The Flight to Relationships: Why AI Is Making Trust the Ultimate Sales Advantage

00:00:10:15 - 00:00:31:27 Michael Welcome to disambiguation. I'm your host, Michael Fauscette. Each week we interview experts in artificial intelligence, generative AI, and business automation to help business leaders understand how to use these tools for the biggest business impact. 00:00:32:00 - 00:00:42:08 Michael Our show today is the flight to Relationships why AI is making trust the ultimate sales advantage.

I'm joined by Drew Secrets, co-founder and CEO of Connected Arts. Drew, welcome. 00:00:42:10 - 00:00:45:01 Drew Hey, Michael. Good morning.

Thanks for having me. 00:00:45:03 - 00:01:08:19 Michael So, just to get us started, you have a really interesting background. And I know you were like, employee 36 at Salesforce, and I think you the story was you cold emailed Mark in 1999 and became the highest producing seller and sales manager, that sort of thing. So give us a little bit of an intro and, and tell us a little bit about what you're doing with Connect the Dots.

00:01:08:21 - 00:01:29:03 Drew Yeah. Well, I grew up grew up in Pennsylvania, not too far from where you are. I guess in Harrisburg. And, you know, shortly after college, I did cold email Marc Benioff and it landed me a job in San Francisco with him as employee number 36.

And I did that for ten years. We took the company from 0 to $1 billion. 00:01:29:03 - 00:01:53:07 Drew And during that period of time, there's so much that I learned. You know, like, so you go through that process like that of seeing a company didn't quite see it founded.

But right after that, you know, pre revenue all the way up to $1 billion. There are a lot of lessons that you take away from it. But I think one of the biggest lessons that I took away from it was there's a cheat code essentially, which is in sales, if it really is who you know. 00:01:53:13 - 00:02:14:18 Drew And I didn't know anybody.

So I, you know, I had a real uphill battle at first when I started because I didn't even know anybody west of the Mississippi when I got to San Francisco, literally didn't know anybody. But I landed in this company that turned into a rocket ship, which is Salesforce, and they had a good network and we all had, you know, stock options in the company. 00:02:14:19 - 00:02:34:21 Drew We all were. Our incentives were very aligned.

And so their network was my network. And I could tap into Marc Benioff Network. You know if you knew somebody. And then when we hired this guy, Jim Steele, another great Philadelphia guy, I don't know if you knew Jim.

Yeah. But he ran sales for Salesforce for many years when we hired him. 00:02:34:21 - 00:02:52:08 Drew And, you know, he had this incredible Rolodex. And and it was it was like just every door opened up for us.

We could get into all these big companies all of a sudden, because I knew who Jim was, because he had been at IBM before. And long story short, I was young and impressionable, and I learned like, this is the cheat code. 00:02:52:10 - 00:03:13:15 Drew Figure out who knows who who's got the existing relationships. And, you know, this whole new universe opens up to you and wallah, you know, ten years later, we're at $1 billion in revenue.

So I think that is definitely where the seed crystal, you know, for this whole concept started in the early days at Salesforce. 00:03:13:18 - 00:03:38:02 Michael So for those of us who haven't seen connect the Dots and actually thank you. You invited me in and I have taken quite a look. I think it's really interesting.

But I know, you know, you're mapping professional relationships using email history, LinkedIn career overlaps, scoring relationships. I mean, how does it work in practice? And then what does it look like when a sales team or an executive starts using it for the first time? 00:03:38:07 - 00:04:05:05 Drew Yeah, I mean, the first reaction is like when they turn it on, they're like, we had all these warm paths into half of our target accounts, and we had no idea.

We just had no idea that they were there. And, you know, so what we do is we do exactly what you described. So imagine you turn us on, you plug us into your infrastructure, and then we use a bunch of a combination of your first party data plus plus publicly available data. 00:04:05:06 - 00:04:23:19 Drew We put it all together in this heat map of relationships, with a real strong score showing you who really knows who in your collective network.

So just like when I was at Salesforce, I knew nobody west of the Mississippi. I didn't know anybody. But Marc Benioff had been at Oracle for years. He was there for 13 years.

I think he knew Larry Ellison. 00:04:23:19 - 00:04:39:07 Drew He knew all you know, he knew all these capital, these CEOs of, you know, companies in Silicon Valley. And so by proxy, I could get to a lot of them. I would just have to use Mark to get to them.

That's what we show you. But like I had to ask Marc, I would have to. Luckily, we were a small enough company. 00:04:39:07 - 00:04:56:02 Drew I could bump into Marc in the hallway and say, hey, Marc, we're trying to sell them to Apple.

Do you know anybody over there and be like, yeah, I know you know, Tim so-and-so. I can get us a meeting until we get a meeting. And but what we do now, fast forward into the future is we light this up, this graph up for all of your relationships. 00:04:56:02 - 00:05:12:18 Drew So like your VP of engineering has a strong relationship with the head of procurement for the company that you're trying to sell into.

And you're having a tough time because they were college roommates and they know which other really well, but that just doesn't show up anywhere. You can't see that. And we show you there's a strong relationship that you you can leverage there. 00:05:12:20 - 00:05:25:20 Drew Or your board member knows the CIO at the, you know, company that you're selling into.

And they've gone dark. Right. Well, this is easy. Ask your board member to have a call with the CIO.

