[Leadership] Founder selling and how AI will change how team's work with Angie Schwab

The next two years, I predict, are going to be really wild for all of us. You've got companies that are trying to figure out how to piece these together, and then you've got the employees that are there trying to figure out how do we burn these. The entire process of each company is kind of going to be upended in the next couple of years where people are going to learn to use their brains more for strategy and less of these kind of manual things, because the manual things will be taken care of by AI and processes.

It's a great to have you on the podcast. We're really excited to have you here.

Thank you so much for the invitation. I'm excited to be here and to talk with you today and hopefully plant a couple little nuggets for your listeners.

Yeah, should be good. Looking forward to that.

Great.

So we always jump in with one question first for all our guests and it is tell us a crazy or funny story about your career or life.

Yeah, I think life in clinical research is crazy and funny. You start off as one thing, and I'll tell you a little bit about my background, but I started off as a clinician. I never in my wildest dreams thought I would be a CEO or in software development or any of those things. I think it's just keep your eyes open. Anything and everything will happen when you're in clinical research.

Yeah, that's good. I mean, I would love to hear a little bit about that transition to going from that to now CEO and going moving into software. I'm sure that was crazy. I mean, maybe, just maybe want to give us a little background on yourself first?

Yeah, absolutely. So my background is I have a master's degree in genetic counseling. And what that is, it's a very like clinician driven career where you meet with individuals that maybe have a family history of disease and they want to prevent it or they have a genetic condition themselves. So, always fascinated about research and about genetics, but once I started seeing patients, I realized, wow, we need more therapies. And I was just pulled into research and thought, this is where I want to be. And then I quickly transitioned, became a manager of a cardiovascular research team and then a director of research development. But also during that time, I got my hands on probably over 200 different therapeutics, drugs, devices, you name it, I was part of that discussion. Should we be part of the trial or not? And wow, there are some amazing trials and there were some massive failures. I think anyone who's in research, like you, learn as much from the failures as you do the positive things, at least, hopefully. And then from there, while I was there, I was like, we need better systems. Like, this is not working. We need project management systems, we need electronic data capture. We need to capture data from patients without doing on pieces of paper. Like, my whole career has been spent on how can I possibly never see a piece of paper again in my life and in research, you have binders and binders of paper. So that's where my passion of software came in. And how can we streamline things through automation and directly working with our patients to capture data? And with trialinks, it was just time. I was like, I had developed three clinical trial software systems at a specific institution, but their goal was never to bring these to the world. And I wanted to have global impact. So I said, okay, if I want global impact, I'm going to have to do this myself. And So I started TrialInx. And the goal of Trilinks is to help people develop better studies so that hopefully we don't have as many failures out there. We do things better from the beginning and then we document it electronically throughout the whole process. So how it works with trial links is a researcher comes to us and says, hey, I have. I wanted a cardiology trial and it's a drug study and these are our endpoints. And then it automatically uses about 500 AI agents and assistants to help them go through everything. How are you storing your drug, how are you processing your lab samples, how are you reporting your adverse events? So it takes them down all those crazy pathways to think through everything up front. And once you lock that in, then the documents use automation to write themselves. So in the past, you spent months writing protocols. It's now 15 seconds. So 15 seconds for the protocol, the SAP, the investigator brochure, XY, like all of the things at the same time based on the same data. So we've been able to do approximately 45 clinical trials so far and very happy with it. They've sailed through IRB and ethics committees, and now we're just ready to grow and I'm excited to be here.

The craziness with what AI and just these automation workflows have brought to, I think, so many different industries where this is like, I was thinking about this the other day, it's like there's all of these things that, like, had to get done and they, like, just had done and then you needed, like, people to do them and it took forever. And so, like, they would get done slowly, they'd get done poorly in a first rent and now literally like usually it takes 15 seconds. Right. And it's probably formatted perfectly for exactly all of the different, you know, government bodies that have to, you know, sift through to prove all this stuff. Right. So, yeah, it's just amazing, I guess, like where, where we come from in the last couple of years, I think.

