E30: Building AI-Powered Sales Teams with Finally's CRO Kevin "KD" Dorsey

You have to be able to prove to me AI can't do it before we make a hire. Like that was the gist of the entire like memo and like announcements. Like you have to be able to prove that AI can't do this thing before we make a hire to do it or a purchase to do it.

Hello and welcome to the Revenue Leadership Podcast by Topline. I'm your host, Kyle Norton, CRO at Owner.com. And every Wednesday we dive deep into the strategies and tactics being used to drive success by the best revenue leaders in the world. So join me as I sit down with revenue operators to discuss actionable frameworks that you can implement in your business today with no fluff, no sales pitches, and no platitudes. This episode is brought to you by SalesApe.ai.

SalesApe is the AI-powered sales assistant that engages your inbound leads instantly, answers questions, and books sales meetings without you needing to hire extra staff. Built for any company with more than 100 leads a month, SalesApe ensures no leads slip through the cracks. More sales meetings, more deals, less hassle.

Grow without the overhead. Try SalesApe for free at salesape.ai/kyle. Today's guest is none other than Kevin Dorsey, aka KD, the CRO at Finally. who's got a legendary career early at ServiceTitan, PatientPop. Uh, obviously you probably know him from his podcast and, uh, epic LinkedIn presence. And, uh, hopefully many of you have participated in his, uh, Sales Leadership Academy. What's the name of it again, Katie?

Sales Leadership Accelerator.

Sales Leadership Accelerator, which I've sent a bunch of people to over the last couple months and have gotten nothing but really good feedback on that. So stoked to have you here. The topic of the day is AI and GTM, and you and I text about it a ton. You did a course with Jake Dunlap, who's another mutual friend, which I thought was really good. And so you're deeply steeped in it. So we're going to try to get really tactical for folks, but appreciate you jumping on and stoked for this one.

Yeah, no, I mean, we, we talk about it enough that it's like we should probably start to record the conversations about this, you know? Like, people— I'm pumped to do this because I, I also hope on this one we go past some of what I'll call like the, the soft use cases. It's the, the use cases everyone's talking about with it that I think is actually not nearly as important as the other ones. So I'm excited for this, man. That should be good.

Yeah. Research this account, read the— summarize the 10K. It's like, okay, we're, we're past that. I I, my favorite framing for this is AI is a little bit like high school sex. Everybody's talking about it. Everybody thinks everybody's doing it, but nobody's actually doing it.

No, it's surprising to me actually, like how funny enough, actually how little it's talked about by leadership and revenue. Even like you see it getting talked about, but there's not a lot of CROs talking about it, VPs, talking about it, like it's just not, right? But then the use cases of it, it's actually shocking to me. I was at a conference and it was, I was actually very disappointed at like the level of conversations around it. And it was something I was like, y'all, like, are you basically, are you even trying? Are you even trying? Like the things that you hope it can do, people are already doing with it. Like, are you even trying right now? So yeah, man, it's getting wild out there.

Well, we're going to help some people today and hopefully give folks— what I want to take away is a framework and some mental models and especially like a place to start. I want to get into the more exciting further out things that, you know, you and I text a bunch about. But I want to start the first 20 minutes of conversation for people who are just trying to get their hands and heads around it and get them through the first part of the journey because I think that's the tough thing. The tough thing is getting started, building fluency, and then once you get the ball rolling, I think it's a little easier. But so if you're already pretty advanced in AI, you might want to skip ahead a little bit, but we're going to talk about a mental model for thinking about how to apply this in your business. Don't actually skip ahead. You'll miss good stuff. So let's talk about that to start. How are you thinking about applying AI in the business generally? Like, how have you thought about where to prioritize, what tools? Just like, give me the broadest framework in your mind.

So, I mean, the broadest framework is I try to pause before almost any task I'm doing on a regular basis and ask, could AI do this, or how could AI help me with this? I, I, I'm pausing at the highest of levels of just like almost anything that I'm going through on a regular basis. Could it? And how could it? And funny enough, one of the easiest use cases, and this is what makes it so scary, by the way, is asking AI how it could help me.

Meta-prompting. Here we go.

It is actually scary of like, hey, I have roughly 14 one-on-ones per week right now, ranging across different organizations and different individuals. I want to have a framework that would help me manage this, prepare for this, and digest this information more easily than I am right now. I really just want to know how people are feeling, what's their main topic, and where we should focus our conversations. How could you help me do this? What that spit out for me in front of like a weekly digest process and system, a prioritization list, and then a sentiment analysis of the one-on-ones from that one conversation, I would say, with— I didn't know how it could help me. I just said, how could you help me do this? And so I think what people need to start defaulting to is going to AI for help. Ask it how it can help. I've got these tasks. What are some ways you can help me do this and do this more efficiently? Is probably the easiest— I don't know if that's a mental model as much as it a mental checkpoint to start leveraging AI. Yeah.

I find myself doing this all the time in Slack. And I sound like a broken record and my team who might be listening to this are gonna laugh because the amount of things that people are like, oh, I did this, like the perfect example from this week. One of my, one of my directors went and audited like 20 different calls to see if the rep had done what we call a sell between. Did they send the email ahead of time with some, I noticed that intrigue building piece of, of observation, like hypothesis of need. And are we doing that? Cause we know when we execute the pre-call research and do the sell between, show rates are good, win rates are better, like everything's good. And, and obviously like I should just have like a hotkey for this, but like this is something we use Momentum for all this stuff. I was like, Momentum should be doing this. I was like, we can, we can build a prompt to, to go do this at scale. Like like, I like that he's doing it manually, and, and I think it's good to start there to reason through the problem, but it's like, as fast as we can, we should figure out how AI can deliver that to us quickly.

One-on-one I had this morning, one-on-one I had this morning with my director of CS, says the sales managers aren't reviewing all the contracts and the reps are putting things in there that they shouldn't. And first of all, I say Never. Salespeople would never do that. But hypothetically, let me prove how wrong you are, director of CS. I said, what do you guys like? Basically, what do you want to look for? Well, if it ever says anything like this, if it ever says anything like this, if it ever says anything like this, if the terms are this— it gave me like 9 or 10 things. So he's like, this— these are the things that every manager should be looking at for every single contract. Yeah, I was like, guess what we're gonna build in the next 7 days? Yeah, we will build an agent that we can, at closed one, download contract to PDF, upload into the contract inspector, run it through the 10 to 12 things you want it to look for, and spit it out green, red, pass/fail. That will be done in a week.

And are you using Bolt or Make.com, or what do you— what do you— or Zapier?

So we do a lot of Zap right now. I actually want to get more into Make, maybe even a little bit. I've been playing all around with Replit quite a bit, but right now it's actually, it's a lot of Zap and custom GPTs, and whether that's in Claude or the custom GPTs in OpenAI, but like really Zaps are, we're pulling a lot out and pushing things out. And I do have an internal resource now. I was about to say his name, but I don't want people to come steal him from me. This dude, like, it's actually hilarious. Um, Ryan Mullen, I'll shout him out. Ryan Mullen, he was in a completely different role 6, 7 months ago, and we like put that role on pause. And basically I was like, what else are you good at? He's like, well, I've kind of like to dabble with this. I was like, all right, like, help me build this thing. This dude is like a— he was— of course, you're a closet genius. He is like building some of the coolest stuff internally right now. I just— all I have to do is something like, this is what I'm looking for. Like, cool. I'm out. So he's using Claude, he's using OpenAI, he learned SQL, he's like coding stuff now. Like, and like, it's, it's been amazing to have him as a resource, but a lot of OpenAI, a lot of Claude, a lot of Zaps right now pulling things together and it works.

