Fireside Chat: How Sellers Can Earn Trust in the Age of AI

Foreign.

Spencer Wixom is the CEO of the Brooks Group. That is a sales training company. You in Charlotte, North Carolina. Right.

Companies in Greensboro. I actually find myself in the Denver airport right now, but out and about seeing customers. Yeah. Wow. Yep. Company is there.

So how should salespeople adapt in a world where everything is driven by AI and those AI driven narratives impact buyers and sellers? So what, what is the best way to look at that and to think about that?

Well, look, let's start with the Herbert Simon quote, right. A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention. And I want to build on that a little bit. Right. So we clearly, in the age of AI, we have a wealth of information of communication that's going out there, but we are all experiencing very clearly that deficit of attention. But building onto that, there is also a deficit of connection and ultimately a deficit of trust. Right. Why, why do not individuals trust the communication and the information that's flowing at them? Because there's such a large amount of it with often ulterior motive or hidden or veiled motive associated with it that they don't know how to sift through that and really connect with anything true, legitimate, human on the other end. So we just have this deficit of connection and trust. What do sellers need to do in that environment? Circumvent work around, break the framework of the mass communication and find a way to get to connection and trust. I mean that's the ultimate outcome. What you need to do is work back from that outcome what builds a connection and a trusting relationship with an individual and work back from how I create that. It's not to say that AI doesn't play a role in that. Play a role in understanding that individual and their organization. Like helping you think critically through a communication and a connection strategy. Practice that strategy. All of those can be things I can augment and support. But at the end of the day we have to decide what it is that we want to do that's going to bring us the greatest amount of success and build our strategy around that.

It makes a lot of sense. And I would imagine that in the Brooks Group sales training that you deliver, you teach salespeople about those pattern interruptions and how to capture the attention of the client.

Yeah, well, in our, in our section around investigating and in a sense doing prospecting, that's a lot of what we talk about. We think about how are you positioning yourself in the market. And when you think about positioning, we did some research on prospecting a few years ago that was really insightful to me and it said, look, everybody expects and uses the same channels of communication. We use email, we use text, we use phone calls. That's going to probably continue to be what it is. Maybe LinkedIn and social connections as well. So there's no new channel or different mass channel under the sun that you can use. But what really makes the difference in solidifying a connection with somebody, it's one of three things. Either that person is confident that you have exactly what they need in that moment. And that's great if you do in fact have that and have a large market that in fact does need that. But beyond that, there's two things. Either they were referred into you or know you in some way through a source or an individual that they trust, or they have had some kind of personal experience with you that has built that connection and trust. Right? That's really what makes the difference in our positioning, our prospecting, our pre call planning is whether we can substantiate those relationships and those connections. And our training does that. It walks through how to think about all of those elements to put together a strategy that circumvents or breaks the frame of just mass outbound noise.

Got it. So many people argue that AI can dehumanize sales. What is your take on that?

Well, I kind of put that one back to you, Gerhardt. Haven't we been dehumanizing sales for about a decade now, if not more? I mean, so much of the. You think about the scale of outbound prospecting activity where we were looking to try to, to try to influence the greatest batch or you know, sell to the greatest batch of people. Well that's dehumanizing it. Where we're just sitting somewhere pulling levers, you know, pushing buttons, trying to create scaled outcomes with the least amount of effort or critical thinking possible. So I think, you know, when we look at AI, it can just add an additional layer on that. It can just build on top of that dehumanization of sales. Or we can think, okay, let's go back to first principles. Let's think about what is really needed to sell to somebody, which is that connection and that trust and that demonstration of value. And how do we use AI opportunistically to build those human connections? I don't think AI itself will dehumanize sales. I think we've been finding a number of different methods and ways of doing that for a long time already. Hopefully what AI will do is actually give us the tools necessary to rehumanize sales if we use it in the right way and we see it in the right way.

That is really interesting. I like your perspective. Let's shift to the buyer side. AI is used by everybody now, and there are a lot of buyers that use AI to guide their decision. How does that impact sellers? What does that mean for sellers?

