Cutting Through the Noise with Relationship-Based Selling

The sales robots have taken over and they're decimating deals left and right, destroying them right in their tracks. On the AI for Sales podcast, our mission is to empower everyday sellers to embrace AI superpowers to build new bridges and crush quota. Dr. Joel Laban said it best in the AI for sales book. In sales, time kills deals. In AI for sales, AI kills time. Join our hosts as we learn from the C suite of the world's fastest growing companies about how you can leverage AI today to transform your sales revenue engine while being the best version of you.

Welcome back to another AI for Sales podcast. I've done two today, so that's why I put the hat on now for anyone who catches this on video. But I've got someone really cool today. He has is with a company called the Swarm and we're going to talk more about that, I'm sure. Prior to joining the Swarm, David sold his last startup to Sequoia Capital. He's now building a platform to help sales team leverage their company's network using AI. Love it. Can't wait to drill in. They're part of a growing category called GOTO network that maximizes the relationships surrounding a company to efficiently grow in this post. Zirp. ZIRP World. So I'm sure you're going to tell us what ZERP stands for. David, glad to have you on the show.

Thanks very much. Yeah, I appreciate it, Chad. And the, the, the ZIRP era, the zero interest rates and growth at all costs being a lot more expensive than it used to be.

Love it. Yeah. I've been doing this for seven years and I remember in the beginning days, the former head of Eloqua when I posted that an AI wrote a hundred emails that were highly personalized in under 10 minutes. He wrote the word gross on my profile. Mark. Org and I have become good friends over time. But early in the days of AI, people were like, well, how is this going to affect jobs and what's going on? And now companies are forced to reckon with, hey, what's that headcount actually doing? If I break it down to per unit basis, right. How, how much per dial, how much per email sent, what's my return, how much per meeting? Everything manufacturing has done for decades. I think now people are looking at the black box called sales and I'm really going to be interested in this conversation. So thanks for being here.

Absolutely, yeah. Stoked to be here.

So. So you grew up in Australia? I mentioned I went. I lived in New Zealand for six months. Most Australians will Say, oh, I'm sorry to hear that, but you've been way too nice for that. So I think New Zealand's your, your neighbor. What, what did you love to do when you were younger? What was your passion in, in Australia when you were a kid?

Yeah, man. So grew up in Melbourne, born and raised there. I've been here in the States for about, about 10 years now. Growing up in Melbourne, you know, I, I always love sort of starting little, little side businesses and little hustles, you know. So I was, I was the guy like selling cans of, of soda out of my locker at lunchtime. And my first, I think business was when I was 5 and I started a stationary lending business. 5 cents for use of a scissors or glue stick. And then I ended up getting like a couple hundred dollars in this little, little plastic container. And then the teacher confiscated it. And they're like, you can't be doing this, making money off your classmates. Ended up throwing this great pizza potty for like the whole school. And I was the most popular kid for about a day, you know.

That's fantastic. You and me have similar stories. I used to sell suckers on the bus and they were a quarter each and then when you get to the last two, you could sell them for a dollar. Scarcity kick.

Surge pricing.

Yeah, exactly. So I learned to keep about 5 back because if you could sell 2 for a dollar each, then why couldn't you sell 5? So talk to me about AI at the 30,000 foot level, right? You' in and around it. What are you most excited about? That it can help us solve as humanity, man.

Yeah, I love sort of watching this space. I had the great privilege of meeting Sam Altman a couple of years ago just before OpenAI was anything and sort of seeing his vision for this future, this artificial general intelligence that could do all these activities as good as a human. I don't think we're, we're close to that yet. It's still very narrow in this application. But the powers and the capabilities of what some of these generative AI reasoning engines can do are super impressive. You know, we're trying to think through what happens in the next five to 10 years when these tools are ubiquitous and when everyone has access to these mass reasoning engines that can think of who to contact, what message to send them. What's the best way to engage these different leads. And at the end of the day, where does the human and the relationship kind of fit into that? Because we're all people. And at the end of the day, I Don't want to be necessarily working or talking with another robot. I want to talk to a human. And we're kind of in this interesting time now where the playbook is getting written for the next decade and decades to come. And what has worked in the past, that's what I mentioned before. In this kind of growth at all costs era now isn't working right. And everyone knows they need to switch to efficient growth. But also at the same time, there's this huge tidal wave of generative AI that's crashing down and everyone's sort of thinking from first principles, how do we leverage these tools now? But then what's the world going to look like in the future?