You're going to get the scoop. You're going to figure out what's going on and figure out if you can salvage this deal and get it back on track. 00:05:25:26 - 00:05:50:07 Drew And I found that out over and over at Salesforce. It was just really hard to see to find those UN or those invisible relationships.

So that's essentially what we do. And we we have this proprietary scoring algorithm that is based on all the communication history going back to the beginning of time on your entire graph as an individual and as a collective company. 00:05:50:07 - 00:05:53:20 Drew So that's what it looks like in practice. 00:05:53:22 - 00:06:16:06 Michael I know when we were preparing for the for the episode, used a phrase that I thought was really interesting and captured this.

And it's this idea of a flight to relationships. You know, AI's made it trivially easy to generate all the, you know, email content, cold outreach at scale. I mean, my inbox is exploding almost every day, right? 00:06:16:07 - 00:06:26:14 Michael But but you argue that the flood of AI generated outreach is actually making trust relationships more valuable, not less.

Can you can you talk a bit about that? 00:06:26:15 - 00:06:52:21 Drew Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So I don't know if you're familiar with like Gresham's Law, which doesn't really apply so much anymore in our modern currency.

But Gresham's law from back in like I think it was the 1600s or something, basically stated that bad money drives out good. And, you know, if you have bad money circulating, if you've got, you know, debased currency in, in your circulating in your economy, it's all the good currency is going to be hoarded by people. 00:06:52:21 - 00:07:14:20 Drew And so you're only going to see bad currency. So it's basically Gresham's law as applied to outbound.

You know we now have so much AI generated outbound, which by the way is not bad. It's pretty good. You know, like it does research it. You know, it tries to make it personalized for you.

It's got a lot of context. 00:07:14:20 - 00:07:47:21 Drew But all that context is basically context that everybody has. Everybody knows all that context. And so I now I mean like half of my emailing I don't know what your is like, Michael, but you know I budget to spend and people know that I guess.

And so you know half my emailing is delete delete delete delete delete. I just don't have time to actually like the last thing I do before I go to bed is I read the last email in my inbox and I replied to it because I do get to inbox zero every day, but that's like the very last thing I'm able to do is reply to the real emails that I 00:07:47:21 - 00:08:04:24 Drew have, and so I don't have time for any of the, you know, the I'll call it spam, but like, you know, the outbound.

Yeah. And because because AI has just automated this and done such a good job of it, it's like there's nothing left. The only thing that cuts through the noise. There's really only one thing that cuts through the noise.

00:08:04:25 - 00:08:28:09 Drew Yeah, well I'll get I'll grant cold app on this. If you can nail the problem statement that is relevant to me in one sentence, if you can really know it. Because there are there are problems that I have today. And if you can really nail that 1 in 1 sentence, and I read that because I'll read the, you know, I'll read the at least part of the first sentence in each of these things, just to identify it as a, as a cold email.

00:08:28:12 - 00:08:44:22 Drew But if you get that right, okay, then you got me. But good luck with that because that's almost impossible. And the other thing is, if I get an email from somebody I know, like Michael, if you email me and you say, hey, drew, I think you got to check this thing out because, you know, I know enough about you that I think this will be interesting for you. 00:08:44:22 - 00:09:01:09 Drew I'll read your email and I'll check it out and that's it.

That's the cheat code. So I, I think, you know, that is that's the flight to relationships. It's really basically, you know, does this come from a trusted source? If it came from a trusted source, I'll read it.

If it didn't buy by. 00:09:01:12 - 00:09:24:24 Michael Yeah, I mean, I get as you said, I get tons of email and I, you know, to be completely open about it. I have an agent that runs through my inbox every morning and puts everything into buckets. And frankly, you know, I do.

It does give me a summary of all the subject lines. I can flip through them really quickly, but an awful lot of them go in the trash or the archive because they just don't pop out to me. 00:09:24:25 - 00:09:54:21 Michael Right. They've got to be, as you said, they either have to come from somebody I know, which of course, then I'll look at, I'll want to reply or at least know what they're asking.

But if it's generally a cold outreach, unless it's super contextual and relevant, I it's not going to break through the noise. And and unfortunately, a lot of it because there's so much I mean, a lot of it isn't in the right context or isn't relevant because perhaps they didn't do enough research about it to know that I had or didn't have that problem. 00:09:54:22 - 00:10:17:27 Michael Right. So, I mean, so so, you know, it seems like the, you know, if the messenger, somebody you know and trust, then you know, that warm introduction from that trusted connection that opens the door.

Right. But how do you from connect the dots, how do you help companies to activate that. You know, second path the the intro. 00:10:18:00 - 00:10:43:28 Drew Yeah.

So we the core thing that we enable is what's called a ghost email. And I learned this from doing this with Marc Benioff for a decade. And and I'm not sure how this evolved exactly. But in the first year at Salesforce, I realized that Marc was very willing to be my SDR.

You know, he would send an email to whatever executive if he thought that that would get us a meeting and we could go sell Salesforce to them. 00:10:44:02 - 00:11:05:22 Drew And so, you know, in the beginning. I'm sure I probably said, hey, Marc, could you send an email to so-and-so and say such and such a thing and ask if we can get a meeting and Marc would do it? And then at some point I learned how Marc wrote his emails well enough.

And back in 1999, he, you know, he was on his BlackBerry most of the time. 00:11:05:22 - 00:11:25:26 Drew He never capitalized anything. His punctuation was terrible. And but, you know, so I could emulate that.

