50: Using AI for Sales Optimization Strategies with Steven Werley

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Welcome to the Using AI at Work podcast, where we dive into the transformative power of artificial intelligence in the professional landscape. I'm your host, Chris Daigle, and today I'm happy to speak to Stephen Worley, the visionary behind Closable AI. Together we'll explore how generative AI is revolutionizing sales acceleration and monetization, enhancing sales coaching and optimizing sales processes. So whether you're a sales leader or an AI enthusiast, this conversation offers profound insights into harnessing AI to drive meaningful business growth. Let's get started. Welcome to Using AI at Work. I'm your host, Chris Daigle.

Each week we'll be learning how today's business owners, entrepreneurs and ambitious professionals are.

Getting more done with smart use of tomorrow's tech.

Let's get started. So, Stephen, I'm excited to have you on the podcast today. This is a topic that we talk about a lot of things on the Using AI at Work podcast, but we have never had a conversation specifically about leveraging it for the monetization and sales acceleration and optimization environment. And after the conversation that we had the other day where you explained to me what you were doing, I was fascinated and knew that this would be something that would be a topic of great interest to our audience. So with that, why don't you tell us a little bit about what you're doing and kind of the genesis of Closable AI and where you see this opportunities for individuals to be able to leverage generative AI to boost monetization of their existing operations.

Yeah, great question. So the thing that I noticed, I come from a marketing background and then I shifted into the sales world, really the high ticket sales world that a lot of people are familiar with, where there's a lot of external sales teams, there's a lot of players in the space, there's a lot of trainings and things out there. Um, and the, the big thing is these teams can operate at an extremely high efficiency when the offer is great, obviously, and when they're put in a position to make closes happen very, very quickly. What I did notice is that when we started to move into certain offers that might have been more real estate based or something that was a little bit of a term of a fulfillment and needed more due diligence and things like that, there needed to be More to help these sales reps be able to convert. So what I have gone through and built and put together is a way for sales teams to be able to take AI, get reviews on their calls, be able to really push deals along and get coaching along with that. To be able to, yeah, really just move the needle forward is really the most simple way to say it. But then also create dashboards in ways that they just don't forget things.

Okay, great. So I'm going to clarify a couple of things based on what I just got from that is that if it's a quick sales cycle, like a one call kind of close situation, this can certainly help. But this isn't necessarily the area where you're focused. You're focused on the sales cycles that require multiple touches or there's a delay between initial conversation and next conversation and the close and that sort of thing.

Yeah, yes and no, actually. So I do a lot in the one call close world. I just also believe that if you don't one call close someone, it doesn't mean that the deal is necessarily dead. I think that's in an industry issue where a lot of people feel like you need that one call close and if you don't get it, you're not going to get future closes. I'm a bit of a skeptic. So I looked at that and I was like, okay, is this really true or is this just something that we just all say and are okay with? And I think it became something that we just became okay with. And then it was a way to say, this person's performing, this person's not performing. We don't have data to look at offers and figure out whether the offer is actually positioned in the best way. So I work in both worlds. Whether there's a little bit longer sales cycle, whether there's that shorter sales cycle, I think it can help. Overall, I still believe that even in the short world, AI is huge because you can get coached along to get maximum efficiency on those one call closes.

So I want to address that AI supported coaching in just a second. But I want to share with you my experience of working with telephone sales teams. And I've done it off and on and worked with companies that had a lot of them and blah, blah, blah. And for the salespeople listening to this, please don't take offense. And I think that you might find a little. You might say, yeah, that's about right. I've found that the best salespeople tend to be prima donnas a little bit. They don't like to do the paperwork. They don't like to do the updating of the CRM. They don't really like to take coaching or instruction very well. However, companies find themselves in a situation where that's my best salesperson, what am I going to do? And then you've got the other people who are kind of the average salespeople. Maybe they don't have necessarily the gift, they're not naturals at it, but they can perform the process. And those tend to be the ones who do subscribe to the hey, sales manager said do it this way, I'm doing it this way kind of thing. Is that your experience as well?

