HOW A.I. HAS SOLVED THE PRACTICE PROBLEM IN B2B SALES - BREVITY, KELVIN JOHNSON

With all this talk about artificial intelligence, and I'm sure you've checked out different tools and products, and maybe you felt like I have where it's like, ah, that's a curiosity, that's nice, I like that, but does it really improve your workflow or your ability? It's subjective. Helpful, I would say, for me. I don't know what it is for you, but today in this podcast, I'm going to share with you something that I did find that is insanely helpful. In sales, we have a practice problem. How do you practice selling? On the strategic side, you can work on your strategy and you can practice that. That's good. I don't know if anyone does it, but—

If you do it, it does help.

But how about the conversation part of it? Really thinking out loud, that part, that discovery call, that first cold call maybe, or the Q&A, or maybe the presentation or a job interview even. For those, what you say is critical because they don't really know you that well yet. And how you say it is just important as what you say. But so where you going, Brian? Well, now there's a product that can help you, and I've used it. I would not present anything here that I didn't believe in, and I also have no connection to this company whatsoever. They're not sponsoring it. There's no formal partner. Agreement of any kind in place. So my impressions here are sincere and honest and untainted, other than my personal passion for this particular element. Because in sales, to practice has always required someone else's cooperation, someone else's feedback, someone else's questions. And I think we've all gone through role plays as sales reps and If you get 2 people who are really into it, it can be good. I get it. And I'm not against it. I'm for it. But it's finding that other person. Then you have to sync up on time, sync up on topic, have a similar view of sales. And their feedback, yeah, it could be good, maybe not. And their judgment of how well you're doing, their coaching. But at least it gets you to warm up. It gets you to open your mouth and get the things moving. And you can do it in front of a mirror or talking to your computer or your smartphone. And I do that for journaling. You know, I don't want to type in, you know, what I'm thinking, what, what's working, what's not working, trying to get to the bottom of something and how to improve it. You just talk right into the smartphone today.

It's, it's magic.

Let's get into this interview, and I want you to just take it with an open mind. And if you happen to be a sales leader, uh, they're looking for beta sites, uh, I would highly recommend you check this out because this is game-changing. And I'll sum it up at the end, several use cases that this could really help you build up your game. without all the overhead that you're used to. Here we go. Hey, Kelvin, thanks for joining us today.

As a way of getting started, give us a little background on yourself.

My name is Kelvin Johnson. I'm CEO, co-founder at Brevity, which is an AI-powered software helping sales teams role-play, which has a positive impact on new hire ramp-up and overall quota attainment. I grew up in West Philadelphia, child of 2 sales professionals themselves, and kind of unorthodox background. I started off as a CPA, got into management consulting, eventually took a risk and joined as employee number 5 at a tech company in Denver. And then, you know, through that experience, eventually landed into Yeah.

And raised by 2 salespeople, how do you become a CPA?

I mean, what went wrong?

My mom and dad were like, you know, Villanova. I went to Villanova for grad and undergrad. There was a big push. You know, I scored incredibly well in finance accounting class and professors that actually ended up becoming investors in Brevite, ironically. Drove me to pursue a career in accounting. They thought it'd be a really good foundational background. With that being said, me being on Excel spreadsheets for 12 hours a day during busy season when my parents are like, how the hell are you going to be a CPA? You can't stop running your mouth. They were right. And eventually followed in their footsteps.

Give us a little background on Brevite. You know, how did it start?

Whose idea was it?

Why are you so passionate about it?

