[Sales] Insights from the first month at Succession with Keith Daly

I think nowadays being a generalist in a lot of cases might be better than being a expert in one specific vertical just because you have access to so many hell, like cloud code, for instance, where it is an expert in all of those things. And so by you having broader knowledge of a bunch of different areas, it makes you more well rounded to where you can just like get more done faster, more efficiently because you have like literally the little experts at your fingertips to do all of the details for you.

Yeah, 100% agree. I, I definitely agree with that. And also I think when you're meeting so many different companies on a, on a daily basis, you know, it's great to have that kind of wide knowledge where you can, you know, just kind of like have a conversation about a lot of things.

So the full phrase, if you want it, is a jack of all trades is a master of none, but often times better than a master of one.

Hey.

Well, welcome to the podcast. Welcome back, everyone. We got Keith, who's going to give us a little intro to himself. He's a new employee of succession, but as always, we're going to make him start with the horrific question of tell us a funny or crazy story you've got.

Well, great. Thanks for the intro, Nick. And also thanks very much for throwing this question on me just two seconds ago. So I appreciate that off the top of my head, I mean, of course, trying to keep it some bit respectable as well. I can probably think back to maybe the first time I did like a sales trip for my previous role. So, you know, I was working as a, as a sales rep for a US company. I got to make the big on site trip, you know, to a couple of healthcare facilities in Houston. But no one told me in advance that Houston was like crazy, crazy hot in July. So of course I didn't prepare well. And my, let's just say my Irish skin didn't do. Didn't do very well walking around the streets of Houston. So I came back with quite a bad sunburn.

That's. Yeah, that's pretty rough. Houston's hot in the summer. Also. Muggy too.

Yeah, roasting. I think it was like more than 40 degrees for 10 days straight.

I think that's like around 100 for American listeners.

Yeah, I just want to make the joke of Houston. Keith has a problem.

But I, I had a beat. Yeah, I landed into a few healthcare facilities looking pretty red, I have to say.

They probably thought you were embarrassed.

Yeah, they just thought I was embarrassed, like constantly embarrassed.

That's it. Well, I Know, we wanted to pull this one together and get you on here. It's been about a month now, so kind of talk through your learnings, but maybe before we get through all of that, we'd love to maybe have you share some of your background with the audience and how you came about finding succession. Perfect.

Yeah, well, I think now it's like, yeah, it'll be the end of the four week today, so I mean it could be the end of the fourth year judging by how quick it's gotten so far. But yeah, so far it's been super good. But I suppose to track back a bit, I think like the rest of the succession team, I think, you know, I've started off, you know, by studying a science degree, then worked in industry for a while and kind of, you know, slowly drifted towards like a more commercial role that is kind of a bit more aligned with my personality as regard to my degree. I studied biochemistry at a university in Ireland, University of Limerick. And then after I worked kind of in several different industries. I worked in the food industry for a while in a R and D role. I worked in pharmaceutical excipients and then probably my longest stint was with Regeneron in a production role as well, upstream production for biopharmaceuticals. So kind of a jack of all trades, a master of none. But I think now it's, you know, it's really good to have that wide knowledge, especially, you know, trying to help different companies in the role with succession.

Yeah, jack of all trades is a good thing that that phrase is always used wrong. Apparently there's a second part to it and it is a jack of all trades is better than a master of none.

Jamie, pull that off.

We gotta get.

I mean, to be fair, like, I think nowadays being a generalist in a lot of cases might be better than being a expert in one specific vertical just because you have access to so many, like hell, like cloud code for instance, where like it is an expert in all of those things. And so by you having broader knowledge of a bunch of different areas, it makes you more well rounded to where you can just like get more done faster, more efficiently because you have like literally the little experts at your fingertips to do all of the, you know, the details for you.

Yeah, 100% agree. I definitely agree with that. And also I think when you're meeting like so many different companies on a, on a daily basis, you know, it's great to have that kind of wide knowledge where you can, you know, just kind of like have a conversation about a lot of things.

So the full phrase, if you want it, is a jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one.

There we go.

So then, so I know when we first started talking, before you even joined, one of the things you were talking about and kind of what got us excited about you as a candidate was that you were already really thinking about making like noticing these trends within the market around go to market and noticing how challenging it was, how tools and systems and processes were changing and, and that was kind of already leading you down the path that you wanted to go. So we'd love to maybe hear how did you sort of like identify that trend? Like, what made you kind of notice that and pick it out? And then also like, why did you then decide like, this is where I want to focus my effort rather than going down a traditional sales role?