Yes, I think coaching wise, I make sure when I'm hiring someone that somebody's coachable. So I don't deal with that too much though. That happens in any industry. I feel like the biggest thing though is tech is just feels like this huge hurdle to sales folks. I really don't know why, because it's a relatively young guy industry and I feel like we should be better at tech. And I know I come from more of a tech background than most people and I have very much, which is fine. But yeah, there's a huge hurdle in the tech space. So it's how can we make the tech adhere more to the salesperson's process? And really what that is is having almost a better hook to pitch the salesperson to do these things, which is you're going to make more money. Right. Like, and that's what it needs to be. It's like if, if we can do things in this way, it's actually relatively simple. We can walk through it a couple of times and you will be able to start collecting more cash and making better commissions and things of that nature. But then somebody really bought in the process. They, they have to see that vision. Otherwise like you said, they're going to have that more prima donna attitude and they're just not going to get on board with it. And then it's really hard to decide to let go of your top person, which is usually who it tends to be. That's giving you issues. Yep.

Okay. Well, that helps me kind of reframe my perspective on things. And, and really we're talking about this in the context of how, how technology in a sales environment has been. With the introduction of generative AI, things change a lot. There's more engagement and interaction from the technology than just it being a recipient of input. So. Okay, well, that's helpful. So you mentioned this process when we were talking the other day about what you're doing to support the salespeople in their performance by leveraging generative AI in some very creative ways. Do you mind kind of walking us through your way of, of leveraging generative AI into that high ticket sales environment?

So I think the biggest thing is that actually taking a look at the process, the sales process, which is typically different for each organization, and making sure the first step in everything is making sure that the pipeline is structured in the way that the plan pipeline needs to be structured. And when I say pipeline I mean like you're, you know, getting your stages right and everything like that. Not actually everybody within. So once that's done, then we can start looking and seeing where everybody's living at within the pipeline. How many, how long does it take to get deals to close? How long or you know, how many people are one call closing? What's the show rate? All, all of those things that the data that really matters that actually a lot of sales organizations track very poorly or they track it with spreadsheets that aren't actually tied to a contact and there's no source of truth on the data. Not to get too rev ops in it, but that's also a big issue within these organizations. So with that said, and not to take the long way, but once that's done, then we can start optimizing with AI. And the first piece that comes in is once a call happens, we want them to get feedback and follow up steps as soon as that calls over. So now obviously it's not lightning fast because the transcription needs to process and things like that, but we want to get that transcription process sent over to AI and then right there where they can see it within the CRM where they're working, they can have the ability to get feedback on the call make sure not just that they. And now I train the AI to coach very similar to what I do, but not just to get those coaching tips, but also to make sure that what they're saying is true to the offer and compliance is there. I'm not saying I'm like the best compliance person in the world. There's obviously bigger people than me in that. But those things are huge in the phone sales world. And once that happens, then we can start to break down the next steps that need to happen in order to move that deal along. If it didn't close, we can start to map out probabilities of the deal closing things of that nature. And then as more things start to happen on that account and more data starts to run through the AI we can get a lot of more specific about how probable things are going to happen or how we can improve that sales process and really figure out what's working. Because there's going to be so many transcriptions from that where the AI is just going to get, you know, we, we can take those and then we can update it. We can update the, the basic framework of, of how it's grading everything based on what's working and what's not. Actually at a little bit of a side story there, that was one thing that gave me an issue. On one account we were having the biggest show rate issue. Not to get too far to the side, but what I did with that was I actually had delegated out a SDR setter manager for the role and the show rate tanked. Really my responsibility anyways. Even though I put someone there, but it was my responsibility to figure it out. So what I manually did because at the time I had not developed the system I had. I had to manually go through and figure out who showed, who didn't show. And then I started to pull recordings, move things into transcripts and get tons of examples of shows and no shows. And I fed all those to an AI. The custom AI that I had created on the sales side. I had it tell me what the main differences were in those and and I helped it provide me a script that would optimize for show rate. And over the course of the next few months our show rate went from 35% to our worst performing setter was setting at an 80% show rate. Now the account as a whole was sitting at about a 70 something show. And the reason was there was because we weren't getting on phone calls with absolutely every person is set. Some people don't answer their call. But our, our setters were literally showing for there was on that account from 80 to about 95% when a setter had a conversation with someone and it was insane that that was like the thing for me where I was like I gotta keep, I gotta keep on this because that's massive transformative for sure.

So let me, let me get this straight. The you took information and the information that you used to train this scenario was CRM data or what information? How did you determine the shows versus Obviously somebody doesn't show up. But I mean like what were you looking for? Because you couldn't read transcripts if they didn't show up. So what were some of the key distinctions between those who showed up and those who didn't?

So we always try to have a set call before we have the close call. Got it. So what I was doing was I was trying to figure out who had set calls and then of those set calls, who showed up to the close call and who didn't show up to the close call. And then I took those, those set calls and I separated them into those two groups.

