AI Without the Headaches: How to Automate Sales Workflows Without Losing Control

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Welcome back everyone. We have an exciting session for you next. Not only is it going to be engaging and fun and interesting, but you're going to learn something and you'll be able to take it away to actually make a difference in your life.

And we are going to talk about our favorite topic that is changing the world right now, which is AI. And we talk about workflows. And Tango is the number one AI solution in the marketplace that is the master of workflows. And it is our privilege to introduce an amazing panel with Ken Babcock who is the co founder and CEO of Tango and Leslie Vaness, she is the founder of the sales lead led GTM agency. And our moderator for this session is none other than Mark Hans. He is the chief content creator for Tango and.

An amazing personality. You are going to enjoy this session because he is kicking up that conversation to a level you've never seen before.

Excellent. Thank you so much. We are so excited for you all to get here. I see people that are just starting to join as you get here. Let us know in the chat, where are you joining from? We know people are all over the world here at the conference, so let us know in the chat where are you joining from? As people are rolling in, we do have an amazing panel for you today. Thank you for that great intro. We have two of the greatest thought leaders, in my opinion that are out here today to talk about AI without the headaches, how you can automate sales workflows without losing control. And if you have an Internet signal wherever you are in the world, you've probably seen their faces. You've probably seen their thought leadership somewhere on the Internet. So again, as folks are chiming in, let us know in the chat where you're coming from. It looks like we have folks here, California, Boise, Idaho, never been, would like to join. Lots of folks coming in. Ontario, Virginia, Wheaton, Illinois, not too far from us, Leslie in Chicago. So again, as folks are coming in, we'll give you a moment to get settled here. We have a great discussion planned for you all today. We're going to be diving into all things AI, what it means for in your org and your sales process. And again, if you haven't seen their faces before, go ahead and follow Leslie and Ken on LinkedIn. They live there, their thought leadership is there. And we have a great conversation. Let's take a moment to kind of set the stage here. Leslie, you got a lot going on. You are worldwide. I think right now you're in Arizona, is that correct?

I am I am indeed joining live from Scottsdale.

Live from Scottsdale. You're always popping up all over everybody's feed. Introduce yourself, let folks know who haven't seen your amazing. Let them know who you are, what you're up to, and don't forget to talk about the big surprise later this year.

I know, I'm so, I'm so excited for that. Thank you. Hi, team. Thanks so much for being here this morning. This is going to be a great conversation. I'm particularly excited to weave in some of the strategy, but also some of the tactical pieces that you can use to make your life easier and better. I am Leslie Vanette. As Mark said, I'm the founder of the Go to the Sales Go to market agency. So I do B2B outbound. Done with you consultancy. So outbound sales is my absolute passion. So much so that I did write a book, Profit generating Pipeline, which drops on August5. And otherwise I'm keeping myself busy. I am on TikTok, I am on LinkedIn, I am on YouTube, sharing my knowledge and hoping that folks can use it to empower themselves to work better, work happier. So very, very grateful to be here this morning. Thanks, Mark.

Of course.

Now, Leslie, just so you know, I don't want to downplay your intro here you are all over the world. You're all over everybody's feed. Somebody in the chat just called you Dug Goat, which if folks don't know, this is what kids nowadays, what we say, the greatest of all time. So already we're off to a great start. You are the goat. Your content is all over and it really, I think it does such a great job of blending the humor, the reality of what it's like working in our world and then giving those practical takeaway tips. So we are excited to have you here, Leslie. Ken, we. Oh my goodness. Ken, go ahead and introduce yourself, please.

Yeah, absolutely. I love Dug Goat. That's putting like a Chicago spin on to go to Goat the bears, you know. No, it's awesome to be here. I too am pumped to be here with Leslie, co founder, CEO of Tango. We're going to talk a lot about your AI journey and where you are on sort of that adoption curve. I think that journey actually reflects a lot of what we've done at Tango. So we started about five years ago in the middle of the pandemic. We started with the most seamless way to automatically create documentation of your internal tools. So think about process mapping. We eventually became the easiest to implement digital adoption platform. We took that documentation, we took over your screen. We walked you through it. We gave you analytics on how people were adopting those processes and now using a lot of those principles of how easy it was to create documentation, create walkthroughs. We're becoming the easiest way to train an AI agent for your CRM. So I'm excited to share more about that. I'm excited to hear more about where you all are in your AI journey. AI is both this exciting thing, I think, in this scary thing for a lot of folks. So I think Leslie and I are going to demystify a lot of that.