Yeah, I don't know if we said. One of the things you said in the interview that stood out to me the specifically around that was that your view was a sales team in the future will have a couple of like sales ops people running stuff and a couple of amazing closers. And that's what a sales team will

end up looking like a hundred percent. I mean, it's. We're definitely like in a time of serious change in all career paths, but I think especially sales. But from my point of view, you know, after I kind of moved out of the industrial roles, I, you know, I then went into like a very, you know, traditional SDR type of role. You know, kind of do your, do your 80 calls a day or, you know, we'll see or there's the door. So, you know, I started doing that and you know, I have, it was, it's a great learning experience. But then probably around, you know, I guess maybe 18 months ago or so, I think like everybody else, you know, I started seeing so many stuff popping up on LinkedIn, you know, so many stuff like outboard, outbound 2.0, you know, how sales is changing. And then like that really piqued my curiosity because I think it's like it is, you know, there's now this great intersection between like people who are some bit technically minded, but also people who are like, you know, very sales educated and commercial minded also. So on the back of that, you know, I started reading a bit, you know, started trying to make my own kind of ramshackle, you know, AI workflows in my day today. And you know, I got on the, the free clay account and started playing around, you know, I think I remember pulling like a, a clay workbook of like independent record labels in the, in the UK and just like, yeah, just like playing around. And I think I, I wrote in the newsletter last week, you know, that it's like just like follow your own curiosity and kind of get involved and, you know, I think you can. That's the best way to learn, you know, some of these, you know, different tech options that are out there in this day and age.

Yeah. So you were reaching out to record labels, huh? I guess. I didn't do your essay. Give a shout out for your music. Come on.

So shameless self promotion. But I actually didn't mean to do that.

Do we need to check out the API tokens and how many are going?

I'm going to flip the podcast around.

He joined for the free clay credits. That's good. Yeah, I mean, I obviously totally agree. Part of the reason we started the company was exactly with that philosophy around, how can you do more with less? How can you leverage tools, automation, AI workflows to just be as efficient and effective as possible? And I should say those two things are very different, right? Like being efficient and being effective. If you are efficient, but it's crap, that's not going to work, right? So I could click a button and launch a bunch of crap, but that's not going to be effective. It's not going to drive results. And I think those two things go hand in hand. And so when people, I think, think about leveraging AI or any sort of automation, they go to like, the first thought in their mind is like, crap, right? Like it goes to like, this is like, if I automate this or if I use AI, it's not going to be good quality. And then on the flip side, then you have the people who are like, cool, but I'm going to be so effective and I'm going to be like hyper surgical and I'm going to like prospect very, you know, effectively. But then they can't get anything done. So there really is that happy medium and like you have to like really work with AI and you really have to train it and mold it, build the right automations, know the right logic. It takes a lot of time, honestly, to like get it to work right. But that stuff is where it's really critical 100%.

And I mean, even by my own lived experience, I can definitely say, you know, I probably had to make a lot of mistakes to improve and to upskill myself to, you know, be able to use AI a bit more. Effectively in outbounding.

I think for me, the biggest game change in this kind of approach that AI brings is actually you can use the same AI you're using to develop the workflows, to teach you how to develop the workflows. So if you're sitting there thinking, I want to build something, but I don't know where to start, you start with the AI, GPT or Claude or whatever, and you go into it and you know, I want to build this thing and you Brain dump. Walk me through how I'd set this up step by step, and every time you hit a snag like it says, oh, now you need an API. I don't know what an API is or where to find it. Okay, cool. Tell me how I get an API and what I should do and it will walk you through every single step of the process. When I started this, I had very little knowledge around any of those things. And I've gradually built that. I'm lucky that I got people around me that have more of that knowledge as well. But now the stuff I can do is now mediocre.

Right.

So it's like incredible. But it'll joke in the side we can build things from start to finish that I didn't even know half of the words involved in what I ask it to do now when I started. But I've been taught by the systems I'm using and I think that's the. You don't have that bottleneck of, okay, I'm going to need to go to Google and read everything I need. You can actually get, you can skip past some of the knowledge you don't need by just getting it to walk you through the steps.

Yeah, I agree. And I think as well, like, one thing I've really surprised by, you know, in the last four weeks is like, I think it's one of probably the advantage of being a small company is, you know, like how quickly we're able to roll out and how quickly we're able to iterate these type of internal solutions that, you know, are, you know, easily cutting hours out of our week that we can then commit to other tasks that involve using our human brain, so to speak. Even last week, I remember you and Jess having the app off in the Friday meeting over whose app that they built during the week was better?