Yeah. I am just about to post a role for, I'm calling it like a head of applied AI. I'm just basically, Ramp has a role and I thought that sounded like a cool name.

I like it.

I like it. Stevie Case from Vanta has a team. I think she's calling hers like an entrepreneur in residence or founder in residence, basically somebody building tools just for their internal teams. Because we're doing a bunch of this and we use tools and RevOps is running it, but I want to expand on our ability to like custom build stuff, even just no-code things like through, through Make or Zapier.

Um, by the way, real quick, people listening, this is, this is my biggest fear of selling SaaS to SaaS in the future, is quite literally the last 90 seconds of Kyle talking is we're sitting here talking about building tools internally that used to go out and buy, and now we're buying, we're building them internally. Yeah, it's, it's one of the reasons why I try to stay out of SaaS to SaaS, because it's like if I'm selling to people like me, people like Kyle, We're literally building internal teams to build the tools that we need for us and we can do it. That's what makes it scary. I know we're gonna talk future of sales later, but like that's something that I don't think people realize is already happening.

Yeah, we're gonna, we will jump back into that one because there are other tools that I'm also thinking about building from scratch that replace things that we're currently using. And you know, I've spent some time with the Salesforce folks the last few days And there's a big promise around AgentForce, like, oh, like, you know, AgentForce can do that, AgentForce can do that. And I'm— so I'm going to go look and see if it's possible to maybe not have to build too much of it ourselves. I would like to not be maintaining like custom-built soft internal software. But I think for some of my use cases, like this scripting tool If you're listening, you want to start a company and you want me to be your first customer, you can have this idea. But like, I want an, a hyper bespoke scripting tool that basically can look at the lead that we're calling in Salesloft, pull in, you know, from the, from the script templates, the right module, the custom field, like the dynamic field so that people have like a perfect script every single time. Super possible. I was working with some of my product folks a few weekends ago and he was like, "Oh, you could just build a Chrome extension app for this and do this and this and this." I'm like, "Great." I was like, "Can you help?" And I wouldn't want to pull him away from the other stuff he's doing, but there are definitely more than a few things that I'm thinking about scratch building. Okay. But okay. Finish with that.

Well, I think it's actually, I think I know what your next question is. So my, what I was going to talk about sets it up. So do the question then.

Okay. I was thinking about like, where have you, so this is, you're running into things day to day, finding areas of opportunity, but if you sort of go to one level of abstraction higher, how are you thinking about what parts of the business you're trying to apply AI to? What, what was the decision-making look like to know where to start? Because these are not small projects much of the time.

Where I was about to go is I've taken, I think, a little bit of a different approach to this than what I see a lot of people talking about on, on LinkedIn and in conversations. I feel like a lot of people have prioritized what they call the low-value tasks. Account research, like lead enrichment, like these things that, like, you know, like they're, they're low value or tedious. Where I've actually tried to approach it from the other way, like, what's the most valuable place I think, and I can apply this? And to me, that's been the comp on the sales side. There's a lot of other places internally, but on the sales side in particular, it's the conversations, right? To, to me, eventually everything happens, or like, what is actually being said on these calls and how well is it being said. So I've prioritized much of the early resources to building a really powerful call scoring process, right? Because to me, that is actually the first domino that needs to fall around the org. If I know what's happening with AI on the calls, well, then I can do AI issue diagnosis. From there, I can actually do AI coaching. And from there, I can do AI role play, all because of what I know is happening on the call. So this is like, I'm actually looking like, what's the most valuable area of my org? And that's where I'm trying to put, I'll say resources first versus chipping it away at a lot of like the smaller things like, I can do, like, to me, like, I'm a very first principles thinker. I can do all the research in the world. What I say on the call still matters. I can do all the lead scoring in the world. What I say on that call still matters. I can segment my territory the best. What I say on that call still matters. And so I, I view that as my first principle of like, how well are these conversations going from the cold call to the discovery call to the demo call to the pricing call? That to me is where the first domino comes down. So that's where I've been looking. It's like, what's the most valuable area in my org that I want to make sure I have insights into? And that's where I've been applying it.

Is that a live production use case for you now?

It is.

And how'd you build it? Or like, what can you share about it?

I mean, so we built it all in, so it started with our scorecards, right? So we already had our scorecards, right? And you mentioned it very briefly, and I think it's a, I talk about this all the time internally and with companies I work with. I don't believe you should put AI on top of anything that isn't already being done manually.

Yeah.

I don't know if y'all caught it listening. He's like, my, my, my director or manager like went through a bunch of calls and I was like, well, we should get a tool to do this. But then he still said it. He said, there's still a time for the manual part of this, but the AI is supplementing it. Right. So like we were already scoring calls manually.

Mm-hmm.

But you can only do so many. So I already have the scorecard in place. So we've actually— this will go— I'm not even sure what I'm going to do with it, to be honest yet. But we actually just finished building a scorecard builder.

Mm-hmm.

Okay, here's how to build your DISCO scorecard and it'll guide you through it. Then it's done. And now you can run your calls through it and score it. So it runs it through our scores very specifically. Scores it across like 17 to 18 different things on DISCO, gives it a 1 through 5 with reasoning. So here they scored a 1, and here's why they scored a 1 here. And then I have heat mapping across the call so I can see where my reps are scoring red or green in their different areas down to the call. I can click in and see like, all right, they scored a 0 here on agenda. One of my favorite ones is like setting expectations.

Mm-hmm.

Where like, just as an example, where it goes like, it's a 0 and it says like, the rep said, you know, what the goal of the call was, but didn't really actually lay out the actual agenda and get agreement to it. The only reason we can do that is because our scorecards are built in a way that, and this is what we've learned in the building the scorecards for AI, you got to tell it what is good, but also examples of what it's not.

Mm-hmm.

So like, here's what setting an agenda sounds like here. What'd you call it? The thing you were looking for? The sell the next steps.

Oh, sell between.

Sell between. Here's what some examples of sell between are, but also here's what it's not. Like what are the ways that reps kind of do it, but you know it's not really it. You give it that and it, so Ryan has built all this out. So now I'm getting call scores across all my AEs on one org, all my AEs on another org. We're just rolling this out for sales dev in the next week or so. We're rolling out for my onboarding and CS team in 2 weeks. So like this, it's amazing, right? And now I can actually see our reps getting better or not. What are we going through? And it's been great. That's awesome.

Yeah, we're working on the same thing right now, but with a vendor. So the same vendor, uh, Avara, who does our, um, AI sales sim, like it's trained on our methodology. It's got all the call records. So new, like onboarding reps can sit down and just do like sim after sim sim after sim on like chunks of the call. Do the discovery, ask for next steps, the cold call open, like there's a bunch of these and, and it's the managers can spin up these sims pretty easily, but now they're taking that same tooling that works really well in a sim situation. Okay. And just point that at, point that at the calls. We have more work to do on building out robustness on the scorecard side to make sure we can like get to the point I want to get to. But, but the language I've been using here with anybody who will listen, my internal teams, vendors. I said the same thing to Salesforce the other day is I, what I want to do is build a management intelligence layer. When you and I have talked about this much, but, um, that management intelligence layer is basically like, you know, you have the wiggle. We know what good looks like in all of these places, but I should be able to tell if this person is on, on or off wiggle on every single facet of what we teach. Did they do the pre-call prep? Did they send an email ahead of time? What was the quality of the email? Did they have a hypothesis of need on the first call? Did they use a local name drop on the— We know all of these things and every single time you're like, oh, like we should add that, we should add this. You just continuously add. And what I'm framing up now is like, okay, you don't want a list of 150 things to score on, But how do we bucket and basket the skills into a matrix that people can actually conceptualize? What's the taxonomy of it so that you can say it's like, all right, there's red, yellow, green. We know that you're red here, but it's a skill that doesn't really matter. It's not very highly correlated to outcomes, but you're a yellow on something that's the most correlated with win rates. So let's go unpack the skills there and figure out what to fix.