It's a great question. And you know the Forester research as well as I do that just came out. Right. And I think the number is somewhere around 90% in of individuals in a buying situation using AI to support their decision making. Right. If that is even close to, you know, accurate of what's going on across industries and such. We've had a massive shift in the way people learn, think and evaluate their various options because we know what AI can do as far as like supporting research vis a vis what we saw five, 10 years ago. So, and I was having a conversation about somebody about this actually yesterday in a session and what the conclusion that we came to and the thing that I think sellers and sales leaders and organizations need to realize as soon as possible is with AI being used by that significant number of individuals in a buying process, you have essentially created a dynamic where there's an entity out there selling on your behalf and educating people about your products, your solutions, even your prices, presenting you, comparing you, evaluating you to which you do not have direct control. Which means you have to appreciate that that's a factor. And you have to explore in your discovery what it is that people know about you. I don't think it's any longer the question of, like, do you know about us? Have you heard about us? Do you have an opinion about us? It's what do you know? What have you thought about? How have you evaluated the various options that are out there? We need to, in our discovery, really explore deeply the research that our customers have done about us because we need to understand what that entity has taught them that is accurate and what that entity has taught them that isn't.

So we talked about Forrester, now let's talk about Gartner. And they say that 75% of buyers prefer a rep Free experience. What does it mean to salespeople now?

Well, I think if you think about the rep Free experience, I think that's a placeholder statistic in a sense. Right. You can say 75% of buyers want a rep Free experience, but I would bet that 100% of buyers want to be pleasantly surprised by the experience that they have. They want to see something happen that is better, more helpful, more energetic, more engaging than they would expect. I mean, why did why do buyers feel that way about sales reps? They feel that way because they've been conditioned to feel that way over a decade of dehumanizing the connection and the trust between seller as an individual human and buyer as an individual human. I went out to dinner on Saturday night with my wife and we went to a nice restaurant. We were celebrating our 15 year anniversary and we expected. Oh, thank you. Even though it was a really nice restaurant, we had a preconceived notion of the way the service would be done with that restaurant because we had seen it time and time and time again. Every time we went out to celebrate a big occasion to a nice restaurant, the service was basically the same. The menu was kind of basically the same. It was all just sort of met expectation. And so when things just meet expectation, you're looking for kind of the most efficient and, and sort of worry free way in which to have that experience. But our server, her name was Renee, and I'll never forget her name came up to us, said, why are you here tonight? Well, we're celebrating our anniversary. Tell me about how you met. Tell me about your life together. Tell me about, you know, what it is that makes your marriage really work. And we had a wonderful conversation with her. And as she had that conversation with us, she learned things about us. We have three children later, afterwards, she brought out three additional small desserts for us to take home to our kids. She, she found out what we liked. She made sure everything was exactly to our liking. It was an incredible experience, well beyond what I would have expected. And I was so pleasantly surprised. Now what do I do? I tell everybody. Go to Eddie V's near Stonebriar Mall in Dallas and ask for Renee. You'll have an incredible dining experience. Right. We are all open to being pleasantly surprised. And that's the way I think we as sellers need to attack the Gartner statistic. You know, don't just shy away from it, attack it. Break the frame. Help those buyers see that it can be different and better than what they expect.

Be different, think differently, act differently, and stand out and make it memorable.

Yeah. And can we use AI to help us do that? Absolutely. Why? Because AI can help us know more about that customer than we would otherwise know. It can help us practice and evaluate the quality of our messaging for that customer. It can help us think critically about which customers you know would be open to that kind of experience. They're so practice and evaluate the quality of our messaging for that customer. It can help us think critically about which Customers, you know, would be open to that kind of experience. There's so many ways technology and AI in particular can help us. But we need to start it. We, we need to decide what our goal is. Is our goal to make stronger connections and trust or is our goal to just continue to erode that relationship between us and the buyer? I think it's really our choice to make.

Great point. You also know, Spencer, that buying decisions that take longer, there are more decision makers involved and it becomes more complex. So what is your advice to sellers and how to navigate that new reality?