And then what was the, I guess what was the logic in that, that prompting environment or the, the intelligence environment that you were looking for between the two? Kind of just to help somebody who's listening kind of understand how a sales professional is thinking?

Yeah, absolutely. So there's. It really helps to go back a little bit further than that because I actually already had a trained sales AI at that point. So I literally just asked it for the differences and it actually gave me really good information and it breaks it up in the different sections that I've broken up. And I don't have everything in front of me. Exactly what I do. But know there's the opening in a, in a set call that you have, that opening leads into actually getting their. Just buy in to have a conversation shortly and then getting the information that we need, checking the boxes and then making sure they're going to show up or set them for a close call and then seeing how bought in they are on that and then just setting up the expectations for that call. Those are pretty much the main sections that I have figured out. So in that, you know, going back to your question, what you're going to need to do if you are looking to run something similar to this, if you have a sales organization, is you're really going to need to ask for the key differences in the different pieces that happen in a call and then you can continue that conversation with the AI and figure out with, you know, all those pieces, what are the, the key changes we can make in order to, to get more shows, if that's what it is. But sometimes it's not the show problem. Sometimes you're getting a lot of shows and then you're not getting closes, but you have to go back to the sets to figure out what happened and why those people aren't closing. So. So the number one thing that you really need to figure out is what's the actual problem here? Because if you tried to just like the doctor thing we all use, right. Like if you try to solve a problem for an improper diagnosis, it doesn't really matter. You're never going to fix the actual problem.

Yeah. So interesting. So this is something that I, I Guess it's taking the transcripts of those calls, it's evaluating that and it's looking at the, the conversation, the consistent differences between a show and a no show and it's identifying and making suggestions back to you, the sales leader or whatever to. Did you find that it was the individual that they were connected with? Was it the delivery of the, the set dialogue? And for those who don't know, a setter is somebody who sets the appointment, they reach out to a prospect, they get them interested and they schedule an appointment for that person who will end up closing the sale. So did you find like what, what were some of the discoveries from that?

Yeah, so there were a couple things that certain setters were doing that other setters weren't. Sometimes people were just getting lazy in their conversations. And that happens in the sales world with a lot of people. It's. You sit on calls and you say the same thing all day, every day. So it can get a little over the top. And then sometimes you just get in those ruts. Right. And you have to be able to pull yourself out. So, so that was one thing that allowed us to see at a more mass scale instead of just going in and manually listening to all these calls. That's really a huge time saving hack for any sales manager out there. So with that said, a lot of the differences were really critical in the actual booking component and raising the, the value in the close call that was going to happen. One of the things that it gave me and some people are doing this and I know like people are going to say like you owned a sales agency and you weren't doing this in all your set calls. Like some people are probably going to feel that about me and it is fine. Like we learn and we, we grow. Right. So one thing that I had gave me and spit out was once you book the call, just say hey there is there. What's one thing that you just really want to make sure that we can answer on this call for you? And as long as the answer is not pricing, if it is pricing, then we're going to get back to a different question. As long as it's not pricing, then we're going to have the setter like take a note on that, right. And, and they're, they go in the actual notes and, and then it's going to be great. So I'm going to make sure that John is able to talk to you about how the actual H Vac system gets set up. Right. That's not something I've ever sold Before, So just trying to make sure I'm in the clear here. But you know, those things tie back because now this person's like, yes, I do have this question about this. Oh, this person's going to answer. And it's just that simple email hack of open the hook, close it on the next email, open a new hook that we know from the marketing world and sales world and, and that I think is one of the biggest drivers. The other thing was getting qualification pieces down. It did help with qualification pieces, but we now have a qualification piece that we have improved over the course of time that is just killer. That just removes all types of barriers around asking somebody their actual financial situation. It just works really well. I shouldn't say all the time, but honestly, 90% of the time we run no issues now when we ask somebody how much money they have based on how we, we approach getting that question.

So this is interesting because my, my, my brain, I know how this stuff works. I'm like, okay, they could actually take that, the answer to that question in, in an AI powered environment, spin up a half a dozen answers, feed those into the CRM so that when the closer gets on the call, that closer knows the primary concern or the ideal outcome for the person they're talking to and they don't have to think on the fly about, oh, here's how I'd answer that. They've got a half dozen options. Depending on how the conversation's going. I would imagine that the impact show rate, great, you double the show rate, you'd think that you would double the sales, but you can actually get better than that because it's not. Everything stays static on the closer side. The closer is actually being enhanced by the use of this information and generative AI. So for somebody who is, you know, has a sales team, how do those numbers kind of track for you before and after the introduction of AI with the hell. Let's start with connection rate, book rate, show rate, I don't know, length of call or one call, close percentage and those sort of metrics. Do you have those mapped out? Kind of.