Excellent, excellent intro. And I love how you so succinctly can talk about where Tango started, where it's been and where it's going. So for folks that are here joining us, thank you again for joining us. If you wouldn't mind, in the chat, on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 is you are the Michael Jordan of AI and sales. You know it all, you're reading it, you stay up 24 hours a day, you've got it all one. You're just learning what AI stands for. Let us know in the chat, on a scale of 1 to 10, or where do you feel you are in your AI journey? We're going to start there. And Leslie, I'll turn it over to you. As folks are chiming in, we see some activity there in the chat. Let's talk about the AI journey. Where have we started? Where are we right now? Where do you see possibilities for folks with AI in sales?

You know, I have found that the diversity of levels of familiarity and comfort from AI are so varied still. And I have to admit, Mark, I was a bit surprised by that because I am a bit chronically online. And so the, the echo chambers that I am often in make it feel like everybody has this extremely advanced grasp of AI and advanced approach to it. But as I have conversations with teams and as I have conversations with the community, I find that that is, is not the case to the extent that I host a book club. Months ago, we read a book called Supremacy and it's all about the evolution of AI and the coming evolution of AGI. And one of the people in the book Club doesn't use AI at all, doesn't use ChatGPT.

So I, I think what I would say to start is for folks that are showing up today and they feel like they're already behind.

You, aren't you? Aren't. There are some people that are maybe a little bit ahead, but don't stress out. One of the beautiful Things about AI and how quickly it has come at us and how quickly it continues to evolve is that even if you just start using some of these amazing tools like Tango today, you're going to catch up very, very quickly.

That's a great insight. It is, it's this continuous evolution. It changes day to day. So the big nugget there is if you feel like you're behind, if you feel like you haven't been caught up, you're exactly where you need to be. Great, great nugget. Ken, what about you? I mean, you talk to so many people, you've seen so many different use cases of AI. Talk to us about where folks are at in their AI journey and where you see people having benefit and being in those different places.

Yeah, I agree with Leslie. I mean, it's still, it's still really varied and I think there's, there's probably a silent majority that doesn't want to admit, oh, I'm, I'm super early. I don't know enough. I'm trying to keep up. Leslie's absolutely right. The rate of change here is so fast. I mean, I'm talking every two weeks that, you know, basically everyone's starting new at every interval. And so, you know, I talked with a CEO of a, of a finely tuned LLM company for the enterprise and they don't let their sales reps use talk tracks from three to six months ago. That's too old, that's too outdated. And so when you actually think about that and how the companies that are actually defining this future are treating, the rate of change starting today is totally fine because things are going to change again in two weeks. And obviously you have to keep, keep on top of that. But, you know, don't be shy about where you are. Don't be intimidated by AI. We're all learning together.

Oh, see, this is a safe space, right? This is a safe space for AI and sales. Your transformation journey is a safe place to be. Let's talk about that journey. Let's talk about it specifically in sales. Right? We're at the Sales Transformation Summit. Everybody here has got something to do with sales. Let's talk about some of the, a lot of these organizations right now, they're trying to operationalize AI and sales, right? This is where we see a big lift. What are, in your estimation, what are some of these biggest roadblocks we're seeing in AI adoption today? And how can some of our friends here in the chat and at the conference, how can they overcome operationalizing AI and sales let's go with Leslie on this first, if you wouldn't mind.

Yeah, the list is, the list is long. A few that are at the top of my mind. I think one is folks saying that they are using AI, but really they're just doing automation.

