI have you guys up to speed on the whole thing?

Yes.

I know you've been out surfing.

I know we even heard it out there. We even heard it out there in the ocean.

Yes, we did.

Look, here's the thing. And by the way, like, this is a, like a pro tip for sellers. One of the big things that everybody, every buyer is grappling with right now is, okay, I know I have to go do something with AI.

But I don't really, if I'm honest about it, I don't really understand how it's going to change the workflows that I, that my teams typically do in SaaS applications today. And they're afraid that they're going to buy something that doesn't that's not future proofed. I guess, for lack of a better description.

Yeah.

Meaning the way people are working is changing so quickly.

The workflows are changing. And if you don't, if you, if you just show up and say, oh, yeah, yep, don't, don't worry, this is good. This is all, this is all going to work. Yep. It's going to work in the future too. Don't worry about it. I don't know. That just doesn't seem to carry credibility with me. And I think showing up in today's world and saying the level of uncertainty and the level of risk is high. Yeah, the potential rewards are massive, by the way. They still outweigh the risk. But if you don't kind of ground into what those risks are, I think you're doing your buyers a disservice.

I think one of the big fears is what I buy today will be obsolete tomorrow. That's the, that's the rate of change or the rate of innovation or whatever you want to call it. And I, I hear and, and feel that a lot from buyers, and I hear it from sales teams that I work with, that there's hesitation in people holding back on making a purchase because, okay, Richard's got this cool, you know, new workflow or this cool tool that does XYZ today, a week from now. Everybody has it. It's everywhere. Why did I rush to buy this thing when it could have been included with something I already have? Right. How do you. Do you face that right now in. In your sales cycles? And if so, how do you recommend people address that and try to overcome it?

So, two, Two parts of the question. Let me, Let me talk to the first one first.

We don't face it as often as some of the other vendors with whom I'm familiar.

And the difference there is. I'll go back to the start of the conversation. We've been solving this data problem for a decade now.

And I think one of the things in the AI space, one of the things on which there's universal agreement, is that for AI to work well, you have to solve the data layer. Okay?

So we, frankly, you guys know the expression, I'd rather be lucky than good, right? Well, we, we are like the poster children for that expression, right? We, we spent about a decade solving the sales data layer problem before the term LLM went mainstream. And so when, when, when buyers and frankly, other vendors started saying, well, how do I do this AI thing with sales data?

We have a very unique value proposition in that space. Now, I want to be really clear about the types of use cases I'm talking about. Okay, so let's take like, very top of the funnel prospecting use cases, okay? A lot of those are wrappers. How do I write a better email? How do I use a signal to send an email to the right person? That's all, like, highly structured data. There's tons of vendors, tons of solutions to do that stuff. The data layer that we solved was actually like enterprise B2B, complex unstructured data. So imagine, imagine what the average enterprise sales cycle is, what, 18 months? Right. That's the, that's the saying in the industry. And there's now, according to Forrester and Gartner, now like dozens of people in a buying community or buying.

Yeah.

Yep.

So over 18 months and dozens of people, you're talking about hundreds of emails, hundreds of meetings, dozens or hundreds of meeting transcripts, countless notes and next steps in CRM if salespeople did enter them. Being able to use all of that data.

In an AI world is actually incredibly complex. And the number of vendors that have chosen to take that on is a relatively small number. So all of that story goes to say we don't actually run into a lot of the everybody says they can do what we do thing. We're very fortunate in that regard. And again, we'd rather be lucky than good. We just chose a really gnarly, boring problem to solve and it's actually paying off in spades.

Those are the best ones. That's success, right? Anytime I could replace paper, I'm very happy.

Yeah, right.

Like that's in that world. So I interrupted you. Go ahead.

No, you're, you're, you're, you're good. So, so then, then Scott, I think the next part of your question was like, how do we, how do we deal with that?

