The Future of Sales and the Role of A.I. ft. Chad Burmeister

Okay, well, I think we're ready to get going here.

All right. I'm really excited, Mark.

I am too. Michelle, everybody. Welcome back to the SalesGlobe Rethink Sales Roundtable. And our whole purpose here is looking at the future of sales. So we're looking post Covid what's going to happen even further out. So we're at sales globe all about problem solving for sales organizations. So we do that kind of work in the areas of go to market strategy, sales organization design, sales process, sales compensation, so all sorts of areas like that. So feel free to reach out to us if we can answer questions for you and Michelle. We are excited today. We're going to be talking about a really cool topic.

AI.

Oh, yeah. I'm very excited about this. So we have. I'm actually really, really privileged to have Chad Burmeister with us. So I met Chad last year. I had a conference in Florida and I was asked to be part of a panel on inside sales. And little did I know when I got up there that Chad was going to use a little AI on me. Right. He said to me, will you be a good sport? I'm always a good sport. But he went up there and proceeded to tell me, like, the story of my life. I felt like I was singing a one direction song. Oh, my God. But also things I chose. I would have loved to have forgotten that. I went through all that therapy I told you about and he raised all those issues then. But anyway, so Chad, he literally wrote the book on AI for sales. And we are so excited to have you here today. Chad, welcome.

Yeah, great to be here. And the app for that, by the way, we were planning on talking about today, but now that you've brought it up, if you haven't looked at Crystal knows, it plugs into your LinkedIn and it'll tell you exactly inside the soul of the person that you're talking to. So it's always good to know the other person better than you.

Yes, it is like that.

Like that.

Yeah. I just say that because I don't want anybody going to look at me up.

It's all there. It's all.

We're gonna be talking with Chad a lot about a lot of. Lot of cool things. Chad, you literally wrote the book AI for Sales, how artificial intelligence is changing sales. So I read the book. I loved it. It's got a lot of great information. It gets really specific, too. And in every chapter, Chad, you kind of do a futurist thing. And I wanted to talk about one of those Points because you say, well, here's what I think is going to happen in terms of sales enablement or whatever topic might be. But one of the chapters, you talked about the coming economic downturn and you talk about prospect engagement with virtual assistants. You basically said companies are going to be laying off people and they're going to have to do more with less, which I found kind of predictive, kind of eerie. But can you talk about that a little bit? You know, what were you thinking about then and how's that playing out and what are you seeing ahead in terms of, okay, we've got a lot fewer people out there now in jobs and companies are looking differently about how they, how they do sales. What's that mean?

Yeah, the funny thing about the book, so this is the book, I like to kind of hold it up, half face, you know, half robot, half person, because augmentation is really where things are headed. So, funny thing that I haven't told you guys yet, when I wrote the book, I was actually on a trip to Italy, France, and we were on a Royal Caribbean cruise ship that started in Barcelona. And so I had written the book over the course of 6 to 12 months and now I was in the final throws. So funny enough, right? Cruise ship, those are kind of shut down at the moment. And airplanes are kind of shut down at the moment. So all those planes, trains, automobiles, I just look at the stats and every, what, eight to 10 years there's a downturn. So I think me and a lot of colleagues would say, it's coming, it's coming, be ready for it. And so up until Covid hit, our core customers are seed round funded companies up to series D. So they're funded. Well, guess what? They have an imperative to grow. That is their mission in life. If they don't, the CEO gets fired, the VP of sales gets fired every 18 months. So that's been the core market. So the good news is we created this AI for sales program that's purpose built for companies who have an imperative to grow and do more with less. Right? More market domination in a shorter period of time. So traditionally you'd call into a CRO of a big company and they're like scratching their head, we're fine, we're covered, we've got enough headcount and money. We don't need this stuff. So what happened is we deployed 150 clients in two and a half years and then Covid hit and now the market changed. So all of a sudden everything that we did, which is build a speedboat that can go 10 times faster than a cruise ship. Now it's more relevant to everybody else. So it was definitely just timing, timing, luck, and a little bit of skill.

What do you see companies doing right now to leverage AI as we're having the need to do more with less? What kind of tools are they employing?

Yeah, in the book, there's 21 chapters. There were supposed to be 20. We added chapter 21 because we left social out of the mix. There's so many ways that companies can use AI for sales. From building your list, right? What's your market look like? What your icp? You may not even know what your ICP is, but there's AI that can tell you what it should be and what it is.