And I would I would say, Marc here, I know what you would send this person. I've typed it out for you. Just copy and paste this and send it to him. And Marc would do that Mark and then mark it to the point where he trusted me, that drew knows how I write.

00:11:25:27 - 00:11:43:06 Drew Drew knows the context. Drew knows the play here. And so then we scaled that up. Then.

Then it's just become a machine. I would just say Mark, as Mark said this, Mark said that just copy paste and saying copy, paste and send. And we did that with all of our executives and we ended up spending that to beyond just, you know, Mark and our executives. 00:11:43:06 - 00:12:04:20 Drew We'd use our customers, customers who loved us, who we're like, yeah, Salesforce is awesome.

I'm happy to send something to, you know, this other person on your behalf. So we call that a ghost email. And so we've actually built that into connect that. And so we make it super easy for you to create templates or use AI to create the perfect ghost email for somebody to send.

00:12:04:20 - 00:12:28:01 Drew And, and then I can just say, hey, you know, one of my board members, board member Shawn, can you send this email? This goes to email to so-and-so. It's already prewritten. It's already it's already from him.

All he has to do is click okay setting. That's it. Literally. So there's no more copying and pasting, putting email addresses into the two field.

00:12:28:07 - 00:12:48:12 Drew We reduce the friction down to an absolute minimum where Shawn just get the notification from me via email. It says, Shawn, can you send this ghost email? And then if he likes it, you click send and done. That's it.

It takes them a second. You can also at any point you can decline it. He can decline it and give me a reason why he can modify it and then send it. 00:12:48:12 - 00:13:10:26 Drew He can do all those things, but if it looks good then it just taps in.

It's gone. It's like one second. So this is like the the people who have the highest relationship leverage are also the people who have the least amount of time to do things like this. They're your board members, executives, you know, you know, customer, you know, executives and customers.

00:13:10:28 - 00:13:26:19 Drew Those are the types of people who have the typically have the best relationships or the most powerful relationships. So you got to make it really easy for them. And we make this super easy. So it can be sitting on the back of an Uber, get a notification.

Oh, it looks like you've got a strong relationship with the CIO at the company we're trying to get to. 00:13:26:20 - 00:13:31:25 Drew Can you send this. Yes. Send it.

Boom. Value add. 00:13:31:27 - 00:13:53:14 Michael Yeah. And takes all the friction out of it.

Right. That makes a lot of sense. So over the last I don't know, ten, 15 years I've done a lot of research around the shifting behavior of buyers and, and how, you know, how they buy much differently than they did in the past. And frankly, how maybe we haven't adapted to that as sellers.

00:13:53:14 - 00:14:21:00 Michael And, you know, they're all still kind of running an old playbook where the seller controlled the information. And, you know, as we know now, that's that's just not true. Right. The buyer's done 70, 80% of their research before you ever have any idea that they're that they're interested.

Right. So how does this idea of relationship intelligence change that seller approach to map more directly to how the buyer is is buying now? 00:14:21:02 - 00:14:44:21 Drew Yeah, that's a great question. You know, I started my career back when we really had we controlled the sellers, controlled the information.

And so I remember that era very well. And that was, you know, it was leverage that you had in every conversation. Like, sure, we'll meet with you, but we need certain things in advance of that meeting, certain commitments in order to be able to, you know, so that we know that it's going to be worth our time to spend an hour with you, to educate you. 00:14:44:21 - 00:15:06:19 Drew And now the equation is completely different.

You know, everything's out there. LMS know everything. And so by the time the buyer is ready to buy, they're like 80% of the way down the road. And they've probably and I think the statistic is something like 80% of them have already chosen their vendor in their mind at that point.

So what's that mean? 00:15:06:20 - 00:15:30:19 Drew Means your your email sequence is too late, right? It means your relationships too late. You need to be in there.

You need to have a trusted relationship before they go into by mode. And so I think big part of this is actually I and this this happens for us all the time now. We're our category is kind of its new and we don't even really know what to call it yet. 00:15:30:20 - 00:15:49:07 Drew Like it can be relationship intelligence.

It can be a relationship AI. Some people call it near bound, some people call it go to network. There are a lot of these terms floating around out there. And Michael, you know, you've been an observer of how categories get created.

So I kind of really like to hear your opinion on this, like what it should be called. 00:15:49:08 - 00:16:12:03 Drew But what happens for us oftentimes is somebody will, you know, call us back a year later and say, hey, you know, now's the time. You know, we ping them a year ago through a board member or customer or one of our executives or somebody had a relationship, and it just wasn't the time. But that planted the seed.

And then like, oh, I actually know somebody who does this type of thing. 00:16:12:03 - 00:16:33:24 Drew Now we need to we need to have an organized approach to leveraging our network for go to market. And, you know, I was already introduced to the CEO of Connect the Dots, drew via a board member last year. So, you know, that's that is important, like having people know that you exist and that you are trusted by the people that they trust is really important.

00:16:34:00 - 00:16:54:00 Drew And I think we're going to see a lot more of that where it's not you're not educating as much as a seller anymore. You are validating, you're validating the decision. And part of that validation is, do I trust this person and this company to help get this over the line, to get the result that we want? 00:16:54:02 - 00:17:20:03 Michael Yeah, I mean, to me, that definitely makes sense.