I don't have the numbers directly in front of me right now, but I can give you a pretty good basis for a lot of those metrics. So we already covered the show rate, which essentially doubled.

It's fantastic.

And that was huge from there, the close rate. The close rate improved about. We probably had a 10% increase in close rate if, if I remember my numbers correctly. I'm sorry, I'm just searching.

No, that's good.

Here in terms of the connection rate at the beginning of calls, they were huge. We were getting, I don't know those numbers off the top of my head, but we were getting so many more just conversations continuing forward. We knew whether somebody was a little bit of an older lead or whether they were a fresh lead that came in. We were getting much more calls. We actually. One of the things that we also did throughout this whole process was we used. Because our show rate was low, what we were doing is we were continuing to intensify the reminder automations that actually continued to create a problem and start to piss people off to the point. And we toned that down significantly and that helped the conversations get a lot warmer then too. Because that was then all of a sudden the only barrier that people had, right to having these warm conversations. They're just pissed off. They're like, yeah, I already saw it. I know I booked this call here, why are you calling me now? Type thing. But then we learned to tone that down a little bit and then we were able to pitch the set call as well. I'm going to save you about 30 minutes on that call if you have a 10 minute call with me here. And we really tried to get those calls done in five to 10 minutes. We try not to take out a massive amount of time. Some people try to run longer 30 minute calls. We really try to get a couple key things to make sure that they're in the right place and actually understand something that we do qualify them. Get to booking.

What's the primary model? I guess the LLM that powers a lot of the output for your coaching and those sorts of things. Which one are you using?

And ChatGPT.

Do you feel that ChatGPT has a good grasp of how to be a, a good closer?

I don't know. Here's, here's the thing. I, I guess I got to say to. If you just go and you just ask CHAT GPT to, to tell you something out of the blue, I don't, I really don't know what it's going to give you in terms of a, a closing thing. What I did was I created a custom GPT and I was trained to create this, this custom GPT by a guy named Doug Foley. He's an author, really cool guy. He started doing AI and selling to a lot of his clients, creating custom AIs and stuff. He would be a great guest for you to have, by the way, Chris. So I learned how to do this from him and he has a full set of way to create these custom GPTs. And that's the process that I went through. And then I end up spending probably honestly close to 20 hours because it was my first one that I was really building, training this custom GPT and I was asking it, I was testing it and I would say what do you know about spin selling for example? That was one of the first things I did because I like to really use that model in my discovery. And it helps the setters too. So it helps both the setters and closers significantly. And it told me what it knew, which was pretty good. So then we started to incorporate these things into the grading that happens. But then what I noticed is I would feed it transcripts and then I would have it break up the questions into the spin selling model. For. For anyone that doesn't know, there's four different types of questions. It's an acronym, it stands for situation, problem, implication and need payoff. Those are just the different types of questions. When I started seeing it categorize these, I started to see issues. It was actually categorizing situation questions as other things, which isn't great because we really want to get past the situation questions when we're in the sales mode and get to the problem and implication. So I was going back and forth with it, where would I would give it a transcript and have it grade it and then I would dialogue with it to adjust its thought process and how it's looking at that and you know, understand the language a little bit better. And over time it got really, really good and efficient at that. So if you just go and you catch ept to just do it, I don't know what it's going to give you. That was before 4.0 was out. Maybe it's a little bit better from that angle now, but.

So what are you using to capture the transcripts of the calls? Just audio recordings being sent through a transcription service. Or are you using like an in meeting meeting assistant? Like a. An otter or a fireflies or a fathom?

I am using Read AI. The reason I use read AI and some of the other ones might do this is you can automatically have it send a web hook once a meeting's done processing and then we take that webhook, we throw it in make because make significantly less expensive than zapier. And now we use the OpenAI assistants instead of my custom GPT that I created, which I created the assistant with all that knowledge base anyways and had a huge pool to pull from.

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Right.

So let's talk about what you do at Closable though, because this, this is great and you've, we've gotten into some tactical questions about the tools that you're using and kind of high level architecture and process and that sort of thing. But there's a lot of people listening to this who would rather have the result than the learning curve of building it themselves. Right?

Sure.