What's an icp?

Ideal customer profile for those who are not familiar. You know, what's the. For example, inside view can come in and you push a button and a day later can tell you can put all your customers into quadrants. Upper right quadrant. You should sell more companies that look and feel like that. Lower right quadrant, they're okay, but maybe, maybe not far left quadrant. Run as fast as you can from those, or at least don't go sell more that are like that. Go, you know, and then slowly move away from those customers in order to try to get into the upper right quadrant. So that's just one example is getting a cut of your data, the way you speak. So one, I look at it as gas in the tank, right? You got to have good gas in the tank. You can't just go wide to every single person in the universe. As one of My mentors says TK Cater, formerly ToutApp, formerly Marketo, he says the riches are in the niches. So figuring out the alignment and finding your ICP and then reaching out to them, then you can go fast. Because now you can use automation to help you send emails, do social connectivity, even paid ads. That's very specific to that individual target set. So lots and lots of things can be done with AI.

So we were talking earlier, and you painted this picture, which I thought was a little eerie. You said you had worked with a company and they were having trouble on social media, targeting social media. And you said, well, what you figured out was that their target audience was or their target buyers were males age something like 40 to 64, and they're followers of Elon Musk. And you were talking about how you could then start to do a mass drip campaign based on interests of people. So how do you do that kind of thing?

Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because we literally hired a CMO a month and a half ago. So traditionally it's been pure AI for sales and not AI for sales and marketing. So now we've got a CMO who's riding shotgun in the car with me, and he's able to drive in the AI world for marketing for the. You know, I've been focused largely on sales. So he goes in and said, okay. He spent three hours with me. Chad, tell me about what keeps the CROs up at night. What. What are they most excited about? What are they scared about? And he tapped into the emotion of what people are going through, especially in the times we're in today. So then he wrote up the digital ads and he. We basically decided. Age 40 to 64, male, follows Elon Musk, salesforce.com group. And so I'm used to looking at it probably much like you guys are. Let's go to ZoomInfo. Let's pull a list of VPs of sales that are in this revenue range and this Geo, and maybe they have deployed Salesforce or Marketo. I'm not used to coming at it from the other side that says, let's just go find the people with the right interests. I have yet to marry the list up, to be honest with you. This was launched a week and a half ago. We just had a call this morning with my marketing advisor, And Nick, my CMO, is 100% confident that that list is going to be right in my icp. Even though we didn't start from the icp, we started from interests and what they follow, and then it'll just naturally flow into deals in our icp. So very, very interesting approach. Right.

Well, and what I'm finding really interesting about this discussion is that when people think about AI, they think about robotics, they think about automation, they think about, you know, the dissemination of the salesperson. And I'm not hearing you say that at all. And actually, what you're talking about is using this augmented intelligence to identify Personas and interests, which, again, that's got a bit of a personal touch.

Yes, it's. So I went to the B2BMX conference in February, one of the last conferences before. Before everything happened. So I'm very happy with that because it was a fun couple of days there. I can reminisce about how fun conferences used to be back in the day.

When we used to travel.

When we used to travel. Yeah. That did free up a little budget, by the way. My CFO was looking at my numbers And I'm like, am I doing okay? I feel like I'm spending a little more money. He said, no, you're not, you're not, you're fine, keep spending. But Pam Didner was the opening keynote and she talked for a good hour and 20 minutes. They almost gave her the hook because she was so awesome of a presenter. And she talked about Terminator and the Jetsons. And you know, when you talk to her kids, I think her daughter I believe was about 18 or 20 and there was a group, what do you guys, when she was doing the market research for this talk, she was, what do you guys think when you think of AI? And they came up with all those kinds of things. And then a lot of people in the market say, oh well, if it's not Terminator esque, then it's not real AI. And so what I tell my sales team when they come, I've had a couple people on the team over the last couple years that say, well, that doesn't really feel like AI. You're saying it's AI and it's not. And I say, you know, I don't care if you call it AI, bi, CI or di, as long as it helps make the customer more efficient in their processes and build more pipeline faster. Don't worry about the definitions. Right? We're not talking about the Terminator being able to come in and have a conversation like this. We're talking about AI augmentation that will allow you to go 10 times faster and better. Not just faster, but better. And that's where it's interesting change over the last couple of years because I'm seeing it happen.