Yeah. And it's crazy. The reason we're talking today is that we had a short conversation, Angie and I was. I quickly became a fanboy of what you're doing because I love science and I love AI. Right. So I basically just wanted to talk about it again. So I quickly put you on the podcast. But yeah, it's really impressive. Some of the things that I was really interested in though, from like a commercial sense of it, is that you have a very extensive background in clinical and in the clinical research space. And he's on a bit of sort of a sales side of business development consultancy. However, you're now a founder led sales company and I just really would like to hear your opinions on transitioning into that and what the challenges of it.

I mean, wow. Okay. First thing is like when you get a science degree, they teach you nothing about business. I mean like nothing. Not even like how to budget, like not so thing. So certainly nothing about marketing or sales or budgets or like even team leadership and management. Like none of those things are in a science degree.

So they budget in the cost of your experiment. Not even that far.

Right.

Literally nothing.

Nothing. Literally nothing. So when you get into the real world, you got to learn all those things hands on. Gratefully I had that experience. But jumping into the CEO side, like, even when I was at an academic center, I didn't have to sell things except my own ideas, which still was a thing. But you know what I mean, it wasn't like, let's negotiate every single term of this agreement. And now going on the sales side, it is a lot of passion. I think that's what probably draws people in is they know that I know the problem and have a passion for solving it and want to work with them to solve it. But there still is so much to learn about listening to the customer, understanding where they're at, understanding their exact pain point, so you can provide a good solution to them. It's a whole nother skill set. I feel like I'm this far in. I really appreciate those who have that sales expertise.

I wonder too. I think this is also part of being a founder. Like you've built this thing and it's like, I just want to show this to everybody. Right. It's like, I've built this, like, really awesome, like, product service, and I just want to, like, show it to everybody, which is if I just show it to you, you'll probably want to buy it because, like, it's so cool. And I built it specifically to solve all your problems. But, like, to your point is, it's really not about that. It's about, like, stepping back, pausing, asking better questions, understanding. Like, first of all, do they even have the problem that your product or service solve? Right. And, you know, so I'm sure there were some learnings along the way there.

Yeah. And in the world of being a founder, they call that product market fit. You go out with your favorite thing, and you think it's going to solve all the world's problems, and you realize those were just your problems, and no one wants to pay to solve your problems. They want to pay to solve their problems.

Yeah, exactly.

One of the other things I think that is in the sales world is known that actually the best salespeople have thick skin. They can take you on the chin. When somebody doesn't like what they're doing, they think they're wrong. However, I think if you're the founder and it's your thing, like, no one wants their baby to be called ugly.

Right.

So I think that's probably an extra challenge if you're. You're out there pushing something and somebody doesn't like it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You kind of have to emotionally remove yourself a little bit. And yeah. That thick skin of saying, my job here is to solve a problem. It's not to be in love with my product. And you have to switch that mindset.

That is a great mindset. Wow.

We're staying in that quote.

Yeah, go ahead. Oh, that's really good reference, Bone.

If you're the first go, and then afterwards, it's ours.

Fine.

And I think one of the other, I think key things that you've met that you mentioned earlier is the passion component and how that passion comes through. And I think that is something that many founders have, otherwise they probably would be starting companies. So I. They have that passion, but I think what's. What's challenging is, as you look to grow, is how do you transfer that passion, that knowledge, that. That inherent understanding of the market and the problems and expertise that you have, how do you transfer that to somebody else who's now going to ultimately have to start selling on your behalf? And that is really, really hard to do to find those people. And I've definitely seen Founders, like, get really frustrated with salespeople that they hire, and they're like, they just can't do it. It's not working. And, you know, it's because it's a very different process to, like, sell something that you are not like the founder of.

Yeah. And you don't know all the backstory. You don't know why everything was developed the way that it was and how everything interconnects and all the value that you bring. It's. It's a lot to come in as a salesperson and learn all of those things as much as possible. But what I do with my team is really like, just join all the calls. Like, we do this as a team. This isn't just like, let me train you and hand it over. It's. I'm here too, as a resource, and I want to be that resource as we continue to grow, because I get valuable feedback on every one of those calls. I find out what our customers really care about, what maybe we're missing, and I don't want that to also go through a third person. At least as of right now, you know, we're still growing, so I want to hear it firsthand from the customer, so I could ask a question if needed. The other thing, as a small company and growing is not only do you have the salespeople, the salespeople also come customer success. People. Like, we all wear multiple hats. Right. So it's not just like, seal the deal and run away. It's no like, you sealed the deal. Now let's help make sure it's a wonderful experience for our customers and our clients that are coming on board. So it takes an additional special person that can wear that hat too.

