Fireside Chat: Customer Obsession in the Age of AI

Today we have a very special guest from New York, Eric Barich. He is the CEO of Coastal. Welcome.

Eric Gerhard. How are you? Thanks for having me. Today.

You are known for what I would call relentless focus on customer obsession. So from your perspective, what are the core elements of true customer obsession?

If you're in a customer facing role in an organization, and I'd argue everyone is, by the way, but if you're a seller or if you're in customer service, or if you're in product marketing or product development, it's about getting into the shoes of your customer. Like, what do they actually need? How do they perceive your brand? How is your brand helping advance their organizations, their livelihoods, their creativity? Right. I think that's the first rule of customer obsession is how do you take yourself out of your space and put yourself in your customer's space and truly feel what they're feeling again? At Coastal, we do that by going on site, by buying our customers products, by getting in the car with them and riding with them and seeing how they go. See customers. Do everything you can to get into the shoes of your customer. If you're actually going to truly be customer obsessed. Because until you understand their vantage point, until you understand what is driving their success and what their challenges are, it's very difficult to come up with products and services that will serve their needs. I'll tell you something else too. You have to talk to them. I work with a lot of sellers in our organization. I work with a lot of sellers that work at companies like Salesforce. And I always ask this question, like, did you talk to the customer? And the first answer I get is, yes, I talked to the customer. But I clarify that question. I say, well, did you have a conversation with them? You finally get to the bottom of it? No, no, I, I exchanged an email or I sent an email or I texted with them. Get to the bottom of talk to your customers, have conversations with them. If you can get in front of them. Right. Read body language, truly qualify what's going on. And this doesn't happen over a digital. Over the digital chasm, I call it. It actually happens when as human beings, we interact with each other.

Let me shift to AI. I find your white papers and insightful information and guidance on your website fascinating. And what I found really interesting is that what you write here is 67% of companies expect to increase AI spending, but only 21% report proven outcomes. How would you explain that, Cap?

Well, I think we're in the very early days of a technology that is clearly, incredibly powerful. And we are all trying to make sense in terms of how we're going to actually drive real productivity. And we see it with our customers. Like, we see a tremendous amount of investment right now being targeted at AI initiatives. But it's like the Internet in 1998. Like, we understood the power of it. We all tried to figure out how to use it in the right way for our businesses, but it took a good five to 10 years before we really, truly started using the Internet as a way to conduct business. I'm not suggesting it's going to take that long with AI, but I am suggesting that these powerful technologies take a long time to figure out. They take a long time to deploy in the right way. And I think today with AI, the constraint is the data, the tools work, right? Everyone knows we're a big Salesforce partner. Agentforce is an amazing product. It works, but it's only as good as the quality of data that you give it access to. And the first step that CIOs are going through right now to release that constraint is they're redoing their architectures and they're building modern tech architectures that surround their CRM system. So we're big partners of Snowflake as an example, and a lot of our customers today are migrating a lot of their data into these data lakes like Snowflake, and they're using modern techniques to get at that data to feed AI. But that's going to take a while. So in our report, when we talk about the 67% versus the 21%, that gap will slowly be filled as these data architectures get into a position to truly enable AI.

So what are you saying? The gap is not in the AI capability. You cannot blame the Internet for not having customers visit you. It's really the underlying architecture that enables those capabilities to scale.

And then there's also, like I read this morning that, you know, you know, Gartner's whole like, hype curve where, you know, technology goes like this and then it starts to go into the trough of disillusionment. Like we're. Gartner's currently saying that we're going into that trough with AI for a little while because it's dangerous too, right? Like, AI has to be governed correctly. It needs to be monitored, it needs to be enhanced and tweaked. And organizations are not yet ready to truly run a business with a full fledged set of AI tools until they have those org structures in place.

Can you share how your clients that you've been Working with recently are using agentic AI in sales today.