This is an area of improvement for us that we've been, that we've been chipping away at over the last 12 months, let's call it. We have to be better at showing people what we can do for them. I know that sounds like really basic, but oddly, the use cases that seem to resonate the best are the mundane, boring ones. So I'll give you guys an example. So there's this little conference called Dreamforce a couple of weeks ago, and we had a bunch of two dozen customer meetings set up over a 48 hour window. Okay. And you guys have been in sales long enough. You know what happens when you're going to introduce customers to your, your C level executives? You have to produce these executive briefing documents. Right? And there's a template that's stored somewhere in Google Drive or on seismic or wherever.

Wherever, wherever.

And when you get within a week of the event, somebody says, hey, go get the sales team to produce the executive briefing documents. Okay? And this hunt ensues. Who can find the right version of the template? And then the CRO cascades down through the organization. Hey, we need customer briefing documents prepared for these accounts, sales reps start working with them. They schedule a bunch of internal meetings with their CSMs and their SES and their value consultants, and they're these people and those people and they produce this executive briefing document, and then it cascades its way back up the organization. Right. I don't know how many hours and salespeople would have been harmed in the process of producing the 24 documents we needed.

Right?

But here's. This is crazy, you guys. Like when I say the way people are working is changing, this is what I'm talking about. On the day before Dreamforce started.

I used anthropic product Claude. You guys familiar with Claude?

Oh, yeah.

Amazing product, by the way. Okay. I opened Claude and we have an MCP integration between Claude and our AI product.

And I said, I uploaded our template, our exec briefing template. And I said, claude, use this template and go work with people AI to produce the exact briefing documents for these 24 accounts took like 14 and a half minutes.

Right.

I didn't even talk to a salesperson about it. I. We showed up at these meetings, everybody had copies the exec briefing documents. And so that's a really, really tangible example of these workflows are changing. That scares people. But when we show them the potential of these workflows, like this use case, people are like, oh, okay, I get what you guys do and I get that nobody else is doing that.

That's cool. I agree. I mean, I think that's great. First of all, I've fortunately never had to prepare an executive document for anybody other than myself. And I'm kind of sitting here going, isn't this the same story of why isn't the CRO going and looking for this shit in the CRM anyway? Like, like, why do I have to, as a salesperson, go tell them that? Like, they should be able to do.

The data is not in there. The data. I. So you guys, I've been running this test, okay? So I do this now in almost every prospect meeting I'm in, I say, hey, just out of curiosity, how much do you guys roughly order a magnitude spend on CRM every year? It's always measured in seven figures, by the way.

Yes.

Now, on average, according to my very rudimentary research, enterprises have been spending these seven figure sums going on two decades now. Okay? So let's say the average spend is $3 million. And they've been doing that for 20 years.

$60 million. Okay. Spent on CRM. And then I ask them on a scale of one to ten, where one is there's zero data, and ten is. It's perfect. Like, it's a perfect representation of what's happening with my customers. I ask them to rate the quality of their CRM data. You know what the average score is?

7.

3. 3. All right, 6 is a 3. What you get for spending $60 million.

3 out of 10. 3 out of 10. 3out of 10.

Wow. People, you guys, people don't. Sellers don't enter data into CRM.

And then who do they. They sell.

I kind of had a chuckle when you. When you said, we've been solving data problem for a decade now. And I'm thinking to myself, do we actually solve the data problem we got? Well, I mean, still won't put data into a CRM. Three out of ten. $60 million. Oh, my gosh.

For our customers, I should say we've solved the data problem for.

There you go. So I got. I have a. I have a couple of questions. One is. First one's pretty. I think is simple. One of the biggest pieces of data that I think is missing. I actually wrote about this, I think it just got released on your blog the other day, is that nobody's capturing the internal meetings of all the selling committees. They're only capturing the data from the external meetings. Right. So if you sit down in the big Deal meeting, Chris, with your team and you go through this, or, you know, gosh, we had to talk to the product team to see if they could build this customization for something. You know, nobody's capturing that data as part of the forecast as a whole. Do y' all do that? Have y' all started doing that or have you always done it, maybe since you've been doing this for so long? Because I feel like that's at least 15 to 20% of an accurate forecast is what's happening internally at your company to support this particular opportunity.

So I, A, I totally agree with you. B, it's not a technical challenge. And I think we can say that authoritatively.