It was mine.

But yeah, no comment. We'll let the people decide whether to.

Yeah, no, I think she wins this one if I'm honest.

It was good.

Yeah.

Look out for it.

Yeah. I mean, I think it like to kind of touch on that a little bit more. It's like what you sometimes have to do, it's hard to always, unless you're on the cutting edge, realize what's possible. And so what I always recommend to people because I mean I, I watch and listen to pretty much everything AI related all the time, like what's coming out, what's new. I'm trying to tinker with it, but that's also what my job is basically. Whereas most people have full time jobs, they still have to get their stuff done. They don't have time necessarily to be tinkering and playing with tools to figure out what works. And so what I always recommend is just kind of lay out a couple of low hanging fruit options. It's like what are two things that are just sticking points where you're like, hey, if I had a magical bond and I could automate this or I could make this faster and more efficient, more effective, whatever. Then just write down what those things are brain dump it into a Claude or ChatGPT, whatever or copilot, whatever you're using and have it walk you through step by step, how to build an automation, how to write the correct prompt and then just go and do it. And then that will give you two quick wins right away they're going to save you a bunch of time around things and then from there you'll have a better idea how to work with these systems and to then where you can start to expand those use cases as you understand how they work, how they function, et cetera.

I also think one of the easiest ways to start is assume you can make some assumptions. Like I often will start with the easiest prompt I can write like, like do this thing for me and then see what the output's like. And maybe it was good enough for what I wanted. Maybe it needs a lot more input and sometimes you can just stop. But rather than worrying about every single detail of what you need to do the thing, just start and in that cyc, treat it like a conversational colleague and you'll get to the end point you need eventually.

Yeah, I mean even one, one super quick prompt framework that I use a lot just because it's so simple is like, it's, it's like the race one. So it's like role action, context and execution and it's super quick and I think it just helps you like structure, you know how you're working with, with AI. So much better.

Yeah, walk me through that. So it was a role.

So yeah, it's role. So you say, you know, for example, like you are Expert Marketer with 10 years experience, you know, something like that. You put the AI, you know, I think we've all seen the stuff like, you know, you have 20,000 years of experience in writing. So yeah, you know, you kind of, you put the model into the mind frame of you know, what it's supposed to be, what it's supposed to act like. Then you give the actual action, you know, what you want to achieve with the, with the prompt, whether that be, you know, an email or a list or double check something and then some, some back background context, what you're, you know, working on. If you have any examples, this is a great time to put in those examples of you know, what you think the output should look like and then execute. That's like more of like your formatting and how you would like to receive the input from the AI and super quick. And I do think, you know, if you can just have these like simple, simple things in your workflow, you're easily beating, you know, 80, 90% of, of a lot of people who are just using it, you know, using the technology, you know, quite basically.

I mean most people use it like Google and they just ask it a question, it responds and then they're done or they don't like the answer or they assume something's not right and they just move on. Like yeah, I think it's the opposite

of the jack of all trades, right. The more specific you can be with a task and then you want to build on those tasks sequentially. With more specific tasks I think you get a better output than when you ask for very broad general over view, you know.

You know what though? I actually sometimes I feel like nowadays I, I sometimes disagree but I think it depends on the use case because sometimes if you get too specific it it has your like biases and heuristics like plugged into how you would think about the process. And I find myself doing this too where I'm trying to like put together a workflow or something or you know, that build something with cloud code is like I have a heuristic in my head of how I think it should work and sometimes I find myself being too prescriptive and then maybe that's not the best output. Whereas sometimes if you are less prescriptive you might get like a result and it's like, wow, I didn't even like think of that. Like I was working on this database thing the other day and I was like, instead of saying like, hey, here are the Things I want on the dashboard. I was like, go build the dashboard. Like, you have access to all of the data in the database. Go and figure out what are the most important things. And it created this, like, sentiment analysis that, like, looked at companies and all of the news related to them over the last couple of months and then, like, scored them on sentiment. I'm like, I never would have thought of that. Kind of cool. And it made like, this, like, keyword cloud of, like, trending topics of going up and down. I'm like, that's kind of cool too. So, like, some things that you just wouldn't think about if you're trying it, too prescriptive, it can be cool. It can be a good way to, like, let it go wild. But when it comes to messaging, don't do that.