So what's that going to feel like to a salesperson? Because you know what I think about it with AI and think about these chatbots, I think about getting on a website and the website wants to chat with me, I don't want to chat with the website. And I get a call at night, you know those robocalls. And obviously it's, it's somebody calling me that doesn't have the time to spend with me, with a real person yet. They want my real time. But that all seems kind of intrusive. So for a salesperson, how's it going to feel for the salesperson, how's it going to intersect with their day to day life? And for the customer, how's the customer going to even be comfortable with that?

Yeah, I say let the AI do what the AI does well are best and let the human do what the human does best. So I'LL give you an example. Winter Park, Colorado. My folks own a place there. So when, back when skiing was also open, we would go to the condo. And when you have two or three days in a row, you go to the hot tub. And after the hot tub and a nice glass of wine and a cigar, then you go to the massage. So Alpenglow is the massage place on this little block right outside of the condo. Right. And so traditionally, over the last five years, you would call and you would wait, and then someone would probably come out of the massage room, and they're like, that sucks because you just interrupted my nice massage that I was in the middle of. And so I have to now talk to this person. She's like, this is Helga. How can I help you? And I'm like, oh, Helga, I'm looking to book a massage in the next 20 minutes. Do you have availability? Hang on, let me check. And she scans through her paperwork, and it's a very terrible and poor experience for her and me this time around. I called and I got a text while I was making the call, and I'm like, oh, that's interesting. Oh, it's the massage place. So I click the button. It takes me to a page. It lists out six or eight different people and all their skills. So one person focuses on the back, One person's done prenatal stuff. All these different skill sets. I was like, oh, I'm going to pick. Okay, I might have to wait two hours. So maybe I'll go get dinner first and then I can pick this person because they're perfect. So I got to actually self serve, pick the best person, not interrupt Helga. And the best part, guess what my cost of the massage went to? It used to be about 120 bucks. This time it was 80 bucks. So when I went in and I was like, why did you guys prices go down? Well, because we don't have to pay for Helga and we're not having to figure out the back and forth. So it was a better experience and I got the right person. I mean, man, I'll take a chatbot all day in that situation.

Oh, poor Helga, though. I don't don't know what happened to her.

Yeah, well, now she can do massages all day and she doesn't have to have split time jumping out of the room and doing two things. Right.

So for her job, decontamination. I love that. So, Chad, if you flip that to a B2B application, you know, I'm a corporate buyer I don't want to hear from a salesperson unless it's something I'm really interested in. How is AI going to intersect my buying experience as a B2B buyer?

So think of the. It starts at the lower end, right? High volume, lower end. So I've been in running inside sales teams for a long time. And I remember back at Riverbed 12, 14 years ago, the SVP said, Look, 70% of our transactions total count represent 10% of our revenue. So how do we use an inside sales team to optimize that 10% of our revenue? And at the time, it was an inside sales rep that cost $100,000 instead of a field rep and an SE for $500,000. So that's how you optimized in today's world. Thinking of that experience of the chatbot, well, that spills over into emails, it spills over into voicemails. Because now a great marketer or a great revenue operator, that's why RevOps is so big now, right? RevOps sits on top of sales ops and marketing ops. It should not be two discrete silos anymore. It's let's build the experience for the customer. That's the best possible experience that serves their needs. And so when I was at Ringcentral, I would go to the Philippines and that was our answer to how do you support an $800 a year customer? Because one conversation might cost a hundred bucks. I just ate up one eighth of the margin. Oh, I got another support call. Oh, I just ate up another 1/8 of the margin. So how do you best support the customer? Man, if you can build the chatbot and you can build the emailing follow up. Now bring the human in when the humans required and then that line in the stand will start to move up over time, right? Volume, the volume of transactions. Bring the human in when the humans need it. You probably don't need the human as much as you think you do, so.

Probably doesn't need to depersonalize things as much as we may think. I guess that's the thing that scares me is all of a sudden it's depersonalized and I don't have that interaction anymore. So, yeah, you know where I want it when I want it.

Well, so I actually brought my Alexa in just to demonstrate something here. Oh, she just listened to me. Hey Alexa, what's the way? What's the best way to accelerate pipeline?