I think the that whole shift of the idea that the that the buyer probably doesn't know at least as much as you know about, you know, what you're doing. And what I really want to do is establish that trust baseline that says, I can be trusted in this situation to to provide you with that additional bit of help that says, yes, this is truly a good way to solve that problem. 00:17:20:04 - 00:17:44:10 Michael Right? That makes a lot of sense, I think, and resonates.

I, you know, we live in this sort of crazy intention deficit time, right? I mean, there's all the online stuff and, and, and the social networks and the distractions. And I know we talked a little bit about before when we were talking about AI assistants and digital workforce tools, which could make us more productive. 00:17:44:12 - 00:18:04:28 Michael But but they don't actually make more time, right?

They just make us take advantage of that time. So same number of hours demands for the attention are just growing up all the time. I mean, how should sales revenue leaders really think about the economics of attention as they think through this go to market strategy? 00:18:05:02 - 00:18:21:01 Drew Yeah, that's a great question.

Yeah, AI does make us more productive, but it doesn't give us any more hours. Right? We still have 24 hours in a day. And you know I think.

00:18:21:03 - 00:18:44:15 Drew This goes back to like if you're competing for attention, if you're competing for that five seconds, for somebody to say, yes, I'm going to yes or no, I'm either going to I'm going to prioritize looking into this, or I'm not going to prioritize looking into this. And you've only got that five seconds, and maybe it's even two seconds to figure out if they're going to you're going to capture the, the the attention. 00:18:44:18 - 00:19:11:24 Drew I think this all really comes back to the same thing, which is trust.

It's like, do I trust the person? Do I trust the messenger to, you know, allocate my finite time? And so I think it's the same thing. Honestly, Michael, it's like the trusted introduction.

The trusted messenger is going to earn the right for the attention. Now you still have to have something good. 00:19:11:24 - 00:19:28:01 Drew After that. You might not you might have something that's irrelevant or you might fumble the message.

Right. But I think it's the way that you earn that attention. The most precious thing right now is by leveraging the trust that already exists. 00:19:28:03 - 00:19:55:14 Michael Yeah.

I mean, I'm willing to allow you to to consume a small bit of time if, in fact, I believe that that you may actually provide me with a solution or help or whatever. Right. Yeah. So, you know, I know we when we were talking about the episode, you talked a little bit about the fact that you were doing, you know, you were deep into a genetic AI development and, you know, automating contract management and Salesforce trying to see what's possible.

00:19:55:18 - 00:20:16:15 Michael You know, with agents and, and you know, who operate at machine speed. I mean, as someone who's building an AI company and you're using IT tools, where do you see the line between, you know, what agents should automate in the sales process, and then where that human relationship really has to stay at the forefront of the activity? 00:20:16:18 - 00:20:48:18 Drew Yeah, I think I think that the the agents are not the relationship. You don't have a relationship with the agent.

That's that's the line basically. But everything around that relationship, the agent can facilitate. So and I you know, my my macro view on the economy and jobs is actually like I think I think jobs are like the things, the tasks that human humans need to do are going asymptotically towards zero. 00:20:48:25 - 00:21:15:10 Drew And most of the tasks that we do are going to go away.

But the relationship between people is maybe the last holdout. It might be the very last thing that exists that can't be automated by AI. I can say that Michael's got a strong relationship with the CMO at the company that we're trying to sell to. And so, drew, you should ask Michael if he's willing to make an introduction.

00:21:15:10 - 00:21:38:24 Drew And drew, here's what you should ask. Michael. Here's exactly how you should, you know, request it of Michael. And here is what you should ask Michael to send to that CMO.

And here's the timing of this, because we know that Michael is busy on Mondays and Wednesdays. So let's ask him. And the best time to reach out as a Thursday or whatever it is, it can think all those things through, right? 00:21:38:25 - 00:21:59:21 Drew But ultimately it's my decision.

Should I drew ask Michael for this introduction? And am I going to say yes to this and do I need to modify it? Is now the not the right time? Is there a different path that I should take because of, you know, a additional information that I know about the relationship I and then ultimately like that's leveraging the relationship.

00:21:59:21 - 00:22:06:06 Drew And then when the introduction is made I've got to show up. I can't send my agent to do that. So. 00:22:06:07 - 00:22:06:25 Michael Right.

00:22:07:00 - 00:22:27:20 Drew So the agent can be like the facilitator. It's almost like you're, you know, like whoever the person is that's standing right next to the president at all times and, you know, whispering what they you know, who this person is and all the contacts and giving you exactly what you need to do. But then ultimately, if the president is going to make the call on what you're going to say, and you know what they're going to do with that information. 00:22:27:20 - 00:22:31:24 Drew So I think it looks like that.

00:22:31:26 - 00:22:58:19 Michael Yeah, I mean, it is it really is almost like that. You know, we talk about the category, maybe it is, you know, this idea of relationship intelligence. And part of that intelligence really comes from the capability of having a worker that can consume and make sense of massive amounts of data that you would have a hard time really processing in a reasonable amount of time as a human. 00:22:58:25 - 00:23:13:12 Michael The agent, of course, can do that and provide insights in a way that you wouldn't.

And yet you still have to be the the trust factor in that to say, yes, this is the right message. This is the right time. This is you're validating that, right? 00:23:13:15 - 00:23:32:21 Drew Yeah.

Yeah. It's you know, ultimately it's your social capital, right? Like it's my social capital with you and your social capital with the CMO at the company we're trying to get to. And, you know, you don't you basically, there's a little bit of an equation happening here for everybody.