Well, it makes me think of War Games with Matthew Broderick when the Whopper. You remember the big, huge mainframe that was going. And you know, seven years ago when I launched BDR AI, I remember creating an Amazon voice prompt that was kind of a joke but kind of serious at the same time. And I, I would say to the prompt, Amazon, create A list of CEOs in the United States and send an email introduction introducing BDR AI. And you know, and it said, okay, Chad, you know, and it was just a fake prompt. But we're now, fast forward seven years. We're not too far off from a point where you can say, go ahead and do this and think like a CMO or think like the best salesperson on earth and create the message through LinkedIn, through Facebook, through phone.

Right.

You know, it's all very personalized video.

With, you know, your own voice that you've trained a model and then personalize every video so it actually looks and sounds like you, but you're saying the company name of the person and all these other personalized, you know, variables differently. I just saw that that company this morning. I raised a series a 18 mil to go and scale that tech up. It's really crazy, the tools that are coming online just as we speak.

Yes. So we purchased a company three years ago and then we sold it that would, we called it warm introductions. And so what it would do is look at all my connections on LinkedIn and then look at the people that I want to get a meeting with. And then we would ask the first degree connections. Hey, I, you know, I see, you know, David, how well do, you know, would you be willing to make an intro? And out of maybe 1 in 10 or 1 in 20 people would go, yeah, I know David really well, let me make an intro. I'm starting to see this space progress to Where AI can tell you, hey, this is a first degree connection of yours, Chad, that you know quite well and then that person knows the next person quite well. So you should probably ask this person to ask an intro for that person. I've seen a lot of people say, hey, anyone in my network that you want to get a meeting with, let me know. And it's like, I'm not going to look through all 30,000 people that you're connected to.

Right.

Is, is I'd love to learn more about the swarm. And you know, is that kind of where, where you're seeing things headed of leveraging the network or tell me more about the swarm.

Yeah, absolutely. And you know, the swarm, you sort of think about that image of all of these individuals or parts like a swarm of bees, you know, sort of all coming together to form this sort of superorganism. And you sort of can think about the swarm that exists around your company. Right? There's all of these individuals with all of their extended networks, not just the internal team members, but the investors, the advisors, your partners, your vendors and suppliers, your friends, your customers, your alumni, even the candidates that you talk to. There's all these people that are somewhat connected to your company that could probably help you out if you just came to them with the right ask at the right time. And that is currently just not mapped. So the first sort of task that we're applying AI to is let's map this extended network for all those stakeholders that I just mentioned and give you then the keys to the relationship data that you need to accelerate these different workflows. So in the sales world it's hey, what are the warm intros to the target accounts that I'm working on right now? Right. I've got a hundred accounts for the quarter. What are my warm intro pods? What are the warmest target accounts that I should be leveraging Some of these intros and maybe that's 30, 40% and then the remainder I'm then going to do my normal cold outbound playbook. I'm going to hit the phones, send them emails, do social touches. But those 40%, then I know, and then maybe, you know, an AE and I'm trying to close deals and then I'm looking at, all right, what am I in pipeline deals that I have influence and connectivity to? How can I be multi threading some of these conversations based on some of these relationships that we have? For the first time I can actually see an investor in my company used to work with the CEO of the prospect that I'm currently working on and you know, I'm just currently talking to their, their salesperson and I can really set up some more interesting conversations here. So there's all kinds of these different plays that drop out of having this data, but the first step is mapping and revealing all the relationships that you can actually tap into.

Wow. So that's interesting because the tech I've referred to at the beginning here, it didn't have a lot of things right. It, it basically mapped some things, but it didn't tell you the strength of relationship. It certainly couldn't tell you. These are the counts where you can have the I, I call it like eight ball, corner pocket and pool. This is the combo shot. Right. So which, which ball has the most likelihood to hit the eight ball in the corner pocket? And so by serving up, hey, These are the 30% of companies based on your network and their relationships. That's a good question to ask and an important question to get to because you're right, you might be able to hit your quota through the 30% of relationships and therefore what reps actually want to be spending time doing cold calls or automated emails and those kinds of things. It's a pain. So coming through a relationship, I've found those behave more like a inbound lead.

Absolutely. And you know the conversion rates that we're seeing staggering, like it's 5, 10, 20, 50x better conversion of these warm leads than doing cold outbound. But not just that the win rates are Then higher, it's 5 to 10x higher win rates in the bottom of the funnel because you have that trust that exists in the relationship that you can go back and lean on, you can do back channeling, you can set up these multi threading conversations. And this is what I was sort of referring to before that this wave of generative AI that's now crashing down on the market is increasing all the noise that prospects are getting in their inboxes and in their voicemails. So before maybe they got one or two of these opportunities a week because someone would craft a really personalized email or send them, you know, or try and give them a call. But now everyone can send out a thousand, ten thousand of these messages a day. So all prospects are just getting inundated and guess what? They do, they just delete it. They don't even look at it anymore. So if you're not cutting through that noise and you're just sending some generic can template email sequence, you're not going to get anyone's attention. And that's only going to get more and more pronounced over the coming years.

