Full Throttle Leaders Podcast- JD Miller

Hello everybody, Michael Falato here again. We're with our, our new podcast that's been going about 30 episodes now, Full Throttle Leaders. We got JD Miller. He's the author for The AI Handbook for Sales. He's a well-known person in Chicago and across the world. JD, how you doing?

Great. Thanks for having me today, Michael.

No worries. Tell me a little bit about your, what you do now and your book that you just kind of built up.

Sure. So I'm a longtime B2B salesperson. I began my career in the late '90s selling web content management tools when my sales pitch was, I'm calling from the internet. Do you need a website? And, you know, we've seen a lot of evolutions. It was, that was a great successful business in the late '90s. It got me hooked on B2B sales and particularly at companies that are owned by private equity. So I've been through 5 private equity exits. I've been CRO and CMO multiple times. And today I work for a private equity firm itself, Rothschild Company's Five Arrows, where I am their in-house— we call me the CRO in residence. So I'm advisor and consultant to the go-to-market leaders of a portfolio of companies that we've invested in.

And how many companies have you invested— are you invested in now at your company?

Today, Rothschild's portfolio is about 3 dozen. I believe it's invested in 3 different funds. At any one time, I get to work with, you know, 5 to 7 of them, kind of depends on where they are in their investment cycle. And then lately, I've been really talking to them about what they're doing with AI. You know, we've heard so many people thinking about whether it's lead gen or sales rep coaching or forecasting, What can we be doing with AI? So I've interviewed a bunch of our portfolio companies about that. I just finished a survey of 158 AI vendors and put it together in a book that's called The AI Handbook for Sales Professionals to help people down the road.

How long has that book been out?

It just released a couple of weeks ago. So April 14th of '26.

And do you have it on audiobooks on Amazon? Like how could people get a hold of it?

It is available everywhere great books are sold. So yeah, Amazon worldwide is a very easy place to find that. Your local bookstore will have it at least in their digital catalog. And then you can find it, you can find it on my personal website, jdMillerPhD.com. We'll link you off to all of the other online retailers.

What's maybe 2 things out of that learnings that were like, wow, that was incredible? Positive learning, or you learn, I'll never do that again, or, or learn from a, from one of your prospect clients or advisors that that's not a good idea?

Sure. When I began researching the book, I really expected that it was going to be a very simple, you know, what does Salesforce have, what does Outreach or Gong have, and that was kind of the end of the story. It surprised me how many players were actually out in the marketplace. You know, I found 158 of them really quickly, talking about 48 different kinds of sales processes that AI touches.

Mm-hmm.

And I know I'm just scratching the surface. At the same time, there's a survey that says about 61% of sellers have never touched AI in their jobs yet. And so I think one of the first big surprises I saw was this dichotomy of everyone really cares about AI and thinks it's really important. We also haven't figured out how to do it really well.

Mm-hmm.

And so I think we're still all in an experimentation phase and, and looking for guidance from each other. I think the second big thing for me is really about the distinction between AI and humanity. I have a PhD in organizational communication, so I have a little bit of bias of interpersonal connections. But, you know, AI has gotten really good at pattern matching, and it's learned that when I say I'm having a really terrible day, it's supposed to say, I'm sorry, I hope tomorrow will be better for you. Do you want to talk about it? And that feels like a person, but it's actually just kind of pattern response. And so when we start putting these tools into sales motions where trust, authenticity, relationship building is so important, you know, I think it's, it's really clear to me that human sellers in the seat are still going to be really important for doing those authentically human kinds of things.

Yeah, I look at that in the whole Legion side. It's like, people use AI to go, oh, JD, I see you wrote a book and you work at this company in private equity. I would love to talk to you or follow your journey. Oh yeah, sure, Mr. AI written-based, you know, agentic approach on your background and taking LinkedIn and trying to align with me. So I, I really think that you gotta like open the door with AI, at least in Legion, or, or open the door in other things that use AI, but then Use the human aspect of it to be naturally inquisitive. So that's the human-based thing. That's what I'm looking at, at least in my space, is the AI has been making more noise versus being— you working it better, smarter, and faster, more efficiently.

I think you're right. And I think it's, I think it's really doing a good job of prospect research. You know, get me a dossier on Michael in 5 minutes, you know, and That's awesome. I'm really curious, you know, you and I have been in this business for a long time, so we already have tons of podcasts and tons of blog articles and all sorts of things in the world that tells you who we are authentically. I'm really curious about the newer professionals who are just coming out of college that haven't produced any of that material on their own and are only going to be publishing, writing, and speaking the words that AI has generated for them. And so I'm really curious, you know, how they're gonna develop their own, unique skill sets, personalities, and careers over the next couple of decades.

Have you monkeyed with, like, I just tried doing delfi.ai, which is a digital twin.

I actually wanted to ask you about that. You know, as I was doing my research on you, I had a brief chat with your digital twin.

Yeah.

And it, I don't know you that well, so I don't know how accurately it's speaking in your voice. It certainly is very confident in, advice and kind of moving your sales pitches forward. But what's your experience of it?