Yeah. And I think that's something that when you're looking for these early stage hires, which I'm sure, you know, maybe I would love to hear your experience with this is you have to find a person that's willing to do more than their job description. You have to find the person willing to work with limited resources, the person that's willing to, like, you know, thrive in, like, the ambiguity of a situation. People. And oftentimes it's not. The people that, you know, come from structure, come from, you know, resource background. Right. It can be really challenging, I think, to go from experience like that into the fire pit of a. Of an early stage setup.

Absolutely. Because at a bigger company, it's just inherently different mindset. You are given very clear instructions on what you can and cannot do. There's SOPs and policies and procedures so narrow, you know exactly what to do on a daily basis, for the most part. In general, in a small startup, you're creating those SOPs, policies, procedures, everything, while you're doing the work. So it's like, as they said, you're building the roller coaster as you're speeding down the hill. That's life. And you have to be okay with it.

Yeah, I used to joke then it was only half a joke, but when I was in smaller companies, in the lab still, that I would be changing the bins and fixing the incubator. But this afternoon I need to present to the board and it's like, this is the big, the gamut of what I'm doing. And then you're like, where's this SOP that doesn't exist? Go write that first, right?

Yeah. Figure it out and then take a video of it and then write the sop. Like, teach everybody else.

Yeah. Oh, this hit. Yeah. Did you? I guess. So it sounds like you have made a couple of sales hires. How, how did you kind of approach that or how have you sort of approached the hiring process to bring, you know, people into the team? Like, what kind of things have you been looking for?

So for me, yeah, it is that flexibility. They have to understand clinical trials. They've. You've got to have some background. They've had to feel pain in some way in order to help us, you know, understand the issues and convey it. So for me, even if you were the most amazing software salesperson at, let's say, Adobe, but that doesn't reflect at all in the clinical research space. It, it would take me so long to onboard you. I just don't have that time as a founder. I can't. So even though you might be amazing, the sync it would take for me to train you up on those important things, I just can't do it. So I need someone who knows clinical trials, who's been in this space, someone who's incredibly flexible, someone who needs very little oversight, who can run a project management board and update me there so in the morning I can look at it and see, oh, this is where this, this, this, this and this is happening. Someone who I don't have to message and say, where is this? As a founder? And if you're working in a small team, I will tell anybody who's like thinking of that. If they have to ask you where something is, they're already angry. They don't have time to remember all the things everyone should do and touch base with them. They are trying to run a business. So they need you to be on top. You, you deliver at all times. Be very transparent and set up the processes to do that and you'll make people incredibly happy.

Yeah, I think the proactive nature is super important and I think that works not only in small companies, but even in larger companies. It's like if you can be the like I got it person which is oh, it's like a problem comes up, it's like hey I got it. And if you can be that person, you're going to stand out and you're going to be successful one way or another, then you also have to deliver on it and get it done well.

But you do.

Yeah. That's the kind of attitude that you need in the early day. Let's take a quick break from the podcast to talk about what we have going on over here at Succession. We work with 40 plus life science sales companies to help them find more opportunities and close more deals. We provide a range of services to support your sales growth. So whether it's increasing top of funnel opportunities with done for you lead generation in person or virtual sales training reinforced by personalized training plans, recruiting top sales talent, or just building custom AI workflows to help make your team more efficient focused on selling. So if you're ready to transform your sales strategy, visit Succession Bio and schedule a call with Nick and I and we'll see how we can support you.

Something else you said in there that is sort of as a bit of a penny drop moment for me and something you said and I'm not sure.

If.