Two areas where we see the biggest uptake. Number one is on the marketing side and using AI to drive more inbound engagement to your brand. Using AI to qualify that engagement so that you're delivering your sellers qualified leads, qualified opportunities. I think just like these marketing automation tools that came out 15 years ago, like the marketos and the exact targets and the eloquas of the world. You remember all those names, right? Garrett, when they came out, they really pushed the fun funnel so that sellers didn't have to dive as deep into the funnel. They didn't have to. You know, back in the old days when you and I were first selling, we'd like go through the yellow pages and literally cold call people and we were sellers. Right? Well, marketing automation helped change that. AI is only enhancing that further as a seller like you should be getting very qualified opportunities to go and have these conversations with, to have these talks with that I talk about. And then the second area we're seeing a lot of uptake is quoting order processing. Like once it's time for a customer to get that proposal from you. Using AI to generate the right proposal with consistency I.e. comparing your proposal across every like minded proposal in your organization with like minded customers, there's an amazing way that you can shorten that cycle and then shorten the cycle of how that quote gets approved, how, how it gets to the customer and how that order eventually gets signed and processed. We're seeing AI really generate a tremendous amount of productivity there.

What about AI as a guidance system where AI is analyzing your conversations or analyzing your data universe online and then funneling those insights to salespeople so they can have better, more focused conversations with customers.

It's a great training device, right? Like back when I was first selling, my manager would sit in my cubicle and wear a headset and listen to my conversations. Right? That is being like products like Gong as an example, which is, you know, we think they're ahead of the curve in a lot of ways. You know, they're using AI to kind of supercharge that coaching moment. Using AI to, to refine messages and also to you know, continually a B test what's working and not working. The concern is don't move too fast. Like we've all fallen for the shiny metal object that's going to quickly change my business and we over invest in it and we do it the wrong way without the proper amount of planning and thought and evaluating the true outcomes that you're trying to pursue. And I think the mature CIOs are still. I won't. They don't have a wait and see attitude, but they have a crawl, walk, run attitude. And we 100% believe that's the right way to do it. If you're a sales leader, you know, the question you're probably getting asked is, can I sell more with less people? I think AI will accelerate performance management. I think sales is only going to get harder because we will be more adamant about sellers that perform like we will easily identify those individuals. And I do believe the skill that is going to be more important than ever in sales is your ability to relate to people. Because if you think your job as a seller is to do a bunch of administrative work, I got news for you. There's a chatbot that can do that a million times faster than you.

Yep.

Invest in your relationship skills, Invest in your creative skills. Like be able to paint a vision and a narrative for your customer about their future that they want to move into. Because if you can do that consistently, they're going to buy your products, they're going to buy your vision, they're going to buy your brand.

Let's talk about the future of CIM in an AI world. Do you see that one day that traditional CIM systems are going to be eliminated by AI agents?

If the question you're asking is, is the CRM market going away? No, it's only going to grow faster. However, I think the real question you're asking is, what is this going to look like in five years? And you know, let's just be honest here. Like Salesforce Automation has always had a little bit of a stigma because it requires so much time for a seller to be engaged with this application. What does that mean? That means that for a Salesforce environment that has been implemented in a average way, it's still too many clicks, it's too many fields to fill out. There's too much stuff that doesn't make sense to a seller. Sellers come and go. You're onboarding new reps all the time to keep them attuned to exactly how the system is supposed to work is next to impossible. So to me, the future is the system is just going to work on its own and you're going to interact with it and talk to it and you're gonna, as a seller, say, hey, can you update this opportunity? Because I think it's gonna close in August now, it's not gonna close in September, and it's gonna do it and you're gonna Be able to do that by speaking to your phone. You're gonna be able to do that by having a conversation with the system. It's also gonna make a lot more predictions for you. It will. You know, this whole agent to agent world is real. You know, the agents will talk to each other as a really good seller that's out there meeting with customers and helping to paint that vision for your customer. The system will be way more automated.

The CM will transform from that digital treadmill that salespeople were running on and feeding to more of a partnership that delivers insights and guidance to the salesperson.

Correct. With a lot less data entry.

Let's shift to our friends over at ServiceNow. They made a lot of noise recently about beyond workflow automation, where they will go into the CIM territory. Do you see them as a serious contender in the CM market?

I think with customers that are completely bought into their platform, I can see customers saying, oh, I can use that for CRM as well. I don't see them being a contender. When it comes to organizations that truly have highly charged go to market motions, I don't see ServiceNow encroaching upon the whole customer experience space.