And that opens up the conversation for Closable. How does a client like, what does that, what does that a client experience look like? They reach out to you because of what they want to obviously increase sales. But then where does it go from there?

Yeah, it's a great question. So the big thing is, and I think you know this really well and I think people listening to this show probably know it really well, but I don't think that people outside of this audience knows it really well. So I just like to, to make sure I say it is that there are certain tools that we choose to use and when you start to work on a process with us, we will use those tools. With that said, tools are changing absolutely. Every single day. AI is a moving target that we never know what's going to happen. In fact, I just saw in your community the other day about the whole Amazon thing that's happening and I didn't really even look into that yet, but I need to. But we're going to create systems we can integrate with your CRM already. We're going to use other softwares that have AI included already to help jumpstart some things. One that I really like is ClickUp. For that it's more of a project management system. I talked to you about this the other day. People would never think to use ClickUp from a sales perspective. However, I would think that a lot of companies probably use Notion. I know Notion has AI now. I don't know what it entails. ClickUp also has AI called the AI Brain. When your sales guy's on a phone, he can type in the little chat thing in ClickUp to ask a question about whether we do this or that or what the pricing is or how do I get the payment link. And the knowledge base is just going to spit it out to them, like through there, which like I love, because I don't have to train it to do that. I literally just create our notion style training base inside of ClickUp. And now everything lives in ClickUp. Closers setters have dashboards, so we're going to set up that. So the big start is let's set up the environment. And once the environment's set up and we understand your sales process and we get that mapped accordingly, now we can start integrating the AI tools into it. The AI tools don't take that long to integrate to it, but we need the system set up correctly. And then once we have all of that rolling, we're not just going to have AI helping the sales team, but we're going to have much better data likely than what you had before, using tracking sheets and things like that. We're going to have significantly better tracking, as our next president would say. The best data. You're going to have the best data, right? Yeah. You can't live without having some sort of source of truth if you really want to scale significantly in a sales environment. And so many teams, teams are missing that. So we're going to build that and then we're going to be able to make decisions on that offer based on what the data is telling us and what the AI is telling us in order how to move it forward. So many people want to fire sales reps really quickly or setters, really, whatever it is, really quickly and turn them over. And a lot of times it's an offer problem. It's something happening on the marketing side and we can see that if, if things are not showing up right on the, on the sales side, we know that's not mapped out right. And luckily, because of my marketing background, I also bring a little bit of that knowledge base to it. But it's not really where I live anymore, so to say.

But it's good that you have that perspective because you're able to look upstream. It may not be a sales problem exclusively. It may be a mismatch of what was promised and what's actually the product based on the marketing and things like that.

And, and really where I'm trying. And really where I'm. I'M going at this point is RevOps, which, which I talked to you about too. So it's, it's a little bit separate. I have those, those marketing tools, I have those sales tools. But now we're really trying to move to is RevOps. How can we become more profitable? How can we make better decisions and really drive teams? Now my ideal person is going to have a sales team that I want to work with because those are the people that have experience making big results for. So.

And I would imagine that the introduction of this type of stuff that you're doing allows even a smaller company to punch above its weight when it comes to sales capabilities, sales volume processing and things like that. One of the things that I'm very curious about is we've all seen demonstrations of kind of like voice AI. And I don't mean like interacting with the models by asking it a question that feeds you back, but actually like VAPI and tools like that that are capable of having natural conversations, although they're AI powered. It's a human voice, but it's AI powered, able to engage with low latency. As far as delays when it comes to client says something, AI responds. Have you tested or worked with any of those tools as part of your process?

Yep, I have. I will say that that's very close. We're very close to that. And I actually feel like that can very much help a sales team out too. One of the things that I always think about is also I'm not necessarily thinking about how can I just eliminate employees. I think that's a little bit of a harsh angle to take at this point. And rolling into 2025 here, I think we're. We're not really quite there where everyone's going to change in the future. Look, you're going to need to adapt and there's going to be different things happening. We have to be prepared for that. What I think about right now is how can I use AI to really assist my sales team and help them perform better and make more money. That's the method that you need to, in order to really lead an organization, have people with you and retain them. And that's tough in a sales organization too. They have to really feel like you're on their side and you really need to be, and it needs to be genuine. So with going back to your question of the AI voice tools, I think that's huge. I think that in terms of a speed to lead scenario, especially in some of those off hours, it's extremely valuable. But the key thing is that I think a lot of people don't do or a lot of businesses don't do is they're not very transparent with it and they try to mask it as a real human being. Everyone's going to start to hear these voices really soon, like all over the place. I would say probably by the end of 2025, a lot of people are going to be like, oh, this person sounded exactly the same as that person. It's going to start happening. And there's also some restrictions that the SEC has started to put around this stuff too. So we have to be very careful and pay attention to those things and how we're doing it now in terms of a speed to lead situation, being transparent about being an AI and getting them to a real person or talking to a real person, huge. I think that's, that's massive. It allows your sales team to be a little bit more relaxed and not feel like they had to be so jumpy all the time. As soon as something comes through and not everyone's fighting, we can honestly just make things a little bit more even from a round robin scenario too. So I like where that's going. I like the future of that. I don't think it's there as a replacement tool at this point, but I see a lot of value in it and it's something that I do, I have experience with and I do use in certain scenarios, determining, determining on, on the lead flow and all of that.