I think that's a really, really big roadblock in terms of understanding what AI is and is not and actually using a AI tools that can be deeply assistive. So that like that is one that is just a bit of a thorn in my side. And I think another big challenge for me is that AI does struggle a bit with a garbage in, garbage out problem. And so when it comes to sales specifically Mark, often we are seeing folks get outputs that are bad. They're the same type of. I hope you're well emails are very like seller centric product centric talk tracks that are not working now, that are not serving our buyers now. But that's, that's what's feeding into these AI models. So of course that's what the advice is that are coming out of them. And then the compound is they are not using AI, they are using automation to send what's not best practice already too many, many more people because they can do it so easily. So those are two of the huge maybe stumbles that I'm seeing. An early adoption of AI or automation from sales orgs.

Interesting. So then folks, if you're just joining now, Leslie, what you're saying is some of the biggest roadblocks we're seeing is one kind of education on what is AI, right. AI is not just automation. Right. There's kind of two kind of exclusive things. Secondly is if we are using AI, we have to be really diligent about the level of data, the level of input and kind of prompt engineering. We're giving an AI or an LLM so that we get great quality content out. And there's. Those are big roadblocks. So maybe what I'm hearing here is a what would you see as a takeaway action item? If somebody's just joining now, they're just starting their AI journey in sales to avoid those two roadblocks. What are some opportunities or nuggets you think would be helpful for them?

I think the biggest one is make sure that you are leveraging AI in a way that is assistive, not replace it. So I think just an easy litmus test is if I am looking for something that is a silver bullet that is promising to make me all this money or is promising that I can fire, you know, 50% of my staff, they're probably selling you a bit of a lie.

And instead look for tech that is going to assist your team to allow them to work smarter, to be more strategic, to be more empowered in their role. So I think it's a bit of a mindset thing in a lot of ways.

Interesting, interesting. Ken, your thoughts? Again, the biggest roadblocks. Again you talk with so many different people. What are some of the biggest roadblocks you're seeing, folks in operationalizing AI and sales and how can they start to overcome some of those roadblocks?

Box. Yeah, I think the first thing I want to do is, is sort of establish a distinction. You know, we're using AI as like sort of an umbrella term, but you know, there's really generative AI, you know, the chatbots, the interfaces where you are communicating in text based format and now, you know, pretty powerfully in image based formats to get a response. And you yourself are actually fine tuning that. So generative AI is kind of in that bucket and I think that's probably what people are most familiar with in the other bucket around AI agents. That's really where you're talking about letting something autonomously reason based on your processes. So there's less of this. I think it takes about eight to 10 messages to arrive at an outcome with generative AI. This is one trigger with AI agents. And an AI agent is acting based on your processes and what they've seen you do. And so coming back to Leslie's point, I'm garbage in, garbage out. The tactical thing that I talk about with customers is start by mapping your processes and they, and they really fall into three buckets. 1. Here's an opportunity for, you know, something to be taken off my plate. Here's an administrative process that I would like to, you know, delegate to an AI agent. Here's a process that I'm going to map out. But that process probably needs some revisiting that could probably be more efficient. This is where AI agents thrive because as they're autonomously reasoning they can say, okay, actually you know what, based on all the inputs that I have, I could probably make this better. So those are two buckets and then the last bucket, which sort of gets us away from that fear of like AI taking our job, is what are all the things I wish I could be doing that I'm not today? And now we're not feeding that into the agent. But that backlog is so important to getting people comfortable with, okay, well, I'm going to pass all this stuff off to the Agent, what's my wish list? And so you know, when I think about AI agents and the garbage in, garbage out, you really start with that process mapping. That's critical.

Those are huge insights again for folks. We got some great stuff in the chat I need to address. But Ken, what I hear you saying is one, let's differentiate LLMs from actually AI agents that are there, as Leslie said, to be assistive. Right. Something that's not just going to completely replace us, but really help us do our work. You then talked about that big way to remove that roadblock of utilizing AI in sales is map those processes, number one. Number two, let AI figure out are these even the right processes? Is there kind of inefficiencies within there? Let that help you and be assistive to create more efficiency in that process. And then you talked about what is that backlog of work? This is a big thing, I think you hear across all domains of businesses. AI is coming for our jobs. And what I hear you saying is it's only going to assist you in doing your job faster, better and more effectively. But what's the other stuff we can get to now that we have the advent of all this new time? Either one of you, have you seen examples of this in orgs you've worked with? Leslie, again I know you're all over talking. Any examples where you've seen somebody have that aha moment? I just got all this time back. We mapped this process. Things are helping us. Any great success stories that come to mind? If not, we can go to the chat.