Right. It's not anymore. For sure.

For. For sure. C, there is a.

Subjective, cultural, social challenge with it.

Recording and processing internal communications tends to be the third rail for many of our customers. And I get why people say things and, and act differently in internal communications than they. Than they do in external facing communications. Sure. And so there is a. There is a legitimate concern.

On the parts of these companies, privacy organizations, you know.

That says, hey, let's draw the line there. Let's not ingest internal communications. Now, I suspect just like ingesting External communications is, you know, we companies have kind of been chipping away at that over the years. That same thing will happen with the internal communications. But right now it's a pretty clear line for most of our customers. We do not want you to do it.

I mean, I mean somebody, but I mean somebody like you, like you're sitting down with your sales team or your VP of sales is sitting down with the sales team and the marketing org and finance to have these discussions about how you're going to try and, you know, maneuver this internally to get the deal over the line, you know, and I get it. It's like sometimes, you know, everybody be like, oh, fuck them if they can't get on board with this or whatever. Right. Like, I get it. But you know, like, can't the software also be taught to at this stage? You know, I have some friends who went through, you know, present company excluded, went through some, some harsh divorces and there are now message systems that like won't let you send a message a certain way based on how it's written because it's not a healthy message to have. Right. It's not going to actually solve the problem you're really trying to solve. It just seems interesting to me that from the sales, from the seller side and the, the org side of selling it that you're just missing so much valuable data.

That should be part of the conversation or part of the analysis of forecasting.

But I mean, I, I, you, you're right. It's so again, I'll just reiterate it's, it's not a technical challenge for organizations that want to solve it. It's solvable.

Yeah.

How broadly we roll it out will depend on the market and our buyers and whether they want to buy it.

Yeah, fair enough, fair enough.

Yeah. So in the meantime, I guess I'd propose a middle ground which is, and we are doing this very much so, by the way.

A lot of these internal conversations are summarized in things like escalation feature docs. Okay? So one of the most common things you see in a forecast call is, hey, I can get this deal done in Q4 if we agree to build this feature and it's ready by this date. And so there's like an escalation doc stored in Google Drive somewhere and then engineering has to comment on that and so on and so forth. This happens in every organization I've been a part of. Okay. So I can very easily ingest either that document or if that document makes its way into CRM, etc. Etc so that's a very solvable problem.

Yeah, that's this kind of stuff I'm talking about. Right. I'm not talking about, you know, the behind the scenes where you're like frustrated with the prospect or something like that. I get it.

Right.

Because we all do it, we all know what happens. But so here's, here's a totally different question, totally different place to go. Like, you know, what's the difference between what's the Delta, I guess is the best way to describe between like an Oracle, a Zendesk, an outreach of people AI and you know, those big names versus unknown startups trying to get all this done. Right. It's, there's a delta there that I think people know exists, but I don't know if they quite understand it yet.

Curious to your thoughts?

So one of the, one of the coolest parts about the, the experiences I've had is I've literally worked. I've been the first hire, first sales and marketing hire at a company, $0 revenue.

And I've worked at a company the size of Oracle.

Right.

And man, you can just learn so many different things in those environments. It's amazing that the, the delta for me has always come down to.

Like what I guess I would call like ownership or, I don't know, I mean, I, Accountability. Accountability. Impact, maybe. I don't, you know, I like, I, I work really hard. I, I, my, my parents made me go get a job when I was 13 years old. My first job was as a fish washer, shucking oysters, getting promoted. When I got the dishwasher job, it was a promotion. So I've worked like since very early in my life. I, I've always worked. I like work, I like to work hard. I don't like, I didn't like working that hard in a company where it was like literally did not matter whether I worked hard. And so for me that's one of the biggest Deltas. Now you could say, well, and I would appreciate this if somebody said like, well, it's not about the external validation. You should, whether you work at Oracle or at, at Outreach or people AI or whatever, you should still work hard because it makes you feel good. I get all that. Right. But I do want my work to have an impact on customers. I do want my work to have an impact on my team members.