I would have phrased it this way before to be said so you talking about you need to be able to have felt the pain your customer has felt. And I always say it's great if a rep knows what the customer is talking about or salesperson knows what they're going through. And by that I always thought in my mind is more about understanding their technical language or something but I think you mentioned it in a way that is actually having empathy with the person you're trying to sell to. And if you have that empathy with what they're going for and what they're selling to, you can actually much easily, more easily articulate the pain, the problem and also how you would solve that. And I think like I'm just sort of speaking back to you what you said too because it was something that resonated with me.

Yeah, I agree. The empathy goes a really long way. People are in pain. I don't know if you know but 20, 25 has been a year. Lots of things are happening. And no matter what, I don't think any of us are immune to lots of struggles and strife and stress in this year. And if there's anything you can do to empathize with someone and make their lives easier, it's going to make the sale so much faster.

Maybe switching topics a little bit here would be how are you kind of thinking about growth mode now? We were chatting right before this, but you just kind of redid. The website looks incredible, by the way. So anybody out there looking at what an example of a cool website is, check it out. We'll put the link in the notes. But yeah, it looks beautiful.

Thank you.

Really thinking about growth. So how, how are you approaching it? Like, what are the different ways that you're thinking about making that happen?

Wow. What's been wild? So in full disclosure, we pretty much bootstrapped this company, got some very small angel investor money, bootstrapped it, got some early customers to say, hey, I can do this one thing. Can we make a deal? And then I can do this next thing. And then like, we grow as we bring in customers and we do what we need to to keep building and going forward. Interesting conversations. Lots of people take it different ways. Some are like, I want VCs involved right away. I want big names involved right away. But how I've approached growth is I surround myself with incredibly brilliant people, advisors and consultants that know this space. They can give me good insights into what the problems are and how we're solving them and maybe some things that I'm missing. And we're pretty much going down that path. So we may take on some more angel funds or potentially private equity, but we're honestly not even knocking on doors of VC's not there yet. And as we continue to grow, I am 100% customer focused. My job is to ensure that I'm delivering on my promises and I'm making something that people value. My goal is not to just stack and say, I got X amount in investment. Yay, I'm amazing. And now I've made it. Like, to me, that's not a made it metric. A made it metric is I have happy customers. So that's where I've been focusing my time. That said, with investment funds comes the ability to serve more customers. So I am going down that path. And yeah, so we'll entertain a little bit more on the angel private equity side as we continue to grow. But that's not my main focus, if that makes sense.

What about from like the sales and marketing side, how are you thinking about that? Like, how are you thinking, okay, cool. Now we need to get customers, right? Like, how are you thinking about your acquisition and the different challenges there?

And boy, do we need to. So being founder led sales and founder led marketing and founder led everything, right, you start carving out little slices of your budget that you can start throwing out little things like, let's get a little bit better website and LinkedIn presence and then try to get out onto podcasts like yours. Thank you. And just get on more stages. So we were at dia, it was Whale Tank. I was able to present there. That was a phenomenal opportunity. I am doing more of those things. So maybe it's not the traditional way of like, let's message 8,000 people on LinkedIn and see who hits. It's more of, let me get out in front of the key customers that I think we can really help right now. And where do I find them? And for me, where I find them is at these big conferences and gatherings where it's larger sponsors, CROs or academic leaders who want to bring in solutions for their teams and make life easier, given the new AI world that we're living in.

Yeah, so it's like, basically, how do you.

Yeah.

Who are the list of customers and people that I want to get in front of and then where do they hang out? What do they do? And then how do I go and get speaking slots there? How do I. You mentioned your website with LinkedIn presence. How do you sort of put this, like, aura, you know, around the company so that people are attracted to, you know, wanting to talk to you, to come in and actually, like, take a meeting. And frankly, you're in a hot space around AI, so I'm sure there's lots of people that like, want to learn more and want to dig into the details on how things work.

But surprisingly, it's also really confusing. So for us, we make documents, right? You're like, oh, but there's like a million of these AI writers. Like, you could even use ChatGPT to do it. So because it gets crowded, in essence of medical writing, we have to distinguish ourselves. And every company has that challenge now with that AI sticker in the front. Because every company should be AI now. Like, if you are in tech, you are AI now. And how do we differentiate ourselves from other people? So for us, how I've approached that is, no, we're not just a word plugin that helps you craft a paragraph or reword it. We essentially help you develop the entire Study operationally, we bring your team together to design a fully robust trial and then the documents come from that. So it's really a switch of mentality in the research world because they're used to start on documents and then copy paste data downstream. Now I'm saying no, let's make the data and let the documents make themselves.