Absolutely. So ironically, so I went from being a CPA, management consulting, then I joined as employee number 5 of the tech company called ThrivePass out of Denver, Colorado. They sold corporate wellness, a software as a service solution. And that CEO founder, Wade Rosen, shout out to Wade, Said, when you have the makings of a tech CEO, when you're mature and you have a bankable business idea, I'm gonna be an early investor in your company. And he ended up keeping that promise. And but why Brevity? After that experience as employee number 5, I had experience with leading a tech team of 10 .NET developers in New Delhi. I managed customer success, account management, And they eventually ended up acquiring 2 companies in the Twin Cities where I led the due diligence and the post-merger integration of those 2 companies. And through that experience, it was great in terms of getting cross-functional experience, got P&L ownership. But eventually I started my own freelance consulting shop called Humble Warrior Advisors, where I was helping other early-stage entrepreneurs get to that next major milestone. But what I found myself helping out the most with was the pitch. And Brian, I'm a huge book nerd and there was a couple books that really inspired this brevity concept. In no particular order, Why They Buy by Cherry Tree, StoryBrand, Made to Stick by Dan and Chip Heath. And then the one that really took it over the edge, who ended up becoming an advisor investor at this company, Is Brandt, who's the author of *The Three Minute Rule* saying less to get more. And I read this book, and it was the most pragmatic way to help people craft and deliver persuasive pitch and presentation. And loved the book so much, I reached out to the author Cole on LinkedIn, and he actually wrote me back. And then this is during COVID Where I was helping clients try and raise capital. And once he wrote me back on LinkedIn, I just had some courage and said, hey, it would mean the world if you gave me 20 minutes of your time to see if one of my clients implemented the best practices from your book. And he ended up giving us an hour Zoom call. And at the end of that Zoom call, he mentioned that he was looking to bridge the gap from learning to application. By producing an online course. And through that experience, I was just like, all right, what are the current tools in the market if someone has an amazing idea, but they have difficulty crafting and delivering persuasive pitch and presentation? And on one end, you have expert pitch consultants, coaches that not necessarily everybody can afford. And on the other end, you have these expert books and blogs that can be time-consuming to learn and apply those insights into action. And then when I looked under the pitch and presentation software as a service market, 99% were hyper-focused on slide design, layout, and formatting, but not a lot of people were really focused on story content and messaging from a self-service perspective. So we saw a gap and no different than TurboTax, it's kind of the first product we have was a mix of TurboTax and Grammarly. Where you're getting that step-by-step guidance to craft and also deliver a persuasive pitch. And then we, in the beginning of this year, we ended up pivoting. We found a greater pain point where sales teams, when it comes to overcoming objections through the various stages of the sales process, role-playing is a common mechanism to help train and develop your reps. But there's only so much manual training and peer-to-peer training that can be done. And then we eventually created an AI-powered role-playing software, and that's kind of where we've shifted the direction of the company.

And what's the feedback been so far?

The feedback's been great, right? Our first paid pilot, we were able to increase not just set appointments, but Completed demos by close to 400%. And then the training period was shortened by close to 30%.

Yeah, because sales definitely has a practice problem.

I know. And I played Division 1 football and a lot of, you know, we played, I played, I was a part of the 2010 national championship team. And to be honest with you, practice was a lot harder Than the actual game. Sure.

And that's on purpose, right?

Correct. Correct.

Because that game is so important.

Correct. So I mean, I think my teammates, we had about like— Villanova is like Division I AA. I think we had about 5 people make the NFL from that team. And yeah, practice was not fun, but that's where we got better.

Yeah, because in sales, how do we practice? Most people just think, they sit there and they go, how's the call gonna go? Well, they're gonna say hello and I'm gonna say hello. And what do I do?

Well, what am I doing? And it's like our big overall theme at Brevity is really just turning insights into action, turning ambition into action, right? So one of the big things I struggle with during, you know, some of my sales calls is Asking for budget, right? And seeing, you know, you've identified XYZ as a problem. You said that this is the impact. You know, what funding does your team have allocated to solving XYZ issue? And I practice that on brevity role play every day, right? Because it's an area within a sales conversation, even being, you know, from the East Coast and being confident, I get a little, you know, oozy in my stomach sometimes. And being able to have that practice and repetition is We use our own product to sell our product, right? And that's had some, you know, tremendous benefit.

That's it. Because role-playing's nice, but you need another person. And that other person doesn't have a stake in the game. They're like, yeah, hey, hello. Yeah, yeah. Not interested. You're like, you play the game with each other, but it's not really real. You kind of break rapport all the time.

Correct. It is like a jovial— like, my co-founder Max Huck and I have been friends since 3 years old, right? Like, there's a jovial nature to our relationship, right? One, the problem with role-playing, one, it takes time to schedule.

Yeah.

And people are in meetings back to back, right? And then 2, that jovial nature, you may let me slide or you may not take it as serious where what we've set up, we have 12 different Voices in the software that can go from calm, that can go to angry, right? And it's randomized objections that you get. So it really keeps you on your toes.

That's it. Yeah. Because when you set the appointment to do the role play and every company tries it, especially right after training. And then most managers want to do it with the reps, but they get bored with it. Correct.

They got other things on their mind.

Right. So the manager's saying, well, leave me a voicemail with our elevator pitch once a day. And you're like, okay, that doesn't feel awkward now, does it?

Correct.

Correct.

Is your manager even gonna listen to it? Do they give you any feedback? They'll say, just do it better next time. Okay. That doesn't tell you anything.