And so the biggest delta to me is like, how big of an impact can I make in these organizations? And.

That for me has always been super important.

You feel like a smaller company, a startup type company has the opportunity to.

Make as big of an impact right now on their customers as a larger one. Do you think the playing field is totally evened out right now or do you think it's skewed one way or another?

Look, the old adage, nobody ever got fired for buying Oracle or Salesforce or Microsoft has, has never been truer. Right. So I would not describe the playing field as level by any stretch of the imagination, but that's a little bit of a cop out in my opinion.

I actually think it proves exactly what I'm saying. And by the way, I think this is if you are a sales nerd and I use that term affectionately, like now is your time, this is, this is like I don't want to be too dramatic. I get accused of being dramatic and I maybe I am being a little bit too dramatic. But like this is the new golden age of sales because if you show up and you do your job really, really well, like if you execute really, really well, you can win against those players. You can win in a playing field that's stacked against you a little bit. But you have to, you have to commit to executing like way above the competition. And I do think that's super cool.

You still, do you still feel like there's the majority of sellers who are not putting in that time and energy to show up the right way in this kind of golden age of sales, do you think? As it's probably always historically been, there's a large swath of people who are.

Sort of dressing late, just doing with a bare bones minimum still and not seizing the opportunity. And I worry about those people having a future frankly at all in this space.

Sure. Okay. So maybe, by the way, I've spent like a ridiculous amount of time thinking about this exact question not knowing that you were going to ask it. But it's always on my mind. So there's a couple of things I want to get on the table. One, it's not just salespeople, by the way.

Two, I don't think it's malicious. And what I mean by that is.

This sales is.

And has always been the only function in companies where your boss can tell you to do something.

And not only can you say no or just not respond at all, go off and do it your own way and not only will you still have your job, but you might actually be the highest paid employee in the company 30 days later. So think about that for a second. Like this is not like customers.

The opposite could be true though too, right, Chris?

Like if the Opposite. The opposite is more often true, honestly. But it's different than customer service or finance or whatever, where leaders say, hey, team, we do the job this way. You fill out these tickets, you use these applications. You do this on Thursdays, you do this on Tuesdays. That doesn't. People have tried to do that in sales, and I would say adoption and adherence is nominal at best. And then I think the other thing that happened though, is I referred to this like, Golden Decade of SaaS sales, 2010-2022. Money was free, everybody was buying.

I mean, I'm not going to name names, but there was a company that I knew of, I might have worked there, where we brought in massage therapists because.

The inbound sales team, their necks were so sore from taking.

And we didn't want anybody to get hurt, right? So, like, come on.

So I remember holding a phone like that. I'm old enough that that's what I did.

The fact, the fact that, you know, again, I want to go back to like, it's the, the fact that sales people are. My colleague Chad, and I have this phrase, people are out of sales shape. It's. Yes, all of those things piled up okay. And now. And things change. It change from the ZURP golden era that ended in 2022, 2023 to now, actually one of the most. The hardest periods of selling SaaS that, that ever. That people have ever dealt with. And people are out of sales shape. And so, yeah, so how do we.

Get them back in shape? Are you a.

You hire someone like me?

Are you a return to office guy? Do you still think the remote hybrid stuff can work? Are you a 9, 9, 6, I hate to say this word out loud. Are you a 9, 96 believer all of a sudden? Like, are those just massive pendulum swings over correcting the wrong direction?

I don't know. That all feels like a bunch of LinkedIn debate topics to me. That, honestly, I, you know, whatever. I'll leave it to the. I call them the linfluencers. LinkedIn influencers, by the way. I don't trademark that.

I wish that. I wish that I could just completely agree with you, but unfortunately, I run into founders who are legitimately running that and trying to recruit.

No, I know. Here's my two. Here's my two cents on it. Look, we're. We're a mostly. If not. If not, well, we are a mostly remote company. My sales team are all in the field, so to speak, closely aligned to the geographies of buyers, et cetera, et cetera.

I'D love to do more in person if I had an office to go into. Like I live in Montana, so that shows you my perspective on remote. Now I get on a plane most Monday mornings.