Well, it's a, it's a great question. We've actually been doing some research about this recently that I think is really interesting. So if you've watched this, the Forrester and the Gartner research over the years, as I have, right. I used to, I used to work for Gartner and we loved publishing. The new number of stakeholders involved in the buying decision, right. It was like 5.7, then it was 6.8 and like we couldn't keep up with it. Right. And then it was 9 to 11 and then it was like 13 and then it was like approaching 20. Something has happened in recent years and I think we all need to be aware of what has happened. I think organizations found that it was unruly and counterproductive to involve that many individuals actively in the buying group. Some research that we just did, Gerhardt, the mode number of individuals active in a strategic buying group is between 3 to 5. Now. What does that mean? That means the other stakeholders have not like alleviated all concern for what's being purchased, but they are not playing an active role in evaluating. And this is, I think particularly true with the advent of AI. You don't need 20 people actively researching something. You need a few people with some technology tools to really evaluate more. It is that you're going to buy strategically. So I think sellers need to recognize there is going to be a tighter, more involved, more active strategic buying group that you're selling to, but you are selling them on a strategy and on a partnership. Here's the problem. There are stakeholders outside of that buying group who don't understand the strategy, who have not done the research, but who are otherwise going to be very involved and very active in evaluating the economic decision around that strategy. Meaning do we commit to release funds to purchase whatever that strategic buying group decided? That's those are the stakeholders, not who's in that strategic buying group, it's who's outside that strategic buying group. Otherwise informing it that you need to be careful about, and you need to arm that strategic buying group, those three to five people, to be able to promote your value proposition, to defend it, to argue for the, the use of that solution to those other buyers. Because what happens, particularly recently with the economy the way it is, is sometimes those core strategic buying groups are operating on what I call a phantom mandate. That means that when they were formed, the organization said, hey, we want you to make a decision and figure out how to purchase this solution. What they don't know is that the organization, particularly at the C suite, has looked at the economic environment, has looked at the uncertainty of cash flow and growth and all of that. And it said, well, maybe we'll fund something, maybe we won't. We're not as firm in funding something anymore. So when that core buying group goes back to them to ask for the funds to fund the solution they've decided on, they get a message they weren't anticipating. And if they're not prepared to defend, if they're not prepared to say, I know times are less certain, I know money is tight, but we need to do this because it will benefit the business, they're not confident enough to say that. It's so easy for them to fold and say to the C suite, you're right, times are tough, they're uncertain. Let's kick this can down the road. Sellers need to be aware of those dynamics. We need to play to those dynamics, understand them in discovery so we understand the real purchasing buying group dynamics, and then arm that core strategic buying group to sell on our behalf to these other stakeholders, less informed, hyper concerned about investing capital in solutions.

I want to go back to what you said earlier about abundance of information and poverty of attention. How can sellers stand out in this era of information overload?

Well, I think they stand out by working directly through the channels that are most human connected for them. Meaning who does who, you know, know. It's a complicated way of saying it, but how can you connect with individuals where there is the ability for either experience with you or experience with people who trust you to share that information? To, to share information, to build relationships like, we just have to accept the fact that if they don't know who we are, if they haven't had experience with us, their default mode is going to be skepticism and blocking and a lack of attention. So we have to find a way to know what connections are real, what relationships are real, what experience is real, and play to that. Do you get as much scale out of it? No, but the quality can be There and our yield rates on scale are so low that, you know, does it really even make sense for us to continue to chase that?

I just got a question from the audience. Somebody is asking a very astute question. How do you scale trust?

Well, the fastest way to scale trust. Trust. It's interesting, right? Because like we've just been saying all along, trust does not scale as fast as communication. We can communicate and we can send content and we can push information out there much faster than we can build trust. Number one, I think trust is built off of a reputation of excellence, of delivering what it is that you said you were going to deliver, of keeping promises, of executing as well as you possibly can with each and every one of your customers. At the Brooks Group, we measure NPS with every single one of our customers and we connect a question and to that NPS evaluation, which is would you be willing to recommend us, discuss us, partner with us in some way of helping introduce us to other people? And when we have a good NPS score coupled with that, then it's a matter, it's on us. And we can use technology tools like AI to figure out who do these people who love us, who trust us and value us, who do they know? Because if we can use them in partnership, we can to introduce this to these other people. We can scale that trust. We can build that trust faster. So number one, execute with excellence in everything you've committed to do. And then number two, figure out how you leverage the people with whom you have trust to introduce you to other people.