Yeah, because that's where, like, why I started with the calls. And then the next one we're building right now is the issue diagnosis. So it's like, okay, let's say Kyle— so we identified the metric. Kyle's number one metric is close rate. It's 17%. Now, more often than not, if you ask a manager, well, why is a rep's close rate 17% or whatever, it's like, oh, they'll just give you some random, like, oh, like they're bad at disco. You're like, the hell does that even mean? Right? Well, now, like, it's like once we identify the metric, well, this will probably be about, probably about 4 weeks from now, I'll say 4 to 6 weeks. We can click the close rate issue diagnosis. Now, again, because this is also a checklist, if someone has a close rate problem, this is the checklist that you go through. First, it is looking at the call scores, but it's no longer saying disco is bad. It's saying they're not setting a proper agenda. They're not getting problem and they're not selling next steps.

Mm-hmm.

Okay, let's say it goes through disco. It's like, actually, disco sounds good. That's the demo calls. Where are the demo scores? No, demo calls sound good. Okay, go to the pricing calls. Oh, pricing. They're not presenting pricing. Yeah, right. Absolute train wreck. It's not confident. It's not like recommendation. They're not giving 3 options and they're not like selling the middle option. Okay, but let's say like all the calls actually do sound good. Well, then it's looking at, okay, well, what types of companies are they selling to? What's the industry? What's the size? Like, and all this is again, already documented. Now can go through this process, right? Even to the point, and this is, you know, I don't know if I told this story on the last one, but like, you know, it can also help you tell you like who's actually a good rep or who's not a good rep. Sometimes there are reps that have a higher close rate that are not actually your better reps, they, they might be getting more inbound leads, they might have a territory that has more social proof built in. Yeah, they might be getting opportunities through a referral process, like a referral channel, that other people are not. So on paper they look like they're the best, but in reality they're not the best. There's a different outside factor in accordance there. So like, this is why like issue diagnosis comes next, is most managers, they don't truly have the time and also don't have the know-how to actually go that deep to find it, right? Like, one of the most common questions I'd probably ask my managers is, what's the ID? What's the ID? What's the issue diagnosis? They're like, oh, like, their, their LDC is bad. Cool. What's, what's the, what's the ID? Oh, they're not following up on their leads enough.

Cool.

What's the ID? What's causing that? Let's keep going till we can figure out what the actual cause is and then do something about it.

I think a lot of people are going to be listening to this and going, I don't have any of this stuff written down. And you could take a shortcut, take your course, get all your templates. And I, uh, I would encourage people to do that. It is a great way to, to fast forward, especially if you're in these similar markets. But, um, I know where this is going.

I'm going to jump right in on this. And like, here's the thing. And I've gotten this feedback often when I teach companies, when I go into orgs, is like, the beautiful thing about what I'm talking about is most of y'all listening do have it. You just haven't written it down. It's in your head somewhere. If I came to you and said, I have a rep that has a bad— we could do this live right now, whether Kyle has one or not. Kyle, I have a rep who has a bad show rate. What would you look for? They have a bad show rate. What would you look for?

The quality of the set. Did you discover an actual pain that this person is gonna be willing to talk about and show up for? What was the offer of value at the end of the call? You know, was it a compelling presentation of like what you're gonna receive to show up for that call? The sell between for sure, as we've talked about.

Now get away from the call things. What are other things you'd look for? Someone has a bad show rate. So say, what else?

Quality of the account. Like, does this account actually have a problem that we can service?

Right. How far out was the meeting booked? Yeah. Yeah. What was the confirmation process?

Mm-hmm.

Did the follow-up email and confirmations contain a problem? Did the AE send an intro note?

Text. Did you text them the day of?

Right there, 5 points, issue diagnosis checklist done in, I was trying to watch it. I think that was 48 seconds. Yeah.

So if you're listening right now and you're going, but how can they do it with AI? Because they've heard, okay.

What you can't do that with AI, you have to capture that first.

No, no, but you can record your, yeah, yeah.

This is what I'm going to say. Yeah, go for it. Like you could do that with that. You could talk to it. Like I still think too, most people don't understand the power of voice to AI. They sit down to try to type it. And it's weird. It's arduous when you're like, okay, so I'm trying to create an issue diagnosis checklist. Talk to it. Talk to it. Like, this is what I'm trying to do. Talk it out. Let it run. But that's my first step for everyone when they're trying to dabble with AI is you got to capture, I'll say, the wiggle out of your head first. It'll make your AI so much better because you've captured it. Every single one of you, if you're a VP, director, even a manager, shoot, even a rep, all of you have call scorecards. It's just in your head.

Yeah.

And you know you have a call scorecard because every time you listen to a call, there's certain things you're listening for. Yeah. There's certain things you're trying to hear if it happened or not. That is your scorecard. Yeah. Document that. Now you can do so much more with AI. So much more.

Yeah. And where I was trying to get to there, which is where you, what you're talking about is just sit down and I use SuperWhisper. So it was as like a dictation tool, but you can just use the ChatGPT like voice mode and just go and be like, hey, I'm making a score. I'm a, I'm a sales leader at an XYZ company. I've got this many reps. We sell to whatever. And ChatGPT is great because it will remember all those things. You can use to say like, hey, commit this to memory, but now it's got more persistent memory across all your chats. But you can say, like, using what you know about me already, or you give it a bunch of the preamble. I wanna make a checklist for my discovery call. Here are the things I wanna, I wanna talk about. And, like, what else might— so you do that and then be like, what else might I be missing? You know, the, like, how do you use AI to be your, your thought partner? What else might be missing? Oh, I like that. I like this. I don't like that one. Okay, great. Give me this thing, and you have a document. And it's gonna be pretty good. Like, it's not gonna be as good as if you sat down for 3 hours and really were super thoughtful. But I think The important message that for people, especially on this topic, that I try to impress upon them is it's about ship rate. Like, just ship it. Just like write a doc. You, you, you talk about this a lot. Like, you know, give yourself the 1 hour. What do you call them? Dark, dark hours.

It's called a dark week. Oh yeah. Like, but you can do it like a dark day where it's like, it's like 1 day, no meetings, no email, no Slack. On the business, you will be shocked how much documentation you can get done in one day.

I think people hear that sometimes and they go like, I can't do a day. So it's like, start with an hour.

Well, I know I'm going to argue this point.

Okay.

Okay. I will argue this because if you can't take—

I agree with you, by the way.

No. Well, that's why I'm going to argue it.

Okay.

If you can't take a day away from your team because you think shit's going to break, that's exactly why you have to do this. Because it means you are potentially the bottleneck in that org. Because what good looks like is living in your head. Like, it's that important that if you are afraid— I actually did this with one of my directors. He's like, man, like, I can't take a vacation. I was like, cool, pick a week in 2 months. Yeah. What do you mean? Pick a week in 2 months. You are You are going on vacation. He's like, no, I can't. I was like, that's exactly why you have to. One, I want you to see that nothing will break. But two, if things do break because you're gone for a week, now we know what we have to fix. It's a win-win regardless. But you need to be gone if you're that worried about the team falling apart with you not being here. So y'all block, block the day, block the day. If I can figure out how to do it a week, a year, you can figure out how to do it a day. A year, and they are the most productive weeks of the year. I look forward to them every single year. I think I'm doing mine in May or June, I'm not sure which month, but it's a full week of like— we're talking 60, 70 hours of work. Yeah, on the business. And it, it, man, I come out of that so fired up and like ready to go because I've created all— it's the best.