Me, I'm the success story as somebody who builds processes for a living. Right. Like that is what I do. I go into organizations and I help create the strategy. But the strategy only works if it is backed up by repeatable processes that the team can and will follow. So as somebody that creates processes for a living, being able to have a tool that can just do it for me, literally I open up my computer, I click through the things and then suddenly there's a video and there's this easy to edit output. That's the step by step sop. I'm telling you that work probably would have taken me four hours previously and now it's maybe an hour. And it's this beautiful example of the assistive not replace it because I'm still needed for the strategy and I'm still needed to start the process of what good and great looks like. But then there's this incredible tool that can just ship it for me.

Interesting.

Yeah, I'm like obsessed with Agents. It's one of my favorite new things to talk about. I've been testing them to build sales decks. I've been testing them for copy, obviously for. For sales copy and for sales messaging for quite a long time. And the.

Amount of effort that I no longer have to put in doing some of like, the nitty gritty manual work, it's incredible. Like, it's completely changed my work life and my ability to like, have more time to be strategic and do the.

Fun stuff, like be in Phoenix, Arizona, having a great little like master guide workshop. Okay, cool. Just wanna make sure that.

Yeah, that's right.

And I see you lighting up as she starts talking about the efficiencies AI is creating. What's on your mind?

Yeah, I mean, hey, Leslie, thank you for talking about Tango, by the way there in your SOP creation.

But yeah, no, I mean, look, there's an emotional element to this too. And I'm talking specifically to the. The heads of Rev Ops, the Rev Ops leaders right now at the summit. The word that I've heard over and over again from heads of RevOps is I'm fighting fire drills. I'm fighting fires. There's a fire drill every single day. And that is preventing me from doing that creative strategic work that almost like, in a way I was promised. And if I can get to that creative strategic work that improves my career growth, that allows me to have a larger impact on the organization. And so that emotional element of like, what does it mean to be bogged down by administrative work is very real. I mean, even sales Reps outside of RevOps, you know, they spend about 28% of their time actually selling. I think that's what studies have shown. And so I think something similar with RevOps where, you know, you're spending so much time in that admin work that in a way it almost seems like it's a speed bump to your career goals.

And can I add to that, Ken, because there's similar data for sellers, that sellers are spending about 35% of their time on admin. And a lot of the admin is them trying to kind of figure things out for themselves and getting it wrong or trying to follow this process that is just adding a ton of friction. And those are sort of red flags, I think. And I feel like one of the most important things that AI is going to be able to do for us is help remove a lot of that friction and help remove a lot of that administrative burden.

Yeah. And it's not just, it's not just removing it Either. I think removing it's important. Right. That volume of time is significant, but it's also about driving consistency around data entry because like you said, there's a lot of rework going on in there and then some of the work that gets done is probably incomplete. I think Salesforce and their state of sales, you know, basically said, and granted there they are the developer of the largest CRM in the world and they said that 91% of CRM data is incomplete. So that administrative time, it's being spent, but the ROI is not there.

And when I talk to reps, one of the biggest gripes they have is lack of CRM hygiene. But then they don't have the time or want to spend the time or feel enabled to have better CRM hygiene. But then they know lack of CRM hygiene is one of the biggest barriers preventing them from doing what they want to do, which is having those great sales conversations.

Yes.

This sounds like raising teenagers. They know what they want, they just don't want to do the work to do it. Right. So it's like we want great CRM hygiene, but we don't want to do. We don't want to enter it in the first place, but we don't want any idea to take it. There's a, there's something here in the chat that I think we should address. It's definitely aligned with one of the questions. It's definitely aligned with what we're talking about. Somebody here says be careful with agents. Every time we let an agent do something for us, a learning opportunity disappears. This is interesting. So we do talk about, and the question that I had kind of queued up for you all here directly aligns with this. The question here is that AI is basically saying, we're going to save all this time. AI driven automation is improving sales efficiency. But does removing manual work lead to a drop in the rep discipline? Right. Is there going to be any sort of a drop off in what we're seeing folks do and are we maybe getting not the right data there? Any thoughts there?