Well, it's kind of, I mean it's the same thing. If you think about like prompting, right? If you are using ChatGPT or any model, if your prompt sucks, you're going to get a terrible output. And so what you're basically doing here is prompt engineering the documents by saying, let's go get all, let's get an insane prompt. That's incredible. And then now because of that, the output is going to be flawless and then you'll sail on through and get everything approved, no questions, all of that good stuff.

And it's strategically marrying the two, automation and AI, which people also get confused because they think they're the same thing. But for maybe your listeners that don't know, automation is literally like I put something here and it's going to be put exactly there. It's like a direct programming, one to one relationship. This goes there.

It's deterministic, right? It's very.

Absolutely. So you can think of it that way. AI is the creative genius, loosely that can help you like creatively bring things together and write paragraphs and then you know, you can use prompts to have it be a brain but what it cannot do is structure things well. So you have to bring in both structure and creativity to make these things.

Happen as quickly with changing back gab to the comment, you was about growth and it was about how you're just going to get out there and be in front of people. And Harrison and I obviously run a company that does sales training and obviously advocates for sales teams and obviously lead generation. But we don't advocate for everybody in every scenario because it's not always right. And I think if your goal is to get your first five customers and you have or your next 10 customers, these can be done by founder led sales. And I think that's really key that when you're founder led sales is about your presence and your exposure. So the way that you're going through I think great is when you get to those next steps of growth that you need to start thinking about what processes you're going to put in place, what AI you're going to use, what tools and what teams you need to actually scale that to a hundred Customers. But I think founders go, oh, I need to sell, I need a sales team when they only really need four people to get an extra funding. And I think that's a misconception, that sales means massive team.

Yeah, like hiring. Hiring people to close deal versus like owning it as the founder first.

Yeah, yeah. But I can tell you why some founders go down that path because it's easier. A lot of us are the technical people or the medical people, we don't know sales. So we're like, please let me hire someone, do it for me. So it's a learning process to go through. But I also love how you pointed out that this is all staged. And what you're saying is like, okay, now that we have this baseline of X number of customers who've gone through the platform, we refined it, now we're in a really good place to scale dramatically. Yes, that's. We're absolutely going to need a sales team and a marketing team, and that's going to be critical for us.

One thing I've also found, curious to get your thoughts on this, and maybe you're not quite there yet, but is when. When you get like, there's. There's kind of like two. Two ways I think about, like messaging is when you get somebody on a call, it's very easy to in most cases differentiate your product, differentiate your service, talk about how it works in comparison to their problems of what exactly that they're facing. So you kind of have this, like, there's a warm conversation and it's occurring. And so, like, I have full control over the narrative and the story here. And like, we crush it once we get somebody on the phone. And that is like, one thing that I think people have. And so then I think they get a false sense of, wow, we have product market fit where we can now go, like, outbound to people. Whereas, like, that is a completely different motion. And it's like, how do I get somebody to, like, respond in 100 words or less to, like, know what it is that you can kind of do in the problems that you can solve? And it's like, that is a much different message than the message that you're trying to use and you're using in conversation? And I think that's also a disconnect that people. That people, you know, have. It's. So it's. Yeah, like, the two don't always go hand in hand. And so you have to have like, you know, basically think about if you're going to go outbound, what is like our offer what is our thing that's going to like catch people's attention and like a crowded marketplace and where everybody's, you know, bombarded with messengers left and right. So yeah, I definitely kind of think about those two being separate.

Yeah, I see this all the time. On the receiving end of LinkedIn as well. I'll get messages that are like this long and I'm like, nope, no time close. Where if someone sends me like quick two sentences of like, hey, Angie, great to connect with you. This is what I do. If I can help you, let me know. And then I'm like, oh yeah, actually I think you might be able to. But like, I don't have all day to read your three paragraphs about how amazing you are. Like, I don't.