Scale X is by far the best.

Right? Okay, so now imagine if you could say, hey Alexa, launch a multi channel sales acceleration campaign to the Fortune 1000. All CEOs must have a cell phone number. Start on Monday at 10. She has no idea what I'm talking about right now, but that's where things are going. So I did not program that feature yet. But imagine a day, couple years from now when the executive can say, here's the strategy I want to execute. And because you've got all the pipes, piping, set up, triggers, alerts, icp, the right gas in the tank, the right email messages, the right social outreach apparatus, it's as easy as here's what I want to do now do it. And then the machine, which includes part people and part AI and part people powered by AI. Now that entire strategy can be executed in a moment's notice. So I think that's the promise in the future of AI. And it's, I think Covid actually birthed a lot of companies that you are going to find solve a lot of these problems because we all had a lot of time to really think about our organizations and how to build around the new world, work from home, right?

So one thing I think is really interesting is that how AI can actually enable the salesperson. So we talked about, you know, some of the automation where you might not need Helga or Helga. In that case, you didn't eliminate Helga. What you did was you allowed Helga to do the higher order thing or what we talked about earlier, that what she is best at doing. So how do you see the role of the salesperson then evolving? You know, everybody talks about be authentic, trusted advisor, develop that relationship. Like what does that mean for a sales rep and how does AI help?

Yeah, I'll give two answers. So the first is let's think about the traditional role of an sdr. That's data, digital outreach and dials. I think that further bifurcates. And so look, now the digital communications needs to be written by someone that has a high eq. And I don't know about you, I haven't read Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, but I have a suspicion that of the two types, there's probably one that has a higher propensity to have a higher eq. So I think that would be. There you go. See? So I think there's going to be an interesting level of growth that says, look, I'd rather have my wife Tracy or Michelle or someone with a high eq. Now Nick has a high EQ too. He's my cmo. So I'm not saying there's. You can never draw a broad brush like that. But I do think that you want the person with the higher EQ to write the emails, to put the ordering of the zeros and ones, because that's, after all, all it is is words on a page. So why would I give a team of seven men and three women of sellers the same responsibility when, when one person on that team who has the best EQ could write the emails? So that's the kind of marketing, slash sales, slash digital outreach piece, which, when you get that right, you can lower your cost per meeting down to sub$100. Most B2B companies are spending $800 to $1200 for a meeting. So if you can imagine if you can reduce your costs by 75 to 90% per meeting cost by doing it with a high level of eq, then you bring in the salesperson at the right time and right place. Right? They just log into their screen every morning. Oh, there's 15 calls I need to make, click. And guess what? 50 voicemails have already been left by that person. So it's just a prerecorded voicemail. Hey, this is Chad. I noticed that you were recently on the Scalex website. Welcome. I really look forward to either having a conversation with you directly or you'll work with one of our revenue acceleration experts. You know, and then it could be a CEO message, it could be a rep message, all that can be automated so that it feels personal to the prospect that, I mean, that's where things are headed. So it's an interesting world we're about to enter.

So you don't have that scary first call where you've got to get your point across in 10 or 15 seconds. It's automatically going to voicemail. And then the follow up is based on something they've already heard. Right. And they're wondering, well, my phone didn't ring. How did I get a voicemail?

Yeah, I mean, that's called touchless voicemails. And it's a real thing. It just shows as a missed call. And there it is.

So that's a little scary in itself.

Pretty interesting. Yeah. The first time I tried it, I dropped 59 voicemails to series A founders and I did them all in a 30 minute window. And all of a sudden my phone starts lighting up off the hook. And so the first time I said hello, and they go, oh, sorry, wrong number. And then I lost them. So I had the fish on the line and then I let it go. The very next call. This is Chad, CEO of Scalex. How can I Help you? I said, I up leveled my professional game. And they said, oh, I just saw a missed call. What's this about? I said, oh, because it turns out when it's a ringless voicemail, they just see the missed call and they call it back. They only listen to the recording 1/4 of the time, so 3/4. You just got to be ready to dance when they call you back. So I said, oh, well, thanks for calling. Purpose of my call. I've been tracking your organization. I see you've just recently received your Series A round. So the gun just went off, and now you've got 12 to 18 months to either hit your number or be booted from your organization. My role is to help make sure that you're not booted from your organization and that you make it to the Series B round. Do you have just a few seconds so I could tell you how we can help you do that? And this guy's like, whoa, whoa, whoa. And then my phone starts lighting up more with three, four, five people. And I'm like, sir, I know I was an interruption here, so why don't we just. I'll send you a meeting invite and we can take this offline. He goes, no, no, no, no, no. We might need, like, 15 minutes right now. And meanwhile, all these fish are jumping in the boat. And I was like, whoa, whoa. So anyway, we signed an $18,000 deal off this callback from 59 voicemails dropped. So that's when the math clicked. I was like, oof. Right, People with the new fishing line where we can get people to call us back. And now we're on a different stance when it's a cold call. Hey, Michelle, this is Chad. I'm the CEO of Scalex. Did I catch you in an okay time? You're like, what is this, a sales call? Goodbye.