And it's not constructive. It's not directed feedback. Right. And, you know, for people that are serious about getting better, those A players, You want directive-based feedback. I really break down feedback into 3 different buckets: affirm, affirming what I'm currently doing, what's missing in what I'm currently doing, and then what are some new ideas or alternative approaches that I can consider to get better for the next time I get in the game.

And, you know, for the last 5 years, a lot of people have been looking at call intelligence to solve this problem, but that gives you just cursory feedback. You know, talk, listen times, question, answer. But that, that's not practice. That's real life.

Correct. And it gets, it's too late, right? So, right. You know, and that's the inspection of sales performance, right? So, you know, my defensive back coach, if we've identified, you know, some, you know, footwork in a game, Or if I'm, you know, if someone's doing a hitch and my footwork's a little sloppy to, you know, jump on that hitch and be able to make that tackle at the right angle. Well, we now have identified the weaker area. You've gotten the insight, but how do you turn that insight into a specific drill before the game the next Saturday? And that's essentially what we're doing. Inspection of sales performance is Paramount. But how do you turn the inspection, get that, take that coaching feedback into a way to practice that, develop that muscle memory to where it becomes automatic, similar to a recent post you just had, to by the time you get into that next scenario or situation, it's off the top of your head.

Which brings up a great point because I think too many salespeople are comfortable with the, I know it, the conscious level. Now let's take that to football. Every, everybody on the team knows how to play football, right?

Yep.

Every opponent knows how to play football. Why do you practice then? You, you want it muscle memory. You want it subconscious.

Correct. Correct. They take it from conceptualization to actualization.

Yeah. So that you don't have to think about it. It becomes natural. You see the ball coming to you, your arms go up. You don't have to think, oh, I should, should I catch it or not? No, you're going to catch it.

Got to catch it. Got to catch it.

And that takes a long time. How long have you been playing football?

I was playing football since 7 years old.

Yeah. You know, I was a baseball player, a pitcher. So guess what the coach had me do all the time? Throw to the catcher, throw to the catcher, throw to the catcher.

Yeah.

I know how to throw the baseball, but they want you to be Automatic.

Correct.

Yeah.

And that's essentially what our value proposition is.

And this is kind of, I think, the most usable AI I've seen in the sales tech space. You know, coming up with automated spam or, you know, even analyzing calls, I haven't really seen any real value out of it. This I see value to because reps need a way of practicing On their own.

Period. And, you know, yeah, period. There's no other, it's, it's, you know, we've gotten to the point you're doing your team a disservice if you're not enabling this practice, you know, turning your sales playbook into a, the sales playground is kind of, it's, it's, it's essential.

Yeah.

Now I'm biased because, you know, I co-conceived this, this concept with my, my business partners, but We use it daily and it's like 3 to 7 minutes in the morning as a part of your morning routine and ritual on the most challenging areas that you're having within your sales conversations. This makes a difference.

Yeah. And I've used it and, well, I gotta imagine even before a call, any call, or even in a podcast interview, if it has a warmup, To just get the brain and the juices going, get the mouth moving.

Oh, it's huge. To go off of that, the sample questions you even provided me in this podcast, I literally put those in the brevity role play and practiced once or twice. Nothing too crazy, but it took from a setup to practicing those questions, those sample questions you provided me, took about 7 minutes of my time.

Right. And you felt better afterwards?

Correct.

You're like, okay, I wonder how it's gonna go. The role-playing in your head, it's better than nothing, but it's nothing compared to doing it. Get the mouth moving.

And hearing a voice.

Yeah.

And, and hearing an actual voice and hearing different voices. Now I know your voice already, so this isn't a high-pressure, high-stress situation, right? But For those where, you know, the CEO at the company, the economic buyer's like, yo, I don't have, I know we have an hour booked, but I only got 25 minutes. How do you respond to that?

Right.

Calmly, confidently, with composure. We'll get that repetition in brevity role play.

That's it. Because I think the longer people use something like this to develop their skills, they'll find the nuances. Like the football coach did with your leg movements.

Correct.

You didn't see it because you're not looking at your legs. You're thinking of just running the play. The coach sees what you're doing wrong or room for improvement, and brevity can do that for you.

Absolutely.

Well, where do you see this technology going?

Just, just making it more and more realistic.

Yeah.

You know, that, that is the typical sales conversation, just continuing to make this easier to implement, making it easier to practice. And yeah, that's where I see this going, becoming one of the best communication training platforms in the world.

Because how do salespeople do it otherwise?

Review. There's, there's 3 mechanisms, right? You got reviewing your sales playbook, right? And passive, I call these passive activities before you have game day over here and you got passive, you got active and you got passive. You know how it's typically done is you have manual role-playing, which is still good, right?