And in fact this coming week I'm getting on a plane Sunday morning. So my motto is hire the right people, spend a lot of time with them. If I could change one thing about the way I operate, I'd spend more time with my sellers every day.

And.

Like be a great coach.

Be in the deals with them.

You know, it's just like working with buyers. You have to have, you just have to have time in seat with people to really get to the bottom of what's going on. I think you can do that remotely. The office doesn't hurt. I don't think 996 is the answer in sales, by the way. It might be the answer in engineering, I'm not sure. I'm not an expert there.

Yeah, I think that's, I think that's a fair statement. And you know, going back to what you said, I think knowing Scott and knowing you and knowing me, you know, in our earlier parts of our careers, before we had significant others and, and kids and stuff, you know, a 10 or 12 hour day wasn't that big a deal, right? Like that was being in the trenches. Particularly if you're at a startup. It's part of the, the culture. Like, you know, if you don't, if you join a startup thinking you're working nine to five and an hour lunch, like you might need to adjust your thought process before you take that role a little bit. So I, I agree that I think we sort of grew up that way and it's shifting based on lots of things. And let's face it, by the way, your field sales approach, it's been around since long before all this, right? Like that high, that type of hybrid sales. It's not even a hybrid sale, it's just called field sales. Like it's no different. Right. But I do, I do think it's very interesting the, the generational challenges that we're running into and the generational expectations and you know, in some cases, you know, people like us, you know, scream about how hard, you know, they're not working hard enough in other respects. They're also, sometimes, I don't know about people a. I don't think so, but you know, they're kind of getting the shaft that they can't afford to buy a house and they can't afford to do some of the things that maybe we could at 30 or 35. You know, I bought my first house when I was 28. I don't know a lot of 28 year olds in Denver. Right. Like in a great place. And I just don't know a lot of 28 year olds, you know, unless they've really niched their way in, at least on the sales side, that could afford to do that today in the places they want to live. Right? Maybe, maybe Austin. I don't know. Scott, you tell me if it could do it at Austin. But you know, lots of places you can.

Not really in Austin and outside of Austin, surrounding areas, maybe you could.

Yeah.

So Scott, I'm curious, you mentioned this is a common topic with founders that you meet with. And I'm curious. So what trends do you like? What are they saying is working and not working?

Well, to be clear, they're not saying that it's working because they haven't been doing long enough to have any proof that it's working.

They're just sort of saying this is what it's going to take and this is our mission. It is mostly engineering driven organizations that are sort of looking to add, go to market.

You know, employees kind of for the first time, if you will.

And.

I can. My experiences, these conversations are extremely frustrating.

I will say.

I don't think, I don't think that a 24 year old new graduate Y Combinator founder with no kids and no significant other can possibly understand.

From a maturity level like what it's like to ask you, Chris, to work 9am to 9pm Six days a week. If you are a family, if you have a family, if you, I mean, it's just like wild. And then they get frustrated right now that recruiting is difficult and it's like. Well, I can tell you why it's difficult, man. Nobody wants to do that, dude.

Right?

Oh, we want to build something. We want to be a part of something special. Yeah, motherfucker. You got 40% of the company and they got 500 options. Okay, right. I get why you want to work996. I don't think your SDR that you want to hire is going to be motivated to be in the office till 9pm every night, six days a week by 500 options. Like, come on.

Difficult conversations, man.

It's a difficult conversation. And here's the weird imbalance that we're, that I, we're in right now. There's, there's, you know, the economy's been, especially in SaaS, in tech, the economy's been a little wonky. Lots of people looking for jobs right now. So they're may be inclined to sign up for a non ideal situation, maybe with a company they're not super familiar with or leaders that they don't know. Well, they don't know what their models. Their models. I mean, look, I'm blessed. So we, there's been a rough patch in the Albro household. We had, you know, son that required pretty major surgery. We had a death in the family.

Several other things going on. I don't want to rain on the parade here, but look, it was not a, this wasn't my best 30 days professional contribution. I'd be lying to anybody if I said it was. I'm getting my work done sometimes at crazy hours of the day.