How do you see the rise of Revops changing your Salesforce consulting work?

You have to get Revops out of your ERP system. It doesn't belong there. And we do a lot of work with Salesforce's RCA product which is brand new. It's the evolution of the steel Brick acquisition into revenue cloud. And one of the visions is get that data out of your ERP system. Like keep customer data close to your sellers, close to your customer facing people because that's going to help accelerate what they're buying, share of wallet, how they're buying and that then feeds your whole revenue lifecycle management system. There are a lot of great products out there that are trying to fill this niche and one of the reasons for that is it's not only about how you're managing your revenue downstream, it's about how you're feeding your marketing attribution back upstream. Why are people buying? When are they buying, how often are they buying, how long do we keep them as customers? All of that data that is really important to adjust how your selling organization and your marketing organization is improving is really, really important. If that's buried in an ERP system, you're never going to mine that gold.

Give us a little bit of insight on how Coastal is helping Salesforce clients deliver a measurable outcome from AI powered solutions.

We start with the outcome so if you were to call up Coastal today and say, hey, I want you to build me an agent for revenue lifecycle management, the first question we would ask is why? What are we trying to achieve here? Don't just do AI for AI sake. And typically we are looking for sales acceleration as the answer to that question. Look, AI is going to take a lot of cost out of businesses. It's also going to probably increase your technology costs, by the way. So, but I think the first question you want to ask is how is this going to accelerate our growth? Like look for top line opportunities. I'll give you a great example actually. We have a customer in Vegas, huge data center customer. They're on this rocket ship because everyone needs a data center with AI, right? And they sell all of their products on a consumption basis. Their consumption data sits in their ERP system. Their sellers aren't sure when they can talk to their customers about buying more consumption because they don't have easy access to that consumption data. So we built a modern tech architecture for them. We brought in a data lake, we moved all this data from the ERP system into the data lake. We now access it through data cloud, which is a Salesforce product. And we're constantly updating the reps on the consumption of their clients platforms, which means they can call the customer at the perfect time.

So give me another gentic AI solution that you have implemented that has the highest ROI for all the customers that you're serving.

We built an agent for a healthcare organization. This agent that we built for this healthcare organization makes sure that when a mother gives birth, her child is immediately put on her health plan immediately without any intervention by a human being. And we built an agent to do that. So I don't know if that's ROI Gerhard, but it's definitely a feel good story.

It's magical.

And by the way, if you relied on human intervention to do that, there would be situations where children were not being put on a healthcare plan in a timely manner.

You stressed earlier, AI is not going to replace but enhance the human interaction. What is the most effective way to sort of maintain empathy and trust and authenticity? As you said earlier, while you're scaling AI operations in sales and marketing, I.

Think it has nothing to do with technology and I think organizations undervalue the amount of resource and capital they spend on just working with your teams. To be better professionals, to be able to communicate better, to be able to present, to be able to have a narrative right, to be able to make point, to be able to have an Introduction, a thesis, three supporting facts, a summary and a close. Like, that's how we learned to communicate in school hundreds of years ago, Gerrit. But like, we don't value that right now in our organizations. And look, the technology is going to do more and more. I mean, I remember Parker Harris of Salesforce told me a few years ago, we just want the CRM system to work on its own. So where's the human value? The human value is unlocking the other side of the brain, figuring out how to motivate people and how to get people to follow and how to get people to believe. And that is also embedded in trust. Right. You don't trust Chatbot necessarily, and you don't trust every human being. But the human beings you do trust, you take that to the bank, right?

Yeah.

So I think the challenge organizations are going to have is we get so focused on the technology and we forget that we have to continually work on our human skills. Yeah.

And I think one skill is intuition. There's no intuition in AI0.

It's a practical machine. It deals with facts or what it thinks are facts. And when it goes bad, it's dealing with non facts that it thinks are facts.

Eric, you have been amazing. I love your insights and I suggest for our audience, go to the website ghostalcloud us. You're gonna find lots of white papers. And what is really fun is you can actually interact with an intelligent agent online. It gives you the opportunity to tap into Coastal's intellectual capital for free.

I love it. Thank you, Garrett. It's great to be back with you on Selling Power tv.