What? I thought you were a client. I'm sorry, I don't know.

Imagine you calling me now. You've just called me, right? It's on your footing. You own the call. Totally different conversation, so.

Oh, I love that. So what you just demonstrated was how AI can enable a salesperson. And what you also, though, most importantly, is you showed what the human intellect needs to be, right? So the AI didn't make that decision. You knew that there was some human intervention that needed to take place. Right? The right conversation, yes. Leaving that ringless voice, that's really interesting.

And it's hard to train. Right. I've tried it with about five customers now, the ringless voicemail and at scale. So There's a company and here we're back to high eq. Danielle. Danielle Sabras from Rexy Media. When she started going out, her customer sells apparel and at the beginning of COVID Apparel did a 180 and went down by 59.5% in sales across the board. So they retooled their entire production line from apparel to masks. And she was the PR department. So they said, hey, you're our PR department. Figure it out. So she called me, I was at Winter park and she calls me at 6:30 Pacific, 7:30 my time. Well, I was in the bunker at the two weeks into Covid, right. It was about the time, if we all remember back to two weeks in. Man, I love my family, but I just need a few days away. So I was up in the mountains enjoying the scenery and walking and nobody's skiing, but it was beautiful to be there. So she calls and I'm in the bunker, so to speak, in the condo. And so we pulled a list of 1300 Chief Procurement Officers from ZoomInfo. That morning we pre recorded a 37 second voicemail that she recorded. We I said okay, I've learned because I've done this a couple times now. So we're just going to do 50 drops in an hour. And Danielle, text me if you're not getting enough calls, we can always move it up. So by 3pm that afternoon she texted and she's like, this is the most amazing day of my life. And I was like, what are you talking about? She's like, I can't tell you how much I've sold, but it's over a half a million dollars from, from concept. Think of the Alexa thing we demonstrated a minute ago. We did it on a very small scale which was voicemail drop. Now imagine when you can say I need to take over and I need to do paid ads and I need to do email and social and voicemail and, and, and all that stuff can be built into a sales and marketing machine and done with the snap of a finger. That's where the pancake flipped for me. I was like, holy cow, I am sitting on something that I've been working on for two and a half years. I wrote the book on. I didn't know how important and big this was, but this is a pretty, pretty important job that I have right now.

It's important and it's pretty cool. So I would like to. We have questions that people have submitted. We actually had a lot of questions that came in, but I'd like to open it up and see if anyone would like to ask Chad a question themselves.

Four quadrants. Based on what I see, that is a curve ball because I may have to pull my graph the inside view when they go in and they do the study. If I can picture this right now and maybe I can send it to you guys and you can post the quadrants after the call in the recording. Upper right is they have a potential to buy a lot from us and stay for a long time. That's the one quadrant that I remember. They can buy a lot and they can stay for a long time. The next one down might be they can buy a lot, but they may not stay for a long time. So that's second. Good. Now move to the left side of the screen. They can't buy a lot. They buy short period of time and they turn over. So I see Rich Blakeman here, he's the former SVP from Miller Hyman. He's helping us and build our icp. And those are some of the things that he's going to be doing with us, is saying you probably need to stay over on the right hand side because even though that little $14,000 deal felt good, you guys only quote unquote made 40% margin on it and it's gonna go away. And you just invested a lot of time for somebody you shouldn't have invested in. So the AI can plug into your salesforce, snap a finger, show you what's in the quadrants and tell you which ones to leave. Now I was like, well, wait a minute, why would a CRO want to fire half their customers? And when I talked to the head of product for Inside View, he goes, no, no, no, no, it's not fire them. It's just don't sell to more that are like that. Right. If you're going fishing, why put the bait on the line that gets those small fish in the boat? Let's go fishing for whales. So I think I got that pretty close to accurate. And I'll make sure you guys get the resource after the call.