But I work like, I work with an amazing team. Our executive staff is phenomenal. Like, just so lucky. Right? Like, and, and not everybody's that fortunate. Right. Where they, they can navigate that.

And, and that's the, I think that's one of the deltas between a company of your size and a startup. Right. Like that's, that's the difference. And you know, it's, it's, it's interesting to see it sort of all playing out this way where there needs to be this new balance of work ethic with mental health, with, you know, mentality and humanity. Right. Like, we're in a different phase of culture these days. So it is different. And it sounds like you're, you're mostly through the other side of all that. So I appreciate you being vulnerable about it and I'm hoping things are moving in the right direction for you guys.

Yeah, for sure.

Yeah. So we're kind of at that end where, you know, we want to let people know, to check out people, AI, let our listeners know. It's cool. Chris, for people listening, are you hiring? Are you hiring salespeople? Might as well plug it. If you're not, that's okay. But you might as well say, well, we're always looking for somebody good.

So we are, we are always looking for great people. And I, I will say we've got, not just in sales, but we've got, we've got hiring going on in pretty much every group in the company.

So this is that part though, where we flip it back to you. So people listening. Absolutely. Go to people, AI, and let them know you heard Chris on here and that you'll go and work for him if he sends you to surf and sales in Costa Rica in November. But Chris, what questions might you have for us? We always like to Open the door for you to ask some questions.

Yeah, well, so we, we, we hit one really big one that was, that was top of mind for me, which is, you know what, what do you guys hear from this next generation of founders in terms of hiring branch into sales?

The second question I wanted to come back to was this concept of like how, how, how much do the other, other people you talk to, how are they thinking about leaning into these AI workflows? Where do you guys think we are in this hype cycle? What do you think cuts through the noise in that hype cycle? Yeah, I guess just broader trend commentary on the AI go to market.

Well, I'm a lot like you and how you describe things very early is that I'm all about the use case. Right. The hype cycle is all about the use case. That's how you break through any hype cycle. I've seen it for years and years and years. So I always like that because that talks about the pains people have and how to solve them, not what you do. Right. You didn't go into, well, here's what people AI does. We make you more effective and efficient. It's like no, no. These are some examples. Right. That's the first thing that breaks through. I think people are over indexed on AI. I think they think it's going to replace people. It's not there yet. It is there to enhance people. I think that's been one of the challenges that people just over index. But particularly on a sales side, we always sort of over index on that. It's like you were at outreach and there was this golden age of like, oh my God, we don't need as many SDRs. Well, actually you still kind of do. Right. But that's where I see people just over indexing on AI and sales. And of course, just like everything else will probably ruin it too. Like we do everything else when we get new technology.

I think that.

I think one of the interesting lessons I'm seeing it doesn't happen a lot is that I believe marketing is always two to three years ahead of sales and technology in the sense of they know how to use it in an effective way. Right. And I think, I think that people are starting to pay attention to how marketing understands technology before sales touches it in some ways. Right. But it's also difference of their. What's their strategy? Marketing is not, is about getting information in. They're not about getting revenue in that information is meant to get revenue. Meanwhile, salespeople are hit with these goals that they have to Go after in a certain way. So I think that's, that's where I sort of at this high level see it externally. But Scott, you, I don't know, you might have a different opinion or some of this.

I think tired, I think people are tired of hearing about it and they're looking for more direction on what exactly to do with it. Yes, if that distinction makes sense. It's sort of like enough already about AI and all these tools. What specifically do you want me to do right now, Chris? To do better at my job?

Yeah.

And I think people are over stimulated with the copious amounts of options that are out there. I, I can't, I don't want to say the company's name, but I was talking to somebody yesterday and there's 157 competitors currently in this niche kind of space. And this niche space didn't exist arguably three years ago. It's like I'm selling as 157 people. I can't possibly filter all that out. To figure out which one of these is, you know, the right move for.

Me, for an invented workflow, by the way. So we, one of the, one of the things we did recently was we just wrote down all of the things that our salespeople do every day, week and month.