Yeah, yeah. And, and the, the rate that you can ship now is so different because you can go from like what used to be an embarrassing document, like, you know, it's like 7 bullet points in a sheet. You're like, this is our checklist. And you're just like, man, like I'm a VP of sales, like I'm a CRO. I'm really like, this is what I'm going to send to my team. But with AI, you can at least dress it up. It'll look a lot better. It'll clean it up and, and you can get moving. And then if you ship that and then you're like, oh, I missed like 3 things. All right. Just go back to the doc, add it. but like ship.

I made, so like I, I did the, I did the SKO for Notion earlier this year and I'm taking their leadership team through my, my program.

Cool.

And I made the best, I'll say pre and post-docs I've ever made in my life for those sessions because I spoke to ChatGPT. I said, so here's module 1 and I basically walked through like, here's what I wanna cover and here's the most important parts and here's some of the things I'm gonna call out. And here's what the exercise is, and da da da da, can you make me a 2-page summary of the— and it captured it all. Yeah. And it was great. I cleaned up a few things. Boom, module 1 done, module 2 done. It was be— I would never— it would have taken me days.

Yeah.

Especially like, you know, everyone has strengths and weaknesses. I'm, I'm a speaker, I'm not a writer. It's hard for me to just sit down and—

you write a lot for a guy who's not a writer, right?

Do I though? 1,400 characters? I don't even know if that's Writing or not, that's, that's spitballing. That's just throwing things out there. Like writing, like a full page doc on things. I capture things. I document things, but it's actually, I don't enjoy bullet pointing. I got failed English. Can't spell for save my life. So like, so, but that was amazing. It was high quality and good because I spoke it out and it saved me days of time and produced something better than I would have done on my own easily. Yeah.

And now you can connect your Claude instance right to Notion through an MCP. I set that up a couple of weekends ago. And it's awesome. It's annoying because you have to manually pick, go to every single page and add the integration. Notion, if you're listening, let me like find a better way for that. But yeah, you could. So now with my Claude, I can— so I, the first set of pages that I connected, once you connect the top page, it gets all the subpages. But I went to my leadership, uh, my leadership workspace and added the top page. And now I, in Claude, I can be like, hey, uh, summarize every, every document in the, uh, Leadership Academy that talks about this topic and give it to me in like 4 bullet points, or write a one-pager on all this stuff. It's, it's pretty— Notion with MCP into Claude is gangster. I love Notion.

So, uh, I know some people, so let me, let me see if I can get them to to build that, that for you there. So the other— these are the things, y'all, like the use case on this is massive. Funny enough, Claude is better for call scoring than, um, ChatGPT, but ChatGPT does a better job of building the scorecards.

It's same— like, yeah, I've done the—

I've—

funny that we've done the exact same thing. Claude is more creative. I use Claude for all my writing stuff. I use ChatGPT for problem solving and like breaking things down and, and obviously research because it's got Deep Research and now O3, but Yeah, and you just, well, I'll come back to this topic. One other thing I'll say on like the content creation front is just start recording every single meeting all the time. Internal, one-on-ones, training, anything. Because what happens is you get into a conversation, you know, you're talking to a manager, they're struggling to like have a tough conversation with a rep. You're like, okay, well, you know, when I do tough conversations, I like the Crucial Conversations framework and this is what it's about and this is what I would do. And then afterwards you go, oh, like, I can just take that transcript. I'll put that into Claude or ChatGPT, and I'll be like, summarize how I coached them on handling tough conversations. And it's like, boom, now you've got your document on tough conversations because we all do this hand-to-hand combat. All you have to do is remember to record that call. And I use Fireflies because you can record via the Chrome extension, which I really like. You don't have to have the The thing in the call.

Oh yeah, because we use, we use for a lot of our call recordings, but I do still a lot just like the Zoom recordings. But we do something similar, but I actually try to have the individual or the manager do it. Hey, take this recording, go create a summary for it with the team. So that way it's a little bit of like a tribal training, right? Where it's like, you know, say you were, you know, just managed me, like you taught me all this stuff, like, hey, cool. So did you get value from this? Like, do you feel like you can do this? Yeah, cool. I want you to take the recording. I want you to take the transcript, go whatever. Here's the prompt or whatever. Go make a summary. But then I would like you to share that with the team. And so then I go into Slack. I go into, yo, just had a great chat with Kyle. Like you say, it's like a leadership channel. Had a great chat with Kyle. Like we were talking through like some tough conversations. Like here were some of the main takeaways. Just thought I'd share this with everybody. It's a great use case. Hopefully can help you. Now we've got that 3-part a little bit of like you taught me I got to digest it. I created the summary and then I'm the one sharing it out. So you get that tribal training action in there as well. But like, y'all, I hope, I hope people are just hearing like all the places that people aren't even talking about using this stuff. Like we're talking about individual one-on-ones being leveraged with AI. We're talking about call scores. We're talking about lead hand, like so much more than write a cold email to Kyle Norton and book a meeting. For me about sales leadership training. It's like, no, y'all, there's so many more use cases.

Yeah. Um, changing gears slightly, how— so you're building a bunch of stuff yourself. You're, you're like configuring things through Zapier or, and people can do stuff on their own. How do you think about like, what are you building a point solution for? What are you looking to your vendors to do? When are you buying something that can do multiple use cases versus like a best in breed, like because the landscape has fractured so much. How do you think about that?

So the way I'm looking at it, and it changes weekly at this point because AI changes weekly, it's like basically the way I'm looking at it is like, what do I think is completely out of my scope of understanding? So for example, AI voice. AI voice is completely outside of my scope and understanding of like how to do and or build. So I'm looking at vendors for that. When I look at something like call scoring, it was relatively simple to build on my own. And because I know I want it to connect to other things, I wanted to build it myself because I know I want it to then connect to the coaching tool. I didn't want to have to worry about, well, you know, not like, by the way, like, I don't know, Momentum, like great tool. I've actually looked at, I'm in conversations with them around this. But I don't know if it can then do the next part. And so then it's like, if it can't do the next part, I'd rather it, you know, handle it internally. So that's the first lens. I'm like, how far is the scope? Like, is this something I can even fathom to do? Um, like, another, another one, interesting, like data interpretation. Yeah, can it actually tell me the trends? There's tools that I think are better for that. Than me trying to build it. I know I could probably get the analysis out of the data, but when I think about all the steps to figure out the— can it actually tell me the trend, or is it going to give me bad trend information? Like, oh, Kyle's, you know, like, ACV is down 18%, but it's not really. So like, it's things like that I look at as outside the scope. But if I wanted to connect to other things, or I, you know, the way you phrased it, like that leadership suite Within the leadership suite, I'm looking very closely at like, if I want this all pieces to connect, SDR call to AE call, AE call to onboarding call, onboarding call to, you know, whatever, issue diagnosis, checklist, coaching. Like that to me is a very unique process that I'm not sure yet if any tools out there can do it all or if I'm having to connect multiple tools. At that point, I'm like, all right, I'm connecting multiple tools. I might as well. Connect my, my own. So that's kind of the lens I'm looking at is like how far outside of like my understanding and capability is this. What's the risk reward? That's another one. Like with data, there's a very high risk in that if it's not done the right way and security and everything else. Whereas like the call stuff, it's not like a high risk thing. If it's getting it wrong, I can tweak it. Yeah. Over time. So that's how I'm trying to grade what I do internally versus go out and look for. But every Every month I go out and look. Every month I go out and look and see, you know, but this is also, you know, I talk about this. There's still not many tools for leadership.

Yeah. Well, we've looked at a bunch and sent them to each other and we're like, ah, I don't know. Oh, maybe a little bit.