Well, and even if you're using a tool, you know, Reggie, AI I think helps increase the quality of communication where it might say, hey, we went to the same school or hey, I looked at your 10k and here's what I found and here's how our solution maps. But to your point, the further we get into AI now all the messages are going to be, are going to be coming in with that level of sophisticated mapping between your pain and my solution. And trust, the trust relationship becomes way more important in these warm introductions. So I, I love it. And the fact you're able to use it down funnel as well as top of funnel is something that I haven't seen done yet either. So that's really. You're onto something.

Yeah. How long? Days. But there's been some big shifts in the data landscape that kind of now make this possible when it just wasn't before, you know. And that's what I saw when I was at Sequoia. I built them almost as proof of concept with the data science team and the internal product team. We worked on this product that maps Sequoia's extended network and then applied scores and weights and tags to everybody. And what I then saw was actually there was a few things that had shifted. You could now get all the LinkedIn connections through the GDPR and CCPA data requests that allow a user to request a copy of their own data. They there were third party data vendors who had gone and crawled and scraped the web to be able to get the company profile data that you needed. And it wasn't just locked up into these gatekeeper platforms like LinkedIn or ZoomInfo or some of these other platforms. But we could all build on top of these data sets that were now available. And then also the depth of the data meant that you could go into these interesting kind of use cases and build out these workflows. Just, it just wasn't possible before to do this, but now it is.

Well, and look at what's happened. Infotelligent is a company out of the uk. I believe that many of the large data providers leverage for mobile phone numbers and things like that. Last year I was spending 25 to 30 cents per record and then we're a wholesaler. So then we go sell it for 50 cents to a dollar. So that's just how the market worked. And ZoomInfo has been in that space for a long time. So they, they always kept their rates around a dollar a record. But now selling dot com, the old infotelligent, for 159amonth, you can have unlimited downloads. Wow. Sales intel out of the east coast, same thing. Hey, they go, they have 150 people doing research to find out if they're still working there. Same thing. They have a package, maybe five grand a year for X number of employees can have unlimited downloads. So that as that pinches and becomes more commoditized, then everybody can email everybody. So you better be different at how you're approaching people coming in. Don't go eight ball, corner pocket anymore. You got to go, you know, the yellow one to the eight ball. And that's how, that's how to build trust in these relationships.

Absolutely. Yeah, it makes a ton of sense, but you know, it takes a little bit more work. And I think that's where people are having to rewrite the playbook and kind of rethink how these machines get built. Right. And the traditional model of let's scale up a bunch of SDRs and BDRs to do all this outbound and all these touch points and then the AES will come in and help to convert and close those, you know, those deals. And that interest is now getting shifted into this sort of new salesperson that can do just a lot more and they have a lot more responsibility as well, and which I think is great. And I think it's, you know, a real evolution of the sales function and it's a much more interesting job that you can be doing and almost letting the robots, the machines doing some of the lower value, you know, kind of repetitive tasks, then freeing up for more high value stuff, which is talking to other people and, you know, helping to be that creative problem solver.

Well, and that's, that's what I've done for this long five, seven years where you look at my calendar, I have 15 appointments every day. Now, 30% are customer satisfaction, helping them on board and things like that. And then the other 70% are sales calls, investor calls, and, and that kind of thing. But without AI and this kind of tech, I, there's no way that I could have grown the business to the level that I've grown it. Right. You can do more with less. And I do believe that that's exactly where things are headed. There's a book by Dr. Howard Dover, and I'm looking in my bookcase right now to remember the name of it, but he talks about this. He says CFOs will be, they're responsible to their shareholders if they continue to overspend in the old model that you and I talked about, 7 to $10,000 per BDR per month. Then when you pay $10 for one dial, that's the math. 10 to $12 to one dial to nowhere. Then you pay 10 to. Imagine driving down the freeway with a stack of $10 bills and just you throw them out. Every 10 seconds, you're throwing out a new $10 bill. By the end of that, you've littered the highway with thousands and thousands of dollars and no results. So that model can be so much more sophisticated when you focus on the leverageable activities like a network, like what the Swarm is doing. So I just love, I love where you're going. I can't wait to see it. I've been approached by some companies recently to say, hey, come join us. We need you to take all those seven years and bring them inside of our company at scale so that we don't have to continue paying the teams like we used to.

Right.

I believe it pretty. Yeah. Well, where do you think it goes? Right. We talked about you're looking five years out. I remember when I joined FedEx back in the day and the CEO Fred Smith came out and he told our new hire class, I don't work for FedEx. And all of us were like, well, that's the CEO. What is he talking about? And he goes, I work for FedEx five years from now. So everything he did was in the future. And Arrow Electronics now has a thing five years out. So I have to think you're, you know, wearing those shoes and wearing that hat from five years from now. What's changed as the five years out?