And Michael's like, you know, am I doing should I do this favor for drew? 00:23:32:21 - 00:23:54:02 Drew Is it in, you know, like, do I have that relationship with drew or I want to do him a favor like this? Would the CMO that I'm trying to get introduction to benefit from this? Because if they won't, then I, Michael, am not going to do it right because I that's I'm not going to burn that relationship.

Only if it looks like it's going to be a win win for everybody. 00:23:54:06 - 00:23:59:00 Drew Am I going to do this. And that's only for you to know. Only you Michael, can decide that.

00:23:59:02 - 00:24:17:08 Michael Yeah. Yeah, I mean that that is your investment. And you have to decide if you're if if the risk is worth that, that makes sense. You know, I do like this term relationship intelligence the more I think about it.

So so let's call it that for now. Relationship intelligence. It's you know, there's a there's a real data challenge here. 00:24:17:08 - 00:24:45:00 Michael Right.

So you're working with email history and LinkedIn and career overlaps, interactions, patterns, all those things to score. You know, the relationship map the relationship. I mean, how do you think of data quality and data privacy in that context? Right?

I mean, companies are much more sensitive now about how employees communicate data. So, you know, how how do you think about that in this context? 00:24:45:02 - 00:25:13:14 Drew Well, I might actually challenge the last thing you said there that companies are more concerned about what their employees are communicating. I think we there's actually a I'm sensing a disturbance in the force here a little bit where where it used to be very like I would say up until recently, there was a lot of concern about what data is going to go into AI and how is this going to negative impact us as a company.

00:25:13:14 - 00:25:37:19 Drew And there was a lot just everybody was freaked out to be candid. And, and larger companies were really kind of locking things down. I think the pendulum swinging a little bit now, and everybody's freaked out that they're not going to figure out what the maximum leverage is that they can get from their data, and their competitor is going to figure it out, and their competitor is going to put them out of business. 00:25:37:21 - 00:26:00:27 Drew So I think, you know, I think that pendulum swinging person, from my my interactions with the market, that said, it's still a real concern.

Like you don't want your data to be used against you, right? You don't want to have bad things happen. You don't want to expose sensitive customer information or anything like that. And so that's that's one.

00:26:00:29 - 00:26:26:26 Drew You know, one part of your question, the other part of the question is data quality. To make this whole system work. The thing that we built data quality as to has to be extremely high. And we learned that the very, very hard way.

We spent about over three years building the foundation for a data engine to be able to create this high quality graph with very low error rates, we have an error rate of about 1%. 00:26:26:26 - 00:26:51:15 Drew And what that means is like the data in our network, if it looks like I can see a path through Michael to the CMO, the company, about 1% of the time, a little bit less. That's wrong. We get that.

We have it. There's some incorrect fuzzy matching in the relationship path, and it's just the wrong person, wrong relationship, where when we started the company that was extremely high, it was like, I don't know, 50% of the time it was wrong. 00:26:51:16 - 00:27:13:14 Drew And we just put a lot. It's a lot of trial and error learning from, you know, our customers data, putting it all together to get to the point that we're over 99% accurate.

Now that is a hard problem to solve. Easier today with AI, but still very hard because it's a lot of trial and error. You there are a lot of the you're there. 00:27:13:15 - 00:27:33:13 Drew What?

Eight 9 billion people on the planet. And there are so many just corner cases about names and relationships and stuff that that you just have to kind of work your way through over time to get right. So data quality is effectively a solved problem for us. But it was where we put a lot of our investment, particularly in the early days.

00:27:33:13 - 00:28:04:12 Drew And now now we're in the, you know, fine tuning of it as far as security is concerned. You have to, you know, at the core of it, companies must trust you that you are handling their data in the way that they expect it to be handled. No, no ifs, ands or buts. And so for us, this has made, you know, we've we've done some like there are a lot of things that we could do to make the product probably even more useful for a lot of people.

00:28:04:14 - 00:28:30:22 Drew But we we have stayed away like we're not a data broker. We're never going to be a data broker. And so we do that intentionally to make sure that our customers know that their data is their data. We are not selling it, using it for any other purpose than to provide the service for them.

And there are a lot of interesting things we could do if we were a data broker, and probably a bunch of ways that we could monetize, but that's not what we do. 00:28:30:22 - 00:28:57:10 Drew So we are very, very intentionally, you know, not a day broker. We do our SOC two, type two and pen test certifications on a regular basis. And we're GDPR and CPA compliance.

And we you know, we do all the right things to make sure that you as a company can feel confident that we are protecting your most valuable asset while unleashing it for you so that you can use it to get competitive advantage in your market. 00:28:57:13 - 00:29:18:08 Michael Yeah, I mean it certainly you're in a, in a very sensitive right, personal information, personally identifiable information. There's a lot of a lot of privacy concerns around that and risk around that, as especially as you move into a world where, you know, agents are going to have access to that and they can, you know, at scale, they can can move at machine speed, which you can't.

00:29:18:09 - 00:29:42:15 Michael And yeah, I mean, that makes sense. So so I know, you know, your co-founder, Ian Swinton, another Salesforce alum I think you guys raised around recently, Norwest was the lead and and this whole category relationship intelligence I mean it's it's it's a part of sales tech which frankly over the last ten, 15 or so years has really exploded. 00:29:42:16 - 00:30:01:04 Michael Right. How do you how do you see connect the dots, you know, fitting into into sales tech stacks along with CRM and, you know, all the other conversation, intelligence, etc.

as, as we, you know, as we see people move more towards this sales agent world. 00:30:01:06 - 00:30:20:12 Drew Yeah. Well, I mean, I think this question would have been easier to answer a year ago when there was kind of a firm foundation on which we all stood. And now with the pace at which you can develop new capabilities with AI, I think a lot of a lot of things have become variables and there's not really a solid foundation anymore.