Like there's things like that do parts of what we're looking for, but when it actually comes to frontline, second line execution and enablement, there actually isn't much out there. Right. Or there's not much out there that actually get it. That's actually what I do like about Momentum in my conversations with them is they get it. They're a GTM company themselves. So they get it a bit of like, oh, okay, we see what you're kind of going for here. Let me see if we can't put it together. But it's just getting so quick. I have a call. I'm like, I'm hiring like AI agents internally. Like that's like, you know, just, oh, just build all the agents for me all day long. Right? And funny enough, one of their first rules is just shadow, shadow, watch. Yeah. Just watch. Cause you're going to see things. You're like, dude, what the hell is your team doing? What? It's like, yeah, I know. Solve it. Go, go build the thing. You know? So it's, it's getting crazy, man. But that's how I look at it. I look at like, what's the scope? What's the risk on it? And if I want it to be a very specific way, I'm going to figure out how to build it internally.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. This is one of the categories. It's funny, like forever I thought I wanted to be a founder at some point, and I never really had an idea that I'm like, that's a, that's a, like a really high-scale business idea. And since being an owner and like working with our CEO, I'm like, uh, I'm not built like he is. Like, I'm, I'm like typically known as a super hard worker and he just operates at a completely different level. I'm like, I should work with a guy like that. And as soon as I made the decision that I don't really want to be a founder anymore, I've got all these ideas, this being one of them. It was like this management intelligence thing. Nobody's doing it well. I know exactly what it should look like, but now I don't want to go do it. But I'm looking, like I keep talking to founders or accelerators to try to get somebody to incubate this idea.

I don't, so this will be interesting. This will apply to the future of sales too. It's like, I, no one's going to be able to do it.

You think?

No, because, because of what you just stated, like your level of context on what you're trying to build is miles ahead of anyone else. Like, and that will be the gap. You, you understand at the most granular level what you are trying. To build and handing it off to anyone else, they might be able to get it to 70, 80% of the way. But like, if you were building it, you would catch those things early, right? The context is what is so hard. It's why people, I believe, like yourself, are going to win in this game. It's because you know your business to a granular detail. You know what good looks like to a granular detail. That's what allows you to leverage AI at a whole different level. I'd be willing to bet you do end up building it. Like my take on a lot of things, you know, is, you know, I will see if I'm right on this. Who knows? I think there are going to be fewer and fewer 50, 100 million ARR companies. I think it's going to get very, very, very hard to get to those levels if you're not already on that pace. Like, unless you're like a true like AI, AI company, because I feel like it's going to be very easy to rip products off.

In GTM tech, or you're talking more broadly?

I'm talking like more broadly, like not just GTM tech. Like if, if it's a technology, right, to get it to $50 to $100 million ARR is going to be much, much harder. One, just go-to-market in general is more challenging, but two, it's easier to rip products off and it can happen much earlier. What I do think is going to happen is you're going to see thousands of 3 to 10s.

Hmm.

Thousands of 3 to 10s, right? You could build that company with yourself and one other person and a whole bunch of agents. Right. And it solves a very unique problem for a very unique customer in a very unique way. Is it $100 million for your company? No. Could it be an easy 3 to 10? Yeah. Yeah, you can't, right? So that's what I think ends up happening in SaaS. You're going to have some people that we have— you have a path there. I believe Finally has a path there. There's other companies coming up. But if you're starting a new company now, I think it gets very hard because like I see all these founders building in public. I would stop tomorrow. You got Lil Wayne in that shit. You got to be a real G's move in silence. Like, because if you're out there promoting this product, oh, I just crossed $4 million, oh, I just crossed $5 million, what am I going to do over the next 3 weeks? Yeah, a little mock-up, build a replica, mass blast the TAM. Like, it gets tricky there. Like, it's gonna be very, very interesting if it's not like connecting to other products in a way to make it defensible.

Yeah, I think that's when the world swings back to brand and credibility, sales execution, word of mouth. And I still think that there's going to be tons of these companies, but—

There will be, but even all the things you just mentioned are big company things. Those are big company things.

But I think you can build that, like, I think you can build that from the jump. I think founders need to start with founder brand or build founder brand very rapidly because I think, you know, what I've— my experience with Oner has been really instructive. I've seen this a little bit over the years, but it's been really palatable, uh, this 3 years where there starts to be a momentum in a company and then there's just a gravitational force in a market. Like if you look at the talent that we've been able to acquire, especially in the last like 12 to 18 months, you know, people can copy us and rip us off and do all of this stuff, but it doesn't really matter because we're always going to be 3 steps ahead. Not always, but we will.

That's what I'm— what I mean, like, that's you now. Like, I, I think it's the new ones coming up that I think are going to have a harder— like, if you're already past 20, 30 now, like, those paths are still there because also you have the ability to add on things because once it's a connected ecosystem, yeah, I'm not splintering out. So you have that path. It's the new ones coming up that I think are gonna have a much harder time. Like, I, I really, I really— yeah, we'll see, we'll see. But like I said, you're, you're already ahead of all that, right? You're, you're not the people I'm talking about. Finally, it's not the people I'm talking about. The ones that are already up there, not who I'm talking about. There's plenty of zombie companies right now that are just dead, but they're walking, you know, where they, they can't get moving fast enough again. So it's gonna be very interesting. Very interesting.

Yeah. Yeah, it is going to be interesting. I think this like talent density, talent gravitational force. Is still the thing that will make or break companies, but how does that happen early enough to build winners? That's going to be a cool thing to watch. So, a question that I think a lot of people are probably thinking is, well, where do I start? You've clearly spent so much time on this. You know what model is good for what, and so the tooling, you got a guy on staff doing stuff. But, um, where should people start to, to like learn what's possible, build their mental model, and understand a framework of this market? Like, how do you figure it all out?

Oh, there's a few questions in there. How do you figure it all out? You don't. You just try to keep up because we'll never figure this all out. Like, I'm just trying to keep up. I know there's places that I don't even have a fathom or an idea of like how it's possible. What I would actually encourage people to do, like, I like YouTube is my favorite resource on, on this, of start, I'll go on YouTube and, you know, basically start researching AI agents. And what it will hopefully do for you is just show you what's possible, right? Because once you know what's possible, you know, like, not to use like a biblical reference here, but like the scales fall off your eyes. You start to see the world differently. We're like, oh, if someone went and built this thing over here, oh, I bet— it's like you start to have those I bet conversations.

Oh, I bet.

Yeah, I bet we could do this. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Over here. So my first piece of advice is like to start to see what's possible. You know, go, go on YouTube, watch, you know, videos on AI agents. Like, watch what people are building over a weekend, you know, in some of these tools like, you know, Lovable, like Cursor, um, Replit. Like, go and like just see like what people are making over a weekend. That would be my first tip is you just need the scales to fall first. We start to go, oh, this is what's possible. Then the second step is, you know, I don't want to overkill it. It's starting to capture the wiggle. You have to know what good looks like. AI is still not in a place yet, in my opinion, to tell us what good looks like yet. It can tell us what's like better than bad, but it's like, it's never going to build a scorecard on its own better than Kyle Norton. Like, you know what good looks like. So it's starting to capture those things. That, those would be my first advice is just start to learn what's possible. And it changes the lens. You start to pick one thing, pick one thing, define what good looks like for it, and then use AI to, to actually tackle it.

Yeah, the, the amount of cool stuff on YouTube is just like unfathomable. It's like there's, um, there's a, there's a bunch of these 3-hour videos by— is it Ilya Sutskever?

Uh, watch me have that bookmark too.

No, it's the guy who left OpenAI. But, um, there's a— he does a 3-hour video on exactly how, uh, these models work, how building a foundation model works, uh, pre-training, post-training, what's inference, like what, what are all of these things. And how do they work. And then there's another 3-hour video of him breaking down exactly how he uses all of these tools. And you could watch that 6 hours and accelerate your learning like multiple months.