It's a good question.

You know, look, I think it depends on. It depends on a few things. You know, when you hire, what are you expecting them to be exceptional at? You know, and, and I think right now a lot of sellers would say, okay, well if, if 65% or 70% of my time is on admin work, I guess I have to be exceptional. There's. But most of them aren't predispositioned to be that way. And so, you know, in a Lot of situations I think about, you know, sellers getting back to like the bread and butter of what they're really good at and so removing that admin lift. Now to the question in the chat. I think a critical component of all of this is having a human in the loop. So there are AI agents where it's a black box, right? Something gets triggered, something happens, you can't even really audit it because you maybe see a bad outcome and you're like, well, where did this go wrong? I think what's critical and the approach that we've taken is in those key decision moments, we are looping the human back in to say, I'm either going to make the decision or I'm going to validate that it's a good decision. The most powerful AI products out there have a significant evaluative mechanism to say this is working, this is not working. And so for us, we need that human in the loop. And so it may not be something where you lose the learning opportunity, but the learning opportunity actually gets condensed to these like process.

Yeah, that's a huge insight.

Like does the learning opportunity need to be me entering phone numbers or emails in the CRM? Right. You know what I mean? Like a lot of the learning opportunities are not things that I need to know because they do not fundamentally improve my ability to do the core of the job of a seller. And that is human to human connection.

And I will say I have tested a lot of the like conversational bots. They're not coming for our jobs, folks. Like, they're not coming for our jobs both because the tech is simply not good enough yet and I don't think it will be for some time and even then it will have very limited applications. But it's not coming for our jobs because AI, as amazing as it is, is not going to overwrite thousands of years of human brain chemistry and we deeply crave connections with other humans. So I think, just to double down on your point, Ken, that yeah, like it will take some of that busy work away and there will be opportunities to like we won't learn, but they're things that we didn't need to learn in the first place and instead it will give us more time to spend on those deeply meaningful interactions, those sort of, you know, like the, the crux points where we really need a human to be making decisions or we really need to enable more time for strategic think, more time for one to one human interaction. So like yes and no.

Yeah, yeah, there's something in the chat here and I'm just gonna, I hate to put you on the spot, but I will. There's a comment here and I want you to kind of put it in this context. We've taught. We started this conversation talking about where we're at in the AI journey, where people are at in the AI journey. And one big insight was AI is evolving day to day, week to week. Right. So if you're just jumping in now and you feel behind, don't worry, you're exactly where you need to be. The comment I'd love for your response and your take on says CRM training and governance is pretty critical these days for sales teams. Thoughts on that where we currently sit today, April 9, 2025. Thoughts on where we might be next year.

Yeah, what a, what a, what a statement. I mean, absolutely right. I think here's, here's one thing we talked about, Mark. I know before this. The CRM isn't going anywhere. We have got, you know, basically a system of record that's captured so much of our business. The idea that we are going to rip that out is, is just, it's infeasible for a lot of organizations. And so, you know, to the point of like, I think the underlying message within that comment is that the CRM is still critical and people understanding the inner workings of the CRM, particularly in a world where you have human in the loop AI agents, yes, you do need to have a broad understanding. Now, are those CRMs going to adapt? Are those CRMs going to become what I call move from the system of record to the system of action? Maybe. But tools like Tango are meant to take those legacy systems of record and actually enable them to be the system of action. So yeah, people still need to understand the inner workings, the underlying, you know, mechanics of the CRM. But, you know, once they've understood that, you know, let, let the agent sort of take over.

Interesting. If we were not in this beautiful professional setting, I dropped the fire emoji thing that goes off because this system of record to system of action, what an amazing way to kind of encapsulate where we see that CRM growing and evolving. Leslie, you were about to jump in.