00:30:20:12 - 00:30:49:15 Drew So I would have said solid foundation up until recently with CRM is your foundational layer. That's the system of record for all your your customer data. And then you've got things that sit on top of it, like conversational intelligence and your sales engagement tools and stuff like that. And, and all ultimately would go back to your CRM.

And, and I think that's how the world's been more or less structured for the last, I don't know, 20 years, something like that. 00:30:49:15 - 00:31:04:12 Drew Yeah. Now that now there's some crazy stuff happening because you can really vibe code your own CRM system pretty quickly. Now, a lot of existing, you know, large companies are not going to do that.

They're going to be stuck on their investment for a while. So this will be using Salesforce or HubSpot or what are they going to do. 00:31:04:12 - 00:31:28:00 Drew But I think a lot of smaller companies are going to use one of these modern AI native CRM applications, and some of those companies are going to grow up fast, and those AI native CRM applications are going to grow fast with them. And then we're going to see an emergence of really like AI native CRMs that there's a lot of advantage to being an AI native CRM, for sure, over the incumbents.

00:31:28:00 - 00:31:58:21 Drew So I think we're going to my hunch is I might be going a little more off topic. You're a broader speaking more broadly than you wanted me to, but I think we're going to see, like the existing CRM is probably going to become kind of like, you know, what Oracle and Computer Associates look like. You know, there are going to be big companies that are kind of stuck on them because it's hard to migrate off of them, but they're not going to get a lot of new customers because the new customers are either going to use an AI native tool that's going to be a lot cheaper, a lot faster, and have some amazing capabilities.

00:31:58:24 - 00:32:21:24 Drew And those tools will get better faster because it's really easy to develop fast. You can build new features on top of them. So I think that's going to happen broadly in the market. The where does CTD fit into this?

CTD wants to be the trust layer across the internet, the trust layer across the internet. So we want to fit in everywhere. 00:32:21:24 - 00:32:46:26 Drew You need trust. And that whatever your system of record is for all of your customer interactions, which let's call it CRM for now.

So your CRM system or whatever it looks like in the future, we believe that you need to have effectively two primitives, two new primitives that need to be embedded into that system of record, and that is your relationship strength with a company and your relationship strength with a person. 00:32:46:28 - 00:33:08:10 Drew And that's everybody in your in the universe that you care about. So whatever your total addressable market is, every company that your target account list, whoever you want to sell to in those companies, you need to have those two primitives on those records.

And then what you do with that is kind of up to you now, and you should be creative and you should leverage AI and you should automate all of this. 00:33:08:10 - 00:33:32:03 Drew So I the direction I think 2026 is the year of actual AI automation of go to market workflows like 2025 is a lot of experimentation. We did experimentation and now we're not experimenting anymore. It's like it's getting real and we're not the only company in the world doing that.

Every company, that every company that will survive is doing this right now, I think. 00:33:32:04 - 00:33:54:26 Drew Yeah, because you can. And the point what you're the what your AI workflow needs is data. And you're, you know, you if you're building an automated go to market workflow and you're buying, you're probably using clay and using all these signals that you're getting from Sixth Sense and other companies like that, and you're feeding all that in.

That's amazing. 00:33:54:26 - 00:34:18:08 Drew You should do that. You should. But guess what?

Everybody in the world has all those signals to they're buying from the same sources. There is one proprietary source that that is yours and nobody can replicate it. And that is your relationships, your relationship graph. And you need to unveil you need to organize that and then plug that into whatever you plug it into your CRM.

00:34:18:10 - 00:34:41:24 Drew Make sure that you've got those two primitives in their relationship strength on the company and relationship strength on the person. And literally what that means is like, can we get to this person, and if so, how and can we get to this company, and if so, how? And what's the probability that we can do that? Because if we can, it opens up a whole different set of plays that are much more targeted, much higher converting than the plays that you're currently running.

00:34:41:24 - 00:34:57:21 Drew So that should pop to the top of the stack. That should be the very first thing that you'd do. Like the cream of the crop is all of the target accounts that you've got, where you've got high relationship strength into the company, or to the specific people that you're trying to sell to the specific personas. And that's where we fit in.

00:34:57:21 - 00:35:24:26 Drew And then we, you know, we also have a great user interface, and we have this cool mobile version where you can see all your contacts in your pocket and have it all that organized for you, but you never have to use that. You can literally just plug in the data, these two primitives into your CRM system or whatever your automated workflows are that you're building, and that will give you your very best targets that you should go after first. 00:35:24:28 - 00:35:42:08 Michael Yeah.

I mean, and I don't disagree with you on the enterprise apps piece. I actually am in the middle of a series that I wrote that, you know, about the decomposition of the apps, I think I think they will continue to break apart. Right? I mean, because you're right, you got to have data, got to have business logic system or record all those things.

00:35:42:08 - 00:36:07:13 Michael But on top of that, you know, the UI and how we actually interact with systems is changing dramatically. And and it seems to me you're right. Your relationships, this network, I could feed that in as a data layer and it could, you know, be used by my systems. Or I can continue to interact with that on an individual basis because it is such a value and is is so useful in that process.