Yeah, I just went through one by, um, Liam Otley. He's one of my, my favorites. He has a 3-hour 50-minute video on how to build and sell AI agents, but it's 3 hours 50 minutes.

Yeah.

Like this stuff is insane, right? Like it's so crazy. But then the other one I just watched that was really good. I built 5 AI agents in 36 minutes and AI agents clearly explained by Jeff Su.

Like Jeff Su is good. I liked him early in my early days. He, I learned a lot from him.

Yeah. And what's funny is like, I laugh at these things, right? So like I look at AI agents clearly explained. It was posted 9 days ago. It has 287,000 views. And in my head I go like, God, we're so far ahead. It only has 280,000 views. You want to guess how many, like, right, that 3.5-hour one is? 286,000 views. Uh-huh. 23 chapters. Like, it's not a joke. It's not a light— like, this is not an Instagram scroll through. This is like, if you're taking this stuff seriously, invest the time into it. So that's my biggest advice, man. People just aren't even getting started. They're not taking those first steps.

Yeah, the YouTube has been big for me and then Twitter. I don't, you're not a Twitter guy.

I was gonna say Twitter is just, oh man, it's also tricky. Like it takes me down some rabbit. Holes. Like, I have like an account now. I don't post anything. Yeah, I have like an account and I'm like, okay, but then it almost always pushes me over to YouTube and I'm watching things over, over, which is fine, which I, I like.

I think Twitter— X is so good at, at surfacing some of the really interesting stuff. And I'll put a bunch of the, the like people I like in this space. There's this guy like Min Choi, I think is his name, but every post is sort of the same, like MCB just broke and here's 10 wild things people are doing with it. ChatGPT-03 just launched. Here's 10 wild things people are doing with it. And then I watch those and your brain just starts like going crazy. It's Andrej Karpathy. That's who the OpenAI guy— Sutskever's still there. Karpathy left and he just like is chilling in his office, like doing a 3-hour breakdown on everything. And he's one of the smartest, most knowledgeable people on AI in the entire world. Like literally was a co-founder of OpenAI and one of like the second in command basically. It was like Greg Brockman and then maybe he's like the third most important guy there. And I sent it to my team. I was like, you need to watch this.

Like watch. This is actually hilarious. This is the first time I've ever done this. I just pulled up like my Twitter bookmarks.

Right.

First one, Dan Coe, how I've been using AI. Choose a task, find a YouTube expert that teaches it, summarize the video, add examples of context, have AI turn that into a meta prompt, test, refine, reuse prompt. Next one, I turned JAT TV into my startup co-founder. The next one, this course, this prompt, this next one. So I have a 3-hour course, like such a nerd. I'm a loser. I just really like, this just makes me feel like a loser. Like this is all I have saved. There's nothing in there about like Seth Curry or anything. It's just, oh no, man.

Because the moment, the moment you linger on that, the moment you linger on a Steph Curry post, you start just getting basketball all over the place and you're all, you're like down a different place. So, okay. YouTube, Twitter. I'm the exact same thing. Like you guys did a course on it. People could go there. It's probably pretty out of date by now.

I guarantee it is. I guarantee it is like, it's, it's wild. I just shared, actually, Microsoft just dropped a free course on GitHub on building AI agents.

Yeah.

It's phenomenal. I shared it internally with my team and I'm trying to plug away at it, which I also think is a tip I'll give is like, you just need to truthfully learn what's possible and then find someone who already knows how to do it. Yeah. That's been my freeing. Moment a bit of like, I was actually feeling quite— I don't know if the right word is like stressed or fearful, like I'm not keeping up, like I can't learn this fast enough because I'm also running 5 orgs and trying to take a company, you know, public over the next 5 to 7 years. Oh, and run Sales Leadership Accelerator. So like a lot of things happening there. I was like, but like, it's like, you know what, I just need to know what is possible and we need to find someone and bring them internally that knows how to execute on it. Here's what's in my head. And they say, I got you. Yeah, okay, I got you. Like, right now I'm not seeing enough revenues leader even like consider what's possible to then even instruct someone to go do something. Yeah, right. They're still worrying about like a lead scoring thing, and it's like, cool, go, you go score those leads, you, you do that, right? It's like there's so much more that could be done with I will say scoring leads was really impactful for us. I threw that one out there.

But we did it in 2022. So I get it.

3 years ago for you. Like this is what people are just starting now. They're just starting now to even dabble into something you were doing 3 years ago. This is what I mean around context, man. Like you're so far ahead. Yeah.

So, um, I very much agree. I think I have not found many courses. Everybody asks me for courses. What course should I take? What course? I, I think that to like put the time into producing a course takes so long. By the time the course is produced, it's sort of irrelevant anyways. I, I actually think YouTube University plus X. Yeah. Is the right combination here. I, I'd love to hear from listeners if they, they have like other things that they think is really, really important, but like O3 just came out this week and it like really changes a lot of how I'm thinking about using these tools. It's like, okay, so. Sort of like Deep Research Mini, and now it has like all of this memory of me, so I don't have to think about capturing this stuff and having it captured in like prompt project, uh, or like in project knowledge base, um, files. And, and you just, you, you like, you have to stay on the cutting edge with it, and it's so hard because it's moving so fast.

It's impossible. Like, the only course I've like recommended actually out to people a few times is Cursive. So Cursive is actually pretty good, I'll say, as a starting point for people just to like, one, what are the tools out there? It's not going to make you a master by any means. It's not going to be like perfectly up to date. Not affiliated before anyone figures it out. Not affiliated, not affiliate, no referrals, whatever. They're not paying me. Like you got to say that nonsense now. Like it's just like it guides you through the different tools and how they connect and different like, you know, Midjourney, DALL-E, ChatGPT, Claude, Anthropic, like it just, it guides you through these and it just starts to, I think, give people, it's like 15 minutes a day, like on like the phone, it just kind of guides you a little bit to kind of show you like what's possible. So Cursive, maybe they should send over some money to me, but like that's, that's one I would recommend to people just to get started. Yeah, like just, just start y'all and you will see places to use it everywhere. And then yes, YouTube, that's where I'm at because it gets dropped. Like people drop, you know, something there. There will be lessons being taught this weekend is when I'm gonna dive in on what happened this week.

Yeah.

And then I get to learn over the weekend, 3 to 4 hours of what happened this week. What's the new use cases? Like you just said some shit there. I was like, wait, I didn't know that. Dang it. You know, like, oh, I gotta learn a little bit more about that.

So agent space, like the last, even just in the last week, It's been agent space, O3, memory in ChatGPT, like new memory. And, uh, there's one other big one and then MCP was a couple of weeks ago or months ago. But, um, yeah, it's, it's like, it's, it's, it's crazy. So switching to vendors. So now, you know, like we both have a couple, uh, production use cases with vendors that we, that are really high value. Talk me through how you like decide, because there's a million of them. How do you decide who to even talk to and how do you think about evaluating them?