Yeah, because I agree. Because I'm like nodding furiously over here. We still need a single source of truth. And that is what our CRM should be, is the single sort of truth for all of the contacts, for all of the accounts. What is missing from most CRMs and frankly from most organization sales processes is the ability to use the information that sits in the CRM to connect the dots to understand how to better serve our audience or how to better use that information. So having an AI agent that can go through and audit your CRM and say, hey, Here are the 10 best opportunities based on this deep cut information that I pulled, not just for the CRM but also from these third party sources and market factors. And here are the specific actions that I believe you should take as a result. And hey, I've actually even drafted up a template of the copy that I think you might want to audit and then consider sending a version of. That's going to be pretty incredible when we reach that level.

Agreed. Ken, any thoughts on that?

Yeah, I mean, look.

What is an AI agent? I mean it's, it's manifesting probabilistic statistics. Right. And so we were saying what is the next logical step? I think what, what is really powerful that Leslie mentioned and I mentioned earlier is like not just this, this audit, but this, this optimization of everything that you're doing via an AI agent who can kind of reason and use that probabilistic mentality to say, well, I think this is the next step. But looking at other workflows that have been sort of evaluated as yes, that works actually I'm going to do this, I'm going to move into this arena. And that reasoning I think is so valuable for so many organizations because the inertia of process is super real. Hey, I've done this a million times this way. I've never even taken a step back to really optimize it.

Yeah, what we've seen from a lot of folks is they're so busy with the day to day, they're so busy, as the statistics said, either the amount of time they're spending on manual data entry and administrative work, they got the blinders on. And now that this agents are going to be able to kind of give them the opportunity to step back and look at is this the right process? Is this what I should be doing? This is where we're going to see some of the biggest lift. Leslie, you gave a great example of, of what an AI agent can do in a CRM. The question that I wrote here is where do you both see the biggest opportunities and biggest challenges for AI in sales? A pretty direct question, I think we've talked about some use cases here. Where do you see these opportunities? Where do you see challenges?

Kind of highest level biggest opportunities? I mean, I think broad strokes, the biggest opportunities are any time that AI and AI agent can come in and enhance seller capabilities without adding friction, without adding complexity. So I think very big picture, that's, that's the opportunity.

I have to say one of the things that I am personally very excited about is AI agents that can nurture deals. Because nurture is a, is an area where I see reps drop the ball a lot. And I get it. It is because they are in quota bearing roles, they have those revenue goals and they have to stay focused on the contacts that are most likely to close in quarter two, achieve their personal, you know, team company revenue goals. But what happens is that opportunities that are maybe a year, two years, three years out, they don't get the attention that they need. So I think I am very excited to see an AI agent that can identify the probability that a deal will close down the road and then appropriately nurture them when there's nothing to sell to them. And we shouldn't be having a sales conversation, but we should still be sharing relevant insight, sharing value drops with them. So I just putting that into the universe for somebody to, to create. That's what I'm personally excited about.

Great, great use case, great opportunity. What I hear you saying is nurturing those deals that have just a longer sales cycle. How can we really help empower, you know, the, the sellers in that? Ken, what are you most excited about? The biggest opportunity or the biggest challenges you're seeing right now?

Yeah. And the opportunity side, I'll share something that initially horrified me when I heard it. And it's a CRO of a unicorn SaaS company who, you know, was, was sort of talking about their internal processes and basically said, hey, my reps are really good at copy and paste. And I was like, are we in the 21st century? Like that sort of mentality I think is pretty startling because there's a lot of room for error there. But what that highlights to me in terms of the opportunity is there is an ecosystem of tools that reps are referencing. When you're copying and pasting, you're taking something from somewhere else, pulling it into maybe your CRM or elsewhere.

The opportunity to create more connective tissue across those tools with the CRM as, as the nucleus, effectively that I think is, is going to be huge because today as it stands, not all tools talk to each other super well. Not all AI API endpoints are created equally. And so I think where AI can be really powerful and you know, this is a lot of how we've built Tango is being that layer on top of all your tools that can make them communicate effectively. That's a huge opportunity in terms of challenges and and this is on companies like ours to solve is really around trust.