Yep.

You have reviewing your sales playbook. You have reviewing your calls, you have shadowing the best rep. But again, those are pretty passive activities. So we, what we wanna do is make sure the insights are good. And if the insight is good, you have to have a way to practice that before you just go into the game.

That's it. Because it's too expensive to do it on real deals.

We, it's way too expensive even for us, right? There's different qualification frameworks. You got BANT. You got medic, right? When the way our sales process works, we have test drives as you took a test drive of brevity role play, but we gotta have the important pieces of information and be able to really personalize that demo from a, from a needs perspective, right? Do we, do we take care of the need? But what we've identified is if you're not asking, okay, well, It seems like this could be a great fit. Who are the other key decision makers that need to be involved to, you know, possibly drive this forward? And then what you may find out is you're not talking to the economic buyer.

Right.

Right? And then, you know, be slow. Like, oh, what was that guy's name again? Blah, blah, blah. Who else? And not being so hasty to just move forward, but stay controlled. in that sales process. That's what brevity role plays even helped us.

And, and I think it also, because in today's world, it takes a long time to get somebody to pick up on the other line, just out of trial and error. You get a lot of voicemails, you get a lot of no answers, a lot of, you know, do not disturbs. So the rep needs those 10,000 hours. Why not do it, condense that through interacting with AI instead of interacting with a prospect?

Correct.

Get a year's worth of experience in a quarter simply by putting, you know, 5 or 10 minutes here and there on brevity to get the juices flowing, get the feedback going fast, and no one's judging you.

Correct. Well, we do have AI scoring on the back end, right? Right. So that's not correct, correct? Like an opera singer would not just go on stage. It's awkward. Yeah. Because their voices aren't warmed up.

Yeah.

Right. So an opera singer needs to go through those repetitions. La la la la la. Like they gotta do their—

do that again.

La la la la la. Right. They gotta do that before they just go on stage to You know, get a standing ovation. And we need to look at the sales profession in the same manner.

That's it. And we don't, it's too subjective. And let's face it, the manager just wants a deal. They want meetings. They don't want to diagnose each sentence, each response. They don't have time. And the rep, as soon as they're great—

Well, they don't want to do it.

The reps, you know, everyone thinks they're an A player. Until they open their mouth, right? Here they have a practice buddy that can help them get better at the pace they want to get better at.

Correct. Correct. And you think about the greats, right? Like you think about the Kobe Bryant, rest in peace, Jordans, they are maniacal about practice. Right. And, you know, the game is won really before it starts. Yeah. And that is really our motto, you know, at this company.

And, and in sales up until now, we haven't had a way of practicing.

Correct.

That scales, that you can do every day that you have control over.

Correct.

You know, I had one guy on the show, guy in his 50s, he practiced his opener Every day, all day in the morning, his family would just be annoyed introducing himself, explaining what he does, flipping it to them. He does it in the shower. Now, I've met one sales rep that does that. That's it. What do the rest of us do?

Yep. It is our most successful companies. They look at that because you're not always going to get connects when you're dialing.

Not.

No. Right. So. So you don't wanna wait till like you got a great prospect that fits your ideal customer profile. And because it's not muscle memory, you botch it and you miss the meeting. And first impressions unfortunately are everything. So our most successful companies take that breakfast time and lunchtime, get 3 to 5 minutes before they start their progression of dials.

And you can do this for all kinds of calls, discovery calls, competitive calls, closing calls, demo calls.

Correct. My favorite is doing it for, I'm not a big, you know, Vic Sandler fan, qualify hard to close easy. Yeah. And that's where, you know, we've identified a gap in our own company of, you know, mediocre qualification. So we specifically use brevity role play as an organization To practice our own qualification script, making sure we're getting the key elements and not just giving people a demo. They have to unpeel the onions and earn the right to receive a demo.

Because this isn't just reading the script, it's all the nuances of communication.

Correct. Yeah.

So it's not just recording You record reading something.

It's the interaction.

It feels like you're really talking to somebody.

Exactly.

And somebody that you're not anticipating sometimes.

Correct. And the way we set up the software is when you go from one rep to the next, you're gonna get a different voice and you're gonna get different objections. Yeah. So it's gamified so people can't like just game it and Figure it out.

And, and what have reps told you about this after they've used it?