Yeah, so it's, it's funny, you know, I'd be curious how many, you know, messages you get per, per day, per month. This has been the most active I've ever been in email before. I've like actually opening cold emails because there's no other way to find some of these things. And so like, so that is, I've actually been a little bit more active in email of like, normally I don't open many unless it's like really like personalized, personalized to it. So that's been one of like, end of the week, pull up, you know, emails in like the other phone. It's like, what's out there? Are there any use cases whatsoever that are speaking to me? So I am seeing what's coming to me via email. And via social. I'll say this is probably where the, you know, called the brand helps, is I have people reaching out like, yo, Katie, we're building this thing, you talk about this thing. Yeah, I think you might like this over here. Um, so that's been good, things have been coming. But then I do every, every month I go out and Google, like, I go out and Google, like, you know, best, you know, AI call scoring, you know, AI, you know, lead inspection, AI sales agent bit layers, go out and, like, look for the things that like I'm considering and see what's out there, you know. Yeah. And then also too, like I'll say I'm blessed to have a team where I say, hey, Guller, check this out. Yeah, check this out. Like, I'm very rarely the first person into that, you know. It's like, hey, like, check this out. Real— yeah, like, I just, you know, I just saw something. I texted you about it. I just saw some stuff on Tuesday that I was like, holy You know what, like it's the best I've seen so far in terms of like AI voice and like true conversational low latency. Like it sounded phenomenal, was trained on minimal information. Like it was great. Like I'm going to go very deep. Yeah. Very deep into it.

I still take a bunch of demos myself. I'm like the first person taking demos because I like, you know, sometimes it's I want to see the tools and if it's really interesting, it might be something I bring to GTM Fund or Stage 2. So I take at least 2 or 3 demos a week, I would say, like 30 minutes, 30 minutes with a founder, walk me through it. Like, you know, let me, let me see.

I'd say probably at least 2 a week. I'd say I'm probably pretty close to that.

You sort of have to, I think at this point, this is by far the most demos. I've ever taken in my life, for sure. And, uh, but, but even because a lot of the time me seeing something is inspiration for something I might do on my own or do with an existing vendor, but keeping a pulse on what's going on. But those mostly come to me through either a recommendation. I have enough, like, friends in venture capital that I get a lot of good ones that way. The most, the most high-quality in highest volume of calls that I take, I'm like, actually, this was pretty sick, was friends in venture who have like cut a deal because they don't— I find they— no one asks me to meet a founder when it's like not good because, you know, you just look like an idiot. And people in venture are very careful about managing their relationships and their network equity, you know, because if they tell me to look at one good, bad one and the next one that's good, then I'm gonna be like, oh, I don't know, like, I'm busy.

This is, this is why, you know, having the right people in your circle so important. How many of you and I exchanged?

Yeah, tons.

You know, like, it's like, yo, have you seen this one? No, let me check that out. Yo, I need to intro you here. Cool, check it out. Like, the people that are learning this stuff, like, it's like, ooh, check this, check that, check this, check that. Like, y'all literally— was it today? It was today. Like, yo, I gotta intro you to these people. Yeah, dude, set me up. Like, yeah, I want to see it. By the way, I just saw this. Oh my God, you gotta show that to you. Like, that was— yo, that was a text exchange this morning between Kyle and I. Like, it's that level of like, you gotta surround yourself with people that are doing this stuff. I have, you know, a few people that's like, yo, have you seen anything lately? Oh yeah, just checked this out, you gotta take a look. Like, okay, send it my way.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. Um, that's the other biggest, biggest channel is I've 3 or me— 3, 4 people that I think are as geeked out on it and are seeing cool things. And anything they tell me to see, I'll hop on a call. Like, if you're like, hey, you would like this, I'll get on a call. And there's a couple people like that that are really— that really know what's going on. Um, okay, last thing, uh, that we'll have time for. What about personal productivity? What are your favorite personal productivity tools and workflows?

Ooh, favorite personal productivity tools and workflows. So I mean, definitely for LinkedIn, Kondo.

So, oh, you're using Kondo.

I like tried and I didn't get into it, but yeah, it's, I mean, I still fear my inbox all day long on LinkedIn. Like I fear it. I can't, like I'm probably sitting on tens of thousands of dollars in there and I just can't get myself. To go in there because it's so, so condo. I just do it in batches. I just knock a whole bunch of stuff out in condo for LinkedIn. So that's very helpful. Superhuman for email, also very, very helpful there. But funny enough, like my biggest productivity tool still to date is my little note card in the morning. What's the, what's the 5 to 7 things that I need to do today to knock it, knock things out? I write it out and then I, you know, I calendar block accordingly. I'd say my other biggest one is Opal. If anyone here is familiar with Opal.

No, I've never even heard of Opal.

Opal is an iPhone app that like blocks apps during the day.

Oh, it's like Brick.

Yeah. Yeah. So like a Brick type thing where it's like, I can't access certain apps throughout the day. Like my phone is on lockdown. It was like, so I can't get distracted. So I guess that's funny enough. It's like one of my favorite pieces of technology limits technology, right? It's like, it's not even an addiction. At all, you know, like I don't, I don't, I'm not picking it up and scrolling or anything there. So Opal is a big one.

What about like ChatGPT or Claude use cases that you do for yourself as a CRO frequently?

Yeah. So, so ChatGPT, I mean, I'm in there every day for sure of just like either like thoughts and ideas of like, ooh, like how does this work? Or like, what would be a great way to do this? You and I have talked about this. Like, I like, could you give me some good rep? Like I know this is true? Could you give me some references like books or studies, etc., that talk about this concept that I could use with my team? Document collection. I don't write docs anymore. That's by far and away the— that's been a huge time save, huge time save there because you happen to know I'm quite a fan of documentation and checklists. That's a big one. I'd say those are probably the biggest so Far, um, I wish, I know there's a tool and you don't use it to write, like you're not using it to do LinkedIn or leadership content. No, not, not yet. Like I've built two, I'll say courses with it, or not course, like a module with it. Like I built, um, a, a module on like how to build resiliency and perseverance, like using performance psychology. So that was a fun one that I got built.

That's cool.

Here are my 5 favorite books. Here are some of the key concepts that I teach here. So what I'm trying to do, I lead salespeople. Um, if people like— I just haven't even released it or anything. I dropped that in the, the show notes if we want to, but that was a really cool use case. Yeah, they're taking me like who knows how long to do.

That's in the Leadership Accelerator.

Say again?

That's in the Leadership Accelerator?

No, not even in there yet. Like, this was some— like, it's funny if I actually think about this this never would have gotten done if I hadn't used ChatGPT.

So many of those for me, right?

Like, so I don't even know if that's a productivity hack or what. Like, it just never would have occurred. I never would have done it because of the time it would have taken. But like, the idea struck me, I had a meeting cancel, went in, done. Yeah, in 45 minutes. So, but I still write pretty much all of my posts at this point. Like, I have some that I've done like rewrites on where it's like, hey, like, here's the concept, rewrite this. I have a few of those, but not too many yet. Um, meeting summaries for sure, because I am not a big meeting guy. So like, hey, y'all had that meeting, shoot me the summary. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, so that saves me time for sure. Um, I think— do you use Fixer?

No, I've heard it come up a bunch though. You and Sam talk about it.

Yeah, I haven't, I haven't used it yet. Like, I need to take a look at it because that would help me probably, I believe, with Slack. I think it's supposed to help a little bit because Slack's the bane of my existence. Like, it's just, there's God knows how many channels, how many Slacks per day. It's like, how many of these do I actually need to read?

Catch-up mode is my favorite. Mark as read, mark as read.

Oh yes, oh absolutely. Like, I'm like, and then I go back in 2 hours later because also like I'm very Like, my team knows this. I check email 3 times a day. That is it. Like, I don't check it throughout the day. It's 3 times a day that I check Slack. I have closed pretty decent chunks of time during the day because, like, I'm— when I'm with people in meetings, I'm like, I'm in it. When I'm creating, like, I'm in it. Like, I don't want those distractions there. So when I get into it though, it's just Christmas tree, just, just pure pain, you know. It's just, you know, it's just, it is. I'm sure there's a way. I'm sure there's tools out there. Everyone has a Slack AI. So actually, funny enough, one of my managers built a KD recognition GPT. Like, it's scary good in terms of how well it nails my, my voice. And I was like, bro, like, I just need like a KD Slack responder GPT.