It's actually funny you say that. Like we've done a bunch of obviously LinkedIn messaging and different testing of different messages and we always find that like the one sentence question or the, like the one or two sentence questions always do and outperform, you know, the longer form messaging. So yeah, it's a kind of alignment. We're just saying I think everybody's attention span is getting shorter and shorter so you have to figure out. And I think too like the way you framed that question there too was it was very song like, it wasn't like our hey, let's jump on a call, might have a 30 minute meeting. It was if I can help you in any way, you know, would love to or like, you know, just let me know. And it's like super casual. It's like you sort of detach from the outcome. And I think that's something that a lot of people.

I really like that you said it as well for another reason because you're the founder owner of a pretty cool company that's doing some amazing things, right? You would be the what we would call high ict. People want to get to you because you're an important profile and can make decisions. And often I hear when we're talking about messaging being short and succinct and friendly, everyone says, oh, CEOs don't want that, it needs to be professional. And I think they just forget that CEOs like to go to the pub and have a beer too. And we can be casual as well. Right? It's not. Yeah.

Proper punctuation, please. But it doesn't have to be dear sir or dear Madam, you know.

Can.

You just accept that you're going to forgive my punctuation in emails going forward? Because that's not my strong Point I got Grammarly. We're fine.

Well, that's what, that's what the AI tools are for nowadays. Exactly.

Grammarly's help me.

I would say we've also, as we're growing our LinkedIn presence and getting out there to the world, it's been interesting because we thought our ideal customer profile was totally different when we started the company than where it is today. And it's been really intriguing going down that path. So if you have just a second, I'd love to share that story with you. So as we started, I, you know, I started as a clinician and I hated writing these documents. So my first customer said, I said, you guys, you need these clinicians. You're spending your weekends and your nights writing, and you're not good at it. Let's be real. Like, they don't love doing it and it's not that great. So, like, let me help you. And then I would get pushback a lot. Like, oh, gosh, I don't have budget for this. Like, even if it was like $99 a month, I don't have budget. My institution doesn't have budget. We can't bring on a software provider. Like, it escalated quickly into the, I cannot possibly use anything to help me. And I was like, that's so interesting because, like, they'll actually tell me, hey, Angie, could you just write it? So then I was like, huh? So I was like, all right, well, let's open up a services model. Sure. Get near abstract. We'll write it. And as a services model, they could contract. Contract with us, but they couldn't technically, as an entire platform of bringing software in. So you have to understand your customers, what they can and cannot do within their budgets and their organizations in order to help them.

Yeah, that's super interesting. So what did you find then became the actual ICP now that you have here?

Yeah. So it kind of bifurcated. We've got the group that's like, just write my documents for me. I acknowledge I don't love doing it. And we've got a small budget. Just write them. And then the other side is the software access. And the software access now goes really high up. We're talking heads of clinical innovation or technology innovation at top 10 CROs, top 10 pharma. Those are the ones that want to implement this over their entire organization for all their medical writers, for all of the people involved in the clinical trial process. So those are dramatically different customer profiles.

And is that because they're looking. We often talk about going more Senior and solving a business problem, et cetera. That was with the clinicians. It's more about how can I get my documents written. It's a pain, but you know, it's not critical essentially that gets done. Whereas with the business level people, it's more like how am I going to get better data that's going to give me better trials, that's going to basically save me billions because I'm not failing. Late stage and efficiency trade off of.

What we do right now.

Yes, it's how do we do it better, how do we do it faster, how do we decrease your risk of these coffee paste manual errors that happen all the time? So all of it together is what the higher individuals are looking for. They want that kind of strategy and they want to bring in AI. Obviously everybody right now is thinking, how can I streamline our operations using AI and how do we plug all these pieces in together when there's so many AI companies that are out there? The next two years, I predict, are going to be really wild for all of us. So you've got, you've got companies that are trying to figure out how to piece these together and then you've got the employees that are there trying to figure out how do we burn these? Like the entire process of each company is kind of going to be upended in the next couple years where people are going to learn to use their, their brains more for strategy and less of these kind of manual things because the manual things will be taken care of by AI and processes. So, yeah, I don't know what your guys's thoughts are, but it's going to be interesting.