Thanks for that, Chad. Okay, now here's another one. What can't AI can you read that mark do in sales and marketing that some people assume it can do? Do you ever need to reset people's expectations? I was able to read that. I wasn't sure I would be able to.

That is a very good question. What can't AI do? So think about heading into Covid, everything's great. Seed round, Series A, series B, series D. We got this. We nailed it. So The AI is going to say here, let's just serve up a lot of fish that look like that. And so, you know, the lines are in the water, we're trolling, and all of a sudden the fish aren't biting like they used to a week ago. What happened? Well, other fish start coming around and saying, hey, I'm with this little company called Ringcentral, and we sell unified communications. And, you know, you used to work here. We want to buy all your capacity. How much can you sell us? I was like, wait a minute. Would I rather be chasing a $14,000 deal, or would I rather go after a company who wants to buy every single activity that I have? And then that clicked. I was like, well, shoot, if there's Ringcentral, they were promoting their SDRs and BDRs from qualifiers to quota carrying sellers. And so they didn't have the capacity to follow up on their leads in a timely manner. And I was like, oh, yeah, we can solve for that. I've got reps who can drive 1000 dials per day. We'll automate the email, we'll automate the social, will make sure that the customers have a very good experience and convert at a higher level. So we're now converting at an average of 333 dials to meeting. And if you monetize that, it's about 300 bucks a meeting. And, you know, do the math on what your ACV is. I'd rather spend 300 bucks versus 1200 bucks because now I can get four times as many meetings.

So.

Really?

Good question.

Yeah, great question.

Let's pause for a second. We've got one more question here from the group, but anybody want to throw a question in? Okay, so here's one. Chad, how do we balance in this new environment, managing our teams without micromanaging an independent sales organization? How can AI help?

Help?

So we've had a few other guests were talking about, well, you know, we have a call every morning, or we have two calls a day. And some people like, wow, that's. That's oppressive. Can AI do anything in terms of helping us manage the organization?

Yeah. I heard one person right when all this was going on, we. I would do these calls with the American association of Inside Sales Professionals. This is probably week four into lockdown, and I'm on the call and there's 50 people, and one person said, hey, I need to see everything that's going on with my team. So does anybody on this call know a camera company that can install it at my reps houses. Because if they're out doing, you know, eating food and not in their office at their seat, I don't know what I'm going to do. How do I handle this? And I was like, I was you 20 years ago. I see where you're coming from, but come on, man, we're adults. Like, we can manage ourselves. The answer. So I just bought this Garmin watch about six weeks ago, maybe eight weeks. And it's when my COVID 19 started adding up on my weight factor. So I was like, I really better. I really better take care of this. So a friend of mine, Sushi, who's the CEO of maxsold, he takes a picture of his watch. He's like, here's how you take care of the COVID 19. And so I bought it. And so about two days in, it says, it buzzed at me one night. Beep. Congratulations. You've just hit 5,500 steps. I'm like, I don't remember putting that in, but okay. And so then the next day, a week later, maybe it was like, beep. You just hit 7,400 steps. Congratulations. And so the AI is actually helping me become a better, more fit person. It manages my oxygen levels, it checks all this stuff and puts it in the cloud. And so I liken this watch to what's going on with management of salespeople. Right? So there's another company. Let's talk field Reps. SalesDirector. AI Bobber is the CEO. He's a good friend of mine, also a customer. And their product will integrate to your Outlook calendar and your salesforce. And so let's say this was a sales call. Within 10 minutes of the time we hang up this call, I'll get a text and say, hey, Chad, how'd the meeting go with. With Michelle and Mark? I'd be like, oh, fine. And I try to stump the AI by the way, it's kind of fun sometimes. So I'll say, went great or super califragilistic expialidocious. Right? So you have a little fun with it. And sometimes the AI doesn't quite know what that word is. I'm sorry, I don't understand what you just said. Right. But if you just use normal human language and say, it went fine. Great. Is the close date still June 30th? Yes. What's the next step? And by the way, think about it. You can actually talk to your phone nowadays, right? So you can talk to your phone and say. And then it'll type it in. So very Touchless updates to your CRM. It's pretty fabulous. So, yeah, I mean, if you want to call it micromanagement, you can call it micromanagement, but I certainly don't feel micromanaged by my watch and rep. Shouldn't feel micromanaged by those kinds of tools and technologies.