If a rep doesn't trust what the agent is, is about to do or the outcome that it's going to drive, it'll never be adopted. And so, you know, that's the human element of all of this, is there needs to be a foundation of trust. And, you know, we've, we've sort of anchored our, our product roadmap around that.

Interesting. So this is, this is a conundrum. Right. So what I, what I kind of hear us saying is we see all these great opportunities. One challenge that we kind of see is the trust and then the challenge of these legacy tech stacks that people have. Right. So like, oh, these legacy tech stacks, oh, they're so terrible. But I also don't want to go through another huge tech adoption. Where's the technology that is going to allow me to keep the stuff that we've always used? Because big tech adoptions are, are challenging. How do we find something that can speak and layer on top and be connective and be trustworthy across our entire tech stack? Leslie, I'm sure in your work you've seen tech stacks that would give us all nightmares. Where are you seeing opportunities for AI to kind of connect? And then we do have something in the chat, I've pinned it here. It is a great question, but where are you seeing tools, opportunities that are really connecting those old legacy tech stacks? Empowering sales reps to do better work?

Yeah, I mean, I think my own tech stack might be a bit of a nightmare. There's no, there's no reason that my tech stack should be as big as it is for a solopreneur. But I love good tech, so I have to test it all out so I can feed back to people what the best of the best is. I think we saw a version of this happening when we were in that, like, growth at all cost era, and everybody was just picking up somebody else's playbook and plopping it on their organization and then wondering, why isn't this working for me? And they weren't taking the time to figure out, does this serve my specific goals? Does this serve my cut? Like my customers, Is there fit for purpose here? And so we're starting to see a bit of that with AI, where people are taking somebody else's tech stack or somebody else's AI playbook and they're trying to plop it on their own organization and they're getting this bloated tech stack. Things do not integrate. Things do not speak to each other. So a call to action that I would give folks that are exploring, what new AI tools should I use? Avoid the silver bullet like the shiny object tech tools and make sure that whatever you choose to bring into your tech stack solves a unique problem that you already have and are looking for a solution to.

Interesting. Very similar as Ken was talking earlier, map the process. What is the process you're trying to say? What is that use case? What are our rev ops leaders, our sales leaders, our account executives? What are their biggest challenges? What are we hearing them say repeatedly? And let's just solve for those challenges. This is a great example. So again, folks joining us, this is a great question we should all be asking ourselves is what are the challenges? What are the problems? What are the things we keep hearing? Somebody I heard earlier today, someone said they're scabs. And I just keep picking these scabs, right? They're always there, things that never go away. What are those challenges? Ken, what are your thoughts?

So the, the big thing that I would say in evaluating, related to, to Leslie's point, you know, when you're looking for those AI solutions, really understand also the viability of these businesses. There are new entrants every day. It feels like, you know, and we're playing in this space, you know, we've been around for, for five years and built a significant business, you know, on documentation and guided walkthroughs, and that those learnings, that experience is what's setting us up to be successful with AI agents. There are a lot of new entrants, so ask the hard questions. While you're going through procurement, while you're going through evaluation, what's the longevity of this business? What other customers have you seen? What unique use cases do you serve? And if people aren't buttoned up on those answers, you know, I would, I would be careful. There's a lot of, there's a lot of people trying to sell the, you know, the, the pickaxes during the gold rush. So just be careful.

Interesting. All right, so here's what we've got in the chat. This is a very interesting question. There's, there's some banter going on, which is a really great conversation. Essentially, it's focusing that they're saying, we've been talking about how AI can help us sell. How can AI help the buyer? So are these two things mutually exclusive? Right? Like if AI is enabling sales reps and sales teams to be better at selling, to automate that manual work, is it better for the buyer or Are there other actions, other things we should be thinking about from the buyer's perspective?