Well, guess what, it's a really short list. Like the number of things that salespeople do every day and week and month is a really short list of things. And so the fact that there's like hundreds of funded startups doing things that salespeople didn't previously do to me is a.

Now that's an indication of a bubble that's going to pop.

It could be an indication of a bubble or. I mean, I'm trying to be very open minded here. It's an indication that that actually AI is what it's cracked up to be and it will reinvent and transform how salespeople work by letting them do new things that they weren't previous to. I don't know, we'll see where it goes.

The tricky part about that, that I think is disillusioned people is I think a lot of people believe ultimately that that's where it will go. It's just so not there yet.

That.

You'Re just in this weird purgatory zone of like, oh God, can we just hurry up and get to the part where the Jetsons is just like, you know, right happening. Can we just skip this like adolescent years of, you know, the change is the change curve.

Where's my flux capacitor?

Yeah.

Okay, so. So I have one more question for you guys. So going from Jetsons, Flux Capacitors, you guys. Then opposite end of the spectrum, you do this event that is about as far away from AI as you can get, which is you bring a really small group of people together in a really authentic, cool setting, and you do like a very tactile human meets Earth thing called surfing.

What is. I'm really curious, what was the number one topic of conversation.

At this last event we just got back from? Yeah.

Well.

It is either. Well, number one, it's always career growth.

What should I do?

And what do I want to do with my life? That's always been number one thing. Thing.

Secondary to that would be all of this AI stuff that we're talking about, how to use it, what to do with it, what's real, what's not, what's noise. Where are we headed? Is this all existential dread? Are we all doomed? How do we get ahead of things? How do I profit from this stuff? It's, it's all of the thoughts that are probably swimming around everybody in our industry's mind all day long on any given day.

You know, I think, I think this one, because it was the first one we did in Europe and 95% of the people were not from the United States. This time, a big topic was breaking into the US Market. How do I do that better? And also for those of us talking to people, the flip side of that just sort of happened naturally of, well, how do we break out of the US Market into these other cultures? Right. So that was, that was not planned, I don't think. I mean, I think we had one topic that we sort of said, well, maybe we should talk about that.

But that was very different than. Than most of the surfing sales was this, how do we do that kind of thing? Which I thought was pretty cool. So.

Yeah.

Yeah. So. Well, Chris, how can people get a hold of you just, you know, aside from LinkedIn. Right.

Well, I'm. I'm tempted to give out my cell phone number.

I was just about to do it all.

Your cell phone number?

I mean, because most people. Most people haven't. Like. I get more cold calls. It's awesome. I, by the way, we were doing an enablement session on cold calling a couple of weeks ago, and I got a cold call during the enablement session.

I love doing that. Yes.

I answered it and said, hey, are you willing to cold call me in our enablement session? Like, can I put you on speaker and bring you into this meeting and the guy's like, sure, why not?

Yeah.

And it was awesome. It was so cool. I love doing stuff like that.

I agree, I agree. By the way, I give up my cell phone and nobody ever calls me all the time.

LinkedIn's a great way. Email is a great way. Chris Albroeople AI. Super simple.

I think. I think you're the first CRO to actually give out their email address. So kudos for that.

So we. Why not?

Yeah.

I mean, yeah, Fearless.

Fearless, right?

Fearless. Like, that's, that's also a good way for Chris to, like, if he gets a good message, you might be like, hm, maybe we should poach this person.

I'm just. I'm. I am going to say it is absolutely a recruiting move if you. If you are a seller that believes they can execute top of the game day in and day out. Not996 day and day out, just five normal days a week. You know, if you can bring your AAME and you think your execution's at a higher level, absolutely. Send me an email.

We're going to make that a snippet and we're going to put it on all the platforms so that you get flooded more than you already are. Chris, so. But seriously though, Chris, thank you so much and thanks to people AI for. For supporting surf and sales. We appreciate it, what y' all helped us do and accomplish to get the word out and have people and, you know, we'd love to see you there or some people from. From people AI come to the next surf and sales. So thank you again for your time today.

Yeah. Thank you, guys. Legends. Appreciate it.

Thanks. All right.