So the way I see it unfolding is, as I mentioned before, more noise in general getting created by the advent of all these generative AI tools that are flooding the market. Salespeople getting the ability to have these mass emailing, mass personalization channels that can hit all their prospects at once. And then this realization that actually that's not going to convert. So we need to do something a little bit different. I think there's a few things that cut through the noise now. One is more product LED signals, first party product data. Someone's using your product, someone's, you know, getting engagement and that's a great time to then chat to them. Again, different model. And that's more of an inbound, you know, kind of interest. The relationships in the network are kind of more where we're sort of focused on where people will respond to those they trust and they have a relationship with. And the way that people are buying. And the way that companies are buying is shifting where people want to learn more themselves, they want to talk to their close peers and communities they're part of and they're going to be more and more learning from their partners and people that they're interacting with than from talking to salespeople. And I think that's the future that we're moving towards. This goto network motion is really arming everybody in your extended network that's just, you know, not just your team and your investors and your advisors and folks in your cap table, but everyone in the extended ecosystem that sits around you. Your vendors, your partners, your customers and all of these different constituents and nurturing your network. So it's not just this short term transactional I'm trying to sell to you today, but actually, hey, for the long term, how can we all support each other and on these, you know, these journeys that we're on both as individuals and as companies. And I think once you sort of start framing it in those sort of multi year long term relationships, everything kind of becomes a lot more fun and interesting, at least for me.

Well, I love it. One thing, because of this AI for Sales podcast that I've been running with 150, almost 200 guests now, I'm investing in a master class for communications right now. So I'm about four or five months in learning how people speak. They're either visual, auditory, kinesthetic, how do you speak differently to them and just be a better communicator. So I think that's something that companies should probably start to bring in is, hey, let's bring in a master practitioner on the art of real human to human conversations. Right?

Makes sense.

Salespeople think to the next thing, what am I going to say next and how am I going to respond versus let me really absorb the information and fully understand what is being communicated to me.

So, and I think that, you know, talking about communication and kind of talking to mass groups of people and influencing large groups of people. I really also like this movement of, you know, building trust at scale. And I think I've seen this movement towards B2B influencers and creators and salespeople building this audience and influencing by sharing, you know, informative and educational content. So then when the buyer is ready, they've already been warmed up, they almost feel like they have a relationship because they've been consuming content with you. And I think that's why the podcast you're doing is so important and so critical for a lot of salespeople. Who is just starting to get a brand. But they can be doing this on LinkedIn. They should be looking at other ways they can post, you know, blogs and different other things. And I think that is going to be the way of the future where again, the buyer is doing a lot of their own evaluation behind the scenes before they ever talk to a salesperson.

Yeah, I remember Josie Ann Fagan in Northern California. She's got this big hair and she's just an awesome person. And she taught about telesales on the phone. Right. And that was her book about telesales. And I asked her, I said, hey, you've written books, they've been bestsellers. What should I do if I want to do that? She said, just start blogging and, you know, just write it in text. This was before really video was a thing. The vlogs hadn't even come out. And so I just started blogging every week. By the end of the first year, it was like, oh, I've got enough for a book. Let's just call it sales hack. And we'll take all those hacks that I shared and put it in a book and. And that's it. Yeah, nowadays you can do video, you could do audio, you could do short clips with video AI or opus clips. And it's just gotten so much, so much cooler. But really enjoyed talking with you today. I guess. One more question and it's the elephant in the room question I think a lot of people ask, which is what impact is this going to have on salespeople? Does it add jobs? Does it subtract A little bit of both. What's your perspective?

Yeah, look, I think the role is changing, right, where it's becoming more multidimensional, it's becoming more interesting and it's not going to be as compartmentalized, I think, as it was in the past, where you're not going to just have appointment setters, you're not going to have people closing you. You're going to have salespeople doing the full spectrum of activities and they're going to have responsibility over a lot more of the, the, the entire journey, which is great. I think AI is coming to help us and to be the assistant or the co pilot that it can do all of the lower value repetitive tasks, but frees up the humans for the best part of work. And you know, in my mind, that's kind of working, connecting with other humans.

And other people love it. I'm on the same page with you. Well, let me just say, David Connors, it's been an honor and a privilege to meet you today. Thank you for being on the show. David Connors, C O N N O R S We'll put it in the show notes he is the co founder and CEO of the Swarm. They launched in August of 2021. So that's probably right at the tail end or middle of COVID and I love to see all of the cool companies that were birthed during that time because the world certainly has changed post COVID 19 and David's the better for it by launching the company then. So thank you very much for being on the show today.

Thanks again Chad. Had a great time. Appreciate it.

All right everybody, catch you on the next AI for Sales podcast.

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