They love it. They love it. Specifically that, well, you know, there's 5 use cases right now for Brevity Roleplay. Uh, number one, not in any particular order, but just if we think about it from a lifecycle perspective, some people are using it to vet sales candidates during the interviewing process. We have certain people. We also have a job interview role play where you can enter your LinkedIn URL, the job description, and we automatically curate the questions and answers to help you prepare your content and delivery for that interview. We have sales process and product service onboarding, right? We're able to whip up sales playbooks in under 7 minutes with our AI. And then the other 2 use cases are what I would call performance fine-tuning and daily warmups.

Yeah.

So those are the 5. That's kind of the lifecycle of how this product is being used. But the feedback is excellent. You know, when it comes to great feedback on the job interview, we've had people secure jobs with the Strykers and Johnson Johnsons of the world with one of our first paying customers in the, in the med device industry. And, you know, just the daily warmups and just picking something that you're struggling with. Once you got that insight from your coach, being able to practice and rehearse that. So by the next time you run into a situation, it is subconscious and it just rolls off the tip of your tongue.

Right. Because I think too many people in sales Almost all the questions I get are about repairing when something goes wrong. What you're doing is preventing things from going wrong.

Correct. Correct. Preventing, you know, talking to a champion and you never got, you know, buy-in from the economic buyer, you're gonna lose. Like, you're not— you gotta get the right pieces of information to qualify hard, to close easy. And that's where I think this product I think it's great for SDRs, but those account executives that, you know, need to go through, you know, getting those critical pieces of information to vet if it's actually a qualified opportunity, that's where I think this product can, you know, take storm.

Yeah, because let's say you're not used to handling, you know, somebody who's agitated, somebody who's aggressive. Here's a way of doing it that's real.

Correct.

And I've seen those, they yell at you and you're like, yeah, it's crazy.

Like we, one of our, ironically, one of my worst sales conversations since I started, since we started Brevity, you know, the guy was a prick. His tone was off. He was brash. And ironically, one of the 12 voices in the software sounds exactly like that prick.

Yeah.

So I make sure I select that voice every single time. So when I run into another one, you know, being able to adjust the different tones and personalities is important in sales. So that voice variety is another big value add that we provide our customers.

And how about managers? What do they like about it?

The scalability, right? So if you're managing, you know, 11 sales development reps, being able to quickly create assignments, blast that out to all 11 of your SDRs, being able to review whether they completed the assignment or not, being able to look at the letter grade and the different components of our auto-scoring, they love it. Yeah, it's just accountability. Cool.

Hey, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to connect with you and learn more about the company and the product?

Yeah, brevitypitch.com. You know, select contact sales and myself or Max Huck will be able to You know, see if this is a good fit for your team.

Now think about your day at the office. You go in and you've got an important call. Maybe it's a discovery call or a first meeting, or you just want to hit the phones all day and you just want to get better without getting nervous. Warm up. Why not talk to Brevite for 5 or 10 minutes, maybe more? Or how about if you really want to become good, really good? What if you practice maybe 20, 30 minutes a day on different things or random things to get you fired up? See, the way our brain works is it's repetition with emotion. And when you take the fear out of the call where it doesn't matter, you're talking to an AI. That person, it doesn't matter. It's just practice. And there's no cleaner way of doing that today. And this is why I'm so excited about this product, because most people in sales, they get comfortable that they know the script. It's in front of them. I'll just read it. I've done it a million times. That might be the problem. You may need just a little bit of feedback, a little bit of practice on a particular thing. And I use this, and boy, does it catch you off balance when somebody very aggressive comes towards you, or you hear something you haven't heard before, or you realize how important tonality and tempo and timing is. These are all critical things when we're communicating with other people. And when you just get into the office and you haven't Opened your mouth yet and started conversing with somebody, what do we do? We kind of trip over ourselves at first.

It's natural.

But why not have it warm up? Why not even develop your skills? Maybe there's a new product or new territory, or you want to become really good at something. You have to practice. And today, the only way to really practice the closest thing to this is doing it live with another human being. You know, you, you can tell me if you have access to somebody to do role plays with, but this is better than role plays.

Why?

Because there's no coordination. There's no laughing at each other. There's no egos involved. It's really magical. Check it out, brevity.com. Get your manager onto it because they're looking for beta customers. If you're an individual rep, you can check it out, but I think they're looking for like a minimum of like 10 seats. To do a deal. Maybe you can change their mind. But I really enjoyed this. If you want to become great at starting these conversations without cold calling, go get Start the Conversation, Get the Meeting. If you want to become great at closing large complex sales, go sign up for Winning the Complex Sale. We'll see you next time. Thanks for listening. Make sure you check out the sales questions, Brutally Honest Answers podcast as well. We'll see you next time.