I like it pretty much. I mean, I think it's a lot of— if it's a self-serve model, right, and I want to buy something, it could solve a lot of problems. I think when it becomes into a strategy, analytics, tools, my personality, it could help open the door again, take some displacement of time away. But it's not going to be the end-all be-all. I think it's really, really good for self-serve solutions, technologies, low, low-ticket things. Like if you want to ask something right away versus doing a chatbot, I think that's just so archaic. I'd rather hear someone's voice and talk to them like a human versus, you know, typing something into those little live help things. But yeah, I love it. Um, I haven't done like the whole enterprise model. I just kind of started and screwed around with that. I'm doing a— actually have another PhD, uh, this guy named Michael Becker that's doing a digital twin roundtable that you should join then. If you, if you thought, if you thought that was interesting, that digital twin stuff, you'd probably love talking to Michael Becker too.

Because I think it'd be, I think it'd be really interesting. There's a story I told in the book, um, I wound up doing case studies, you know, but across lots of different folks. But there was a company I interviewed who said they had a key founder of the company that was going to be moving on to something new. And they sat him down with maybe a tool like that for about 3 weeks.

Yeah.

Interviewed, listened to his key stories, listened to him talk about, you know, product demos and ways to overcome objections. And now that the founder has moved on to the next role, He still has this sort of digital twin. Maybe it's a chatbot or something like that, that current employees can say, you know, what would Michael do and get, you know, a little bit of coaching. And it's, I think it's been a helpful, you know, onboarding and coaching tool for different folks.

Yeah, that's actually a great idea. I thought actually my dad lives in Yorkville, not too far from you. And like, why don't I ask my dad a bunch of questions and have a kind of creepy, a little bit spooky, but also sentimental to have a my dad lived forever conversation like you saw in movies. Like, like, like Superman's a good example of that, you know?

Absolutely.

What the hell is he— how's he talking to his dad? Well, now we can see how they, how, how they came up with that. It's basically a digital twin where you can have a conversation, but they're not live.

It's— we actually, here in the Chicago suburbs, there's, um, a Holocaust museum that fed an AI bot hundreds of transcripts and interviews with Holocaust survivors. And now in the museum, they've developed sort of a hologram person that you can sit and talk to and ask it a bunch of questions about, you know, tell me your life story, tell me about, you know, this experience and that experience. So I think it's—

A person, are you talking to like a general Holocaust overall?

Uh, I'm not sure if you can pick the person or if it's one person every day or how that works.

Yeah.

Uh, but it's, it's an interesting kind of approach.

Have you set up a Digital Twin yourself yet?

I haven't. You know, I, again, kind of with that communication thing, I actually think my unique self is my differentiator. So I'm a little afraid to have a total, you know, JD bot out there Speaking on my behalf.

Well, think about this, like, especially if you ever, you know, to hang your own shingle completely, right? There's $100 an hour for your digital twin or $500 an hour for your real person. Now you can say, you know, you can get some hours here and some hours there, and now you have a repeatable and scalable JD.

Interesting. Yeah, I think, I think that's an interesting approach that a lot of AI tools is really helping the small business owners compete like the big guys. Here in Chicago, we have a tech incubator, 1871, that are really often single-person companies, 2-person companies. We just did a workshop with them on how can you use ChatGPT or Gemini to really put together the lead gen motions, the collateral, the outbound efforts, all of the things that the big guys do. And it's not perfect. It's not the same, but it's a whole lot better than it was before. And I think it's, I think it's really raising the bar for us.

I used Gemini to make a deck that looked a lot better than I had, which was a decent deck. And then I, then I took all the LLM, um, language of what I talked about over the years, put it in there in my decks, and then they made a, uh, a guy and a girl talking to each other about Full Throttle and lead gen. And it sounds like a radio show a little bit.

Interesting.

And then the inflections, the pauses. I was like, oh my God.

Well, you know, I was just listening to an interview. There's a podcasting company that is now going to market with all AI-based podcasts. And they said there's— they have about 6,000 shows right now that are really niche topics. And so they're like, how many people really care about organic gardening on rooftops in Chicago? maybe there's 4 people that would care about that kind of podcast. And so mainstream media, you wouldn't have, you wouldn't put a show together.

Right.

But with them, they've created an AI bot and they've said, you know, here's that very niche topic. This is the personality of the bot. It's a, maybe it's got a very clear Chicago accent or whatever. They market it, they get 4 subscribers, but they're doing 6,000 shows every week with, you know, 4 subscribers, 12 subscribers, and the ad revenue they get from all of these little micro podcasts is sustaining them as a business. It's really interesting.

Landing pages with audio.

Yeah, exactly.

Awesome. Well, who, who do you want to reach out to, to basically engage either with you as JD or you, you as your private equity Company?

Yeah, so I am a go-to-market specialist, specifically work on, you know, boards of directors or coaching to CMOs and CROs. So you'll find me at jdMillerPhD.com, whether you're a tech company looking for a board member who knows something about sales or you're a sales leader that's looking for, you know, strategy and advice. That's where you would work with me directly. But I've also really tried to share that knowledge as widely as I can. And so we've got the first book is The CRO's Guide to Winning in Private Equity. And now this new book, The AI Handbook for Sales Professionals, is really how we scale further than just a conversation with me.

Well, awesome, Jeannie. I appreciate you being on the show and we look forward to continuing the conversation and I'll send you some context around other things that you might be interested in, on the digital twin stuff from other people that I'm doing it with.

Thanks for having me, Michael. It's good to talk with you.