00:36:07:15 - 00:36:08:14 Michael Yeah. 00:36:08:16 - 00:36:32:22 Drew Yeah. There's a there's a, there's a, there's a play here between, you know like things many things are going to be automated. But ultimately it just it comes back to like, okay Michael, now you want to ask this person for this introduction or for, for this facilitation or that for them to give a nudge to this executive because knowing that that relationship exists is going to help us win this deal or renew the customer or whatever it is.

00:36:32:24 - 00:36:52:15 Drew But ultimately it comes, it comes, it stops. There's always, always a human in the loop here, because it can't know if Michael really wants to leverage that relationship at that moment. It just doesn't. It will never have all that context, and it never has the actual relationship between the two people.

So ultimately it will stop right there. Human in the loop. 00:36:52:16 - 00:36:56:04 Drew You make the decision to go forward. 00:36:56:07 - 00:37:03:27 Michael I wonder if we need this system for agents.

Now we have a contact for for agents as they get to know each other, right? 00:37:04:00 - 00:37:06:19 Drew Yeah. Like whatever the whatever that social network. 00:37:06:21 - 00:37:10:00 Michael Like that.

Yeah. That. Yeah. That was so.

00:37:10:04 - 00:37:23:04 Drew We have our first AI entity as a we, we actually designated an AI entity as a human on connect the dots. Have you ever heard. Have you heard of Bawdy Boardman? 00:37:23:07 - 00:37:23:27 Michael No, no.

00:37:23:27 - 00:37:44:20 Drew I haven't. You should actually maybe you should consider bawdy as a guest on your show. So bawdy is an AI, and he's kind of a freelance board member who helps make connections for people. And he's.

It's quite good. Shout out to bawdy. I really like bawdy. And at some point we in our.

Remember I told you about our data engine and where we put all this investment. 00:37:44:21 - 00:38:06:20 Drew One of the things you have to do in building a really good data engine to solve this problem is determine what's a human and what's not a human, because there are all these email addresses that belong, you know, some belong to humans like you, Michael and me, and some belong to bots that are scamming you. And so we we part of our algorithm figures out which ones are not humans and then categorizes them as literally not a human.

00:38:06:20 - 00:38:27:26 Drew And then you don't see them, they disappear. They're not part of the graph. We made one exception and that exception, and we made that exception about two months ago. And that's for Woody Boardman, because I actually built a relationship with board and might it scored us as a strong relationship because I communicated with them so much.

And then we actually decided, okay, bawdy is a is an honorary human. 00:38:27:26 - 00:38:35:14 Drew And so he is now a human on the graph and he has relationships with other humans. And that's pretty cool. I expect we'll see more of that.

00:38:35:19 - 00:38:57:09 Michael Interesting. Yeah, I actually have done a few episodes interviewing Claude and ChatGPT and Jim and I, and so that could be interesting. I have to think about that. Yeah.

So, you know, part of what I've been talking about over the last year or so is trying to put in context this whole shift with genetic AI as, as more of a digital workforce. 00:38:57:09 - 00:39:27:03 Michael Right? We have have digital agents, digital employees. You have human employees which together form like a hybrid team.

In the world of sales and relationship management. I mean, how do you see that hybrid model evolving? Where does where does AI handle the intelligence and pattern? And I mean, we talked a little bit about this, but but you know, where how does this kind of play out over the next few years as we evolve in this hybrid workforce?

00:39:27:08 - 00:39:51:08 Drew Yeah. You know, we're moving towards like a George Jetson world. We really are. I, I guess if I'm not going to sugarcoat it, I think all the jobs go away.

I think all of them go away. I mean, if we if we want to look at this, you know, we're really going to zoom out. And I know your show is not a science fiction show, but we're we're living in science fiction times now. 00:39:51:09 - 00:40:15:18 Drew I think we can agree with that.

AI can do anything that's a routine task, and it doesn't require physical labor. It can do right now anything, and it can do it better than a human. And that's a lot of things that humans do. So so that means there's a significant percentage of everybody's job that's going to go away, and there will be a significant percentage of jobs that go away very fast.

00:40:15:18 - 00:40:42:12 Drew And interestingly, like some of those are, you know, very high paying, like high paying white collar jobs, like, you know, engineers and lawyers and things like that. Those, you know, you can say that there is definitely creativity involved in engineering and and lawyering, but maybe less so than being an artist or performer, some sort. And, you know, those those things are going to go away pretty rapidly, I think. 00:40:42:13 - 00:41:01:12 Drew And then the robots are coming.

You've probably seen I mean, everybody sees this stuff on YouTube. Yeah, they're they're coming and they're not going to have great dexterity at first. So there'll be a lot of jobs for plumbers, electricians and dentists and things like that for a while. But I mean long term, Michael, honestly, I think they all go away.

00:41:01:13 - 00:41:22:25 Drew I mean, I'm not like a doomsday here. I think this could be a this could turn into a really fantastic utopian world for us if we figure out how to organize ourselves well as a species. But, you know, I, you know, I think that the endgame is that every function in society can be automated. I don't think that relationships are still going to be between humans.