Very good. So we had a question from Jacques. Would you like to ask your question?

Oh, Jackie.

Oh, Jackie. I'm sorry, I misread.

Jackie's on the line. What's going on?

Jackie's in the house.

Hey, Jackie.

Well, I've been a member of Chance for a long time, but really just a user of Scalex for about two months. And, you know, with COVID everything going on, there's, you know, we can't always execute on what we want to execute every day. But that damn AI, it works when I can't work. And it's really been helpful. And I'm going to plan on having a conversation with Chad on how it can take me to the next level and integrate with the social media, because one of the things I was so impressed with at the beginning of the call when you talked about bringing authenticity into the AI process, and I don't know if anyone actually said that because my Internet cut out, but I think that that's the difference is that when you can deliver someone that is kind of your, you know, your ICP to you in a time when they can hear you and want to fill a need and you can be authentic, think, that's when the real conversation starts.

Fabulous. And thank you, by the way, for being a Scalex customer. There's another customer called Newton Talent, and they sell recruiting. And so you would think, what a terrible time to be prospecting for recruiting, right? I've heard so many people say, oh, no, just shut down the doors and let's not prospect during these times. And that's like. That's the silliest thing. So Newton Talent comes in and she's empathetic in her approach, and it says, hey, you're probably like us. You've either had to let some people go, you've had to downsize, or you furloughed and you're planning to bring some people back. Have you thought about what happens in July, August, when the market comes back and we may very well have one of the best resurgences in the history of the world. In Q4, my organization, Newton Talent, helps companies, blah, blah, blah. And it's all because the first line is hits and lands right between the. Oh, yeah, I haven't thought about that, okay, this person just caught me at the right time. They empathized with me, and boom. I looked the other day and I was like, I don't want to exaggerate this. When I'm in my screen share and I'm like, I bet you she. I saw 50 or 60 replies. I go, I don't know, maybe she's up to 100 by now. It was 213 replies in a month. And it's because she empathized with the buyer. And by the way, you can't just connect on LinkedIn and then say, hey, can we come grab a cup of coffee? No, you have to use the Josh Braun approach that says there's $0 in the ATM. When you start, you have to say you have to deposit money into the ATM before you can take money out. So a deposit is, hey, have you thought about this? Here's a cool resource you might like to check out. You might not even say, Chad Burmeister, Scale X. You just say Chad. And they're like, who's this Chad dude? He seems to be adding some value. And then you just make a bunch of 20 to $50 deposits over the course of four weeks. And then you may never even need to ask for a meeting. They just go, hey, can we meet sometime? You sound like you're knowledgeable in this area. So that's the trick is, if you give the strategy to entry level college grads, guess what they're gonna do? They're just gonna carpet bomb the entire market. So a lot of people think, oh, bots are bad because they're just gonna carpet bomb the market. Yeah, they will if you tell them to. But if they're programmed by smart people, then they work for us as augmentation and not against us.

So, Chad, I got a question I want to ask you. Conversation Intelligence. You talked about that, and this one scares me a little bit. You talk about how AI can listen to our sales conversations, and it can listen to the patterns, it can listen to the tonality, and then it gives us feedback after. And that seems maybe a little intrusive, but how does, how does that work?

Yeah, so Xecvision was one of the first. They used to be called Team Vis, Team Visibility. They changed to Execvision, then Gong and Chorus came out, and now there's four or five other companies that do this. So it plugs into your Outlook calendar. If you've got a Zoom meeting, it calls into the bridge, and then the Chorus AI bot shows up in your room. I think it probably showed up here today because it shows up on all my calls. But you guys may have booted my chorus AI bot. So I won't get the value of the conversion of this conversation.

We were a little creeped out by it, Chad.

We might have.