Here's another number that is fascinating. When I. When salesforce.com started like in 1999, salespeople were spending 47% of their time actually selling. And today it's shrank to less than a third. So what, what do you make of that? Explain the dynamic and where we headed and what can we do.

Yeah, so it's interesting. I, I spent the first part of my career in sales enablement and sales development and, and such studying time and motion of large sales forces, where people spend their time, what activities, what tools, all of that. I am less concerned, to be honest with you, about something like administrative duties, CRM activity. What I'm most concerned about as far as time spent of salespeople right now is sitting around not knowing what to do. When you don't know what to do, when you don't have a process, when you don't have a method, when you don't have an engine for a commercial engine that you are running, you spend a lot of Time either flailing around trying a bunch of different things, or just feeling that anxiety and that uncertainty, which really diminishes your productivity and your, your critical thinking effectiveness. That's the thing I'm most concerned about. Do we have sellers sitting around not sure what to do? If I'm sure that I'm doing administrative duties, great, because those can benefit me, right? Getting the CRM accurate and enriched with good data, that can benefit me. Sitting around not sure what to do or who to call or, you know, what activity is best. That, that's the, that's not only a time killer, it's a morale killer.

So you were in the training business and your enemy is the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve. Salespeople forget faster than. Than ever. So how should training adapt to make that learning stick?

Well, here's my opinion on it. I don't think training should adapt to something new. I think training should look at the history of learning and what has been present. When people have really learned or retained information and what has been present is novelty is change is breaking the frame. We learn things. I mean just everybody use this personal example, right? You probably can remember much more clearly a live meeting in a new place in a different city with people you'd never met before from 10 years ago. You can remember that more clearly than a zoom call you did a week ago. That's the part. Why? Because on that zoom call you were in the same place, doing the same stuff, sitting in front of a screen in the same environment as you always are. We cannot expect salespeople to learn new things, to develop new skills in a static environment. Movement is the. As the author Matthew Crawford would say, movement is the scaffolding of episodic memory. You have to break a person's frame. This is why in training, when you need to plant something foundational with a sales team, get them in a new place with new people in a new environment so that that memory really sticks. And then make sure it's captured and it's written down so that they can go back to it over time. They have ways of refreshing, but in the first instance, make sure what you're. When you're training people on a new thing that it's planted in a novel new frame breaking environment.

I think we are running out of time. I want to hear your vision of the future of sales and what do salespeople need to do in order to avoid being replaced by AI?

Here's and thank you, Gerhard. And I know we're running short on time and this has been A great conversation. Let me. Let me tell you what my dream is, what my hope and aspiration is. My dream and hope and aspiration for salespeople is that they. They know what they're supposed to do, meaning they have a process and a method, a commercial engine that they're confident that they can run. So they wake up in the morning, they know what to do. They recognize the importance of critical thinking. They recognize the importance of connections, human connections and trust. But they have the tools, particularly in AI, to help them do those things, to help them follow a process, build connections, develop trust, and do the critical thinking necessary to really bring something new and interesting to customers. That's our vision at the Brooks Group. Those are the kinds of sellers we want to build.

Perry, you want to join us and give us your take?

Yeah.

Spencer, I really like your perspective on building stronger connections and trust with AI. I think we're hearing the theme throughout the day so far of how important the relationship is, and building that trust is essential. So thank you.

Well, and it can't. It can help that, it can help that, or it can erode that. And it's our decision which way we go.

Yeah. And somebody just commented. Peter said AI is the tool that enables humanization. I think that's very positive and constructive.

Yes, absolutely.

Well, thank you. You've been a guidepost for so many years for all of us. I. I've known the Brooks Group now for what, 40 years?

That's. That's how. Yep. It goes back to Bill brooks in the 1970s. Absolutely.

Bestselling author and charismatic trainer who left us way too soon. And you were carrying the torch.

Doing my best. Doing my best. Yeah. Thank you all so much. Just loved it. Appreciate it. Thanks for all you're doing.