I think the. The thing is there, you're already in. Within a niche. You already know it's coding it. No, it's doing a task. You didn't say, build me a platform. Like, you've. There's already a lot of specifics assumed within that and I think that's why it works.

So, yeah, that's fair.

Become broad within a frame of specifics.

Quick random platform. Build a media platform. Make no mistakes.

But quick random question, Harrison. I think I know what your answer will be, but I'm not sure for you, Nick, favorite AI tool that we use or that you know, that you use on a daily basis?

Well, if you had asked me like two weeks ago, I would have said clay, probably. However, now it is strictly like CLAUDE code. Specifically the custom plugin that we've built that we can use internally. And it does everything. It is absolutely magic. And the speed at which you could build this stuff, like building custom skills within claude, which is basically the business logic. So then it just follows your business logic. It understands all the context. You can just literally connect it to every other tool with APIs. It is insane. I can't even fathom what this would have been like three years ago to try and figure out. It just wasn't possible. The things we're able to do now wouldn't even be possible before.

This wasn't possible six months ago because we spoke about. And he said perfect life.

Yeah, that's true. I think. Yeah, I agree. The thing that I think is the most interesting to me though is that it's enabling us to do stuff that we wouldn't even have been able to do before. Right. Like, it's just these are tasks that just wouldn't have gotten done or it's analysis that wouldn't have been run and now it's just automated. And now like all of this is just flowing into us on like a proactive basis rather than being reactive. And I think there's just so much really cool, so much cool stuff that you could do with this here. And honestly, I think more companies need to just enable their team to do this and, you know, stop. Stop worrying about what tools they use.

As far as, if I asked you two weeks ago, you should have said clay, because I'm definitely still in my honeymoon period with clay for sure. Because I was trying to use it, as I said all along, but now like, to. To be using it properly. Like, I'm still like, you know, really enjoying that and, you know, trying to get, you know, as creative as possible by using it.

Yeah.

My answer is slightly different to Harrison's, only for the reason that I'm thinking about the listener. So what Harrison just said is cool, but he's like the culmination of all of us thinking about this for two years and what we could do and the technology catching up with our ideas. So it's kind of like a big leap. One of the new things I've started using in Claude and using it for that I think is. Can be game changer for anyone is something called an artifact. So if you have an idea include, you go off and say, build me an artifact and talk about that idea. So maybe it's a business plan, maybe it's a idea for an app that's going to do something replicate plan.

It could be a territory plan, could be account, could be account search, all that. Yeah.

An hour I calculator specific for your business needs, anything like that. But you do it and ask it to do an artifact and then it will generate you that artifact, that thing you can use. It's like a little web page basically. And you now have that asset that you needed and you have it in 20 minutes of a conversation with Claude. And even if it isn't 100% perfect, what's great about it is you can use it. Go. This is amazing. Show it to your team, your line manager or your IT person and say, I did this for me. Can you build this with code or vibe coding for us? And I think that it is a really quick way to either build something that's useful for you or alternatively build a prototype that somebody can make and render more relevant for you. That. So that's what I think is a really cool.

It's like the other kind of use case. There for those people that are using like HubSpot. And your team will let you connect your HubSpot MCP or let you connect Claude to your HubSpot via MCP, because there's a plugin for it if you didn't know. So you should ask your team about that is you could then ask HubSpot some sort of questions about your CRM, about your data, about pipeline, report next steps that you recommend, whatever it is, and then just tell Cloud to make an artifact of it. And it'll just make a sort of interactive pipeline review or interactive account coverage map, whatever you're looking for. Uh, and yeah, it's pretty. Pretty powerful from that perspective to your point.

And I think it's actually, it's a really easy thing to do. You literally download Claude, start using it, ask it to build an artifact, tell it, and you'll. You'll see the output straight away. Whereas the other thing, what Harrison's saying is my favorite tool, but takes a quite a bit of implementation to get to that point.

I'm surprised it's not replit.

Well, that was my phase two of Repnit's great for visualizing something that's amazing like that. Yeah.

But replit, you build. You built it in replit, right? So you built that.

Yeah, I used the artifact to give me the prototype of something and then I went and built it in Replit as a full app. Coming soon. Event Navigator.

I use the limit.

Yeah. Yeah, we've gone down a couple rabbit holes we never even got to. So, Keith, the first month,

Extreme tangent, but just flawless. Just flawless.

How's. Yeah, like, I guess I'd be kind of curious to hear your thoughts around before you came in, what you were expecting. And now that you're here, how does it feel?