Yeah.

It's like, you know, someone slacks me like, hey, like, you know, what do you think I should do here? And it just responds back like, yo, I trust you, bro, go get it. You know, just, just, just basically just responds to everybody via Slack the way I would.

You can get, uh, there is a Slack MCP server, so there is a way to pretty easily, uh, set that up.

Okay. All right.

It's funny you said, you know, like, you know, that course would have never happened.

I don't—

the podcast would have never really happened. If I didn't have a bunch of this stuff. Like, I, most people are gonna be listening, but I'm gonna screen share my prep doc for this. This is the first part of this Clay, it lives in like the Clay table. And then it gives me this output on your background and all your, all your media appearances basically. Then it summarizes of all of that content, the key themes and patterns. I don't really need this because obviously I've read your stuff and know you personally. But then it's like a content analysis. Then I feed it some specific questions. But in this, I have trained it on my previous interviews. So this is all of my tone of voice and character. These are my key themes and patterns. I talk— get a lot back to philosophy. Philosophy and psychology. This is my interview style, active listening, value-based process. Like, so this is all about me, and then I just tuck in the couple questions that I want to talk about. Somewhere in here I put it, uh, oh yeah, at the very end I was like, the topics are— because the model will remember things better at the very beginning or end of a prompt, quick tip for people. And so I put like, the topics are AI and GTM in the future of sales. And so this is the output of like the whole thing. This is your background of like your signature stuff, your big achievements, summary of like thoughts and opinions. It's actually pretty good. Like, this is actually pretty great. And, um, this was— these are like specific questions that, uh, O3 has written for me for this one because we know each other and this is a topic that's like really that I spent a lot of time thinking about. We just went off the cuff. But these I will typically for many interviews, I'll use 60% of the questions that it drafts and a bunch of them are good.

Yeah, these are good. Yeah.

So I think one of the tips I'll leave people with is like you want to— once you start to get a habit for asking basic questions to AI and using it for basic stuff, then you want to figure out the prompt engineering and sort of the tuning. And so, for me, for example, like the newsletter that I write every week, a lot of that is Claude drafted and then I'll do an AI edit and then I'll manually edit it. But those articles would take me like 3 hours to write because I have to go back through my notes and the call transcript and listen to clips. But because Claude drafts it, I remember all this good stuff and like in my notes, I write down, like as I interview, I take notes. I'll note the things and I'm like, oh, that's, that'll be like a good newsletter piece. And so I'll make sure to add it, but that's also trained on all of the stuff I've written over the years. So it's trained, there's like a 150-page PDF of a bunch of my writing that I fed to ChatGPT and I said, uh, describe my writing style and tone of voice and character in like significant detail so that an AI model can replicate it. And, and then it gave me an output. And now anytime I write, that prompt snippet, which is like 2 pages, is there. And you can, you can really start to like ship like crazy because now it writes like me.

Yeah, Kyle, Kyle Coleman built me an amazing one on copy.ai. I just haven't fully leveraged yet. Like, amazing, where I can put a transcript in or training in and it will write a newsletter and 5 different types of LinkedIn posts in my voice. So like an inspirational, a tactical, um, inspirational, tactical, vulnerable, um, win, and comical, like from the same topic, but then 5.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

In my voice from one podcast episode, training transcript, meeting transcript, or whatever else. Like, this was just 3, 4 weeks ago, he showed this to me. I was like, yes, like, that's cool, right? Now I can post 7 times a day, Kyle Norton.

People needed more from you. Maybe we'll run this through your, maybe we'll run it through the Copy AI thing and see what it spits out. And that will, those will be our LinkedIn posts for this episode.

There we go.

Very meta, very meta of us. Well, that's cool. Um, all right, the— we're not gonna have time for any like other topics, so we'll, we'll call it here. But hopefully this gave people a way to think about things broadly and think about things like super duper tactically. And the message I'll leave folks with is just like, just start. It doesn't matter where you start. Like, you're going to be bad at it for the first while, and that's okay, but don't give up because there's no There is no more important skill to learn in modern business than learning to use these tools, in my opinion. So just like get after it.

Yeah. Just start, y'all. Just start, start learning it. See what's possible. You'll see, you will quite literally see the world through a different lens. You really will. And then you start to ask the right questions. Like I just talked about this with one of my managers today. Can AI do this? Yeah. Can I do this? Like that needs to be one of our first questions. I think, was it Shopify's CEO? He said, yeah. Also like his memo got leaked and then he went on Twitter. He's like, apparently my memo's leaked. So here it is. Yeah. He's like, there's nothing I'm afraid of in here.

He's a gangster. Toby is the frigging best. I spent 3 years there.

Right.

He's awesome. Like just like an elite leader.

Yeah. And if y'all haven't seen it, go read it. He's like, people were getting in their feelings. About it in some way, which I thought was interesting, but basically saying like, you have to be able to prove to me AI can't do it before we make a hire. Like that was the gist of the entire like memo and like announcements. Like you have to be able to prove that AI can't do this thing.

Yeah.

Before we make a hire to do it or a purchase to do it. Like I need everyone looking through that lens and people were kind of getting in their feelings about it, whatever else. Like, no, like that's real. Like, that's how we should be looking at everything, is can AI do this? And if it can't, can it help with this? Those two questions, if you start looking and asking that, if you— like, funny enough, here'd be my parting tip to everybody, sales leaders, sales reps: look at your calendar next week, and I want you to look at everything that is on your calendar next week and ask those two questions.

Yeah.

Could AI do this? Yes or no? Could AI help with this? Yes or no? And you might be shocked. You're like, well, KD, I got one-on-ones with my AI, will never replace me in a one-on-one. All right, whatever, cool story.

It'll help you prepare though.

But could it help? Could it help prepare for it? Maybe. I have a board deck that I'm working on. Could AI do that? Well, probably could. Could it help? Absolutely.

Yeah.

So like, those are the things where like, start— look at your calendar next week. Look at your calendar. Start to ask those two questions. This was the exercise I did 2.5 years ago when OpenAI came out. I might frame this bad boy someday. Is I went on— I was on my phone and I basically was like, what I do as a leader? You know, I was like, what do I think has made me somewhat good at this thing called leadership? And I wrote it all out. And then next to it, I said, what do I think AI could do now, 3 years, and 5 years? And I went through that list, and in my personal opinion, there was basically nothing left by year 5 in terms of what I thought made a great leader. Than what I thought AI was going to be capable of doing. And like, some of the things on there were like, give a genuine hug and cry. Like, I can still do that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, but like, that's the lens that I see the world in now. And if I'm wrong, I win. And if I'm right, I win, because I'm preparing myself accordingly, right? So there's very few things that I think it's not going to be able to be able to do unless it gets like shut down or there's a solar flare or some stuff.

Yeah.

Then we're all in trouble anyway. So like, whatever.

Yeah. You just like it, the, that future world just requires first principles thinking, a depth of understanding of people and psychology and, you know, the inability to solve problems and reason through, reason through things. Because yeah, it's gonna be, it's gonna be an interesting place to be, but we'll have to do that next time. Um, all right, this was awesome. Appreciated it as always. Uh, this was great, and, um, Katie stepped in on late notice here because I had a cancellation, so I'm, I'm appreciative of that as well. I can always count on you to be, uh, like, just like a stand-up dude, and, and, uh, you're the man.

Hell yeah, man. Appreciate it. Enjoy the stuff. Thank you. Okay.

Thank you for listening to the Revenue Leadership Podcast. If you enjoyed it, don't forget to subscribe, and you can find a link in the show notes. And be sure to leave a 5-star review, share it with your network, and please join me next Wednesday for another great conversation.