I'm gonna have to have a stealth mode chorus coming in here soon. But it is legal. It's illegal to have stealth mode. It has to be announced and show up on the screen and all that. The current model, there was a lady named Sabrina Atienza who was with a company called qrius IO with a Q. And so Gerhard Trottner from Selling Power and me and Sabrina had dinner five years ago in San Francisco and she said, yeah, you know where I see this industry going. And they had raised a million dollars at the time. Where the industry's headed is that that's cool. To capture the conversations and do post mortem analysis of sales calls, but the calls already dead. Where it's headed is that we'll be able to do call conversation intelligence inside the conversation. Right. So I think the choruses and the gongs currently have a really nice market cap in the hundreds of millions of dollars for postmortem and the huge value. I don't want to minimize that. It can write back to your Salesforce. If I've just hired a new CRO, he can go in and hear all my conversations with all my prospects for the last several years, my reps. It's all written in Salesforce. He can search for a word like a competitor. Right. And it just pops up. And so it's hugely valuable. But imagine a world. In fact, if you'd like, I could share. If I have share screen capability, I think I'd like to show you this two minute video of that.

Mm, I think that's great.

All right, let me make sure that I'm if while I'm pulling this up. If make sure I have share rights. That would be amazing. Let me find it.

I'm excited to see this, Chad.

Well, this may creep you out the most, so prepare yourself. This is called Balto Software, their partner of ours. And I will. This is the exclamation point on the whole sentence. So here we go. It's only two minutes. So tell me what got you interested in our solution to start with. Interesting. It sounds like you're saying this product might actually be a good fit for you.

Is that right? Balto's smart checklist helps reps execute the key milestones that drive successful calls. By always keeping reps on track, managers Know that conversations are carried out effectively and no calls slip through the cracks when the rep hears the objection, like it's too expensive, Balto identifies the objection and instantly provides the rep a successful rebuttal.

Let's see if we can find an option that works with your budget. Is there a particular price point you're targeting for this purchase?

By providing reps with instant, highly targeted suggestions throughout the call, Balto saves calls before it's too late.

Hey, I totally get it. I totally understand. I'm just like that, too.

When the rep gets nervous and starts talking too much, Balto hears it and reminds him to pause and let the other person talk.

Could you elaborate on that?

Balto gets rid of the bad habits that lose calls and replaces them with highly effective habits that close calls. With Balto leadership can easily identify what's working and what's not, and then instantly push the winning strategies live across the entire team. Grow your business by empowering your people to make the most of every conversation.

So think about what you just saw, right? That last piece of this is exactly what I'm talking about. Marketers have done this for decades. They say ab test what works in a sales role. Hey, Mark, I'm going to need you to change your opening talk track from hey, this is Mark and Mark and I see you, you know, downloaded a white paper. So anyway, I know I'm an interruption, but, you know, maybe could we get on a call in the next week? That's terrible. Now imagine we push the strategy live that says you just read it over there on the screen and nobody sees you reading it. And once you get good at it, it becomes second nature, unconscious competence. But now it's hey, mark. Chad Burmeister, CEO of Scalex AI. I realize I'm interruption. Do you have 27 seconds so I could tell you why I called? You know, do you want the first one or do you want the second one? I can guarantee you if we can push out these strategies to reps in real time, either postmortem is good first step or inside the conversation and bring on AI all day long. I would probably not gotten fired from my very first job out of college if I would have had AI for.

Sales and a bit like guided flight. But I like the part, Chad, where it tells you you're talking too much. That's very handy.

I know. I just get a little card put on my desk when I'm on calls, just calls. And Mark has this little card and it says, stop talking. It's very subtle, very subtle.

As CEO first break all the rules. So you can do it everywhere.

I know, right? I can do whatever. But one thing I was going to note on that very powerful is how salespeople, big age, just big issue that we have is when salespeople, the best salespeople, what do we do with them? We typically promote them into management. But yeah, we don't give them any of the training and development that they need to develop their teams. So this could really, something like that could greatly augment that process as well. I find it kind of interesting. So with that, I believe we are, we have wrapped up an amazing, a really, really interesting and engaging roundtable. Chad, thank you so very much for being with us. Chad Burmeister, Scale XI. Look for him on LinkedIn. We will be on YouTube and again, sales Globe. Mark and me, I'm Michelle. We're so happy to have you guys join us. Privileged to have you join us every week and know we are here to solve your biggest sales problems. See you all next week and have a wonderful weekend.

Thanks everybody for joining.