Yeah, I mean, it's one of those things as well. It's like you're always going to have a preconceived idea in your head of how something is going to be. And then like, usually once, once you encounter that situation, it's always totally different. And that definitely holds true for probably the last couple of weeks for me. But. Yeah. So, I mean, I think. I think I. Probably the. The main thing that I realized is just like how complex some of the campaigns are, you know, that we're building, especially in clay. You know, they have so many layers. And then, like, you know, to see like some of the signal. The signal triggered campaigns and stuff like that. And then like, also just to see, I think the. The amount, like, you know, the amount of different tech that we're using that is also feeding into Clay, you know, because we've what, four or five, you know, softwares just for, for list building, you know. So I think like that's one thing that, that, that surprised me that I didn't really think about before I started. You know, all along in my career in sales, you know, I was either using, you know, just Apollo or just Zoom info or something like that. And then like to see it all come together and to see you know, even, you know, something like a waterfall enrichment, you know, for me, you know, that's still super impressive that that's just at the click of a button and you know, you can have a number of data providers just feeding in.

Well, it's actually about 10 different tools, but you haven't got a month to unlock yet.

Yeah, I got to level up the gated. I have to collect more XP points.

You got to accept your GitHub invite.

Yeah, I did. I just created the account.

There we go. That's good. I think you're probably a good person to ask here because you are sort of the newest into this. Coming from your previous world of doing this, I'd call it like the old school way or the classic way. Right. Which is if you had to give a couple people out there advice that are maybe, maybe they're not even using Apollo or maybe they are, but what kind of things would you tell them as a starting point? It's like V one go kind of think about these things.

Perfect. Well, I mean, another bit of shameless self promotion. I think the article, the newsletter article that, that, that we wrote last week, I think that's a good starting point because it breaks down, you know, list building, you know, a sequencer, clay and everything and just have a little read about all the different parts and pick a couple of things and just play around with them. Use the free accounts. I mean, use what's out there. Don't break the bank. And let your own curiosity be the, be the driving force, you know, watch. There's a lot of like, there's a lot of brilliant people creating on, on YouTube as well. And you know, you can go down some, some rabbit holes. So I would, yeah, just, just start like instead of just reading stuff on, on LinkedIn and being like, oh that's cool, like just go and actually check it out and you know what, like you start and like, kind of like like what Nick said as well. Use AI to guide you as well. If you don't understand something, just ask it. If you don't understand the response, ask it again. Be like, you know, explain it in more simple language.

Let's do it. I think one thing that's really important what you just said is rather than just reading stuff that you see on LinkedIn or just like even just reading the newsletter that you put out, it's the time from reading to action. And I'll toot my own horn on this one because earlier today I was on X where all of. Formerly known as Twitter, which is where all of the like, AI stuff, like everything in AI happens first on Twitter. So if like you're. I understand why you may not want to be on Twitter for many reasons, because there's a lot of stuff on there. However, if you want to be on the bleeding edge of AI stuff, that's where you got to be. Where I saw this guy put this post out about how they made a slack automation to where if they react to a post, it triggers like some workflows in them for like, I don't know what, I can't remember what they were doing with it, but that gave me the idea like, oh, we should do that. So I literally now have, within 30 minutes built a mini workflow that will. Anytime I react with a message or a specific reaction to a slack message, it will go and create a client task for us to go and take action on. So like now, instead of having to like copy paste, do a bunch of work that way you simply just react to the post and it creates that little automation. Now I am the world we live

in where copy and paste is too much like, fuck that. I ain't doing that. I want to. I want to emoji this shit and have it in.

It goes from emoji to task. Yes.

I can't emoji life. I ain't doing it.

At one point you're just going to look at a slack message and it's going to be able to create a

task just to see, I mean, technically kind of already exists, right? Yeah. When we get the. As soon as you have neural link implanted in our brain, like, this stuff is going to be so much easier. Like, I can't wait. I won't even have to. I won't even have to use.

So, like, we all know you already have it.

I didn't want to point out, look, here's the transition. We used to have to type. Now we use whisper flow. So now we just talk to our computer and it does it for us. In the future with neuralink, we'll just have to look at it and think and it's just going to do stuff.

For anyone listening who hates AI the next episode will not be as tech worry we'll get back to the science

will be I don't know. All right, Chiefs. Well, yeah, it's been good. We're up on time. Plenty to have you here on the team. Really excited work you've already done in the first month is amazing and excited to see what you can bring to the team going forward.

Yeah, 100%. Thank you so much. And yeah, good to have the chat and I hope everyone listening enjoyed. Sam.