I can jump in because I have a couple strong opinions on this one. Here's what we're doing really wrong right now and we, we sort of hinted at this at the top of our conversation is that folks are saying they are using AI, but what they are really doing is using bad automation. I'm seeing this a lot with people being sold like an AI sdr. These are sort of a lot of fly by night organizations and it's not an AI sdr. It is using AI to spin up really, really, really bad copy and then just spamming like opening the spam cannons and sending a bunch of emails like that. That is not a use case for AI that serves our buyers. They do not want more of the same type of bad emails and they all sort of look the same. Right. They're all kind of a version of reading your resume. Back to you. Hi Ken, I see you're the founder of Tango. Would you like to buy my widget? We need to stop doing that. That is not the future of AI. That is not what our buyers are asking us to do, to have a more buyer centric sales process. What I think is going to be incredible is being able to use AI to inform, to educate our buyers to all this time that we buy back. Because we're not doing the sort of manual Drudge data entry, we're going to be able to take that time to sit and think critically about how can we share these actionable insights, how can we share this valuable knowledge so that at every point sellers are showing up to interact with their buyers in a way that really earns the right to their attention and time. Because we have been able to say, hey, across all of the conversations that we've had with this icp, this, this is what we're seeing, this is what our research shows. So I think that is going to be a really powerful way to better serve our buyers and help make the buying process more valuable for them.

Be helpful, right?

That selling process be valuable.

Yes, yes. I love how you frame that. I think it does answer the question as well. We're just coming up, we got about just a few minutes left as we start to kind of. We're not winding down. I shouldn't have said that. This thing is just cranking up. We could probably go for hours if we need to. We're going up. For folks that are here, thank you for joining. I want to kind of start to think about Ken, what are some Big takeaways. We did talk about how AI automation is going to help your sales process. What are some of the big takeaways you want people walking away from this session with?

Yeah, I mean, a few things. If you feel early in your journey that's okay, we can, we can start today. And I think if, if you're an organization that is starting, map those processes, distill them down to even the most discreet use cases. Agents are going to thrive on things that are really specific and really deep that they can reason on. Obviously. Evaluate your tech stack, what you need, do you need that connective tissue to speak, you know, across tools and then you know, the emotional components. Right, like what will this do for your team? What will that unlock for them? How does even like sort of the skills shift? And what do you start looking for more in hiring now that you've been able to like remove that administrative burden? So there's a long tail of things to think about. But if there's really one thing I want people to take away is that you can get started today, you're not behind and there's really easy ways to get started.

Sound kind of like old adages of digital transformation. Map your processes, define your use cases, get really clear on those things that's going to make your AI future a lot more successful.

Excellent. Leslie, parting thoughts from you.

Yeah, my biggest takeaway from this conversation was I think a call to slow down so that you can speed up instead of looking for those sort of silver bullet AI companies that are promising these big results. First, take the time to be maybe a bit critical in terms of what your needs in your own organization are to really map those processes. You all heard me say a few times, garbage in, garbage out. And I think that is the downfall of AI. So I agree, Ken, 100% that the most important thing that people can do, start now, you're not behind. So first start now. But then make sure you start by being very thoughtful of how you are mapping your own processes and getting very nitty gritty with that so that you are setting your entire organization up for long term success because you are giving the AI, the AI agents the information that it needs.

Can I add one more thing, Mark? Because I kind of shared a little bit of like my takeaways from what, what I was saying. But you know, I'm so glad we had Leslie here too. I have takeaways from, from what Leslie was saying, which is like, you know, think about the, the downstream outcomes of implementing this within your organization. Let's say that administrative burden is lifted. You start working the right deals, you start moving things through the pipeline appropriately. You hit your forecasts, you're able to forecast more accurately. And so I know it's a few, you know, it's a few leaps. But the reality is like, if you have bad data, if you have incomplete data, you're not making the right decisions for your org. And so I want people to come away from this, not fearful, not saying, well, I have to adopt AI or else my competitors are going to, but really see that opportunity of what this can do for my organization and how this will allow us to hit our goals.

Great, great points. Thank you both so much. I put some links in the chat. Be sure to follow Leslie on LinkedIn. Some of the greatest content out there. Leslie, seriously, virtual high five. Thank you for joining us. So great to officially meet you. Follow Ken on LinkedIn as well for great thought leadership. I also put the link for Tango visit our sponsor booth. Thank you all. We hope you have a great rest of the conference. Thank you all so much for a great session. We'll see you on the Internet and we'll see you soon. Take.