Okay. Three things came out of that that.

I want to address.

The first one is just tactically, are there any of those voice AI vendors that you think are doing a really.

Good job Where I saw it used the most within one of our accounts, we actually had a separate contractor like custom build it using voices from 11 labs. Okay.

So they didn't use a platform. They custom coded. Were the voices that they used, were they, were they, I guess avatar voices from 11 labs or were they actually voices of their sales team?

Yeah, they were avatar voices of 11 labs and that's the same thing that Go High Level is doing right now. So that's one of the softwares that we use and that's part of the closable AI software. I don't try and hide that. Like we use Go High Level, a white labeled version and Go High Level within what we do. They just released the unlimited voice and unlimited AI assistance on, on the accounts, which is huge because now we can, instead of being charged per usage, we can really have a better feel for how to properly charge for this to our clients, which just makes things way more fair. That's going to be really. Well, we've already seen some early tests that just dropped this month in terms of that and it's only the fifth. So we're having some fun just testing things out, creating stupid things like, and not stupid but you know, creating like a Santa workshop call thing and just test it, you know, testing out on things that aren't even business related just to see how it works and really see what limits. Right now There's a maximum 5 minute time limit on that. But the thing that's really nice is because that's an integrated tool into our CRM already, there's not going to be a lot of customization that needs to happen in terms of like a quick booking or thing, something like that. And also makes the warm transfers really easy to sales reps. So, you know, go high level. Not HubSpot in certain aspects, not Salesforce in certain aspects. But the reason that I like it so much is because they are very driven to adapt and move fast and that's what we need in the AI world. I don't know how fast those other companies are going to be able to move. So I am holding out hope that that's going to continue to develop and I don't have to use outside tools. I've seen some others in terms of the DM chat work well off the top of my head, I honestly forget some of the names.

No favorites other than the native stuff in ghl.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. There are some I've seen used really well from a DM perspective. But yeah, I mean I think the DM piece is going to be essentially, you know, voice and dms, they're, they're going to be all merged into one really soon with how fast this industry is moving.

Great. Okay. Another thing that came out of that conversation we had just a moment ago is you said the transparency. How do you recommend someone introduce that dialogue into an AI powered phone call? Like what does that look like?

Chris, do you ever hear a really good cold call example where, I don't know, sometimes I see that it's funny. I don't sit on social media a ton and I have my notifications turned off every once in a while I'll just open and go to TikTok and my feed's honestly some like just more business oriented stuff or like I'll listen to a guy that sells private jets and stuff like that and it's just interesting to hear. But anyways, if you ever sat and just Heard somebody on a. A cold call that just does a really good job. They usually don't hide it, and they usually make things personalized, so it'll go something like, hey, John, this is Mark. We don't know each other. Honestly, this is a cold call, but it's a pretty personalized cold call. And I just want to know if you can just give me the. A quick second here. And. And those types of openings are a pattern interrupt versus everything else that we hear where it's just like, this is so and so from company. Have five minutes to talk to me. Yeah. And. And like that honestly sounds so robotic. Like our sales team members might as well be AI if they're. If they're doing that. I think AI now, we're not cold calling with AI And I'm pretty sure that's one of the things that the SEC says no to. Anyways, for anyone listening, just to check it out, but check with your lawyer. Yeah, yeah. We are doing obviously warm inbound stuff here and there with it. And it's just, hey, this is Evelyn. Just to let you know, I'm an AI agent and I'm happy to get you to a real human too, but this is the easiest way for me to actually move the process along for you. Like something like that. I didn't say that in the best way, but you get the point, right?

Yeah.

Like, you just want to make sure that you're showing it as a benefit instead of a negative. I love it.