I mean, I can tell you one thought is I what used to take, you know, 10 to 15 people at a company can be done by one person. Now when it comes to like prospecting outbound, go to market, a lot of like, like orchestrating these things. All you need is like a couple hundred bucks, play credits, helpful tools where you can get data from and like works of magic and you could have one person doing mostly just like bits and people. It's pretty wild. Yeah, yeah.

The only challenge might need somebody that's competent enough to run those tools because they're not many of those people around at the moment, I think. So we still think that they're really easy, like, oh, do this. No, there's a lot more involved than just do this. You have to understand how to prompt, you have to understand to test the output, you know. And I think that the challenge, which is probably why we work with A lot of clients is the skill sets to actually set that sort of stuff up is.

Yeah.

What the challenging piece is, not whether.

You need those people because it's interesting. Where have you seen you're going to have like more. I think you're going to end up in a world where you have more generalists but are more technical. Like, I think there's going to be this level where people become more technical naturally because they have to leverage AI automations, they have to be able to like understand APIs, they have to be able to understand how tools like mcp, how these things connect and communicate. Like maybe there's going to be an interface in the future. They don't have to worry about this stuff. But I think if you really want to get ahead of the curve and be the person that like is the one that people go to to get this stuff done and like runs these types of teams and makes this stuff happen. I think you got to get into leads and you got to really like I've just gone deep on cursor and so I'm like, unlike learning to code, I'm getting deep into it. I've made, look at you been like great for like our lead generation for like us as a company. And like that's the type of stuff I think a lot of people should be thinking about doing because that is where the Future is going 100%.

And just setting up the processes as you have, implementing them into all these other companies, kind of like what we do, we implement process improvements and AI into companies changes the ball game. It changes their cost, their trajectories, their capabilities. But imagine when we're all at that level in five years. Well, not everybody's going to be there, let's be honest. There'll be people who don't adopt and then this is what's going to happen.

The reason I started getting into AI, not to go make this too much about AI and less about science and stuff, but the reason I started getting into the AI tools and I probably two years ago, roughly where I started just interacting with it was I have a sort of almost a direct analogy that for a period of time when I worked in stem cells, I ended up in what is induced peripheral stem cells when they had only been like really just invented slash discovered in a few years and it was just by chance. So then once I'd worked in that for seven years, I'd been in that for like 70% of the time they arrived. I don't think I was particularly a specialist, but almost De facto I was because I had the experience. So I got involved with more AI tools in the fact that, hey, if I just get on this early, I'll be way beyond everybody else. No matter how good I am at this. I'm not a naturally computer tech based person. I'm a scientist. And I think that working with Harrison, who's pretty geeky about this stuff, I can seem that maybe I'm not ahead of the curve. But when I talk to everybody else, I definitely am. And that's what I'd say to everyone. You need to just adopt now. You will make mistakes, you will fail, but you need to adopt it now because it's going to make your life better.

So do we end it there?

Nah, let's do something else. So different. Don't let me get the last word. That's what I always want.

Yeah, that's true. Well, edgy. Honestly, it's been a pleasure. It's been really fun talking with you, hearing your experiences, your stories. Maybe if we could end with one thing from you is if there's something that you think sales reps should stop doing where that would help level up the perception of salespeople in the industry. What do you think that might be?

Well, first off is that really long LinkedIn intro. Don't be doing that anymore, please. Number one, please don't bombard me anymore with those really long intros. I appreciate the sales people who are less attached to the outcome. As you were saying, they're more attached to. How can I help you than. Here's my solution. Watch me do it. And those you will always get me to pay more attention to. Like, hey, this is a unique thing in one sentence, how I do it differently. I think I can help you. Like this sentence 2. Are you interested? Can I help you?

Yeah. Yes or no?

Quick. Yeah. And I love those. So you can send those to me, LinkedIn world. But please, not the really long, long paragraphs and pages.

I've already written a pitch for our services in LinkedIn while you're talking, following your exact plan.

Hello. Awesome. Well, thank you, Angie. Really appreciate you coming on. It's been great talking to you.

Thank you both.