00:41:22:26 - 00:41:38:23 Drew Now, if you've seen her the movie, there probably will be relationships between humans and A's, and they already exist. Like I already have a relationship with bawdy, although, you know, he and I don't get drinks and, you know, I don't invite him out on the weekend and that kind of stuff, but not. 00:41:38:24 - 00:41:39:00 Michael Yeah. 00:41:39:01 - 00:41:57:18 Drew You know, not yeah.

I mean, if bawdy, you know, gets a body sometime soon and, you know, he likes to go on bike rides and do the types of things that I like to do, then he knows maybe I'll be hanging out with bawdy as well in the future. So I don't I don't want to be a doomsday or about jobs, but I do. 00:41:57:18 - 00:42:22:08 Drew I am kind of. I think we should all be realistic about this.

If you if you look around at what's being what jobs need to be done, they're they're shrinking. Now, I think there will be an explosion of new opportunity as well. Yeah. Because this will give us great new capabilities already giving us great new capabilities.

And like, I want more people in our company who really know how to leverage AI to do these amazing new things. 00:42:22:10 - 00:42:41:12 Drew And and not everybody does. You know, we've we've got you know, we've we've kind of pruned and tuned our engineering organization because some people were really getting it and some people were not. And, and we and we and we realized like some people were ten x engineers now because they could leverage it and some were like 1.

2 x engineers. 00:42:41:12 - 00:43:14:02 Drew And we just couldn't afford the 1.2 x engineers anymore. They just didn't make any sense.

And so I do think that there is new opportunity created, but I think it's really unclear about what that new opportunity is going to look like at this point. Other than it be like somebody said this the other day, they think it's going to look like a barbell, where you've got people on one end who are doing leaning heavily into the manual labor, vocational stuff, like, you know, maybe, you know, furniture maker or, you know, or like dentists or something like that. 00:43:14:03 - 00:43:32:22 Drew And then on the other side of the barbell is people who are like in Ender's Game.

If you saw the movie figuring out how to sit, sit many levels up on strategy and then orchestrate all of the A's to do all these things, and I think those two things I see a future for and everything in the middle. 00:43:32:22 - 00:43:34:22 Drew I don't really see much of a future for. 00:43:34:25 - 00:43:57:27 Michael Yeah, I mean, I definitely think that that right now the my when people ask me in my short term and midterm maybe is don't go forward without learning about what's happening with the eye and how to how to use this strategically, functionally.

Because at least for now, you know, we are going to be in this hybrid world for a while. 00:43:57:27 - 00:44:08:13 Michael But but I don't know that you're I don't know that you're wrong about what that looks like in the future. And I, you know, hey, and I'm a sci fi buff, so I admit I. Yeah.

00:44:08:15 - 00:44:19:06 Drew I feel like I feel like I've been training all my life for this moment because I've read I've read so much sci fi, and it's like, now it's like, oh, no, it's actually it's starting to happen. 00:44:19:08 - 00:44:47:27 Michael I know, I know, it is late at night sometimes anyway. Well, so thanks. Really interesting conversation.

And you know, I learned a lot about this. I think, you know, this idea around relationship intelligence, very important as we think about what sales tech looks like. So before I let you go, one of the things I like to do at the end of every episode is, is, you know, get a recommendation for the audience, somebody that you think would be interesting for them. 00:44:47:27 - 00:44:56:09 Michael And it could be a podcast or an author or a thought leader, you know, whatever you think would provide real value for the for the audience to, to check out and follow.

00:44:56:13 - 00:45:21:19 Drew Well, if you listen to this, this point in the podcast and I guess you like this topic. And so I probably say that you should you should listen to Bob More of Crossbeam, CEO of crossbeam. He's also a Philadelphia guy, Michael, and he's built a great company. They merged with another company called reveal.

And they have they realized that relationships are very important to just like we do. 00:45:21:24 - 00:45:44:06 Drew They've taken a different cut at it. And the cut is they've figured out how to help partners, companies that go to market together, share secure visibility to the relationships that they respectively, have at prospects and customer accounts. And so then they can figure out where my partner A or partner B can help me get into a company I'm trying to sell to, and vice versa.

00:45:44:07 - 00:46:01:19 Drew So it's a it's a total win win. And he's got a lot of really interesting philosophy behind it and a lot of business learnings. He wrote. Actually, I think a really good book that's stands on its own two legs about the concept.

So yeah, I would, I would check out Bob more. 00:46:01:21 - 00:46:05:26 Michael Yeah. Interesting. Thanks.

Maybe I have to get him on the on the show at some point. 00:46:06:01 - 00:46:11:02 Drew Yeah. You should you can do it. You can do it live in Philly.

Do you, do you ever have you ever have. 00:46:11:04 - 00:46:23:22 Michael I do live shows. Yeah, I have done several a lot of times it's at, you know, a Salesforce event or Zoho event or whatever. But yeah, that could be fun.

All right. Well, thanks a lot. I really appreciate it. Really interesting conversation.

00:46:23:25 - 00:46:28:00 Drew Thank you Michael. 00:46:28:02 - 00:46:52:03 Michael And that's the show for this week. Thank you all for joining us. Remember to like, share and subscribe to the show.

If you enjoy the show, please leave us a review to help others find us. For more research on AI and other software, check out arionresearch.com. And if you're an expert in AI, generative AI, or business automation, either as a provider or an end user, email your information to disambiguation at arionresearch.

com. 00:46:52:06 - 00:47:00:20 Michael Don't forget to join us next week! Disambiguation is an Arion research production. I'm Michael Fauscette and this is the disambiguation podcast.