Yeah. You're not trying to trick them into thinking that they're talking to, you know, a charming phone representative. Okay, I like that.

Yeah.

Another thing that came out of that, that you mentioned, that is a hot topic regardless of industry, is that change management environment. You've got salespeople. My experience with salespeople, as we've talked about already, they don't have a tendency to be tech forward. They're much more tactile and interpersonal as. As compared to being technical. You're introducing an emerging technology that there is some chatter in the marketplace about it taking jobs or replacing me or anything like that. How would you recommend that, specifically in a sales environment, that a sales leader or a business owner introduce this through that lens of, hey, I need to make sure that people don't get freaked out about this or get concerned that. That I'm looking to replace them?

I guess in the terms of the voice, AI is probably the biggest piece where this is directed to every other way that we use AI then the nice thing about it is it really is more of an assistance type thing directly for them. You know, this is one of those things where it really just helps to already have a connection with people and have some trust built up. And some people are horrible leaders unfortunately and some people are great leaders. Wherever you fall on that board, I think it's always try to be better. And that's one of the things that I've learned. I've made mistakes, I've done certain things and I always try to improve where I'm at on that, you know, whatever it is, that line trajectory, whatever you want to call it. And I always want to be trending up. So when, when you're doing the voice AI stuff with a sales team, a lot of times to be honest that's going to be implemented before there's even setters on a team. So usually it's a more closer, focused team anyways and we're starting to take workload off the closers to self set deals because the team's smaller. And then we're actually going to bring setters in to help with warm transfers and things like that. So it's really like hey, we don't want to rely on this completely. It's not there. We want somebody that we can really trust and like saying like we can trust you, we can't trust the AI type thing like and, and really. But you again, these things need to be believed by yourself before you tell somebody that. Otherwise you're just lying to them. And you have to have a strong foundation for how you see that team progressing and being built through certain milestones of we can call it revenue or just volume of calls. Right, Volume of leads, volume of calls, whatever that looks like. You have to have a plan in place for how that team's going to grow. And I'm a big believer. Most sales teams I feel like don't get this in the high ticket world. I think they get it at Those more enterprise SaaS company type levels. They see the growth pieces. I'm a big believer. Even with those small teams with the prima donnas and everything is sharing the vision. You have to share the company vision. You have to show where we want to go. We want to say how many people we want on the team to get there. And we had to say that you guys are the foundation for that. There's going to be leadership spots that open up here, here and here. And we want them to be invested in that growth model and if you do those things, you'll avoid a lot of it in the sales world as you know, and you said early on you're not going to avoid all of it. Probably not any industry, but that's what I tend to do. I like to make sure, especially because sometimes I come into teams and they already exist. I want to make sure that I'm coming in not as a threat, but as more of an advantage, a helping hand, you know, another person that. That's just gonna be on their side when I need to be. Right.

A couple of takeaways from that. I really like the. If they understand the vision, how we get there isn't as important or as like much of what they focus on. That's a great pointer. There's this conversation about it's. It's going to be, it's going to assist you, it's going to be your assistant. Think of it like an assistant. I think that's very powerful. And, and talking to any category of, of your business where they don't tend to be early adopters or embracers of technology. I think that's fantastic. Let me ask you now, let's. We're getting close to 2025. This episode will probably come out before or right at the beginning of 2025.

Cool.

Give me your kind of what your thesis was of 2023 about AI, what your thesis was of 2024 and kind of where you see things like, what do you think will be the difference between. In 2025.

Okay, 2023. What was my thesis of AI? I honestly didn't use AI a ton in 2023. I'll be super honest about that. I used it here and there. I thought it was something that had a lot of potential, but I didn't quite see yet where that potential was going to go. I didn't know exactly where it was going to go. For those that don't know, I have a degree in computer science. I'm not saying I'm a know it all in this space at all, but we've been talking about AI for a long time and I knew that like, okay, there's a tool that released. Everybody's freaking out. It's probably not quite, quite there based on, on what I know, which was the case. And honestly, I was probably sleeping on it a little bit. I. To, to be totally honest, I think if I would have got in a little bit earlier, it would have been even, even better. I don't consider myself one of the like AI Bros or whatever. I don't think anybody on this show is, is like that either. But I, I think you guys really saw how can we really improve things instead of just like selling a gimmicky tool or something like that. And that's, that's where I see. So 2023, I was like, maybe this has potential in a couple years. Well, we're pretty much there, right? So then moving into, you know what I saw for, for 2024, like throughout this year, as I started to use it a little bit more, I saw a lot of potential in just making my life easier in terms of creation. Right? So that's, that's where my mind was at. Like I need to create something, ask me 10 questions, 20 questions and create it for me. Right. I don't want to have to deal with that. So, so that was helpful. And then in terms of 2025, I foresee significant change in integration. And what I mean by that is in the tools we use, the softwares we use, we're going to get more and more AI built into those tools to make our lives a little bit more seamless. So instead of us logging on to Claude or Chat GPT and typing in prompts and doing everything, things are just going to be more and more integrated into. And they're starting to get integrated now. We're starting to see that. I'm actually talking to some employees at ClickUp soon in a couple days. I'm super excited because I have huge ideas for how to use their AI and make things smoother within the system and how to make it better. I just see that just continuing. And I don't know about you, I get emails from quite a few sasses and I feel like every month I see another one says we're introducing AI.

Yeah, how do you. And then I guess kind of a final question, how do you filter signal from noise when it comes to all of that stuff? Because what I know is when companies say, oh, we're introducing AI, like even companies like Salesforce and things like that, if they're saying that on the earnings calls or that's what's going out in the press releases. But if you talk to people inside those companies, they're like, eh, yeah, it's when you know, it's not as, as thrilling as it's being presented. How are you filtering signal versus noise and all of that.

I really hate the good idea fairy a lot. I see so many people that post stuff every day, especially coming from the marketing world about a tool or something, whether it's AI driven or not. And this has been happening forever. Lifetime deals on things, different things. I'm not talking about like Appsumo, but just individuals selling things for lifetime white label, trying to make a quick $10,000 here, a quick $10,000 here. What I try to honestly do is I try to just not pay attention to it. I don't know if that's something that makes sense or not.

It does.

I know it does. Yeah. But. But I try not to. To pay attention to it. When I see these people making their Facebook posts and LinkedIn messages about all this new AI tool stuff, I. I really just have a feeling that the majority of that stuff is gimmicky and will be around for a year and go away, unsubscribe from the email, don't pay attention to it and just let it go and focus on the tools that, that I can do and, and what I know in it. And like I said, I, I think I was maybe a little bit late to the game. I think we're so early in the game, but I think I was later than I. I could have been in the game. So. So keep in mind, I just really try and push the good idea fairy away because I see more harm in that. And I still feel like I'm a very quick mover than just getting everything and trying everything because you just won't make progress that way.

That a hundred percent. I hear that from people all the time. They say there's so many tools out there, I can't keep up. And my advice is, don't keep up. Find the tools that work for you. Stick with them. And what I found is that, well, this one's doing this. Yeah, we'll give. Give your preferred tool a month, they'll be doing that too. Like, there's no real moat that lasts very long in tool categories that are AI powered. Once somebody sees something, the competitor's like, oh, well, next release we've got it too. So I think that's great advice. Now, obviously, you know, AI for content creation and AI for ideation and things are all great, but AI to make more money for my company, very exciting. Right? So for those who are interested in exploring that topic more with what's being done at Closable AI, your company, what. What do they need to do to. To connect, to follow, to kind of stay abreast of how you're using the tools.

Absolutely, yeah. Connect with me on LinkedIn or shoot me a friend request on Facebook. I don't post very much on Instagram and to be honest, my Facebook is pretty much friends and family. But you're happy to connect with me there and you know, follow my crazy running stories and all of that, but connect with me on LinkedIn and check out Closable AI that, that should be fully functioning by the time anybody's listening to this. It's 90% functioning now, so it should be pretty easy to get in contact and make that stuff work. And yeah, it's, it's pretty, pretty easy. I think I'm, I'm pretty accessible for the most part and generally I'm, I'm a pretty nice guy but you know, generally, generally.

Well, Steven, this has been great and thank you so much. I'm glad that your team reached out this opportunity. You and I obviously had a connection prior to this and, but it had been several years since we'd spoken and what you're doing is an area that like sales isn't really my background and I, it's a recognized weakness on my part. There's probably a lot of other people in here that same thing. They're just not wired. That's not where they focus their career. But knowing that you're doing these types of things with sales and it doesn't sound like, you know, long term implementation cycles or anything like that. It's very exciting for small business and big business alike. So thank you for taking the time to share this and let's see what happens in 2025.

Let's do it. I really appreciate it, Chris, and I thank you for what you do here on the podcast as well. I think this is a great source to get away from the noise of AI and talk about the things that really matter.

Very cool, man. Thank you so much everybody. We'll see you on the next episode. Take care.

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